Vienna, Cocaine, Ice Cream, Hot Sex
David and the Lion’s Den, chapter 8
Of course I could never look at Hilda the same way again.
Instead of the sweet old widow who gave me cookies, I saw the golden-haired girl from an ancient Austrian family. I saw the gem of the dance floor, silken gown aflutter as she floated in the arms of white-toothed, square-jawed young men with razor parts in their hair.
I saw her studying at the Conservatory, passionate in her love of Baroque music, playing Bach on the grand old organs of the city by day, practicing on her own cherrywood harpsichord at night, secure under a gabled roof that watched over dewy green lawns.
I saw her wedding — arranged but not unwanted — to a handsome doctor ten years her senior, her move to an elegant brick townhouse where she learned to supervise a small domestic staff.
I saw her swollen belly. Nineteen years old and pregnant, love and beauty cradled her and gentled her to sleep at night in a cruel deception. I saw the tiny infant whose saffire eyes and cornflower hair framed a piccolo laugh.
I felt her trust and belief in love, beauty, and art.
I watched her eyes narrow into slivers of doubt as the blue horizon turned black and bloody. I saw them widen in angry disbelief as the tanks rolled in and the shrill discord of shattering glass replaced the intricate harmonies of the music in her hands and in her heart.
I lived her fear as she realized with a sense of prescient horror that her belly was swelling once more. I tasted her terror as the windows of the surgery on the ground floor shattered, adding a shrill descant of curses to the cacophony.
I saw her cowering behind a tree one afternoon after coming home to find the building surrounded by tall, cruelly beautiful young men dressed in black and silver. Her hand over baby Kurt’s mouth, she watched them throw her husband in the back of a truck and break his teeth with sticks.
I heard the baby whimper, saw him tighten his chubby arms around his mama’s neck, hiding his eyes.
I watched her scurry away, fleeing a life that would never exist again.
The rest of Hilda’s story was much harder to hear. My ears tried to close. I don’t want to tell it here. You know it, anyway. You know the grisly facts, the basics of the inhumanity of those years. You didn’t know Hilda, though, so can you really know her story?
Art is supposed to answer that question.
I’m an artist, or so they say. A distinguished one. I’ve been on the covers of the The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and Art in America.
So, I must be a real artist.
I’m not sure what that means, though. I don’t know if art is worth anything. They probably never imagined I’d say something like that when they asked me to speak to you, but that’s OK. I love art. I make art. I just don’t pretend anymore that I know why.
Most people don’t realize that I painted Hilda before.
I created that work of art before I knew about little Kurt’s body going blue and stiff in a frozen ditch, Hilda trudging away dry eyed. I painted her portrait before I knew about the sticky gobs of hot straw that once cradled the purple-stained remnants of her second son, his miniature but precise features blissful and blank — unaware of a world he’d never experience.
I painted her before she told me how it feels to keep walking, keep suffering, keep breathing, keep being.
The details of her escape, her flight through endless winter’s nights, are details like so many that have already been told. So, why should I tell it again?
They say I told her story in oil and pigment, but you know better.
That stifling night was one like you only ever experience in Manhattan in August. I felt like I was struggling to suck steamy air through a hot washcloth. The usual throngs that electrified the corner of Bleecker and Christopher had evaporated in the sun. Anybody with two nickels to rub together was searching for a sea breeze somewhere — The Hamptons, Fire Island, Provincetown, Jersey.
I imagined them that Saturday night as I licked away at a melting ice cream. I imagined them strolling on cool beaches, mixing elegant cocktails out of liqueurs whose names I didn’t know how to pronounce, gathering around ice-blue private pools.
We’d closed Cucina and wandered over to the corner, drooping. I can’t remember the name of the place anymore, but if you spent any time in the Village in those days, you probably stopped in for ice cream or espresso. You probably remember the balding, middle-aged owner and his sleek, 20-something Columbian inamorato. He wasn’t as beautiful as Raph, but he had a better thing going. He’d have inherited the business and a two-bedroom just east of the Park — if he’d survived.
He was sneaking shots of white rum into our cups under the table as Raph flirted with Jill. She put up with it the way an audience does a snake charmer’s act — with horrified fascination.
She was annoyed with me too.
I’d told her about Renaud — Are you KIDDING me? He was HERE? In my house? — only after he’d come by. I hadn’t stopped to think about how she’d feel. She’d had some pieces shown already in out-of-the-way galleries in Queens and Brooklyn, but the idea of Renaud de la Fréta doing a studio visit without her there really hacked her off.
When the messenger came by with the contract, she went real quiet for a while.
So, she was subdued that night as we sat under around trying to catch any stray breeze that might manage to limp over from the Hudson. When Raph put his hand on her cheek, she got up and stalked off without a word.
I’m not sure how we ended up on the gravel roof high above the shop. Maybe we thought it was cooler up there. It was me and Raph with Russell and Carlo, the mocha merchant and his Latino Antinous. I remember snorting bright white, electric lines — chilling as the coke forced sweat bullets out of our skin that the rooftop wind blew away to make us shiver.
Raph’s hands were all over my ass, squeezing — I guess Jill had made him horny — and I was going with it. Why not? I always figured he was way out of my league, not to mention straight unless wads of cash came into play.
He was sizzling. I wanted him. I’d wanted him since that night at Limelight.
I watched Russell kneading at Carlo’s chinos, working his belt loose as Raph’s lips found my neck then trailed up toward my earlobe. I closed my eyes and let myself vibrate.
Powerful suction announced that Raph’s lips had found my own. He pulled me in, hips thrusting to drive iron into my own frustrating flaccidity.
I can never get hard when I’m on coke, but I didn’t know that yet.
“No te importunes,” he blew into my ear. “Don’t worry about it, mi bello.”
So, I let his hands flow under my clothes, glide over bare skin to leave prickly trails of pleasure behind. I heard Carlo moaning and opened one eye just enough to see Russell on his knees.
I melted as Raph undid me and let the weight of my belt drag my black waiter’s slacks to the gravel-tar floor. He panted into my ear as his hands roamed in widening circles over my chest, belly, and below.
I gave way as he slowly turned me, thrusting hard against my ass, pushing relentlessly on my shoulders, bending me over, lowering my boxers, spitting on his finger, opening me.
The pain broke the dream.
“Ow! No! What do think you’re doing?
He pushed even harder on my back, pinning me to the ground, holding me down forcibly, panting harder than before.
“Fuck you, man!” I spat as I twisted violently out of his grip. “The fuck you think you’re doing? I glared at him as he just stood there holding himself, a half smile softening his features.
“What were you trying to do, man? Split me open? Who said you could fuck me? And no lube? No fucking condoms? You outta your fucking mind?”
I don’t know what might have happened if he’d taken his time, or if he’d had something better than spit to work with. Even right then, angry and wincing from his failed attempt, my eyes sought out his soft, exposed skin — the ridiculously large swelling in this hand.
Even then I might have calmed down once the pain relented. I might have allowed myself to be charmed and mesmerized, and I might not be here to tell you this story. My fingers were reaching, brushing against his satin erection, when Russell spoke up.
“Don’t fight, boys,” he clucked as he scrabbled over gravel on his knees to engulf Raph in his mouth.
Carlo did his best to get me off. He bobbed up and down while I stood naked on the roof, sweating in the breeze, listening to Raphael grunting, watching him thrusting into that shiny bald head for what seemed like forever.
Sirens wailed a lullaby in the distance.
You just read chapter 8 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.
