When they pulled up to Evan’s place on 106th Street, halfway down the block to the river, she hopped from his lap and straightened her clothes.
Cancel the second stop, she said through the acrylic opening. Evan had taken out his wallet.
I’ll pay, she said. He looked at her and put the wallet away; she tugged a twenty from her tiny bag and got out of the car on the wrong side and went to the driver’s window.
Thank you so much for a wonderful ride, she said, blew him a little kiss.
Hey, he said. No problem. The ride was four seventy-five and she tipped him five plus the quarter. She had never tipped a cabbie anything close to five before. She was stoned, seductive, angry and rash. Evan stood on the sidewalk watching. She felt like an assassin.
In the elevator she pushed into him, put her hand on his pants, kissed him. This is new, he said. She detected his nervousness and so continued, amused, even going a little harder. His face looked like something made from dough—he was afraid.
Up in his bedroom, she executed it all ruthlessly; she pleased him ruthlessly, straddling him, running her body down along him, letting her breasts fall against him, her hair, moving downward, taking him in her mouth briefly, feeling his breath suck in, feeling him rise—funny the way men almost levitated when you did that. Ruthlessly, she provided this tandem of brief pleasures while he lay there, and then, ruthlessly, she fucked him—that phrase ain’t no pleasure but meanness flicking through her mind. He seemed so small, so insignificant to her, even while he lay beneath her and was inside her. She pushed down roughly on him and she thought: So this is what it’s about, this is what it is to feel powerful, this is what it is to feel like a man: what one needed, to experience power, was to find an advantage and use it, to abandon the idea of equality, or justice, or love. In the flush of that thought she began moving much faster on top of him, as if she were a guy, and her orgasm rose up strong and fast from a deep heat in the middle of her, up her thighs, down from her abdomen, usually this happened slowly and often it hung there, not arriving or sometimes arriving, but not here, not now: she came in two short explosions, fell upon him for a moment, and then she rolled off him. He followed her, as if he would now get on top, but she shook her head, pushed him back and rose from the bed.
What? he said. Clearly, he was shocked.
So was she, though in a more pleasant way. She quickly had her underpants on and then was hooking her bra. She could feel that her chest and cheeks were still flushed. She was breathing hard.
Whew, she said. What a strange, unreliable gift orgasm is.
He glared at her, an angry disbelieving expression—she would remember it later with a trace of sympathy but for now it only annoyed her, that he still, after his performance, had expectations. She lifted her pink dress above her head and let it fall over her body like a curtain coming down at the end of a play.
And you’re just leaving? he said. He sounded like a bratty twelve-year-old boy, and the particular note in his voice was so familiar that she knew, though she’d not acknowledged it before, that he frequently sounded like a bratty twelve-year-old boy.
Her little sweater, her shoes, her bag: all there. She would straighten her hair in the elevator.
I’m not just leaving, she said.
I guess I’ll call you, he said.
Don’t, she said.
And then she walked out.
* * *
IN THE OUTER hall she stood, slightly nauseated, waiting for the elevator in the dim landlord light. Ah. Here was the flip side of power: isolation. She felt as if she were in a capsule of some kind, autonomous and untouchable. Power was a disease—it cut you off, like leprosy. What a vista of solitude. Until now, even to be aware of such a state had been completely outside her nature, not to mention her convictions, which were flimsier things. She was utterly still, almost frozen, feeling herself change. All the narrative trajectories she’d sketched for her life—sexually, romantically, professionally, even spiritually—pointed to some relatively nice ending that as of this minute she didn’t believe in anymore. Maybe she would again tomorrow. Maybe not. Maybe from here on everything would be different and she would remember this night, this sex, this emptying moment in the hall, as the point when everything was altered, when her life went off in a new and not necessarily better direction. Now—here it was, right in front of her, making her dizzy, this change, she felt it, a part of her, but also not, something alien—this was the unmooring of American life. Now, anything was possible: any form of false promise, any form of blindness, any form of savagery, destruction, cruelty or ruin. And why not? After all, it was the beginning of a new decade.
|| PART TWO || all exit in silence
15
Among other innovations the new decade introduced was the practice of New York City landlords driving people out of their apartments with dogs. It was the rents starting to climb. Koch was mayor; there were tax abatements for creating luxury apartments out of run-down SROs and now everybody loved real estate. People a year or two out of college actually talked about real estate as if it were world history or Chinese art.
Which made life more difficult. By 1981 Anna wanted to live on her own, she had lost her cheap rental on 108th when the building was sold, moved in with a couple of semi-friends from Barnard. She was working at Newsweek as a researcher, she shouldn’t need to live in a share apartment. Yet suddenly everything decent was, minimum, six or seven hundred a month. She found a place, finally, a small one-bedroom on 98th Street, just east of Broadway, rent-stabilized, old landlord with old lady wife as his secretary on East 42nd Street, she went in to sign the lease, the old man’s hand shook over the signature lines. It was a little noisy, an open kitchen set off from the medium-sized living room by a counter; the living room faced west and the small bedroom north, at the back of the building, just higher than the buildings behind her, just higher too than the ailanthus tree that was almost six stories tall and that despite its aesthetic poverty she came to love; nice light, pleasant light, not the kind that would heat the place up too much. It was five twenty-five a month, a bargain but almost half her take-home pay, which was insane, but it made her happy. Two blocks from the subway. And there on Broadway was Fowad Discount Clothing store, with the racks of crazy polyester blouses and skirts out on the sidewalk, no, not forward, but Fowad; and Comidas Criollas y Chinas, the Chinese-Cuban place for rice and beans and maduros. There were a slew of these on Broadway: La Tacita de Oro, La Bella China, a Citibank on the corner of 96th with six new cash machines. She loved cash machines with their crisp twenties and tried to have balances allowing her to withdraw from them but sometimes she didn’t. She bought herself a modest stereo at the electronics place on the west side of Broadway. If she’d needed a washing machine or refrigerator she could have had that too, along with televisions, fans, air conditioners, all at 99th. At 100th Street the renovated Metro Theater, former porn hole that even the guys she knew hadn’t gone near, now a pretty little revival house with seats rising two levels, elegant old décor repainted and restored. Every Wednesday a Japanese directors double feature: Ozu, Mizoguchi, Kurosawa. At 95th Street the Thalia—another revival house (go ten blocks south she’d hit a third, the New Yorker, then the Regency), the Thalia the most rugged of them all, so ancient some thought it predated the medium of film. Holes in the seats and a curious construction in which the floor sank from rear to mid-theater then started rising again, with seats in front higher than those behind. It worked in that you were looking uphill at the screen so no one in front of you actually got in the way. She learned never to let her hands wander under the seats. Gum of Neolithic era and yesterday too, layered on the steel seat bottoms. That sense of encroaching human fluids. She went by herself but wished she didn’t have to. She saw Paris, Texas there, and came out and walked forty blocks south to Columbus Circle before taking a slow bus back home, just to have time to absorb the thing.
And at the Embassy a special (meaning scandalous and semi-forbid
den) screening of Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses, which disturbed her and then, for a time, obsessed her. Certain images—the oral sex at the beginning, among others, she wanted to make a man come in that deliberate, quiet, almost cold-blooded yet servile way—such images clung and appeared in her mind’s eye throughout a typical workday. She read what she could find about Sada Abe, on whom the story was based—she’d killed her lover via erotic asphyxiation, cut off his penis and scrotum and carried them around with her in her kimono. This violence was not the appeal—nor was the obsessional love that drove Abe—but the bloodlust was, and that mysterious abasement, which builds up as an annihilating power. She wanted to know what it was, to feel that kind of obsession, that kind of erotic pull, enough to make you lose your sense of self. Like a surfer longing for the largest possible wave, though it would swamp him, possibly kill him. She didn’t believe she could actually be induced to do such—she was too proud. But for a time it fascinated her. The men she was meeting, young white men, did not have that pull; they were weak magnets, all wearing crisp white broadcloth shirts, hoping their crisp white broadcloth ships would come in. What had happened to the dangerous ones, shirtless, dirty, untrustworthy, alive as fallen wires snapping at the curbside?
She thought about the wires snapping at the curbside. Good snake imagery, girl. Not surprising. And she could listen to the Clash and Talking Heads all day. She needed to go downtown and find the punks, but she rarely ventured there and never came home with anyone. Such skinny boys.
* * *
A RECESSION CAME and lingered into ’82, more than a year, and for a long portion of it George was living on forty dollars a week—which he got for one day of work in a photographer’s studio—just office work and bank statements and the like; the photographer had no work either. George had, starting at age twenty-one, two hundred dollars a month from his mother’s estate, which was from the sale of the house and some stock, and which just about covered his rent and utilities. In the strange heat of an early spring, there was a transit strike. He’d bounced through a couple of short-term sublets and now without his own place he was staying with a girl on Staten Island, her name was Jennifer. It was a miracle for a man of his age never to have gone out with a Jennifer before, there were so many, but she was the first. She went by Jenn, which was unusual then, a new name shortening for a new decade. She had an apartment in St. George, a pretty apartment in a bad neighborhood, a five-minute fast walk to the ferry, three and a half at a manageable run, he’d go in on the car level from the parking lot and not break stride as they were closing the gates. Every single time he rode that boat—especially when he sat on the deck outside and watched the water and the passing Liberty statue, which he almost always did—he thought of his acid night with Anna, her body and hair and lips in that wind, and the fallen tree, and the death of Jeffrey Goldstein.
And there was the statue, the muscular lady; and there were the two monoliths. No matter what time of day or night, this set of monuments, one statue and two towers, heralded one’s arrival to Manhattan or saluted one’s departure from it, isolated indomitable facts of the harbor geography: one verdigris and forever alight by candescence manmade or natural; the other two lustrous slabs thrust more than a quarter mile into the sky, twin statements of absolute black when in darkness, tremendously grave; or, on overcast days, leaden gray, like the water; or, on lighter days, silver; and, sometimes, in limpid sunlight, magically reflective in pale blue, turning pink or pulsing magenta at sunset. Like the harbor itself, changeable but the same. Water all around. The entire rest of the density of buildings, which is to say, the city, was like a unitary other fact, a massive stone and glass palisade. The ferry, on its way to Manhattan, just after it passed the Statue of Liberty, tacked forty or fifty degrees starboard to slide between the Battery and Governors Island and nose its way into the slips of the South Ferry terminal. Sometimes he waited in the stern, abandoned by the other riders, who rushed forward and pressed like sheep at the bow, eager to disembark; and from here he looked back, past Governors Island and across the water to the old Norwegian sailor town of Red Hook in Brooklyn. The Norwegians had called it the Bitter Desert. The Dutch had given it the name that lasted, after its outcropped land and the red clay that formed it—but the bitter desert it remained, just possibly the toughest section of New York City, a rank contested by certain areas of the South Bronx, parts of Bushwick and Bedford-Stuyvesant, and a series of postapocalyptic corners on Lenox Avenue in Harlem where flames burned in ash cans and ghostly young men like Kurtz’s acolytes at the nightfire moved through the shadows in a gangly dance, selling dope. All these Dutch-named villages. You could feel this history downtown, where the place had been settled. The log pilings and wooden walls that the ferry banged itself on, slowing itself, stopping, creaking its way to the dock, might have dated from colonial times. If he were looking from the bow he’d see approaching the trimmed tops of the pilings, wooden and haphazard, mossed and algae’d, scattered like teeth in the gray-green water. Some of these pilings supported the plank barricades mounted with tires, which jutted out at uneven angles from the beveled edge of Manhattan, the thirteen-mile plinth on which modernity had been built—all this cheap old wood added a homey touch.
They lived together, he and Jenn, for four months on Staten Island before he found himself a place on Henry Street, just south of the Lower East Side, not far from Chinatown and the fish market. Before that, when the subways and buses were out, that near-two-week strike, the ferries still ran (different contract, different union) so he came into town and walked to the job near the Flatiron, for his forty-dollar, eight-hour day.
All those other days with Jenn in the hot apartment on Staten Island. She worked three nights as a waitress at a bar in St. George so they were both home most days: she was supposed to be working on her art—she made paper, and from it, collages of large size and rough surfaces. He was supposed to be writing: what, he didn’t know. Magazine and newspaper pitches. But mostly they read and fucked and listened to music, played backgammon—whenever he took a late lead, knocked her out and blocked her return, and then doubled the cube, she threw the board off the bed. No matter how many times she did this he never altered his strategy. It was a contest, as was so much between them. They went for walks down to the water in search of a cool breeze. She’d been a stripper for a while in ’77 and ’78, lined her eyes with kohl, and she liked clubs; she pulled him into punk and new wave—he was an altogether too Caucuasian boy from Connecticut and in this scene he’d known only Patti Smith. And, by then, Blondie and Talking Heads. Somehow he had seen the New York Dolls in ’74 but wasn’t taken, which she thought, given the golden opportunity, was criminal. She got him listening to Iggy Pop and the Ramones (he got the Ramones, he told her: they sounded like the Beach Boys put through a grinder) and the lesser-known Bowie stuff, the Sex Pistols and other bands he never remembered the names of; and if she was feeling rich from a night of good tips they’d meet late and take the ferry to go to CBGB or the Mudd Club, where he always felt out of place.
She was lean, spikey, painted and inked, she loved to dance and was his short-lived pass to such venues; she sweated openly and profusely and liked to embrace him and kiss him in the heat and wet of it. He tried to like this; he tried to yield to the body-pleasure of it but never quite managed it. Sweat in bed was fine but on the dance floor it was testimony to a wordless erotic place that she had gotten to and he hadn’t. She was long-limbed and sinewy, her body was a topography of clean lines, small breasted with sharp nipples, a strong, alluring torso and ass, muscled legs as from a futurist mural; her leanness was such that, in sex, everything stood out when she came, tendons like taut ropes down her neck and between her torso and arms, muscles of her shoulders and chest and abdomen delineated, flexed, adamant, while she gripped the sheets on either side hard enough to put small tears into them, leaving a few of her sheets looking as if they’d been attacked by chickens. Sometimes instead her nails went into his back, an
intense pain that in such a sexual-pleasure state felt like a distant sweet scream. Later it would hurt. She curled upward and scissored her legs tight against him. Almost always three growling grunts. Four was an accomplishment. Hell, it was all an accomplishment. It was with Jenn that he began to understand that there was a kind of miracle in bodies, in their uniqueness and their gifts. Hers, at these moments, was magnificent and frightening. The muscles of her vagina fluttered on his cock with surprising strength, massaged the semen efficiently out of him as they would one day urge outward an unsuspecting child. The sex was explosive, it had an angry edge to it, knocking bones, it felt as if both he and she were picking a fight, looking to get back at the other for something, to avenge some hurt, to find recompense for some valuable item that had been taken from them. As if each held a grudge, not against the other but against all women and all men respectively; against sex. Against cocks and cunts. He would flip her over and she would strike back at him repeatedly, and kick, really try to hurt him, but once he learned to keep going, to do battle and overwhelm her, she would then arch her back and push her cunt upward to be fucked. The first time, he’d stopped.
What did you stop for, she said.
I thought something was wrong. You were kicking me.
Fight for it, she said. I want you to fight for it.
Crazy Sorrow Page 15