Eve in the City

by Thomas Rayfiel

  “They’re grow lights,” he explained. “The place used to be a hydroponic garden. They grew marijuana here. At least, that’s the rumor.”

  It was the biggest space I had ever seen. You could have fit six of my apartments there. No, ten. Or more. But it wasn’t just the size. Or the windows. It was the bareness. The floor and ceiling and walls were all stripped back to exactly what they were. Pipes were visible, the plumbing and steam, coming up out of nowhere to make a sink, or snaking along the baseboard to meet a register. There was a mattress in one corner. A door that led to a bathroom. A hot plate. A portable refrigerator. A coffee maker. And that was it. I had this vision of a room as the inside of a person’s brain. So mine was this tiny cluttered dark afterthought, this space at the top of a building that no one knew what to call, that didn’t even exist, officially. And this was Horace’s brain, beautifully organized, everything for a purpose. A big table stood in the middle. He had obviously made it himself. Thick, nailed-together pieces of wood. Another, the kind that tilted, a drafting table, was off to one side. Then there were metal shelves with all kinds of equipment, paints, brushes, jars, some art books, running along one wall, and canvases against the rest, all with their backs turned, except one. A big one.

  “Did you clean up for me?”

  “It gets dirty. Grit floats in from the highway. The windows don’t seal. I mop every other day.”

  He nodded to a real mop, the heavy kind with a tangle of thick strings, in a steel bucket with that powerful squeezer attachment to wring it out. I wanted to be that mop, have him use me, purge all this dirty ugly black liquid from my body and leave me pure.

  “So you did clean up for me?”

  I had just been joking.

  “I cleaned.”

  The floor was painted, that was another strange thing. It was this glossy white, a blank picture we were entering.

  “You can come in,” he said.

  I was still standing at the door, scared of all the space. Also, I didn’t want to look at the painting. It’s not whether I would like it or not. I really didn’t care. I was afraid of what to say, how to act.

  “You look tired. Why don’t you sit? Here.”

  He wheeled over a chair, the kind of high adjustable stool that’s in sections, with a little panel that pushes against your back. But I went to the mattress, instead. The bed was made, with sheets so tight you couldn’t imagine just slipping in. It had his smell. That was reassuring. Sandalwood. There was a book and clock next to it. From down here, the floor stretched away, this unbroken expanse. I got a flash of how he felt, how lonely he was. Lonely in a different way than I was. Lonely inside himself.

  “Eve, wake up.”

  “I’m not asleep.”

  “Why are you crying?”

  He sat next to me and squeegeed this tear along my cheek. It was such a professional gesture, catching this dribble of paint before it ruined things, pinching it off. I felt a distant shiver.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “What you said before. That we’ll never see each other at our best.”

  “I meant because one of us will always be tired.”

  “I know what you meant.”

  “So, really, each of us will see the other at his or her best,” he worked out. “Just not at the same time.”

  “Wow.” I finally pretended to notice the painting. It was hard not to. The thing was the size of a billboard.

  “I started it tonight. Before I came. That’s why I was late.”

  My vision was flickering. I had drunk so much coffee it was backing up on me, making me queasy. My head was having trouble staying on its neck. There wasn’t really much to see. It was mostly bare canvas, huge, with a few colors. I tried to see what they made but I couldn’t. Or maybe they didn’t make anything. But they were pretty. Like him. He was pretty. Can a man be pretty? He was. I was getting confused, this low down. I was having a love affair with gravity.

  You haven’t said anything, Eve, a voice reminded me. Say something about the painting. Quick!

  “Do you believe in the divinity of Christ?”

  His hand had slid under my hair and was holding the whole back of my skull, palming it the way those incredibly sexy black guys in the playground can do with a basketball. I smiled. It was funny, comparing Horace to a black guy. He was so pale. It never occurred to me it was funny comparing my head to a basketball. That’s exactly how it felt.

  His voice came from far away. His fingers were doing the real talking. They were all along the outsides of my brain, feeling it, pressing it, probing.

  “I hadn’t really thought about it much.”

  “Because I think I may be Him. A female Him.”

  His fingers kept doing what they were doing. It irritated me that he didn’t react. Did that mean he wasn’t listening, wasn’t taking me seriously? Or that nothing knocked him off his calm center?

  “Why?” he finally asked.

  “Well, for one thing, Christ’s mother was a whore.”

  “Wasn’t she a virgin?”

  “Oh. Right.” Great, I thought. A nitpicker. “The point is . . .”

  I waited. And then I realized I was still talking. I mean I was supposed to be. But I had run out of words, finally. It’s like you lay tracks, with your eyes down, not looking where you’re going, just throw them in front of you and steam along, and then you run out of tracks, reach for the next one and it’s not there. You look up and discover where you are, where you’ve taken yourself, and realize, This is where I was heading all along. This is my fate.

  But it wasn’t. Not yet, at least, because after a few more minutes he saw how tired I was and said he was getting me home. I didn’t understand. I still thought it was just a question of where we’d end up, together.

  “No, no, let’s stay here.” I tried picturing how I’d left my apartment, every single piece of dirty underwear either hanging over the back of a chair or on the floor. “You cleaned up for me, but I didn’t clean up for you.”

  “It’s my fault. You’ve got to sleep. I should have realized what your schedule was like. I didn’t think.”

  Don’t think! I felt like screaming.

  The next thing I knew we were on the street, walking again. I was exhausted. He practically carried me. Then I was alone, in a cab, heading home. I watched the city stream by. It was so glamorous. I even liked the way the total on the meter kept going up. That seemed very New York, that all this beauty cost something. But when I dug into my pocket, the driver said it was already taken care of.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The gentleman,” he said.

  “He’s gay.”

  “He is not gay.”

  “He’s gay and you’re a slut. It’s a match made in heaven.”

  “Ladies.”

  Krishna, the instructor, held Brandy’s ankles, one in each hand, looking back and forth, lining them up.

  “Perfect!” he announced.

  Even though we were standing on our heads, I saw she managed to give her hair a little flip. Then he walked right by me like I was invisible. I wanted to stick out my foot and trip him, but my foot was tucked behind my ear. I should have taken the karate class, I thought. Instead of this retarded grope session where a bunch of horny women in Danskins waited for a yoga dude in a loincloth and shoulder-length hair to come over and “correct” them.

  “It’s gross,” I complained later. “His hair was brushing right up against you, wasn’t it?”

  “Why is that gross?” Crystal asked.

  “I don’t know. It just is. And I am not a slut. I told you, we didn’t do anything.”

  “But you wanted to.” Brandy lay back against the wood with her eyes closed. “On the first date, too. So you’re a slut in your mind, which is the worst kind.”

  “It sounds like he was being nice.” Crystal yawned.

  “Thank you,” I said. “That’s exactly right. He was being nice.”

  She wore a towel. Three o
f them, actually. Brandy was naked. I didn’t know what to do, so I compromised, half sitting on one and kind of draping it over me but then letting it slip.

  “What’s the point of this again?”

  “To make you sweat.”

  We were the only ones in the sauna. I thought it would be like her birthday party, all of us bonding, but even better. Nora was older and not so interested. Viktor was the cause of all our trouble, all our discord. But without those two, without work around us, it was awkward.

  “Like Native Americans.” I thought of that policeman, Detective Jourdain, calling me Eve America.

  “Who?”

  “Indians. They have sweat lodges. Where they go. It’s supposed to help them meditate.”

  “Are you going to see him again?”

  I let the towel slide more.

  “I’d go out with him again, if he asked.”

  “So you’re just going to hope he comes back to the bar?”

  I wished I could be Brandy. Her limbs were tumbled back, eyes closed. She had dropped all her irritating movements. She was channeling her true self. I wished I could be her or I wished I could be Crystal. She had made a tent out of towels and was camped inside, protected by this thick wall of Attitude.

  “Call him,” Brandy said.

  “And say what?”

  “ ‘Come to my place.’ ” She sprawled the length of the bench. “ ‘Come to my place and we’ll make love on my roof.’ ”

  “I can’t get to my roof.”

  “Well, then on my bed.”

  “I don’t have a bed, either.”

  We were all innocent. That, I finally realized, was what we had in common, why Viktor had picked us. Even Nora, who looked so tragic, so ruined by all sorts of excess, had this amnesia when it came to men. Brandy and Crystal, they were so into talking tough, into being big experts, but that’s all it was, talk. I folded the towel into a pillow, then, keeping my eyes shut (maybe other people were going to see me naked but I wasn’t), reached back to put it under my head. I lay down, felt my body unfurl, took a deep breath, and blew out, hard.

  “Just think of a reason to get together,” Crystal’s voice came. “An excuse. It doesn’t matter what.”

  But it did. When I called Horace, I wanted it to be for the right reason, not a tawdry little lie, an excuse. I wanted it to be something that would lead us down the path to true love.

  Someone giggled. They were making fun of me. They could read my thoughts. That’s what went through me at first. Then I wondered if I was dirty or I had funny-looking feet like in those subway ads. HAMMER TOE. INGROWN NAIL. PLANTAR WART.

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” Brandy said.

  “If you were getting raped,” I asked, “what would you do? Fight? Or just go along?”

  The sweat was collecting on me, forming rivers, pools. I reached down and smeared my hand across.

  “Go along?”

  “You know. Play dead.”

  “It depends.”

  “He has a knife at your throat,” I added, more confident now, really seeing it. Except not in images. Feeling what happened. Trying to imagine. I knew I would keep feeling it as long as I kept my eyes closed.

  “I don’t know,” Brandy said. “I guess it would depend.”

  Crystal snorted.

  “Depend on what?”

  “A lot of things. It’s a stupid question.”

  “Don’t tell me you haven’t thought about it.”

  “Of course I’ve thought about it.”

  “Well?”

  “Just because I’ve thought about it doesn’t mean I know what I’d do. Nobody does.”

  I couldn’t breathe. There was a blade at my throat, choking me, burning, heated by my own fear. I couldn’t swallow. Inside me, I felt this awful force, like my spinal cord was being cut.

  “And what about after? Would you tell?”

  “No,” Brandy answered, almost before I got the question out, strangely sure.

  “Of course I’d tell,” Crystal said. “Why wouldn’t you?”

  But almost as if to illustrate the point, Brandy didn’t say.

  “I’d tell everyone,” Crystal said.

  Maybe not in words, I tried to imagine Brandy saying. But in how I acted. How I saw men from then on. We all acted as if we’d been raped anyway, whether we had been or not. Just the possibility, the fear, dictated how you faced things.

  “Is that a tattoo?”

  I frowned and tried raising my head while keeping the rest of my body flat. This solid black bar lay across my upper thigh.

  “That is when I tried to get up at the restaurant. When he came in and I was sitting against the wall. The table made that. It’s not a tattoo, it’s a bruise.”

  “You better call him.” Brandy laughed.

  And then it came to me: I had to find her. The woman on the street. I didn’t know why, but suddenly it was clear that she held the key to the mystery. Not just to what happened that night, but to what was happening right now and what was going to happen in the future. My future. I moved one leg so it sealed against the other, then raised them both high. They were the tail of a fish. I was a mermaid. I tried following myself in toward the center, where my body changed from fins and scales to flesh. But I couldn’t. There was no clear point where I switched over. What would I do, once I tracked her down? What would I ask? That wasn’t important. It was the idea of a quest that appealed to me. To find the truth.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The sixties. Mother kept one dress from then, a fabric printed with hundreds of red-white-and-blue circles. They were supposed to be election buttons. Each had KENNEDY in the middle, except where they got cut off at the seam. Then they just said KEN.

  “We made them ourselves,” she explained. “The campaign didn’t have a lot of money. They gave us the material and told us to be creative.”

  It was short. I watched her in the mirror and thought, I do not have nearly as good legs. Dad, whoever he was, must have been a midget.

  “Didn’t he die?”

  “Who?”

  “Ken Kennedy.”

  “Bobby. He was my great love.”

  “You knew him?”

  She turned and looked over her shoulder, examining her back.

  That’s it! I was the President’s daughter, sent by my father to go among ordinary mortals, until one day, discovered, I would reveal my true nature and—

  She took it off. I looked away. I didn’t like seeing her naked. She was so casual. I slept in a T-shirt that came down to my knees.

  “You want it?”

  “Want what?”

  She was folding it up. She folded really well. Things stayed together. She could do those paper animals. Origami. My clothes looked so perfect after a wash. It was only when I put them on that they got ridiculous. I watched her tuck the dress behind all my shapeless uniforms, hiding it. From who? From her. She had to teach me both parts, the rebel and the rule-keeper. Because there was nobody else. Because both were inside her, battling away. And I never said thank you. I just accepted things, grudgingly. They were these burdens I was taking off her hands, off her conscience. But I must have sensed how special the dress was. It was one of the only things I took with me. And now it lay here, this package, smaller than I remembered, a little decorative animal. A crane. A giraffe. I hesitated before undoing it. Maybe there was some secret message inside. Of course there wasn’t. I put it on and tried smoothing ancient folds. The dress was the message, all by itself.

  Horace didn’t understand.

  “What are we doing here?”

  The corner was different in daytime. People walked right over the spot. I felt like shouting “Look out!” every time a man’s shiny shoe or a woman’s heel splashed down where the puddle had been. I could even see the tracks that were begun, all from this central point, bloody footprints, radiating out. Nobody stopped. It didn’t even slow them down, that they were trampling this sacred patch of cement. They wou
ld have trampled me, too, if he hadn’t been here, by my side.

  “I don’t know. A clue, I guess.”

  “What kind of clue?”

  “Well, I was reading a first-aid manual, and it said wounds in the abdomen usually have a lot of blood. So I thought maybe there would be this trail we could follow.”

  He looked at me. I was following all the imaginary footprints.

  “But it looks like the trail leads everywhere.” I shook my head. “Everywhere and nowhere. See, then I was reading the Triple A Roadside Assistance Guide, and they said—”

  “Wait. You were reading a first-aid manual, and then a book on how to drive?”

  “What’s so strange about that? They’re both about solving problems. About how to live.”

  “But—”

  “And they only cost a dollar. I didn’t go to college, like you. This is my college, right here.”

  “So what did you learn?”

  “When you hit a patch of ice,” I recited, “when you lose control of your vehicle, turn in the direction of the skid, and keep going.”

  He waited.

  “That way the wheels straighten out. By heading right into the disaster. I’m not sure how. And then you regain control. So that’s what I decided to do, by coming here. I’m turning in the direction of the skid.”

  “You’ve lost control of your vehicle.”

  “Yes. And I called you.”

  Why? Why had I called him? Because I thought it would be a really fun date? It suddenly occurred to me that maybe the best way to get a man interested in you was not by repeatedly describing this vision of seeing some guy almost get his penis cut off.

  “Are you sure it was a dream?” he asked.

  “Yes, I’m sure.”

  “But dreams happen in your head. You don’t come back to them. Not to a place.”

  “This is where it happened,” I insisted.

  I was about to crumple, inside. He must have sensed it, because he stood in front of me, blocking my view.