‘Chelsea’s like SoHo was in the 80′s,’ Vienna explained. ‘Only not as dated.’
‘SoHo wasn’t dated in the 80′s,’ Leon said, baring his teeth at her. ‘Pay no attention, J.P. Moomba is dated. Lot 61 is dated. Going to clubs in Chelsea is like jacking off in a coffin.’
‘Oh, Leon,’ Vienna sighed. ‘You’re just the littlest old bitch.’
The year was 1999.
‘Ignore those two deep thinkers,’ Mandarin breathed into J.P.’s ear. ‘Their idea of fun is to–’ she hesitated a few seconds, ravishingly. ‘Is to — uh–,’ she rolled her eyes at the front seat. ‘I can’t think of what. Maybe that coffin thing.’
‘My idea of fun is this,’ J.P. said. What he meant was: exactly what I’m doing at this moment. Riding up Tenth Avenue in a tapioca-colored Bentley with three incontrovertibly beautiful girls, one of whose father was in Aerosmith, and my second cousin Leon. Not being upstate. But he knew before he said it that it wouldn’t be enough. In fact he knew that it would ruin everything.
‘You go to art school, huh?’ Mandarin said. She was intentionally ignoring the distressed snakeskin hi-tops he’d bought on Canal Street that morning. Girls upstate would have loved them, of course, but those were girls upstate. Girls with reasonable names.
‘Applied Arts School,’ J.P. corrected her, flinching a little.
‘What does ‘Applied Arts’ even mean?’ Vienna squeaked over her shoulder. ‘Do you appliqué t-shirts?’
‘More or less,’ J.P. said, willing himself into invisibility.
‘Who’s the big favorite with the art kids these days?’ Mandarin asked him. It seemed like a sincere question. ‘Who does everyone copy?’ She bit her lip for a few seconds. ‘Is it Kippenberger?’
‘Shut up, bitch!’ Leon barked over his shoulder. ‘You’ll have to excuse Mandarin, cousin. She was genetically engineered for the entertainment industry.’
‘More like Frank Frazetta,’ J.P. said, ignoring Leon, though he’d have been only too relieved to change the subject. The fact that he went to art school counted for nothing with these girls — half of their parents had paintings in museum collections. Vienna’s stepfather, for example (or was it her godfather?) had just sold a silkscreen to Vladimir Putin. It would have been more comfortable for everyone, all things considered, if J.P. had been studying proctology.
‘Frank Frazetta is hot,’ Kiara said, doodling on the back of the driver’s seat with eyeliner. Kiara was a princess in another country.
Mandarin was smiling at J.P. ‘He is hot,’ she said. Lazily, matter-of-factly, she took his left hand in both of hers. J.P. gawked at her in blank amazement. Her perfect face had a tenderness behind it that seemed oddly out of place: he felt as though he’d discovered a beautiful city on an uninhabited moon. Mandarin was real, she was capable of human feeling, and she didn’t seem to mind about Applied Arts School. There was life on Signus X-12 after all.
Kippenberger, J.P. thought, trying to fix the sound of it in his mind. It seemed like the name of someone deeply unimportant: a substitute teacher, maybe, or a dentist. Kippenberger, he said to himself, moving his lips silently, as the 10th Avenue storefronts flickered past Mandarin’s irreproachable silhouette. Kippenberger. Kippenberger. Kippenberger.
‘It’s not true what you say about yourself, that you have no real interests,’ J.P. said to Mandarin an hour later. They were at a club in Hell’s Kitchen that didn’t seem to have any bathrooms: it hadn’t occurred to him to ask its name. According to Leon, the theme of the club was ‘unemployment’. Its windows were sealed from the inside with duct tape and the dance floor was covered in cardboard. Mandarin was sitting across from J.P. on a milk crate, sipping omnipotently on a kier.
‘You know a lot more about art than the average person, for example,’ J.P. went on. ‘You know a lot more about art than me.’
Mandarin shrugged her shoulders. J.P. noticed, for the first time, that they subtly freckled. I’m bored,’ she said.
‘I don’t believe that for a minute,’ J.P. said, shaking his head. ‘Bored people watch cable. You go to museums and openings; you read terrorist’s autobiographies. To know as much as you know already, at the age of 23–’
‘Bored with this conversation,’ Mandarin corrected him.
Soon after that she glided off into the crowd. A screen of vintage denim closed around her.
‘Kids are mad about that shit in Japan,’ Leon said wistfully, looking after her. It took J.P. the better part of a minute to realize he meant the denim.
‘They seem to like it here, too,’ he said dully, taking a long, bitter pull from his pint. ‘I guess this was a bad night to wear my Dockers.’
Leon looked at J.P. as though he’d just taken a bite out of his glass. ‘This is Japan, cousin,’ he said. ‘You’re soaking in it.’
‘What is?’ J.P. said, blinking. ‘This club?’
Leon gave a conspiratorial nod. ‘It’s not just the jackets,’ he said, so quietly that he barely seemed to be moving his lips. ‘It’s also the pants.’
‘Right,’ said J.P. As usual he had no idea what Leon was talking about. ‘All right, Leon,’ he heard himself muttering. ‘It’s the pants.’
To join the FiveChapters mailing list — and enter to win a copy of John Wray’s new novel, “Lowboy” — send an email to editor@fivechapters.com.
Part Two
Leon took pictures for a living: that was how he’d met the girls. He specialized in fashion spreads with painstakingly composed backdrops that were calculated — in the words of one critic — ‘to arrest, to disquiet, to disconsole.’ Each of the backdrops was based on a storefront upstate, in the town he and J.P. were from. J.P. didn’t quite know how to feel about that.
A little while later, J.P. found Kiara and Vienna sitting next to somebody named Parkinson who owned a dirty magazine. The magazine was called ‘Parkinson.’ It blurred the boundary between fashion and pornography, Vienna explained. Parkinson wore a loose-fitting tracksuit and a watch with three faces, one of which showed the time on the Bikini Atoll. He looked like an unathletic David Beckham. J.P. wondered whether ‘Parkinson’ was his first or last name. He thought of his own three names — James Patrick Pulaski — and tried to pick two to get rid of. It was harder than he would have thought.
Parkinson couldn’t seem to get J.P. into focus. He squinted at him for a while, pursing his lips, then threw his hands up in defeat. He turned his milk crate counter-clockwise, away from J.P., and stared out at the dance floor, pinching his forehead just above the eyebrows and taking short, asthmatic breaths. Both Vienna and Kiara were ignoring him completely, so J.P. figured it was safe to do the same. Men in blue madras suits were evenly distributed among the crowd; they gave no sign of knowing each other, though the suits and even the men themselves were practically identical. J.P. felt the first faint stab of panic as he watched them. They were moving their bodies with no relation whatsoever to the beat of the song — an electroclash remix of the theme from ‘Barney Miller’ — but then again so was everyone else. Maybe they work here, J.P. thought. Maybe they’re paid to impersonate narcs. But there was something familiar about the men — something scalp-tinglingly familiar.
Leaning to one side of J.P., like a coworker leaning around a cubicle, Parkinson said slyly to Vienna: ‘Do you find me attractive?’
Vienna dipped one long, pale finger into her glass of Cava, let it soak for a few seconds, then took it out and examined it closely. ‘That’s a good question, Parkinson. I’m not sure how to answer it. You’re kind of like a made-for-cable movie.’
‘This whole club is,’ Kiara said. She yawned.
‘I asked you a question,’ said Parkinson, smiling tightly.
Vienna rolled her eyes at Kiara. Kiara grinned at her approvingly. Vienna’s grandfather had invented remote control.
‘Let me ask you another question, then,’ said Parkinson. ‘And take your time about it. Consider it carefully.’ He put an ice cube in his mouth. ‘Have you ever experienced orgasm?’
‘Five or six times, I think,’ said Vienna. She winked sweetly at J.P. ‘Make that seven. I forgot about that one night with Emo Philips.’
‘Lies!’ said Parkinson, biting down on the ice cube. ‘Lies and propaganda!’ For no apparent reason he turned and poked J.P. in the ribs. ‘Fewer than six women in a hundred have experienced orgasm by the age of thirty. I’m talking about the full bodily orgasm — the animal climax — not some hollowed-out concept. What you refer to as ‘orgasm’ is so much wishful thinking.’ He popped another ice cube into mouth. ‘I’m talking about coitus, of course. Oral sex doesn’t count.’
‘That’s what Emo Philips said!’ Vienna squealed. ‘You must be on to something, Parky.’
Parkinson nodded primly. ‘I know I’m onto something, as it happens.’
‘What the hell are you talking about?’ J.P. heard himself shrieking, but no one at the table seemed to hear. The fun had seeped out of his night like nitrous oxide out of a carnival balloon.
‘Here’s Mandarin!’ Parkinson announced at that moment, with a deep and privileged affection in his voice.
J.P. watched her coming, prepared for the worst, but the feeling he’d had in the back of Leon’s Bentley washed over him instead. If he’d had to describe the feeling, he might have compared it to the awe he experienced when he discovered a painter in some forgotten museum catalog, minus the embarrassment when he realized the painter was a household name, or the inevitable depression when he tried to reproduce the painter’s style. Mandarin was holding no less than three drinks in her left hand and a pack of cigarettes and two pints of Guinness in her right. She was moving in perfect synchronicity with the song that was playing now, a mash-up of Slayer’s “Seasons in the Abyss” and the “Monday Night Football” theme by Hank Williams, Jr. Everyone else at the table seemed to go slightly blurry.
‘Mandarin Shikasta Miller,’ Parkinson purred, ‘has experienced full, unadulterated coital climax.’
‘Not when you were fucking me, Lawrence,’ Mandarin said, setting the pints down in front of J.P.
J.P. couldn’t have said, in the immaculate pause that followed, whether the bliss that broke over him was caused by hearing such an inimitable girl — no other adjective was appropriate, really — say ‘fucking’ so matter-of-factly, or by the arrival of the pints, or by the revelation of Parkinson’s first name. Vienna gave a little shriek of happiness when she heard it, knocked her bellini off the table and started chanting ‘Lawrence! Lawrence! Lawrence!’ like a mantra. Mandarin clinked pints with J.P. and looked at him in a way that made him forget about his dockers completely. Parkinson chewed ice.
You’ve made it, little man, J.P. thought breathlessly. Little man, you’ve made it. It sounded ridiculous, even to him, but he went right on thinking it.
Part Three
Approximately two pints later, J.P. was standing on Japan’s fenced-in rooftop, letting his eyes wander sleepily from one soot-streaked brick wall to another, touching one of Mandarin’s Gitanes thoughtfully to his lips. The fact that he no longer saw anything silly about the club or the music or the clientele troubled him in a distant sort of way, but he ignored it effortlessly. He was sure now that Mandarin would have him. That was how he put it to himself, like a suitor in an old silent movie: Mandarin will have me, if I ask. That was how he’d put it to Leon, and Leon, astonishingly enough, had agreed right away. He’d agreed with a kind of tired indulgence, and there’d been a quality to his smile that seemed to imply an intimate knowledge of the subject, but J.P. couldn’t be bothered with implications just then. The thing to do now was to maintain his focus.
The fact that no one else in Japan was drinking pints of anything — other than Mandarin, who seemed to treat beer as an exotic drink — didn’t seem to bother him anymore. A lot of things didn’t bother him. He felt a deep fraternal love toward the people downstairs, toward the men in the madras suits, toward poor Lawrence Parkinson, toward the whole ice-chewing, eye-rolling, bellini-swilling crew. The distance he’d felt earlier — now, alone on the roof, he could admit he’d felt a distance — only increased his affection for them all. He wanted to give every last one of them a compliment. First he’d finish his cigarette, then he’d ask Mandarin one very simple question; then compliments would fly through the club like buckshot through the Adirondack woods.
He’d just begun speaking a few trial compliments out loud, fixing the sound of them in his mind, when the fire door flew open and Kid Estados Unidos stumbled out. J.P. took a deep breath. Kid Estados Unidos was a Puerto Rican man in his early forties who claimed to be related, on his mother’s side, to Leon. According to Vienna, who’d gone out with him for about a week, the Kid sold birth-control pills to schoolgirls in the Bronx. He was short and moody and physically fit in a way that made J.P. uneasy. When the Kid had been told, earlier that same night, that J.P. was also a relative — on his father’s side — of Leon’s, he’d pursed his lips and shaken his head regretfully.
‘Uff! Little Jip,’ the Kid said, bringing his bloodshot eyes into focus. ‘Hiding out, huh? I don’t blame you.’
‘Hey, Kid,’ J.P. said politely. ‘You’re looking very well tonight.’
‘Ha ha,’ the Kid said, frowning. ‘I get it. O.K., little Jip. Fuck off.’
J.P. shut his mouth, hesitated a moment, then decided to try again. ‘That’s a nice bandanna you have on,’ he said. ‘I like the pattern.’
The Kid touched the back of his head self-consciously. ‘It’s the stars and stripes,’ he said.
‘I see that. Very nice.’
The Kid cleared his throat. ‘Are you a patriotic man, Jip? How much do you care for this city?’
J.P. felt unsure how to answer the first question — he barely knew the Kid, after all — but the second one seemed simple enough. ‘I like New York very much,’ he said, taking the cigarette out of his mouth. ‘People here are a lot friendlier than I expected.’ He gave the Kid a wink. ‘But maybe that’s just because I’m Leon’s cousin.’
The Kid looked him up and down, squinting a little, as though trying to make his mind up about something. ‘I’m Leon’s cousin too,’ he said, jutting his chin out slightly. ‘On our mothers’ side.’
J.P. said nothing. He knew for a fact that there was no relation between the Kid and Leon whatsoever. He put Mandarin’s cigarette back in his mouth and looked down at his hi-tops for a while. They were sticky with spilled beer and another substance that he was at a loss to identify.
‘What do you think of cousin Leon?’ the Kid asked abruptly.
J.P. thought it over, weighing every imaginable answer against the glint in the Kid’s eye. A wave of apprehension broke over him suddenly, making him feel wobbly on his feet. ‘That’s hard to say, exactly. He’s certainly very, ah, generous.’ He coughed into his hand. ‘I’d have to say, I guess, that Leon is–’
‘Leon is a vampire,’ the Kid said, taking J.P. by the shoulder.
‘Is that right?’ said J.P., his voice no louder than a sigh. The Kid’s breath smelled like Campari and clove cigarettes and something else that J.P. couldn’t put a name to. He felt completely passive in the Kid’s grip, like a kitten that’s been picked up by its scruff. He had no idea what was going to happen next. The Kid was looking up at him wistfully, scratching his salt-and-pepper goatee with his free hand. He began to squeeze J.P.’s shoulder in a searching, steady rhythm, as though trying to pinpoint the exact spot where his arm fit into its socket. J.P. kept absolutely still. After a few seconds he realized, with a mixture of terror and relief, that he was being given a massage.
‘This city is full of bloodsuckers,’ the Kid said in a melancholy voice. ‘This city is no place for one such as yourself.’
‘Such as myself?’ J.P. murmured.
‘Why do you feel the need to impress those whores downstairs? Why do you apologize for yourself at every turn? What have you done, my friend, that you should smile and blush and kiss their powdered culos? Have they infected you already? Are you sick?’
J.P. gave a tiny shudder. ‘Listen, Kid, I think you might have me confused–’
The Kid tightened his grip on J.P.’s shoulder. ‘There are men in suits downstairs,’ he whispered. ‘Have you seen them?’
‘There you are!’ said Mandarin, poking her head out of the fire door. ‘We’ve been looking for you for literally forty-five minutes.’ She spun J.P. expertly out of the Kid’s grip and steered him back downstairs without a single wasted movement. ‘Leon’s pissed at you, J.P. You almost made us miss the show.’
‘The show?’ J.P. said, following her dreamily out to the curb.
Leon and Kiara were already outside, waiting stone-faced in the backseat of the Bentley. Vienna was wedged between them, drooling quietly into her shatoosh.
‘People go there,’ Mandarin said simply, shoving J.P. into the back seat. ‘It’s new.’
‘It’s new and old,’ Leon said bitterly. ‘It’s probably the greatest thing on earth.’
‘I’m not that big a fan of shows, really,’ J.P. murmured. Now was the time to ask Mandarin his question — he sensed it. ‘I was actually thinking–’
‘You’ll like this one,’ Mandarin said, arranging herself beside him ‘It’s the one thing in this town that isn’t boring.’
‘We have shows up in Schenectady,’ J.P. said. He lowered his voice. ‘What I’d really like to do, Mandarin, is to–’
Leon laughed loudly from the front seat, cutting him off. ‘There’s nothing like this in Schenectady, cousin. Believe me.’
To join the FiveChapters mailing list — and enter to win a copy of John Wray’s new novel, “Lowboy” — send an email to editor@fivechapters.com.
Part Four
Twenty minutes later J.P. found himself in the cramped, plexiglass-walled foyer of an apartment building on West 57th Street, trying to keep Vienna breathing normally and propping the street door open with his shin. Leon, Kiara and Mandarin had gone to a bodega to buy cigarettes and Vicks VapoRub; J.P. asked what the VapoRub was for but no one had given him a straight answer. He’d also asked why he couldn’t go to the bodega, why he was stuck in the foyer like someone under a restraining order, but all Leon had said to him was ‘Patience, child,’ and Mandarin had blown him a kiss and disappeared. In the end it had been Kiara, of all people, who’d taken pity on his confusion and explained in an undertone that the inner door was buzzed open from time to time without warning, for a second or two at the most, and that someone had to be there to wait for it to happen. ‘Somebody clean, J.P.’ she’d whispered, shooting Vienna a disenchanted look. Then she’d patted him on the top of the head and left.
A minute went by, then two, then ten. Vienna was propped in the corner like a snow shovel, chewing serenely on her lower lip. J.P. pressed his face against the plexiglass and looked inside. The lobby was empty except for two off-white couches and a cactus in a plastic tub: it managed to emanate seediness in spite of the fact that it was one of the cleanest spaces J.P. had ever seen. It wasn’t the kind of interior he could picture Mandarin spending time in, or Leon, or anyone who wasn’t living off the government. I guess that’s what makes it the perfect front, he thought, and began for the first time to wonder what was going on upstairs.
He was about to shake Vienna awake to find out what she knew when the inner door clicked open without warning, tipping him forward into the lobby. Only afterwards could he make out a faint humming sound, almost to low-pitched to hear, and a voice over the intercom repeating the words ‘Three oh six, three oh six,’ in a steady, mechanical drone. J.P. committed the number to memory, repeating it under his breath, then went back to wait in the foyer.
He was still waiting ten minutes later when the door clicked again. ‘Three oh six, three oh six,’ the voice repeated, with something that sounded distinctly like impatience. By now J.P.’s curiosity had become excruciating. The smug confidence in Leon’s voice when he’d said there was nothing like the show upstate, and the way Mandarin had squeezed his fingers every time it was mentioned — the way she’d clearly preferred it to a night with J.P. in Leon’s crackhouse-themed bedroom — ate steadily away at his composure. Keeping his right foot wedged in the door and his left arm braced between Vienna’s breasts to keep her from falling over (a position that would have excited him incredibly under any other circumstances) he leaned back and held his watch up to the light. 3:13 a.m. — he’d been standing with his foot in the door for more than twenty minutes. The only indication that Vienna was still alive was the faint, erratic jangling of the bracelets on her impossibly pink left wrist. He tried to lean back far enough to look down the street, but a row of abused-looking shrubbery blocked his view. At the base of one of the bushes, six or seven strawberry-colored condoms huddled, their bright tips glimmering in the streetlight like the cassocks of tiny elves. J.P. stared at them for what seemed an eternity, fighting the urge to lie down next to them and go to sleep. Then he stood up very straight, propped the inner door open with Vienna’s left shoulder, and took the stairs up to room 306.
He’d expected to find himself in another world when he came out of the stairwell, a soft-lit world of perfumed mystery; but the hallway he stepped into was as bland and unassuming as the lobby had been. In spite of the anonymity of the place — or possibly because of it — he felt a tingling in his spine that no strip club or pay-per-view movie could have triggered. This hallway is last the place on the planet that I’d expect something sexy to happen, J.P. thought. I feel like a volunteer for Meals on Wheels.
The door of room 306 was no different from any of the others: a gray slab of particleboard with three plastic numbers glued to the upper right-hand corner. If it hadn’t been for a quiet but unmistakable murmur coming from inside — the sound of a discreet but convivial cocktail party — he might have second-guessed himself and gone back downstairs. Instead he found himself knocking hesitantly on the door.
The door cracked open almost at once and a solitary green eye stared out at him unblinkingly. It belonged to a woman in her mid-to-late fifties with a powdery face and oddly chapped lips. She must be the madam, J.P. thought, but somehow he found that hard to believe. She looked like a receptionist at a cut-rate chiropractor’s.
‘Name?’ the woman said flatly.
‘Kippenberger,’ J.P. answered without a moment’s hesitation.
‘You’re late, Kippenberger.’ The eye disappeared and the door swung smoothly open. ‘You one of Leon’s friends?’
‘That’s right,’ he said brightly, stepping past her into the apartment. She’s perfect, he thought, admiring her khaki housedress and her graying, wig-like hair. The blandest front ever. I bet she smells like Windex and cottage cheese.
They were in a narrow, L-shaped entryway with framed diplomas lining both walls. The diplomas were an odd touch, no question, but J.P. had come to understand by then that he was in the hands of consummate professionals. They’re perfectionists, he thought, looking around him with a kind of wonder. He thought of the sights waiting for him around the corner and shivered.
‘Go on, sweetheart. Folks are waiting.’
‘What for?’
‘For you to pay me.’
He blinked at her. ‘I have to pay for everybody?’
‘Uh-uh, funny bunny. Just for you.’
By coincidence or fate he had exactly the right sum in his wallet. The receptionist pocketed the money without a word and ushered him into the next room — ‘No smoking, if you don’t mind’, she murmured — but by that time he’d forgotten her completely.
He was in a typical midtown living room, with a TV and a futon and a glass-topped endtable made out of cork and bamboo. A framed poster hung crookedly on the opposite wall: MONET AT THE MET — THE WATERLILIES. A man was sitting in the middle of the room wearing nothing but a Rutgers sweatshirt, his bare feet digging into the coffee-colored pile of the carpet. His right hand was braced against the floor behind him, as though he was afraid of falling backwards, and his left hand was clamped like a tourniquet between his thighs. A cluster of men in denim jackets — J.P. recognized some of them from Japan — stood around the man at a respectful distance. The man’s arms were faintly liver-spotted — hairless, grandfatherly arms — and his legs were the color of aspic. His face quivered wetly.
‘What’s he doing?’ J.P. mumbled, if only for the comfort of hearing his own voice. There was no mistaking what the man was doing.
‘Ira!’ the woman hissed suddenly. J.P. turned and looked at her, grateful for the distraction. She was still in her cream-colored housedress, still wearing her high-heeled plastic slippers, but there was a new quality to her now, one that made J.P. tongue feel strangely faint. She looked grim and purposeful, resigned to her fate, like someone about to drown their firstborn child.
‘Ira!’ she said again, narrowing her eyes.
The man on the stool gave an outraged grunt and brought his legs together. He looked like a first-grader trying to tie his sneakers. He was at least twice the size of the woman, possibly more. The woman cleared her throat and stepped around J.P., circling the man on the floor like a boxer. She paid no attention to the circle of spectators. For a few seconds J.P. thought she was going to start throwing punches, but instead she planted her feet squarely on the carpet and sucked in a long, weary breath, pressing two putty-colored thumbs against her forehead. Then she hiked up her house-dress and scuttled quickly forward, lowering herself onto her husband with a groan of pent-up misery.
Sweet Mary mother of Jesus, J.P. thought.
Part Five
The two of them were moving quickly now, making an effort to coordinate their movements, but they might as well have been filling out a Medicaid questionnaire. J.P. was about to slip discreetly away when he noticed a girl standing alone in the far corner of the room, just behind the little bamboo table, staring at the couple as though they were Thanksgiving dinner. It was Mandarin. Leon was just behind her, sweating and nodding, flicking his tongue in and out of Kiara’s ear. The carpet began to undulate under J.P.’s feet. Try as he might to come up with something else — anything at all — to describe the look on Mandarin’s face, on Leon’s, on everybody else’s in the room, there was only one word he could think of.
Vampiric, J.P. thought, closing his eyes to keep the floor from lurching.
With his eyes closed the sighing and grunting was even less appealing than before. In spite of himself he thought of that old cliché, the praying mantis, and of a particular South American species, in which — according to National Geographic — the male had to be decapitated before conception could occur. She’s going to eat him, J.P. thought helplessly. And then everyone else is going to eat her.
‘How are you feeling, Captain?’ an unfamiliar voice whispered. ‘Feeling a little off?’
J.P. nodded and smiled and prayed whoever it was would go away. To steady himself, he pictured his two-room basement apartment back home, its floor littered with books, its linoleum walls plastered with awkward charcoal copies of dated expressionist paintings, and the thought of it made his throat go tight with longing. He knew in that moment that he was a failure, that timidity was as natural to him as boredom was to Mandarin, and he took a kind of comfort in the knowledge. Kid Estados Unidos was right, he thought. This city’s not for me. If it was I would have an erection.
An image came to him then out of the darkness: a sort of snapshot, colored in like an old-fashioned picture postcard. The Burzcinski-Korleitner bridge glowing gold in the sunset with the Mohawk flowing beneath it, tranquil and green, and downtown Schenectady huddled between its corroding arches like something straight out of the Old Testament. I’d like to make that into a painting, J.P. said to himself, keeping his eyes clenched shut. I’ve got to try to remember it exactly.
How long the vision lasted, how much time he spent hovering above that gilded twilit landscape, J.P. couldn’t have said with any certainty. After what seemed like only a short time- – much too short for his liking — he felt a fine-boned hand gripping his arm. It was Mandarin, looking tired and unamused again. ‘Come on,’ she said blankly. ‘Leon wants to head back to Japan.’
J.P. blinked at her a moment, then looked carefully around the room. It looked as though the show was over: the middle-aged couple were nowhere in sight, and what was left of the crowd looked dazed and slightly skittish, like deer seen through infra-red goggles. Leon and Kiara were standing with their heads together, rubbing VapoRub into each other’s temples. Vienna was watching TV.
‘Time to go, J.P.,’ Mandarin said, bringing her hand up to his face and snapping her exquisite fingers. ‘Can you hear me, J.P.? Hello? It’s Mandarin.’
‘Mandarin,’ J.P. said thoughtfully, rubbing his eyes. ‘What the hell kind of name is that?’
