City on Fire (86 page)

I couldn’t understand; cheating was the one thing I’d told her all those years ago would be unforgivable. She knew, she said, but that was part of what had been confusing her, that I would even have told her that, as if she weren’t an actual human being with the freedom to act, but some character in a scenario in my head. There was a quality I had of making the people closest to me feel lonely, somehow. Some essential cold withholding at the core of myself.

To make a long story a bit shorter, I wound up staying on this friend’s couch, this friend who was a girl, because for some reason most of my good friends were girls. I wasn’t involved with her, sexually, but would have been happy for Julia to think that I was. How was I doing, Julia would ask, on those rare occasions when we talked by phone, as if she cared. As if it were possible for one person to care about another and still treat him or her like this. The truth was, I was doing terribly. After several years of keeping it in check, I was drinking so much it didn’t even knock me out anymore, and anyway, it wasn’t falling asleep that was the problem, but staying asleep. The cushions of my friend’s couch were some kind of rubberized velour, the windows were uncurtained, and at five a.m. the birds were all atwitter and the light, the L.A. light everyone goes on and on about, was right in my East Coast eyes. Give me New York any day, I thought. But when New York came, it was with fangs and claws, in a nightmare I now woke from screaming.

Wait. I’ve just realized that the heights of the buildings in this version of the dream were exactly those of the buildings on Broadway between Eighth Street and Fourth, where I used to spend hours at the Tower Records. But of course they couldn’t really be any specific buildings, because no matter how many blocks I ran, they stayed the same. Think of a rat in a maze. And when the veils coming loose from them pulled forward or sucked back, there was now a rasping sound. If I listened hard, I might be able to discern actual words, but I didn’t want to hear what they were saying. I didn’t want to look to the side and discover that the ravenous thing lurking back there, which once seemed so huge, was now the same size as myself.

This relapse or whatever it was lasted longer: two months, five or six nights per week. The screaming, in particular, led to all kinds of friction with my friend’s housemates. I’d hear them murmuring through the walls at night, or through the sliding door of the patio where I sat all day under an umbrella playing one of the early hand-held video games. (This being practically the only thing I felt capable of doing; I’d given notice at the restaurant a month earlier, and was living on my trust fund.) In the glass, when I turned, I looked skeletal. I’ve never been a physically large man, but now I was down to like 130 pounds.

Then, in July, I got a call. Uncle William had somehow gotten the number. He was in town for his solo exhibition at the L.A. County Museum of Art, he said. (By that time, he’d given up painting for photography, and had become semi-famous for it.) The opening was on Tuesday. I started making excuses, because I didn’t want the state I was in getting back to my mother, but he insisted we at least get together afterward for a drink. “You’re the only person I know in Los Angeles, Will, and so far the only reason not to hate it.” “That’s the thing,” I thought about saying. “You don’t know me.” But he’d already gotten off the phone.

So I went to meet him a couple nights later, at a nightclub that was unlikely to change his opinion of the West Coast. I sat waiting for at least an hour, singularly unappetized by the lager before me in its frosted glass. What else do I remember? On each side of the room’s sunken center was a fish tank, tin-hued betas in garish teal water. They reminded me of some paintings my grandfather had once owned. Dirt drumming down on a casket; unisex posses flirting by the bar. By ten o’ clock, twenty dollars’ worth of beer had vanished down my gullet without my really noticing. The waitress, a fellow thespian who’d at first taken pity on me, kept tromping past, a silent reminder that there were other people who would like a table. For a moment, I could actually feel myself aging, moving toward the point when only half of my life would remain, then less than half, then none. Then heads started to turn toward the hostess stand, and there he was, my uncle, still in that motorcycle jacket, all this time later. Indelibly New York, despite sleeves scrunched up to reveal his forearms.

“My favorite nephew,” he said, sliding into the banquette.

Your only nephew, I replied.

He asked the waitress for a cranberry juice, no ice, and then turned back to me. “Well, you certainly look like shit.” I’d done enough improv that I still could probably have vamped my way through thirty minutes of hail-fellow-well-met. Oddly, though, the impulse overrode itself. I mean, here was the person whose defenses I’d studied so closely in our dozen previous encounters and in the lyrics he’d once written. After whom I’d in some sense modeled my own. And it all came pretty much spilling out of me—even, eventually, the part about my girlfriend’s coworker, which I hadn’t even told to the friend I was staying with.

After a while, the fact that he wasn’t saying anything started to get to me. I guess hanging on to a good woman was not something Uncle William had to think about. Have I mentioned he was gay? It was part of his mystique, the sense of outrageous freedom he carried about him. But there I went again, turning people into symbols. A form, maybe, of sublimated aggression. “Feel free to respond at any point.” I meant it to sound sarcastic, but as I scratched a pinky-nail through the frost of my fifth glass, I felt myself reaching across a chasm.

“What can I say?” he said. “It worries me to see you like this, and I don’t have to tell you, from personal experience, it’s not something you’re going to drink your way out of—”

“It’s not the beer, it’s sleep. I’ve gotten like maybe fifteen hours in the last five days. Sometimes even when I’m awake now I see hallucinations, acid trails, things that aren’t there. And then at night, I keep having nightmares.”

“But what do you expect me to do about it, Will?” Though I was too ashamed to look him in the face, I could feel him watching me. “Advice, disaster control, that was always your mother’s thing, not mine.”

“Uncle William, a person I loved fucked someone else.”

“It happens. No, hey. I’m not trying to be flip, but you still love her, don’t you?”

I focused on my beer, but didn’t touch it. Nodded miserably. Of course I did.

And there it was again: his weird mixture of ferocity and bemusement. “Listen, do you know how a Zulu speaker greets another Zulu speaker?”

“Beg pardon?”

“I learned this recently, and it struck me as insanely beautiful: The word for hello or goodbye in Zulu literally means ‘I see you.’ And the answer is ‘I am here.’ You understand? ‘Sawubona.’ I see you, Will.” He made no move to get up from the booth. Or to pay for his cranberry juice, I might add. But I could feel a change at the molecular level, as if he were gone already. “Say it. It doesn’t work if you don’t say it.”

“I am here,” I said. And something lifted off me, not all the way, but enough.

I realize I’m burning through your paper supplies. The condensed version of what came next is that I went to see Julia, and we talked. We talked about the past, and we talked about the future, and we talked about the ways the latter didn’t necessarily have to repeat the former. We practiced our trust-falls. I sobered up for good. And a year later, we were married.

A decade and a half passed—no further nightmares. I went to law school. We had a kid, a daughter. We stayed in L.A. I turned away from history, which is what I thought people came to L.A. to do. I went back to New York only every four years or so, when it became impossible not to give my parents a Christmas or a Thanksgiving, and we would stay at a hotel, rather than in the guestroom in Brooklyn Heights, owing to some lingering static between me and my dad. And at a certain point, between work and parenthood and the ordinary unglamorousness of life in the SoCal ’burbs, I was so tired when my head hit the pillow that I didn’t dream at all. And for all this, in some way so strange that even I didn’t understand it, I had my uncle to thank.

It’s been hard for me to accept, I guess, that he’s dead. Not because I knew him well—I didn’t—but because I remember him, for all his quirks, as this incredibly alive person. He was diagnosed with HIV in the late ’80s, but you wouldn’t have known; the drug cocktail they put him on kept him mostly out of the hospital. And when we did head east, we’d go see him in his crazy apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, which he refused to renovate even after everything else was condos. My daughter loved him. Julia, especially, loved him. But in early 2002, my mother told me he’d been having some health problems, and he went quickly downhill after that.

His art dealer blamed the events of the previous fall. “I don’t mean causation, exactly,” he told me. “More as if whatever happened to this city had to find its mirror in him. There was a certain mood of elegy, those first few months after. He’d been pretending to be immortal for so many years, and suddenly he was seeing something that helped him let go.”

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The art dealer’s name was Bruno Augenblick, and I met him last September, just before my symptoms returned. He had a gallery down on Spring Street, and had mounted a retrospective of some of Uncle William’s paintings from the ’70s. Evidence I, said the invitation I’d received in the mail. The funeral had been in the family plot in Connecticut, and I hadn’t been back to the city proper in several years, and downtown in longer than that. But I felt I owed it to my uncle to show up for the opening.

In my head, on the plane, I allowed myself to imagine that the blocks south of Houston were still the ones where I’d felt so free, but on the ground, tsunamis of capital had swept all that away. Now there was art every five feet, along with brasseries and artisanal what-have-yous, all of them at eight p.m. crowding the street with their constituencies. The gallery, once I’d found it, was an extension of that, mostly expensively jeaned young people, and in a way, it was comforting. None of them had cause to suspect that I, in my schlubby cords, was anything other than a tourist who’d lost his way.

Somewhere inside, though, I must still have been expecting the city to save me, or how else to explain the scale of my disappointment with the actual canvases on the wall? Uncle William had always had that largeness of spirit that drew people toward him. And these, by contrast, were minimalist nullities—entirely white, albeit with surface disruptions that came clearer as you approached, alabaster drips and milky salients of brush. You could trick yourself into thinking a figure was struggling to emerge from all that blankness, but one never did. The only thing remotely interesting about them were their shapes.

I was staring at an eight-sided polygon, white on white, feeling complexly bereaved, when a voice spoke just behind my shoulder. “You know what this is, don’t you?”

Augenblick’s shirt was blinding and wrinkle-free, his glasses fashionably clunky, his head bald, and there was something phrenological about the angle at which he held it, as if he were sizing up my skull. “A ghost in a snowstorm,” I said. “I don’t know. I give up.”

“It’s a stop sign.” He extended a finger so that it almost touched the bottom of the painting, whose eight edges he traced. “He stole this off its pole. Whited it out. Of course, most people don’t remember he was more than just a photographer”—was there a moue of distaste here?—“but even so, you get some insight into your uncle’s mind. But forgive me. You’re the nephew, aren’t you? When I got your RSVP, I assumed you’d be coming with your mother.”

“I think Mom has some qualms about your selling work he never showed.”

“You are her ambassador, then.”

I held my hands up. I wasn’t sure what I was.

“In any case, there are a few matters we might clarify. Why don’t you follow me?” The question was rhetorical; he was already crossing the cement floor.

His office, behind a white wall, was as spare as the rest of the gallery. A slab of table, an espresso machine, a laptop so sleek as to barely be there. I took the chair he nodded toward, but Augenblick didn’t sit. He seemed to emit a faint hum. “It really is uncanny.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“The spitting image, I believe is the expression. Wine?”

I didn’t drink, I told him, with that embarrassed feeling I got whenever I was reminded that I had a body, that I looked like anything at all.

“Well, it’s not very good, anyway. This is a thing one learns: the cheaper the wine, the sooner the freeloaders move on to other openings. But surely you won’t refuse a little coffee.”

He turned to fuss over the machine behind him. There was a pound, a scrape, a rumble. This was when he said the thing about the mirror. My uncle, he concluded, had been like one of those trees that’s grown around the fence that contains it. When a hole is blown in the fence, what becomes of the tree? Then, as if none of it had happened, he turned and set before me, in a white cup with a white saucer and a doll-sized spoon, a black decoction with a precise ring of caramel-colored foam. It occurred to me that this was exactly what I’d wanted to jolt me out of the state I’d been in since stepping off the plane, this weird sense of parallel lives. “Of course, it’s his work we must discuss,” he said. “Estates can be messy things, and when art is involved, one ends up with multiple executors.”

“You have to understand, this is all still hard for Mom,” I said. “He was her only sibling.”

“You are grieving, too.”

I searched for my reflection in the little spoon. “I wouldn’t say we were close, exactly. I haven’t been back much since I was eighteen, and Uncle William hardly ever left.”

“Well, your uncle could be somewhat … difficult. He was prolific when he got going, and had trouble editing his ideas. This was true of many artists at the time, but it made him a particular challenge to work with. The Evidence diptych struck me as quite ambitious, once I understood the full scope. But there was also his music, which to my ears was nothing of the sort. And then something convinced him to pick up a camera, and we had already been quarreling, and I had to insist, ‘No, William, this is not art. Your gift comes with certain responsibilities …’ So he found other representation for the photographs. I maintained exclusive rights to sell his works on canvas—though to my knowledge he attempted only one after 1977. His will made the same dual provisions for posthumous exhibition and sale. But last month, going through William’s apartment, my assistant came across something I’m not sure how to handle. You’ll excuse me a moment?” What was I supposed to say? I’d drunk the man’s espresso, and was beginning to notice he never paused for an answer anyway.