EMPTY GRAVE

Empty Grave


"People who set fires," Myra said. "That’s where the trouble starts."
"Not every destructive person is a pyromaniac," Laura replied, her eyes fixed on the blackness beyond the window.
“You’re just engaging in logic,” Myra snapped. Logic had never cut any ice with her. “All wasps are unfriendly; no puppies are unfriendly. No puppies are wasps. All I said destructive people who—I meant metaphorically. Light fires, tear things down—”
"Henry used to burn matches," Polly said. She didn't intend any real provocation, but knew Myra was in a mood to snarl at anything.
"Please let’s not get into Henry tonight. Laura has been down there every single day. It’s exhausting. When you think of all he’s been through—"
"He did, he used to burn whole packs of matches until his fingers got singed." And it was always a restrained, impatient snarl, Polly thought. She'd never seen Myra explode, but imagined the sight of it would be amazing.
"I’ve got almost everything ready," said Rita. She wiped her fingers on an apron.
“He almost burned that bar down in Montauk.” Polly couldn’t resist. She came out with it as if thoughtlessly, to watch Myra swallow her exasperation.
"Need any help?" Myra and Laura nearly tripped over each other to ask first.
"You could help me," Rita said, meaning Polly.
In the kitchen Rita said, "I have no idea why I invited the two of them for dinner. I suppose it’s because I’m fond of Laura’s brother. God what a horrible thing."
"It could have been even worse," Polly assured her. "He could’ve spent the rest of his days in a stinking wheelchair if he hadn’t been so drunk that he landed just right."
"What was Henry doing up there?"
"What would anyone be doing up there? Escaping from Godzilla?"
"Christ these look burnt."
"Just scrape them a bit. Those two live on take-out Chinese, don’t you think?"
"Laura, actually, is a rather good cook. But that little place they have, how do you cook a proper meal in a kitchen that size? Anyway Myra’s so driven she never stops to eat. God knows how she keeps the weight on. Help me put this on the."
"There. Lester called me this afternoon."
"Good news?"
"Not really. He seems to think it is, but now I wonder what Lester thinks I consider good news."
"Well, that’s a little…fucked, isn’t it."
She's done this room like I would, Polly considered. Pale watercolor flowers in frames, absolutely innocuous and even sappy-looking. The blander these summer houses were, the better.
"Here we go, there’s limes and cayenne pepper for the corn, this is a beet thing. For our carnivores, some lamb chops, and I have this Japanese salad you make with a guillotine."
"I’m terrified of those things," Myra shuddered dramatically. "I nearly sliced my finger off with one."
"They are nasty if you’re not careful," Polly said, smiling as much like a snake as she could manage without a mirror. Everyone knew Myra was an utter klutz, terrified of any kitchen implement, nervous around machinery, incapable of pumping her own gas at a filling station.
"You marinate it in vinegar very briefly and sprinkle it with sesame seeds."
"You know what some woman told a friend of mine?" Laura was already laughing. "She said she had an affair with Perry Schlitz years ago and that he really knew how to please a woman."
Laughter exploded around the table.
"Even if he knew, he couldn’t—"
"Who," Polly said with a bright air, "would want to have sexual contact with that squalid marsupial, with that nose of his, that perpetually disappointed face, he looks like a walking apology. Strange he’s so full of himself."
"I imagine," Rita said, "plenty of art students would make the sacrifice of giving him a toss if he recommended them to a gallery."
"It doesn’t work that way any more," said Laura. "As you well know. Critics don’t sell works, works buy critics. Galleries buy critics. Artists buy critics. How could you live off being a critic if somebody didn't buy you? I know at least three people who've bought Perry Schlitz for the price of a drink like a salted peanut. That oozy prose of his, it drools out like pus."
"We’re eating," said Myra.
"Maybe he gives off an abnormal amount of pheromones," Laura speculated.
"I love his think pieces," Rita opined. "When he boldly defines his role as a critic and charts his course like the bold captain of The Intrepid—"
"Daring to go where no man has gone before," Polly added.
"You mean into Carla Jackson’s vagina," cackled Myra. "I seem to remember—"
"--she was with that artist what’s his name for years before the irresistible Perry came along," Rita finished for her. "She’s such a mouse, she’s probably dick crazy in bed, takes it up the ass when she isn’t very clean up there, sucks him off for hours--"
"Richard McCaffrey," Laura said, interrupting her chewing. "One-man wallpaper emporium."
"I happen to own a Richard McCaffrey," said Rita, umbrageously.
"Then you must have pretty wallpaper back in town," Myra drawled. “Not that I ever get to your parties because the magazine, it’s madness, Rita, sheer plain madness.”
You got that right, honey, Polly reflected. She had once worked in journalism, and, rather disastrously, for Myra upon occasion. In Manhattan, Polly used a printer that made a zithery sound. Depending on how stoned she was, the inflections of this sound transformed the printer into a sort of anemic Alpha 60, wheezing the same words like mantras, like, “You’re in trouble, you’re in trouble, you’re in trouble,” gradually changing into “urine trouble, urine trouble, urine trouble.”
"Honestly Myra he gave it to me, people are in and out of my place all the time, I had to put it up somewhere."
"I think that guest room you never use turned out to be the perfect place," Laura told her.
“What goes on in that room, Rita Mayhew.” Myra aped Hedda Hopper, knitting a cup for her chin with her fingers as if she had gloves on.
"I don’t use it personally, Laura, but it seems to me you have on several occasions."
"Yes, but not with Perry Schlitz, I assure you. I think of you as my occasional safety from imprudent sleeping arrangements. Even when I’m smashed I’m discriminating."
"That reminds me. I got a telegram today, it turns out I’m Queen Marie of Romania!"
"You’re such a bitch, Rita. That’s why we love you so much, when we do."
“I’m not flattered by being called a bitch by you two bitches. Admit it. You hate me. You hate me because I didn’t eat a lamb chop. I’ve been a vegetarian all my life, I went to one of those Beatrice and Sydney Webb schools that George Bernard Shaw helped them set up, I didn’t take up vegetables to thwart you. Anyway I served meat, you liked it, why hate me for it?”
“If we hated you for not eating meat, Rita, do you honestly think we would have come to your house for dinner?”
“What could stop you? A lei of garlic around my neck?”
“Subside for a moment, could you,” said Myra, lightly rubbing Rita’s shoulder. “I realize we all have a touch of vampire in us but we really do mean you well. And I really mean ‘well’ in the sense of how well can things possibly be. You’ve been under a lot of stress.”
“I only really saw those two socially on two occasions," Polly reflected. "Once, ages ago, at Ned’s place. He wanted me to come early and help him do this pot-au-feu, we did that all afternoon, that was the fun part. Ned is such an intuitive chef, he never has to measure anything, it’s really wonderful to watch him. I keep remembering there were a lot of bird cages around and as far as I know, Ned’s never kept birds. There weren't any birds in them. I wondered if he missed the kind of birdsong he hears along the bayou. But sometimes I remember things from one place and move them to a different memory. Anyway, he puts together this magnificent meal. Then the Munsters arrive. And Ned had warned me they were the only other guests, he’d expected Germaine and Wyler and Donald and then they couldn’t come, but I thought, How bad can it be?"
"Just thinking about this gives me the creeps," Laura said. "Getting parked next to that baggage at dinner. I’ve endured it more times than I care to count. She’s like an expanse of fading freckles on a Marie Laurencin painting, one of those bohemian gals with no facial features, groping inside her vacant cranium for an idea larger than one she’s just cribbed from an academic magazine. And his nose, for some reason, always seems like some kind of oily relief, poking in to get up to speed on the meaningless conversation I’m having with his wife. As if my life weren’t wasted enough without that."
"And how bad was it," Rita pressed, as if she wanted to rush the story along.
"Have you ever had to sit across from two people with absolutely no sense of humor who try to guess whether you’re joking or being serious?"
"Who hasn’t," said Myra, who had, Polly thought, no sense of humor herself. “You say something funny to people they think they’re hearing something tragic. Like whosis, Laura, remember? ‘I was so sorry to hear about your brother’s tragic accident.'”
Laura sprayed speckles of her drink out along with her laughter.
“That,” she said emphatically, “Myra handled with surgical finesse.”
“I felt a kind of existential duty to explain that my brother’s accident was not a tragedy. A tragedy, I said, technically speaking, is an insoluble or tragically concluded situation in which both antagonists are equally right. My brother was dealing with the vicissitudes of mixing alcohol with climbing in the dark up to the roof of the carport in the rain, to worship what he referred to as Ramu, the god of nothingness. He’s a libertarian or something. I just can't see that as tragic. I see it as totally consistent with what my family is all about, the blind worship of nothingness.”
“It seemed more like resignation than worship the few times I was there. I don’t think they were expecting quite as much nothing as they got.”
“I think they got exactly as much nothing as they deserved. Most people would call it a tragedy. Most people would call a spilled glass of water a tragedy. And, you know, if it was Edith Wharton’s water glass, it would be.”
“When that word came up with me,” Polly said, “in connection with recent events I won't go into, I said a bit too sharply, King Lear is a tragedy. Aida and Medea are tragedies. In its own way, The Marcropolis Secret is a tragedy. I mean, it's about a woman who really has lived too long—now, that’s my idea of tragedy.”
"Oh, please. That's your idea of fun. I’m sure you scared whoever it was stiff," Rita said. "As far as Perry and Carla, I’ve seen little bubbles of laughter issue from them now and again. I wonder what strikes people like that as funny."
"It’s lucky I didn’t drink too much, I would’ve forgotten their names before the evening was over. That was merely dreary. The second time turned out to be a farce. Remember that party at Jane and Rudolph’s place where Mitchell Angus got up off their white sofa and Rudolph saw this bloodstain where Mitchell had been sitting—"
"You came with some girlfriend of yours, I remember her, quite an attractive young woman—"
"I wonder what’s happened to her. Maria. She’s Puerto Rican, but she looks like Judy Holiday in Born Yesterday. She was like Judy Holiday in Born Yesterday, too. She worked at Anna Sui and that girl had everything you were ever gonna need. Three times smarter than she pretended, an especially good strategy in those days. Except I haven't heard a thing about her in years, so who knows. I had started taking her with me everywhere because she was so much more interesting than a lot of people at these parties. She could act…deliberately brainless for hours to see how people would react to her. And the invitations I got that summer, it was bizarre. For some reason chi-chi people I mean Bettina Marlow chi-chi and that type of name brand person had started inviting me to their parties."
"Why shouldn’t they?" Laura said. "You've written plays. You've won prizes."
"I wasn't used to being collected by that type of person. They figure they know you if you're there, but they don't. I remember something with--well, it wasn’t on Gramercy Park, it was at Earl McGrath’s. But the night Mitchell had his period, the Jane and Rudolf thing, Maria has too much wine and wants to get in a cab and go back to Brooklyn, we’re coming down that slightly curvy staircase and who’s coming up but Perry and Carla, Carla in the lead: Maria stands there wobbling on the stair railing turning green while I tell Carla how much I’ve been enjoying her writing, how insightful she is, really laying it on with a trowel, she looked absolutely terrified, but I can be very good at this when I feel like it, as it happened I had run across some inoffensive drivel she wrote by accident a day or two earlier and recalled it enough to paraphrase part of it, and she started to really believe I was burning with admiration for her, the poor silly thing, I swear her face had begun to glow, exactly at the moment Julia vomited all over me."
"You suppose Carla thought that was planned in advance?"
"I wish it had been. Lucky accident, though. Ruined a Chanel but it was worth it."
They ate, Rita cleared the table, they drank Pinot Grigio with the cheese course, and Rita put on a Geraldine Fibbers CD.
"The thing is, you want to like people when you’re there having dinner with them. The same way you automatically believe a newspaper story while you’re actually reading it, even when you know it’s a complete lie. It wasn’t even their vacant brains that time at Ned’s, but that deathly earnestness, as if they were puzzling out some Norse runes by listening to these strange sounds ordinary people recognize as language."
Laura and her girlfriend, or Myra and her girlfriend, depending which quadrant of the psychotic friends’ network they happen to flutter in on, needed to wake early to get the jitney and lay out the magazine at the office. Once they’d gone, Polly couldn't tell if Rita wanted her to stay a while or leave.
"It’s funny we can all still go on talking about the most miniscule and petty things and they haven’t meant anything in years. Just these tape recordings you’d like to be quit of but then you’d have the silence.”
“I think there’s a lot of fog on the road.”
“You hardly ate a bite of food tonight. Be very circumspect going home. Especially on your way out to Girard Drive. Something happened out there on the highway to a teenage kid who was probably hitching into East Hampton.”
“It’s not ever about losing circumspection with me. I let everybody pass me, I’m not in Ben-Hur, but the way some of these people take those blind corners, of course Jackson Pollock crashed the car. Didn’t Truman Capote crash into that general store in Sagaponick? Alcohol and a fading potato economy have an almost natural affinity."
"I don't see where you get that, people make vodka from potatoes. You know I spoke with David the other day. He wants to sell his Lucien Freud."
"When I was living up there on the island I used to talk to him on the phone all the time. Not that he was nearby, in fact we never actually saw each other, but when you’re in the country…"
"You talk to other people who’re in the country. I know about it."
"I can’t even think about that island now without feeling I made a stupid mistake."
"It may have been stupid, Polly, but I'm not sure it was a mistake. Think what it taught you about the long-term fun of draping yourself over your own coffin. Anyway you had Mary McCarthy up there, you had Marguerite Yourcenar.”
“No, I had the ectoplasms of Mary McCarthy and Marguerite Yourcenar. The first eight months, heavenly. Then it all became…gray, flannel gray."
“David said you were on the phone with him for four hours one night, apparently drinking yourself into a coma the whole while, and at some point, you said, To whom am I speaking?"
"David loves to tell that. It’s true. Near the end of all that I’d wake up on the floor with an empty vodka bottle cradled in my arms."
"At least you had something to hold onto. What went wrong with Lester when you talked to him."
"Nothing went wrong, I could be paranoid about it, or else, things in the business are so awful he thinks I’ll take anything.”
"David must be broke if he’s dumping that Freud on the market."
"He is broke."
"It seems impossible to go through ten million dollars in however long—"
"Rita you went through three million in two years, David hung on to some money for twenty years or longer. I think."
"The first time you get it, you lose it fast."
"Every time you’ve gotten it, you’ve lost it pronto."
"Well, that is true. You think you learn all this prudence after the first time and then other things come up that drain every penny. If we didn’t have money we’d have some other form of nonsense. But I do a reasonable amount of business. I hit a dry patch every so often, even long dry patches, but something always comes up."
"Like David’s Freud."
"Actually, that may be not as easy to flip as you think. To get what it’s worth I need to play cat and mouse for a good many months. Some museum will want it and try to make you feel good about yourself by letting them stiff you for a fortune. It needs to be a private sale. It isn’t just selling it, it’s selling it to somebody who’s going to pay for it within my lifetime. Collectors are such shits. I think Marvin Dreyfus has the right idea, don’t give them the merchandise until they've written the check and it clears."
"I’m not sure what I’ll do if Lester’s project falls apart. It's nothing lucrative but it's a paycheck every week for probably two months."
"You’ll do something. You always think of something. We're much the same, one hustle after another. We belong to the accidentally not rich. Should have married neurosurgeons but I suppose if we had, we'd both need one now. Now, I’m afraid my dear I’ve got to kick you out, I’ve got to make a year’s worth of phone calls tomorrow morning."





Ryan couldn't sit still. He was smoking again after months. He told her he'd met one of the people in 405 he assumed were a bunch of addicts. His new acquaintance made amateur porn with a video camera.
"Some of the stuff he showed me had real possibilities," he said. "Unfortunately the guy can't make a frame to save his life."
"You could teach him that."
"You can't teach it. It's something you have or you don't. But I did say I'd help him shoot one of these things. There has to be a way to make pornography that's attractive and doesn't have these infantile narratives attached to it."
"When they put story lines in, that was considered a big breakthrough. Then everyone who wrote the scripts was a moron."
"The directors write the scripts. That's why they're shit. A porn director only knows to keep the intercourse lit and clearly visible. You notice how in gay porn for example the models only deal with each other's cocks and holes? You'd think you could get diseases from everything except putting your prick into somebody's asshole."
"Are you still getting jobs at the magazines?"
"Not enough. I did a shoot for one of those slick startup rags that all look the same last week. It was relatively painless considering what a bunch of cunts you have to deal with."
When he was younger Ryan looked like the Jolly Joker, saturnine to the point of making Polly queasy. Now he seemed more solid, and made enough money to dress well. How they happened to live in the same hotel, all these years later, on opposite ends of the same corridor, was a typical New York accident.
"That creature on three was doing her William Faulkner performance piece, right on the elevator."
"It's odd. Every time Tragedy Ann pulls herself together, the other one goes on a rampage. They're not even on the same floor."
Polly wanted to ask Ryan something, but it was so crazy she decided not to. What she believed she'd seen couldn't possibly have happened. Yet she felt certain if she'd had a camera it would have registered on film.
"Stay with Rita?"
"No, I thought I told you, Nina left her house keys for me, she's doing something in Hong Kong. I had dinner with Rita. I frankly don't think I'm the kind of person she cares to have as a houseguest."
"I bet it was nice to see her."
"Her, yes. Then Myra Kittridge and her gal pal showed up."
"Myra Kittridge. She comes to the shoot, supervises everything herself, tries to tell you where to put the camera, where the lights should be, she doesn't know fuck about photography and even writes about it when she's in a prolific mood. For real magazines, not her piece of shit rag, and gets paid for it."
"We're lucky to live here," Polly told him.
"This doesn't feel a lot like lucky to me."
"No, I mean we know certain people are cretins, people out in that--chimp world called America see the shit they put out and actually take it seriously."
"When you put it that way," Ryan said. "On the other hand I don't mind Laura at all. I wonder what she sees in Myra."
"What all Myra's girlfriends see in Myra. A man without a dick. What could be less threatening?"
"A man without a dick who wasn't Myra, to start with."
Ryan always wanted Polly to hear some CD he'd just bought. Polly always told him she couldn't bear listening to music unless she was by herself. Sometimes Ryan became almost maniacally insistent, carried away by too much adderol. Polly deflected him, protesting that she felt too pushed in from everything, the deal going south any minute, no prospects worth even thinking about. She consider throwing in stomach cramps but decided that was excessive.
"Well, you really should hear it when you're in the mood for Jay-Z."
If she let him, he'd slip it into his CD player and get it blasting before she could blink.
"I should get back to whatever it is I'm supposed to be doing."
"Are you still thinking about that Nevada--"
"Oh, fuck Nevada. I can't do another one of these unremittingly ugly stories about human monstrosities. It's always like having your head in the oven for a year wondering when you'll turn on the gas."
"I thought you had a lot of fun doing those things."
"I never want to have that kind of fun again. It wasn’t fun at all, it’s just that once you put together one piece of something another one that doesn’t fit presents itself and it turns into a problem you want to solve. It's like assuming the identity of someone who does have fun thinking about that stuff. At first I thought it would give me the answer to something, but before I even finished the last one I realized it's something I'll never know."
"But in that Nevada thing, I thought the kid--"
"Yes, definitely, Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, kicks in around eighteen into something totally psycho, anyway it wasn't going to be so much about him, but that friend of his who saw it starting to happen and didn't do anything to stop it."
Silence. But there wasn’t any peaceful silence any more, even in friendly environs. The sodden defeat they lived with changed the air in the room. It was forever there, the heaviness of time as the movement of the world whirled faster and faster, and now when there was silence, time felt like something to kill and nothing to make any use of.
"I wish I could never do another thing," Ryan said. "I’ve given this a lot of thought. I mean as much thought as I can give anything. I like to burn myself, you know. I have my reasons if that’s what they are. The rotten truth is, after you've taken a few million photographs there's really nothing visible worth taking a picture of. The skin of the world is just this blizzard of distraction from what's behind it. Once you can make a turd look as glamorous as a brace of diamonds or a beautiful face look like a car wreck, everything starts to look like shit."




Dolores: loyal and kind and feral and determined not to cave in on what she called Survivor Island. She had nailed down a few important things, she had something to lose if she lost her mind and she wouldn’t let that happen. A decade earlier she had given up obsessing on people, now she studied them like insects with amusing little habits and bizarre ways of surviving.
“You have to look at it this way,” was a favorite Dolores locution, but among her unusual virtues is an absence of didacticism, and Dolores did not, in fact, believe that other people had to look at anything the same way she did. “If you were someone who wanted to be good, you would find everything you need in Kant.”
Sometimes Dolores did find the only way to look at something.
“I have such mixed feelings about this Jesus Christ person,” Polly told her. “Kids are brought up eating him. It’s a big day in their lives, their first chewy mouthful of Jesus Christ. On one hand, if there really were such a person ever, he was obviously a revolutionary, something like Arafat, or Che Guevara, and picked too many good targets for the Romans to tolerate him. Or, he emitted some kind of radioactive aura that so attracted people that by the time they died of radiation poisoning the cause and effect factor really never occurred to them.”
“He drove the money-lenders out of the temple.”
“So did 9/11, and it’s the first thing they opened afterwards.”
“Have you seen Cure?”
“I'm the one who told you about it. That was what started me on this Japanese-Korean horror trip. Remember one of his methods of putting people under was fooling with his cigarette lighter or lighting a cigarette? In that Korean one, H, the female detective who treats her new macho colleague like something unpleasant she stepped in, she hardly says anything because she knows how the whole thing is going to turn out. In fact she doesn't quite know all of it. So instead of answering some stupid question she keeps this really cool expression on her face and clicks the cigarette lighter her fiancee, the detective who jumped out the window after the first serial killer brought the last body, in pieces, to the guy’s office in a duffel bag, gave her as a token of their love. I was so sure she knew everything that when it seemed to be solved I turned it off the first time. Then, for some reason, when I watched it again, I realized there were ten minutes at the end I'd missed completely.”
“I wouldn’t try to get into ad copy if I were you."
"I'm just tired, Dolly."
"I thought of an ad. I woke up with it in my mind the other day. Imagine a bus shelter Duratrans. The picture shows an Iraqi veteran, multiple amputee, in a wheel chair, with his metal prostheses showing, and in his remaining real hand, he’s holding a Nokia cell phone, big smile on his face, talking, and the ad copy says, ‘Freedom of Speech. It’s the most precious thing you have. But you don’t have to pay an arm and a leg for it.’”
“Nokia is a Finnish company, isn’t it? I bet if you could sell it to them, they’d snap it right up, just to keep what happened in Amsterdam from striking Helsinki.”
“My god I’ve been to Helsinki, they could use the excitement.”
Dolores plunked some notes on the grand piano in her living room.
“The only time nothing stupid happens,” she said, “is when I don’t leave this hotel and don’t answer the phone.”
“I can make stupid things happen all by myself.”
“Naturally. Not as many, though.”


It's hardly an easy thing to see catalcysm in the microscopic close-up of a group of cells. Yet this is how, every day, disorders in our bodies are detected, categorized, recommended for treatment. People trained to read cells can detect anomalies, abnormal groupings, markers of future difficulties.
What about this frame enclosing a configuration of people--connecting or, as the case may be, disconnecting them.
Dolores had the advantage of living on the top floor, with roof access. She passed weeks barely aware of the life around her, the shrieking eccentricities that often burgeoned into circus sideshows in the corridors below.
When people went mad, there were either people who stepped in and looked after whatever needed attending to in order to preserve the person going mad as a viable entity, or there weren't. That was the true danger of madness. Not that it might befall a person, but that there might be no one on earth willing or equipped to handle the damage. You came out of madness changed. How changed, perhaps, depended on how much difference it made that you went mad in the first place.



Polly didn't hear about Walker's cancer from Walker himself until Walker chose to tell her. By then, Walker took for granted that everybody knew, including Polly.
Friends they had long ago shared on a more or less daily basis had phoned her, starting with Colin. She imagined Colin smoothing moisturizer mixed with Tiger Balm into the sides of his nose as he led up to it with implacable creepiness:
"Polly, I'm afraid I'm calling with bad news."
She carried the phone to the alcove kitchen and reached in to feel the frost on the Stoli bottle. She braced herself before Colin spoke again, with a long swig.
"This is rather hard for me, we haven't spoken in so long I'm sorry it has to be under unhappy circumstances."
"Well, I'm sorry too," she said, meaning ever having to talk to Colin again, "but what is it."
"I didn't know whether anyone called to tell you about Walker."
She stumbled over a broken floor in her stomach. She did not want to hear this from Colin, it struck her as an outrage that this needy wheedling parasite would be the one telling her anything about Walker. Things were flying apart in her brain, things she could not recognize or distinguish from pure animal fear.
"What's happened to Walker."
"It's pretty serious."
For Colin, she realized, it was not a call about Walker. It was a call about Colin, and how bad her could hurt her in the space of a few seconds. She thought it pathetic that Colin himself didn't realize this, it was among many things about himself of which Colin would never glean the slightest awareness.
"How serious ?"
This must, she thought, be how his mother led up to telling Colin that his father had gone gay and run off to Aruba with his business partner.
"It's bad."
"You want me to ask you how bad? Could we cut to the fucking chase? Is he dead? Is he sick, what?"
Colin sounded positively desolate about having to cough up his bad news before she'd had a nervous breakdown waiting for it. Throughout the rest of the call his tone resonated with injury, as if Walker's distress had been contrived to bring them closer again.




Old friends called her for advice, for reassurance, for empathy. She hadn't seen some of them in years, and now she felt close to them again, and hated that because they had grown into the kind of people who can only feel authentic social bonds in the presence of a shared wound. Walker was the only person from that time that she still loved the same way. Ties that were exclusively sentimental made her forlorn and suicidal, even though you couldn't get rid of them.
She didn't loathe them, she had no reason to, she'd simply learned not to care about them much. She had only known them in the first place through Walker and it was only through Walker that she ever still had any contact with them.
They knew Polly knew about oncologists and radiologists and particular cancer protocols favored by various doctors at specific hospitals, for reasons that depressed her to think about.
"I can tell you what my own experience has been with people going through this," she said. "Which doesn't mean I'm a doctor. There are definitely certain things he has to be clear about with the doctor. He's going to have to learn a lot more than he probably wants to. Promise me one thing, you won't tell Walker I know about this. He'll tell me when he wants me to know."
The tumor involved the lung. Part of it had slithered around Walker's aorta. They were urging him to go to an oncologist, she thought she heard, on 14th Street.
"It's hard for me to picture an oncologist on 14th Street."
"At that medical center facing the park."
"You mean the hospital over the supermarket."
"Do you know anything about the cancer doctors there?"
"I had a bone spur removed in that place. I'm sure their cancer doctors used to bag groceries down on the first floor as part of their internship."
"Well, this one was very highly recommended."
"Oh, look, what do I know. But you have to get his radiology done at Beth Israel if the tumor is that close to the heart."
"Oh, they did the radiology at the supermarket."
"Have another set of scans done at Beth Israel."
"The problem," said Walker's friend, Victor, who had an especially insinuating and sometimes yodelling voice, "is, first of all, they've got to send all that paperwork to another place, etcetera."
"Has he scheduled the surgery?"
"We can't get him to have it. He wants to go to Tenerife first because Nina and I were planning to go at the end of the month."
"Look. Victor. If he goes to Tenerife right now he's coming back in an urn, I wouldn't hesitate to make that point to him."
Nothing of it yet seemed real to her. She could even imagine Walker dead without the possibility seeming real.
"He says he'll have the surgery right afterwards, it's a large cell cancer and moves slowly."
"What does the oncologist think?"
"He said absolutely out of the question but then Walker went back to his internist and the internist thinks it would be okay."
"An internist is not a second opinion on lung cancer treatment."
"Well we know that, he knows that, but he likes his internist and the internist caught a mistake the oncologist made."
Polly knew her energy for this would drain in a minute or two and she would be left staring out the balcony windows at the incomplete red M that had materialized one day or one night at the top of a building she hadn't noticed going up, somewhere in midtown. She thought it stood for Mitsubishi, or Met Something.
"You've got to get him to a second oncologist. He has to know what's going on and understand it and make informed decisions."
She sounded like a tape recording to herself, probably better, she thought, than sounding like myself now.
She thought about going downstairs and sitting in the restaurant bar, or down to the seventh floor, if Wendell was in she'd get a valium from him. Or go to Wendell's first, take the valium, then go down and drink some margaritas.
Instead she called up Elena and asked her if the statistic Elena'd told her about alcohol and breast cancer recurrence applied to men as well, applied to lung cancer, and so on. Elena mentioned that she herself was having her second glass of wine at that moment and no two statisticians seemed to agree about the alcohol thing and you couldn't be that strict with yourself or you might as well be dead already.



Walker acquiesced, he must have been in shock after the diagnosis and needed some days to absorb it. When Victor or Nina or some of the others called she got an impression of too many people on the phone with each other too many times in a day and involving themselves in Walker's medical business at the same time, because she knew them all well enough to know they'd repeat anything they heard from anybody and fill Walker's head with confusing and contradictory information.
The business about the paperwork. Victor mentioned it with such finality and yet that was not how things functioned, you got a second opinion, period. Paperwork passed between city hospitals every second of the day, usually via computers.
What do I do. What must I do. What must I absolutely not do. For Polly the sidewalks no longer could be counted on for a solid consistency. They undulated on certain streets, or the inside of her head undulated, or an attack of vertigo hit her so she had to grip the nearest building wall or a railing or a street light.
The hospital discharged him after four days. Fast in and out and a lot of Percocet for the pain, which depressed his breathing. He slept round the clock. He said the forgotten moments of his life all came back in dreams. The first time she went to the apartment Ken was in back rolling joints.
Ken was one of Walker's familiars from the bars. A black man whose face had a rubbery look, his mouth full of discolored teeth. He was either homeless or had some impossible living situation and he had a lively if uneducated mind, a lot of people like that gravitated to Walker, who liked all their odd qualities.
Walker never hurried. For decades this gave his days a formless appearance, even when he had many things to do. Nights followed a seasonally altered routine that took him from bar to bar, usually the same two or three, where he might nurse a single beer for an hour or drink three or four in the same amount of time. Polly had noticed early in their friendship that Walker felt uncomfortable outside his own geographical slice of the city, and when he needed to venture beyond his ken, after an hour or two he grew anxious to get back there.
She understood this. Walker lived a free life within the scope of his slender means. It had become increasingly difficult to live that way in the city, and because his neighborhood still was a neighborhood, he knew how to survive in it with almost nothing in his pockets.
Now the neighborhood showed signs of the harsh restructuring the rest of Manhattan had undergone. Whole blocks of small buildings were gouged out of the landscape, foundations dug for mall-like constructions that rose slablike under transparent black veils. Bodegas and laundries became wine bars and pricey bistros.
Walker and others who'd lived there forever signified a kind of underlife that seemed imperishable because New York, everyone thought, needed its unconventional energy and its peculiar talents. This certainty, too, was being eaten away by the spreading demolition sites and the massive influx of college students, who ran in packs and seemed to have unlimited spending power.
She couldn't stay, she told him, she had a dinner meeting. Walker's hair had fallen out and he wore a close-fitting beige knit cap. I can come tomorrow, she said. I mean for longer.
He asked her to bring a camera and photograph the scar from his operation, fat as a gorged python running across his back, because he couldn't see it. Three days a week he went somewhere uptown for chemo. Whenever they took him off chemo they gave him radiation. The scar would soon shrink down. He wanted pictures of it before it disappeared.
She offered to go with him. He preferred to meet her after a treatment, at Knickerbocker's on University or the restaurant bar in her hotel. He never looked wasted, rather the opposite, avid for a cocktail. He had a permanent supply of the best kif she'd ever smoked. One hit did it for at least four hours. Sometimes he came upstairs and they smoked in her flat, or she walked him home from some downtown bar and they smoked on the way.
He told her it looked better than they'd originally thought. They'd gotten all but ten percent of the tumor, the part around his heart, and implanted that with radioactive needles, which had already shrunk it to a third of its earlier size. He said the oncologist said she wasn't looking for a remission any more, but rather for a complete cure.
She didn't fear seeing him now. She still needed drinks, or drinks and pills, but only to put her out at night, flatten her nerves, and it wasn't all about Walker, Polly had problems of her own, nothing like lung cancer but money cancer, a malady she'd carried around for almost three years.



On the eleventh floor she found Sonya in her Japanese dragon bathrobe, holding a glass of Pinot Grigio. Stout, with enough remnants of her younger beauty and ebullience to attract men half her age, she appeared, as she often did, startled, then quickly arranged her face in a souffle of surprised delight.
"Sometimes," she said, "I feel like the Minotaur. Then whenever I leave the hotel I feel like Theseus."
"Sometimes I feel like Ariadne's thread," said Polly. "But I came up for a drink if you have one."
Polly's friendship with Sonya stretched back twenty years. It had not been uniformly smooth, but the bond had somehow survived several long periods of noncommunication.
"I have wine, some vodka, scotch I think."
Sonya's living room was glossy with a potted tree that refused to stop growing. There were large quadrants of open space. The alcove kitchen just inside the door smelled of warm bread.
"I just heard on the French news channel that forty million people live in caves." Sonya automatically poured Polly wine. She hesitated about where they should sit: at the round dining table, or on the couch, or in chairs.
"You can't be the Minotaur," Polly told her. "Surely the Minotaur lives in one of those little rooms down those curving narrow halls. You're right on the main corridor."
Sonya, Polly believed, had been born twenty years before herself. But each year they seemed to grow closer in age.
"Do you have to pay rent on a cave?" Polly wondered.
"I imagine that depends on where the cave is," said Sonya.
The glass doors to the narrow balcony stood open and an intermittent breeze blew the filmy white curtains in. Sonya was like Ryan. She couldn't sit still. She did, now and then, perch, but her ponderous frame never settled anywhere. She has to be doing, doing, doing, Polly thought, whereas I have to be not doing, not doing anything. That's how she's kept her youth, and why I've disintegrated.
"And did you see Arthur in the hall?"
When Sonya had opened her door, she had looked quickly to the right down the corridor.
"No," said Polly, though a few weeks earlier when she and Sonya were leaving to go to dinner, a gaunt figure had been crouching near some base molding where a side corridor met the hall, slathering it with black enamel paint, and until they were in the elevator and Sonya told her, she'd had no idea the nondescript figure had been Arthur, a poet of sorts whom Polly had briefly run with during her first years in the city.
"The man in the next room says he talks to himself day and night," Sonya said. "Sometimes he thinks he may be on the telephone, but usually not. He cries, he carries on, he accuses himself of bad behavior."
"Oh," said Polly, "he was always perfectly capable of doing all that. When you say next door do you mean Freddy Krebs?"
"Yes, and Freddy says when he stops raving Arthur sails out at eleven or midnight in a perfectly tailored Armani suit, acting the elegant clown for everyone he runs into."
Polly had, without really caring about it, spliced two strange pieces of information. She knew Freddy: he wrote popular books about film stars, and whenever she encountered him she noticed a pint of Georgi vodka, the cheapest, tucked into his inside jacket pocket. Freddy had told her of his uncomfortable impression that Arthur's bed was flush against the other side of the wall from his own.
"Can you imagine how creepy that feels?" Freddy had asked her. And indeed, Polly had shuddered. It would have been creepy to have Freddy on the other side of the wall, too, but she considered Arthur one of the most despicable people she'd ever known.
The other piece of information she opted to share with Sonya.
"Don't ask me how I know this," she said. "It's too much of a story. But Dena Patterson--you wouldn't know her, she had a career as an art director but she was really a dope dealer--well, I thought she'd cleaned up years ago. And I visited her really late one night with a friend of mine--I hadn't seen her in ten years--and we were all drinking vodka. I thought that was a positive sign. But then…out on the street, my friend told me she's still dealing and she's still using. Which I didn't think junkies could do, drink alcohol. Makes them throw up. Or it used to anyway."
"It must be evolution," Sonya laughed.
"But here's something even crazier," said Polly. "Arthur and Freddy are both copping from her. They hate each other's guts. So if one of them's over there buying and the other one comes to the door, the first one has to hide in the closet until the other one leaves."
"I would love to see Arthur hiding in a closet full of women's clothes," Sonya said. The idea greatly amused her.
Polly knew if she stayed Sonya would want to show her latest art work, or pictures of it anyway, and Polly felt too pushed in to pay attention. She felt people were generally too fond of showing others what they'd made with their own hands.
Of course, she reminded herself when people wanted to share the fruit of their activity, these things are made from love of one type or another. Then Polly would think of interested things to say, sometimes inciting herself enough to become interested in the object at hand, against her will and her own better judgment.
Artists, she thought, are so blinded by their own exuberance, which is only fear mixed with vanity. Polly got on better with artists than other people, but sometimes wondered if she really liked anyone.
The one person Polly knew she liked was Walker, but that was difficult too: Walker constituted some emotional center for her, yet much of what she'd done for twelve or thirteen years had been decided by a need to get away from the past times Walker represented. She had moved out of the Lower East Side to sever herself from the bohemia in which Walker had always been a central figure.
Walker himself never changed, they still understood each other perfectly even when she avoided making time to see him for a full year. This understanding was painful because they both recalled an evaporating past when their lives had been strangely hopeful and infinitely more flexible.
"You're somewhere else tonight," Sonya said. "Maybe I should read your cards."
Polly shook her head.
"Not tonight, but soon. I don't want to be influenced right now in my thinking."
Sonya offered her some cherries. She put them in a Zip-Loc bag for her.
"Don't be sad," she told Polly as she left. "There's nothing to be sad about."




Sad weighed on her, the word sad, she realized it said all there really was to say about it, and of course there was something to be sad about, plenty, for she must have known as far back as when she first met Walker that unless Polly herself went over the edge or acquired a precocious fatal illness this day would come, sooner or later, that she’d never once contemplated it in all the years she habitually dismissed the steady process of losing things by saying nothing lasts forever, life goes on.
She did not believe as Sonya did that life was entirely a matter of how you chose to think about it.
I have flattered myself all these years, she thought, posing as a stoic, just because I survived so many things that kill most people, survived by pure chance and not an ounce of willful strength. I have never been strong the way people thought I was strong. And she felt a flush of cowardice as her mind conjured a pefectly detailed vision of herself en route to the hospital from the subway, she pictured walking up the slope of the sidewalk and reaching whatever that pavillion was called and turning around at the door and fleeing into that unfamiliar stark and unpromising part of the city, she imagined herself in that future moment assuring herself that Walker wouldn’t notice that she hadn’t come because of all the drugs they were giving him. The worst part was exactly this ability to picture all the actions she would need to perform between 23rd Street and whatever it was called way up in the 90s, Klingindorf, Klankendorf, Frankenstein Pavillion, the awful barren names they gave their places always heightened the sensation of morbidity and the reduction of human beings to lumps of meat within walls of pale green nothingness.
On her bedside table a book of French poetry rested atop a ten year old English translation of the same book of poetry. A publisher she sometimes worked for had suggested that Polly might like to produce a new translation.
Polly couldn’t see that the previous translation was flawed in any important way, and though she now and then re-translated things for her own pleasure she usually declined to add a superfluous variation on something that had already been done well. Translation was a form of showing off, usurpation, and betrayal. Translators took criminal liberties with other people’s writings, she thought, to enhance the impression that they had a fabulous surplus of literary eptitude.

Nuit putride et glacial; épouvantable nuit,
Nuit du fantôme infirme et des plantes pourries,
Incandescence nuit, flame et feu dans les puits,
Ténèbres sans éclairs, mensonges et roueries

No, she couldn't better the earlier version. She could make it different, but it didn't need her. The word mensonges sprang out at her, lunging claws of guilt. Had she told Walker a great many lies, over the years?
Polly thought it unlikely. If only because Walker could tell when she was lying. Many people, even most people when they're told a lie don't recognize it as a lie, but feel it as a confusing wrinkle in the scanning pattern of a conversation, a relationship. Walker saw through people. The most remarkable thing was that he saw through them with equanimity, as he enjoyed their flaws as much as their virtues. If Polly had ever lied to Walker, she felt sure, it had been with extreme trepidation and the certainty that he did not believe her.
Yet Walker wanted, for years, for Polly to write another play, one they could perform with friends as they had staged so many plays so many years before: and though she always told him she would try, knowing she would not, Walker invariably believed her no matter how much time yawned between their last real effort and the present.
She had not written a play in several years, nor a novel, and had turned down so much magazine work that editors had given up calling her. After a five year marriage to a man so rich even his impotence and schizophrenia didn't especially trouble him, Polly experienced a divorce of astonishingly deft nastiness. The mingy settlement his lawyers contrived was rapidly evaporating, suffusing her days with a fear of pennilessness that had always been waiting in ambush for her.
Translations paid execrably, but she had no wish just then to write anything of her own. She felt sure if she embarked on something, a novel, a short story, a piece of theater, the result would be a horrible transcription of the cold dead feeling with which Walker's situation now swept in sudden waves over most of her waking hours. She could think of almost nothing else. It rendered her numb and inadequate to the most ordinary facets of daily life.
She was letting everything go, letting the bills pile up unopened, passing whole days without eating, forgetting to shower or arrange her hair, wearing the same clothes until she couldn't stomach the smell of herself. And absolutely nobody noticed.