Heart of Glass (10 page)

At the bookstore, Rodney sort of doted on us in his own way. I think he liked our youth and thrift-store style.

“Love that skirt, Wendy. And, Annie, well, that leather jacket is divinely you.”

“Thanks, Rodney,” we chirped in unison. We had just
gotten back from lunch fifteen minutes late, but he didn't seem to care because we were so flash.

Rodney placed a skeletal arm around my shoulders one morning and rasped into my ear, the smoke from his Benson & Hedges stinging my eyes, “Don't tell anyone, Wendy, but you and Annie are my favorite ones.”

“Gee, thanks, Rodney.”

“It'll be our little secret.” He pretended to lock his lips and throw the key away. I nodded solemnly to show I understood. Sometimes I felt that he wasn't so much our boss but our babysitter.

I worked at the B&N during the week, and on the weekends I had a gig that Pete had found me, modeling for an artist friend of his, Dan. They'd grown up together in a small town in upstate New York. Dan was a talented painter and printmaker; his work had been bought by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Walker in Minneapolis, and by private collectors. Even with these impressive credentials, he was still a starving artist, barely able to pay the rent on his share way uptown in Washington Heights. He drove a dilapidated, rusted-out, yellow Volkswagen Rabbit, which always seemed to be in need of a jump. He was tall and softly bearish in build, with dark blond, scraggly hair and an unkempt beard. He had a chipped front tooth, which made him look kind of sweet and defenseless, which he actually was, like a little boy. He wore plaid shirts and worn corduroys and looked as if he slept in his car. He was the kind of nice guy whom women shunned and generally mistreated.

He wanted to do a series of large portraits, four in all, and needed a model. Pete had volunteered me—and I was excited. It would be fun and fairly easy work—after all, how hard was it to stand around? The job also had a hint of glamour, à la Dora Maar, Picasso's famous muse and mistress. Just as important, Dan was paying $10 an hour, more than I had ever made doing anything else. Pete had mentioned that I might have to pose nude, and I thought it might be cool to have a picture of me, naked, hanging in someone's living room. What the hell, right? It's not as if anybody who saw the paintings would know me. I was psyched—it was almost like having someone write a song about you, something I'd fantasized about my friend Lee Thompson doing, though he hadn't yet.

Passing by the tatty mélange of cheap restaurants with their stink of rancid fried food, and bargain clothing and housewares stores—the kind of places where you could buy a giant pack of tube socks for a dollar or an oversized suitcase to mail your grandmother back to Mexico in for ten bucks—I walked down Fourteenth Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, where Dan's studio was. Below the studio was a great Cuban place, where I picked up a café con leche before traipsing up the rickety stairs.

Dan's studio was basically an empty room with a low tin ceiling and grimy windows overlooking Fourteenth Street. A huge easel stood in one corner, and at a spattered worktable crowded with coffee cans stuffed with brushes, he would furiously squeeze tubes of paint. The air smelled of turpentine
and mold even though it was drafty. A banged-up boom box sat on the window ledge, playing staticky music from a classical station. One chair perched atop a wooden box against the opposite wall, with a shadeless floor lamp casting a flat, white light across the room. The chair was for the model—me. We didn't talk much—I knew he had to concentrate on what he was doing. Surprisingly, I wasn't bored. Sitting for Dan gave me all this time to think, like being on a train and looking out the window—it was like mental floss. I would think about what I was going to make Jenny and Pete for dinner, how my sister was doing back in Boston after opting not to return to college, and what the hell I was going to do with my life.

In the first painting, I wore my street clothes—a white-collared shirt underneath a black crewneck sweater. After a few sittings, Dan finished it.

“Can I take a look?” I hadn't wanted to crowd him by asking to see it before it was done, even though I was dying of curiosity.

“Sure.”

I walked around to his side of the easel. It was beautiful. I looked ethereal, even ghostly, as if you could see right through me. Maybe trying to forge your own identity was like a painting, layers and layers applied until people could see you, and you could become your own person. Looking at myself on the canvas, I could see I wasn't quite there yet.

“You look like an angel,” he said, showing his snaggletooth smile as he wiped a brush on a rag.

I didn't think I looked like an angel, but I loved the way my eyes looked in the painting—they had a fierceness that I wanted to believe showed in my real life. I yearned for something—
I didn't quite know what—and he had captured that. It was a little window into my soul.

As we moved on to the next portrait, I asked Dan if he wanted me to take my clothes off. I wanted to try on being that tough chick who strips not giving a damn who sees her. I also wanted to see if I could shock him with my brazenness. Before he could answer, I popped my sweater off over my head and started to unbutton my shirt.

“No, Wendy! Stop!” Raising his arms and practically making the sign of the cross, he seemed mortified. I realized that I had embarrassed him, so much so that he was acting as if I'd asked him to take off his clothes. It seemed like the opposite of the artist-model relationship to me, and I was a bit offended.

As I slowly got to know him better, I began to realize that Dan was quite religious. He was completely unlike Pete's other friends from childhood I'd met, like crazy Colin, Pete's flamboyantly gay chum who wore leather, shot heroin in the closet of the apartment, and got into bar fights regularly. Or the guy who once arrived for dinner at our door stark naked. Dan was like a monk compared to them.

I finally convinced him to let me wear a camisole for the last two paintings—I didn't own a bra because I was so flat-chested. These portraits had a more brutal, confrontational feeling to them—my mouth was an angry red smear and my
eyes looked empty. Something had clearly changed between us. Whether I'd upset or frightened him I would never know. The first, more innocent, portrait remained my favorite—the phantom girl. She seemed full of possibility, and I looked forward to filling in her blanks.

•   •   •

Back at the Barnes & Noble, I was answering the phones with Annie and taking orders as usual. Rodney spent the days talking to his boyfriend on the phone and smoking. He always looked tired and hungover. I imagined him voguing until dawn in some gay club in the Meatpacking District.

I'd dragged Annie to a B-52s concert the previous night. The band came out in these crazy neon-colored suits and dresses. The women wore towering beehive wigs in purple and hot pink, leopard-print minidresses, go-go boots, and huge dangly earrings. We danced to songs about going to outer space, dance parties, poodles, and ancient Egypt. The B-52s were all about having a great time and looking outrageous while you did it.

But Annie had a lukewarm response to the band; she liked the Talking Heads more because, she said, they were intellectuals, in addition to being artists. Because I liked Prince, she accused me of having frivolous taste in music.

I'd seen the Talking Heads a few years before in Boston at the Berklee College of Music. All dressed in black, looking like actors in a modern dress play or beat poets, and barely acknowledging the audience, they'd picked up their instru
ments, unsmilingly, and began to play. After each song, they said nothing, not even introducing the songs. At the end of their set, the lead singer, David Byrne, said, “Thank you,” into the microphone, and that was it—they walked off the stage. Maybe they had lightened up since then.

“The Talking Heads are serious thinkers with a super deep message, don't you see?” Annie sucked on the straw in her Diet Rite, her heavily kohled eyes looking at me as if I were an idiot. “They don't have to put on a show for you—they're doing it for themselves. And fuck what you think.”

“But they acted like assholes. It was like they hated us.” I shrugged. She was so intense sometimes. It was just rock 'n' roll, for Christ sakes.

After work we walked together across Eighteenth Street and turned down Seventh Avenue to find a bar and ducked into the Riviera Café, a joint in a brick building across from Sheridan Square on West Fourth Street. It had once been a hipster hangout in the late sixties and seventies, but was now just a place where you got a cheap drink after work. We were playing the jukebox, drinking rum and Cokes, and bumming a few cigarettes from the bartender when this wraithlike man walked in with a young boy, about ten years old or so. The man looked familiar to me, but Annie ID'd him right away.

“Jesus H. Christ, Wendy! It's Iggy Pop!” she hissed to me behind her hand, her black-rimmed eyes opened wide. I knew he hadn't heard her, but somehow his radar picked it up, and he made a beeline for our table.

“Are these seats taken?” Iggy Pop was asking if he could sit at our table. With us.

After a sizable pause, I answered, “No,” because Annie had been struck dumb.

Iggy and the boy sat down. He introduced the kid as his son, Eric. Eric played waiter and asked us what we were drinking, then he went to the bar and ordered drinks for all of us.

Everything about Iggy looked cadaverous, except for one thing: his eyes. They were the only part of him that looked alive. His face and body looked leathery, and his skin hung from his frame, clearly having turned on him, but those blue eyes burned in his face, searing into you. I was terrified; it was like seeing someone who'd come back from the dead.

“What's this?” He snatched up from the sticky bar table a copy of Oscar Wilde's play
The Importance of Being Earnest
, which I had been carrying around. At Christmas in Minneapolis, I'd done my audition pieces for the artistic director of a small summer theater in the mountains of Colorado. It wasn't much pay, but my dad had encouraged me to try out, and I'd gotten a job as an apprentice mostly, but I'd get a chance to act in the Wilde play, as Cecily, a sort of madcap schoolgirl who doesn't like to do her homework.

“Just something I'm reading,” I stammered as the drinks arrived, including Eric's Dr Pepper. I didn't want to tell Iggy Pop that I was going to act in the boonies.

Annie was still unable to speak, but I could tell that it
was her he was interested in. She had that Siouxsie and the Banshees thing going on. I was just the friend, which suited me fine.

Iggy asked Eric for a pen, and the boy went to get one from someone at the bar. When he returned, Iggy started drawing on the inside cover of my play. I thought about stopping him but didn't. He drew a little cartoon head, bald with bulbous eyes and a sagging mouth. Underneath the picture he scrawled,
Cancer can be cured
.

“For you,” he growled.

“Um, thanks,” I said—not knowing what else to say. I was sure I'd be the only girl on the block with an Iggy Pop autographed Oscar Wilde play. Maybe I could sell it?

“Hey, do you girls wanna stick around? Bowie's picking me up in a limo real soon. Maybe we could all go someplace.” Iggy looked straight at Annie, but it was nice of him to include me.

“Wow, that's really . . . tempting. Bowie? You mean David Bowie?” I tittered nervously and looked hard at Annie, wondering how much more talking I was going to have to do. Eric shoved a toothpick in his mouth and leaned back in his chair like the badass boy in math class who always sits in the back row and gets sent to the principal a lot. He looked bored; I was fairly certain he'd seen this all before. It must have been tough being the only kid in the limo.

“Yeah, he's coming here. We could drive around for a while—then check out the Mudd Club?”

The Mudd Club was one of the hottest spots in town—
an underground, hip cabaret with Keith Haring's art gallery on the second floor, fashion shows, gender-neutral loos, and a bar and a dance floor. Blondie and the Talking Heads had performed there once, and Lou Reed and Nico chilled there with Andy Warhol.

“Cool,” I said.

“We're supposed to meet up with Bill Burroughs there. You should see that old geezer dance, he's smooth.” Iggy cackled.

I looked at Annie and nodded. No help. “Mudd Club,” I said coaxingly, trying to tantalize her as if cake and ice cream would be waiting for us when we arrived.

“I have a boyfriend,” Annie sputtered, nodding her head like Iggy should have known.

Iggy just looked at her as if she were a juicy lamb chop.

Suddenly she grabbed my hand. “We need to go!” Annie squealed in fear as if we were running away from the Mummy, or Dracula, which we sort of were. I was surprised that Annie was so afraid of a middle-aged rock star. I guessed her tough-chick appearance made me think that she could take care of herself, get rid of him or drink him under the table.

We bolted up and ran like hell through the front door, booking it along West Fourth Street.

We ran down into the subway and collapsed onto a bench on the platform, the book he'd signed clenched in my hand. The familiar steel-grinding sound almost drowned out our voices.

“Oh my God! That was so freaky!” Annie squealed, and grabbed my arm, squeezing it.

“He was so into you,” I gasped, still trying to catch my breath as we stumbled onto the uptown train.

“Really? Do you think he was telling the truth? About Bowie and all?”

“I dunno.”

She kissed me on the cheek and got off at her stop. I rode home looking at the strange doodle creature in my script.

A week later, Annie disappeared from the bookstore, not showing up one morning or ever again. Looking for her, I cruised Barneys and the restaurant where we'd eaten the Steak Bunnies together on our lunch breaks. I stopped by her apartment a few days later—the landlady told me Annie had moved back to Maine but had left no forwarding address.