Music for Wartime Read online

  At this point, Chapman brought me a glass of water and their whole bowl of Halloween candy (“I don’t think we’ll get any kids,” he said, “so eat it all”) and told me he’d found a fifty-dollar bill in a library book that morning. Just when they needed grocery money.

  “Everything happens to Kip,” Ling said. “He’s a magnet for fortune.”

  I wondered if Ling was including himself in that magnetic field—and if so, whether he considered himself good or bad fortune for Chapman. Famous, but sick. Handsome once, but no longer. Living at the Chelsea, but dying there, too. Adored, but needy.

  Artforum, in writing about the buildup to the Whitney show, called Chapman “Mr. Ling’s amanuensis.” A careful, glossy word—as if he were taking dictation for Ling’s memoirs, rather than giving him sponge baths. It was a term I’d learned only recently, one that now, when I hear it, brings back New York 1988 in full Technicolor. We were in a terrible state that year, all of us. The big art money was gone with the ’87 crash. We were pinning our hopes, for Christ’s sake, on Michael Dukakis. And yet there was urgency to everything. Each visit was maybe your last, each voice something to be memorized. It was worth ordering another glass of champagne. When I hear “amanuensis,” I see Chapman’s face, his young face, and I see Ling’s hands, cragged and ruined, and I feel like jumping out of my chair to do things, to see people, before it’s too late.

  That day, I showed both of them the Polaroids of my new acrylics. Ling shook his head and told me I should go back to oils, that the oils loved me better. I’d have ignored him, but it turned out to be the last thing he ever said to me, and how can you ignore the last thing a great man says to you?

  It’s chilling, how you can spend years with someone and be left with only the smallest pile of scraps. That sentence was one of my scraps. And so eventually I went back to the oils, which did, indeed, love me better.

  Here’s what happened: In April, on the night of the Whitney opening, Chapman left Ling at home and headed over early. Ling trusted him to check the lighting, the positioning, to make sure the curator hadn’t messed things up overnight. Ling was supposed to take a cab uptown at eight. He was still strong enough to walk out of the building, but he was going to call Juney if he felt too weak. Chapman had helped him dress, had combed what remained of his hair.

  It didn’t feel odd to arrive before Ling, to be greeted by Chapman, his beard soft against your cheek, a drink somehow already in your hand, as the sea of patrons and artists swallowed you up. The work was extraordinary—what had looked small and half-finished in the apartment suddenly luminous and monumental, each piece a triumph of fluidity—and we were awed, each practicing, privately, what we’d say to Ling, testing the words on each other first. “It’s gentle,” I remember saying. “It’s like a détente, a melting.” But the crowd never parted for Ling, the room never hushed. Instead Chapman breast-stroked his way through, sweaty and flushed, and grabbed Juney’s arm. “You’re sure he never called you?”

  A few of us stayed behind and tried Ling’s number, again and again, from the pay phones by the entrance, and a few close friends even remained in the gallery, circulating and keeping things upbeat, but at least ten of us sardined into cabs and rode back down to Twenty-third Street, slapping our faces to sober up and wondering if we remembered our CPR, wondering if we’d have the courage to put our mouths to Ling’s.

  My cab was the second to arrive at the Chelsea, and when we got up the stairs and through the door and to the living room, Chapman was on the phone with the police—not the paramedics—and we joined in ransacking what was, aside from the absence of Ling, a normal apartment. Wherever he’d gone, he’d taken his essentials: wallet, satchel, toothbrush. His painkillers, but not his AZT. Not the cat, who walked in circles, mewling. What he left behind was a page of shakily written instructions for Chapman: pieces willed to friends, unfinished works to be destroyed. At the bottom, he wrote—at a different slant, an afterthought—“I grant Christophe J. Chapman legal rights to my artistic and physical estate. Please consider this legally valid.”

  It was a warm night, and everything was wet when we set out to blanket the city. I wound up with Juney, who braided and unbraided her hair as we walked. She had me carry her shoes. She was never one to be afraid of broken glass. Juney taught me the prayer her Catholic grandmother had used when she couldn’t find her passport or purse: Good Saint Anthony come around, something’s lost and can’t be found! We chanted it over and over, searching the sidewalks and stoops all the way to Gramercy Park and then beyond. I’ve been using it the rest of my life, and it hasn’t brought me much luck ever, except the few times I’ve found my car keys when I certainly would have come across them anyway. I looked Saint Anthony up years later, expecting him to have found a child in the woods or food in a famine—but all he ever found was his lost psalm book. If that’s enough to make you a saint—the reappearance of your book—what, then, were we, wandering in packs and alone, posting signs outside the hospitals and around NYU, not sleeping for three days? Saintly, maybe, if you’re generous, but not saints. Sainthood requires divine intervention, or at least the type of luck that passes for it. But we called the Chelsea every two hours till our quarters were gone, and Ling never came home. We kept our eyes open around the city for months, and no one ever saw him.

  A year later we held a memorial service of sorts, a gathering in what was now Chapman’s apartment. The Chelsea had let him stay on, and he was doing well enough to afford the place. It was still full of Ling’s art; Chapman would have to wait six more years for the issuance of a death certificate and so, despite the will, couldn’t sell or donate a thing.

  I should admit that there had been some attrition, beyond the kind we’d all grown to expect in those days. A few of Ling’s friends, not having seen Chapman’s tears and panic on that first night, his desperation and mourning on the subsequent ones, whispered foul play. Of course they did. Some held that Chapman had been a predator from the start. Others said he killed Ling out of mercy, that they had planned it all together.

  The official theory was that Ling, madly in love for the first and last time in his life, wanted to spare Chapman—and the rest of us, for that matter—his slow and ugly death. That he’d checked himself in to one of the small and discreet hospices that had sprung up in that decade, the ones where everyone was dying of the same thing and anonymity was understood.

  My own take was that Francisco Ling had been the one using Chapman the whole time. That the answer to his last days had shown up on his doorstep and punched him in the face: young, healthy, patient, useful. The kind of man who would run around Seattle with a dying fish. Easy on the eyes, good for running to the store, opening your AZT, clipping your nails.

  A year is a long time, and we had already returned to our own lives, our own deaths. We had other sick men to tend to. That search through the city had been only one of many panicked nights, a dot on a long and vicious timeline. Everyone’s soul was a slippery fish.

  That night, we made toasts, we cried, we told stories that required us to imitate Ling’s accent. The more we drank, the better we got at it. We left empty-handed, which was unusual. So many men had been disowned by their families, and left all their things—the books, the clothes, the wine—to their friends, that I had a small shelf devoted to artifacts. But six years later, Chapman would call us all up and ask if we wanted to have something. “The store is finally open,” he’d say. I would take Ling’s dish rack, the one that had held his tools.

  If you sat down today and read about Chapman’s life, his time with Ling would merit only brief mention, between the punching series and the Berlin work. It might be an explanatory footnote to his series of photos of Ling’s abandoned things: the shopping cart, the stool, the detritus of three decades’ fevered creation. He referenced Ling in his 1996 Liner Notes show—the set of thirty-six fake album covers, one of which featured a photo of a hollow-cheeked Ling under the titl
e Kaposi’s Sarcasm, a complicated joke that many found inappropriate, in part because Ling never had a sarcoma.

  But Chapman was a guy things happened to, and that’s why the Ling episode would be buried. There was his car crash and his miraculous recovery; there was his show in Moscow, the first solo show by an American in the former USSR; there was his studio fire, his MacArthur grant, the time he made national news when Mayor Giuliani singled him out for what he considered an obscene installation at JFK. Through it all, he did what Ling used to—he mentored a generation of young artists, found them representation, kept them out of the soup kitchens. The ones who needed saving found their way to him. Or he found them. Or they just seemed to fall on him, out of the sky. He was one of those saints of lost things.

  And meanwhile, there were the rest of us, or what was left of us. Things happened, but they were the predictable things. People got sick, and they died, and then buyers discovered their work. The smart buyers knew who was sick, bought early. I never got sick myself, and maybe this was the most remarkable thing that happened to me. It felt more like a blow from heaven, a singular and unearned benediction, than anything else in my life.

  But here’s the strangest thing that ever happened to Kip Chapman, stranger than the fish: In 2007, Francisco Ling died in São Paolo, Brazil.

  Which is when we all—Chapman, everyone—found out he’d ever been alive in São Paolo, that he’d lived past the night of the Whitney show in April 1989.

  There was a story in the Times Arts section, with photos of a studio full of unshown late work, and an interview with Ling’s “life partner, the composer Félix Maria Silva” telling how Ling had returned to his native Brazil in ’89, intending “to die in Portuguese.” But instead he’d gained a little weight, met Félix, got new drugs, got the cocktail when it came around, got the next thing and the next thing. Lived out the rest of his life in quiet seclusion. Died, finally, not of AIDS but of complications from those early years of AZT.

  I sat at a table in a bakery, a human stone, staring at the photo of Ling and Silva that accompanied the second half of the article. I wanted to call Juney up, to tell her we’d found him at last. I wanted to say, Your saint came through. But Juney was nine years gone. An overdose. I wanted to say, We should’ve looked a little south of Gramercy Park. I wanted to say, Juney, we need to redo the tallies. Juney was the one who kept lists of the ones we’d lost. She was the one to know how many we buried each year, how old they were, how much they’d left unpainted. I wanted to say, Juney, we found him. So why does it feel like we’ve lost something? I sat there a very long time. The waitress knew me, and when she saw my face she said, “Oh, honey.” She brought me a scone.

  Chapman, I heard, was devastated and inarticulate—both vindicated and humiliated. According to his sister, he didn’t eat for a week. Certainly he’d known about the more malicious theories, and here was proof of his innocence. But he refused all interviews on the matter. He’d moved down to Evans, Virginia, a few years earlier, to a converted barn, and was undergoing treatment for pancreatic cancer, a sickness he blamed on alcohol even as he continued to drink. No one was much surprised that he didn’t attend Ling’s retrospective.

  I did go. I wouldn’t necessarily have placed the work as Ling’s—difficult, angular shapes, hardware and nails, a roughness and anger I found completely unfamiliar. The room was full of faces I’d never seen. What was I expecting? Juney Kespert and the other ghosts of twenty years past? I suppose I did. I expected Hugh Steers and Patrick Angus and Luis Frangella. I expected Peter Hujar. I expected, somehow, Chapman and Ling, arm in arm, a mere twenty years late to the party. In the middle of the room, I mouthed Juney’s prayer. Not an actual prayer, just an homage, maybe. Because I didn’t believe anything would happen. I couldn’t raise the dead, I couldn’t bring back our innocence, I couldn’t even believe—as Chapman could—that something remarkable was always around the corner. My only magic was in survival.

  The rumor started that Chapman was working on a portrait of Ling. The two of us only communicated by occasional e-mail at that point—but we shared a dealer, the young and optimistic Beatrice, and she was the one to whisper to me in awe. “It’s eleven feet by thirteen,” she said. “And it’s not a photo.”

  “He’s painting again?”

  She leaned in. “With his fist.”

  Beatrice was good to me. I’d spent the past two decades painting heaps of clothes, medicine cabinets, chairs. They sold, but I didn’t love them. If they were about my life, it was obliquely—the chairs and clothes being, after all, empty.

  When the portrait arrived in New York six months later, I walked up to the gallery just to see it. Bea left me alone with the thing. She locked the front door.

  I was more overwhelmed than I’d been by any piece of art since I was a very young man. Primary colors plus green, a sloppy stippling done, yes, with the fist. It was clear he hadn’t really punched it, because there was no splattering, no puckering. He must have pressed the backs of his fingers patiently to the canvas a thousand times. Even so, a sick man shouldn’t have tackled a piece that large. I knew, and the dealer knew, and I believe everyone who cared about it knew, that this was his last work. How could you continue, after something like this? What would be left to give?

  It was Expressionist, if you had to categorize it. Maybe a bit derivative of Chuck Close, but only in scope—not in execution.

  And if you stood across the room, it was Ling.

  Not Ling as we’d all known him, but Ling as he’d appeared in the Times photo. Smiling, better than he’d looked in ’88 despite the white hair, despite the jowls. What had it meant for Chapman to put his fist to Ling’s face again? I’d never be able to ask. Was he absolving him, or executing him? Or had these always, to Chapman, been the same thing?

  There’s one more story about Chapman, the one we told at his funeral. After his funeral, rather, at the Thoroughfare Diner in Evans, Virginia. Imagine the New York art world—three hundred of us, at least, dealers, painters, photographers, critics, former students—descending on the bed-and-breakfasts, the truck stops, the knickknack stores of a town that hadn’t seen a gay man, as far as they knew, since that one kid took off for San Francisco in the nineties. Chapman had blended in fine, beard to his chest by that point, rusty red pickup.

  We took turns telling it, adding up the different details he’d given each of us: how toward the end, in the shower of his barn studio’s bathroom, Chapman slipped and fell. He hit his head and he twisted his ankle. Dizzy, unable to bend his neck, foot useless, he lay a long time on the bottom of the tub, feeling the water pelt his knees. He was weak from the cancer, weaker still from the chemo—and the wall of the tub was a porcelain cliff, insurmountable. He might pull up with his left hand to sit, but then what? Cross his injured right leg over and step out with it, lose his balance again on the wet floor? The metal safety rail was inches above the reach of his fingers. He knew he was going to die there.

  He told people, later, about looking out the open bathroom door—how the only thing he could see was the giant portrait of Ling across the studio, half-finished. Ling’s eye, Ling’s ear, Ling’s hairline. He told everyone that Ling had saved him. I believe something different. I believe he summoned his strength one last time so he could save Ling. So he could resurrect him, finish him, send him home to New York. What I’m saying is: If you have a fish in your hand, it’s easier to run.

  The solution came sudden and clear as a miracle: Hand over shoulder, blind, he stopped the drain with the rubber plug and switched the control from shower to faucet. He waited twenty minutes as the tub filled around him, as water poured over the side. It bore him up, Noah on the flood, until he could finally grasp the metal bar. He pushed against it, sailed himself to the lip of the tub, to the waterfall that ended on the tile floor and the submerged bath mat. It wasn’t graceful, he told us later, but we suspected it was more than that. It was grace itself.
He floated over the edge, dropped into the puddle below, and—blessed, exhausted, fingers pruned—rolled to safety.

  SUSPENSION: APRIL 20, 1984

  The most alarming photograph in my possession: my sixth birthday, eight children gathered at a picnic table, staring at a bomb. In the background, my grandfather’s hands rest on his bald head; my father stares at the sky. Above and behind them, unnoticed by anyone but the camera, my sister is flying.

  Five minutes later, my mother would exchange the camera for a tray of chocolate cupcakes. Erin Tazio would throw the bomb up into the tree house, and as we sucked the crumbs off our crimped wrappers, we waited for the little hut to fly apart in fiery shards.

  Ten minutes later, the sky would crack open with thunder as we all ran screaming for the house. My sister, underneath the neighbor’s trampoline, at first did not understand the sound of slicing rain.

  Exactly six years before the picture was taken, I came out purple, the umbilical cord wound three times around my neck—as if some tribunal in utero had found me guilty for the crimes of a past life. My pardon came from the doctor’s quick fingers.

  Two years and eight months later, my grandfather would call to joke about the time difference. “Happy New Year! I’m calling from the old year! Tell me, what is the future like?” We were as delighted by the joke as by the elaborate obstacle courses he set up in the basement the few times he came to Chicago—mazes and prizes and puzzles and traps.

  Twenty years later, looking at the photo and forgetting the thunderstorm looming overhead, I would wonder if it was the suggestion of a bomb that made my father turn his face to the sky, where the bombs of his childhood had screamed. He squints, hands on hips, as if awaiting a message.