for/pq-done

The only movie theaters that were worth anything, said Charly Cruz, were the old ones, remember them? those huge theaters where your heart leaped when they turned out the lights. Those places were great, they were real movie theaters, more like churches than anything else, high ceilings, red curtains, pillars, aisles with worn carpeting, box seats, orchestra seats, balcony seats, theaters built at a time when going to the movies was still a religious experience, routine but religious, theaters that were gradually demolished to build banks or supermarkets or multiplexes. Today, said Charly Cruz, there are only a few left, today all movie theaters are multiplexes, with small screens, less space, comfortable seats. Seven of these smaller multiplex theaters would fit into one of the old theaters, the real ones. Or ten. Or even fifteen. And there's no sense of the abyss anymore, there's no vertigo before the movie begins, no one feels alone inside a multiplex. Then, Fate remembered, he began to talk about the end of the sacred.

“I’ve never told you this,” she said. “But there’s something about taking the cart back instead of leaving it in the parking lot. I don’t know when this came to me; it was a few years ago. There’s a difference between leaving it where you empty it and taking it back to the front of the store. It’s significant.”

“Because somebody has to take them in.”

“Yes. And if you know that, and you do it for that one guy, you do something else. You join the world. With your body. And for those few moments, you join it with your soul. You move out of your isolation and become universal. But they were standing there watching me. Then I was afraid: a woman so far removed from nature that the checkout clerk had to tell me which way the wind was blowing. And she heard it from someone in the coffee room. Then the men left, and I pushed the cart back. I live by trying to be what I’m doing. I could do nearly everything I do without thinking about it. But I’d be different.”

His face was tender in the light of the fire; he said: “Yes.”

Two years after I left Davey Levinson sitting in the restaurant on East Broadway I interviewed Joe Durbin for a story I was writing on a rent strike. He was a labour organiser on the left, and a throwback to the romantic figures of my earliest life. The union movement was Joe’s passion. He had been an official in the CIO, known every labour leader from John L. Lewis to Walter Reuther, and had organised all over the historical map: California in the thirties, Michigan in the forties, New York in the fifties. He was twenty years older than me, and he was married. The age difference gave me my control. A week after the interview he called to suggest dinner. We were together six years.

That strange word “believe,” with “lie” in it, is still going through her head when he has pulled down the straps of her dress, and spun her around, the dress slips over her narrow hips to the floor, and she’s standing in front of him in a little white slip. On the way to the couch they walk hand in hand through the dark corridor, and pause for a moment in front of the large mirror.

Do you suppose a mirror remembers all the people it’s ever reflected?

Maybe, he replies, but you know I — I will remember the picture of you in this mirror as long as I live.

So will I, she replies.

And they go on.

I acquired a reputation as straitlaced in The Restaurant when I started seeing the hateful man. My colleagues interpreted it as some kind of new leaf or intentional maturity that I never went out with them after work anymore. But it was just that I didn’t need that scene to fuck with myself because he did it for me. As the employee roster at The Restaurant was infiltrated by more and more people who didn’t know anything about me, and those who did moved on, quit, or were fired, who I was to everyone morphed into this paragon of good work, consistency, professionalism. An example. I ignored new people until they had lasted for three or four months. I came in at five, rocked my shift the same hard way I did every night, no matter how busy or not, and walked out whenever it was over without looking back. I never left without polishing my tables. Not once. There were many nights when I was so exhausted I’d forget which position I had started at, and have to polish the whole thing again just to be safe. No matter how weary I was though I loved the strangeness of the place when it was empty. That every night we could walk onto a blank stage and invent all that. Take The Restaurant from pristine and silent down to a staggering state of chaotic, deafening, and excessive disarray, and then put it all back together like no one was ever there.

There is a cruelty in abstraction. It cuts into flesh. It relies on our fear of mortality for its meaning. The way it disturbs, distresses is meant to undermine some illusion of duration, of time controlled, even simply perceived. My paintings were abstract and splashed with guilt as much as paint, scratched with shame as much as with the knife or spatula. Back in Philadelphia I discovered bad dreams and fitful sleep. I locked myself away to explore those abstractions. My isolation wore well as I was an artist and artists were supposed to be moody and at least occasionally reclusive. The paintings I made I could just barely look at. I drank. When I emerged from my bed, so to speak, and went to my studio and revealed my paintings at my review, no one said a word. My professors, one after another, quietly, privately gave me nods of approval, then backed away as if something was wrong with me. They had no idea.