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me.”
    Shenge and Jean-Michel clean up the loft and place flowers everywhere. The refrigerator is filled with pastries.
    Every morning Jean-Michel leaves the loft to go and paint in the basement of Annina Nosei’s gallery. He returns every two hours to see Suzanne and bring her some cakes. Then he comes home every evening at six.
    Jean-Michel lets Suzanne wash his dreadlocks when he sits in the bathtub. They take a long time to dry—like sponges. Suzanne pats them and squeezes them in a towel for an hour.
    In the Crosby Street loft there was a color TV and a TV stand on wheels that was either in the living-room area or would be dragged into the bedroom area. There was a Haitian voodoo statue that stood about three feet tall with a little bag around its neck. The statue was crudely carved out of dark wood. Jean bought this statue one day and told me to never open the bag around its neck. I never did. He told me never to touch the statue. I never did.
    There were lots of toys around. Jean loved toys. Toy trucks and cars, marionettes from Italy. Strange little handmade toys. There were drawings and papers strewn everywhere in the painting area, which was also the living-room area. There were books all over the floor or leaning on the wall. The kitchen table had bowls of fruit and flowers on it. Jean always bought me flowers—those red flat plastic-looking things with the yellow penis coming out of them. Those were his favorite flowers. There were bottles of expensive wine. Everything was always a mess. I cleaned it up every day. He had oil-stick crayons everywhere, hundreds of them. Many were mashed on the floor.
    He always shopped at Whole Food and Dean and DeLuca on Prince Street in front of the Annina Nosei Gallery. He bought expensive plates and stainless-steel pots and pans and utensils to cook with. The refrigerator was always full. He liked fruit mixtures. He bought a juicer and made carrot and vegetable juices. But then he would go and buy expensive Italian pastries or chocolates. He would only buy expensive food.
    In the bedroom on the bed was a pale yellow and gold wool blanket with a floral large diamond design and a child’s Superman polyester comforter. There was a black piece of fabric on the headboard shelf. We always went to sleep with a mirror covered with coke right at our heads on this headboard shelf. There was white powder ground into it all over the place.
    Sometimes he would stay out for three days at a time on coke and in the clubs with other women. He would not talk to me but he still wanted me there. He had different people over at night. Sometimes it was fun for me. We would sit around the living-room coffee table and do coke for hours.
    The smell of his sweat came out of my pores.

THE CROSBY STREET LOFT MADNESS
    She irons the clothes, folds his clothes, places them in the same order on the shelf—the red sweater is folded this way and placed above the red shirt. She places the soap at an angle on the sink and always places the towels in the same order 1-2-3. She irons one shirt five times. She makes the bed three times and irons the sheets. If a sweater fades in the wash she cries. She never speaks and only answers questions or speaks in a panicky monologue:
    “My mother was a spy in the war. They took her to see a woman with transparent skin. They could see her heart beating in there and her lungs and blood. They could see her eyeballs turning. This was a military secret. Nobody knows about this. And they would give the woman food—turnips, oranges, bread—and watch it all go down into her. This was a military secret. I heard about her when I was five and I thought she must have been very beautiful like a larva, but very scared. I kept looking at my own stomach and wondering what was in there. I chewed carefully. My mother said she was a kind of Venus or virgin.”
    At first Jean-Michel thinks this is funny and puts some of her words in his paintings. Then he tells her to shut up.