Chapter 15
It wasn’t exactly that Rai felt sorry for herself as she waited to get into the Museum of Modern Art. She did feel lonely, and she wondered where Z had gone, what he might be doing that was more important than being with her. The usual answer didn’t work, because the forecast predicted a clear and warm night, and he had told her to wait for him at 10 on 6th Street with 53rd. What was he doing?
Lost in thought, she did not hear the footsteps until it was too late. She felt a strong hand on her shoulder and heard, ““Young woman, I’d like you to step into the security office…”
Rai turned in terror. She saw no uniform; the hand was attached to Yazmín, the girl from the writing class. “You scared the shit outta me!” Rai raged.
“One of my less appreciated skills.”
“You coulda been a cop, or–”
“Get your panties outta your crack. I ain’t. I just thought you might wanna teach me about art.”
“How’d you know I could–”
“Spend some nights on 34th Street, you learn to lick more than dick.”
By this time, Rai’s confusion had completely overcome her anger. “Huh?” she stuttered.
Suddenly, Yazmín’s hip-hop posture relaxed. “I know how to caress an ego, too. No, really, mostly I was just lonely. But if you wanna see the Picassos alone…”
“No, no, that’s not what I meant…” Rai handed a quarter to the ticket taker. She noticed that Yazmín gave a dollar. “I’m just kinda… shocked. I didn’t expect to see anyone from the Place here.”
“’Cause we’re all dumbfucks, right?”
“Well, no, I mean… maybe…”
“I’m no dumbfuck, OK? I do some stupid shit, but I’m not dumb.”
Rai stood at the base of the escalator, unaware that she was blocking other people’s path to it. Yazmín laughed and pushed her onto the first step.
“Truth is, I don’t know if I’m a dumb fuck or a smart fuck. Maybe I should hand out client satisfaction surveys.” She was clearly having a good time taunting Rai, but she seemed to realize that she had gone far enough. “I’ve been so rude. I didn’t even ask you how you’re doing.”
“I’m shitty, but I’m doing a good job of hiding it.” Rai had been thinking about that line. using it made her feel a little more at home in her own skin.
“I’m sorry. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing a pretty picture can’t cure. Let’s go in here.”
Rai hustled past the Brancusi, then through the Van Goghs and the early Picassos into a small corner room so bright it almost pained the eye. Yazmín resisted her speed, but followed, protesting: “But that’s ‘Starry Night!’ Hold on; you can’t just run past Picasso! Isn’t that Henri Rousseau?”
Rai didn’t respond until they stood in front of a Kirchner so bright it hurt her eyes. “Now that’s what I need!” she declared, then let go of Yazmín’s hand and sat straight on the floor, crosslegged, her skirt billowing around her. For three minutes, she stared at the haughty woman in impossible colors, almost without blinking. Yazmín, after she stopped wondering at the strange behavior from her new friend, stepped to the other wall to examine a Klimpt.
By the time Rai stood up, her mood was almost normal. Not happy, but normal. Yazmín had made her way into the Kandinskys in the next room.
“Do you believe this? Fucking whack,” Yazmín declared. “And look over here. It looks like the painting is moving, but of course it’s not. It’s like pure motion…” She examined the card by the side. “ ‘Dynamism of a soccer player.’ Exactly. Dynamo, dynamic, dynamite. God, it’s so amazing…”
“Boccioni was a fascist.” Rai felt good to say something authoritative.
“Huh?” All of Yazmín’s brain cells were focused on her eyes. She may not even have heard Rai.
“The artist. He hung with Mussolini. Helped send Jews to Auschwitz. If it weren’t so beautiful, I’d burn it.” Rai’s anger about anti-Semitism sometimes got in the way of her grasp of the facts.
“But look at the colors…”
“Ya wanna see colors? C’mon.” Rai took Yazmín’s elbow, pulled her through the de Chiricos, a couple of Duchamps, the Russian constructivists, and into the Matisse room. “Now this is color.”
Yazmín stood transfixed in front of a feminine interior with a small window opening to the sea. Rai gave a satisfied sigh at a large, almost clichéd canvas of dancers. She moved her head, arms, and legs to mimic each of the postures of the five women in the circle. Both stood silently, consciously awestruck, until Rai became impatient to show Yazmín more, not even thinking that the girl might have been there as often as she. Rai did not want to wait. “This is boring,” she insisted. “The next one is what you want to see.” She pulled her into the Miró gallery and sat her on the floor, facing “Birth of the World.”
“My God,” Yazmín gasped.
“Yeah.”
“I’m about to come.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s just so sensual. The texture. The line floating down…”
“The sperm.”
“But it’s a feminine sperm! Look at those curves…”
“And a masculine triangle. Look at the corners.”
“Huh?”
“Triangles are supposed to be female. Pubic hair, I guess. It’s a fertility symbol in lot of cultures.” Rai tried to constrain her temptation toward didacticism, but it was hard. “But this one’s a guy. Look at the sharpness.”
“Yeah. ‘The Birth of the World’ happens when guys and girls get mixed.”
“Uh-huh…”
Yazmín laughed at Rai’s wistful tone and looked back to the painting. People milled around them, trying to pretend that two girls weren’t sitting on the floor talking about sex. “It’s like having Marc Anthony come up to me on the street and tell me I’m beautiful.”
“Huh?” Rai didn’t keep up on salsa, so she missed the reference. “This is art. So much better’n any guy.”
“You’re a dyke? I didn’t know.” Rai wasn’t sure what to make of Yazmín’s tone. “I mean, no problem if you are, I’ve licked lotsa oysters in my day–”
“No, that’s not it at all.” Again, Rai tried to suppress her urge toward pedantry. “Look, y’know how Z — well, you don’t know Z, but y’know how so many guys can just get hot by seeing a nice ass walk down the street? I mean, there are girls who are the same, who get turned on by a big package, right?” Rai knew that she didn’t have a real grasp on this vocabulary. She didn’t talk this way most of the time, but sometimes — especially in public, repressed places — she felt almost a responsibility to scandalize people. “But I can see DMX naked and there’s nothing. Or a copy of Hustler or whatever. Sex just doesn’t turn me on.”
“But a painting does?”
“Yeah. Pity I can’t fuck it, huh?” They both laughed, and a half dozen people in the gallery looked down at them. “Look, you’ve been on the street. It’s like that guy who’s always around, maybe you even sleep under the same blanket, right, but there’s nothing there. I mean, sex just never comes up.”
“Did that with my pimp for a while. Weird shit.”
“That’s what I’m like with everybody. It’s just not there.”
“But that doesn’t make any sense. You got the same hormones as everybody else. You got nice boobs and a hot ass, and–” she gestured toward the Miró “– you just said those juices are flowing. So how you gonna dis sex like that?”
Rai thought for a moment, ignoring an old man who stared rudely down at them. “You really wanna know? I’m not really sure, but it prob’ly starts out with necessity. Small town, no boyfriend, all that. Then I met Z. And he was — well, so much better’n me. He knew the world, and he was so smart, and he had all these big plans and quoted Marx and all these philosophers I’d never heard of. So what’s left for me? How’m I gonna be the best? I was pretty much a prude, so I guess I kinda fell into that. I could be more moral. I mean, that’s stupid shit, and I don’t even think fucking’s about ethics, but there you are.” Rai wondered why she was sharing these details. She didn’t even know this girl.
“Huh. But you got no problems with cursing or–”
“Or shoplifting or any of that shit. Doesn’t make any sense. But whatever.” She thought for a while more. “Plus, it kinda gave me a power over him. I had something he wanted, and I wasn’t gonna give it to him.”
“But that’s in your head. Doesn’t say nothing about your body.”
“Practice it long enough and it does. I guess that’s what’s going on.”
“Huh.”
“But like I said, other shit definitely turns me on. Great paintings. I listen to Rage Against the Machine and I’m wet. And Dostoyevsky — God, he’s like a seven hundred page orgasm.”
Yazmín sputtered a gasp. “You gotta loan me one of those books.”
“Or a good argument about philosophy. Now that’s better’n sex.”
Once again, Yazmín shook her head in disbelief. “I’m like completely the opposite. Everything turns me on. Guys, girls, that Matisse back there. It’s got me into some serious trouble.”
As Rai became silent, Yazmín suddenly realized that she was talking very loudly in a crowd of very rich, very white people. She turned red and the confidence drained from her body. “Oops. Let’s go.”
“Fuck ‘em. This is the best painting in the place. Who cares what they think?” Rai had always found that by taking the lead, she felt less embarrassed; the technique had served her quite well. The old white people moved into the next room, calming the deep blush on Yazmín’s cheeks. “Can I ask you a really patronizing question?” Rai went on.
“You just did.”
“No, like… why are you here? Looking at this shit? I’m psyched to have somebody to talk to, but…”
“Yeah, that’s patronizing. No doubt.” Yazmín smiled anyway. “What you’re asking me is why some ho wants to look at pretty pictures.”
“That’s not what–”
“Yes it is. I could ask the fucking same of you, huh? I like art. I draw. It’s free. Being a ho’s just my night job.”
Rai had begun to figure out some of Yazmín’s defense mechanisms. They were smart. If she had needed to hook to stay alive, she might have developed the same ones. Rai thought for a moment, looking again at the uncertain symbols on the intricate, coffee colored background. Finally, she invited Yazmín into the next room. “Hey, lookit this.” She pointed to surrealist sculptures by Man Ray and Marcel Duchamps — an iron studded with nails, a cup and spoon lined with fur. Something had caught Yazmín’s eye, though, so she pushed through the crowd to the wall.
“Frida!” She sighed. “God, it’s fantastic. She’s so beautiful. Look at that self portrait: it tells everything…”
Rai hated Frida Kahlo. Thought she was a self-obsessed, fragile whiner who painted nothing but self portraits because she couldn’t be bothered with the real world. Anyone who suffered that many years of abuse and infidelity from Diego Rivera without killing the bastard didn’t deserve to be a feminist icon. On the other hand, Rai knew she could only deal with conflict by turning it into a shouting match, and she didn’t want to do that with a potential friend, so she just said, “Uh-huh.”
“Don’t you love her?”
“Yeah, great…” Rai faded backward, hoping Yazmín wouldn’t notice. She slid into the next gallery to stare at the angry, violent Siquieros. Now that was a Mexican she liked.
As they walked through five floors of galleries, they spent the rest of the evening talking about art. Rai tried to explain abstract expressionism, but Yazmín just didn’t like Motherwell and Pollack. She drooled in front of the huge Monets, though, and showed Rai how the layers and layers of oils either obscured or reflected the light. They stopped for a moment in the café, where a septet was playing jazz. Yazmín desperately wanted to stay, but Rai dragged her away impatiently to see some conceptual art.
“You don’t like jazz?”
“Fucking old people music.”
“Oh, c’mon. Whaddaya listen to?”
“Nine Inch Nails. Metallica. Rage Against the Machine. Rai music. Stuff that doesn’t put you to sleep.” Yazmín laughed in the superior sort of way Rai often did, and Rai, feeling bile rise in her throat, calmed down only when Yazmín giggled and suggested they go up and see the Van Goghs they’d run past.
By the end of the evening, Rai wondered if she might have a new friend; she had even learned something from her. Even so, she found Yazmín’s taste hopelessly conventional: Van Gogh and Monet and Kandinsky and Matisse? Really.
As the museum closed, they walked out into the warm night, heading for 6th.
“What the fuck’s that?” Rai exploded. She started to run down 53rd Street toward a crowd of people gathered around a fiery glow. Yazmín rushed after her with long, gangly strides.
A fire truck turned the corner from 6th and rushed down the street against traffic. It stopped hard, then directed a flow of foam toward the sidewalk. “Back off, back off!” one of the firefighters screamed at the crowd, but Rai pushed through.
A silver sedan smoked under the dissipating foam as firefighters broke the windows to insure no one was inside. Then, as her eyes moved up from the stylized L of Lexus to the wall behind the car, the poster-covered plywood of a construction site, she read large letters written with spray paint.
“He alone is worthy of life and freedom
who each day does battle for them anew.”
-Göthe
“Oh, Z. Oh, fuck.” Rai whispered to herself. “What the fuck are you doing?”
Seeing the cops surrounding the car for the first time, she turned away and pushed urgently through the crowd toward 6th Avenue and stopped on the corner. Several seconds later, Yazmín caught up with her.
“Whassup, Rai? It’s just a car. That’s New York for ya.”
“I don’t wanna talk about it, OK?” As always when she tried to keep her emotions in check, Rai clipped her words and spoke with an arrogant formality.
“Whatever, girl. If that’s how you wanna be–”
Rai grabbed Yazmín by the shoulder. “It’s not about you. I’ll tell you someday, maybe, but not right now. I gotta be alone.” Her reserve was cracking; she had to get away. She rushed off uptown before she could even hear Yazmín say goodbye.
