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  Burn

  Modern Erotic Classics

  The Houdini Girl

  Martyn Bedford

  The Phallus of Osiris

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  Kiss of Death

  Valentina Cilescu

  The Flesh Constrained

  Cleo Cordell

  The Flesh Endures

  Cleo Cordell

  Hogg

  Samuel R. Delaney

  The Tides of Lust

  Samuel R. Delaney

  Sad Sister

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  Julie Hilden

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  Paul Mayersberg

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  The Agency Trilogy

  David Meltzer

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  Michael Perkins

  Dark Matter

  Michael Perkins

  Evil Companions

  Michael Perkins

  Beautiful Losers

  Remittance Girl

  Meeting the Master

  Elissa Wald

  House of Lust

  Michael Hemmingson

  Burn

  Michael Perkins

  Modern Erotic Classics

  Series Editor: Maxim Jakubowski

  Constable & Robinson Ltd

  55–56 Russell Square

  London WC1B 4HP

  www.constablerobinson.com

  First published in the US by Blue Moon Books,

  an imprint of Avalon Publishing Group Incorporated, 2002

  This edition published in the UK by Robinson,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2012

  Copyright © Michael Perkins, 2002

  Series Editor: Maxim Jakubowski

  The right of Michael Perkins to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in

  Publication Data is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-1-47210-603-2 (ebook)

  To Maxim Jakubowski

  Nothing is as interesting as passion, because everything in it is unexpected and its originator is his own victim.

  —Stendhal

  PART ONE

  THE LIGHT AROUND HER BODY

  1

  ROSE SELAVY

  THE FIRST TIME I saw Rose Selavy she was sipping champagne at the opening of my show of celebrity portraits at the Boatwright Gallery on Tenth Avenue. From where I stood across the room she looked like she was on fire. She was enveloped in a light so intense that I blinked. She was like a candle burning inside a transparent egg.

  The huge gallery space was dominated by my paintings, and packed with an art crowd excitedly aware—perhaps because some of the celebrities had posed semi-nude—that this was the hot downtown opening of the fall season. A few of my subjects had shown up, and little islands of admirers had formed around them. People shook my hand, slapped my shoulder, and shouted their congratulations over the roar. I remained focused on Rose Selavy, wondering if others saw what I was seeing.

  She was 24 that September, and had been taking the scalps of artists of both sexes all summer. Her grandfather was one of the artistic giants of the century we’d just survived, and her background had made her sophisticated early. She was an actress, a model, and she wrote art criticism—a dilettante with access; she was excited about art, and her enthusiasm magnified the impact of her famous name. Rose Selavy was the pseudonym she’d chosen from art history to stay under the radar of the media. (It’s one of Duchamp’s puns. Rose Selavy = Eros is life.)

  Her beauty was somehow fierce. She was glamorous in an old-fashioned way, as if she’d stepped out of 1920s Paris. She scared off all but the most intrepid and bedazzled of both sexes. These she flirted with casually and reflexively, licking her lips and staring over their shoulders, seldom smiling.

  Surely they could see she was on fire.

  She must have sensed me watching her. We exchanged glances. She raised an eyebrow. I averted my eyes as if I’d been caught peeking through a bedroom window, having seen something that was not for me. Dirty old man, I suppose I thought, feeling goatish. I squeezed my way through the networking throng and let myself into the Boatwright office. There was a mirror in the bathroom, and I needed to see if I suddenly had horns growing from my temples.

  Nicholas Wilde stared back at me as he had for fifty years. I saw the intense, deeply carved visage of an artist at the top of his game: moderately famous, somewhat successful, still a rogue capable of causing a sensation—or at least a mild disturbance. But there was, I noticed on closer inspection, something new in my eyes that I wanted to paint: desire. I hadn’t felt desire in a long time.

  After that night I’d see Rose at parties and say a casual hello, tell a joke or a story and move on, meanwhile imagining what it would feel like to caress her smooth fair skin. I told myself it was the same skin I’d loved at seventeen. Why shouldn’t I love it now?

  She went off to Europe, where she’d grown up. There were pictures in the magazines of her modeling, sometimes a piece in an art magazine.

  I couldn’t get her luminescence out of my mind. Sleeping became difficult as my obsession with her grew. She starred in what dreams were granted me. Sometimes I tried to draw her from memory the next morning, but I couldn’t get her right. She vanished, as dreams will.

  Mostly I painted self-portraits—trying to capture Desire?

  I was working too hard and not leaving the loft on Houston Street for long stretches of time. I didn’t like what I was doing, but I couldn’t do anything else. The paintings were like hallucinations. They scared me. I wasn’t in a relationship, not really, although Midge pretended to think we were a couple. I thought we were like brother and sister, and I hadn’t seen her or anyone else in weeks when the phone rang. Usually I let the machine pick up, but I grabbed it.

  “Hello?”

  “Nick Wilde?”

  It was Rose Selavy. Her low voice was almost a whisper. It was like she was calling from inside my head.

  “This is Nick.”

  “I’m back in New York, and I saw an article about you in Art News that made me curious to ask you some things . . .”

  Her voice trailed off, and then she giggled. I wondered if she was high. The giggle was so low down and lascivious I flashed back thirty years to a forgotten thrill: teenage lust so strong it was like an electric shock sizzling my chakras.

  “What’s been happening?” I asked into the silence.

  I guess I expected her to reply with the usual art world litany of shows seen, places traveled to, and connections made—the business chat that passes for conversation among the artistic young—but she surprised me.

  “I set myself on fire.”

  “Say that again?”

  “I poured drops of lighter fluid on my pubic hair and used a little birthday candle . . .”

  I dropped my cigarette into an ash tray and pressed my left ring finger to its burning tip.

  “Why are you t
elling me this?”

  “Oh, don’t worry, I put it out. But when I did it, I thought of you holding that little candle. Maybe it was the way you looked at me at your opening.”

  I put my hand over the receiver and exhaled. Then took a deep breath, letting the image expand in my head. The match struck, the tiny pink candle, the smell of burning hair. Ashes.

  “You there?”

  “I want to see you.”

  “Hurry.”

  2

  CHOOSE YOUR DELUSION

  AND SO IT began, my passion with Rose. I took a cab across the Williamsburg Bridge to the address she gave me. My heart was pounding so loudly I wondered if the driver could hear it. Probably not. He was talking to himself about the other drivers like a sports commentator. We lurched along.

  It was winter, dark and cold. I shivered, and looked down at my hands in the light from the bridge. Wrinkled and mottled, they were the trembling lascivious paws of a man on the verge of geezerhood. They had a life of their own when I was painting, and now they were drawing me to the soft skin of a 24-year-old who’d struck a match. Since Blue Angel I had seen countless variations on this theme, and had always supposed I would feel ridiculous chasing youth.

  But I didn’t. I felt alive. Inside my suit of aging flesh I felt boyish. I knew that I looked and felt younger than my birthday. I kept trim and boho-stylish. I kept up with the latest despite my resentment of its insane speed. Eros had never caught me napping in my life. My lance was still at tilt. I was ready.

  Sure, It was self-delusion, but one of the lessons of age is that almost everything is. Choose your delusion. I jammed my hands in my pockets and forced a smile that cracked my lips.

  Oh yes, I was ready.

  3

  PLEASED TO MEET YOU

  SHE LIVED ON a waterfront street of Gothic factory buildings converted into lofts. I ascended to hers in a freight elevator sheathed in mirrors. I didn’t want to look at myself—afraid of what I might see in my expression, some fear I hadn’t anticipated—so I closed my eyes until the big doors rumbled open.

  Rose Selavy stood before me in a black slip, her red hair loose over her small breasts. Brightness behind her created a radiant nimbus around her slender form.

  Her eyes were wild, those of a fox running from a chicken coop. Her grin said we were about to get into some mischief together.

  “I didn’t have a chance to put anything on,” she said.

  “You said to hurry.”

  “And you did. Come in.”

  The elevator doors closed behind me. She took my hand and held it to her lips—my sweaty old paw!—and kissed its palm. Then, lifting her slip, she placed my hand on her pubic hair. It was sparse and stubbly. This unexpected, sudden intimacy took my breath away.

  Her loft was painted white. Large factory windows gave her a view of the Manhattan skyline. The big space was almost empty. Straw matting covered the floor. Feeling bewitched, I followed her across it to a long marble table. In a far corner sat a gleaming grand piano banked with so many plants it seemed to float.

  The long table served her for dining and working. She led me to its far end and stood before a drawing lying flat against ripped brown wrapping paper. It was a Balthus rendering of a sleeping girl. I remembered he’d done it in the seventies.

  “I just got it back from the framer,” she said. She watched me as I studied it. Then I saw the resemblance.

  “It’s you, isn’t it?” I tried to keep the awe out of my voice.

  “He was a friend of my father’s.”

  “So you’re what his models look like, grown up.”

  “Do you like it? Is it the right frame, do you think?”

  “Clement Greenberg, eat your heart out.”

  “Oh, good” It was like I’d passed the first test, this was second.

  Seeing her through the eyes of a painter I revered was like looking through a magic lens. She was one of those special beings who’d been born luminous. Balthus had seen it too.

  “Have you ever been in love?” she asked. Her voice was dark now, and low. It was such an abrupt shift I stepped back from her.

  “Pleased to meet you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you’re going to interview me, we should introduce ourselves first, don’t you think?” I tried to keep it light, but I knew I sounded stuffy.

  She sighed. “Look at me.” Her eyes were intense—little flecks of yellow in the green, like licks of flame. I was hypnotized—almost.

  “I’m serious.”

  “I just want to take it a little more slowly.” Could she hear my bones creak?

  “I want to know,” she said impatiently. I thought of the heat between her legs.

  “Okay. Let me tell you a story. Off the record, okay?”

  “Umm.” She nodded, sitting at the table, her hands clasped in her lap. I paced back and forth, performing. What I told her doesn’t matter. Even I knew it wasn’t convincing, and I’m good.

  When I finished, she just looked at me, like she couldn’t believe the bullshit she’d just heard. She shook her head.

  “That is really pathetic. You obviously don’t know what I’m talking about. You can’t lie about love.”

  I thought to say, maybe I don’t believe in it, but instead I said, “It’s been a long time. I was a teenager, in fact.”

  “Who was she? Did she look like me?”

  “Not really”

  “Well—how did it feel? Do you remember?”

  “That was a long time ago,” I said lamely, as if to remind her I was old enough to be her father. She heard the frustration in my voice, but she was persistent. It wasn’t my age she questioned.

  “You must remember something.”

  “Her name was Claudia. I was sixteen, she was a year older.”

  “What did you do with her?”

  “We set fires. We didn’t hurt anybody, but we left some burning buildings . . . ” It was a more desperate lie, but it worked.

  I had her attention now. She bit her lower lip and nodded encouragement. “Then what?”

  I exhaled slowly, “We’d get down in some alley as quick as possible. Sometimes just back in the car. She’d pull her skirt up, and we’d go at it like alley cats. We’d both be bleeding.”

  I broke eye contact with her and took a deep breath. She was staring at me intently, with a curious half-smile on her face, but I kept my head down.

  “I think I believe you.” Her voice was hoarse.

  It was my first deception with her.

  “You have to want to,” I said, looking at her.

  She closed her eyes and held up her arms like a little girl waiting for a goodnight kiss. She pressed her lips to mine forcefully, almost antagonistically. When I stepped back we were both taking ragged breaths. Then she hopped up on the table and pulled up her slip, spreading her legs wide. I had imagined that her sex would be dark and sooty, but of course it was inflamed and dotted with black specks. Her vulva was like a ripe, split-open peach glistening against the gray marble.

  4

  ARTIST OF FLESH

  I’VE BEEN A liar all my life with women—sometimes even when I thought I was telling the painful truth. I wanted from them what I couldn’t give myself: some dark surprise. It was as if I could only learn about me through their eyes. What they saw—that’s what I was. If only it were that simple; but I was ever hopeful. At last I met Rose.

  There is a way of seeing through the flesh and the lies into the mystery of spirit. Lovers, but also children, the insane, the mystical and the dying supposedly know the secret. At fifty, looking back, although I have made many paintings and caressed the flesh of many women, I cannot say I have ever seen into this mystery.

  I have been satisfied with flesh.

  I am an artist of skin and surface, scorned by an art establishment that believes concepts, and not rendering, ideas and not execution, are what is important. I am infamous because people—private collectors and museum curato
rs—buy my work, and journalists report on it.

  Now that I’ve reached my prime, hypocritical critics will start calling me a dirty old man because I want to paint the firm flesh of youth. But the question is, what will I call myself, because I want to make love to it?

  5

  EVOL AT CHEZ MIDGE

  BEFORE JUMPING DOWN the rabbit hole with Rose Selavy, I went to see my friend Midge for a reality check. Her grip on reality is tight around its throat, and she’s good at handling other people’s affairs. She’s a gallery owner who started out in an East Village hole-in-the-wall space showing the work of her friends. Now she’s a big success on East 57th Street with a stable of young Europeans who exhibit sides of beef in formaldehyde.

  We’ve been friends since art school. Even when we were married to other people, we were close. Sex between us was off and on, here and there, but it was always in the background. Eight years ago I did a life-sized full length portrait of her that linked us together in the minds of the culturati who care about such things. Although she’s a striking-looking woman, most of the time Midge wears her blonde hair in a bun. Glasses hide her doleful eyes. I dressed her up in leather and gave her a whip, and told her to hold that snarl. She was topless. I called the picture The Gallery Director but one reviewer called it “The Gallery Director Shows Us Her Tits” which caused a little stir that helped both our careers.

  I guess Midge saw us outfitted with twin rocking chairs one day, but meanwhile, there was no rush. We were comfortable, even with periods of separation.

  Or so I thought.

  She was in the bathroom when I let myself in her apartment.

  I’d called, and she said come on over, but there was an it’s-about-time tone in her voice that I recognized.

  “Help yourself to a drink, Nicky. I’ll be out in a minute. Make me one too, okay?”

  I heard the hum of her hair dryer and went to the sixteenth-century armoire that held her bar. Row upon row of expensive bottles lined the shelves. Midge didn’t drink much, but her artists did. Midge was about plentitude.