“People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.”—Elizabeth Kubler-Ross
GLASS
For D. who sparkles from within.
Someone once described friendship as a glass ornament. Shattered, it rarely returned to its original form. Liza Carty expected the same could be said for her friend’s foot. It wasn’t until much later, when he’d called her in excruciating pain at an hour when even the gods were disgusted—when the booze and the coke had worn off—that she considered the same might apply to them.
They were multi-faceted glass ornaments, Guillermo and Liza; artfully contrived to reflect the secreted desires of their audience; the ones who followed their exploits, goaded and parroted less brazenly their shameless moves before malice set in.
Guillermo Glas Flores. Everyone called him Guy. He was rock-star lean, not as tall as he appeared. His accent hinted at Dutch and he was often taken for a “dese, dem, and dose” guy. Sometimes he sounded more like a native than she. He glowered from a pair of Spanish eyes that penetrated a conversation like hot coals and made you think he towered above everyone else in the room. Sleek, black hair sprung from his head and looked like a busted raven’s wing. Black suited him. In summer he wore black t-shirts, faded to soot, like a second skin. His suffocating leather pants left his ass-print on the plastic seats of her white kitchen chairs, which no matter how diligently she scrubbed, Liza could not remove. His feet were usually shod in a weary pair of black lizard Tony Lamas; toes pointed heavenward, exaggerating Guy’s naughty elf persona. These gave way to frayed espadrilles in the hottest New York summers. In winter, he wore a vintage leather motorcycle jacket, waist too high, and arms too long. Discarded after an overlong, dissolute evening it lay like a spent doppelganger, unable to shed Guy’s form.
Liza called him Dingo when she loved him, Guillermo when she loved him less. She braided her fine, long, blonde hair into a tender rope that drooped across her shoulder. She favored Timberland boots, jeans and flannel shirts, preferring the element of sexual surprise when a lover discovered a penchant for sheer teddies and satin underwear.
His heritage was luminous, hundreds of years it seemed of writers and artists, architects, and musicians. The maternal Dutch side included celebrated stained-glass artists whose colorful windows appeared in stark clapboard churches in New Hampshire. A reclusive Spanish father penned dark, political plays and novels in Paris, far from Guillermo’s mother in New England. Liza knew little of her family’s history. There were uncles she’d heard about who were French Canadian fur thieves and on her father’s side laid a festering nest of Fundamental Christians hardly German after all this time.
They had met in an overheated loft space where they designed and produced a small activist newspaper. Coke-fueled all-nighters were spent alongside raffish young journalists with an unquenchable thirst for drugs, alcohol and establishment blood. The smell of hot wax permeated the art department and only rarely concealed the trace of pot coming from the camera room. Pay was poor but their artistic lives were rich. It was before the inexorable rise of the cost of everything and the need to find a way to make more and subsist on less. It was the best time of their lives.
Liza and Guillermo had since worked together as a team. They had crossed from Chelsea to the east side to freelance at a magazine called Electronic Consumer. They left a sunny windowed loft for a higher hourly wage and artificial light. He was the art director and she was his assistant. Liza often ran interference when an editor or creative director questioned his whereabouts and she knew he was still in bed, bemoaning indiscretion. She sat in for him at editorial meetings, submitted layouts for approval, so they would forget that he was nowhere to be seen. When she had to, she lied. The mostly male editorial staff returned from the weekend buzzed by a commercial aired during the Super Bowl. Liza unwittingly sized photos of her future—the Macintosh that ignited the office chatter—but the burgeoning field of personal computers held no interest for her. For now it was still cut and paste. As freelancers they became adept at wasting time, ratcheting up the hours.
Plum staff positions guaranteed salaries, health insurance, and deadly boredom, which they deliberately avoided. They preferred to be self-employed. Corporate publishing paid the rent and allowed them unbridled nights that made up for the painful days deprived of their passions.
They were both painters, only Liza’s pursuit was singular while Guy was the servant of many muses: he painted, wrote songs reminiscent of Jacques Brel, and played electric guitar. He disrobed and posed on the other side of the artist’s canvas. Small parts in subversive plays came his way, which was how he’d met his wife. He wrote poetry in an unintelligible scrawl that looked like ragged fissures on a frozen pond. It veered from English, to Dutch, between Spanish and French; all of which he spoke with ease. But Liza liked best the little notes he left for her drawn with sleeping cats. They had a passion for cats.
The creative director, Davis Armando, demanded a closed door meeting at the end of the day, dressed them down. After hours partying aside, he chided, their antics in the office were distracting. “Fine,” said Liza, tight-lipped. Guillermo, hung over, could barely recall the debauchery in the bar at the start of the weekend. He slouched before Davis in a charged stupor. His legs twitched, his gaze darted unfocused around the office. Only a few nights ago in Old Town Bar he was the ringmaster directing an after work circus crowding into their preferred space behind the front window, bathed pink by the neon sign above. After every round the laughter was louder, his audience fueled. His rapid downward trajectory to playing the clown puzzled Liza.
“Keep da fucking jokes out outta the office? What the fuck? Dere wasn’t a problem Friday night.” Liza hurried after Guillermo. “Dingo, hold up,” she yelled, but he was at the freight elevator, pressing the call button furiously. She slipped through the closing doors. In the large empty car he paced as they slowly descended. Cracks appeared on Guy like an antique crackle glass finish and spread across him with every slight, every blow to his ego. A usually slow burn suddenly erupted with an indignant reflex. His left leg shot out and his foot met the elevator wall with a sickening shudder. The doors opened and Liza stepped into the lobby, faint and sweating. He followed her into the wintry evening, striding, as if nothing had happened, into streets curdled with begrimed heaps of sodden snow. Vigilant as a feral dog, he had an instinct for sniffing escape routes where he could lick his wounds. “Gas Station?” he asked grinning. “Why not?” she replied. They could both use a drink.
They lounged in the funky reconverted bar on 2nd and B, while Liza’s friend Rodolfo—also a painter—tapped out bumps on the bar, hoping to achieve the impossible and seduce Guillermo. The place was empty but for a gaunt Nuyorican poet tending to the stray cats and they warmed by the pot-bellied stove, taking turns feeding the fire with discarded sticks of furniture. The caustic sting of burning varnish mingled with their fruity drinks—con gas—in a familiar comforting haze. Her headache had subsided. She would talk to Davis in the morning. He had a kind of unresolved crush on her, she could tell. Closeted men did. She was raw, blonde, uninhibited and everything they wished for, and nothing they would ever have.
Liza’s equilibrium returned, what she came to feel was her unshackled self, away from the paralyzing freelance work, drinking and laughing with like-minds. They were hungry and headed over to El Sombrero, refueling with cheap plates of rice and beans behind windows dripping with condensation from the never ending rounds of steaming tortillas. A pitcher of margaritas sounded a clarion call to carry on and they headed uptown to Downtown Beirut. Liza noticed Guy was favoring his left foot and after a few belts of Maker’s Mark she urged him from the nearly empty, narrow dark interior, from the jaundiced tranny who’d taken a fancy to Guy, from the juke box which still held their selections un-played. Liza hustled him past a laconic dealer pushing loose joints on Tenth street, ignoring other, more aggressive overtures: “Tuinals, meth.”
Later—much, much later—he’d called her at home. Her heart pumped wildly, a deep piston churning up consciousness. He screamed into the receiver: “It’s huge, my foot is fuckin’ huge.” Before she took on the seriousness of it, she’d quipped groggily: “Well then it won’t fit in your mouth this time.” She turned off the radio, stroked her irritated cat, and promised it would be the last time as she laced her boots and fell into her jacket.
Unsure of what lay ahead, Liza ran through the pre-dawn darkness from her inherited rent-controlled apartment off Fifth Avenue across 96th Street to his moldering walkup on First. “It’s always something with him,” she muttered and wondered briefly if he might end up like Michael Jackson someday, setting himself on fire. His face was gray, distorted with pain. Liza quickly took stock; saw the evidence of a whirlwind marriage—brightly patterned curtains, half-finished against windows nearly opaque with grime—and his fight to free himself from domesticity. Two decidedly peeved female cats rushed to her ankles and before she could maneuver Guy down five flights of warped planks she worked a can opener around a couple of cans and dropped the cat food to the floor.
Liza looked up from the wilted, popular magazines. Funny, this place, she thought as she gazed around her. She’d discovered the Emergency Room at Doctors Hospital last winter, when she was bent double from pneumonia. They pampered you. Gracie Mansion was within spitting distance.
Alone in the waiting room, she pulled a chair in front and lifted her aching legs. Dingo. Relentlessly single. Her too, she reckoned. They had fucked around each other but never with each other; he with the actress who became his wife for a split second, she with whatever moved in her direction after her divorce from the son of a psychiatrist.
A few hours ago she’d fallen asleep to the radio. Still jazzed, she was listening to an intense performance, an orchestral piece called Guernica. It was followed by an interview on WNYC with the composer, Leonardo Balda. Should the artist be politically involved, he was asked. “No, the artist should be socially involved.” Liza thought about this. How involved was she in anything except painting when she could and drowning her sorrows when she could not?
It was getting out of hand. That summer was an intense period of escalating mayhem. Joblessness left them at liberty to conjure new ways to define their freedoms. Liza painted and Guy simultaneously bemoaned the break up of his marriage and championed the dingo’s escape from domestication. They drank bourbon in her basement studio on East 85th Street and toasted their “Kentucky Afternoons.” Invited to gallery openings, they recognized only their own disappointment. They stuffed their pockets with canapés and fruit, drank cheap red wine and disparaged rather than celebrating. They were very nearly arrested for a fracas they started at a downtown temple of chic; stealing the tips from surrounding tables, flinging their brandy glasses to the floor like some badly drawn characters in a twisted Russian story. Fall and the job at Electronic Consumer came as a relief, though that was short-lived.
Liza scratched her cheek and it burned from the memory of the past weekend. She marveled at how quickly a thick blanket of snow—like a dozen billowy duvets—had deflated by Monday into a moonscape of coarse, unnavigable piles. They had left Old Town together, feeling merrier as the flakes grew thicker. They parted at the 96th Street station and like excited children they hoped aloud that the storm would be a big one. “Snow day!” they shouted back and forth until out of each other’s sight.
When she woke, the snow was still falling in erratic speeds; whirling under a steely sky and then suddenly dancing more slowly between claps of blinding sun. They had been invited to a party uptown, a few blocks from Columbia University. Liza lived in that neighborhood before she was married, just out of art school. She’d recently answered an ad for a room because the lease on her studio was running out, the rent expected to rise beyond her means. The young man at the other end of the conversation invited her to the party. “Come and meet the inmates,” he drawled.
Guy decided for them that a tab of acid was just the thing to put them in a party mood and Mickey’s cartoon grin disappeared on her tongue, washed down with red wine. Liza put on tight black jeans and a thick black wool turtleneck sweater. She split the dark with one of the many fake flowers she collected, a searing red poppy tied around the end of her braid. Guy borrowed another and stuck it through a leather lapel. They looked like crazed twins in a French film noir. At the party, the apartment looked like the scene of an accident with a psychedelic paint truck, though the room offered was dingy and small. “We’ll get it cleaned up,” someone promised. It was a desultory promise. Liza could tell Guy was on edge. Out of his element, not to mention his age group; they were a couple of thirty-somethings gasping from the stultifying air of youth. The rooms filled with smoke and unwashed bodies. Ninety-nine balloons looped in German from a cassette player, over and over and over.
She found him in the kitchen, pressed against a coughing frig, making himself invisible. Her jacket was buttoned tightly around her newly bulging stomach. He grabbed her by both arms, bent sharply at his waist and staring through her groaned, “There’s a chick out there, scaring the shit outta me. Kept callin’ me one of the gray people. Fuck this place….” In the street she poked her bump and a stolen soccer ball thumped at their feet. They stumbled down Broadway kicking the ball, laughing hysterically until their cheek muscles ached.
The clock said nearly six. She squinted out the window lit by sunlight. Liza looked around her living room at a glassy field of empty Düvel bottles. She rose from the sofa, stretched, and poked Guy on her way to the kitchen. “Hey dere,” he mumbled. “Stopped snowing,” she said. “Looks gorgeous out.” The smell of butter melting in the pan, eggs cracked and sizzling rejuvenated them. “Toast?” He held out another tab. “Why not? Let’s go mad.” “Mad as hatters,” he shouted and they collapsed with laughter.
Liza navigated with exaggerated steps over the deep snow. He pranced sleek-footed like a crystal deer and she wondered how he didn’t break. They headed north, away from the open field; away from the beginning onslaught of loud children on fast sleds. They scaled the curved pergola in the Conservatory Gardens, and Liza stopped to discuss the meaning of life with an animated squirrel. She left Guy at the fountain to plow through the bare bones of the yew hedges and drag through to the center of a deep, pristine ocean of white where she dropped to the ground, sinking blissfully into the snow. Liza waved her arms and legs in slow motion. An angel formed beneath her, an angel of powdered glass and she knew something great, something important had shifted in her.
What was it, she wondered, peering at the wall clock, taking in the later hour. She was going to have to call in and make excuses for her lateness, for Guy’s absence from the office. She became aware of the cast. He stood on one foot before her, propped up by crutches. She recognized the light that shone from him with each resurrection and she imagined him as a transcendent stained-glass panel held together by strips of bravado. And she knew they had to abandon the trajectory they were on together. They had been grist to each other’s mill but the glass was powdered at this point and ready for re-forging.
Guy smiled sheepishly, wearing his cast like a purple heart. “Ready?” he asked her. “Ready,” she replied.
INNER SCAPE
STAINED GLASS PANEL BY DIEGO SEMPRUN NICOLAS
GLASS is an original short story by Linda Danz.
STORIES ON THE AMERICAN FRIEND Writers Guild of America, East #R28299
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, business organizations, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. The use of names of actual persons, places, and events is incidental to the plot, and is not intended to change the entirely fictional character of the work. © September 2010
1 comments:
You've captured the trajectory - almost too exhaustingly frenetic for someone like me. But you stick with the story and the last line is the exhale hoped for. Bravo again.
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