An Old Dominatrix Rips Her Hair Out
David and the Lion’s Den, chapter 15
The days after the gallery opening passed in a series of blurred flashes.
My memory focuses sharply on only a few scenes — crashing out on the sofa at the Marriott, meeting Kevin for strategy sessions at his luxurious midtown offices, drinking with my parents in the revolving bar at the top of the hotel, clutching my stomach during dizzying rides up and down the glass elevators.
The Manhattan I experienced then, inside my fear, was a different city from the one the struggling artist had inhabited. I almost didn’t notice.
“Dad, they can’t convict me,” I remember insisting as we crunched free mixed nuts out of crystal bowls. “There’s no evidence. There can’t be any.”
He sighed while I stared through plate glass at a skyline that circled under slate clouds. “I just wanna go home,” I complained as the Twin Towers crawled into view. “I want my apartment, my job, and my painting.”
I couldn’t go anywhere for fear of being recognized. I hadn’t been to the garden, or Cucina, or anywhere in the Village.
Mom broke in. “Come back to Kansas City with us until the trial. There’s nothing here for you!”
“What? No way.” I kicked my chair back from the table. “Besides, my bail conditions …” I didn’t really care about the legal problems. I just wasn’t going. Wouldn’t even consider it.
She kept at it, though. “Glen, tell him. We can petition the judge, let Dave come home with us for a few months while we wait the process out.”
“Um, maybe,” Dad mumbled, looking pessimistic. “We can always ask.”
“Dad, I can’t. No.” By then, the Art Deco spire of the Chrysler Building was swinging into view.
“Why not?” pushed Mom. ‘If we can get permission? How are you going to survive here? Your dad and I… Dave, that suite downstairs is almost 500 a night. We aren’t millionaires.”
I hate to admit that I sulked. Being around my parents was bringing out the teenager in me. “Look, I can’t run out on Howie, guys. No way.”
Dad’s face did that thing where he looks like he’s trying not to bark out an order. He clinked the ice in his tumbler and took a tiny sip of his scotch before answering. “Davey. Dave. Son, listen to me. I’m not your lawyer, but I know how these things go. Has Kevin gone over defense strategies with you yet?”
“Such as?” I thought he was changing the subject. Perception isn’t always my forte.
“Such as, you didn’t do it because somebody else did?”
“What? It’s not enough to make them prove I’m guilty with evidence?”
“Of course not,” he fired back. “People get convicted on circumstantial evidence every day. Hell, I did it, myself, in the DA’s office when you were a baby.”
I still didn’t get it. “So, what are you trying to say?”
“If I were your lawyer, I’d defend you by telling the jury that only one other person had the exact same access and opportunity you had.”
My face started glowing as the implications hit me.
Dad looked down and stirred his drink with his index finger. His voice was so quiet I could barely hear him. “Any decent lawyer would tell the jury they can’t convict you because the other guy did it.”
“That’s ridiculous. Insane! Nobody who knows Howie could believe that.”
“That’s exactly the problem,” he snapped, unrolling a newspaper and thrusting it under my face. “Look at this.”
The New York Post. One of their trademark headlines screamed across the page in 20 point caps.
Blood on Canvas!
My photo was underneath, taken outside the precinct, my hair sticking out in all directions, eyes wild and crazed.
I ground my next words out around clamped teeth. “I don’t care. Howie didn’t kill anybody, and that’s all there is to it. End. Of. Story.”
They both stared at me for a minute, mute. I thought Dad’s eyes looked like mine when I’m in the middle of a portrait — analyzing, evaluating, really seeing.
A low current of unease picked up the hairs on the back of my neck. I shuddered.
Dad waited a while before he spoke — softly and painfully. “I need to ask you something, and I need you to be totally honest with me.”
My whole body went cold.
“You’re my son. Nothing’s going to change how I feel about you.”
My hands balled into fists as I watched the inevitable question form on his lips. “Just stop, Dad. Tell me you’re fucking joking.”
“I have to ask. I need to know. It won’t stop us loving you. Did you kill them? Tell us the truth.”
I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of an answer. Childish of me? Probably. I jumped out of my seat and ran to the window, running my hands over cold plate glass as the City orbited under my gaze.
I moved in with Hilda.
If steamy Manhattan summer defined my first creative flurry, then red leaves whirling through Washington Square on an icy wind defined my first of many droughts.
It was Richard’s idea.
“You’re welcome to stay with me for all the good it would do you,” he offered the night I fought with Dad. “But those buzzards are going to camp outside our building forever. Nobody knows Hilda. You can lay low at her place.”
She owned a one-bedroom across from Eleanor Roosevelt’s old building, an overheated, cluttered space filled with the dark furnishings and fabrics of a more brooding era. Expensive art hung on her walls — Impressionist paintings by minor masters and at least one piece I knew would start bidding wars if it ever came on the market.
Renaud sold all five of mine. I thought I’d struck it rich. He got 3,500 each, and 5,000 for the one of Hilda. Nineteen grand for a summer of painting. The scandal had driven the prices up. I was expecting a fat check.
Silly me.
The standard dealer commission — the one Hilda had researched to make sure I wasn’t getting ripped off — was 50%. Dad fronted me 6,000, which is about all I could have expected after taxes, anyway.
As an aside for all you nice people sitting here listening to me and thinking about art as a career, it took more than six months and several angry confrontations before Renaud broke the checkbook out of his desk. I’m lucky my folks had savings, and that they didn’t hold my bad attitude against me.
Thanks to Dad, I had enough to pay Jill a few months in advance with plenty left over to eat on. I didn’t want to lose my spot, but she couldn’t afford the rent on her own.
Living with Hilda opened my eyes. I’d never appreciated how much her activities cost her. Always with the sly remark, witty rebuke, crooked smile, she was a force. Sure, you could tell she was often tired, but she seemed totally up for her mornings in the garden and for her volunteer work.
Rooming with her, I learned the price. Utter collapse.
She’d drag herself home and up the stairs, then practically shut herself off for hours on end. I could see her fighting pain too.
I felt guilty about imposing, but she insisted I was no trouble. I tried not to be. I couldn’t paint. I had nothing in me. So, I shopped for food, cooked, cleaned, and tried to be helpful. With my own worries, though, I don’t think I was always the best company.
I couldn’t go anywhere. Jill’s place was out, because the newspapers had spies posted outside. The stares and cold shoulders I got at the garden set my teeth on edge.
The entire City had decided I was guilty.
I even got hassled in the park one chilly morning as I sat all huddled up on a green bench. Some teenagers hollered insults at me until I shuffled back inside past Hilda’s stone-faced doorman. He managed to make his own disapproval clear without so much as a word or an obvious glare.
That was my first time struggling with depression. I didn’t recognize the symptoms. I’d know now. No painting, hunkering down at home. Picking at my food. Drinking too much.
Sometimes it’s horrible, my depression, even worse than during that miserable autumn. I remember a winter in London when I holed up for months in my room at the Strand, living on fellowship money and not lifting a finger to sculpt.
But that first time in New York when my life was on the line? It was bad.
Richard came over for coffee most mornings, often with Jill in tow. One morning in late October, though, I opened the door to the sight of a scarlet mini, fishnet, and the whiff of new leather. Carla was tapping a stiletto, weight balanced on one leg, twirling her whip, and frowning at me like a teacher who’d just caught one of her students cheating. As she glared down, my dingy sweats and unwashed hair weighed on me.
I fought an urge to sniff my armpits.
“Morning, hon,” piped Jill as she pushed past Carla’s statue-still form. “We brought coffee. Hilda up yet?”
Carla stepped inside and slammed the door before I could answer. “How long,” she demanded, pointing the whip at Jill, “has he?” then snapping it at me, “been like this?”
“I, uh… sorry, I haven’t showered yet this …” I started to mumble, before Jill cut me off. “A month? Maybe longer?”
“Hm,” Carla sniffed, “By the smell of things, you didn’t shower yesterday either. How does Hilda put up with it?”
I opened my mouth to answer, but she ran right over me.
“I don’t want to hear it. Get cleaned up. Now. Get dressed and get your scrawny ass back out here. Hurry up, we’ve got work to do.”
If I hadn’t been so down, I might have resisted, but following orders was easier. When I came out of the bathroom in jeans and an old tee shirt, towelling off my hair, they were all sitting around the table — Carla looking grim, Jill nibbling on a bagel, Hilda wrapped up in an elaborate robe, sipping coffee.
I plodded through the living room and fell into the chair beside Jill. Nobody was talking. The silence was the oppressive kind you know means the conversation had been all about you 30 seconds ago. I barely lifted my eyes, reaching for the last paper cup and peeling off the plastic top. The coffee was hot, sweet, and rich with whole milk. I took a sip and pushed it aside. Couldn’t care less.
Carla started. “So. How much time do you think?”
My response as they all stared at me was eloquent. “Huh?”
“How much time?” she snapped. “What do you figure? Twenty years? Thirty? More? At least New York doesn’t have the death penalty.”
Instead of answering, I slurped some coffee I didn’t really want.
She wouldn’t stop. “The way things are going, the trial’s going to be a formality.”
I finally looked at her, just for a second. “What are you talking about?”
“You hiding out down here, that’s what!”
“What do you know about it, anyway?” I sighed, hunching over my cup.
“I know you’re not doing shit except holing up down here feeling sorry for yourself and drinking up Hilda’s schnapps.”
They all stared and nodded. Even Jill.
“Look, what do you expect?” I asked. “What the hell else can I do? I’ve been to court twice. I’ve been up to Kevin’s office a few times. The trial isn’t for months yet.”
“And in the meantime,” Jill sighed, “Howie sits in a cell up in Spanish Harlem, gets fresh air once a week, and eats food the rats won’t touch.”
“What am I supposed to DO about that?” I whined. “They won’t even let me visit!”
Carla thrust herself out of her chair, but Hilda held out a hand as if to ask for patience. She turned to me. “You must tell this to us, Liebchen — what you are supposed to do.”
I dropped my head into my arms and closed my eyes. I couldn’t be bothered to wonder what she was talking about. I needed to sleep.
A surge of pain jolted me awake as my head snapped up. I heard Jill gasp. I was staring into Carla’s eyes as she held me up by the hair, her long pancaked nose poking threateningly into my own.
“Enough,” she growled, coffee and cigarette breath escaping over stained teeth to knock me back. “I’ve had it up to here with your self pity.”
A tiny pulse beat in her left temple. She shook me by my hair, just enough for anger to surge through my body. I jerked out of her grasp, losing some hair in the process. “What the fuck would you know about it?” I demanded, jumping up. “I haven’t seen you in weeks!”
I pushed forward, furious. “Nobody wants to see me or talk to me, including you. Everybody thinks I’m some kind of sick freak. And now suddenly you come around and tell me I’m feeling sorry for myself?”
I started to shout. “You know what? Fuck that! And fuck you. You don’t have any idea what you’re talking about!”
She shoved me. Hard. “Back off, little boy.”
I stumbled, caught off guard by her strength. “That’s exactly what you are,” she rumbled. “A self-centered, self-absorbed, sniveling little child.”
I stared at her — in shock. I could hear Hilda and Jill dragging sharp breaths in and out as they watched.
“Do you seriously mean to tell me,” Carla hissed, hand shooting up to grab a handful of her hair, “that YOU — the painter, the artist, the great observer of humanity — that you’ve never taken a good look at my face?
Jill laughed.
I turned to look at her, confused, but she just pointed back at Carla. My eyes followed Jill’s finger just in time to see the towering old dominatrix rip her hair right out of her scalp.
No! She was pulling off a wig. She slammed it down next to the bagels and spoke more quietly, in a register a full octave lower than before. “You’re kidding me, right?”
I gawped, taking in her theatrical makeup, bizarre costume, and flashing eyes. Her breast heaved as she breathed to keep up with an angry heartbeat. I saw bristly grey hair contrast with the high arch of a painted-on eyebrow.
My focus snapped to her face and I saw.
“Richard!” I gasped.
“About time, Cookie,” he growled.
You just read chapter 15 of a character-driven mystery set in Greenwich Village during the worst of the HIV Plague Years. David, Jill, Hilda, Richard, and Howie — and Raphael — are walking a path that leads to intense friendship and love, to the creation of gorgeous but wrenching art, and to the unraveling of a series of horrific events that nobody sees, not even as they happen. Because sometimes what you’re looking at isn’t what you see.