Absalon

I showed up earlier than my host. Everywhere there were canvases: draped over a bed, splayed across tables, floors, walls. Sloshes of color, occasional nude photos. And then I noticed the view: Half-height windows to the ceiling on a corner looking out over Central Park and the city to the left and right and ahead from the 31^st floor.

“Do you mind if we play the video again?”

Across from the black leather couches on which we sunk was a flat-screen showing a naked woman doing a kind of gymnastic dance, creating art as her body hit the paper with paint. (Yes.)

“No, go ahead,” I said. There were two guys, both middle-aged-ish, one heavily haired and bearded. Suited.

“It’s called ‘movement art.’ ”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I see that. She’s…moving. And making...art.”

One of the men laughed, one pretended not to hear me. Or did not hear me.

The evening wore better than this though, as I wandered through the “salon” to which I’d been invited. During formal introductions I learned that among the comic illustrators, sex bloggers, and one city planner was one right-wing bigwig for a former (still) bigwig in government. When I talked near him later, I found him to be shouty and spitty. Not about politics, just in general. Shouty. And spitty.

I was at some point in the thrall of a short young man with misanthropic tendencies. We spoke a lot about Jews, about being Jewish, about many things Jewy. And then there was this:

“I had surgery while awake recently.”

“What?” he leapt.

“I had a tumor removed from…here,” I told him as I touched the spot.

“I just got a boner,” he said.

We laughed and laughed and laughed.

Later he made a gas chamber joke. Which left me floored and breathless and for some reason led me to hug him. The irreverence was charming and disgusting at once.

In retrospect, I only remember one piece of art from all the crammed canvases. A terrible tiny painting of a monkey across from the toilet. It had a red background. Awful.