When we left Chinati, we drove to Cochineal, a restaurant downtown that Diane preferred; she’d invited both Monika and the intern along, but they rode their bikes. We only beat them by a minute or two. I’d said next to nothing at Chinati, and, trying to make normal conversation as we waited for our drinks, I felt like a character actor trying to return to an old role. All of that vanished with the first sip of gin; I realized that the weeks I’d gone without speech or alcohol was as long a period of abstinence as I could remember having undertaken since my early teens; the second martini transformed all my accumulated circadian arrhythmia into manic energy. Without ceremony I dispatched the giant steak I had ordered, inhaled it, basically, eating most of the fat off the bone, finishing it while the others were only a bite or two into their barramundi, which left me free to focus on the wine. Here, I noticed, none of the waitstaff spoke Spanish.
The drink seemed to have a similar effect on Monika, and we talked a little frantically about the Judd, although I was embarrassed to concede how much I had been moved, and wasn’t sure about turning the conversation toward the German inscription and World War II. Her English was very good, but she seemed to deploy a limited number of words, rearranging them like modular boxes. She liked to call things “trivial” (“Flavin is a trivial artist,” a bold claim for Marfa) or “nontrivial” (“I am trying to figure out what nontrivial things sculpture can do”), and when, making fun of her own repetitiveness, she described the gorgeous sunset we’d witnessed as “nontrivial,” I found it both funny and beautiful. Whenever the intern tried to contribute to the conversation, the man whose name nobody had used talked over him, cut him off.
I don’t know what part of my largesse was due to alcohol, or to the disorienting power of the Judd, or to my sudden return to human company, but I insisted on using my “stipend” to pay for everybody’s food, even though Diane and the nameless man were almost certainly very rich. We said goodbye to the intern, who biked away, and Diane said we should all go to a gathering at her friend’s. I said I should probably go home and work on my novel, but never intended to, and soon the four of us were driving through the dark to the party. There were a few flakes of snow in the high beams, melting against the windshield, but I saw them as moths, or saw them first as one and then as the other, as if it were winter and then the midsummer of my poem.
We arrived at the same time as the intern, who must not have known if he had the authority to invite us, and when we confronted each other in the gravel driveway, he smiled with embarrassment. Before he could try to account for himself, I hugged him as if he were an old friend I was thrilled to see after an interval of years — a kind of humor totally out of character for me — and everyone laughed and was at ease. How many out-of-character things did I need to do, I wondered, before the world rearranged itself around me?
Because the house had only two low stories, I was not prepared for the vastness when Diane, without knocking, opened the door and let us in. It seemed like the giant living room we entered was an acre wide; the floor was an orange Spanish tile, with carpets and animal skins thrown here and there. All over the room were clusters of furniture, most of it black and red leather, organized around little tables; some of the furniture was art deco and some of it, for lack of a better word, southwestern. There were people, most of them younger than I, sitting and smoking and laughing in these various groupings, and some kind of country music emanating from a stereo I couldn’t locate — country music, but the singing was in French. There was a sense of incoherent opulence: a giant retablo shared space on a beige wall with a Lichtenstein painting or print. Near a vaguely familiar abstract canvas there was a large, silvery photograph of a half-naked, androgynous child facing the camera with a dead bird in its hand.
The intern broke off from us to join one of the groups and Diane led us out of the room and into the adjacent kitchen, also giant, a thousand copper pots and pans hanging from a rack above an island the size of my apartment. I was introduced to Diane’s friend, a handsome woman with silver hair, silver jewelry, and green eyes, who then introduced me to the other people drinking wine and beer around a table that had once been a door; Monika knew everyone. The people in the kitchen were considerably older than those in the living room, as if the parents had retreated to let the kids have their fun at the party — except, disrupting that image, a heavy man with long hair and a beard was dividing a small pile of cocaine with a straight razor on a silver tray. His T-shirt read: JESUS HATES YOU. Diane’s friend pointed us to the drinks.
The man asked politely if anybody would like to join him, and only one of the women at the table said in her British accent that she’d have a little for old times’ sake. The man then proceeded to separate two thin lines from the small mass of cocaine, rolled a crisp bill into a straw, and handed it to his friend. She snorted one of the lines off the tray, inhaling harder than she needed to, and tipped her head back, laughing, saying she was out of practice. The man then took the bill and, after hesitating theatrically over the small line, proceeded to inhale the entire mass of cocaine he had not divided. I stared at him wide-eyed, waiting for him to die or dissect, while everybody else at the table laughed. At this point a young woman in a cowboy hat entered from the living room, her hair down her back in a long blond braid, and asked what was so funny. “Jimmy did the pile,” Diane’s friend said. The young woman smiled in a way that made it clear that this was a thing that Jimmy did. He offered the bill around for whoever wanted the remaining small line; Monika took it.
I carried my beer back to the living room and roamed around looking at the walls. The place was bizarre. A young man and a woman were intertwined on a long burgundy leather couch talking about the pros and cons of raising chickens in their yard. Beside them on the floor a young woman in a swimsuit with a towel draped around her shoulders was texting, saying to nobody in particular, “This is why I left Austin.” The intern appeared with a bottle of white wine and glasses for the group and, seeing me milling around, introduced me to the others as one of the residents, a novelist. More of a poet, I said. They were going to go outside and smoke a joint — although it seemed they had permission to smoke indoors — and wanted to know if I wanted to join them; I said I’d tag along, which wasn’t an expression I ever used.