“Mom! Your beautiful hair!”
“Dead on the hairdresser’s floor.” She folded her hands and placed them in her lap. “I don’t know what came over me.”
“It’s your new look, Ma,” Zinnie said. “No big deal.”
“Next she’ll be going on a diet,” Carmela said.
“And that starts with d and that rhymes with p and that stands for pool,” said Zinnie.
“All I meant was—”
“Just shut up. Nobody cares what you meant.”
“Oh, I’ve got that straight. That’s nothing new to me.” Carmela’s eyes filled with tears. “Nobody cares about me at all since the mystic marvel here ran out of luck and had to condescend to live with the likes of us!”
The telephone rang and Zinnie picked it up. “It’s for you, mystic marvel.”
“I don’t want to talk to him,” Claire shook her head. “And don’t anyone use the bathroom radio. It’s dead. And so, almost, was I.”
“It’s that Stefan.”
“Oh. Oh, all right. Give it to me. Hello?”
“Good evening.” His accent was thicker over the phone. “How are you holding up in this heat wave?”
“Fine. You?”
“So la la. Listen, the reason I’m calling … I’m driving into town tonight … Soho. Julio Marble is having a show and I thought I’d have a look at his new work. Perhaps buy something for the entrance hall. Would you like to come along?”
“You couldn’t have called at a better time,” Claire scowled at Carmela. “That’s exactly what I’d like to do. Get away from everything for a little bit.”
“Pick you up at seven, then.”
“All right.”
“Ciao.”
“And tomorrow,” Zinnie was telling her mother, “we’ll go up to the mall and get your ears pierced.”
Stefan drove along the Long Island Expressway with the top down. Claire’s hair whipped unnervingly across her eyes but he was going so fast that she couldn’t catch hold of it to anchor it down. Gladys Knight and the Pips blasted from quadriphonic speakers, Stefan yodeling along with staccato clumsiness. You could take the boy’s soul out of Bialystok but you couldn’t take the Bialystok out of his soul. By the time they got to the colorful, raggedy streets of Soho, Claire was ready for a calming drink and a cigarette, the hell with reform. Stefan left the red Porsche open and the top down. If he closed it up, he explained cheerfully, they would simply break the window to get the radio and that would be worse still, what with insurance costs and unreasonably long waits for import replacements.
“That’s absurd!” marveled Claire.
“Ah, but true. Just look at the other cars.”
Sure enough, two other German makes had signs taped to their windows, letters to potential thieves: “Radio not here” and “No Radio.” It was so funny. These people had spent fortunes on exotic cars, and there the automobiles sat, with brown-paper-bag letters Scotch-taped to their windows. What an incredible city! Perhaps one day an inventive thief would break into one of these cars and leave a note himself. “Just checking,” it would read.
She followed Stefan into the gallery. The place was packed. There were playboys and models and agents, record producers and suntanned androgynes in from the Hamptons. The mayor and his entourage, Stefan whispered, were sure to come. Where, Claire wondered, would they put them? A crackling recording of Les Brown and His Band of Renown competed with the din. There was the cloying smell of everyone’s perfume. “I’ll get us some bubbly.” Stefan pressed her hand and joggled away through the swarm.
Claire tried to get a look at the paintings. All she could make out were the brown and red peaks of the canvases. Everyone was chattering about how marvelous they were: “eclectic” and “revolutionary” were the words she heard again and again, and so she dutifully wriggled her way over to the main wall. On a canvas as broad as a barn door was what looked like smashed rubbish. She narrowed her eyes and went right up to it. Crushed flowers were glued onto the canvas and covered with muddy spray paint. “You see,” the dowager beside her was instructing the undergraduate at her elbow, “what it means is the end of the world. The annihilation of all that is vivre.”