Slaves of New York (38 page)

Of course, during the party itself there was plenty of food for thought. Was Mike getting along with Fritz (they were talking about tuna fishing and then moved on to what Eastern European tennis players wore on the courts); was Amy talking about her divorce for too long to Marley? Ashtrays, refills of wine, changing the tape from Nino Roti's movie scores for Fellini films to some modern African bongo-bongo music—I was looking for any activity that prevented me from associating with my guests. How the hell had Holly Golightly ever been able to have a good time? The buzzer kept ringing and ringing, but no one else ever arrived at the door (I didn't know then that fifty percent of the time it wasn't working). It seemed like hundreds of people would arrive at any minute, but when this didn't happen I climbed out on the fire escape to see who was downstairs; maybe they had rung and left.

"Wait, Eleanor!" I heard one of my guests shouting. "Don't doit! Don't jump!"

Then for a moment I did feel truly glamorous: in my green satin Chinese pajamas, crawling out the window to the fire escape, I was certain I looked like a genuine hostess.

Now, if only the door would ring with some man I was interested in, my evening would be complete. But I was expecting no guests that I was intrigued with, or even much liked.

Finally the front door of my apartment did ring, and I scurried off the fire escape to answer it. It was Jan, complete with suitcase. I quickly finished my glass of wine. "Hi," he said. "How are you?"

"Okay," I said. "Do come in. But I hope you weren't planning to move in with me—it's rather crowded in here all ready." I was a little put off by the suitcase.

"Don't worry," Jan said. "My girlfriend threw me out this afternoon. I just thought I'd stop by your party before I checked into a hotel."

"Have some wine," I said. I led him across the room to where Amy had arranged herself like a Spanish maja reclining on a bed of soapboxes. Actually she was sprawled on my futon, which was a bed as well as a spare chair. I took out my camera for incriminating photographs. Then I looked at my watch. I wasn't having a bad time, I just couldn't wait until the event was over and I could genuinely enjoy myself. I was sick of having fun. I found fun very traumatizing, difficult even. In some ways it was more fun not to have fun. To me, having fun was almost identical to feeling anxious. I thought I preferred to sit at home by myself, depressed.

Meanwhile, Mark and Beauregard arrived, apparently having come together. "Hi, guys," I said. "Where's Tina and Betsy?" I had assumed they would bring their wives.

"Uh," Mark said. He took out a cigarette and wandered off to look for a light.

"We didn't know we should bring them," Beauregard said. He looked embarrassed, and went to the table to get some food. His foot must have touched one of the table legs; he

leaned forward and the whole table collapsed abruptly, spilling half-finished wine in plastic cups and cheese on to the floor. Three men knelt to clean up. "Oh, God, I'm so sorry," Beauregard said.

Jan propped up the table, crawled under it, and quickly screwed it into normalcy. I looked at him with new interest. "Don't worry about it," I said. "I don't think that table was meant for actual use. It was just a Platonic ideal."

Everyone was smoking cigarettes but the strange thing was nobody had any matches. It seemed that every surface was littered with empty matchbooks. As long as one person had a lit cigarette, though, somebody else could light up from them. Ted trapped me near the refrigerator. "Tell me, Eleanor," he said, "do you think children are just born the way they are, or do the parents have any effect on their personality?" Ted had an eight-year-old son who was already making it big: the kid had a rock band with a hit record.

"I don't know," I said, trying to escape. "I was in SoHo the other day and a woman was carrying a large chimpanzee—the chimp was dressed in a suit and little boots. Strange, huh?"

"I saw some of your jewelry featured in
Vogue,"
Ted said.

"Excuse me," I said. I locked myself in the bathroom. When I came out it appeared most of the wine was gone; I was finally able to get rid of my guests. It was a peculiar thing: each of the men seemed to think I had invited him because I was in love with him, when in fact just the opposite was true. Each one kissed me at the door and said not to worry, that he would call me soon. "Did you get to meet my friend Amy?" I said.

Apparently they had all taken her number.

I thought everyone was gone, but Mark and Beauregard and Jan had seated themselves on the couch and were polishing off a two-liter bottle of wine they must have hidden away. Since I could see they weren't going to leave, I lay down on the futon and held out my glass for another refill. "Oh, God," I said, clutching my head. "Remind me never to do this again."

They sat there like the Three Stooges, waiting to see what I would do next.

"This might have been easier on me if I had a boyfriend.'' I said. "Someone to share the responsibility with. I'm starting to think I'll never meet anyone."

"Let me tell you something," Beauregard said in a slurred voice. "You shouldn't act so desperate."

"Let me tell
you
something," I said. "I was just as desperate when I had a boyfriend. I consider life itself to be an act of desperation." Beauregard looked puzzled.

"She doesn't like to have value judgments placed on her," Jan said.

"Thank you," I said. Nobody said anything for a few minutes. The tape had come to the end and the room was quiet for the first time. "Well," I said again. "Thank God that's over."

"What is it that you had hoped to accomplish, Eleanor?" Mark said.

"It was a party," I said. "Where was Tina tonight?"

"I told her I didn't want her to come," Mark said. He was pretty looped. "I said I needed to go out without her sometimes." I wondered why in that case he was spending so much time with Beauregard. Obviously it wasn't that he wanted to be independent; he just didn't want to be with
her.

"I think I miss Stash," I said. "So did I do anything terrible tonight?"

"You didn't do anything wrong," Beauregard said.

"No worse than anybody else," Mark said.

I was drunk, and exhausted. "I know it," I said. "One part of me knows that—but the other part of me berates myself constantly."

"You don't get what you think out of a relationship anyway," Jan said.

"So it's impossible then," I said.

Beauregard fumbled for a cigarette. "Damn, I keep forgetting," he said. "There's no matches. Wait a minute, why don't I just go light the cigarette from the stove?"

"It doesn't work," I said. I remembered how when I was a child my parents gave me instructions in how to use electricity —always hold a plug from the back, never turn on an appliance with wet hands. Surely they left out some essential directions.

"The stove doesn't work?" Beauregard said.

"I have to call Con Ed tomorrow," I said. Mark leaned forward and poured us some more wine.

kurt and natasha, a relationship

Kurt, a handsome blond German artist, could be found almost every night in a different club. Though he always wore the latest fashions—oversized brocade jackets with gold satin lapels, silk bathrobes in tiger prints—he always seemed as if he should be dressed in lederhosen, marching with the Hitler Youth. He was in his late thirties, but with his pale blue eyes, his boyish, Luftwaffe face, many people thought of him as in his early twenties.

He was a fairly successful artist. He exhibited at a small gallery in SoHo—paintings and conceptual pieces about various instruments of torture. One such piece (never actually constructed) showed a copper-lined pool, to be filled with sulfuric acid. The idea was, as people came into the gallery to view the work, they would be forced to walk across narrow planks over the pool.

It was clear Kurt was well on his way to becoming a major art-world figure.

Natasha met Kurt at one of his openings. She was tall— almost as tall as Kurt—with masses of black hair, milky white skin, and green eyes. Though she was dressed conservatively, in a skirt and baggy top, she had a distinct aura about her: that of a Forty-second Street stripper.

Natasha was trying to start a small hair salon in the East Village. However, she was having a bit of trouble getting

money. That night, at the art show, she decided she was going to pick up Kurt.

Following the art opening there was a dinner in Kurt's honor, and Natasha managed to get herself invited along. She got to the restaurant early, and stole the nameplate opposite Kurt's seat, where she arranged herself like a cheetah in an Avedon photo, about to dine on some particularly choice chipmunk.

By the time Kurt arrived, she had already consumed two vodka martinis and was at her most charming. Though Kurt, who had grown up in Berlin, was accustomed to dating blond women, he found himself quite infatuated with Natasha; as the guests were leaving, he told his date that he was tired and was going home alone. Then he whispered in Natasha's ear, "Why don't you come back with me to my place? We'll watch TV."

Kurt lived in a drafty loft, filled with plans, drawings, and models of his art. He had several large cages, built of steel and aluminum, in the center of the room. Cans of paint, oily rags, broken plates, newspapers were piled everywhere. The only place to sit was a mattress on the floor. "Sit down," he told Natasha, pushing her to the bed. He poured her a shot of vodka and told her to drink it quickly. As soon as she had put down the glass, Kurt took out a roll of adhesive tape, strapped Natasha's mouth closed, and wrapped her wrists together behind her back. He felt her struggling on the bed; he ripped off her clothes and began to make love to her.

When he had finished, he lay back on the mattress and looked over at Natasha. Then he picked up a cigarette and lit it. Her green Russian eyes, he saw, were wide with fear. Slowly he peeled off the bandage from her mouth.

"When you were a kid," she said, "which program on TV was your favorite? 'The Munsters' or 'The Addams Family'?"

Kurt thought Natasha must really be very drunk; there was every reason for her to have been terrified. He decided to make love to her again, this time without the bandages, but it was not as satisfying to him as the first time had been. "I have to get some sleep," he said, "I'm just exhausted."

He lay back on the bed, but found it was almost impossible to keep his eyes shut; Natasha was wide awake, talking, and cleaning his apartment. She swept the floor, and piled all the junk and garbage neatly into one of the cages.

Around six in the morning he got up and made them both some coffee.

"Don't you ever sleep?" he said.

"No," Natasha said. "It must be something genetic. No one in my family has ever needed to sleep. I remember back in high school—my dates used to drive me home at two in the morning, and the whole block would be dark, except for my house. My date would say, 'Do you think something's wrong?' 'No,' I'd say, 'it's just my family.' My sisters, my mother, my father—all of us were awake all night."

Within a short time Natasha and Kurt were living together. Kurt would make Natasha clean the house while dressed in Frederick's of Hollywood brassieres and thigh-high boots; sometimes he would chain her to the radiator and go out for half the day.

It was Kurt's idea to put on performance pieces in Natasha's hair salon, at night—she performed, and if any members of the audience wanted their hair cut, her two assistants took care of business. Kurt knew everyone in town, and not only got Natasha a lot of clients, but convinced the right crowd to come to her place and hang out.

"Kurt, this is more than I can handle," Natasha said a short time after her salon started to take off.

"You will do as I tell you," he said, and that evening when Natasha was getting ready to go out, he insisted that she wear a tight leather corset and an obscenely short miniskirt.

While Natasha felt awkward at first, she was pleased with all the attention she received that night.

Soon she was being written up in trendy magazines; an art collector gave her financial backing to open up a bigger space that became even more successful.

After six months, some of Kurt's friends began to wonder

if he was sick; he was losing quite a bit of weight. "Well, I'm not getting much sleep," Kurt said. "Natasha's up all night."

Yet Natasha, who was forced to cook elaborate Russian dinners night after night, dressed in only a G-string (this made frying uncomfortable, as often grease would spatter from the stove), was more voluptuous than ever. Kurt found he couldn't concentrate on his work the way he once had. It took up so much of his time to think of humiliating things for Natasha to be commanded to do; and so often, just when he thought he had broken her spirit, he would find her chuckling to herself as she scrubbed the floor with a toothbrush.

In the fall Kurt had another show, but though he expected that sales would start out slowly and pick up during the latter days of the exhibition, this year not a single painting sold.

One day Natasha's sister came to town. She was almost an exact replica of Natasha—the same full breasts, slanted Tatar eyes, white skin—but she was much smaller than her sister. As they looked so much alike, it was hard to tell that Natasha was so much larger unless they stood side by side. Kurt wouldn't have thought anything about it, had he not been walking down the street with Natasha's sister, when he realized he was barely as tall as she.