The Exquisite (10 page)

The answer, he said.

That is the story of my teeth. The story of my life is different, though, and even if it is not entirely coherent, even if some parts have been elided into others, it does have a beginning, a middle, and an end.

The End.

I hope that is how simple it will be.

At 3 a.m. I went to the address on St. Mark’s Place and, after climbing six flights of stairs this time, was greeted by Cornelius when I walked through the unlocked door. He was wearing his hat and hunting cape, but was otherwise not particularly elegant in speech or action that night.

Am I supposed to murder
you?
I asked, huffing a little.

No, Henry, he said, lifting a gloved hand and pointing over his shoulder with it, the victim is in the next room.

Are the contortionists here?

We’re all here, he said.

What does that mean?

Ça veut dire qu’on est tous ensemble.

You speak French?

He shrugged.

I used to date someone who spoke French. I mean, she was practically French. Have you been over there? She liked this place called Chartres. For the light pouring through its rose windows and the maze painted on its floor. She had a long story about how she liked to sit outside in the evening light and watch the swallows swoop around its flying buttresses, hunting insects. We were supposed to go over there together. Paris. Marseilles. Chartres. All that.

Cornelius didn’t respond. I looked around. I didn’t see anyone else. It was a tiny front room, barely big enough for a coffee table and the little yellow couch Cornelius was now sitting on. Behind him on the wall was an interesting picture in a brushed-silver frame. Concentric rings drew the eye into a cloud of intersecting lines in the center. To get there you had to go through a number of color combinations: yellow gave way to green-yellow gave way to salmon then to salmon-gray then gray-silver then gray-yellow, etc., to dizzying effect. The smooth-edged somewhat irregular outer rings looked to have been laid down by hand with colored pencil, while the mesh-textured inner rings looked a little like they had been created with Spirographs, those grooved plastic drawing rings that were in vogue in my childhood, and that I used a few times at a friend’s house, though it goes without saying that the results were nothing like this.

Do you know who that’s by? I said.

Cornelius clicked his tongue, looked over his shoulder, then back at me.

I don’t live here, Henry, he said.

That’s a shame, because it’s pretty great.

Cornelius turned and looked at it again, this time a little more closely.

I would say it’s by Emma Kunz. It’s a reproduction.

Who lives here?

Some people, they cleared out for a couple of hours.

Do they have any more of these?

They have some stuff.

Cornelius said this with just enough edge to indicate that he wasn’t interested in discussing art with me any further. I couldn’t quite tell though if the implied request for me to stop speaking was a general one, and because I hadn’t yet been told what I was supposed to do, I tried changing the subject.

So you’ve known Mr. Kindt for a long time? I said.

Yes, Henry. Like I said, we go way back.

All the way back to Cooperstown.

Cornelius had been examining his fingernails. He looked up at me.

It must have been something, that swim he took.

Cornelius nodded. It was quite a swim. You could say that swim took him all the way to New York. All the way to where he is now.

He told me this afternoon that he’d done it with his arms tied behind his back.

Did he now?

He was kidding.

Cornelius shrugged, then said, Aris Kindt. Nice name, isn’t it? Not the average. Has some splash to it. Kind of name you’d like to try on and take for a spin around the block. Fits him doesn’t it? To a T. You’d look at him and say, now that is a guy who has got the right fucking name. Has a ring.

I said I agreed but that I liked the name Cornelius too, and Cornelius said, I’m happy for you, now, please, Henry, there is work to do, shut the fuck up.

I started to speak, but Cornelius shook his head, put his finger to his lips, pointed to a slip of paper on the coffee table, then pointed to the door leading into the next room.

Can we talk afterward? I said.

Shhh, Cornelius said. I’m not kidding.

I picked up the piece of paper, opened the door, and went into a surprisingly long hallway lit by a series of night-lights plugged into sockets placed at regular intervals near the floor along each wall. When I was about halfway down the hallway, the door I had just come through opened again. Expecting Cornelius, I turned and found myself looking at the contortionists. I began to greet them, but they came up quickly and, smiling, began poking and tickling and prodding me forward. When we got to the end of the hallway one of them slipped past me, pushed open the other door, and swept her hand out as if to say, here it is. The other gave my shoulders a few rubs, shoved me forward through the doorway, then jumped past me and stood next to her colleague. They both put mock serious looks on their faces, did a little shadowboxing, gave me the thumbs-up, then flipped themselves over and scuttled back down the hallway and out the door.

The room I entered was larger and more elaborately furnished than I had expected given the street, the general condition of the building, and the Spartan aesthetic that presided in the front room and hallway. There was plush wall-to-wall, deep-shag burgundy carpeting, a long black couch, a good-looking leather cigar chair, a zinc bar with a couple of mahogany stools, a large retro refrigerator and a backlit row of top-shelf bottles, floor lamps that gave off red and gold highlights, and, though there weren’t any more Emma Kunz—or whoever it was—reproductions, at least not in this room, there were two or three expensively framed posters. One of these was a blown-up extra-handsome comic strip featuring a mustachioed heavyset older man with a camera around his neck. Another was a famous black-and-white aerial shot of the Flatiron building taken in the thirties or forties. It wasn’t difficult, looking at the scene from beyond even the photographer’s elevated vantage point, which had reduced all the human beings present to the size and relative significance of dust motes, to feel myself shrinking too. I liked this feeling. New York is interesting in that even at the bottom of the skyscrapers’ deepest trenches a good portion of its inhabitants tend to feel a little bigger, a little more consequential, than they are. In fact, there are days and nights when it feels like everyone (and maybe this is what I meant before about East Villagers looking fat) is holding out oversize thumbs in hopes that history, like some gargantuan stretch limo, will slam on its brakes for them. Not (my comments about being overweight myself to the contrary) me. I’ve always been plenty happy to believe that history would just blow on past if it saw me standing there with my suitcase. On one of our first outings, Mr. Kindt referred to history as “that vast dark entity ravaged by loss and erasure.” Exactly. Not the kind of thing you want stopping for you. It was while I was standing in front of this poster, thinking it was just fine that buildings and trees and cars are the only things that can be seen with any clarity from a distance, that Tulip walked into the room.

She was wearing a long dark-blue silk robe and sequined house slippers and more makeup than I’d ever seen on her, dark around the mouth and eyes. The script Cornelius had handed me read “Keep your mouth shut, watch and improvise,” so I didn’t say anything, just kind of took her in as she sauntered toward me holding what looked a lot like a hatchet.

Later, she told me it was an eighteenth-century embalming tool she had borrowed from Mr. Kindt. This was after Tulip had woken up and we had all walked out together—Cornelius, the contortionists, the knockout, me, and Tulip; after Cornelius had said, good, but I have nothing to say to you about speaking French or art or our mutual friend, and the knockout had said, who would’ve thought? and the contortionists had said nothing, though they had both given me another thumbs-up and one had kissed and kind of nibbled at the other’s arm. The two of us had repaired to a nearby after-hours establishment at Tulip’s suggestion, an invitation that prompted me to register, with more than moderate trepidation, that I had begun my very long day by being summoned to the Odessa by the knockout, my first victim, and that I was ending it with my second.

You’re not going to give me some advice then ruin my shirt and hurt my eardrums are you? I said after we’d left the others.

No more advice necessary, she said. You heard Cornelius.

Not only had I heard Cornelius, Cornelius had given me two hundred more smackeroos.

I’ll buy, I said.

I was expecting you to.

We took a seat in the back of the comfortably shabby place, with its wooden floors, hammered metal ceiling, and soft Nordic jazz, and Tulip said, that was impressive, very direct, very to the point, how did you come up with it?

I don’t know, I said. I improvised.

Which was true.

I also said, after a minute, and there was this drawing in the lobby. Cornelius and I were checking it out before things got started. All these rings and lines leading into the middle. I guess that made me think I should try something interesting but, as you put it, direct. Plus there were the two, you know, contortionist friends, pushing me forward and rubbing my shoulders and knocking a few shadow punches around, like I was heading into the ring. There was also a poster of the Flatiron building that got me going a little on how history doesn’t so much hate us as blindly devour us, like a growing whale eating plankton, so I must have thought a little, maybe just in the back of my mind, of devouring you.

Which was all also true and, I thought, interesting. But Tulip just said, yeah? The “yeah?” she used when she hadn’t listened to what you had just said.

We drank in silence for a little while, then I tried some flattery.

You looked good in that robe, I said.

She smiled or smirked—it was too dark to tell which—but didn’t say anything.

I thought I’d better try something else.

So you’re involved too, I said.

She shook her head. Not really. Cornelius just asked me to help out tonight.

Did he ask you in French?

No. I don’t
parlez franais.
Do you?

No. I know a few words. I used to date someone who was fluent. Did he pay you?

She shook her head—it was a favor. That’s why you’re buying. Go buy more.

I went over to the bar and bought us another round.

It seems like a pretty questionable gimmick, I said when I got back to the table. I mean, do they have people who actually want to pay to have that done to them?

Tulip shrugged. It’s the times, she said. It’s in the air. Gloom and doom. New York–style. Aris says it falls under the rubric of the
danse macabre.

That’s French.

So is the Statue of Liberty, honey. Not to mention Dior and cognac. Would you like to hear some Latin?

Are you serious?

Spiritus meus attenuabitur, dies mei breviabuntur.

What the fuck does that mean?

“My spirit is corrupt, my breath grows extinct.” It’s from the Bible. I saw it in one of Aris’s books. Ask him to show it to you. It’s mostly a picture book. Full of skeletons and people doing the danse macabre. Mostly the skeletons are doing the dancing. “Ring around the Rosie” is more or less what we’re talking about.

I raised an eyebrow.

“Ashes, ashes, we all fall down!” A danse macabre for kids growing up in plague times.

I heard that wasn’t true. That it didn’t have anything to do with the plague.

Whatever. It’s true enough. Can you think of anything?

Dead man’s float, I said, remembering once bobbing facedown in the water at the Hamilton Fish Park pool long enough for the lifeguard to jump in.

Or just playing dead. It’s all the same thing. The closer you think you are to death, even if you haven’t thought about it, the more you …

Danse? I said.

Yeah. And anyway, people pay to have all kinds of bizarre and/or anodyne shit done to them.

Like what?

Like hair implants, collagen injections, liposuction, skin lightening, complexion alteration, extreme makeovers, safaris, Rolfing.

Do you think the knockout …?

The what?

Never mind. It’s stupid. Any idea why Mr. Kindt wants me involved?

Who knows, you never know with Aris. Maybe Cornelius told him he needed a new guy. I understand that pretty boy from last night isn’t going to work out.

You mean Anthony?

Is that what you call him?

Pretty boy? I said.

The knockout? she said.

Tulip did the smile/smirk thing again. I sagged a little into my chair.

Don’t worry, Henry, you’re pretty too, she said.

Yeah? I said, the way I quietly say it when someone has just told me something I’d like to hear again. I leaned back, then forward, then cleared my throat.

But she just shook her head and told me about the blade, that it was a kind of scalpel, once owned by a famous Dutch embalmer, that Mr. Kindt owned the embalmer’s entire set of tools.

It’s an impressive little collection, she said. You should ask Aris to show it to you when you look at the danse macabre book.

Do you think he brought it down with him from Cooperstown?

Maybe, she said. But I was under the impression that he was pretty broke when he hit town. I’m guessing he got it, like most of his stuff, when things started picking up.

Do you really think I’m pretty? I said.

I do, she said.

With that she got up and walked out the door.

I stayed another hour, playing the murder scene over, again and again, comparing it with the mess from the night before. I thought about how I had taken Tulip down not so much
onto
as
into
the plush carpet—hard but not too hard—how I had put my forearm against her throat and pulled her forehead back, how she had gasped and grinned madly and looked into my eyes, then passed out. How the knockout and contortionists had emerged for a moment, taken in the scene, then withdrawn.

I’m pretty, I thought. I ended this little colloquy with myself by letting my head fall to my chest, my shoulders droop, and my mouth sag open.

Danse macabre, New York–style, I said.