Let The Great World Spin: A Novel - By Colum McCann Page 0,61

money in New York City, Blaine and me. In the late sixties he had directed four black-and-white art films. His most famous film, Antioch, was a portrait of an old building being demolished on the waterfront. Beautiful, patient shots of cranes and juggernauts and swinging headache balls caught on sixteen-millimeter. It anticipated much of the art that came behind it—light filtering in through smashed warehouse walls, window frames lying over puddles, new architectural spaces created by fracture. The film was bought by a well-known collector. Afterward Blaine published an essay on the onanism of moviemakers: films, he said, created a form of life to which life had to aspire, a desire for themselves only. The essay itself finished in midsentence. It was published in an obscure art journal, but it did get him noticed in the circles where he wanted to be seen. He was a dynamo of ambition. Another film, Calypso, had Blaine eating breakfast on the roof of the Clock Tower Building as the clock behind him slowly ticked. On each of the clock hands he had pasted photographs of Vietnam, the second hand holding a burning monk going around and around the face.

The films were all the rage for a while. The phone rang incessantly. Parties were thrown. Art dealers tried to doorstep us. Vogue profiled him. Their photographer had him dress in nothing but a long strategic scarf. We lapped up the praise, but if you stand in the same river for too long, even the banks will trickle past you. He got a Guggenheim but after a while most of the money was going toward our habits. Coke, speed, Valium, black beauties, sensimilla, ’ludes, Tuinals, Benzedrine: whatever we could find. Blaine and I spent whole weeks in the city hardly sleeping. We moved among the loud-mouthed sinners of the Village. Hardcore parties, where we walked through the pulsing music and lost each other for an hour, two hours, three hours, on end. It didn’t bother us when we found the other in someone else’s arms: we laughed and went on. Sex parties. Swap parties. Speed parties. At Studio 54, we inhaled poppers and gorged on champagne. This is happiness, we screamed at each other across the floor.

A fashion designer made me a purple dress with yellow buttons made from amphetamines. Blaine bit the buttons off one by one as we danced. The more stoned he got, the more open my dress fell.

We were coming in at exits and going out at entrances. Nighttime wasn’t just a dark thing anymore; it had actually acquired the light of morning—it seemed nothing to think of night as having a sunrise in it, or a noontime alarm. We used to drive all the way up to Park Avenue just to laugh at the bleary-eyed doormen. We caught early movies in the Times Square grind houses. Two-Trouser Sister. Panty Raid. Girls on Fire. We greeted sunrises on the tar beaches of Manhattan’s rooftops. We picked our friends up from the psych ward at Bellevue and drove them straight to Trader Vic’s.

Everything was fabulous, even our breakdowns.

There had been a tic in my left eye. I tried to ignore it but it felt like one of Blaine’s clock hands, moving time around my face. I had been lovely once, Lara Liveman, midwestern girl, blond child of privilege, my father the owner of an automobile empire, my mother a Norwegian model. I am not afraid to say it—I’d had enough beauty to get taxi drivers fighting. But I could feel the late nights draining me. My teeth were turning a tinge darker from too much Benzedrine. My eyes were dull. Sometimes it seemed that they were even taking my hair color. An odd sensation, the life disappearing through the follicles, a sort of tingling.

Instead of working on my own art, I went to the hairdresser, twice, three times a week. Twenty-five dollars a time. I tipped her another fifteen and walked down the avenue, crying. I would get back to painting again. I was sure of it. All I needed was another day. Another hour.

The less work we did, the more valuable we thought we had become. I had been working toward abstract urban landscapes. A few collectors had been hovering at the edges. I just needed to find the stamina to finish. But instead of my studio, I stepped from the sunlight in Union Square into the comfortable dark of Max’s. All the bouncers knew me. A cocktail was placed on