Eve in the City

by Thomas Rayfiel

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Praise

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  EVE IN THE CITY - A Reader’s Guide

  A CONVERSATION WITH THOMAS RAYFIEL

  READING GROUP QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION

  About the Author

  OTHER BOOKS BY THOMAS RAYFIEL

  Copyright Page

  This book is dedicated to

  Nancy Rayfiel

  and

  Betty Durbin

  sisters

  Praise for COLONY GIRL

  “A winning, original, and supremely intelligent novel.”

  —RICHARD EDER, The New York Times

  “Eve shows us just what a writer with a truthful imagination can achieve; she is the triumph at the heart of this marvelous new novel.”

  —Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “A reminder that teenage rebellion can turn a quiet life in the American heartland into a thrilling ride.”

  —The New Yorker

  “Colony Girl is chock-full of sexual and religious tension, and Rayfiel’s writing is always lively and crisp.”

  —The Austin Chronicle

  “Colony Girl makes no big promises and takes no cheap shots. What it does do with wit and intelligence is inject into our All-American triad of religion, sex, and politics a healthy dose of a relatively neglected virtue—tenderness.”

  —The Seattle Times

  CHAPTER ONE

  They say the city never sleeps. It does. Just before dawn you can hear it snore. Light hangs in the air, directionless, not yet pressed into rays. The smell of a hidden sea soaks through stone. The streets themselves have that booming emptiness of a shell held to the ear. Everyone is dreaming. It’s when I began to wander, that time in between. I had been in New York a year, and even though I worked until five, five in the morning, still I couldn’t close my eyes. I had the urgent sense something was happening, something important, the very reason I had come here in the first place. I felt there was a secret structure to the city, a true form, and if I gave myself up to it, became one with the seeming chaos, then I could master it and, I don’t know, attain magical powers, become who I was destined to be. I was seventeen.

  “Eve is looking for God.”

  “Actually, I’m fleeing the Devil.”

  “It is the same thing, yes? Takes you to the same place.”

  I stumbled but kept walking. That couldn’t be right, could it? But like everything Viktor said, it made a kind of twisted sense.

  “Get in the car, Eve,” Brandy yawned.

  “No cars in the Bible.”

  Then was the way to God through the Devil? To head right at him? At Him?

  “If you were violated,” Viktor called, “I would feel personally responsible.”

  “If I was violated, you probably would be personally responsible,” I muttered.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  He acted as if it was one of the big benefits of the job, that you got a ride home. Door-to-door service, he called it. But if she wasn’t careful, whoever he dropped off last got more like door-to-bed service. Besides, I had brought my sneakers. I wanted to walk. I wanted to be alone. After seven hours at the bar, I felt like an ashtray.

  “You know, honey, it really isn’t safe,” Nora said.

  She was nice, older, maybe thirty, with dark maroon hair and this throaty smoker’s voice. She sat up front. Brandy and Crystal were in back. Viktor kept rolling alongside me. I knew all I had to do was turn, go on a one-way street, and he wouldn’t be able to follow. But I didn’t want to be rude. He was my boss.

  “I’ll be OK. I promise. I like to walk.”

  “Let her go, Viktor.” Brandy was getting mad.

  He stopped, and I obediently stopped, too.

  “Why?” he asked. “Why do you like to walk?”

  I shrugged. It was nothing I’d ever considered.

  “I guess because I like to think.”

  Brandy and Crystal cracked up. They were both drunk. I never drank at the bar. That’s how I made my money. When a customer bought me a drink, I got water and pretended it was vodka. That came out to more than my tips, most nights.

  “She likes to think,” Brandy gasped.

  I was red. Even Nora was smiling at me in a kind of pitying way. Crystal couldn’t stop giggling.

  “Shut up,” Viktor said.

  They did. We always did what he said, when he spoke in a certain way.

  “I’m sorry.” Why are you apologizing? another part of me asked. “It’s just that—”

  And then he took off. It was so typical. He had to leave me standing there, breathing the taste of his burnt rubber. What he couldn’t take was anyone walking away, turning their back on him. It wasn’t about me personally, I realized, which was certainly a relief. I watched the car get smaller and smaller and felt this wait welling up in the pit of my stomach. Wait for me! I loved the way we would all slide against each other when he turned, how he accelerated so fast you were pinned to your seat and the whole evening, all the bad smells and ugly looks, got blown out the window, got left behind.

  But it only lasted a minute, that feeling of wanting to belong.

  Later, I don’t remember how long after, I stood in the middle of Madison Avenue. With no traffic, the signals revealed their pattern: red, green, yellow, red again, rippling down out of Harlem. In a store window, male mannequins modeled suits. They had no hands. Cuffs sprouted, perfect tubes, around each absent wrist. A trick of reflection placed me among them. If you asked, I would have said I had no destination, that I was only obeying the lights, that I was as subject to forces as the sheet of newspaper blown across my path. I had nothing to do, nowhere to go. The green finally reached me and I began to walk.

  At Seventy-third Street a couple was making love. Her feet were off the ground, clamped to the waist of a struggling, bare-buttocked man. His side was this S that kept clenching and unclenching, trying to straighten itself out. I wanted to look away, but couldn’t. I was mesmerized. My feet were glued. Here was something that was such a crucial part of life, and I had never actually seen it. I mean, never from the outside. Why wasn’t that allowed? Maybe because if this was what love really looked like I was going to join a convent. She let out a cry. Or maybe he did. It was punishment. They were urging each other on. I couldn’t tell who was obeying whose will, or if they were both in the grip of a power bigger than either one of them. And then something changed.

  Is she getting raped? I asked.

  Because now that I thought about it, that’s exactly what it looked like. I did this flip, this mental maneuver, and in the same exact scene I had just been watching, one thing became another, all because of what was going on in my head. The way her hands were frantically pushing, how her feet, which just moments before I thought were trying to stay up, now seemed to be fighting to get away. What should I do? Should I scream? That’s what she had been doing. But screaming . . . why? Anyway, she wasn’t screaming anymore. Whatever it was, was finished. They slowed, then stopped. In silent agreement, he let her down. I must have made a sound, a cough, or scraped my shoe against the pavement, because she turned. I glimpsed a face packed tight with anxiety—a bud, cut open—then white legs in black stockings. Her heels echoed in on themselves. She was walking away. She was gone. Like she had never been.

  And I was still here. Alone. With him.

  “I’m sorry,” I called. “Was it my fault?”

  H
e didn’t answer. He was propped against the wall, pants still down around his ankles, penis pulling him stiffly to one side, like a dowser’s divining rod or a bad shopping cart.

  “I didn’t know what to do,” I went on. “Stop, or keep going.”

  He made a noise, halfway between a sigh and a moan, then fell.

  I walked to the curb, staggered once, adjusting to the new height, then kneeled. The lights threw conflicting shadows. The streetlamp, high overhead, outlined regular features, straight nose, square jaw, while the DON’T WALK sign, lower down, made a mess of his stomach, a muddy shape that was still in flux, still forming. I reached to steady myself, and part of it came off on my hand, hot.

  “Oh,” I said stupidly, seeing now, planted deep down in his belly, not a penis after all, but instead, wagging in crude imitation, the rubber-coated grip of a hunting knife.

  “Oh my God,” I corrected, as the pool of blood moved toward my shoes.

  The city spun. I was running, but it felt more like my feet were busy staying on top of things while the ground jerked this way and that, changed directions and height, tried to throw me off. I had to find a place with lights, not signs or signals but the warm glow of cloth lampshades, of thick candles. Someplace where humans might be. There were no all-night stores, just locked buildings with doormen sleeping inside. I finally found a Korean fruit stand and after babbling incoherently got them to tell me where a police station was. By the time I got there I was exhausted and panting, my mad dash turned to a crawl. I pulled open the heavy metal door, squeezed in, and plodded to a high desk where a man in a uniform sat reading a newspaper.

  “Yes?” he asked, without looking up.

  I opened my mouth, then shut it.

  “Are you here to report a crime?” he asked.

  A crime. What just happened? It didn’t go with words. It came from another part of my brain.

  “If you’re here to report a crime, you have to see a detective. But there’s none available right now. I can give you a form to fill out and a detective will call you later.”

  “I saw something.”

  He closed the newspaper.

  “You’re a witness?”

  “Yes,” I decided. “I’m a witness.”

  I opened my mouth again, then asked, What did I see? It wasn’t so clear. What I’d seen. It also wasn’t so clear what I should do about it.

  “Miss?” the policeman asked.

  What actually happened?

  I heard myself saying, Yes, I saw a robbery. Two people struggling. And then someone getting stabbed. Of course. That’s what it was. A robbery. I was making it up now, lying my way to a new, better truth. A cleaned-up version. And then I ran away. Yes. It all made sense. I didn’t say anything about what couldn’t be, what I had actually seen. While he wrote things down and talked to someone on the phone, I glanced at my hand. I had been frantically clawing it against my side, so the stain, if there had ever been one, was gone. There was just skin, rubbed raw.

  “What’s your name, honey?” he asked, still working on the form.

  “Eve.”

  “Eve what?”

  “No last names in the Bible.”

  He didn’t get it. This was going to end badly. I could tell. Just the fact that he believed my story was a frightening sign. I could feel me beginning to believe it, too, believe the reasonable lie over the impossible truth. And why not? You slap labels on what you see that don’t even begin to describe reality, labels that paper it over. And then you work on fitting those labels into a nice little life, the life you’re told to have, the life the world offers you, if you want to have a good time, if you want to stay normal. And meanwhile, underneath, what it’s all based on, is this insanity where you can’t even tell what it was you saw, where things change from love to rape to maybe murder! Without changing at all.

  He was looking at me, pen still in his hand.

  “I don’t have a last name.” I stared back, trying to look tough. “I’m Native American.”

  Eve Needs-a-Drink, I added silently.

  Someone was frying steak for breakfast. Its smell climbed the winding stairs, past the fifth floor, up a little hidden passageway at the other end of the hall, to “the attic,” my landlord called it, when he showed it to me; “servants’ quarters,” Viktor had scowled, clinging to the banister, out of breath, the time he tried to get in. It felt like the steps would never end. Even at the top I wasn’t home yet. Getting to the top was just the beginning. I held on to the worn steel banister. All habit had been stripped from my life. The key fit in the lock. It was a miracle. I let the heavy door bang shut and break something inside me. The anxiety of the night that I had kept so carefully sealed came flooding out.

  “Wait,” I told myself.

  My hands trembled as they popped ice cubes from the tray. I poured bourbon into a glass.

  “Wait,” I said.

  And I did. I waited for the ice to melt. Because I knew this was serious. I took my time. I waited so long I almost didn’t want a drink. The moment was past. Almost. But as soon as I took one sip I knew I had to have a lot more.

  It never happened. That’s what I decided. Of course. It was so obvious. I had dreamed. I had fallen asleep, and kept walking, sleepwalking, right into that world I had been thinking about, where everything gets mixed up. It had seemed real, sure, but dreams do, until they fade. And now I could feel it fading. I was washing it away, soaking it out, like a stain. There. It was gone. Completely gone. I was back. Sane Eve. See? All it took was bourbon. And people wasted all that money on psychiatrists.

  When you let the ice melt, I told myself, it tastes better.

  That was my problem. I was impatient. I rushed things. I gulped when I should have sipped, ran when I should have walked.

  “Screwed when you should have kissed,” a voice added.

  “Shut up.”

  I whirled around but of course there was no one. What shocked me wasn’t so much that I talked to myself. I was getting used to that, living alone for the first time. But the words I used! Words I had never said out loud before. And the things I said! Things that weren’t even true. There was other stuff, too. Horrible insults, bad advice, whole scenes I played out with people who weren’t there. They kind of fascinated me. They were clues. I was my own oracle, telling me things about myself I didn’t know, or didn’t want to admit knowing, so they appeared as these unexpected bits of craziness. For example, just now, “Screwed when you should have kissed,” where did that come from? Did it mean I really wanted to sleep with someone? (And there was only one someone, unfortunately.)

  But I didn’t. I took this inventory of my soul. Every lust, every itch. Every wish, every hope. And Viktor Kholmov didn’t figure in any of them. For one thing, he was shorter than me, which I hadn’t thought biologically possible, but even with his ridiculous shoes he only came up to my forehead. And he was a horrible human being. He saw men as things to get money from and women as things to get sex out of. I don’t know if he saw much of anything past that. Brandy thought he was nice. She was “in love” with him. Why? I’d asked. She thought that was the stupidest question, so stupid she couldn’t answer it. She rolled her eyes. I swear I could hear the echo they made in her big empty blond head. “He has nice shoulders,” Crystal said. “Yeah, I suppose he does.” I suppose he did. I had never really noticed them before. Maybe the fact that he left them naked most of the time made me look away. He wore undershirts, not real undershirts but the colored ones that are meant to be seen. One was even tie-dyed. So I was always trying not to stare at his hairy armpits and this mole under one that was like a black egg. I kept expecting it to burst and millions of little six-legged Viktors to come scuttling out and swarm all over the bar. “And the mustache,” Crystal added. I nodded like it was famous. The Mustache. He was always touching it, stroking it, making sure it was still there.

  No, I didn’t want to sleep with Viktor, I confirmed blissfully.

  By now I was eating the
bourbon, tearing off chunks of it like bread. I looked down and saw ice cubes melted to thin discs. It was a shape I had seen in some book. Platelets. What blood came in. My blood, at least. A transfusion. I gave myself more.

  At eight o’clock, the one patch of sunlight my apartment got glittered at the bottom of the tub. I slid deep under the water and stared up. My ankles were black, just from walking. It was amazing how dirty the city was. I scrubbed and scrubbed.

  “Why don’t you shave?” Viktor had asked me earlier.

  We wore hot pants at work. And stockings. He liked that look. To see you all encased like a sausage. I changed as soon as the bar closed. I was the only girl who did. Sometimes Nora threw a sweater over her leotard, but no one else seemed uncomfortable except me. Still, even when I had gotten into loose shorts and a baggy T-shirt, he reached from his stool and ran a hand up my thigh.

  “Stop it.”

  “Hairy women. In my country they were always Party Officials.”

  Why don’t you shave? I realized I should have said. But of course it was too late.

  “Don’t you want to be a woman?” he went on.

  “You mean if I shave my legs I’m a woman?”

  “It is a rite of passage.”

  He would use words and phrases that were so precise. Because his accent was strong, you thought he didn’t know the language, but he did, maybe even better than you. In a different way, certainly. He used English like a scalpel, like it wasn’t part of him, so he could make it do what he wanted. Nothing ever just came from his mouth. It always had a purpose. And that purpose was usually to make you uncomfortable. I pried his hand loose. Brandy was pretending not to see, banging around the tables in front perched on her monster heels. She was already tall. I don’t know why she had to be taller. It was insecurity. Or maybe she thought he liked it. Anyway, I knew I was just being used to drive her crazy.

  “If I shave my legs, what grows back will be different.”

  “What do you mean? What grows back will be hair.”

  “Not the same kind of hair. Don’t you know that?”

  “Know what?”

  “Never mind.”