Wonderland (7 page)

“No, no.”

He runs his finger along the rim of his glass of cava. “Ninety-nine, maybe. I ran into Ezra in Berlin. He was raving about
Wonderland.
”

This I hadn’t expected. There’s only one Ezra in our world, only one in
the
world, full stop. I didn’t know that they knew each other, but then again, of course they do. I don’t miss a beat. “And how is he doing?”

“You know.”

I nod, shrug. I’m not sure what Billy Q means by this, if he means what I mean. “Is he working?”

“Like a demon. He’s nearly finished the album, I’ve heard some of it. Magnum produced—that man is a genius. It’s back to basics, very soulful.”

“He was always that.”

“Will you see him when you guys are there?”

Boone reaches for the salt. I know what I’m supposed to say, which is:
of course.
And
love.
And
brilliant.
And
ever grateful.
But the words stick in my throat.

“He’s said he’ll come up for a song. Which is amazing, of course. So generous.” What is it about the truly famous that creates that zone of instant intimacy? I’ve never met Billy Q before, and yet I somehow feel compelled to tell the truth. “It’s just that what he’s become—it’s hard to watch.”

“And that Ezra knows that,” agrees Billy right away, as if we’ve had this conversation a million times before, in other cities, at dinner, lying on the beach. “Listen, I grew up on that music, he’s a legend. He did so much for me when I was starting out, I still don’t know why. I adore him. I wouldn’t
be
here without him. But we’ve all tried. Susie’s still there, bless her.”

“Jesus. I know, I wouldn’t be here either. A lot of people wouldn’t be here. But I think that makes it worse. How bad is it these days?”

Billy takes my hand. His is dry, soft, warm, surprisingly small, like a little paw. He has, or someone has, drawn a small, wobbly square in black marker, half filled in, on the web of skin between his thumb and forefinger. “Ah.” Billy shakes that world-renowned, oddly shaped head of his. “Hard to say. When did you see him last?”

“God. Ages. I gave up, I guess. Maybe that was wrong. Or stupid.”

Billy squeezes my hand. “It’s not easy for anyone. And, hey, it’s not just the drugs—”

“I know. It’s the whole thing.”

Billy inclines his head. “The whole thing.” He smiles. “Right. What the hell is he supposed to do about that? And at his age—it’s a little late in the day to expect him to turn it around.”

I feel that I have made a gaffe, because Billy knows all about the whole thing, and here he is, intact. Should I be complimenting him? Or would that be another gaffe?

“And those guys,” continues Billy. “It was a different time. They were cowboys. They walked on the moon.”

Boone crumbles bread into his floridly yellow squash soup. “Ezra’s a god. Gods have issues.”

Billy Q and I laugh together, as if Boone is our high school friend, standing in a parka outside the 7-Eleven, saying the shit he always says. Billy kisses Boone on the forehead. “When are you in Berlin?”

“Two weeks,” I say.

“Oh, I’ll be there. I’ll come to the show.”

“Cool,” says Boone. “This soup tastes like limes, isn’t that amazing? Do you think there could really be limes in it?”

“No,” says Billy Q, winking at me. Boone, I think, actually is some kind of genius. For the first time, I believe that this shadow play might actually work. All the little girls in goggles swing their hammers, exultant.

Standing in the wings (striped stockings), sweating from my set, Tom and Alicia and Zach bunched up in unabashed fandom with me, I see the small, casual form of Billy Q like a piece of yarn standing on end, the packed field, thousands of faces uplifted, eerily serene they look in their rapture, and beyond and above them all the beaten silver of Sweden’s summer night sky. I love him, too. We all love him. “Life,” Billy sings, as if the word just came to him in a dream, and we feel it, life, its inexorable pulse. Life. Life. The heat: I have always loved this heat. The sound resonates through us, thumping up our legs, our backs, our skulls, almost too loud. Alicia leans close to Zach to murmur in his ear. Tom not very subtly edges in front of me to get a better view. The crowd surges and rolls, like a wave that doesn’t quite crest. We all know this song, it was one of his biggest hits, we know all the words. I shiver and sweat and sing with the crowd.

A
S IF IT
only happens the second time. Oh, do it again. Tracing the outlines already made, writing over them. The second time is the one we remember, where memory begins. Putting the moments in order is only half the story. What matters is the weight of the moments as they accumulate, which is to say, the place where it catches, where you begin to remember. Time spins backward and forward from that invisible point. Illustration 1: Michelangelo’s
Slaves
are massive figures only half carved, caught in the perpetual moment of emerging from the stone. Atlas, for instance, has the body of a man but his head is a solid, squared-off chunk, his forearm disappearing into its weight. That weight, of his own unarticulated head, seems great. No one knows whether Michelangelo ever finished carving the
Slaves,
or if he meant the
Slaves
to remain in that state, a permanent state of becoming. They are slaves to gravity, to history, to earth, to the artist’s hand that did or did not intend to finish them, to free them, that possibly intended to leave them there like that, half formed, trapped in rock forever. Where is the moment of choosing, can it be seen as an embodied thing, does it displace air? Was there a choice to begin with? Her weight—in my mind, always a she—that I didn’t carry. Dear one, little bird, I think of you.

Illustration 2: There was an enormous clock on the classroom wall of an abandoned schoolhouse in Illinois. My father and his team carefully, apprehensively, took it down; the hands had been still for years. To smash a clock and leave it broken on the ground, to cut a clock, seems like bad luck, the violation of some superstition. No matter that they were going to remove floors and walls from the schoolhouse, divide it from itself, haunt it with the absence of its own removed interiority. Isn’t that a violation, might it not carry its own punishment? No one thought so; they thought only of the mechanics, arguing and figuring for months, trying to calculate how to do it. But we take the clock for the thing itself, and we don’t want to lose our chance. Not of the first time. Of the second time. My father wrapped the enormous clock in newspaper, tied the bundle of newspaper tight with string, left the clock at the schoolhouse door. “It might be worth something” was his reasoning. He never wore a watch himself, easily lost track of time when he was working. Space was his medium, his angel and devil, not time, not the inevitable progression of one thing after another. He meant that the clock might be worth something as an object, not as a tool. Time is my problem, the problem of music. One, two, three, four. Count me in. Fans don’t want to hear the song the first time. They want to hear it again, and to know that they’re hearing it again. Maybe that’s the motive for the order of things, that knowing.

Z
ACH SITS UP
in the narrow room in the pale of early morning. “Sorry.”

“Did I—”

“No, it’s cool. My head gets going.” He twirls a finger near his ear. “I get distracted.”

“Yeah, okay.” I’m thirsty from the drinking, sand-eyed from the light, which is increasing again, after a darkness that couldn’t have lasted more than a few hours. In the valley of that darkness there had been a spark; his room is next to mine. Easy.

But now it’s grainy.

“I’m going to go try to get a little sleep,” he says, kissing me on the cheek. “See ya.”

Oh, Jesus. “Right.”

Click of my door, and a few seconds later, the click of his. I pull the pillow over my face, trying to convince myself that it’s still night and I’m still drunk, neither of which is true.

B
ECAUSE SOMETIMES WE
were mermaids and sometimes we were trout. Because Cy Twombly came to lunch and brought us each little posies, making us flower girls for some invisible, possibly devilish wedding. Because of the long afternoons at the Newark house when Mom was in her studio (a.k.a. the shed) in the yard and Dad was at his a few blocks away and we read every day until we got headaches, since no one had remembered to enroll us in school that year. Because we got so good at packing and unpacking that we could pack up, or unpack, in two hours flat. Because Kathy Boudin became obsessed with Dad’s work and wrote him long letters from prison about it and its importance to the revolution, and we read them aloud at dinner, standing on chairs. Because the donkey in Spain followed me around like a dog. Because of getting impetigo from scratching relentlessly at our mosquito bites in West Virginia. Because Mom was so beautiful, even her feet were beautiful, and she had been a debutante until she ran away with Dad. Because Dad taught me the names of all the handsaws: crosscut saw, ripsaw, hacksaw, coping saw, keyhole saw, backsaw. Later, the power saws. Because we heard that the FBI kept files on Dad, no one knew why, maybe it was the Kathy Boudin connection, or maybe it was something else altogether that we weren’t allowed to know; we hoped so. Because, when we lived in Berlin, you suddenly turned up speaking full sentences in German; you were five, a tiny blond genius. Because of the choreographer who collaborated with Dad, so for a time various Spanish dancers lived with us in Madrid and they worked the donkey into the dance. Because we were on food stamps for a while in Wellfleet and ate amazing orange blocks of government cheese that I can still taste. It tasted orange. Because when we walked into a restaurant there were always at least eight of us, or ten, or twelve, studio assistants and workers from the current site, speaking various languages, and those odd old-lady friends (often with peculiar disabilities) Mom always made and maybe some other dirty-kneed kids we’d befriended, and maybe somebody’s dog and maybe one of Dad’s mad sisters, telling everyone’s fortune or arguing about the Palestinians. Because one time, in Erice, the mayor came to dinner. Because I lost my virginity at fourteen to one of those dancers, and I couldn’t understand, later, why he never answered any of my letters. Because no one else knows what that was like, to be us.

I
S NOT JUST
another word for nothing left to lose. It’s rigorous, you can feel like a dog walking along a horizon line—seduced, determined, thirsty.

My father was free. My mother was not. Here are two examples. He had this funny pair of red corduroy pants he wore all the time: they were too big; there was a swath missing from the hem of one of the legs, as if a tiger had taken a bite out of it; he held them up with an old leather belt that belonged to his father, who had been an engineer for a mining company. It was the belt his father had used to beat his kids with. Because of my father’s bad foot, you could see him coming a mile away, a listing figure who seemed to be wearing a sagging red sail, happily tilting along the cracked sidewalk in Nyack, or drifting down the beach in Wellfleet, or looking like he’d landed from hippie outer space in Piccadilly Circus, or sitting on the stoop in sandals, face to the sun, on St. Mark’s Place. His face was handsome in a delicate way, but his body was crooked. One shoulder was higher than the other. He was never in good health. Always something convalescent about those pants, something therapeutic-looking, like orthopedic shoes. Or like he’d just escaped from the hospital, wearing pants he’d stolen from another patient. But those pants also looked like freedom to me, like sailor’s pants. Traveler’s pants.

Once my father got famous—the unskilled, oversized photos taken by his drug dealer of the sawed-in-half train caused a sensation at the Tokyo Biennale in 1974—we went with him wherever he sailed, trailing clothes and books and pets and valentines we’d saved from crushes two schools back. He sailed around the world, cutting things out of structures until they were transformed, made porous, apparently weightless, like paper dolls but also like giants wounded by a giants’ war, pockmarked, mutilated. People invited him to come to their countries and cut up their rotting buildings, their abandoned warehouses and barns and hospitals. He preferred to cut up things that were already half ruined, left for dead. He was invited to cut up bigger and bigger things and, ambitious engineer’s son that he was, he never refused; he should have stopped before he accepted the commission on the half-built fascist gymnasium in Rome, but it wasn’t in him to stop.

Amid the clutter of workmen and machinery, you could always spot my father on top of whatever building or teetering disheveled structure by the divided, billowing, off-kilter red triangle of those pants, like one of those big red arrows on a tourist map:
you are here.
I loved those pants. He still wears them, much patched and unevenly faded, though he hasn’t broken anything open in quite a long time. After the gymnasium, or after the aftermath of the gymnasium, the accident, the split from my mother, and the financial meltdown, bit by bit he returned to painting and drawing. His hair is short and gray now; when he paints, he pushes his glasses on top of his head and leans close to the canvas, squinting. I can’t help but see his painting as a chastening, though I know I am wrong about this, that it is ungenerous of me to think so.

My mother, by contrast, made curtains. She had a thunkety-thunkety sewing machine, heavier than lead, that she carefully packed in all our pillows and carted from Chicago to Berlin to Wellfleet to London to Madrid. In each place, the first thing she did was haul the machine out and make curtains from local material that she found in a dusty shop on a side street or a flea market or at a church basement sale or at Harrods, splurging: those last were silk, bang-yellow, and they trailed halfway down the floor in a glamorous pool of hypersaturated color. Is stewardship of the house always the consolation prize? I’m sure that’s a cliché, but still, I hated all those curtains. I wanted to take a match to them. The hot, cottony smell of the old sewing machine with its worryingly frayed cord was for me the smell of her perpetual defeat. Indeed, once she and my father were divorced, she bought a house in Asbury Park and married a rotund potter named Ed. She hasn’t moved in twenty years. She never makes curtains anymore. The most exotic place she travels is Bermuda, in the spring. She is happy.