Amor and Psycho: Stories Read online

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2013 by Carolyn Cooke

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Selected stories in this work were previously published in the following: “The Boundary” in AGNI Review; “Isle of Wigs” and “The Snake” in Idaho Review; and “Aesthetic Discipline” on Fifty-Two Stories with Cal Morgan (Harper Perennial)

  www.fiftytwostories.com.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Cooke, Carolyn, 1959–

  Amor and psycho : stories / by Carolyn Cooke.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-96213-3

  I. Title.

  PS3553.O55495A46 2013

  813’.6—dc23

  2012045297

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Jacket design by Kelly Blair

  v3.1

  For Randall Babtkis

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  FRANCIS BACON

  AESTHETIC DISCIPLINE

  THE SNAKE

  AMOR AND PSYCHO

  THE BOUNDARY

  ISLE OF WIGS

  SHE BITES

  THE ANTIHEROES

  SWING

  OPAL IS EVIDENCE

  AMONG THE MEZIMA-WA

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  FRANCIS BACON

  In the early eighties, I often spent afternoons at Bob’s House, which is what everyone called the twenty-thousand-square-foot Beaux-Arts mansion on East Sixty-seventh Street, said to be the largest private residence in Manhattan. There were always women there, always called “girls,” and Laya looked like all of them to me—soft, fat, seventeen-year-old eager-to-please mouth breathers who signed their contracts with made-up first names and requested, for their take-out lunch, Classic Americans from Burger Heaven. Having grown up poor in a small town myself just three or four years ahead of Laya and her ilk, I felt the pinch of proximity as we strove upstream together toward what I hoped would become a vast gulf between these girls and me. Meanwhile, I lived in terror of being mistaken for one of them. To guard against losing my edge (I hoped to become a writer), I’d refused to take a serious job, preferring the professional twilight zone of the men’s magazine industry. The vulgarity of the writing assignments didn’t bother me; I imagined myself in the position of the Isaac Babel character in his story “Guy de Maupassant” and considered myself lucky that, with my English major and thirty WPM, I hadn’t been forced to become a gofer at a fashion magazine. I also enjoyed Bob’s blurred, autocratic presence, his white shirt unbuttoned to the belt of his sharkskin slacks, the chains around his neck, the long gray chest hair. His empire was worth $300 million that year; he was nearly at the height of his power to shock.

  At that time, I needed little, apart from interesting experience, in order to live. While working for Bob, I subsisted on fancy lunches paid for in company scrip, and free cocktails and hors d’oeuvres at openings for artists the company knew.

  My responsibilities entailed exactly what we were doing on this day: traveling across town to Bob’s House, listening to Bob’s orgiastic creative direction, then putting words into the mouths of Babes. Later, from a gray-carpeted cubicle on Broadway near Lincoln Center, I would create implausible erotic monologues (based on implausible true-life experiences) that suggested unspeakably childish innocence, the slight resistance one might encounter parting a raw silk curtain in the dark, accompanied by some subtle but binding statement of adult acquiescence. What better training for a writer than inventing little stories, arousing a casual reader with ordinary language thrillingly unspooled? The story arc was simple, sexual: foreplay, action, climax, denouement. Not that I supposed the men who read our magazine required much in the way of denouement; most of them probably closed the book once they’d spunked. The magazine took great pains—wasted—to expose corporate and government crimes and cover-ups. (We hated cover-ups!) We published the steamier fictions of Roth and Oates.

  Working for Bob made me feel like a real writer, commissioned, dared: Give me twenty-four hours and I could give you a story about a lonely coed and a washing machine that could leave you breathless and satisfied.

  Exposure to Bob’s antiquities and follies had awakened my capacity for judgment. I felt contemptuous of every lapse in his taste—the carved marble toilets, the glazed fabrics, the white piano, the gallons of gilt. (My own shotgun flat, which I shared with my old college friend Mira, contained no furniture we hadn’t plucked from the street. It was here in this studio, with its cold radiators and scuttling cockroaches, where I did my “real” work at night, brutally scribbling over fresh drafts of my austere prose poems.)

  We traveled by taxi across the park to Sixty-seventh Street—an executive, a graphic designer, and a “writer.” Inside the town house, we waited for Bob. We always waited; we waited for hours. It was Bob’s dime; we were Bob’s army, the pornographer’s pornographers. Sometimes we waited all day while topless females cavorted with eunuchy-looking men in European bathing suits by the Roman-style swimming pool, which had been carved out of several venerable rooms. Or we sat in Regency chairs arranged around a fireplace whose panels contained decorative carvings of six-breasted women. Sometimes we waited until we saw Bob and his girlfriend, Kathy, dressed for the evening, descending the stairs and leaving by the front door. (Bob’s face—before the cosmetic work—was sculpted into marble columns along the stairs, and the wall sconces that illuminated the way up to Bob’s “office” were—or at least looked very like—molded testicles of glass.)

  When we arrived, Laya—the girl-woman we were going to give away in a contest—was waiting, too, surrounded by the usual surplus of yellow-eyed men in their fifties and sixties, dyspeptics drinking seltzer water. One of these men immediately offered Laya a weekend in East Hampton. She slid off one strappy sandal, tucked a bare foot under her round bottom and leaned toward her interlocutor. “Is that on the beach?” she asked.

  When she saw our trio, she lit up, as if she could have any idea who or what we were, and said, “Hi—I’m Laya!” The “creative team” introduced ourselves, then Ernie, the leering butler, appeared with a tray of vodka drinks. Laya asked for a can of Tab. From another room, or possibly some kind of intercom system, I heard someone say, “Put that nipple up again, or I’ll have to come over and do it for you.”

  I resented waiting (dogged by the feeling that I had more important work to do), but Laya seemed to be enjoying herself the way a hunter enjoys oiling his gun, the way a whale enjoys breaching. We drank our drinks. Laya deployed her long hair as she turned the beam of her attention from one yellow-eyed man to the other. Stray bits of her monologue escaped, which I mentally filed for future use: “Capricorn,” “unicorn,” “nineteen,” “calligraphy.”

  BOB EVENTUALLY SENT WORD via Ernie, and we ascended the stairway of faces and testicles. He stood for Laya, and took her hand. Bob saw himself as an innovator, an idea man, a feminist. He liked to establish this right away. “I’ve arguably done more to advance the status of working-class women than Betty Friedan or Gloria Steinem,” he told her.
<
br />   “Absolutely,” said Bob’s girlfriend, Kathy. Bob had met Kathy—a brilliant dancer with a background in finance and science—at a men’s club in London in 1969, the same year he launched his magazine. Entranced by her beauty and talent, he had bribed his way backstage to her dressing room, where they discussed nuclear fusion. Now Bob and Kathy were funding a team of eighty-five scientists to “work around the clock” in New Mexico; Bob was investing twenty million dollars in a casino and a nuclear power plant. His seemingly unlimited capital came from profits from his magazine, where his innovations to the print centerfold had made him rich, rich, rich!

  Bob spoke generally to the room, continuing his feminist theme: “We were the first to show full frontal nudity, the first to show pubic hair, genital penetration. We remain the innovators, the leaders. We pushed the sexual revolution forward.” Bob looked the way he always looked—blurred, boyish, reddish and old, his white silk shirt unbuttoned to his belt. “You are all a part of it,” Bob told us, spreading his arms to include Laya, Kathy, a few cretinous men, the “creative” department, even the paintings on the walls—the Picassos, the El Grecos. We were all a part of it.

  One of the themes of his expensive art collection was, naturally, flesh—some of which I recognized from my survey course in art history. Bob owned a number of those fantastically macabre still lifes of Chaim Soutine, flayed rabbits and ducks hanging upside down, pools of blood spilling out among the crystal wineglasses, decanters and blood oranges.

  But today Bob had a new enthusiasm—the painter Francis Bacon. I’d never heard of him. A Bacon leaned against a wall. We stood around it, looking down. In the center of the painting, a lone figure howled to the point of implosion. “Bacon,” Bob said, “didn’t paint seriously until his late thirties. You know why? He was looking for a subject that would occupy his attention. This is it. The figure. The orifice.

  “Our magazine is inspired by these ideas. It’s vivid and bold, and it’s all about opening up the figure. I want a woman who does not simply lie naked representing a woman. I want to make photographs that immediately connect the viewer with the sensation of being in the presence of this woman. I am not interested in the woman; the woman means whatever she wants herself to mean. What interests me is the sensation produced by the photograph.”

  Laya looked studiously at the painting, as if it might teach her how to be.

  Even Kathy’s Rhodesian ridgebacks sniffed around the Bacon. Laya tripped on her heels avoiding one of the dogs, and Bob reached out to grab her. The canvas sighed and fell to the rug. One dog, quivering, escaped from beneath it. Bob picked the painting up and leaned it back against the wall. “Don’t worry,” he said, looking the painting over. “Art canvas. It’s strong.”

  We sat, finally, at an oval table, overlooking a platter of raw meat artfully arranged around a bowl filled with toothpicks. Bob got to the point: “With all this in mind, I want to run a contest. Two weeks in Rio or Paris—someplace like that. Laya’s the grand prize.”

  Kathy slowly raised a cube of meat in the air. The Rhodesian ridgebacks trembled with anticipation, then broke into competition.

  Bob turned his soft, blurred eyes on Laya and said, “The contest will be tastefully done.” Laya nodded encouragingly at Bob. Of course, of course, tastefully done.

  My job, Bob explained, would be to help to shape the story in such a way as to eliminate any tawdry elements. Laya and I would spend an hour together in the “red room” in conversation, from which I would extract her adorable essence, her hopes and dreams, which would appear in the promotional material. One of the cretins handed me a press kit, which contained Laya’s résumé, a high school report card, her height (5′2″), her measurements (35–22–35) and her ambitions: “too model and act.”

  Bob and Kathy left us to go have dinner at an Italian restaurant famous for its lewd murals and Neapolitan pasta puttanesca. After dinner, Bob and Kathy would stop by some wealthy industrialist’s house for half an hour, as long as Bob ever stayed at a social gathering. He had a phobia about being kidnapped and held for ransom, and also he had little in the way of conversation. But this going out into the evening and coming home at nine or ten was one of the great things, I thought, about Bob. He did not hang out with the other porn kings. He lived and socialized right on East Sixty-seventh Street, and was rather abstemious in his habits.

  INTERVIEWING LAYA WAS like being tended to by a friendly, paid person. We sat together in the red room with the sound track to Last Tango in Paris piped in like a gas. Ernie brought us cheeseburgers from Burger Heaven, still in their Styrofoam containers, which I resented, although I ate mine. Laya plucked at hers; it was too rare. She told me about Texas and, later, Arkansas, about her one-eyed mother and her generous and encouraging stepfather, about her scarlet fever and teenage rebellion, about her early talent as an artist, about being selected for a local car dealership commercial when she was only thirteen. She sat on her bare feet on the red silk couch and leaned toward me, flirty and confidential. “Tell me who, you know, who I should get close to. I almost know—I have ESP—but I can’t trust myself because my spirit is so open.”

  LATER, after leaving Bob’s House for the day, I met my roommate, Mira, and her new boyfriend, Amir, at the Russian Tea Room. We ate blini and caviar, and drank ponies of iced vodka and samovars of tea on Amir’s expense account. Afterward, Mira went to the flamboyant penthouse with Amir (they called each other “Amira”); I refused a cab to maintain sobriety and economy, and walked home.

  I stayed up all night writing Laya’s “story”—about an ambitious and talented calligrapher with nonthreatening ESP who dreams of becoming an actress and discovers her sexuality at fifteen on a 747 to Rome. In composing, I entered a fugue state. I realized that choice and freedom are not necessarily optimal conditions for work, and that the most confining, restricting and repulsive situations sometimes open themselves up to be investigated, like the terrifying “orifices” within the “figures” of Bacon. From this black hole of desire that yawns within us all, I heard Laya’s small, hopeful voice bubble up and simply wrote down what it said.

  When I returned the next day to Bob’s House with my story, I found Laya outside the red room, sitting at the white piano and playing “Baby Elephant Walk” to a swarm of middle-aged men who hoped to screw her. She wore a halter dress short enough to reveal a fresh hematoma on her thigh, and expensive gold hoops in her ears. Her hair had a metallic sheen. I thought of the way crows are drawn to foil in their bleak winters, and that this flirtation, which might lead to anything, to sex or marriage or death, was not a fantasy for Laya. It was the real life; it was what she did. She used her body the way I hoped to use my imagination—wantonly. She may have known already that the men she was flirting with could not really help her. They were sleazy, salaried men from Mamaroneck or Babylon, for whom the endless stream of young women like Laya—or like me, for that matter—was a job perk; many of them weren’t even straight or single, just curious. Flirting with Laya, or having sex with her, was part of a fantasy or charade, while real life marched on in shadows behind the scenes.

  Within a few years, many of these men would be dead of AIDS, caught and frozen in the common imagination by the stigmata of livid sarcomas on their faces and the backs of their hands. It was as if Francis Bacon saw that future waiting, named it in bright colors and abstracted figures, nailed it. Before I saw the Bacon paintings, I’d thought of the barrier between charade and real life as an ironic principle that young, attractive aspirants might transcend without much difficulty, like the velvet rope at the door of a nightclub. Imagine Laya, for example, who got everything she had come for—a small temporary fame made possible by men and her own amenable sexuality. (She became an actress, married a producer, lived for a period on a yacht off Skopelos, divorced, moved to London, and died at thirty-two, discreetly, of a disease she wouldn’t name.)

  That night, I read the tale—the fictobiography she and I had made up together—to Laya and Kath
y and Bob. The three of them softened around the mouth as they listened and afterward said how beautiful it was. Bob said, “This is what I do—take a young woman of charm and talent and give her a chance to reach her potential.” Kathy fed a cube of beef to the dogs and said, more pragmatically to Laya, “See what you can get out of it.” (We often boasted of how the first black Miss America had profited handsomely from the exposure our magazine had given her.)

  Bob showered Laya and me with scrip to the Copa, and I wantonly imagined the Veracruz snapper I’d command. Impossible to go to the Copa alone; I was more than ready to wait another hour for Laya, who continued to discuss details of the contest with Bob and Kathy and make new connections and arrangements with other men, working with more passion and intensity and for longer hours than I ever did.

  While waiting for Laya outside the Roman pool, I flipped through a catalogue from a retrospective of Bacon’s work at the Metropolitan Museum and read about how the artist squandered his time until he knew he could be serious, until he found a subject that could hold his attention. I studied photos of his London studio—the liquor boxes, the knee-high trash, the paint cans and brushes, the broken mirrors, the accumulation of thousands of images Bacon would pluck from the ankle-deep soup that functioned for him like an unconscious mind. The mess had a willful quality I admired; it excluded everyone but the artist himself, who had to work in self-imposed conditions that nearly rendered work impossible. Bacon’s detritus boasted of his promiscuity, his gambling, the chronic messes he made by seizing every scrap of life that might serve his discipline.

  I ripped a photo of Bacon’s studio from the catalogue and laid it on the pile of company scrip. The scrip looked like play money—or like a child’s certificate of achievement. We’d use it all, Laya and I—we’d eat and drink and make a little mess of the evening. With a fuzzy resolution born of several ounces of Russian vodka and a gnawing hunger, I promised the ladies of the multiple tits that one day I’d tell their stories, too. Sometime later, a dry finger touched my face with the slightest threat of a fingernail, as if I’d been chosen at random to play some brutal, competitive sport.