Merciless Gods by Christos Tsiolkas
He heard it as a whine. ‘Well, stop fucking dawdling.’
She said nothing but at 42nd Street she inexplicably turned right.
‘What are you doing? That’s the wrong way.’ He wanted to consult the map in his back pocket; he was sure they had to head towards Fifth Avenue, but he didn’t want to take out the map and look like a tourist.
‘We’re getting the subway.’
They didn’t speak a word to each other on the train. She motioned for the map and he silently took it out, inching away from her as he did so, turning his back to her as she unfolded it.
A young Hispanic couple, the youth with his arm around the girl’s waist, both of them listening to music through their earphones as they rested their heads against each other, watched her reading the map. The boy lifted the earphone away from the girl’s ear and whispered something to her. Bill blushed and turned his body further away.
At the 77th Street stop she got up and he scrambled to follow her. His right hand was held awkwardly against the front pocket of his jeans; every few minutes he would brush it against the pocket, making sure the wallet was still there.
Back at street level, she handed him the map. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘we are tourists.’
Pissy bitch. He deliberately dawdled, letting her walk ahead, but as they crossed into Fifth Avenue his bad mood vanished. He quickened his step and reached for the bottle of water in the pocket of her backpack. ‘Hey,’ he said, smiling, ‘look up.’
They stopped, looking down the avenue, at block after block of stately nineteenth-century facades that disappeared into Harlem. It was a workday, and grim-faced New Yorkers in business suits jostled past them. A middle-aged woman, svelte in a tight black dress, held out her hand for a cab but it whipped past her. ‘Fuck this,’ she drawled, putting her sunglasses back on in one quick graceful movement.
Trina slid her arm through his. ‘Isn’t it the most fabulous city?’
A previous night, in a bar in SoHo, he had been waiting to catch the eye of the bartender when he overheard a man beside him say, ‘God, I hate Midtown, it’s full of tourists.’ He and Trina had just spent the day at the top of the Empire State Building, listening to the audio tour, gazing down at the astonishing city encircling them, so moved he had found his eyes welling with tears. But at the bar, he cringed. The bartender had cocked an impatient eyebrow at him, waiting for him to order, and Bill had been embarrassed by his own accent. He had to repeat the order, the harsh Australian consonants and chopped vowels sounding grotesque to his own ears.
But now, with the valley of the avenue chopped into alternating geometric shapes of light and shade from the sun straight above them, he realised that he loved Midtown, the fantasy of it, the romance of it, the cinematic sweep of it. They were still arm in arm when they reached the Whitney.
There was a queue. Bill went to the front to read the sign on the glass doors and a stout older woman in a dark blue uniform approached him.
‘You can’t go in there, sir.’ She was shaking her head. ‘We don’t open till one today, sir.’
Bill joined Trina at the end of the line.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘She was such an officious bitch,’ he answered. ‘And I just hate how she kept calling me sir in that rude, supercilious way. It’s so fucking false.’
At a minute to the hour the glass doors were still locked and the stern woman guarding the entrance still had her arms crossed. A woman in the middle of the queue had just sighed loudly, Oh for God’s sake, when the guard, as if taking pity on them, pushed open the doors and gestured for the queue to start moving. Even so, they were ignored by three young staff at the front desk, a man and two women; they were laughing and logging on to their computers, refusing to look up. Then, almost in unison, their smiles disappeared and they turned to face the waiting line. To Bill, the young man appeared particularly irritated, as though the visitors were an unnecessary imposition. He hoped they didn’t get him.
But as they moved forward he was the next attendant free. He was handsome, immaculately dressed in a crisply ironed fawn shirt.
Bill had his wallet open and asked, ‘How much for the two of us?’
And then the little prick rolled his eyes and tapped the notice in front of him.
Bill felt sweaty, was sure that there were damp patches under the arms of his T-shirt. He was all too aware that, unlike the other visitors, New Yorkers in smart summer wear, his and Trina’s T-shirts and shorts, her backpack, marked them out as outsiders. Fumbling with the money, Bill handed forty dollars across the counter.
Trina stepped up beside him. ‘There’s a Hopper on display, isn’t there?’
And then the little fucker did it again, rolled his eyes. ‘Yes,’ he answered her, not hiding the contempt in his voice, ‘but we are a museum of contemporary art.’ He drew out the penultimate word as though Trina might never have heard it before.
Bill felt Trina flinch beside him and when the man handed over the two paper tickets, Bill grabbed them out of his hand. The young man’s distant demeanour wavered for a split second, then he recovered and the sneer returned to his face. ‘The Hopper is on the top floor.’ Then a pause. ‘Sir.’
They walked towards the lift, then as they waited there behind an elderly couple, Bill exploded. ‘What a stuck-up black cunt,’ he hissed at Trina.
The old woman turned around, stunned, looked at him and then quickly turned away, taking a step as though recoiling from him. Trina had also shifted away from him and was looking at the floor. In the lift to the top floor, she stood in the corner opposite him, her eyes fixed on the numbers lighting up above the door.
She waited till everyone else had exited and then she turned to him, her eyes furious. ‘You Neanderthal, how dare you?’ He couldn’t answer her, he couldn’t find the words. She almost ran from him and disappeared around a corner. He knew better than to follow her.
For the first few minutes he wasn’t even aware of the canvases on the white walls, the sculptures or the mobiles. As much as he was hiding from his wife, he was also avoiding the elderly couple from the lift. He couldn’t stand seeing their distaste, their revulsion. And he did feel revolting; the shame that was blinding him to the world in front of his eyes seemed impossible to quell. His body felt lumpy and awkward, misshapen and clumsy, as if the insult he had uttered had physically altered him. He felt unclean.
For fuck’s sake, he rebuked himself, thinking of the man’s arrogant dismissal of him and Trina, why didn’t I just call him a spoilt cunt, or a rude cunt, or even a faggot cunt? All of them were inexcusable, but none was as disgraceful—no, as blasphemous—as what he had said.
He turned into a small alcove off the main gallery and that was when he saw the Hopper, a row of tenement shopfronts, the red and yellow pigments bold and earthy at the same time, the blue of the morning sky repeated in a stretch of awning, in the hues of the curtains of the apartments above the shops. The beauty of the painting stilled the chaos inside his head; he forgot about the heat of the day, the insulting behaviour of the young man, the wretched abasement of his own response to it. The melancholy of the painting, the quiet, empty street, the evocation of solitude, made him long to be back home. He had to stop himself reaching out to touch the painting, seeking its solace.
Trina had come up next to him. He smiled at her wide-eyed admiration of the work. He leaned across to her and said softly, ‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’
‘I’m not ready to talk to you yet.’
His shame had vanished completely. ‘Fuck off then.’ He didn’t care if he was overheard.
So this is contemporary art. The top level consisted of works in the collection that had been exhibited in biennales over the last forty years. Though Bill was no expert in art, he knew enough to recognise the beauty in the Rothko and the Johns, the Bourgeois and the Kruger. But in the gallery he had just entered, a large flat-topped cubicle took up most of the floor space. Branches and twigs had been arranged around i
There was more wood and metal and wiring haphazardly thrown together as sculpture on the lower level; there was also an early sixties Mustang convertible, the inside gutted, and a video projection of a desert highway flashing across the windscreen, random Polaroids of the desert landscape around Joshua Tree stuck along its chassis. In another room, a DVD on a loop played what seemed to be a harshly over-lit video of a woman’s hand grating a plastic toy; it was not a doll, which would have at least made some kind of sociological sense; nor was it a war toy, which would also have had a discernible purpose. Two women, plump and silver-haired, dressed as though they had set off for church or temple that morning, were looking quizzically at the screen. There’s nothing there, he wanted to say to them, don’t bother, but if the day was teaching him anything it was that he should just keep his big stupid fat mouth shut.
He wandered into a passage that led to a large darkened gallery in which one long wall was divided into two screens. On the first panel a dignified old man, in a thick checked shirt buttoned at the collar, was answering questions from an off-screen interviewer. Something about the old man’s suspicious but dignified manner in front of the camera spoke of a much earlier age, as did the vivid colours of the image, shot on film, pulsating with depth. On the second panel an abstract collage of found footage—from nature documentaries, educational instructions, old family Super 8—reminded Bill of his early childhood, as did the whirring of the projector. The second panel played silently while on the first the old man struggled to answer questions about himself. Within minutes Bill recognised that the old man had dementia, that his memory had been ripped from him the way his own grandfather’s memory had been stolen. The strain in the old man’s voice, the unsettling fear in his eyes as he tried to recall if he did indeed have children, was almost unbearable to watch.
Bill let his eyes rest on the footage of a man and woman setting up a tent by a river: the saturated colours of the Super 8 stock, blown up to fit the wall, were as rich and brilliant as the brushstrokes in the Hopper painting. There were footsteps and he turned to see the elderly couple from the lift enter the room, hesitating for a moment as they adjusted to the near darkness.
Bill slipped out, terrified that they would recognise him, walked quickly to the stairs and straight down them to the ground level. It was only then that he regretted not finding out the artist’s name; the installation about the loss of memory had moved him. The three young attendants were still seated at the counter but he couldn’t face asking them, didn’t want to have to deal with their rudeness, the insinuation in the young man’s tone that he was somehow not worthy to bear witness to such art.
He pushed through the glass doors and took in breath after breath of the hot dirty air. With the exception of the Hopper and the unknown artist’s video installation, the Whitney had only offered him emptiness. He hoped Trina would feel something of how he felt, agree with his reaction. If she didn’t, if she liked that place, responded to that art, it seemed to him impossible for them to trust one another’s feelings again. He felt it would separate her from him forever.
He was awaiting her exit from the gallery with such eagerness that her sudden appearance and grim silence momentarily confused him. Then he remembered and he couldn’t suppress a groan: she hadn’t forgiven him.
She took out the bottle of water, drank from it, and returned it to her pack without offering him any. ‘I’m hungry,’ she announced. ‘There’s a place Chloe told me about, she said it was a fantastic old-school kosher deli.’
‘That sounds good. Where is it?’
‘On the Upper West Side.’
It was already close to two o’clock and it would mean having to walk all the way across the park. Or catch a cab. He didn’t want to go but he didn’t want to upset her further, so he just stood there looking indecisive.
She looked at him as if he were some idiot. ‘You don’t want to go there?’
‘No, no,’ he lied, ‘I do.’
She slipped the backpack onto her shoulders and started walking. He called her name and she swung around, her annoyance evident.
‘I think we should get a cab.’
‘I want to walk.’
‘We’re hungry, it’s hot, it’s across Central Park. Come on—let’s get a cab.’
‘No.’ She was shaking her head, her arms folded. ‘I want to walk. So I’m going to suggest that we split up and we’ll have lunch separately.’
‘No, I think we should have lunch together.’
‘I’m not sure I want to have lunch with you.’
For God’s sake, they had just been words, about a preppy stuck-up shit who had insulted her. And the little prick hadn’t even heard them. But Bill knew that there was no possibility of winning that argument, knew that he didn’t deserve to.
‘I’m really sorry. It was an awful, idiotic thing to say.’
‘It was more than that,’ she spat out. ‘It was a racist thing to say.’ Her voice wasn’t raised at all, but he was conscious of the delivery van that had eased into a park behind her, and that the driver was black. ‘I feel like I don’t know you.’
The driver had opened the back door to the van and was lifting boxes onto the kerb.
‘I feel terrible about it, Trina, I really do.’ Bill found he was whispering. ‘I feel really ashamed.’ He offered her a shy apologetic smile. ‘Let’s get some lunch, eh?’
She shook her head. ‘I want a couple of hours alone. You actually repulse me at the moment.’
If he spoke he would cry. He stood there, nodding, as she told him to meet her in three hours at a bar on Mulberry Street that they had discovered their first night in the city. If he spoke he would cry.
He wandered the city, looking into the windows of cafés and restaurants, unable to decide on any of them for lunch. He walked in the shade of the cross streets of the Upper East Side, past Lexington, past Third Avenue. He found a small deli and ordered a pastrami and salad roll that turned out to be enormous, and sat on a small stool outside to eat it, but could only manage to eat a third of it. Down the street he could see a man wheeling his belongings in a trolley, stopping every so often to check through bins and gutters. Bill wrapped the roll in a napkin and perched it carefully on the edge of the stool for the homeless man to find.
Bill walked all the way to the edge of the island, hoping to find a park, a space, some kind of solitude from the roar and bustle of the metropolis, but at the edge of the city a motorway, ugly and relentless, barred any access to the river. His shirt was now sticking to his back.
He wandered back to Second Avenue and scanned the sign above a bus shelter. An elderly man dressed in a light brown suit, a fedora in his hand, looked across at him and smiled.
‘Excuse me,’ Bill said to him, ‘can I get a bus here to go downtown?’
‘Where do you want to get to, son?’
‘Allen Street.’
‘It’s the right bus.’
They waited, standing next to each other.
‘Are you English?’
‘No, I’m Australian.’
The old man smiled. ‘I’ve always wanted to go there. I’ve heard Sydney is beautiful.’
‘I’m from Melbourne.’ The old man kept smiling and nodding. ‘It’s in the south,’ Bill explained.
But the old man had looked away and was holding out his hand to hail the bus. Bill climbe
‘Allen Street, please.’
The driver was shaking his head. ‘Exact change, sir.’
Feeling foolish, feeling like everyone’s eyes were on him, Bill fumbled through his pocket. He had to re-count his money, confused by the foreign coins. He had only a dollar fifty in change. And a two-dollar Australian coin.
The old man had made his way back to the front of the bus and tapped Bill on the shoulder. ‘How much do you need, son?’
‘Fifty cents.’ Bill gratefully accepted the two quarters, took his ticket and moved down the aisle. The old man had sat next to a young woman who was listening to her iPod. As he passed, Bill said thank you to him, and the old man replied, ‘Don’t mention it.’
Bill took a seat down the back and then stood up again, balancing carefully as he weaved down the aisle to stand next to the old man. ‘Excuse me, sir.’ Bill took the gold Australian coin from his pocket and handed it to him. ‘This is a two-dollar Australian coin,’ he explained, ‘for you to use when you make it to Sydney.’
The old man beamed as he accepted the coin. ‘Thank you, son, you’re a mensch.’ He laughed at Bill’s puzzled expression. ‘It means you’re a good boy, son.’
Bill didn’t dare say a word for fear that if he did he would burst out crying.
He got to the bar fifteen minutes early and Trina was twenty minutes late. The first time they had come across it, it had been evening and the place was full. There was a crush to get to the bar and the music was loud; they had thrilled at ordering martinis and sitting at the bar, watching the mating rituals of the fashionably dressed young New Yorkers. They had sat in a blessed jet-lagged torpor, every so often looking at each other and laughing, We’re in New York, we’re in New York! But that afternoon the bar was empty except for the sullen-mouthed young bartender, her hair dyed platinum in a pageboy bob. Bill ordered a beer and took a seat at a front table.
When Trina did arrive she offered no apology for her lateness. He jumped up to greet her. ‘Do you want a beer?’