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Authors: Martin Roper

Gone (9 page)

BOOK: Gone
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I will go back to New York. I will find something there. Something will happen. I haven't let go of Ursula but I will. One day I will show her the indifference she feels for me now.

*   *   *

I cannot even remember the sound of my sister's voice. It is gone. Her voice has become a huge silence. I loved her laughter but I can only remember that her laugh provoked laughter in me. Her sweet contagious music is gone. There is only the photograph of her gesticulating with the fork and the roaring silence of the page in front of me. The rest is words hobbling after indistinct memories. The true nightmare of death is forgetting. I forget Ruth, she who I believe I loved more than anyone. Knowing that I have forgotten much of what Ruth was, knowing I too will be forgotten. This is the face of survival. It does away with the fallacy of a pure, everlasting love between human beings. But there was the evening in the kitchen in the flat in Dun Laoghaire. I was sitting trying to meditate and wanting Ruth with me, wanting her back. The sound of the fridge in the corner was distracting me and I had almost decided to give up. Relaxed, open concentration alluded me. I got up, unplugged the fridge, and the room fell into silence. I looked out the window at two crows fighting with each other at the end of the garden. The sound of their squawking audible, even behind the glass. My mind cleared and there was nothing—that splendid moment that is akin to the hiatus that stretches between orgasm and sleep. Orgasm, that release from the self, and meditation the enclosure of the self. Ruth was there, before me. Her essence. A calmness as if nothing else existed. The same sensation of watching a film where an actor leaves the room and the camera doesn't follow and yet the essence lingers in the full stillness of the moment. I felt her presence grow, then, and I felt happiness emanate from her and dumb fear gripped me in my gut and she was gone. I sat there, sweating and feeling as if there was a shard of ice stuck in my stomach. Sins became harder to live with.

I became intensely infatuated with the women I slept with while I was with Ursula, but I knew it was not love. I thought it was passionate lovemaking but it was nothing as calculated as that. I was getting over the problem I had had for years with her. I was trying to satisfy that pent-up sexual hunger that could not be satisfied. The heat of the sex was the one area of life where I was not acting. It was a desire to live, as if my own life was running out quickly, the way Ruth's had. I heard a psychologist on the radio talk about near-death experiences and how these makes people change, how they reassess their lives, improve them. She was talking theory. That's the problem with psychologists and priests. It's always theory. Some evenings on the way home from work, or from the hospital, I would slip my seat belt off and drive faster and faster, imagining that it would be all over shortly. There was no fear in me of death, only a fear of the endless pain. But I would think of Ruth hearing of the news of my death and I would slow down and go and visit one of the women who I knew would have me. I poured all of myself into these women, all the longing and ache of life. As I lay in bed, I could tell they knew they were soothing what was locked inside me and I was embarrassed. I would never fall asleep until I was certain the woman was as drained as I was, sure she had come no matter how much sleep pulled me. I needed the mutual exhaustion. I had no expectations of these women, and, more importantly, they had none of me. There were no expectations at all except the pleasure of the moment. Until Holfy.

Holfy

She can only be described through her city. Even more specifically: Gansevoort Street. Melville walked this street here in the far West Village in New York City. The author of
Moby Dick
found it hard to get work on a street named after his relatives. Holfy took on Gansevoort Street in the early sixties. Stonewall was years away from her, and I was not yet born.

She gets bored easily. In 1974 she started a restaurant with her then lover in the heart of Greenwich Village. The
Black Man's Table
still does well almost a quarter of a century later in a city that devours restaurants before the paint has dried on their freshly finished fronts. But the restaurant bored her, she had a disagreement with her lover, and she left. Success in itself seems as uninteresting to her as the same meal two nights in a row. Then she got herself into photography in a city lit by photographers.

Holfy started buying her own train tickets from upstate New York to Manhattan as soon as she was old enough. At eighteen she flew to Denmark and took painting classes. She would become a painter. She sat on both sides of the canvas. Life opened. A year later, when she returned to New York, she and Robert rented a dump on Gansevoort Street in the guts of New York's meat district. They knocked down the wall between them and the adjoining vacant apartment. When the landlord found out, there was nothing he could do because the lease stated
Apartment, second floor.
There was nothing describing another apartment on that floor in the plans. It was fun in those days to fool the landlord. Like his tenants, Charlie Gottleib was young and vigorous.

At night, on Little West Twelfth Street, a sliver of a block from her doorway, prostitutes prance on the cobblestone roads that have been battered by Mack trucks delivering skirts of beef to New York's finest restaurants. In the filthy night, these prostitutes glisten, looking more outrageously beautiful than supermodels and with smoother legs. On a summer's evening, even before darkness gives the hookers mystery, cars stalk the area. Syringes litter the streets on Sunday mornings. A prostitute is slumped in a doorway, his silver miniskirt gathered on his hips. The smell of urine teases the breeze that wafts in from the Hudson River. It is quiet.

During the week, Duffy Dumpster trucks collect the rubbish. Other trucking companies collect the inedible meat refuse after eleven at night. The meat is sprayed with green dye to discourage the homeless from eating it. Bins, as large as small apartments, crash to the ground throughout the night as they are emptied. No sooner has the rubbish been collected than the meat deliveries turn into the street. They park every which way, engines coughing. When the drivers are blocked they rest their elbows on their horns until someone moves. By five, the hour between night and morning, the workers arrive. They scream at each other in Aramaic and Spanish. Someone speaks English. Holfy sleeps with her windows open to the mouth of the street.

She has made her home here for over thirty years. During the summer she cycles to her appointments on her bokety bicycle, bouncing over the broken cobblestones and splashing through rivulets of blood that run out of the processing plants. If she's out, the mailman drops off her photography packages at Florent's restaurant next door. On the hottest days the stench seems visible and during snowy winter mornings the street is an abstract painting—Jackson Pollock playing with colours. I am entranced with it all but it wears off, although in the company of a woman like Holfy the excitement of living never fades.

Her studio is in this apartment. It is packed densely with contact sheets, negatives, photography books, film books, novels, poetry, jazz, classical, clothes, shoes, makeup, and light; the light she gained thirty years ago when she knocked down that wall. These days she feels guilty about the wall. Charlie never did well in the meat business. Soon, in his late sixties, he will break down and end up in an asylum. Photographs of old lovers are pasted on her walls. There are photographs of Robert in the last days of his illness. For her, it's an expression of love, a visual depiction of how much he grew as he died. For me, it's a macabre showing of decay, a photographic equivalent of Lucian Freud. His ghost lives here. Many of the photographs of naked men, their nudity compounded and not neutralised by their number. She photographs her friends for pleasure. She is in pursuit of an aspect of the personality they seldom display. She shoots quickly and seductively. She takes chances. She spends ages taping gels on her strobes and then doesn't use them. She is restless when she works and yet somehow she captures most of her subjects in a state of tranquillity.

The first time I laid eyes on her she was shooting at the IBM kick-off. That was before I learned that I could be dishonest and live with fickleness. Fickle. That was the kind of word Holfy used. Fickle, and, credible. Credible was her most condescending term.

I was still staying with Gerry that first night I met her in the Puck Building. Gerry had been giving me the hint that I'd have to get my own place. IBM had won the Cunard account. Gerry had worked with Fintan, the guy who gave us both under-the-table work, and Fintan had worked with Cunard and got us an invite. She is crouching at my table taking photographs of the marketing director while he gives his lighthearted nautical speech. Gerry and I laugh, not at his speech but at his tic—constantly lifting his chin away from his collar as if the shirt is tweaking his neck. A finger taps my shoulder.

—That's Mr. Welty?

She's pointing her middle finger at the podium. I smile a yes at her. She finishes her roll, replaces it, writes something on the spent roll, and slips it into a fannypack. I watch her working for the rest of the evening. She has a precise economy of movement as she works the hall. I think about talking to her and then dismiss her—as one does with these idiosyncratic New York types. But I remembered that middle finger pointing.

Months later I am at the Gay Men's Health Crisis benefit on Christopher Street. I forget now what I was doing there. Something altruistic. I was with William Davies. We had painted Bill's gallery, and Bill was after Gerry. There she was photographing again. No sleek black suit this time. An official Keith Haring T-shirt with green shorts. She is laughing a lot. She seems to know a lot of the people she is photographing. She touches them gently on the arm, pushing them into poses. Someone hands her a glass of wine which she takes and then leaves on the sidewalk. Bill and I are sitting on an overturned barrel at the end of Christopher. The cops are relaxing; laughing at a drunken Judy Garland look-alike whimper that he isn't in Kansas any more. Bill is watching me watch her.

—You like her?

—Who?

—Holmfridur. The photographer.

—You know her?

—Sure. The one and only Holmfridur Olafsdottir.

—Holmwho?

—Holmfridur Olafsdottir. Imagine crunching your teeth. She's a fag hag.

She has her hair in a ponytail.

Holmfridur, he says again, smiling. He wants me to appear a little stupid, never missing the edge knowledge gives. He gets up with his half-eaten chicken drumstick and goes over to her. She responds much more warmly than he expects. Not the usual strained friendliness that trails Bill's sick life.

—I'm Holfy, she says, giving me the gift of her hand. Long fingers. She speaks as if she has marbles in her mouth. She doesn't remember me.

—We met—talked—at the IBM thing a few months back. At the Puck?

—Right. I remember.

She doesn't.

—You asked me the name of some guy.

Her face darkens. She remembers.

—You're the fuckhead who lost me the account?

—I beg your pardon?

—You said Welty was the M.D. and he wasn't.

—I was just joking. I thought you knew I didn't know any of those gobshites.

—Expensive joke.

She walks off.

—O, dear, you do have a way with women.

—Want to do it Bill?

He looks at me quickly to see if I mean it. He's imagining pushing me down on my stomach but already I am walking after her.

—I love this garlic chicken, she says to some wrinkled queen, stripping a morsel from the bone and popping it in her mouth.

—I'll pay.

She looks around at me.

—I'll pay for whatever I cost you.

—Fifty thousand.

I pale and the queen laughs.

—It was five thousand, and future business.

—I'll pay the five. I can't get the business back.

—You'll pay the five?

Earnest nod.

—Okay. Send the check here.

I take the card and walk down Christopher Street. I walk across to Washington Square, whistling. Then I think of the money. Lot of money for a phone number. That was the beginning of life with her.

I'm as sick of Gerry as he is of me. His girlfriend is some Jew with the classic honker who makes furniture out of sheet metal. He's either too dumb or too indifferent to be bothered by her fake orgasms but it's getting to me. I've put the word out to everyone I meet that I need something. The response is always the same. Everyone is always looking for a place. Every day there is always someone shouting in the window of the gallery wanting to know if it is being renovated into an apartment.

I start to pick up books again but it seems meaningless. Cynical voices. People who have nothing to say, saying their nothing with glossy panache. I begin to walk the streets a lot. In the evening I turn on the radio. The same voices discussing the same problems. I feel cold and put on my old jacket. Rummage for a cigarette. The letter that arrived yesterday that I was afraid to open. I had written in weakness and asked her to reconsider, to say yes. I find it in the inside pocket and open it. I feel shame rise as I read it. She is right.

What you say you want. What you need. I need to explore myself. I can't believe you're coming out with that shit. Are you looking for my blessing? Why don't you just say it? You want to fuck around. You don't have the balls to say it. You want to go and search for the balls you don't have. You know who you should fuck? Yourself. And you know nothing of my passions. You are an assumption with a steady voice. You have become plausible. You sound like Brefini. He talks nonstop about how wonderful Una is and he wouldn't change a nappy if shit was coming out her shoes. Shit smells so men like him—and you—take notice.

I am solid. Dependable. This is what you prefer to think. You pour stoicism into me. One thing I do know about us is that I got to know you well and you got to know me not at all. I am a mystery to myself—how can you claim to know me? This is not aphoristic babble—the kind you excel in uncurling at dinner parties. This is the truth. As for your honesty? Fuck your honesty. I wanted commitment.

BOOK: Gone
11.32Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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