Just Kids [59]
Afterward he asked me if I had any money. “No,” I said, and he pretended to be mad. But I knew Harry. He just wanted to diffuse the intimacy of the moment. Whenever you had a beautiful moment with Harry he just had to turn it upside down.
On the last day of May, Robert had a gathering of his new friends in his side of the loft. He played Motown songs on our record player and seemed so happy. The loft was several times larger than our room. We even had room to dance.
After a while I left and went back to our old room at the Chelsea. I sat there and cried, then washed my face using our little sink. It was the first and only time that I felt I had sacrificed something of myself for Robert.
We fell into the pattern of our new life quickly. I stepped from square to square of the chessboard floor of our hallway just as I had in the Chelsea. At first we both slept in the small space as Robert got the larger space situated. The first night I finally slept alone, everything started out fine. Robert let me have the record player and I listened to Piaf and wrote, but I found I could not sleep. No matter what happened, we were used to sleeping in one another’s arms. About three in the morning I gathered my muslin sheet around me and lightly tapped on Robert’s door. He opened it immediately.
“Patti,” he said, “what took you so long?”
I strolled in, trying to appear nonchalant. He had obviously been working all night. I noticed a new drawing, the components for a new construction. A picture of me by his bed.
“I knew you’d come,” he said.
“I had a nightmare, I couldn’t sleep. And I had to go to the bathroom.”
“Did you go to the Chelsea?”
“No,” I said, “I peed in an empty takeout cup.”
“Patti, no.”
It was a long walk to the Chelsea in the middle of the night if you really had to go.
“Come on, China,” he said, “get in here.”
Everything distracted me, but most of all myself. Robert would come over to my side of our loft and scold me. Without his arranging hand, I lived in a state of heightened chaos. I set the typewriter on an orange crate. The floor was littered with pages of onionskin filled with half-written songs, meditations on the death of Mayakovsky, and ruminations about Bob Dylan. The room was strewn with records to review. The wall was tacked with my heroes but my efforts seemed less than heroic. I sat on the floor and tried to write and chopped my hair instead. The things I thought would happen didn’t. Things I never anticipated unfolded.
I went home to visit my family. I had a lot of thinking to do about what direction I should be taking. I wondered if I was doing the right work. Was it all frivolity? It was the nagging sense of guilt I experienced performing on the night the Kent State students were shot. I wanted to be an artist but I wanted my work to matter.
My family sat around the table. My father read us Plato. My mother made meatball sandwiches. As always there was a sense of camaraderie at the family table. In the midst of it I received an unexpected call from Tinkerbelle. She told me abruptly that Robert and David were having an affair. “They’re together right now,” she said, somewhat triumphantly. I simply told her the call was unnecessary, and that I already knew.
I felt stunned as I hung up the phone, yet I had to wonder if she’d merely put into words what I had myself divined. I wasn’t sure why she called me. It wasn’t as if she was doing me a favor. We weren’t that close. I wondered if she was being mean-spirited, or merely a tattletale. There was also the possibility that she wasn’t telling the truth. On the bus ride home, I made the decision to say nothing and give Robert the opportunity to tell me on his own terms.
He had that flustered look, like when he flushed the Blake down the toilet at Brentano’s. He had been to Forty-second Street and saw an interesting new male magazine, but it cost fifteen dollars. He had the money but wanted to be sure it was worth it. As he slipped it out of the cellophane, the owner came back and caught him. He started yelling,