Smash Cut: A Memoir of Howard & Art & the '70s & the '80s by Brad Gooch
Authors: Brad Gooch
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baby,” Bernard, the younger, clucked, scolding me. So Howard and I returned to Bleecker Street in tandem.
I spent a few weeks back in our New York life, feeling the entire time as if I were walking a few inches off the ground, never quite relaxed, skulking around as the lame-duck boyfriend. Every week I’d visit Dan Deely for the humiliating exercise of examining my hair length, until the telex was finally sent announcing its acceptable length, and then back on the plane I went. In big brush strokes, my second departure turned out to be a replay of all the distress, separation anxiety, and punchy psychodrama of my first exit, though the cards were played in a slightly different order. Our goodbye this time was formal and awkwardly unruffled. I flew on Air France instead of Alitalia. I traveled to an actual apartment promising an adult life in much more intriguing and dimensional Paris. But I inadvertently left behind a ticking bomb, like Poe’s telltale heart, on an orange-crate “table” by our mattress: my black sketchbook journal in which I’d scribbled all my private thoughts as well as descriptions of illicit escapades, a slip whose implications I didn’t need Sister Mary Michael to explicate. Tick-tock, tick-tock. For several days, Howard, on phone calls, didn’t say a word about the diary, and so neither did I.
We did our talking now from the rotary telephone in my new home, Melinda’s Paris apartment, in a hall off my bedroom. Located on Rue de Douai, near Place Blanche in the ninth arrondissement, the Proustian vanilla-walled apartment rambled through three bedrooms, a living room ( salon would be a better word since all furniture and sepia-tint photographs were nineteenth-century), kitchen, and two bathrooms. The apartment actually belonged to Arnaud, a dealer in neoclassical objets . Before I got to Paris, the buzz, mostly from Howard, was that the thirty-two-year-old Arnaud was never seen inthe apartment and led a mysterious private life. But it seems that before my arrival he’d contracted some nineteenth-century-style mild tubercular ailment and was forced to stay home, and, consequently, his patterns had changed. I was surprised on the afternoon I arrived that Arnaud was the only one in the apartment. I was surprised, too, to find that he was so friendly, since Howard had said he pretended not to know English, when really he did, to avoid conversation. But we got on immediately. Arnaud made tea and toast, his hand shaking as he poured the hot tea, apologizing for having taken so long. I of course said no, not at all—“ pas du tout .” I think we got along because we both enjoyed oriental bowing, thanking, and apologizing to each other.
Sipping my tea in the living room that afternoon, I observed Arnaud—a bit shorter than me, with thin blond hair, translucent skin—as he slipped into his room, returning in a red smoking robe and with a cigarette holder, explaining that the holder reduced nicotine intake, cough, cough. Soon I’d learn Arnaud’s routines: whenever he went out he usually put on different kinds of pale corduroy clothes, but always looking very elegant. Rumors were that he spent much time at the Arab baths, but he never mentioned them. When he stayed home nights, he’d buy a bottle of good wine, not so much to drink it all, there was always plenty left over, but to sip, and have nearby. He arranged cut flowers in vases, rotated paintings on the walls, and lit fires in the fireplace. That day, light streaming in the front windows, he invited me into his bedroom, where he kept a large collection of old books from his grandfather’s collection, a heater, and a tape recorder with a few classical tapes, such as Fauré’s Requiem , which he often played. I studied a book next to his bed about German alchemists of the sixteenthcentury, in which he’d underlined many phrases. Over his bed was hanging—somehow rightly—a reproduction of David’s painting of the stabbed
I spent a few weeks back in our New York life, feeling the entire time as if I were walking a few inches off the ground, never quite relaxed, skulking around as the lame-duck boyfriend. Every week I’d visit Dan Deely for the humiliating exercise of examining my hair length, until the telex was finally sent announcing its acceptable length, and then back on the plane I went. In big brush strokes, my second departure turned out to be a replay of all the distress, separation anxiety, and punchy psychodrama of my first exit, though the cards were played in a slightly different order. Our goodbye this time was formal and awkwardly unruffled. I flew on Air France instead of Alitalia. I traveled to an actual apartment promising an adult life in much more intriguing and dimensional Paris. But I inadvertently left behind a ticking bomb, like Poe’s telltale heart, on an orange-crate “table” by our mattress: my black sketchbook journal in which I’d scribbled all my private thoughts as well as descriptions of illicit escapades, a slip whose implications I didn’t need Sister Mary Michael to explicate. Tick-tock, tick-tock. For several days, Howard, on phone calls, didn’t say a word about the diary, and so neither did I.
We did our talking now from the rotary telephone in my new home, Melinda’s Paris apartment, in a hall off my bedroom. Located on Rue de Douai, near Place Blanche in the ninth arrondissement, the Proustian vanilla-walled apartment rambled through three bedrooms, a living room ( salon would be a better word since all furniture and sepia-tint photographs were nineteenth-century), kitchen, and two bathrooms. The apartment actually belonged to Arnaud, a dealer in neoclassical objets . Before I got to Paris, the buzz, mostly from Howard, was that the thirty-two-year-old Arnaud was never seen inthe apartment and led a mysterious private life. But it seems that before my arrival he’d contracted some nineteenth-century-style mild tubercular ailment and was forced to stay home, and, consequently, his patterns had changed. I was surprised on the afternoon I arrived that Arnaud was the only one in the apartment. I was surprised, too, to find that he was so friendly, since Howard had said he pretended not to know English, when really he did, to avoid conversation. But we got on immediately. Arnaud made tea and toast, his hand shaking as he poured the hot tea, apologizing for having taken so long. I of course said no, not at all—“ pas du tout .” I think we got along because we both enjoyed oriental bowing, thanking, and apologizing to each other.
Sipping my tea in the living room that afternoon, I observed Arnaud—a bit shorter than me, with thin blond hair, translucent skin—as he slipped into his room, returning in a red smoking robe and with a cigarette holder, explaining that the holder reduced nicotine intake, cough, cough. Soon I’d learn Arnaud’s routines: whenever he went out he usually put on different kinds of pale corduroy clothes, but always looking very elegant. Rumors were that he spent much time at the Arab baths, but he never mentioned them. When he stayed home nights, he’d buy a bottle of good wine, not so much to drink it all, there was always plenty left over, but to sip, and have nearby. He arranged cut flowers in vases, rotated paintings on the walls, and lit fires in the fireplace. That day, light streaming in the front windows, he invited me into his bedroom, where he kept a large collection of old books from his grandfather’s collection, a heater, and a tape recorder with a few classical tapes, such as Fauré’s Requiem , which he often played. I studied a book next to his bed about German alchemists of the sixteenthcentury, in which he’d underlined many phrases. Over his bed was hanging—somehow rightly—a reproduction of David’s painting of the stabbed
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