The Exquisite (4 page)

There was a silence after I had finished speaking. Mr. Kindt handed me another cracker and momentarily placed one of his unsettlingly soft hands on my knee.

My father died when I was ten, I said. He worked construction. Mostly housing, on Staten Island. I was raised by my aunt. It was a long time ago. He liked Scrabble.

Of course, Mr. Kindt said.

That wasn’t the happiest “anything” scenario I could have come up with.

Happy, said Mr. Kindt. He made an exaggeratedly dismissive face and shrugged.

What would you do, Tulip? I asked.

I would do the same, of course, with the appropriate adjustments, she said. I might, for instance, go after my loved one, fight my way through the meanies, in a yellow submarine.

Mr. Kindt smiled. And I would set off in a purple diving bell, he said. One
should
do anything, yes, my dears.

The three of us sat quietly for a while then. It occurred to me that maybe this talk and cracker eating was all the dinner I was going to get, which was just fine with me. After all it isn’t every night you get to talk about love and intricacy and herring, much less substances and oceans and swept floors. The truth is, once I had stopped feeling for those few moments like I had to immediately vacate the premises, had stopped wondering what the fuck I was doing there and the alarm bells had fallen silent, it all started to seem kind of cozy—the crackers, the anything scenarios, Tulip, Mr. Kindt, me.

At some point a bottle of brandy was brought out. Glasses were poured. Refilled.

Mr. Kindt spoke some more—about smoke and history. Looking in my direction, he said nice things about those we have lost, those who have vanished like so much dew on the oak leaves or something. At this I started to feel guilty and told him that in fact my father, as far as I knew, was still very much alive, that he had been and probably still was a construction worker, but that he had not died when I was ten. Until he had left for good he had come home most nights smelling of sweat and concrete and, after arguing with his sister, my aunt, who had taken over when my mother left not too long after I was born, had watched with me.

Ah well, the truth, Mr. Kindt said, in much the same way he had said “happy.”

It was a good story, Tulip said.

Involving meanies, I said.

The best kind, my dear boy, Mr. Kindt said.

We settled into our chairs. The brandy took hold and the lights seemed to dim. Several weeks went by.

In my room there was one large window and across the window was what I took to be a bird net, but the whole time I was there I never saw a bird go by. Once in a while I saw balloons though. Floating up past the window, up past the black net. It wasn’t hard to imagine where they came from, those metallic pink, blue, and yellow, I think, balloons: a small man next to a helium tank. He would have dozens of balloons, and it was far from inconceivable that occasionally after handing one to a child or a friend of a patient, even very carefully, it would slip free. The small man would look up at the sky then at his client then reach for another balloon. On the house, of course. That night, when he got home, his wife, dressed in worn high heels and holding a plastic tumbler, would ask him how he had done. It would take him a while, maybe a swallow or two of his wife’s drink, before he admitted that he had been “forced” to do another two-for-one, which had cut into the day’s profits. She would scold him halfheartedly, then fix him a drink, ask him to describe the child in question, and tell him she would have done the same. This balloon salesman scenario, which was a little different each time it came to me, was the explanation I settled on, although I was never able to confirm it. At any rate, the sight of the balloons put me in mind of my earlier days, specifically the fact that it used to please me greatly as a child, as I suppose it pleased many others, to ingest the helium of balloons and to talk. It used to please me, as it might have those many others, to say, fuck you, Mississippi. Try it and you will see why. I remember several times being disappointed that ingesting helium did not, in addition to making my voice sound so interesting, render me buoyant. Helium did, I suppose you could argue, provide me with a cast for my left arm that several of my fellow fifth graders signed and drew on with brightly colored markers. One of these illustrations was of what its artist, one Eva Grace Cotrero, explained was a moon lamp, a device she was working on that was supposed to promote healing by harnessing moonbeams. There was also a stick-figure drawing of Conan waving his Cimmerian steel sword, but it was much more difficult, because of its placement, to see. My friends wanted to know what it was like to jump off a shed roof. I told them what the doctor had told me: that it was like being a coconut and cracking your shell.

I saw a guy really crack his shell once. West Twenty-second Street. Ninth floor. Guy just looked both ways and jumped. No yelling. Didn’t even kick his feet. Just fell. Big coconut. I told Job, the night nurse, that I had heard him hit the ground.

Job said, yeah?

Yeah, I said.

Only this wasn’t Job. This was the doctor.

Hello, Doctor, I said.

How are you feeling today? asked the doctor.

Just fucking fine, I said.

The doctor was young and Dutch and didn’t mind if I swore. At least up to a point and depending on the context. From Amsterdam she was. Apparently she had a green card and was just months away from getting naturalized.

You know, a professional degree and connections, she said.

That still works even in this climate of international mistrust and general unproductive uncertainty? I said.

Apparently, she said.

She also said things like, no, your case does not trouble me at all, and, yes, I have had experience with similar cases, and, don’t worry, you are progressing very, very nicely.

I don’t want to progress, I said.

It’s not productive to speak that way, Henry, she said.

She was tall and skinny and had blond hair pulled back up over her ears. They were nice ears. I used to mainly focus on them when she would come in. They were very small and looked like little curled-up hands, like what you see sometimes in reproductions of those in utero sonograms. Sometimes I was just lying there and wasn’t in any state to do much of anything, and sometimes the doctor would lean over me to do something and then I could see her ears up close. Once I tried to reach up and touch one. Or thought I did. It danced and spun just out of reach of the hand I thought I was holding up to it. She had excellent teeth, too. I told Job this. Job concurred. He said that yes the doctor did have nice fresh-looking choppers, and nice pink gums for that matter. She was one healthy-looking customer. Looked like she could take apart a couple of nice raw steaks without burping. Like she could really rip them up. It was little wonder they were letting her stay.

We then talked for a time about teeth and gums. Mainly his and mine.

I won’t show you mine, I said.

I’ll pull back your lips and look after you’ve had your meds and you’re asleep, he said. Do you want to sleep now?

Are you going to pull my lips back and look?

Yes.

I thought about the morphine hitting my system, about following it off down into the orange-colored depths, about going deliciously, temporarily blank.

O.K., hit me, I said.

Job hit me. Nice and hard.

I’m not sure how long I was initially scheduled to spend in the hospital, but I am now in a position to affirm that anything approximating a reasonable interval has long since elapsed. It is possible that relevant information was provided to me at some point and that I may well have it somewhere, maybe over on the shelf in the little armoire they’ve given me, but if it’s there I don’t know what it says. I do know, as I’ve mentioned, that time has passed and that I often, after receiving an injection, after the appealing aforementioned heat and blankness, dream. Many dreams—most dull, some not, a few of which recur. In one of them, which sometimes follows the nasty dream involving the cabdriver, I suddenly wake and the room, which is my room, is filled with wind and the wind is talking and what it is saying is not nice. The wind is not nice, and it howls around me, and talks and whispers, and I am on my bed awake and can’t move. Or I am standing, say, in the center of the kitchen, and I can’t move and there is no wind, but there is something there, something that doesn’t like me. But mainly I am flat on my back in my bed, and I am awake and can’t move, and there is the wind. There is the wind, and it talks and I can’t move and I am flat on my back in bed. It is cold, and I am frightened. Sick.

In the meantime, anyway, when I wasn’t dozing deep in my fine hospital pillows, which I did a lot, or being injected by Job or one of his colleagues, I watched, perused back issues of
National Geographic
and
Scientific American,
and picked through some of the books that floated around the waiting rooms. Most of them were standard mystery/thriller/romance fare that left me pretty cold. One, though, was a book of stories about a character with an unpronounceable name who gets up to all kinds of fascinating adventures in the far reaches of the galaxy or on the earth before dinosaurs had set up their shop or on the moon when it was still supposedly possible to make a day trip there. These stories reminded me of my interest, when I was a child, in telescopes, and of peering through them—even when they were broken, for example in old junk shops, or had their caps still on in the fancy stores—at whatever night sky full of dazzling lights and shimmering creatures that I could conjure up in my mind. Another book that I did more than pick through was a sad, strangely appealing narrative written by an author of the Germanic persuasion. My interest in this one can likely be attributed to the narrator’s bizarre interests and the highly tenuous quality of the causalities he implied. On one half page, for example, a piece of silk would be torn and on the next a whole forest would be knocked down. Also, the narrator was always being hospitalized or talking about other people who were and things were just generally going to pieces. My favorite section of the book was about beautiful gold and ruby Chinese dragons, how when they rolled over, deep within the earth, seas went dry and mountains crumbled. I told Job about this part, then read it to him, and he said, yeah, and looked out the window, and said, I get that.

Once or twice, in the early days, they brought injured fire- and policemen into the hospital for treatment and cheers went up. I did not see these people being brought in, just extrapolated them from the cheering once I had been told, the first time, what the cheering was about. Everyone of course cheered fire- and policemen in those early days, even if their injuries were not directly related to the events downtown. I cheered them too, from my bed, even deep within the windy vagaries of my evening morphine, probably even, several times, when there were none of them around. But mainly, in the hospital, it was TV and magazines and books and consultations and medications. I.e., routine. It was this routine, and my growing familiarity with the staff and their patterns of movement, and the fact that one of the cabinets down the hall had a faulty lock on it for a short period of time, that eventually allowed me to steal a few things that I was able, through Job, to sell.

I don’t do this regularly, Henry, said Job, after I’d passed on a few choice articles to him one night.

Me neither, I said.

I got a guy, said Job, makes everything easy. But I only see him once in a while.

I’ll let you handle it.

Yeah, that’s right. I’ll handle it. And, Henry, they catch you and you start singing, you’re just some homeless guy with a dent in his head, correct?

Mum’s the word, Job.

That’s right.

Except that, Job …

Yeah, Henry?

You didn’t really put that too nicely.

You’re right, I’m sorry. I was trying to make a point and got carried away—like I say, I don’t do this very often, obviously I need to work on my technique.

You do.

I know.

I’m not just some guy—I mean, no one is just some guy. I used to have a girlfriend, you know.

I know. You told me.

So I slipped a little, I said. So I got lost. We’ve all got a little maze upstairs. We all take a wrong turn sometimes and end up who knows where, shivering in the shrubbery.

Now, there you lost me.

Are you being funny?

No.

I’m paraphrasing. It’s from the book.

What book?

This book I’m reading.
The Rings of Saturn.
The one with the dragons. Whatever. What I’m thinking right now is that the dent in my head could be a lot bigger, correct? It could be an unplanned hole. A place to put a fist. A cup holder. An ashtray.

Job let me go on a little bit longer then smiled, put a hand on my arm, gave it a hard squeeze, and told me to can it.

I smiled back and canned it.

I liked Job, very much actually. Not least because of his tendency, not always intentional, to slip into passable Edward G. Robinson imitations when we were discussing business. He also had an excellent low-grade sense of humor, especially about other patients, and was willing to listen to everything I had to say about the doctor, often offering me humorous advice along the lines of, you should just come out and ask her for a xerox of that ear. Probably, of course, this isn’t funny unless you have some morphine in you. Or maybe it is anyway, I don’t know.

Sometimes, late at night, Job would sit by me as the evening meds nestled into the soft and secret areas of my brain and whisper strange little things or seem to whisper them as my eyes went shut. In this way, and in the ways I have just described, the early days and nights passed.

Mr. Kindt liked the museums. He liked the marble on the floor and the possibility of grand staircases and the displays so brightly and evenly spaced. He liked the statues with the arms snapped off and the small ivory carvings and the ancient bone-and-wood playing boards and the skeletons comparatively displayed. He liked the thick glass, with its “strange, dissipated reflections.” He liked the roped-off areas and the animals made of plastic and clay. He liked the displays with sounds and the possibility of narration. He had often wished, he said, he could play a substantive role in the creation of the text for these narratives and wondered how well his voice would be suited to high-quality recording. He liked the short explanatory notes by the exhibits, which he said were “like funereal inscriptions,” and he liked the proximity of dead languages, and the juxtapositions of artists and the guards and monitors and checkpoints. He liked the people moving slowly and silently, and the art holding its position, absolutely still.

Look at
that,
he liked to say in the museums. He liked to say, ah, yes, this one, or, compare this one to that one, or, just, ah … He liked to bend, carefully, and to straighten, slowly, and to hold out his hand and to take it away. Mr. Kindt always wore his hat in the museums. For that matter, with rare exceptions, he always wore his hat in the house. It was a black felt hat with a large floppy brim. He liked that kind of hat. He liked, in fact, for me to wear a similar hat, a black job with a slightly smaller brim, which he handed me one day when I walked through the door.

Uh? I said.

Would you, Henry, my boy?

It wasn’t so bad because Tulip also had a hat, floppy and black. Although it wasn’t quite as stylish as the aviator’s hat, the fringe of spun gold falling in sheets from the dark felt was, as Mr. Kindt put it one afternoon as we ate sliced hard sausage, pâté, and leftover meatloaf prior to going out, a truly noteworthy sight.

So the three of us would sit there at the table or would stand there in the museum. With meat in our mouths. Chewing in the yellow light. Or not chewing, no meat, at the American Museum of Natural History, in front of the Animals of the Plains exhibit—a life-sized diorama with stuffed grazing animals and a stuffed carnivorous animal and a painted background behind glass. Tulip especially liked the next diorama over—the Displaced Animals in Urban Environments exhibit—which showed a flock of cherry-head conures perched in a tree next to a wooden balcony where some long-ago shellacked seed had been spread. Painted on the curved wall behind them was a broad-stroke rendition of San Francisco, with the bay off in the distance. A pair of the conures had been frozen in what was supposed to be midflight, but this potentially dynamic touch hadn’t been carried off as successfully as it could have been. A number of the birds that weren’t focused on the seed had their heads cocked to the left and were peering skyward, presumably, we decided, at the tiny painted hawk circling far overhead. After we’d stood there a minute, Tulip spotted a conure with a blue head nestled in a spray of bright orange trumpet flowers. The explanatory note, which Mr. Kindt conjectured had been assembled in haste, made no mention of this handsome aberration. It spoke only of the redheaded variety that was “already several generations into its stay in the wilds of San Francisco.” Apparently the “wilds” of New York were also home to an unnamed variety of nondomesticated parrot, although they had not been quite as successful as their cousins by the bay. Seeing an opportunity to draw Tulip out, I made some light remarks about birds, flapped my arms a few times to demonstrate what it was I thought was off about the conures that were supposed to be caught in flight, then asked her why she liked this display so much. Instead of answering me directly, she took Mr. Kindt’s arm, dabbed at her upper lip with the pointed end of her tongue, and said to both or neither of us that after the events downtown she had seen a very large parrot with a yellow head vanish into the haze over the water near Battery Park.

Perhaps the most beautiful of the exhibits in the museum was the Hall of Planet Earth. Here there were sulfur chimneys from the floor of the ocean and zircon crystals from near the beginning of time. Mr. Kindt stopped and stood for a long while in front of the display on tectonic displacement and even longer in front of the garnets set in black granite pulled out of the heart of the Adirondacks, a range he was fond of because of its many streams and lakes. An illuminated globe on the ceiling demonstrated the effects of drastic climate change, and Mr. Kindt sat so long on the circular recessed benches under it, watching the clouds vanish and the continents go brown and the oceans evaporate and the reverse of this process, that Tulip and I fell asleep. I woke, I thought, to Mr. Kindt whispering in my ear: it was like that, it will be like that; and to Tulip, her eyes glinting in the reflected light of the barren continents, looking at me.

Or we would go to the movies. Mr. Kindt liked the old films. The black-and-white ones with all their “precise inaccuracies,” with all their instances of exaggeration for the purposes of evoking artifice and, for the same reason, settings that were not quite right.

It is the almost-world I have so often dreamed of, Mr. Kindt said one afternoon as the credits rolled on a film in which a man and a woman had walked for fictional hours through a fabric jungle. The world that all these so-called realist films we have today have banished from the screen. Imagine, my dears, if we could forever slip, or, more important, feel ourselves slipping, like the floodlit ghosts of those old actors and actresses, from one happily constructed world to another, rather than, as we flesh-based units are obliged, from inexplicable light to inexplicable gloom.

Sometimes, if the theater was crowded, we would take our hats off and fan ourselves with them. We would sit there, the three of us, or the two of us if Tulip hadn’t come, and the mouths on the walls of light would move and the sound would come out of the walls and our hats would move back and forth in front of us like instances of pure darkness that looked lost in the brightness that lit our faces in sporadic bursts.

Mr. Kindt liked to sit in the front row. He liked, in looking up at the screen, he said, to have to arch his neck, and he liked for his neck, as a reminder, he said, to have to hurt.

Reminder of what? I asked.

Of my namesake, he said.

Your namesake? I said.

But he didn’t answer.

Sometimes, as we watched, I would let my hand move behind Mr. Kindt’s pale white neck and I would allow my fingers to exert a certain amount of pressure that Mr. Kindt, his desire to have his neck hurt notwithstanding, loved.

It was this deep enjoyment of orchestrated experiences in which pain and pleasure lay tightly coiled that had prompted Mr. Kindt, I presumed, to take out a membership at the Eleventh Street Russian baths, a venerable mobster-frequented establishment where what I took to be blast furnaces filled with boiling, beet-red lumps of flesh coexisted with sinister massage cabinets and a deep icy pool. Because of a recent change in management policy, a coeducational sweat-extruding experience was available most days, meaning both Tulip and I could accompany Mr. Kindt and partake with him of his biweekly round of steams and saunas and lashings with oak leaves. It was Mr. Kindt’s rule, one that Tulip and I were both happy to comply with, that if we went with him we did all of it. So it was that, to my surprising delight, I had a huge guy sit on my back, soap me up, whack me with oak branches, and time and again pour near-frozen water on me. Also, of course, I got to witness Tulip, who was built even more extraordinarily than I have helped you to imagine, in a wickedly petite gold-and-green bikini, receiving the same. It was also pleasurable, though differently, less dramatically, to watch Mr. Kindt—in part for the blissful smile that would spread over his mottled features as he was being smushed and swatted, in part for the gleam, through the dim, burning air, of his little blue eyes. So it was, anyway, that after changing into bathing suits, over which, at the start of each session, we draped a sort of house-issue smock, we went down into the steamy gloom of the baths and moved together from one area to the next, a progression that always ended with a collective shriek in the pool of ice water and a race, well, a race between me and Tulip, back upstairs.

Sometimes we went out to eat. When Mr. Kindt wasn’t at home he liked variety in his dinners, which meant we split time between North African, Thai, Chinese, Japanese, and Indian. Mr. Kindt’s preferred Indian establishment was a little spot on the corner of First and Sixth. The tiny dining room was festooned to the point of feeling overrun with garlands of flashing red lights that were reflected, in ever-receding depths, by panels of glossy plastic and hand-cut disks of wrinkled foil. Mr. Kindt, who was well liked by the staff for his generous tips, loved the minuscule tables and the jostling of the waiters and the 3-D wallpaper and the accelerant effect all this had on the complex combinations of tastes and smells. “Cardamom diffused throughout a blend of lamb and cream and good Bengal curry is magnificent, but cardamom diffused throughout a blend of lamb and cream and good Bengal curry under blinking Christmas lights is sublime” being the sort of remark he was apt to offer us or the waiter or even fellow diners.

Mind your fucking business, the larger and more aggressively postured of a pair of young men sitting at a table near us said one evening after Mr. Kindt had directed a like observation in their direction.

Pardon me, gentlemen, but you
are
my business, Mr. Kindt said.

Both young men slowly turned their heads toward Mr. Kindt.

Then both young men flinched.

Oh …, the smaller of the two said.

Not to worry, Mr. Kindt said. The two of you will leave now and when you leave I will put money on your table to pay for your abrogated dinner. How was your abrogated dinner? I hope that you had time to enjoy one or two bites before you addressed yourselves so unpleasantly, so gratuitously, to me.

We should have known better, the larger one said.

Yes, you should have known better, so good-night, boys. Good-night, boys, and don’t fucking come back, Mr. Kindt said.

When the two of them had left, Mr. Kindt reached over and put some money on their table. He also took a piece of their untouched chicken tikka and put it on Tulip’s plate.

Everywhere we went, Mr. Kindt paid. He always had a tremendous amount of cash with him and he was not averse to slipping a couple of twenties into my pocket at the end of an evening before I went home. After a while, I asked Tulip about this, and if she thought Mr. Kindt was expecting a little something in return.

He’s just generous, she said.

Right, I said.

She smiled.

Why don’t you ask him what he wants? I don’t know.

I did. It was evening, and he had just been showing me something about the lights in Tompkins Square Park from his window, how “lovely and scattered” they were, especially through the black netting, like some kind of “sparkling sea creature,” or maybe, I said to myself, not really getting what he was trying to show me, like a sparkling sea creature that has been blown to bits. We were still standing there, gazing, when I said, Mr. Kindt, is there anything you would like me to do for you?

He looked up at me.

How do you mean, Henry?

I mean you’ve been very generous.

Have you been enjoying yourself?

Sure. Yes—absolutely.

Well then that’s perfect.

So there’s nothing I can do for you?

You can get Tulip off my bed and tell her it’s time to eat.

I looked at Mr. Kindt.

I meant I could help you, if you needed it, with your business engagements, or with, you know, anything you want.

Mr. Kindt took my arm. He held it for a moment in one of his cold little hands then let go and gave it a few pats.

Don’t worry about my business affairs, they are quite well looked after, such as they are at this late stage in my career, my boy, he said. As far as anything else goes, I am an old man and like to talk and I do not like to talk alone. Tulip has been a wonderful companion to me, but it occurred to both of us that another friend might be even more wonderful, and now we are fortunate to have you. It is certainly true that, on occasion, friends do things for each other, but for now I’m not sure what it is exactly besides rousing that lovely wisp of a Tulip you can do.

I looked at him.

He looked at me.

All right, sure, I said.