Music for Wartime (32 page)

A few of us stayed behind and tried Ling’s number, again and again, from the pay phones by the entrance, and a few close friends even remained in the gallery, circulating and keeping things upbeat, but at least ten of us sardined into cabs and rode back down to Twenty-third Street, slapping our faces to sober up and wondering if we remembered our CPR, wondering if we’d have the courage to put our mouths to Ling’s.

My cab was the second to arrive at the Chelsea, and when we got up the stairs and through the door and to the living room, Chapman was on the phone with the police—not the paramedics—and we joined in ransacking what was, aside from the absence of Ling, a normal apartment. Wherever he’d gone, he’d taken his essentials: wallet, satchel, toothbrush. His painkillers, but not his AZT. Not the cat, who walked in circles, mewling. What he left behind was a page of shakily written instructions for Chapman: pieces willed to friends, unfinished works to be destroyed. At the bottom, he wrote—at a different slant, an afterthought—“I grant Christophe J. Chapman legal rights to my artistic and physical estate. Please consider this legally valid.”

It was a warm night, and everything was wet when we set out to blanket the city. I wound up with Juney, who braided and unbraided her hair as we walked. She had me carry her shoes. She was never one to be afraid of broken glass. Juney taught me the prayer her Catholic grandmother had used when she couldn’t find her passport or purse:
Good Saint Anthony come around, something’s lost and can’t be found!
We chanted it over and over, searching the sidewalks and stoops all the way to Gramercy Park and then beyond. I’ve been using it the rest of my life, and it hasn’t brought me much luck ever, except the few times I’ve found my car keys when I certainly would have come across them anyway. I looked Saint Anthony up years later, expecting him to have found a child in the woods or food in a famine—but all he ever found was his lost psalm book. If that’s enough to make you a saint—the reappearance of your book—what, then, were we, wandering in packs and alone, posting signs outside the hospitals and around NYU, not sleeping for three days? Saintly, maybe, if you’re generous, but not saints. Sainthood requires divine intervention, or at least the type of luck that passes for it. But we called the Chelsea every two hours till our quarters were gone, and Ling never came home. We kept our eyes open around the city for months, and no one ever saw him.

A year later we held a memorial service of sorts, a gathering in what was now Chapman’s apartment. The Chelsea had let him stay on, and he was doing well enough to afford the place. It was still full of Ling’s art; Chapman would have to wait six more years for the issuance of a death certificate and so, despite the will, couldn’t sell or donate a thing.

I should admit that there had been some attrition, beyond the kind we’d all grown to expect in those days. A few of Ling’s friends, not having seen Chapman’s tears and panic on that first night, his desperation and mourning on the subsequent ones, whispered foul play. Of course they did. Some held that Chapman had been a predator from the start. Others said he killed Ling out of mercy, that they had planned it all together.

The official theory was that Ling, madly in love for the first and last time in his life, wanted to spare Chapman—and the rest of us, for that matter—his slow and ugly death. That he’d checked himself in to one of the small and discreet hospices that had sprung up in that decade, the ones where everyone was dying of the same thing and anonymity was understood.

My own take was that Francisco Ling had been the one using Chapman the whole time. That the answer to his last days had shown up on his doorstep and punched him in the face: young, healthy, patient, useful. The kind of man who would run around Seattle with a dying fish. Easy on the eyes, good for running to the store, opening your AZT, clipping your nails.

A year is a long time, and we had already returned to our own lives, our own deaths. We had other sick men to tend to. That search through the city had been only one of many panicked nights, a dot on a long and vicious timeline. Everyone’s soul was a slippery fish.

That night, we made toasts, we cried, we told stories that required us to imitate Ling’s accent. The more we drank, the better we got at it. We left empty-handed, which was unusual. So many men had been disowned by their families, and left all their things—the books, the clothes, the wine—to their friends, that I had a small shelf devoted to artifacts. But six years later, Chapman would call us all up and ask if we wanted to have something. “The store is finally open,” he’d say. I would take Ling’s dish rack, the one that had held his tools.

If you sat down today and read about Chapman’s life, his time with Ling would merit only brief mention, between the punching series and the Berlin work. It might be an explanatory footnote to his series of photos of Ling’s abandoned things: the shopping cart, the stool, the detritus of three decades’ fevered creation. He referenced Ling in his 1996 Liner Notes show—the set of thirty-six fake album covers, one of which featured a photo of a hollow-cheeked Ling under the title
Kaposi’s Sarcasm
, a complicated joke that many found inappropriate, in part because Ling never had a sarcoma.

But Chapman was a guy things happened to, and that’s why the Ling episode would be buried. There was his car crash and his miraculous recovery; there was his show in Moscow, the first solo show by an American in the former USSR; there was his studio fire, his MacArthur grant, the time he made national news when Mayor Giuliani singled him out for what he considered an obscene installation at JFK. Through it all, he did what Ling used to—he mentored a generation of young artists, found them representation, kept them out of the soup kitchens. The ones who needed saving found their way to him. Or he found them. Or they just seemed to fall on him, out of the sky. He was one of those saints of lost things.

And meanwhile, there were the rest of us, or what was left of us. Things happened, but they were the predictable things. People got sick, and they died, and then buyers discovered their work. The smart buyers knew who was sick, bought early. I never got sick myself, and maybe this was the most remarkable thing that happened to me. It felt more like a blow from heaven, a singular and unearned benediction, than anything else in my life.

But here’s the strangest thing that ever happened to Kip Chapman, stranger than the fish: In 2007, Francisco Ling died in São Paolo, Brazil.

Which is when we all—Chapman, everyone—found out he’d ever been
alive
in São Paolo, that he’d lived past the night of the Whitney show in April 1989.

There was a story in the
Times
Arts section, with photos of a studio full of unshown late work, and an interview with Ling’s “life partner, the composer Félix Maria Silva” telling how Ling had returned to his native Brazil in ’89, intending “to die in Portuguese.” But instead he’d gained a little weight, met Félix, got new drugs, got the cocktail when it came around, got the next thing and the next thing. Lived out the rest of his life in quiet seclusion. Died, finally, not of AIDS but of complications from those early years of AZT.

I sat at a table in a bakery, a human stone, staring at the photo of Ling and Silva that accompanied the second half of the article. I wanted to call Juney up, to tell her we’d found him at last. I wanted to say,
Your saint came through
. But Juney was nine years gone. An overdose. I wanted to say,
We should’ve looked a little south of Gramercy Park
. I wanted to say,
Juney, we need to redo the tallies
. Juney was the one who kept lists of the ones we’d lost. She was the one to know how many we buried each year, how old they were, how much they’d left unpainted. I wanted to say,
Juney, we found him. So why does it feel like we’ve lost something?
I sat there a very long time. The waitress knew me, and when she saw my face she said, “Oh, honey.” She brought me a scone.

Chapman, I heard, was devastated and inarticulate—both vindicated and humiliated. According to his sister, he didn’t eat for a week. Certainly he’d known about the more malicious theories, and here was proof of his innocence. But he refused all interviews on the matter. He’d moved down to Evans, Virginia, a few years earlier, to a converted barn, and was undergoing treatment for pancreatic cancer, a sickness he blamed on alcohol even as he continued to drink. No one was much surprised that he didn’t attend Ling’s retrospective.

I did go. I wouldn’t necessarily have placed the work as Ling’s—difficult, angular shapes, hardware and nails, a roughness and anger I found completely unfamiliar. The room was full of faces I’d never seen. What was I expecting? Juney Kespert and the other ghosts of twenty years past? I suppose I did. I expected Hugh Steers and Patrick Angus and Luis Frangella. I expected Peter Hujar. I expected, somehow, Chapman and Ling, arm in arm, a mere twenty years late to the party. In the middle of the room, I mouthed Juney’s prayer. Not an actual prayer, just an homage, maybe. Because I didn’t believe anything would happen. I couldn’t raise the dead, I couldn’t bring back our innocence, I couldn’t even believe—as Chapman could—that something remarkable was always around the corner. My only magic was in survival.