A Cute Butt, the Grove, a Death Mask
David and the Lion’s Den — Chapter 4
Smell invites vision to rush back vividly.
Even now I can taste that hospital-sick-room perfume of soft food, body fluids, and disinfectant. Layer some oil and pigment on top, and you’ll be right there with me.
Howie lined them up. I couldn’t do it.
Excuse me, sir/madam. I know you’re about to cash in, and I’d never wish to inconvenience you, but would you mind terribly if I set up a canvas beside your death bed so I might advance my art while obtaining a boost of existential understanding through your suffering? I’d be ever so grateful.
I didn’t have the balls.
Believe it or not, that’s what the reporter from Art in America most wanted to know when they did that big feature piece. How did I find my models? Was it hard getting them to sign releases? I don’t know. Honestly. Ask Howie.
“Allen, are you OK,” I stuttered, jerking my brush away from the canvas too late to prevent the ruined smudge his violent cough had pushed out of my fingers.
I was nervous.
He looked at me helplessly, pale eyes enormous in a face carved from shrinking wax. His friend — they came in shifts to sit with him — held him up as he choked on mucus from deep in his lungs. While Allen caught his breath, I started to scrape up paint from the spot I’d smeared.
He finally laid his head back on the pillow of the rented hospital bed, looking as exhausted as if he’d just breasted the finish tape of a marathon. The pneumonia was killing him, that’s what the visiting nurse told me.
Allen’s raspy voice surprised me with its strength. “Don’t worry, cutie. I won’t kick before you finish. I’m too vain.”
I smiled because I had no idea what to say. Then I frowned in concentration as I furiously daubed, stippled, and stroked — lost in creative reverie, my eyes flicking like machines from the canvas to Allen, then back again.
Ochre for the skin, brown and purple for the KS lesions, flat grey for his eyes. These made up my palette. I broke out a tube of the brightest red to capture the misty spray left on his sheet from the coughing fit. I applied it with pointillist precision.
Then we talked.
He was only about ten years older than me. Thirty four. Even emaciated, you could see from his strong chin that he’d been handsome. By the friends sitting watch, you knew he’d been popular.
He threw me a warm smile. “Have you been out to the Cape or Fire Island yet this season?”
“I don’t have that kind of money,” I answered, lips pursed as I frowned at the canvas. “Besides, I’m too busy working.”
“Honey, trust me. Nobody’s too poor for Cherry Grove. Not with a butt like yours.”
“Allen!” scolded the friend, “Behave yourself.”
“What’s Cherry Grove” I asked, feeling my face flush.
“You’re kidding me! You’ve never been to Fire Island? Never even heard of it?”
“Never Cherry Grove,” I shrugged.
“Kid, pull up a chair,” Allen ordered. “We have to talk.” He was still going strong when Howie peeked through the bedroom door. Allen’s face transformed as he regaled me with tales of the Grove. Raucous house parties. Little red wagons trundling along wooden walks that bordered monstrous dunes. Falling in love in the moonlight — he painted it a sun-drenched paradise with his words.
I slipped back behind the canvas and tried to get it all in there, to let it radiate from underneath his death mask of a face.
Howie interrupted. “Oh, I see Miss Thang is ready for her closeup, Mr. Demille.” He batted his eyelashes outrageously. “Allen, you look fabulous, darling,” he gushed, hurrying up to the bedside to plant firm kisses on each of Allen’s cheeks. He didn’t even try to avoid the purple blotches.
I hid my involuntary shudder. I think.
“Listen, Allen, I gotta grab Picasso here and fly, darling. Sorry, we’re late, late, late!”
“So, what’s new, girl?” Allen rasped. “You’ve never been on time for anything in your life.”
I interrupted them, complaining. “Hey, I’m not finished here. Howie, we’ll have to do it another time.”
“Allen’ll be here in the morning, Mary Louise. What’s the rush? Clean your brushes and let’s go. I’m doing you a favor, remember?”
I sighed. “All right. Fine. But who’s delivering today? You get somebody to cover?”
“I did it already. Rushed through it. Oh, Allen? I left your lunch in the kitchen, hon. Alex can get it for you when you feel like it, OK?”
We caught the Seventh Avenue subway and rode it up past 125th St, emerging up in Harlem where the tracks are elevated. I eyed Howie for reassurance as we rattled above rows of old brownstones. I talked to settle my nerves. “So, you’ve done this before? How many times?”
“A few,” he shrugged. “You look nervous.”
“Not really,” I lied.
“Just be glad it’s available.
“And free! I’m dead broke.”
“That too,” he agreed as the train screeched to a stop at our station.
We picked our way past some ramshackle buildings where flashing neon hawked the latest pagers, past a pawnshop, past a weedy lot where Dominican teens shouted and ran around improvised bases. We almost missed the crumbling brick building and the flight of rickety steps we had to climb.
Could this really be it?
I didn’t want to be there, anyway, but the dingy waiting room with its crowd of hostile, dark-skinned, straight-looking young men was not what I’d been expecting.
A fat woman with jerry curls and wrinkled lavender scrubs looked up at me as I approached her desk. She opened her mouth and spoke at the exact instant a train roared by outside. Grimy windows rattled inside greying wooden frames. I couldn’t hear a thing.
Howie got her laughing, though, got her showing off press-on nails and beaming at his compliments.
“Here ya go, baby,” she chuckled, pushing a sealed envelope into my hand. “You just take that into the room when they call your number.”
“So, what now?” I asked thirty minutes later, wincing as a hunky Puerto Rican nurse pushed a piece of gauze into the crook of my elbow. A red flower blossomed and unfolded in the center of snow-white cotton.
“It takes about two weeks. Call us and we’ll let you know if your results are back yet. No names. Just give the receptionist the number inside your envelope.”
“And that’s that? I’m sure I’ll be relieved after the phone call. I’m not really worried, you know.”
“No, you don’t understand. We don’t give results out over the phone. Deirdre will give you an appointment to come back.”
“But why? I live all the way downtown.”
“Some people don’t take the news too well, if it’s positive,” he said, pushing my elbow up to trap the gauze in place. “Keep pressure on that for a few minutes, OK?”
I started for the door but his voice stopped me. “Listen. When you come back? Try to bring somebody with you. In case it’s bad news. You know?”
I hadn’t actually been worrying. Much. All this anonymous testing drama was making me anxious. Remembering the back room at the Limelight wasn’t helping.
Sitting beside Howie on the train home, I watched him close, marveling at his calm. I glanced down at my arm, lifted up the gauze and decided I’d stopped bleeding. I crumpled up the cotton, started to throw it aside, then stopped myself and stuck it in my pocket.
When I got to Allen’s the next morning to finish the painting, he was dead.
The friends, three or four of them all at once instead of one at a time, stood around the living room, confused with nothing to do. I hate to admit it, but the first thought that ran through my mind was, What about my painting?
That’s what pissed me off when they opened the door and told me the news — I hadn’t finished his portrait. When I tiptoed into the bedroom to gather my things — as if I were afraid of waking him — he was staring up at the ceiling, eyes half open. I guess nobody wanted to press them shut, or maybe they tried and it didn’t work.
Something compelled. His cold, dead eyes were filled with wrongness. They had to be shut. They had to be. I reached out to do it, but my body snatched my fingers away before they were anywhere close to the corpse.
Sweet, milky coffee rose up in my throat.
So began the pattern of my summer. I painted in the morning, finishing Allen’s portrait in the garden, and a couple more when I had to — when my subjects were inconsiderate enough to die before I was ready.
Afternoons I delivered meals with Howie, evenings I waited tables at Cucina.
The promotion kept me in paint.
You just read Chapter 4 of a character-driven mystery set in Greenwich Village during the worst of the HIV Plague Years. David, Jill, Hilda, Richard, and Howie are walking a path that leads to intense friendship and love, to the creation of gorgeous but wrenching art, and to the unraveling of a series of horrific events that nobody sees, not even as they happen. Because sometimes what you’re looking at isn’t what you see.
