Music for Wartime Page 17

  That night Celine was playing Saint-Saëns in the living room, sitting on one of the same four chairs that had remained in a vacated semicircle for the past month, when the doorbell rang. She had wanted so badly to talk to the women before, but now it was dark, and she knew they were angry. They’d had enough time to go home and come back with Lord knows what. Weapons, or pictures of the dead girl. She held her bow in front of her like a saber and sat perfectly still in her chair. They rang the bell again, and then again, and then they started knocking, loud and fast. They’d have heard the cello through the door, and if the sheriff was willing to tell a perfect stranger on the phone about the “oriental lady musician,” he’d surely told these women the same thing at some point in the paperwork process. He’d probably added “famous” and “rich,” neither of which was really true in the grand scheme of things, but that was her reputation in town.

  The knocking was odd and irregular, and she wondered if they had come back with the girl’s drunken father. Or sent him alone. And she deserved their spite, she realized. How condescending must it seem, for the lady in the big house to offer to buy something nicer? Excuse me, could I please make your grief a little more tasteful?

  It took her a good half a minute to realize the knocking wasn’t irregular at all. It was the William Tell Overture, in perfect rhythm. She stood and walked slowly to the door, bow still perpendicular to her stomach. She called, “Lev?”

  “No.” The voice was familiar and vaguely hurt, and the knocking stopped. She opened the door and there was Gregory, his violin case and his duffel bag at his feet, as if he’d never gone anywhere at all.

  He said, “I come to plead sanctuary. I saw your cross out front. This is a church, correct?”

  And what could she do but laugh and invite him in? She made a pot of coffee, and he lit a fire with the wood left from September, and the whole time she didn’t ask what he was doing there, and he didn’t offer an explanation. She wanted to ask if he thought he was in a movie, that he could just show up at someone’s door expecting love or sex or friendship, or whatever he was after. But there were worse kinds of movie.

  They pulled the couch up to the fireplace, and she told him about the note that was still out there under her windshield wipers.

  Gregory said, “And I showed up the same day? It’s a sign.”

  Instead of asking what it was a sign of, Celine said, “I don’t believe in signs.” She was holding her cup in both hands, grateful to have a fire to look at.

  “Sure you do.” She didn’t answer, and so he said, “You must, because you believe in music.”

  “But you came today on purpose. Did you figure it out, about the anniversaries?”

  He put his coffee on the floor and finally unbuttoned his thin coat. “I came because I have another solution. I think you should leave this place.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “You don’t seem happy here, and there’s no good answer to the cross problem, and I want you to know you’re welcome to stay with me in the city. Just for a while. A week. A month. Longer, if you want.”

  “I teach, you know. At the college.”

  “Which is closer to the city than to this house.”

  The warmth was getting too much for her, between the hot cup in her hands and the fire, and the blood roaring through her face.

  “You’ve exiled yourself out here, and I don’t know why. Come live with me and be my love, as they say.”

  “Who says that?”

  “I do. I just did.” He laughed, and she refused to look at him, she absolutely refused, but she could hear his fingers touching his beard. She could see his brown shoes, stretched toward the fire.

  “Gregory, I’m an adult. I can’t run away from my problems.”

  “But,” he said, “wasn’t that what you were doing when you bought this house?”

  “So I should just run away again.”

  “Think of it as running toward something.”

  “What, I’m Cinderella, and you’re going to sweep me away in a pumpkin?”

  He leaned so far into her field of vision that she couldn’t help but see him. “We’ve been over this. You’re Snow White.”

  She said, “Listen. You’re crazy, but I’m not insulted. I will forget, for the sake of the quartet, that you ever presumed to tell me what to do with my life. The old folks shouldn’t quarrel in front of the children.” She didn’t add that she was terrified. That she was tired of running in any direction, away from things or toward them. That maybe the reason she’d bought this house, so big and solid and remote, was the hope that it would keep her pinned down in one spot for the rest of her life, where she wouldn’t have to make decisions. That the cross bothered her so much because it was a wedge in her perfect isolation—an invasion.

  She brought Gregory a bowl of butternut squash soup and a glass of wine. They tried some of Bach’s two-part inventions, but they had no sheet music and they couldn’t remember any through to the end. Celine kept trying to sing Gregory’s part, to remind him, and they’d both end up laughing.

  She said, “The bad news is, your sheets are dirty. The good news is, it’s your own dirt.”

  He said, “See? Another sign.” And he went up to bed without even trying to kiss her.

  Celine stayed down to make sure the fire was fully dead. She straightened Gregory’s shoes by the door so they lined up perfectly with her own, and she made sure all the doors were locked. She sat back on the couch, and at that very moment the last log tumbled forward against the grate, shooting up a shower of sparks.

  If she still believed in signs, they would indeed be clear today: the dying fire, the scene of death on the lawn, the ripped-up note under her wipers. Time to move on. And here was Prince Charming on her doorstep with his fiddle. What other sign could she be waiting for? Except, perhaps, the one that would make her believe in signs again at all.

  She walked up the stairs and brushed her teeth and looked out the bathroom window. There were no streetlights this far out in the country, and so no cross, no flowers. You’d never know anything was out there at all, beyond your own reflection on a glassy sheet of blackness. And what a reflection! She stared in bafflement at this bright-eyed stranger. There she was in the mirror, too, her pulse so fast and exuberant she could see it in her neck and temples. She scratched her cheek to see if it was sunburnt or just flushed.

  Well, there were signs like crosses and runes and totems, and then there were the signs of the body. Those ones didn’t play fair, didn’t sit on your lawn and wait for interpretation. They hijacked you. Before her body could betray her any further, before it could carry her to Gregory’s door, she grabbed the shampoo from the side of the tub and squeezed a good quarter cup of green slime right on top of her head. She said out loud, “You’re not going anywhere like that.”

  But the shower didn’t help, the ratty towel didn’t help. She put her clothes back on.

  The lamplight under Gregory’s door. This stubborn and idiotic lust. Sometimes, after all, a thing wasn’t an omen but the event itself, as solid and irrefutable as an oak in the path of your little motorcycle.

  She walked into the guest room and sat on the edge of Gregory’s bed. He closed his novel and tugged the sheet up to his armpits. He was bare-chested. “I bet your apartment doesn’t even have room for a cello,” she said. “You want to hear a cello every morning when you step out of the shower?”

  “Yes. I want that very much.”

  “You’re not going to take me out on a date first? And we might hate each other. Don’t you think it could ruin the quartet? It could.”

  He held his hand out to her, palm up. It took her a moment to realize he wasn’t offering any answers but that.

  And she took the hand, and he pulled her into the bed and under the covers, and even in the lamplit darkness, even as the whole house dissolved around them into
the gray, ecstatic haze of two a.m., she was wide awake.

  His mouth on her shoulder was warm. The universe flipped in on itself. She found the deep and hollow place where his neck became his chest.

  GOOD SAINT ANTHONY COME AROUND

  The story goes that Chapman, leaving a meeting in Seattle—this was the seventies, he was still designing posters—looked up toward a noise in the sky and got hit in the face with a fish. No one saw, no one pointed and said, “Christ, man, that’s a fish!” but there it was, flailing on the cement. Up in the air, two cormorants still fought loudly. Chapman picked the thing up: a six-incher, cold and dense. He ran with it down the street, shouting at people in his way, dodging bikes. Around a corner and into a Vietnamese takeout place. “Cup of water!” he yelled. “Cup of water!” And when the woman didn’t understand, he grabbed a cup from the trash and filled it at the soda machine and dropped the fish in headfirst. Later he’d carry it to the ferry docks in a borrowed bucket and dump it back in the bay. The fish wasn’t doing well and would just be easy prey again, but what was he supposed to do, take it to a vet?

  My point here isn’t that Chapman would do anything to help you out, although that’s true. My point is, he was the kind of guy stuff happened to. Some people live their whole lives according to the laws of probability. If there’s a one in six thousand chance of getting hit by lightning, they won’t. They won’t win the lottery, either. Because someone like Chapman will. Someone whose stars made strange and intricate patterns at the moment of his birth.

  Chapman met Francisco Ling the same way he met many great artists of the late eighties: He knocked on his door one day and punched him. He’d had the idea over drinks with a friend. “I want to punch Keith Haring in the face,” he’d joked, and the friend had said, “Do it.” And somewhere along the way, the idea became serious, became the seed of a great photographic series: famous and influential artists, right after Chapman hit them in the face. Chapman would ring the doorbell, wait for the artist, and punch him square with his right hand, clicking the camera with his left in time to catch the artist’s shock, pain, blood. And if the artist fought back, Chapman kept clicking. He’d explain what he was doing, and—if you can believe it—most of the artists understood and forgave and were even flattered. The series was called anXiety of influence, and he would patiently explain its Oedipal undertones, its message of forceful reinvention. Aperture ran an article and Chapman let them publish his Haring photo (cowering, bewildered, bloody lip) and the Rauschenberg one (mouth agape, shouting) before the series was even complete. His reputation was made.

  Was Chapman inspired by that fish hitting him ten years earlier? Possibly. Which is to say, we all became aware of the fish incident through the interviews surrounding his eventual solo show. Journalists would ask if he’d ever been surprised like that, if he’d ever been hit in the face, and he’d tell the story.

  By the time he got to Francisco Ling in May of 1988, the Aperture article had run, there had been hot debate over Chapman’s decision not to hit women (chivalry, or a move to exclude them from the canon?), and Francisco Ling, looking through his peephole, recognized the guy.

  He called, “I’m sick. You’re not hitting me today.”

  “Okay,” Chapman said. “Can we stage something?”

  So Ling opened his door onto the hallway of the Hotel Chelsea and saw the man rocking on his heels. Chapman’s beard and flannel shirt did nothing to make him look straight—they were almost an ironic gesture—and his eyes (the way Ling told the story) were wet and brown and strangely apologetic. Perhaps this was because, as soon as the door was open wide enough, he swung anyway and hit Ling in the nose.

  Ling bent double, his mouth filling with blood. The camera clicked and clicked. Ling spat so he wouldn’t drool, and then he said, “I have AIDS.”

  “I know.”

  “Check your hand. Check that you didn’t cut your hand.”

  Ling would later credit Chapman with not checking his hand at all, with saying, “Let me get you some ice.” Chapman would always maintain that he was just busy shooting the rest of the roll—sometimes the best shots came later—and thinking pragmatically that if he’d cut his hand, noticing sooner wasn’t going to make much difference.

  They wound up on the couch in any event, Ling holding a Ziploc of ice chips to the bridge of his nose, Chapman drinking orange juice from a small glass. They talked about the heavy rain, about Ling’s new sculptures, about how he wanted, like Yves Klein, to patent his own color.

  I told you Chapman was the kind of guy things happened to, and maybe what I mean in part is that he let things happen to him, let change wash over him. Because within a week, anyone who dropped by Ling’s found Chapman now living there, too, moving his stuff from the East Village one cardboard box at a time. In seven days, Chapman and Ling had settled into a quiet companionship that seemed built on thirty years’ intimacy.

  Ling threw a party at the end of the month—or really the two of them did, as we discovered when we showed up, wine bottles in hand—the purpose of which was to announce their pairing to the world. It was nice for Ling, we conceded, even those of us who’d last seen Chapman when he hit us in the face, even those who still felt a pulsing in our cheekbones when it rained. Ling’s nose was bruised, and when Chapman leaned in to kiss him, we winced.

  Over canapés and cava, a few of us whispered that we didn’t trust Chapman. Keep in mind that we didn’t yet know about his years of struggle, his earnest and energetic paintings. We feared that his life was a gimmick, that he himself was a gimmick, and we feared he was using Ling to advance his own career. But look at the way they leaned on each other’s shoulders! Look at the way Chapman brought Ling his pills and his carrot juice as the party died down, the way he insisted on the couch and blanket, the way he picked up Ling’s cat and held it to his own chest.

  We sent Juney Kespert in for reconnaissance. “Take him for lunch,” we said. “Find out what his deal is. Find out what he wants.” Juney was a photo-realist. It made us see her as rational, objective, though that certainly wasn’t true.

  You have to understand that Francisco Ling was someone we all adored with a ferocity that had nothing to do with his sculptures or even his suave Brazilian smile, but with his generosity. He was fifty, older than many of us, and to me, at least, he was New York itself. I’d come there from Indiana, a twenty-year-old boy with no more connections than meat on his bones, and although Francisco Ling wasn’t the first person I met in the art world, he was the first who welcomed me. He asked me to show him my work, and I nervously did—a small portrait of my brother—and he closed his eyes and sighed as if deeply and finally satisfied. I discovered later that a lot of us had similar stories, but even then I didn’t doubt his sincerity. The idea that someone might take advantage of Ling’s kindness, of his vulnerability, panicked us.

  And so Juney invited Chapman down to Veselka late that summer, and we waited for her pronouncement. She called us one by one. “He’s a decent guy,” she said. “There’s not much to tell. He drinks too much, but who doesn’t?”

  I said, “A decent guy who punches sick men?”

  “He has a good heart. He needs to be needed, I think. One of those. But tell me why that isn’t perfect for Francisco right now.”

  That “right now” stuck with me, and I found myself thinking about it later that night in a cab, my eyebrow against the cold window. This would be the last boyfriend Francisco Ling would ever have. We didn’t need Chapman to be perfect, or even faithful. We just needed him to stick it out till the end. We needed him not to leave Ling on his deathbed. Ling had gotten tested in 1985 with the rest of us—we lined up for that test like Russians for bread—and, like so many, had no idea when he’d been infected. No one was living more than a few years beyond diagnosis those days. I’d bought a suit just for funerals.

  It wasn’t long before Chapman felt like part of the landscape. We all wa
nted to visit Ling, but we were sick of sickness, sick of death. The East Village was a minefield of disasters that year, and when we trekked up to Chelsea it was more for Chapman’s vivacity than for Ling’s pallor and fatigue. We were tired, after all—some of us were dying ourselves—and Chapman had the energy to crack a joke. Unlike Ling, he could jump up to grab a book from the shelf, could explain with great vigor why you needed to take a second look at Käthe Kollwitz.

  Ling had a solo show planned for the following spring at the Whitney, with the unspoken but universal understanding that it would be his last. The apartment was filled with the finished pieces, lumpy twisted things lacquered green and yellow, plus a series of quasi-phallic clay reliefs waiting for their final glaze. Missing were the monolithic forms on which Francisco Ling had made his name, abandoned along with his studio, with his ability to walk down the block. For a while he’d been using a shopping cart, leaning on the handle and wheeling it around the work. In the cart were trays with sponges, putty knives, spray bottles, towels, chisels, clamps. But now even that was too difficult, and a rolling stool became his seat. His tools lay on the floor in a dish rack. When I went there in October, Ling was on the couch with a cup of tea. The television blared campaign news, and he asked me to turn it off.

  He said, “You remember Kip.” I hadn’t known this was what he called Chapman—at the party, it had still been Christophe—but I nodded. Chapman’s beard had a way of making his eyes the only thing on his face. Just hair and then eyes, spectacular in the way they refracted light. “He never hit you, did he? Kip, did you ever hit him?”

  “I didn’t have that honor,” I said.

  “Well, he should have.” It was a compliment.