Use any of the spices you like. Just don’t touch the liquor.
In Oakland Carter Michaelson tracked down Sarah Lee—he was always tracking her down, he’d been doing it for more than a decade—and asked her to come to New York for two months and watch his place. Carter was an old lover from art school who had made it big in New York with his vast, testosterone-infused sculptures that had people calling him the new Richard Serra, which was always funny to Sarah Lee, because the old Richard Serra was still around: Why did they need a new one? But Carter was irresistibly weird: He had a rolling mass of dark curls that stuck out like a thick bush around his head, matched with a plain, calm face, skin the color of a washed-out beach, and persistent blue eyes that popped out against his pale skin, all atop a set of gangling legs and arms. He looked like he should be famous, and therefore he was. It worked that way in the art world, that was always Sarah’s understanding. Not that he needed any money: He had a trust fund that shot out a check for several hundred thousand dollars a year, some of which he blew on guitars and recording equipment for his rock band comprised entirely of aging artists, with the exception of the drummer, a recent art-school grad who kept the band full of weed and brought in young girls to their shows. Carter had a huge loft in Long Island City and two crazy dogs, a bulldog named Sasha and a lazy-eyed pit bull named Marcus. The pit bull hated practically everyone, but he loved Sarah Lee, which was why Carter was calling.
“I need you, Sarah Lee. You’re the only one Marcus loves.”
Carter was planning on going on walkabout in the Australian outback.
“I’m going to need at least two months,” he said. “Maybe more. I need to be in a place where there are no buildings, just sky and land all around me. I need the absence of metal in order to contemplate it.”
Whatever, it was a free place to stay.
On the night Sarah arrived in Queens, she slept with Carter, because she always slept with Carter when she saw him. He was just so impressive to her, even though she knew he was also full of shit, the way he mumbled and pretended not to understand people in order to dodge conflict, acted like he was in some sort of artistic space in public, isolating himself from the group, when he was really just stoned or bored most of the time. Or fucking with people, she knew he did that, too. He had admitted it to her before. She was his little sponge, soaking up his personality disorders, and they were legion.
But still, his was a compelling strangeness, and the sex was always so good. And she cared for him. And he for her. It was a twitchy kind of feeling she had when she saw him, like how her fingers felt after sewing for hours.
“Maybe you could stay longer, after I get back,” he whispered in her ear. They were on his couch, naked, clothes everywhere, Sasha and Marcus sitting nearby with their tongues drooling from their mouths. “We could be a happy family.”
She could not allow herself to take his offer seriously. She didn’t want to be disappointed, and Carter had done it before. Yet she promised, “I’ll think about it.”
Her first week was spectacular: She took the dogs for long walks through the dirty but quiet streets of Long Island City, down past 5 Pointz, a massive compound of graffiti-strewn buildings that would send Sarah Lee into a creative frenzy for most of the afternoon. Plus she got an illustration gig with a weekly in town after getting drunk with an editor in an East Village dive. The editor loved her work, said she was just what New York needed, said she knew a creative director at an ad agency who would simply die over her stuff.