The Exquisite Read Free Page B

instead of green and somehow, at least the way I remember it, lacking a face; or lying on a bench near the Cloisters, the unseasonably hot sun smashing me into a stupor, a man very nearly as unpresentable as I was walking over and pinching my arm.
    He had a plan, he said, a wonderful plan that lacked only a partner. If I was interested in being that partner he would let me in on it. I told him I was interested. He said that before he could let me in on the plan he had to test me. I asked him what the test was. He said I had to find someone who looked like me and pinch him on the arm. I then had to tell him I had a plan and ask him if he would like to be my partner and, if he agreed, test him in the same way.
    Your plan is to make people who are already dizzy even dizzier, I said.
    It’s not really my plan, he said.
    All of this would no doubt have continued had I not, one night after I had swiped a bottle from a sleeping colleague and drunk half of it over a couple of Halcion, wandered out in front of a Gentle Fragrance Florists truck. This truck, even though it did little more than clip me, proved to be my ticket out. An ambulance arrived and strong arms put me on a stretcher and bore me away. I could see nothing out the ambulance windows—the world had been reduced to that bouncing over-lit interior and four small panes of dark glass. A man with a bored look on his face presided over my passage. I spoke at some length, but he either chose to ignore me or did not hear me or both.
    In the hospital, I was bathed and fed and my dizziness receded. The food was served on flimsy pastel-colored trays and was pretty bland, but it was real and certainly more palatable than anything I had ingested in some time. In the hospital, I began to steal and to sell what I stole. In the hospital, I lay on a firm mattress and things happened.

FIVE
    It was a little hard to figure out, once I became a regular at Mr. Kindt’s, why Tulip was spending so much time with him. I mean for starters consider the physical discrepancy: Tulip young, tall, beautiful, with a penchant for tank tops and tight jeans and with long, fresh muscles that seemed to be living their own bright life beneath her simple clothes and the exposed expanses of her skin; old Mr. Kindt was beautiful too, but in the way that exotic mushrooms or worn-out manatees or bacteria formations are beautiful: a focus on certain aspects and angles is required. Of course, given some baseline commonalities and even, at times, without them, New Yorkers have a surprisingly high tolerance for dissimilarity, and I have no doubt that were I to rip the front off any of the buildings in, say, Stuyvesant Town, I would uncover a jaw-dropping proliferation of physical mismatches. So it wasn’t so much that that confused me. It was something else, something about the way they were and
weren’t
together, the way Tulip seemed practically to live there but also not to be there at all, the way Mr. Kindt would stare fixedly at her while seeming simultaneously oblivious to her presence, the way a troubling cocktail of ambivalence and affection seemed to sit at the heart of their interactions. Tulip was almost completely silent on the nature of and motivation for her relationship with our mutual friend. For his part, if asked about Tulip, and even if not asked, Mr. Kindt would offer up bon mots along the lines of: she takes care of me, the darling, or, I would be lost without her, the dear. The second one I wasn’t so sure about, and the first one, despite my imaginings—which had started almost the moment she had told me she did “things” for Mr. Kindt—I quickly decided just wasn’t true. Though she was awfully nice to have breathing in your direction as she sat cross-legged and barefoot in one of Mr. Kindt’s overstuffed couches or armchairs, Tulip didn’t particularly take care of anyone. Just about all she did for Mr. Kindt—at least that I was aware of—was hang around and help out with