“Would you like to live here?”
“Here?”
“Yes.”
“Sure, I guess so.”
I waited for him to explain further, but he didn’t. It wasn’t an apartment I would have chosen, if I could live anywhere I wanted. But it was about ten million times better than the roach motel on Eighty-Seventh Street. Was he really saying I could live there?
“Do you have any music?” I asked.
“Music? Yes, of course. What kind do you like?”
“All kinds, except for prog rock and jazz fusion.”
“I don’t know what those are.” He fiddled with the stereo, settling on a classical station. Then he put down his glass and stood in front of a mirrored wall. “Come here.”
I was confused. He was standing four feet away from me. “I am here.”
“Come here.” He pointed down at the rug.
“You want me to sit on the rug?”
“Come here.”
I gulped my Scotch and set my glass on the floor. Then I crawled onto the rug and sat down cross-legged. He knelt beside me and kissed me. I understood that we were going to have sex, and I felt nervous and a little repelled, but also curious. It was as if whatever happened would not happen to me. It was all part of the movie.
His kissing gradually got rougher, his goatee scraping my cheeks. He put his hand on my back and positioned me on my knees, facing the mirror. He pushed the skirt of my dress up over my hips and pulled down my tights, rubbing his hand over my ass. I saw him in the mirror, staring at my ass with weird concentration. I worried that it looked fat, and told my brain to shut up. Kneeling behind me was a mad scientist with slick black hair and a pointy gray beard. I dropped my head, not wanting to look. He lifted my chin and held my face toward the mirror. When he let go, I dropped my head again. He lifted my chin impatiently.
He unbuttoned his shirt, took off his belt and pants. I watched him obediently, still on my hands and knees, like a doomed piglet.
“Get that thing off,” he ordered. I pulled off my dress and kicked off my tights. He pushed me down again, parallel to the mirror and onto my back, pressed my legs apart, and pushed into me. I watched him while he fucked me: the beads of sweat on his forehead, the animal sound of his grunting, and the way his hair shaded his eyes, which fixed on my body but not my face. They widened until they looked like they might pop out of his head. I tried to notice what I felt—I knew I felt something, but I couldn’t find it. I was floating on the ceiling, watching a dough-skinned girl lying on the floor underneath a hairy back.
Ivan saw me watching him. He turned my face toward the mirror and held it there.
“Look!” he gasped. “Look!” His eyes blurred again, and he was lost inside his own sensations. He watched himself thrust into me. He wouldn’t let me turn away, so I closed my eyes. It was one thing to see everything through my own eyes like a camera… but to see the scene whole, in the mirror, as if someone else were filming it, was too real.
He pumped his hips harder and faster until he came with a violent jolt, yelped pitifully, and fell on top of me, a moist and heavy blanket. I lay beneath him, listening to his panting. I had an urge to apologize, to say, I’m sorry I did this to you. It surprised me that I could elicit such a strong response from a grown man. I knew that any woman could do it; even the image of a woman, or just part of her, or anything could, but still I marveled: I reduced him to this.
He rolled off me onto the rug, propping his arm on his bent knee and beaming. “Miss Phoebe! With rosy cheeks. You look like a Renoir.”
“Thanks.” I reached for my tights and pulled them on, trying to remember what Renoir nudes looked like. He watched me with wolfish satisfaction.
“Are you in a hurry to leave?”
“Well… no, I just thought I’d get dressed.”
He stretched out beside me, put his arms around me, and kissed my cheek. “We must do this again sometime. We must do it again very soon, and again (kiss) and again (kiss) and again (kiss). Will you go out with me again? (kiss).”
“Sure.”
“We’ll go to a nicer restaurant next time. Have you been to the Russian Tea Room?”
“I’ve always wanted to go there.” I’d seen it in a lot of movies: Tootsie, The Turning Point, Manhattan…
“Have you? Let me take you.”
“Okay.” I shivered slightly; it was chilly there on the rug. He picked my dress up off the floor and handed it to me.
“Here, you’d better put this on. I must get a robe to keep here for you, and a negligee….”
I pulled my dress over my head while he put his own clothes on. My breasts strained against the fabric even more than before, as if they’d swelled in the last few minutes. “What should we do now?”
He rubbed my back with absentminded affection. “It’s late. I’ll take you downstairs and put you in a cab.” He reached into his pocket, flipped through some bills, and pressed forty dollars into my hand. “That should be enough to get you home.”
It wasn’t enough to make me feel like a hooker—though I had no idea how much a hooker would be paid—but it was enough for five or six cabs and almost twice as much as I earned in a day at the bookstore.
“There’s something you should know.” I reached for my shoes. “Someone followed me tonight when I walked around the block. After you went inside.”
“Followed you?” He rushed to the window and looked down, as if he might spot the culprit from the twenty-seventh floor.
“I walked around the block like you told me to. A man in a trench coat kind of popped up behind me and followed me until I got back to this building.”
He grimaced, stroking his beard. “Come on, let’s go.” He helped me into my coat and led me, his arm around my back, to the elevator. We descended. He nodded at the doorman and told me to wait in the lobby while he hailed a cab. Out on the sidewalk, he surveyed the area until he was comfortable that no one was waiting or watching for him. He flagged down a taxi, then beckoned me to get in as he opened the door. I ran out of the lobby. He kissed me quickly on the forehead, shut me inside the cab, and hurried back to his glass high-rise.
* * *
I called Carmen as soon as I got home, but Sarita said she was out. Half an hour later, she called from a pay phone. She was at the Pyramid with Atti.
“What happened?” She had to shout over the noise in the club.
“A lot.” It was too much to tell over the phone.
We met at the Dublin House after work the next day. We ordered beers and pumped quarters into the jukebox. I told her everything. Almost everything. I held back a few of the more embarrassing details, like the way he’d forced me to look in the mirror—even though I knew she’d like that. Somehow it felt too sordid to say out loud.
“He might let me live in his apartment.”
“Is it nice?” She flipped through the songs on the jukebox, looking for something.
“In a way. It’s kind of sterile.”
“Maybe I could live there with you! Secretly.”
“What about when he’s there?”
“I’ll hide.” She punched in the numbers for three Patsy Cline songs. “What else?”
“He wants to take me to Bergdorf’s and buy me clothes and then take me to the Russian Tea Room for dinner.”
“No one goes to the Russian Tea Room for dinner. Only for lunch.” She leaned against the jukebox, soaking in the opening bars of “I Fall to Pieces.”
“Oh.” I felt stupid, not knowing that.
“Maybe he’s afraid he’ll see someone he knows there at lunchtime.”
“And he doesn’t want to be seen with me?”
“Well, you said someone followed you…. I hate to say this, but all signs point to he’s married.”
I flipped through the jukebox.
“What are you looking for?”
“The Jam.”
“I don’t think this jukebox has the Jam.”
“Every good jukebo
x has the Jam.” I hit the J’s; no Jam. I punched in James Brown. I felt like a fool. “I don’t know that he’s married.”
“True. We’re just assuming, based on his weird behavior, that he’s married. But we don’t know it for a fact.”
“I should stop seeing him.”
“You can’t! Not now. Not when the mystery is just getting good. I mean, a guy followed you. You have a right to find out what the hell that’s all about.”
“I guess.”
“And even though the Russian Tea Room is Siberia at dinner, they still have those blinis with caviar.”
“I’m crazy about caviar.”
“We can’t stop now, Phoebs. We have to find out what’s behind all this before you quit. I’m dying to see how this story ends. Aren’t you?”
8 EXAMINATION ROOM
He didn’t take me to the Russian Tea Room. He asked me to come to his office, a maisonette on the ground floor of an apartment building on West Fifty-Sixth Street. He gave me a glass of brandy, hinted that he was going to Paris soon and wanted to take me with him, and then pushed me into an examining room and fucked me on the padded table, which was covered with that white paper doctors use for sanitary purposes. It crinkled noisily under me the whole time. When he was finished, he opened his eyes and seemed surprised to see me. “Okay?” he said.
I couldn’t understand why I felt like crying, because I really didn’t care about him or any of this or anything. Nevertheless, sobs like storm clouds brewed inside me. I choked them down. I refused to let him see them. I’d read somewhere that dolphins evolved to look happy and cute so that humans won’t want to kill them and eat them. It might be true. An instinct for self-preservation told me to act like it was all okay. And it was all okay. I was using him, or trying to, but it wasn’t going well.
When I left the office, I spotted a tall man in a black knit hat across the street. He paced back and forth in front of a building, half obscured by parked cars. I couldn’t tell if it was the same man who’d followed me or not. I hailed a taxi I couldn’t afford and went home.
I sat on my bed in the dark. Carmen was waiting to hear how things had gone at the Russian Tea Room. I didn’t feel like calling her just then. I didn’t feel like talking to anyone.
I stared out the filthy window. It was streaked with grime and pigeon shit. I thought, Someday I’ll clean it. I knew I would never clean it. Across the air shaft, lights burned in the building next door, in bathrooms and kitchens and stairwells. A man sat at his kitchen table in his underwear, drinking milk and laughing over something he was reading in the paper.
The phone rang. I sat quiet and tense on my bed. I heard Mary Frank answer it. She said, “I think so. Just a minute and I’ll see.”
Her footsteps grew heavier as they neared my door. She knocked. “Phoebe? Are you in there?”
Robin’s voice: “I heard her come in a few minutes ago.”
Mary Frank knocked again. “Phoebe? It’s your mother.”
The last person I wanted to talk to was my mother. But if I put it off, she’d call again, and keep calling until she reached me, and if she didn’t reach me by midnight she’d call in a SWAT team to break down the door. I might as well get it over with now. “I’ll be right there.”
I rose from my mattress, creaky as an old woman, and shuffled out to the living room. It took all my energy to infuse my voice with brightness and emotional health. “Hello?”
No one spoke. Someone was there; I could hear small noises in the background, clanks and tinklings.
“Mom? Hello?”
An intake of breath, and the person hung up.
Maybe something was wrong with my parents’ phone. I called back.
“Hello?” My mother’s clear voice.
“It’s me. Is your phone working all right?”
There was a pause. I imagined her pulling the receiver away from her ear to look at it and see how it was working. “I think so. It rang, I answered, I heard your voice, you seemed to hear mine….”
“So why did you hang up on me just now?”
Another pause. “I didn’t.”
“You didn’t just call me a minute ago?”
“No.”
That rattled me.
“Honey, what’s going on?”
“Nothing! Sorry, it was a misunderstanding.”
In the background, Dad said, “Is she okay?”
“What kind of misunderstanding? Is something wrong? Something’s wrong. Your voice is getting squeaky.”
Sometimes my voice gets squeaky when I’m nervous. I made an effort to speak in a lower register. “It must have been a wrong number. A woman called and Mary Frank thought it was you, that’s all. So what are you up to?”
“Don’t change the subject. What are you up to?”
I could practically see her suspicious squint over the phone. Once the gears of her anxiety are set in motion there’s no shutting them down.
“I’m spending a quiet Tuesday night at home in my pajamas,” I said. “So stop worrying.”
“Your dad wants to talk to you.”
The phone changed hands. “Hi Phoebs.”
“Hi Dad.”
“You doing okay up there?”
“Yes.”
“We’re coming to visit you soon. Who’s playing at the Vanguard these days?”
“I don’t know.”
In the background, Mom’s voice: “Honey, not this weekend…”
“We’ll figure out something,” Dad said. “Take care of yourself. Don’t forget to have fun.”
“I won’t.”
“Give me that.” Mom wrested the phone away from him. “We want to come up and see you, but your dad’s been working too hard. He needs to rest.”
“Okay.” I didn’t want my parents coming up to visit me. I couldn’t face them. I had become a person they wouldn’t recognize.
“Sleep well, honey.”
I hung up the phone, then dragged it by its long cord into my room. Across the air shaft, the man in his underwear paced the floor, talking to himself and waving a chopstick. I dialed Carmen. I told her about the weird phone call.
“What about the Russian Tea Room?”
“We didn’t go to the Russian Tea Room.”
“Stay right there. I’m coming over.”
Fifteen minutes later she appeared with a bag of Cheez Doodles, a bag of jellybeans, a pint of mint chocolate chip ice cream, and a bottle of whiskey. “I know you like all of these. I wasn’t sure which one you’d want right now.”
I took the ice cream. She took the Cheez Doodles. I stared out the window while we talked. Mr. Underwear across the air shaft turned out his kitchen light.
“I don’t want to see him again,” I said. “Next time he calls, I’m dumping him.”
She agreed. “No reason to see him again. Now we know how this story ends.”
Except the story didn’t end there. It kept going.
9 THE DIETZES’ PARTY
I was feeling low. My apartment was dark and dirty, I was behind on my rent, I hated my roommates, and I hadn’t been able to dump Ivan yet because he hadn’t called—and Carmen thought a party might cheer me up. Her parents happened to be throwing one. And she didn’t want to go alone.
Len and Betsy Dietz held a bash for their music and theater friends every November, but this year’s party was a bigger celebration than usual. Len had composed the score for a new ballet that had just opened to raves. Hundreds of guests crammed into the Dietzes’ Sutton Place apartment, drawn by the electricity of success.
We took off our coats in the vestibule. I could see people glamorously puffing in the living room, but I didn’t want to ruin my angelic reputation with Carmen’s parents, so I left my cigs in my coat. After a quick hello to the Dietzes—Betsy surreptitiously sniffing Carmen’s breath as she kissed her—Carmen led me to her room, where we spent the first hour of the party smoking a joint with her younger brother, Sid, a tenth-grade pothead in Converse high-tops and
a Black Flag T-shirt.
“Nice hairband,” Sid said to Carmen. “You look like Nancy Reagan.”
“That’s what I’m going for.” Around her parents, Carmen camouflaged herself in wool skirts, pearls, turtlenecks, and black flats. She’d worn her tweed reefer to the party, leaving Mitch at home.
“You’re not fooling anybody, you know,” Sid said.
“Shouldn’t you be at the piano doing your Oscar Levant imitation?”
“I can’t face those people. Every time I poke my head out there someone says, ‘Where’s Rosa? Is Rosa here? Oh, so sad she couldn’t make it.’ ”
“Tell me about it.” Carmen rarely mentioned her older sister, Rosa, who had moved to L.A. to take a small part in a movie.
“Do you have a picture of her?” I asked.
“Out in the living room,” Carmen said. “On top of the piano.”
“We couldn’t possibly come from the same family as Rosa,” Sid said. “She’s skinny and tall—tall for a Dietz, anyway—and looks like a ballerina.”
“It’s true,” Carmen said. “She takes after Betsy’s side of the family. Our California cousins.”
On top of Carmen’s dresser, next to an upside-down top hat, I found a framed photo of three little Dietzes posing together on a pony, lined up by height. I recognized Sid and Carmen’s pointed chins and rascally grins, Sid squinting in the sun and Carmen shaded by a cowboy hat. The girl behind them—Rosa—let her hat hang down her back so that her smooth hair glistened in the sunlight. With her serene, heart-shaped face, she did look like she belonged in a more elegant family.
“How old were you here?”
“Let’s see… three, nine, and eleven, I think.”
I peered inside the top hat, which held a bunch of random bits of paper. “Is this your stub collection? Can I look at it?”
“Go ahead.”
I took the hat off the dresser and riffled through the ticket stubs: A Chorus Line, Annie, An Unmarried Woman, five Rocky Horror Picture Shows, Behind the Green Door…
“Behind the Green Door? Isn’t that a porn movie?”
“What can I say?” Carmen shrugged. “It was the seventies. Len and Betsy went out a lot back then.”
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