FIRST DIBS/LAST WRIGHTS: CHAPTER FIVE*
We find out what Hilda is like when she gets a bit drunk and that Lenny has a secret ... maybe even from himself ...
(Above: Lenny lookalike, Stephen Sprouse, photographed by Andy Warhol. 1984.)
(Above: Andy Warhol, Paloma Picasso, and her husband Rafael Lopez-Cambil at the first Carolina Herrera fashion show at the Metropolitan Club in New York City. April 27, 1981.)
[Sorry it’s taken me a bit to get this next chapter completed in the novel I am writing in serial form here at SES/SUMS IT UP. My commitment to it is firm however. The new WEDNESDAY NEWSLETTER has taken up some writing time so I am adjusting to a new busier weekly writing schedule. You can read Chapter One here. Chapter Two here. Chapter Three here. Chapter Four here. Chapter One is for everyone . The opening paragraphs of each subsequent Chapter are free to everyone with the rest of each Chapter for paid subscribers only. Thanks.]
CHAPTER FIVE
Lenny and Hilda had been silent as he carefully removed the David Bowie astral sphere from her forehead with some cold cream and rubbing alcohol and was now softly scrubbing what remained with warm water and soap. This was what passed as a mother/son ritual for a former fashion magazine editor and her gay still-jobless-but-Bard-graduate 21-year-old son who had together just come from a “Not So Sweet Sixteen” come-as-your-favorite-rock-star party downstairs in the art gallery in their townhouse where they now lived in this small river town in upstate New York, that first part of this run-on sentence what Hilda was thinking about writing in her journal later, the writing-it-all-down in such a context both a foreshadowing and forestalling of the memoir several publishing houses were trying to convince her to write. But Hilda had always lived in the present - hummed about in it, humming about and insistently present the only place she’d actually ever felt at home until she settled here along the Hudson - so much so that even “focusing on the future is just a way to memorize my past in order to recite it back to myself with more concern in my voice,” she had written last week in the journal and when she read that out loud to Rosemary, who was a better writer than she, was told to keep the cryptic quality of it. “Sometimes,” said Rosemary, “we don’t have to understand what we write because a reader will.” Hilda liked that. It let her off the hook, and the only thing she liked better than being let off one was escaping one herself, slipping from it and humming about in the current, a double-entendre she would concentratedly try to remember later as she instead tried now to concentrate on getting her son to look into her concerned eyes instead of focusing so intently on cleaning her forehead. Hilda’s concentration in this moment was finally more maternal - finally - than Lenny’s even though he was being performative in his tenderness in the way she had always expressed such a thing toward him when she found herself trying to act like a mother instead of being one. Lenny’s concentration, in fact, had the odd incongruous depth of the makeup artists Hilda had too often noticed when a photo shoot had lost the light and it was time for a model to be scrubbed of scrutiny. Yes. In the morning, she’ll suggest yet again just short of insisting - an old editorial tone of hers she too often employed with him - that he apprentice with a makeup artist, a female one she was quite fond of, who was always looking for an artistic type to tag along and make her feel both young yet old at the same time, that vibratory axis on which the fashion world spun, that neither/nor netherworld - more incongruity - where allure timelessly lay though alas agelessly did not.
Hilda was still upset about how it all had ended, the party downstairs, after that preacher, Anna's father, full of damnation and his own nasty notion of God - how had Anna been sired by such a sorry menace of a man although he was rather handsome (she hated herself for thinking it) - had shown up and left such seeming damage in his wake. And Lenny, it saddened Hilda to think this as well, to sense it, to remain silent about it in the different kinds of mother/son silences that could befall them, ritualistic themselves in the way they could burrow into both of them for days at a time when Lenny had done something destructive, was already damaged in ways she could never quite discern just instinctively knew were there and which had nothing to do with her, not really, it was a relief actually to believe that, a thudding inside him that could thunder to life the way maternal love had first arrived in her, the thud of that never thundering into existence but remaining just that, a thudding throb inside her she could never quite locate in order to calm and care for it so she could then care for him, calm him. Hilda decided she’d write some of this later in better sorted-out sentences in a journal entry to read aloud maybe next week to Rosemary as some dish they planned to share marinated and they mentioned things they never mentioned to anyone else.
“Mom, is this wash rag too rough?” Lenny asked her, his breath smelling of something like manhood, that worrying rot that youth can leave when it yearns to remain, the sweet stench that is the stanch unraveling in real time.
“Wash cloth, Lenny,” she said instead of saying all she wanted to say. “You know how much I detest the word rag and all the terminology that goes along with it. The rag trade. On the rag. Ragamuffin. Ragout. I couldn’t even read that Doctorow novel. I think it was by Doctorow. I always get him mixed up with Kurt Vonnegut. I once called one of them the other’s name - forget which - at a softball game out in one of the Hamptons. I aways get them mixed up, too, the Hamptons. And Jill and I - she was married to one them - were big buddies before we had our falling out about my not hiring her to photograph whatshername for a profile. Oh, God. I’ve had too much wine. You know. Miss Grey Matter Herself. Cruella with all the credentials - societal, academic, political. Oh, fuck me. The intellectual - the one who is so public about it. The lesbian who just won’t quite let on.”
“Sontag,” said Lenny, his eyes now the ones with the discernible concern in them. “You always speak in italics - even more than usual - when you’ve had too much to drink. Susan Sontag. She has a short story in The New Yorker this week. Do you even read that magazine or just subscribe to it because .. well, for whatever reasons you do the things you do without really doing them.”
“Likebeingyourmother?” Hilda said, a slur of italics that sliced through the air straight at him. Lenny swiped it away, raising his hand dismissively to do so since he’d heard this refrain from her all too often.
“I’m already reading the story for a second time. It’s great,” he said, wondering if she were too drunk to take the hint that she too should read it to understand why he had been so sad and angry lately, lost, feeling either unloved or too loved for he was never sure how his mother finally made him feel. “The story is titled ‘The Way We Live Now.’”
“Do you hate the way we now do, Lenny?” she asked. “It’s a very different life. I hope you don’t resent me for it. Do you remember your own 16th birthday when I took you to Carolina Herrera’s first fashion show? You feigned boredom but I think you were thrilled - unlike me who always feigned being thrilled at those things when I was so deeply, deeply, deeply bored.”
“Mom …” Lenny moaned, “we need to get you to bed,” the italics mode something that he had not picked up from her exactly but had realized when he was turning 16 as he talked with Paloma Picasso and Andy Warhol before the Herrera show began that had always just been part of his genetic makeup, that word again she would not lately shut up about although sometimes she insisted on calling it maquillage and using the word artist in conjunction with it to make it sound more appealing to him. He had heard his sixteen-year-old voice holding its own with those two at the Metropolitan Club that day as he, having done his research, held forth on J.P. Morgan who founded the place. “That man certainly had a nose, but not one for fashion,” he said. “I bet he’s turning over in his mausoleum out in Connecticut. He designed it to look like his idea of the Ark of the Covenant. Can you imagine?”
Paloma had pretended to listen to him as she looked around the room at the other guests trying to find someone of her own stature, standing, age. Warhol said, “Wow,” and mentioned he was looking forward to seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark at an early screening to which he’d been invited. And Lenny - who didn’t care if either were listening to him since he had begun that day to listen to himself - began next to hold forth on the Duchess of Marlborough who had sold the land to Morgan and his members on which the building in which they were standing now stood. The musicians - Herrera had hired musicians - played Cole Porter and he overheard his mother later tell John Duka, who wrote for The New York Times, that the ruffles on the Herrera dresses had been thunderous which Duka used in his review but didn’t deign to credit her with it. He’d told Duka how much that had bothered his mother when they’d been lying around naked after having sex that summer in Hilda’s own bed - Duka had at first declined but then had been rather easily convinced - when she’d been away for the weekend misidentifying writers at a softball game.
Still shirtless, Lenny finally took off his Jim Morrison wig and placed it on his mother’s spiky-haired head, her forehead now clean of the astral sphere. They both giggled in that way they had of knowing when something wasn’t really funny but laughed at it together anyway in order to share in a moment when all they wanted was to be done with the other. “You had to wear a coat and tie to get into the Metropolitan Club that day on your own sweet 16th birthday,” she said. “You were so handsome. I think that was your first real handsome day. Until then, you’d just been cute. A child. MyhandsomeboyatHerrera,” she remembered, as they both stood and he began to help her up the stairs to her bedroom. “Dressed - or not dressed, I should say, huh - abitdifferentlytoday,” Hilda said and flicked one of his nipples.
“Mom … “ Lenny moaned again. “ … god …”
“Are you losing weight?” she asked. “Don’t lose weight. Promise me, you won’t lose weight. Promiseme.”
“I promise, Mom,” he said.
“Don’t break this one,” she said, missing a step. He helped her find the next one. “You are always breaking your promises to your mother. Do you break them to everybody or just me?”
Lenny said nothing the rest the way to her room where he took the wig from her head and tucked her into bed. He stood watching her drunkenly fall asleep - another of their rituals - then walked down the hallway to his own room in the rear of the house. He put the wig back on - his own shag was only slightly shorter - and lay down. He hummed “Riders on the Storm” to himself as he thought back about that day when he turned 16. After the Herrera fashion show, he had headed downtown to celebrate with his new friend, Stephen Sprouse, his first real crush although Hilda, when finding out about their friendship, had said it was rather narcissistic since they looked so much alike, even their asymmetrical shags matched. He remembered how Stephen had laughed at him in his suit and tie and then decided he looked hot in it, like he’d chosen to play hooky from Choate instead of just fabulously dallying the day away having been given permission by Hilda to skip some classes at LaGuardia. Lenny put a hand down his rock-n-roll pants and thought of all the times he’d secretly met up with Sprouse as he waited now for midnight to roll around so he could sneak out down the back stairs to what awaited him on a side street down by the river, secrecy still the current that could course through his body and make him feel alive. He took his hand from his dick and reached for the Sontag story there in The New Yorker opened to it by his bed. He found his place and continued to reread it, finding his place, still at 21, harder to do in real life than it was embedded there in a work of fiction. The only way for him to feel less scared about what was really happening in his life was to feel more scared about something else. That is what midnight held for him: a different kind of fright that could course secretly through him. He was ready for it.
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