The Exquisite Read online

  THE EXQUISITE

  THE EXQUISITE

  A NOVEL

  LAIRD HUNT

  COFFEE HOUSE PRESS

  MINNEAPOLIS

  2006

  COPYRIGHT © 2006 by Laird Hunt

  COVER AND BOOK DESIGN by Linda Koutsky

  AUTHOR PHOTOGRAPH © Lorna Hunt

  COFFEE HOUSE PRESS books are available to the trade through our primary distributor, Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, 1045 Westgate Drive, Saint Paul, MN 55114. For personal orders, catalogs, or other information, write to: Coffee House Press, 27 North Fourth Street, Suite 400, Minneapolis, MN 55401.

  Coffee House Press is a nonprofit literary publishing house. Support from private foundations, corporate giving programs, government programs, and generous individuals helps make the publication of our books possible. We gratefully acknowledge their support in detail in the back of this book.

  To you and our many readers around the world, we send our thanks for your continuing support.

  FROM THE AUTHOR:

  Special thanks for help in shaping The Exquisite go out to my fabulous editor, Chris Fischbach (a.k.a. Fish), and to my fabulous partner in literary and extra-literary adventures, Eleni Sikelianos.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CIP INFORMATION

  Hunt, Laird.

  The exquisite / Laird Hunt.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-56689-187-5 (alk. paper)

  ISBN-10: 1-56689-187-6 (alk. paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-56689-260-5 (ebook)

  I. Title.

  PS3608.U58E97 2006

  813’.6—dc22

  2006011901

  FIRST EDITION | FIRST PRINTING

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  PRINTED IN CANADA

  for Eva Grace

  I fainted during a bit of my life. I regained consciousness without any memory of what I was, and the memory of who I was suffers for having been interrupted. There is in me a confused notion of an unknown interval, a futile effort on the part of my memory to want to find that other memory. I don’t connect myself with myself. If I’ve lived, I forget having known it.

  FERNANDO PESSOA

  The Book of Disquiet

  I entered. I shut the door. I sat down on the bed. The blackest space spread out before me.

  MAURICE BLANCHOT

  Death Sentence

  ONE

  Uh, uh, no way, I don’t want it. But you will have it, Henry, you must have it, my dear friend Mr. Kindt once told me. My dear friend who is now dead.

  You most certainly were. Indeed you did. Is that so, my dear boy? That’s the way he talked. He would hold his hands up to the light and say, aren’t they marvelous? He seemed to be particularly in love with his left arm. A rough patch of skin could send him into a sulk. His favorite word was alluvial. All the worn beauty of our weary old world in that word, he would say. In his apartment this was. One of those once-handsome buildings, turn of the last century, formerly elegant, now covered in dark netting, bricks crumbling, bludgeoned by time. We would sit there in his living room and eat meat or fish with heavy sauce and drink brandy, and he would talk. My God he would talk, his hands moving like strange moths above the meat.

  The first time I saw Mr. Kindt I was standing in the middle of his living room holding a flashlight. Go there, he has things, my friend Tulip had told me. He did have things. Glass beakers and microscopes and anatomical charts and globes and maps and aluminum newspaper weights and a framed poster of a Rembrandt painting of a dissection. Salamanders and small animals and small other things, some possibly alive, but most definitely dead, in jars. And things moving. Things rustling. Things moaning and things howling. And the whole place cold and filled with mist or smoke. I was just standing there taking it in, thinking, yeah, there are some things here, then someone said, hello, Henry.

  Who is that? I said.

  My name is Aris Kindt, I am the curator of this odditorium, the voice said.

  I took a deep breath, tried to see through the mist, the stuff, the smells and sounds.

  I saw you leave, I said. You went down the stairs, you got into a cab.

  Are you sure I did? Are you sure it was me? This is, after all, in at least one of its guises, a city of subtle simulacra, of deceptive surfaces, of glib and phantom shimmerings.

  How do you know my name?

  There was a laugh: a box full of electric lightbulbs being stepped on, a school of small frozen fists shattered against a wall. The voice said, shine your torch over here.

  “Over here” was onto the back of an enormous leather chair.

  I watched you leave and I watched you get into a taxi and I came straight up here, I said.

  Perhaps then, Henry, there is more than one of me, said the voice.

  I didn’t say anything. I could hear my heart beating in my ears. Sweat was starting up along the inside of my thighs.

  He laughed again. Don’t just stand there, do come around.

  I went around. Mr. Kindt, the guy I had seen get into a cab, a cab that had driven off, was sitting there, quite naked. There were wires taped to his chest, and he was holding a monitor in his lap, and for a time the two of us held our positions and watched the steady green light make its way across the dark of the screen, and he looked up at me and said, do you see? and although the sweat had spread to my shoulders and temples and my heart was now as loud as a nail driver, I said, yes, and he said, aren’t I lovely?

  My friend’s name was Tulip, and through her I met a man named Aris Kindt, who used to invite me over to his apartment and serve me plates of meat or fish, and in this way, and in others, I came to think of him as my dear friend. Herring was both served and the subject of conversation during our meeting. Herring, he would say, is holy. Herring, Henry, is God come to us as a fish. Herring is what was meant in the Gospels. Herring is the divine intricacy. Herring grows luminous when it dies, as, it has been said, did the corporeal Christ when he died, or numinous God, when he will die, or did die, and it tastes smashing, hot or cold. Pickled was mostly how Mr. Kindt liked his herring. In a creamy sauce. He would say, here is how you eat it, and he would eat it, and then I would eat it, and at first I could not quite believe that what I was eating was not something that had been pulled live and coldly wriggling from the earth. At first. Now I, too, when I can get them here, keep small jars marked Leiden with me. It is lovely to hold a bit of herring in your mouth.

  Steal something, he said.

  First, tell me what’s going on, I said, but halfheartedly, already caught up, even in those first moments, in the gears of the machine grinding away in Mr. Kindt’s apartment.

  Oh, but that would be so dreary, so boring. Steal something, Henry. Be a thief!

  What should I steal? I asked him.

  There are many things here worth stealing.

  I looked around. I couldn’t see very well.

  Steal anything then get out then come back for dinner tomorrow evening, my dear young man.

  Go to this address, Tulip tells me.

  We’ve met. We’ve gotten friendly. We’ve shared a few drinks. Exchanged anecdotes. I’ve told her that in one of my recurring dreams, Death, dressed as a cabdriver eating a hot dog, rips me out of my shoes as I’m walking up Avenue. She’s asked me what I do when I’m not having bad dreams, and I’ve told her I’m a thief.

  Go to this address and see the things this guy has.

  Why?

  Go there. It will be lucrative, she says.

  I go there. Eighth Street, view of St. Brigid’s and the park. Vintage real estate. I go up lots of stairs. The door is wide open. Mist or cold smoke billows out and I walk in.

  TWO

  Once upon a time I was someone then that stopped. Once upon a time I had a job and lived in an a
partment on the Lower East Side, surrounded by the sounds of Dominican Spanish. Salsa music in the summer. The whack-whack of dominos. Old guys selling flavored ices for fifty cents on the corner. Bad engines revving up. In the afternoons and evenings, kids would stand in the broadening bands of shadow, slugging and kissing and laughing at each other, and in the mornings the streets were clogged with street sweepers and garbage trucks and soft-faced, groggy locals moving their cars. The buildings around me weren’t nice, exactly, but they were old and kind of mysterious, with people leaning out of or moving behind the windows, and there were synagogues nearby and churches and a lot of small neon signs. The apartment I lived in was improbably large, with high ceilings and turquoise floors, and it looked out over an empty lot to a white wall, which represented, I sometimes thought as I stood at the kitchen window and looked over to it, whatever vanished building had once stood there full of bowls of ice cubes and electric fans and sweat pooling in the steaming creases of more or less happy or unhappy but now at any rate probably long-vanished skin.

  There were cats in the apartment. Making a lot of racket. Breaking things. Laying their lazy asses around. They used to wake me up in the morning by attacking my feet. Biting and lifting off little bits of skin with their claws. But they were my cats and I enjoyed their ministrations, and the damage to my feet and to the basically pretty cheap glassware in the apartment was part of the domestic program. Carine didn’t mind. There would be a flash of gray and a large glass object would hit the deck and shatter and she would light a cigarette and look at me with a dazzling violet gleam in her eye and shrug and smile. Carine. Small. Bones like a pepper finch. Elegant of arm and leg. Always carefully shod. She had a short bob haircut and vintage garments, a propensity to build up static charges, and the softest, palest skin. She used to like to quote the poets. After dinner in the East Village, out on the little terrace at Jules, the ashen air of St. Mark’s Place shot through with street and cab light, seared by the softly burning faces of the people sweeping past. She would quote poets then drink heavily. We both did. “All the colors I could write are not fair as this,” she would say. Glass after tannic glass.

  She liked the cats, liked to comfort them, to comfort me. She’d had a cat she’d loved dearly during her time in France, and she liked my cats and would smear lavender-scented antiseptic cream into the claw marks on my feet. She would cradle my head in her lap on one of her soft black skirts when it wasn’t too warm, and she would smoke little Mexican rice-paper cigarettes and tell me about the Ardche, where she had spent a summer, and about the mist that hung over the Bois de Boulogne in the early morning after a long night out on the town in “Gay Paree.” Sometimes she would make an enormous salade niçoise with fresh greens and olives and hard-boiled eggs and tuna and green beans and lots of Dijon mustard, and afterward, if the timing was right, if we had heard the sad, chirrupy song making its wobbly-tire way along the block, I would run down to the street and bring her back up a frozen vanilla custard with tangerine sprinkles from the Kustard King.

  Then, whammo, one night and the next morning she’d left. Before long, after the phone had been cut off, people started pounding on the door. It would start early in the morning and end late at night. First it was friends. Then it was creditors. Eventually it was my landlord. I had never liked him. His idea of fixing something in a tenant’s apartment, like a hole in the ceiling, was to offer to pay you for doing the work yourself. Then to offer to take it off your rent. Then to ask you what the fuck you were talking about when you brought it up with him. Lately he had started construction of a new building in the vacant lot outside our windows. First they smashed into the ground, really beat the shit out of it with their sledges and steam shovels and endless, deadly serious curses, then slowly, morning by horrible early morning, it began to grow, erasing the white wall as it moved skyward. When I figured I had about a week, a week and a half tops, of unencumbered white-wall viewing and concomitant old-time-tenement imagining before it had blotted out space and sun, I asked my landlord to step over to the window with me, put my hand on his shoulder, and told him he had ten seconds to apologize.

  After that I had the place over the comic book store. With the cats, only now there was just one. She used to pull chip crumbs out of the bottom of the bag with her paw. It was a whole business. I’d sit on the bed and watch her. Offer her my foot but she had moved on—to chips and laundry detergent and a big black tom she hissed at through the window. Who was I with then? Can’t remember. I read a lot of comic books and graphic novels, granted. A guy at the Dark Room, where I worked the door for a few weeks, lent me a beat-up copy of De Quincey’s writings. My acquaintance was into the opium eater thing, which gave me shivers and made my head spin, but it was the long essay, “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,” that grabbed me, that set me to dreaming.

  Dreaming, I saw a fire down the block, stood too close to it for too long while they were putting it out, then smelled it on my clothes for days. This smell, though I wasn’t quite sure why, repeatedly put me in mind of my aunt, sitting at home at the kitchen table, where I had last seen her, head down, barely moving. Once, I thought I saw her on the street below my window, and even though I knew there was no way it was her, I leaned out and started yelling. Then I was without lodgings for a time.

  THREE

  I stole a book.

  He said to me, dear boy, you are a thief so steal something.

  How do you know I’m a thief?

  Because it is dark. Because you are in my apartment. Because I did not ask you to come. Because you have confessed to having taken the trouble at least to attempt to monitor my movements. Take something, then, perhaps, knock me down, then come back for dinner tomorrow night and we will talk.

  What? I said.

  He smiled, stood up with a rustling of plastic-coated wires, and gestured with his head toward all the things, the hundreds of things, that were in the room.

  Come back tomorrow night at nine o’clock. I will feed you fish and we will talk.

  Fish? I said.

  With fine crackers. It doesn’t matter whether you are on time or not.

  You want me to come back? I said.

  Yes, he said. But not to steal. That’s only tonight.

  You’re inviting me to steal something from you.

  Yes.

  In other words, you’re saying “take something.”

  He laughed his little crushed-lightbulb laugh and looked around the room.

  All right, take something, Henry, he said. It’s not difficult. The difficult part was walking through my door.

  O.K., good, great, I said. I shrugged, and cracked my neck and three fingers to cover the fact that I felt equal parts spooked and intrigued, put my hand into the shadows and picked up the first portable item it touched, walked over and sort of shoved the item’s owner a little on the shoulder so that he fell back with a light oof and a crinkling of wires into his big chair, then made for the door. When I got downstairs and out onto Eighth Street I took the time to confirm that what I had grabbed was a musty old book, which didn’t smell very good. I’m not at all against reading, in fact I read a lot, but not books that smell like something that has spent time in one of New York’s omnipresent mystery puddles. I tossed the book into the trash can next to the entrance to Tompkins Square Park, thought, well, that was pretty crazy, then went down to the Horseshoe, on the corner of Seventh and B and had a couple. Couple more. Thing is I’d done pretty well with a score I had made while I was in the hospital and I still had plenty in my pockets. Going to Mr. Kindt’s had just been gravy and it didn’t matter that I’d left without anything worth keeping. I asked the guy behind the bar—Job was his name—for a shot and told him to help himself.

  Thank you, Job said.

  You’re welcome, Job.

  We drank.

  Two more, I suggested.

  Job poured two more.

  You ever feel spooked and intrigued, Job?

  At the sa
me time?

  More or less.

  I’m not sure.

  I told Job about my encounter with Mr. Kindt.

  Mr. what? said Job.

  I hear you, I said.

  Job grinned. He went off to help a couple of customers.

  He came back.

  What’s your real name, Job? I asked him.

  Job’s my real name.

  I mean your name before it was Job.

  Anthony.

  Anthony’s a nice name.

  Might be, but it’s not my name.

  Fair enough.

  Job moved off. I drank some more, then some more, and I thought about Mr. Kindt saying “dear boy,” and I both liked it and I didn’t, and I thought about seeing him naked and bathed in the green light, and wondered what it would be like to have all those wires attached to me. I shivered. For a second, I could remember having had wires attached to me, could remember my aunt leaning close with her roll of tape, her graying hair falling over her face, could remember the flecks of bacon fat on her chin. Actually, I had never had wires attached to me. Remember isn’t the right word. Henry boy, sweet boy, I could “remember” my aunt saying. I shivered. I smelled fish and felt mist, then I was sitting in a booth and someone was whispering in my ear: five hundred dollars.

  Sold to the drunk biped in the booth, I whispered back.

  There’s a little shop at Forty-eighth and Lex. Doesn’t look like much on the outside. Ask for Mr. Singh. He’ll give you five hundred dollars for it and that’s if you don’t feel like bargaining.