Eve in the City

by Thomas Rayfiel

  “Wait.”

  But I had worked myself free.

  Now I looked at my leg, stuck straight in the air, trying to intercept the shaft of morning that streamed through the bars of my bathroom window. Beyond them was the roof. I had a razor. It lay in the corner where the tub met the wall. It was my temptation every time I took a bath to shear away my childhood and start fresh. I knew that once I started I’d have to keep going, keep shaving, and what grew back would be that black bristly stuff, not the soft down that lay there now. On the other hand, on the other leg, as I raised it and got rid of more dirt, when I did shave, it would be smooth, smooth like a baby, like those girls men call Baby, and his fingertips would slide over me, not drag against the reality of my flaws, not get bogged down, stuck, and sink in. I would be hard and slick, at least on the outside.

  I didn’t get dressed. I never went out, after. Everyone was running around with their heads down and this haunted look in their eyes. I could hear it happening out my window, the buses and horns, the buzz of people you never noticed unless you worked nights, so you were used to not hearing it. There’s a beautiful silence to the city, but it’s obliterated most of the time. I put my shades down so I wouldn’t have to see the bricks. Daylight made me feel like bruised fruit. I turned on the lamp, lay on my stomach, and read. I loved buying books, not from bookstores but from men on the street, the ones who laid them out on card tables or the sidewalk. I didn’t go by titles but by how the book looked and felt. I liked small paperbacks you could jam in your back pocket, ones that had been read so often the covers were flexible and the paper mushy. They were so cheap. Everything else was expensive. People tried to charge you for a glass of water. But each book was only a dollar. I bought whole armfuls without looking. Why not? I didn’t know what was good. I was so ignorant. I piled them on the floor and opened them like presents, presents to myself.

  It was also my way of eating, because I didn’t like to eat. I got incredibly hungry, but the urge set off this panic in me. I was afraid if I ate, I wouldn’t stop. I would immediately get old and gross and . . . there, in a way I wasn’t now. I felt as long as I stayed empty inside, then none of this was really happening. I could still go back. (Though back to what? And why would I want to, when I had come so far to escape?) So I ate with every other part of my body. I wolfed down liquor. My feet chewed up whole blocks. And at night, which was morning, I lay on my couch, which was also my bed, squeezing down into the cushions like an animal flattening itself against the ground, and read. I was starving for words. I read actresses’ memoirs, diet books, how-to manuals. It didn’t matter. Whatever looked and felt a certain way. I was going by instinct for the first time ever, in every part of my life. It was the only way to explain the mess I had gotten myself into, that it was my mess, and because I had chosen it, because I had let it happen to me, it must be important and necessary. That’s what I told myself, yawning and reading and very drunk, I guess, although I didn’t feel it particularly, the rest of the city gearing up just as I was slowing down.

  Around noon, I turned off the light and looked at myself, examined my body. It was a different kind of shadow than at night, where neon signs and headlights gave everything sharp angles. The dark had this caressing quality. I touched myself, to make sure I was still there. I had to keep planting my hands just to make sure I was me, because the rest of the time I was so busy trying not to be there, not to be the girl they saw. Usually I fell asleep that way, sprawled on the cushions, with no blankets, splayed out, offering myself up to the heat. But this time the phone rang.

  “So,” he said, and let that hang a moment. “You are alive.”

  “Of course I’m alive.”

  “I tried you earlier.”

  “I must have still been out. Walking.”

  “Walking and thinking, yes?”

  “I was just about to go to bed.”

  “Alone?”

  “Of course alone.”

  “Why ‘of course’?”

  I had the phone pressed to my ear. I wanted to hear where he was. There was always noise when Viktor called. Sometimes it was arcade sounds, machines dinging and ringing, racking up meaningless point totals. Once there was music so loud I could barely hear. He was calling just to make me jealous that he was at some happening scene, a party he had found in the middle of the day. As if I cared. Viktor didn’t have an address or number. Nobody knew where he lived. People called him at the bar, but he never came to the phone. You had to leave a message. He called you. Lately, though, it was always from the same empty-sounding place. I could hear deep echoes, like in a warehouse or a high school gymnasium.

  “Where are you?” I asked.

  “Not far. I could be there in five minutes.”

  ... which meant an hour. It was such an obvious trap. That was the thing about Viktor. He was so obvious. I kept thinking there had to be more to it. That he couldn’t really be so wrong for me. That this was all part of some deep plan he had. But maybe it wasn’t. Maybe he was just some sleazy guy who talked funny and ran an illegal bar. End of story.

  “I can barely hear you.”

  “Eve.” He let that hang there, too.

  I had made him call. He was responding to some psychic distress signal I had sent out. It was ridiculous, but I felt in control, like I was influencing him, even though from the outside, in the real world, it was Viktor who bossed me around. But I was making him do that, too. Even though I didn’t want to.

  “Brandy hates me.”

  “Brandy loves you,” he corrected. “Crystal hates you.”

  “Crystal? No. Why should Crystal hate me? I like Crystal, a little.”

  “You don’t know nothing.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Conducting business.”

  There was another vibrating, echoing sound. The airport? Was it a plane landing, taking off?

  “Who did you go upstairs with, this morning?”

  “No one.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “I take the girls home, Eve. That is all.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “You just have a very conventional sense of home, that is the problem.”

  “I don’t want to go home.”

  “Of course not. You are still in flight.”

  And you are trying to shoot me down, I answered silently.

  “Considering your background, it is perfectly understandable,” he went on. “All this is new to you. Perhaps I know what you are going through, more than the others, since I, too, was raised in a cult. The cult of Communism.”

  My brain was already loose from its moorings, drifting, getting slapped back against the dock but no longer tied to it, knocking once and then sailing out, a little further each time.

  “Eve, are you asleep?”

  “Of course not.”

  “ ‘Of course,’ again.”

  “What do you mean, conducting business? Aren’t we your business?”

  “You? You bring in almost nothing. You in particular, with your lying cheating ways. I see you secreting funds in your pants pocket.”

  “We don’t have pants pockets.”

  “Yes, exactly. Why do you think I have you dress that way? Most women would be too modest to pad their buttocks with filthy dollar bills. But in answer to your question, the bar at best breaks even. I could make ten times more having you all sit in a room providing phone sex.”

  “What is phone sex, anyway?” I yawned. There was this blurry boundary where today became yesterday. I was surrounded by it now. This fog. “I’ve always wondered.”

  “Phone sex is something remarkably similar to this, if you must know.”

  “Why do you call me, Viktor?”

  “To see if you are all right.”

  “And am I? All right?”

  “To see that you got home.”

  “I don’t want to go home.”

  “You sound strange. Did something happen?”

  “No. I was dreaming, that�
�s all.”

  “Sleep, Eve.”

  And then I thought he—I know it sounds crazy—I thought he kissed me. It was just a sound, that soft touching of the lips. It could have been anything. What I wanted to hear. What I feared hearing. The only reason I knew the call was real at all was because when I woke, hours later, drenched in sweat, panicked, in the late afternoon, the cord was wrapped around my throat, strangling me, and the telephone was making that siren sound, with a lady’s patient voice repeating over and over, “The receiver is off the hook. Please hang up. The receiver is off the hook . . .”

  It was an Opening.

  I climbed the steep steps to the second-floor gallery. Someone had sent me an invitation. I didn’t understand how that was possible. It was the first piece of personal mail I had ever gotten. I came to find out who sent it. Otherwise you couldn’t have dragged me there. I didn’t like art. I had been to the museum and seen all the famous paintings. They were pretty, I guess. But it was obvious that what made everyone stand around gaping was their being worth several billion dollars. “You can go on the street,” I felt like announcing. “Go anywhere and see visions far more magical. People breathing. The sun on a pigeon’s neck. And you can really have those. They can be yours alone, for nothing. All you have to do is tear your eyes away from money!”

  After a while, someone came over and explained I was in the Gift Shop, but when I got to the real thing I felt the same. It was Idolatry.

  I looked at the name printed on the wall just inside the door, the same as the one on the postcard, which wasn’t even a real name, just like, when I went in farther, the paintings weren’t even real paintings.

  “I took a picture of my vagina,” this woman was saying, “and had it blown up, poster-size. Then I rented advertising space in five subway stations. I left the photos up a month, until they were covered with graffiti, then took them down, had them framed, and hung them in the gallery.”

  “You took a picture of your vagina?” someone asked.

  “And blew it up, poster-size,” she said. “Then I rented advertising space in five subway stations.”

  I kept walking. There were lots of people. They were all talking to each other, trying not to make eye contact with the “art” they had supposedly come to see. But there was a sculpture in the middle of the room, too, so their looks kept running this optical obstacle course, shifting everywhere, then flitting nervously away. I found myself pushed to that one open spot made by everyone else’s turned back. It was a display of soap dishes, the porcelain kind that are built into the bathroom wall, but they were chiseled out and sat on pedestals with the soap still inside, not fresh bars, but used, different shapes and colors. I had no idea what it was supposed to be. At least they smelled nice, all the perfumes, and that one green detergenty kind.

  “You’re next.”

  I looked up. The person wasn’t talking to me but to this guy standing next to me. I mean right next to me. He had just appeared. He was tall and very thin so you could imagine him moving without a sound, even over the creaking shiny wood floor. But what made me jump was that he was suddenly so close, way inside that invisible border you put up.

  The man who was talking to him looked like a jerk. The tall guy must have thought so, too, because he didn’t even answer, just nodded.

  “Are you done? Have you even started?”

  It took him a long time to think of what to say. And then he just came out with, “Not yet.”

  The questioner walked away. I thought he was going to talk to me now, because he was practically standing on my foot, but instead he stared at the soap. So I stared at him. He was lanky. I never really understood that word before but somehow I knew this must be it. He was made of parts that fit together, one after the other, and they moved smoothly, like they were very well oiled. Two long legs, a narrow waist, a torso, two arms, all separate somehow, but perfectly matched. Oh, I thought to myself. A body.

  “That’s mine,” he said, without looking up.

  “Of course it is.” I thought he meant his hand, which I couldn’t take my eyes off of. It had these . . . fingers.

  “That’s my soap.”

  He pointed to a round one, the smallest of all, just that last bit in the middle that doesn’t dissolve anymore, that you can’t get rid of. I tried to think of a profound comment, to show what a deep thinker I was.

  “You must be very clean.”

  He had sandy hair and mild eyes. He was one of those people who have never been worried in their entire life, who have seen everything coming from ten miles off and are just waiting, patiently. For you.

  “Marron came to my studio with a hammer and screwdriver and asked if she could use my bathroom. She didn’t say what for.”

  “Who?” I asked, but casually made it sound, through this peculiar talent I have, like, Want to go out sometime? He had the most beautiful haircut I had ever seen. Different parts of him kept revealing themselves. His kindness. His generosity. It was nothing special, the haircut, but it was amazing. I could see every hair. They were all the same length. I was afraid I would reach out and touch it but then realized I already had, in my mind. I was rubbing against it like a cat.

  “Marron.” He nodded somewhere. “She didn’t even tell me what she’d done. I just saw the hole, later.”

  “You have a studio?”

  He nodded like, Doesn’t everybody?

  It was sandalwood. I bent over, pretending to admire the display of soaps, and his soap in particular, but really because I was afraid I was looking as naked as I felt. All at once I understood that what I had been smelling all my life—from one minute ago when he stood so close to me, closer than any human being has ever stood to another—was sandalwood.

  “Are you a friend of Marron’s?”

  The problem was that, even though I was ready to give myself to him utterly, I couldn’t understand a single word he said. Was he a foreigner?

  “What. Is. A. Marron?” I asked slowly.

  “Marron McKee. The artist. She’s over there.”

  I looked past him. It was the same woman I had gone by on my way in. She was pretty, with dyed blond hair, like a cake that has really fancy icing but isn’t good to eat.

  “I took a picture of my vagina,” she was saying.

  It was amazing how she could say “vagina” over and over again without getting embarrassed.

  “No. I don’t know her. I don’t know anyone.”

  “Marron’s very talented.”

  All right, so he had a flaw. But being intelligent just got in the way, most of the time. I would do the thinking for both of us. It would be this delicious burden.

  “Horace.”

  He stuck out his hand. He was formal, but not shy.

  “So you’re an artist?”

  “I paint.”

  “I love painting.”

  Oh, Eve, I thought.

  I wish I could say we had this great conversation, but it was the opposite. He asked about me a little, which was nice, but I totally ran down what I did, made fun of it. I must have sounded like the most uninteresting person on the planet. There was this tension, which was actually the best part, this stumbling awkwardness we kept trying to overcome. Not boredom or that desperate urge to get away, at least not for me. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. He was very polite and had an atmosphere to him, a world you could walk into, if you took just one more step. I kept sneaking quick breaths and holding them, like he was a drug.

  “What do you do when you’re not working?”

  “I just lie around, basically.”

  ...with no clothes on.

  He nodded like that was a perfectly acceptable activity, doing nothing.

  “But why am I here?” I went on. “That’s what I have to find out. I got an invitation. This postcard.”

  “What’s so unusual about that?”

  “I’m not supposed to get mail. Everything else that comes is just junk, or bills for the person before me.”
/>   He frowned.

  “See, I don’t really exist. In the city.”

  “Apparently you do.”

  “But I don’t know anyone.”

  “You must be on the list.”

  “What list?”

  “Everyone has a mailing list. Whenever they’re in a show, they send out invitations. Marron has almost a thousand names. She’s very focused.”

  Right, I thought. On her vagina.

  “Would you like to meet her?”

  Are you out of your mind? I smiled, which he must have heard as “Sure,” because he started walking over, going in front of me.

  I reset my face, found a new expression, a bored, unblinking, challenging look like, I love your lover. I found strength. It was surprising, because the rest of me was falling down a hole, but on the outside I was putting on this act, walking the walk and talking the talk, I hoped, of a New Yorker. This girl, Marron, I finally figured out (I had this incredible lag in understanding, it was probably already tomorrow), it was her artwork, her Opening. She stood in front of a huge black-and-white-speckled photograph that was covered with scribbles, stains, swear words, even dirty drawings in Magic Marker. It was exactly what you looked through, not really noticing, when you were reading movie posters, waiting for a train. She was dressed very properly. I knew the type. Guys found her attractive because, without their knowing it, she looked just like their mothers once did. But when she turned, I almost took a step back. She had serious eyes. There were flowers at her feet. People had brought bouquets. She was standing on them.

  “Marron, this is—”

  Before Horace could blow it, say something in front of her that would give away the incredible power of our new relationship, that he loved me so much he couldn’t even remember my name, I saved him. I stuck out my hand and said, “Eve.”

  “Eve what?”

  “Just Eve.”

  She stared at me.

  “Do you model?” she finally asked.

  I had heard that line so many times from guys at the bar. Usually it made me laugh. But coming from a woman, it completely tripped me up.

  “Me? No.”

  “You look like someone.”

  “Well, I’m not. I mean, not anyone in particular. Maybe I’m trying to look like some model without realizing it. You know how you see an ad in a magazine and then how if the person looks even just a little bit like you, you make this big effort to look more like her? Because she’s in a magazine? So by the end you can’t tell if . . .”