Shuck (3 page)

“Outside,” he said. “Why did you ask me if I wanted anything?”

“You clearly have no concept of how the world works. It doesn't surprise me.”

“What is
that
supposed to mean?”

“Well, don't take this the wrong way, but ... it's obvious that money's kind of ruined it for you.”

“You're a rude little snot, aren't you?” he said.

I watched the blood dribble down my body and pool between my legs, circling around the drain like little red spider webs.

“Did you call the police?” he asked.

“Huh?”

“For what they did to you.”

“As an independent businessperson, I'd rather bleed here than in jail.”

“Your eye doesn't look very good. I mean, it looks great but it probably hurts.”

“Maybe you can do something with it.”

He grazed the skin just below the cut, pressing ever so gently with the tip of the washcloth, opening the wound to the water.

“Ow.”

“It's turning the most incredible color,” Derek said. “Like a ... like a pomegranate dropped from a window. Two days in the sun. Three.”

Somehow I knew that he was fascinated by all kinds of gruesome stuff. I thought about showing him the toe funk I'd been farming through the winter.

He turned off the water.

“Dark towel, please, so ...”

“I know,” Derek said.

I was pissed at myself. I hadn't shown him yet, but I had fallen for tenderness, a trap that has worked on stupid, trusting animals ever since they were first fucked into the world.

“I'd like to paint now,” he said. “I'm thinking ... something the color of your eye.”

Because you can buy beer at five a.m. from a pharmacy, because you can get Montreal bagels with cream cheese in ice cream flavors like pistachio and Cherry Garcia, because everyone is an actor and no one is a waiter, because everyone “does” something and it's usually something other than what they actually do, because area codes determine your place in the food chain, because you are always in the food chain and you can never, ever take a break.

Even without the telescope of time to back us up, we both knew it was the beginning. The beginning of a relationship that neither of us might ever understand, nor be able to criticize, nor be able to live with, nor be able to undo.

Derek Brathwaite was arranging flowers in a vase on a painter's table in the middle of the loft. His wet blond bangs kept nudging the bouquet out of whack, so he had to do it a few times. I liked watching him lose his mind like that. There were only two tulips and a swollen lilac head.

I was drinking coffee by the big square windowpanes—typical of Chelsea's converted factories, I'm told—letting the afternoon sun dry my naked body. I wasn't used to the heat, and couldn't keep his bathrobe on.

I was both impressed and confused by the size of the loft—the
distance between piles of clutter was hard to measure. Past a heap of canvases were towers of art magazines with names like
S.P.A.C.E.
and
New Paradigm,
teetering over an even scatter of paint tubes on the floor. There were stacks of photos everywhere, shots of boys in trouble piled waist-high, and there was a stripped-down jet engine near the door, maybe a replica, maybe a crash-site score.

The kitchen was a corner of the loft where I learned the extent of Derek's problem. Water ionizer, blender, food processor, KitchenAid tilt-head stand mixer, juicer, vacuum sealer, Wolfgang Puck Electric SwivelBaker (for waffles), Mikasa hand-cut lead crystal stemware, Wedgwood fine bone china by Vera Wang, Hamilton Beach BrewStation Deluxe, and casual place settings for eight, broken and reglued for style.

It really bothered me that he was missing a toaster.

On the floor, in the middle of it all, was a rectangular frame made of two-by-four wood planks, fencing in two turtles.

“I thought you were going to paint something,” I said.

Derek carefully lifted up one turtle at a time, sliding a sheet of canvas under them in the box. He kissed their shells.

“I lost the impulse. The problem was that we cleaned your eye too quickly. The lighting in the bathroom was bad.”

“I don't understand.”

He wandered over to a pile of Polaroids, rooted through them, then emerged with an armful and handed them to me.

“Take a look at these.”

Grainy shots of crying boys with knee scrapes full of gravel. Dubious medical procedures, strange tools. Faces squinched in pain. Teen hoodlums slammed against cars, wrists cuffed tight, shocked faces reflected in the hood shine. Gloomy and insolent. Bloody noses
that puberty had already made too conspicuous. The world ending before they turned sixteen.

I was almost expecting to find a picture of myself.

“Who are they,” I said.

“Concentrated inspiration. Useless boys.”

Derek strapped Magic Markers on the turtles' backs with rubber bands, the thick blue ones you find holding broccoli spears together at the supermarket.

“I haven't been able to paint for two dry, damn years. The pictures don't do it for me anymore because I can't trick myself into believing that those bruises are fresh. Pretty boys heal quickly. You know.”

The walls of the loft were lined with canvases, warm jumbles of squiggly lines and Day-Glo colors that had little to do with Derek.

He snapped the rubber bands and the scaly turtle legs revved into gear. They set off on separate adventures, to different corners of the two-by-four box, tracing their jerky paths behind them in fluorescent purple and orange.

“There are three rules,” Derek said gravely, taking the photos out of my hands. “Rent is three hundred dollars a month.”

“Shouldn't
you
be paying
me
?”

“What for?”

I stared at the king-sized mattress in the middle of the loft, the only bed in sight.

“To be determined.”

“I think I had something else in mind.”

“This place
has
to be a few grand. Why don't you charge me thirteen hundred, I'll charge you a thousand, and you'll get your three hundred dollars.”

“What's the difference?”

“If we're not going to have receipts and invoices, then we at least need pretend ones, to know where we stand.”

“You've done this before,” he said.

“Yeah, but at least the guy had a toaster. Or I'll charge you back thirteen hundred and I'll get you a pair of Fioruccis.”

“Huh?”

I pointed to his Pumas.

“Your insteps.”

“I have an idea, weirdo,” he said, showing me the demonic gleam I'd come to know. “Since you want to play house, I'll raise the rent to two thousand and pretend to love you.”

“That wasn't nice,” I said. “Do you even need my money?”

“Listen, you're the one who wants to be official about this.”

“About what?”

“God, you're complicated. Rule number two. If you end up leaving, don't steal anything from me.”

“I reserve the right to take back the fucking shoes.”

“And three, you must never, ever take care of a wound yourself unless you're farther than a cab ride from home.”

This looked like it was going to work out just fine.

Some days, there's nothing to do but smoke. Those are usually the days it's too cold to hold anything in your fingers.

I notice things. The entire city of New York smells like garbage and flowers. You can buy daisies in winter, dyed Kool-Aid colors and frostproofed with shellac. Rats arrange bouquets out of the junk people throw out:

Broken high heels, alligator-skin pumps dyed the wrong robin's egg blue, clogs that stink of champagne, wingtip bucks missing Swarovski crystals, vinyl vamps peeling off, open-toe stilettos covered in mascara, silver sandals covered in mud, slip-ons with the tassels snipped off.

Some of the stuff I notice is so fascinating, I do a little collecting, too.

Wink and Nod, having eaten a fortune in greenhouse produce (a.k.a. turtle fuel), started to mill restlessly around their box. Nod liked her shell to be tapped so I drummed out a remix of “Tainted Love.” Derek was busy in the kitchen making us fusilli pasta and artichoke hearts with a goat cheese Alfredo sauce.

“Jaeven, can you strap on the Magic Markers? Let's get a masterpiece going before they shit out too much creative energy.”

“What colors?”

“Blue and green. They look kind of surfish and oceanic today.”

“You're the genius.”

I uncapped the markers and strapped them on the turtles. I'm firmly convinced that each of us has a rubber band around us that can snap at anytime. We either have to be ready for it, or cut ourselves loose before it happens.

He wasn't kidding about being oceanic. Today, the turtles were drawing a great big rollicking sea smacking of salt and adventure. They were marching around, bumping
tock-tock-tock
into the two-byfours of their rectangular world, their microcosm, what Derek had dubbed TraceBox™.

Sometimes they will draw at night. We'll be lying in bed and I'll listen to their headlong plods, the persistent knocks into deterrents that don't work, wondering if they're as incapable of feeling (or as capable of unfeeling) as people can be. On their bad days they act like us, turning in circles around and around, leaving pathetic scratchings in corners of the canvas, markings accumulated monotonously on top of each other.

The lines can be bold and straight, like the ones explorers etch into the earth. Other times they're nervous and uncertain. There are even trails that begin, disappear, and resume elsewhere, as if Wink and Nod fly to whatever parts of the canvas they deem worthy of their art-making.