“What’re you doing?” he said.
“None of your business/’ Randy said.
“Who’re you, Randy, his agent? I mean the man can talk for himself, can’t he?” He stuck out his hand, a little too fast to be friendly. His fingers were damp. “Malcolm,” he said.
“Nicholas Reid.” I resisted the urge to add, King of the Funhole. A stupid giggle escaped me anyway.
“So,” cocked-hip stance, half smile, “what are you working on, Nick, that the rest of us wouldn’t get?”
Nick- “Performance art,” I said. Randy was shaking his head, I thought at Malcolm, but then I realized it was aimed at me. “Wild shit.”
“Wild shit.” Malcolm said it with an air of irony so heavy it reminded me of Randy’s steel skull. “Where do you show your stuff, or perform, or whatever?”
“I don’t know,” I said, slow drunken grin, “if you’re ready for this.”
“I’m always ready for a new experience.”
“Nicholas,” Randy’s earnest gaze, one hand out as if to ward my words, “don’t even bother with this guy, okay? You don’t want—”
“Okay,” I said to Malcolm. “Gimme a pen or something.” I ignored Randy, or at least his growing dismay. My scribbling was just legible, green ink smearing on somebody’s badly done, flyer. “Just come by one day, and I’ll show you something you have never seen before.”
Some woman, behind and beside Malcolm, on first glance a cut-down twin, on second just another lab coat, no overbite but a smile like a guard dog’s. “I wouldn’t bet on that,” she said, and gave a snarky little chuckle. “I mean we have seen it all.”
“Oh, I doubt that,” I said, my own smile downright beatific, grinning at a joke she could not possibly get or Malcolm either. Randy either, for that matter, Randy who sat unhappy and grim, sucking down the last of the beer. “I doubt that very very much.”
“If Randy’s into it,” someone else’s sneer, I didn’t accurately see the speaker, being now occupied by the sudden slant of my traitorous eyelids; “how weird can it be?”
“Fuck you,” said Randy, but without his usual verve. J made a little honking sound, disguised laughter very undisguised, mocking their slit-eyed knowing ignorance, the arrogance of slim experience that truly believes when you’ve seen one, you really have seen them all.
Well. I can name that tune. “See for yourself,” I said. “Come one, come all.”
Empty-stomach drunk, yes, and the isolation, yes yes, but still there was no excuse, I should have listened to Randy, now driving home, glum weave through sparse and icy traffic, I should have seen for myself that Malcolm was exactly the kind of fuck who would take me up on it. I could have made something up, I told myself, I could have said I was a mime. My stomach ached from the beer, from nervousness and hunger.
“That was stupid,” I said for the tenth time. “I’ll say I lied. I’ll say I was drunk. I am drunk.”
“Won’t work, man.” Randy’s blinking was so incessant that I was afraid he couldn’t see to drive. “He’ll just start sniffin’ around on his own, him and those smartass art-school pricks he runs with.” We shot past a big rattling truck; Randy was passing everybody. “Goddamned posers. They believe anything he tells them. If we have to, we’ll stuff the fucker down the Funhole,”
I shook my head, smiled to show I knew it was a joke, which of course it wasn’t, but there were some things I just couldn’t do, even me, even now.
“He’ll probably be waiting on the fucking doorstep,” and sure enough, a car I didn’t know, dumpy blue Toyota parked in my Dumpster spot: but it was Vanese, pinched mouth, shivering behind the wheel.
She was out of the car and into Randy’s shit in two seconds, and I saw, from her posture and her hands, the way her body kept reaching for him though she was obviously pissed off out of her mind, that she was terrified; she thought he had come here just to drop off a piece, but the hours passed and she thought, yeah, something bad, had to be, sitting there with a crazy man and she came to check and the lights were out and nobody, nobody was home.
“What’d you think?” Randy, yelling back in the dark. “I went down the fucking hole?”
Which was exactly what she had been thinking, even a drunken piece of shit like me could see that, but apparently Randy couldn’t, he just kept yelling even though I tried to calm him down; which naturally made things worse. “Don’t you start, man, you fucked up enough for one night already,” and Vanese, instantly apprehensive, “What’s that supposed to mean?” and Randy bellowing, in the voice of a man pushed past frustration into some unbearable new state, “Fuck this shit, man!” and slam, bam, gone in a weaving trajectory, he would have squealed his tires if he had thought of it but he was beyond thinking now.
Vanese was crying, upright and brittle with tension, one hand pressed against her face not to hide the tears but it seemed to catch them, as if each was bitterly precious, as if each, like a hologram, held the whole sad moment entirely. She cried almost without sound, deep sobs that occasionally ended in a soft glottal cough.
“Vanese,” I said. “He’ll be okay.”
She shook her head, the pessimism of a woman who knows.
“Really. He’ll be okay, okay?” I didn’t know what to do, I couldn’t leave her there but I was freezing, I had to piss so bad my kidneys ached. I made her come inside, insisted her through the door and up the stairs, but she didn’t fight me as hard as she could have; she was too tired.
On the couchbed, shaking. She in fact was freezing, I saw it in those long jerky shudders. I put the blankets around her, coat and all, tucked her in with clumsy drunken care. “I’ll make some coffee,” I said.
“You can’t even make sense,” through teeth that abruptly began an almost comical chattering, but she was trying to smile, it was a joke. “Let me,” and she moved to get up.
“Sit down,” I said. Forceful. What a man. When the coffee was done I sat next to her, helped her hold the cup. “Another few minutes and you would have had frostbite,” I said. “Why didn’t you just wait inside?”
“I did, for a long time. But that hall’s so cold,” feelingly. “In the car I had heat.”
“Why’d you turn it off then?”
“I didn’t. I ran out of gas.”
I shook my head, lectured her on her stupidity, a lecture that veered somehow into a confession of my own: me and Randy at the gallery, and my incomprehensible boasting, something you’ve never seen before. “Vanese,” sagging back, “I am so dumb.”
“You are,” shaking her head, amazed. “Malcolm. And the Malcolmettes. Shit.”
“I know,” trying to shrug, “I know I know.”
I didn’t, though. I spent the next few hours trying out various scenarios on Vanese, things I could tell Malcolm, and with sorrowful expertise she shot them all down. Malcolm was a wily boy, she kept saying, Malcolm was smart. Malcolm would see through my bullshit, I wasn’t much of a liar anyway, and if for some reason he didn’t, one of his cadre would, and anyway I couldn’t dodge forever. It might be better to just break down and tough it out.
“You mean just show him?”
“Why not?”
“Why not?’ Because it’s the real black hole, Vanese, because it’s unpredictable and uncontrollable, because anything could happen. Because I don’t want to be responsible. Because it’s a pathway, and I wanted to go alone. Because it’s mine. “Because it’s not a good idea,” I said; firm, but ultimately lame. She said so, and then there was really nothing else to say.