Excerpted from AUTONOMY

Bridget wondered again what Gossamer had done to be fired from his job at St. Vincent’s, his reason for leaving New York for a Vancouver post. The elevator opened on a shared landing cozily jumbled with boots and umbrellas (a snowstorm was expected) and further personalized by taped up artworks—a child’s watercolor of camels and palm trees, museum postcards and the familiar black poster with a pink triangle, vaguely bomb-shelterish to Bridget’s eyes, that read Silence = Death. The hallway was far from silent, since music and shouting dinned through a half-open door through which Bridget could already see people standing with drinks.

She registered Nikka’s absence with disappointment; still, she reasoned, it was better to be unaccompanied in this surprisingly elegant apartment than to spend yet another night in sweatpants, poring so intently over a manuscript that she was only subliminally stirred to look up when a full floor of Trade Center windows blinked out. She spotted Gossamer, dressed in an old-fashioned Prince de Galles suit, his hair slicked away from a high, furrowed brow. He was conferring with guests, a cigarette spearing one hand, the other arm bearing swags of clothes and leather-bound books. “I have to get rid of everything,” he repeated, as if he were headed to prison, or planning to leap from one of the bridges be-gemming his East River view.

She squeezed down a hallway crammed with taped-up cartons to a spacious bedroom where guests were leaving things piled on a four-poster bed. The wood frame where curtains usually hung was smothered in textures: bright boas, a sequined gown and a brass-buckled fisherman’s raincoat. Bridget could make out that the room was nicely decorated. She turned to study a framed mixed media piece that represented an ectoplasmic man, his fingers spread as if to fend off an attacker. Aside from these spidery fingers, the man’s body was beguilingly composed of tiny pairs of breasts, clipped from an obsessive’s trove of girly magazines.

“That’s a nifty little dress.” It was Gossamer behind her. “Where’s the preservationist? Isn’t he minding you tonight?”

Bridget explained that Lazlo didn’t live in New York. “Anyway, he doesn’t mind me.”

“But he’s alive, right? In good shape?”

“Yeah. I mean, he’s avoiding certain foods.” It was hard to remember that this man was a certified surgeon. She nodded towards the collage. “You’ve got interesting art here.”

“That’s Titty-Man. I made him years ago. He’s going into storage now.”

“You did this?”

“Back when everyone was dropping out, in the sixties, you know, I quit medical school and tried to make it as an artist. I painted, did collages. But I had a young kid and a wife to support. So I switched to a more lucrative medium.” He paused. “Hey, where’s your drink? Well, you’re no fun! I’ll be right back.”

Right back apparently meant never, given Gossamer’s attention span. While arriving guests deposited snow-beaded coats on the bed, Bridget killed a few minutes inspecting the bookshelf, all the usual postmodern suspects, but also classic literature, probably from his college days, the spines seamed and flaking. She went back to the living room, now bouncing irresistibly to De La Soul. She felt too shy to dance. A light tumble of snow in the window caused guests to point and exclaim, mid-bounce.

At the drinks table, an outgoing woman with wild hair that reminded Bridget of her own pressed her with a glowing glass. “Have you ever had Allen’s Lonely-hearts Punch? Oh, it’s kind of a tradition. No, I don’t think it’s radioactive, though I wouldn’t put it past him.”

Bridget cautiously sipped. The woman had the game and slightly frayed allure of someone who’d thrived in this neighborhood for years, and Bridget thought she seemed familiar.

“I was about to ask you! Where have we met before?”

When Bridget heard the woman’s name, Alicia Krimple, she realized that she was sort of famous, a curator who had conceived a series of well-timed and -publicized art shows that “interrogated the Body,” the capitalization implying the culturally mediated nature of what was interrogated. They listed various schools they’d attended and taught at, employers in the art world and publishing, places they’d lived, agreeing at last that they probably should know each other, without discovering whether they’d previously met.

Her next conversation was with dancing men almost identically dressed in button-down shirts and bright crew-neck sweaters. They invited her to help them name their fizzing punch. “We’re on a film noir theme,” said the shorter one, swaying around her. “Touch of Evil, Kiss Me Deadly….”

“I Wake Up Screaming?” Bridget suggested, as Gossamer arrived at her side. “I was looking for you,” he reproached, handing her an overflowing glass, though she still hadn’t finished her first one. Then he was gone, conducting new arrivals to his bedroom.

After a while, she tired of waiting for Nikka. Guests were emerging from the bedroom in costume, beneficiaries of Gossamer’s purge. She gazed stupefied, lonely, out at the black roofs of tenements, and above them, the scintillant snowfall. She returned to the bedroom to retrieve her coat.

Gossamer was crouching at the hem of a young woman with slick, black-dyed hair. She had been zipped into a full-skirted green dress. The bodice was off-the-shoulder and her shoulders were very muscular and smooth. At first, Bridget wanted to back away, thinking she had walked in on something sexual, though around them people chatted, came and went.

By now Gossamer had exchanged his suit jacket for a garishly beautiful flowered kimono that slipped to reveal his sinewy and slightly sagging flesh against a Brando-esque white undershirt. He bore a fruit-like contraption on his wrist, which Bridget suddenly recognized as a pincushion. He was basting the emerald skirt into “furbelows” he explained to Bridget in his muffled smoker’s voice, detaining her briefly by squeezing her calf with his very large hand.

“Do you know what furbelows are?”

“Uh...I’ve occasionally wondered,” she admitted.

“Allen loves to say that word.”

“Where do you like fur best?”

“Watch out, he’s going to try to make you say it.”

Bridget and the green-gowned girl exchanged a look. He kept pins in his mouth and talked about sewing and sex without losing them. Then he was done and caressed the two strong, white legs under the rear of the skirt, groping higher in a judicious manner, as if he’d assembled the girl with the dress.

“We’re not that close, Allen,” she reminded him, stepping out of reach. The skirt was now fluidly flounced, like theatrical drapery.

Then it was Bridget’s turn to be costumed, which she resisted on the grounds that she had only come in for her coat, before yielding to the playful ambush of two nimble pairs of hands skimming a silvery dress over her raised arms and lowered head, while she floundered through circles of crinoline. Someone had unzipped her real dress behind her, while Gossamer freed her from its armholes, sliding one garment under the other, so it was as if some superfluous part of herself had slipped down underneath. Bridget watched him toss it cavalierly toward the bed. There was a regressive pleasure in giving herself up to this drunken adornment.

The dress was unusually heavy, like liquid upholstery. “Take a deep breath,” he said, hooking the back of the bodice, not as easily as Bridget would have liked. She straightened involuntarily when his strong fingers goosed her waist.

He drew close behind her in the mirror, to leer at them both? And she was confused, though not too drunk to recognize that she was now curious to sample one more whiff of what had repelled her in him in the first place.

Bridget awoke to a list of chores to complete before her trip upstate to an academic conference on publishing. At odd moments she would look up with free-floating raptness whose source would turn out to be Gossamer. As if a grain of sand had lodged in her internal world: his avid, flushed face in the mirror. Sleeping with him would mean an impossible lowering of standards. In any case, he had given no sign of intending pursuit.

Nikka called to apologize for arriving late at Gossamer’s party, having been detained at a dinner where she had made interesting book contacts. “Good for you!” cheered Bridget.

Nikka’s entrée to just about every milieu was a bit of a puzzle to Bridget. Her work in translation was peculiar enough—in an excellent way—that it might never have seen print if she hadn’t belonged to a recurring type that sophisticated New Yorkers couldn’t get enough of: hard-drinking, young, blond Europeans from comfortable backgrounds who tended to rave that the city’s dysfunction was “so real, in your face. Just fantastic.”

Though, before hanging up, Nikka said she was getting worried about her brother, Kai’s, recklessness in trying to wrap up his low-res documentary about East Village life. “Flashing that camera all over the place, like he wants to get it stolen. I just hope he stays safe till he leaves for Helsinki.”

The upstate panel was heavily attended by MFA students, desperate to chat Bridget up about their short story collections and touchingly thrilled to be awarded her business card, which she distributed to everyone, even the weird, balding hippie who said his novel recounted one year of a futurist plague in the voice of a ghost that was trapped in an oxygen tank.

She recognized Marc McHavey, a literary agent she’d known in grad school, beside the chalky wheel of Brie on offer at the meet-and-greet. “You give good panel,” he flirted. They had only coincided during her first year, though he was younger than Bridget. Now he had to be earning twice her salary at William Morris. He had never been more than deflectively pleasant, though she found his poise and fair, smooth-shaven plumpness appealing. They gossiped, then he let drop a tidbit about his girlfriend, who developed scripts for PBS.

Okay, got it. Not gay, but you’re taken.

In answer to her inquiry about the book protruding from his jacket pocket Marc handed her a final page proof of Foucault's The History of Sexuality, Volume I.

 “On my desk this morning. I don’t see how I’m going to sell it to Hollywood, although the title’s excellent.” He seemed slightly drunk and reluctant to end their conversation. “How about if we team up to get rid of it?” He noted his initials inside and handed it to her. “Pass it on.”

“Like a chain letter?”

“You can’t just throw it out.”

“Or what will happen?”

“You’ll be assigned to edit Volume II?”

“Oh, no,” she smiled, already dreading the lonely train ride through half-melted industrial snowscapes to her studio apartment.

As she finished her General Tso’s chicken, the phone rang.

“Kai was having his own little going-away thing at Allen’s,” said Nikka, “but then the electricity got shut off. We’re at this afterhours bar around the corner from his place. The bartender hates us, or maybe just Allen. Better hurry before we get bounced.”

Bridget remembered that bar from her neighborhood days, so she was surprised how hard it was to find again. Then she told herself she could have followed the stench of stale beer and fresh roach spray. It occupied a dingy railroad flat whose weekend crowd sometimes spilled to the street, but which, tonight, was nearly empty. Bridget stole glances at a middle-aged couple trudging in thrall to a warped disco record, looking fixedly away from each other for the length of the song.

“This place is very David Lynch,” she remarked to the table. “It didn’t used to be, but now it is.” What she meant was that every neighboorhood place that had yet to be gentrified now seemed ironically sleazy, a little surreal, both a joke about everyday weirdness, and also a portent.

A young couple were kissing Kai goodbye, wishing him bon voyage. He barely responded, deep in argument with Gossamer, his hair erect in sweaty licks around his head. And Gossamer, still draped in his black coat, seemed only to hear his own soundtrack.

“I don’t do retakes,” he insisted.

Kai wanted to reshoot a crucial segment about an atrocity that had taken place nearby less than a year ago. A dance student, young and gifted, had been killed and dismembered by her boyfriend, a Satanist pot dealer. Then, to the frenzied delight of the tabloids, he had cooked up her remains in a soup he had served free to Tompkins Square Park’s homeless residents. Or so it was alleged. Gossamer had obtained the super’s keys to the still-unrented Avenue B apartment and had led Kai through the repainted rooms of the crime scene. He vaguely knew the victim and had seen the Jesus-bearded boyfriend making his rounds of the park with a lovely brown chicken—poor chicken, where was she?—perched on his shoulder. Now Gossamer mused nostalgically about the neighborhood, the way it was both a cesspool and compost heap, encouraging psychotic flame-outs and also wild artistic innovation.

“And I’m going to miss it like hell when I’m gone,” he concluded, and rose to play darts, as Nikka excused herself to the ladies’ room.

As soon as they were alone, Bridget and Kai began to discuss Gossamer. It occurred to her that they both were a little obsessed with him.

“Why was he fired from the hospital?”

“Politics. You see what’s he’s like. And he doesn’t go on about it, but he has convictions. There was a fight over free condoms. St. Vincent’s is Catholic. Obviously. And then needle exchange. The administration warned him. But he won’t compromise. He pisses people off.”

He seemed to have researched his subject. Bridget nodded, spellbound.

“I was trying to get someone to go on the record about him—"

She had been reaching for the Newport pack on the table when Gossamer himself suddenly loomed from behind and obstructed her hand.

“Uh-uh! Smoking? I’m telling Professor on you.”

“Who’s Professor?” Kai asked. “Sounds kinky.”

“He’s kinky if you’re an old, abandoned building.”

“Oh yeah,” Bridget said. “I’m sure he talked your ear off about his fetish for historic preservation.”

“No, your man was discreet.” Gossamer handed her a cigarette and extended his lighter. “Now, when some patients come out of sedation they babble like toddlers. You hear more than you want to.”

“Look, Lazlo’s not my man. We haven’t been together for years.”

“Bridget is single,” confirmed Nikka, plopping gracefully into her seat.

“Why don’t we fix that?” joked Gossamer. “Look around.”

Just then the waiter arrived, a no-nonsense black man who took their drink order, reserved but cordial. Except in his refusal to look at or directly acknowledge Gossamer. Who had offended him how? And what would it be like, Bridget wondered, to hitch one’s life to such a man? Gossamer was divorced—three times, he’d admitted—so there was her answer. Yet, as they drank strong, cheap cocktails and then wandered to the jukebox and back to play darts, she felt tugged to take note of his gestures, his laughter, the drape of his trouser cuffs. He seemed as ungraspable as a matinee idol she’d watched as a child from a balcony seat. Larger than life, all nuance and motion, no substance. She could see he had once been a beautiful man.

“Listen!” he shushed as she joined him at the bar. “I played this when we came in. Who would put this on a jukebox?”

“Dance?” Bridget asked quickly. Only the drunkest couples had been getting up to overlap like shadow puppets, barely occupying space.

“You can’t dance to ‘TB Sheets’!”

“I can.” She had never even heard the song before, squealing harmonicas. How bad could it be? He stepped toward her reluctantly, holding her at a distance. He was right, there was no way to dance to this. She tried to ignore her awareness of how it must look from across the room.

“The only love song ever written,” Gossamer numbly enunciated, as they two-stepped, just barely, “about leaving your girlfriend to die on the ward.”

“Closer?” she entreated.

He barely allowed her to press against him; still this contact had a potency that should have alerted her to pull away. It was as if she had leaned her full weight against a pivoting library wall, or theatrical front made of plywood. Though she could only sense him through multiple layers of clothing, she understood that her sensation of groundlessness, pitching through space, was his own internal state. What had happened to the barriers between them? She had penetrated straight into the air shaft of his fear.

“You’re juiced,” he informed her. “The song’s over. You need to get home.”

“What?”

He was frowning and stepping away. “Can you make it, or do you want us to take you?”

It took a few seconds to register. The name of this thing was rejection.

“Doctor’s orders.”

“I’m not all that drunk,” she said. “Actually.”

“Let’s go,” he repeated, sweeping their coats from the table and making her button hers before they walked out to the street, where Bridget tried to wave him off, soberer now in the cold.

“Still good friends,” he asserted when he opened her cab door. “Come by whenever. I’ll be home tomorrow. Some nurses are helping me pack.”

As the taxi took off across town, she began to weep. Why? Over Gossamer? Aware of the driver through the open plexiglass, she stayed riveted to her passenger side view: a phony “bodega” with a teenage guard in a fancy down jacket controlling the line at the door. Streets humped with garbage bags, snow draining under a blackening crust. In other words, nothing to look at, and yet she couldn’t turn away.

At work she was hungover and irritable. That week, she had a scheduled personal day, which meant she would struggle to make normal deadlines. There were museum shows to see, discount shopping she’d been putting off; yet somehow, she’d managed to throw her whole schedule off and embarrass herself.

On her subway ride home that evening she discovered The History of Sexuality in her tote bag. As the train stalled inexplicably before entering each station, she opened it, intending to leave it behind on the seat, then becoming absorbed, although the book wasn’t really about sex. Except as it was shaped as a concept by language and culture. Foucault was interested in the way descriptions of both the rarest and commonnest kinks had found their way into leather-bound textbooks: klismaphilia, homosexuality––scientific-sounding terms invented just a century so as to categorize the private behavior of citizens. And if these sexual deviations had never been put into language? Would they have remained too obscure to be subject to punishment?

The train jerked to a halt, then lurched again. Bridget looked around to see how others were interpreting the crackling loudspeaker. Should she dash out when the doors opened, in case they were switching to running express?Despite the uncertainty, no one made eye contact.

At home, she’d spread a story collection on her nubbly rug and had just stretched out with hot tea and two Oreos, somehow enjoying the bite of raw wool on her elbows, when her phone rang. She picked up, though she usually screened, mainly to filter her mother who tended to call at weird times to make flagrantly cryptic announcements like, “I want to take out some life insurance very quickly without a physical. Could you help me figure out how one goes about doing that?” Which Bridget would drop everything to get to the bottom of, only to find out that there was no bottom to Helen’s request. “I just don’t understand any of the things I’m supposed to have, IRAs and whatever. I thought you could help me get started, at least, on insurance. You realize, you're my beneficiary.”

“I’m sitting alone in the dark,” said Gossamer’s cool voice, “thinking. About the way I shooed you home.”

“Oh. Well,” she replied, trying to regulate her breathing. “Maybe turn on your lights? Find something else to think about.”

“No electricity.” he sounded embarrassed. “And I’ve tried that. I have all kinds of business to take care of. Instead, I’ve been dialing your number and then hanging up.”