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306 pages, Paperback
First published January 19, 2010
♪Stayin’ up for days in the Chelsea Hotel...♫![]()
One evening in late November Robert came home a bit shaken. There were some etchings for sale at Brentano’s. Among them was a print pulled from an original plate from America: A Prophecy, watermarked with Blake’s monogram. He had taken it from its portfolio, sliding it down his pants leg. Robert was not one to steal; he hadn’t the nervous system for theft. He did it on impulse because of our mutual love of Blake. But toward the end of the day he lost courage. He imagined they were on to him and ducked into the bathroom, slid it out of his trousers, shredded it, and flushed it down the toilet.
I noticed his hands were shaking as he told me. It had been raining and droplets trickled down from his thick curls. He had on a white shirt, damp and sodden against his skin. Like Jean Genet, Robert was a terrible thief. Genet was caught and imprisoned for stealing rare volumes of Proust and rolls of silk from a shirt maker. Aesthetic thieves. I imagined his sense of horror and triumph as bits of Blake swirled into the sewers of New York City.
We looked down at our hands, each holding on to the other. We took a deep breath, accepting our complicity, not in theft, but in the destruction of a work of art.
“At least they’ll never get it,” he said.
“Who are they?” I asked.
“Anyone who isn’t us,” he answered.
“Take their picture,” said the woman to her bemused husband, “I think they’re artists.”
“Oh, go on,” he shrugged. “They’re just kids.”
“We wanted, it seemed, what we already had, a lover and a friend to create with, side by side. To be loyal, yet be free.”
“I had no proof that I had the stuff to be an artist, though I hungered to be one.”
“No one expected me. Everything awaited me.”
“I was a dreamy somnambulant child. I vexed my teachers with my precocious reading ability paired with an inability to apply it to anything they deemed practical. One by one they noted in my reports that I daydreamed far too much, was always somewhere else.”
“Committing to great art is its own reward.”
“He was a mischievous little boy whose carefree youth was delicately tinged with a fascination with beauty.”
“Who can know the heart of youth but youth itself?”
“Robert was infinitely patient with my seemingly inexplicable melancholy.”
“I drew comfort from my books.”
“But secretly I knew I had been transformed, moved by the revelation that human beings create art, that to be an artist was to see what others could not.”
“Robert was ever in my consciousness; the blue star in the constellation of my personal cosmology.”
At the table to my left, Janis Joplin was holding court with her band. To my far right were Grace Slick and the Jefferson Airplane, along with members of Country Joe and the Fish. At the last table facing the door was Jimi Hendrix, his head lowered, eating with his hat on, across from a blonde.
It was a terrible place, dark and neglected, with dusty windows that overlooked the noisy street. […] I sat there watching him sweat and shiver on an iron bed. The springs of the ancient mattress poked through the stained sheet. The place reeked of piss and exterminator fluid, the wallpaper peeling like dead skin in summer. There was no running water in the corroded sink, only occasional rusted droplets plopping through the night.
Despite his illness, he wanted to make love, and perhaps our union was some comfort, for it drew out his sweat…
Divining how to appeal to Tom's sensibilities, I dressed in a manner that I thought a boy from Delaware would understand: black ballet flats, pink shantung capris, my kelly green silk raincoat, and a violet parasol…