The Exquisite Read Free Page A

for the cake, scooped five gleaming dimes off the counter, then walked over to a lonely patch of wall on Eldridge Street, leaned back, shoved my hands into my pockets, saw a flickering procession of Carines in the handsome gray suit that I had helped her pick out the previous Christmas, and, with the taste of old onion and even older oil in my mouth, pretended, badly I imagine, that the substantial facial moisture that was threatening to bust loose was just something caught in my eye.
    I beat someone during this period. Someone standing next to a deep fryer with grease flecks on his cheeks, who told me I smelled like I was dead and that I should get out and that I should not waste his time asking for work. He had a good life and he had worked hard for it and he had a feeling that
hard
and
work
were not words in my vocabulary. He spit in the sink after he said this.
    I asked him if what he was saying, as someone else had recently said, was that I was “unsuited for the obligations.” That I wasn’t, in essence, up to the shit job he was offering for shit pay in his shit place.
    He didn’t answer. Instead, he repeated the thing about how awful I smelled.
    You
smell, baby, I said to him as I walked away, as he sat slumped against the refrigerator with his hands, palms up, at his sides.
    I realize that divulging this kind of information about myself, whether or not it is true—some people I have told about it have looked at me and laughed, i.e., there may be some blur involved—does not help my position, but I can live with that. I have already, after all, been found guilty and sent here, and it is not my intention in chronicling the eventually unfortunate circumstances of my friendship with dear dead Mr. Kindt to sway public opinion. I was broke, and beat the shit out of someone, some jerk in the kitchen of an eating establishment, or I probably did, then laid low for a while. That’s a fact.
    By
laying low
I mean I got sort of swallowed up by certain parts of New York, not to mention certain events, and for quite some time wasn’t presentable at all. The days and nights that compose this period seem now to have been poured into a bucket and tossed into the East River, so that every time I go looking for them it seems as if I am slipping out to sea. I know that at one point, when the gaping hole—in what I heard someone standing outside St. Mark’s Church call “the arm of the city”—was still horrifyingly fresh, and the air was still stinging everyone’s eyes, and you saw people going around like death’s heads with their goggles and respirators on, I slept under some scaffolding on Great Jones Street in company with several others and that these several others didn’t want me there. I also know that for a while I walked around with one eye swollen shut, because I can remember seeing my reflection in a mirror as I passed the shining windows of a Duane Reade. I can also remember, not very long after this, walking down my old street, late at night, looking up at my old apartment, where I could see a light and a little corner of the ceiling, and being overwhelmed by the feeling that I had slipped back into my old life, that Carine, with her gray suit and salade niçoise and soft lap, was upstairs with the cats. The feeling was so strong, or I wasn’t, that I walked over to the door, reached into my pocket, felt for my keys, and was surprised not to find them. It seems to me it was at this juncture, as I reached with great certainty for something that wasn’t there, that I felt the ground going out from under me and became convinced that I was looking for myself in my own pocket and that—this realization increased the size of the wave of disorientation that had swept over me—it was me, not my keys, that had been gone for weeks.
    There were other moments—sitting in Battery Park eating the remains of a shrink-wrapped giant cookie, great clouds of smoke wafting out over the harbor, the Statue of Liberty gray