Eve in the City

by Thomas Rayfiel

  “You want to come back to my studio again?”

  That was a good idea. Pick up where we left off. Was that what I’d wanted all along? Was this just a very complicated way of me asking him out? I could have invited him over for dinner. But then I would have had to cook, and after my disaster with the artichoke trifle I wasn’t going to risk that again.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t read so much,” he suggested.

  Down in the subway, it was rush hour. The train was packed. We pushed our way in and he took my hand, kept us moving, until we got to the end of the car. Then he slid open the door and motioned for me to go out. I thought we were trying the next one, to see if it had seats, but instead he held me. We were in between, outside. There were two metal platforms, just big enough for one person each. On the glass window was the back of a sticker. SRAC NEEWTEB EDIR TON OD.

  “Have you ever done this before?”

  “Done what?”

  He was standing on one side. I was facing him, on the other. When the train started, we rose and sank at different times as our separate cars negotiated the track. Big springs, hanging off chains, covered in rubber tubes, bounced on either side of us. There was the soft sound of steel clashing, groaning, pulling away, then hitting again, and that smell, of hot dust, I guess, and electricity. His hands were on my hips, steadying me. It was the same way he had appeared that time at the gallery, been past my defenses without my noticing. As a special favor, he put me in a position where I didn’t have to say yes or no. He touched me, but not in some gross way, not bullying, dominating, like I had seen Brandy thrill to with her studly yoga instructor. In fact, his hands were perfectly still, just holding me so I wouldn’t fall, keeping me safe, letting the vibration of the ride, the swoops and shudders of the two cars as they struggled to stay together, all that motion, translate into what he was doing, something between a massage and an incredibly erotic caress. This went on and on. I leaned into him. He had that same serious expression as when he was looking at art, or asking about my life. His hands were this power flowing through me. They held me up, but only because they made me want to fall. I’d heard that saying about someone making you “weak in the knees,” but never knew what it meant, until now.

  Of course it helps that you’re wearing a dress ending three-quarters of the way down your ass.

  It’s her dress. He wants her, not me.

  You are her. Part of you. Half her.

  Half her and half Ken Kennedy, the short fat midget-dwarf.

  President Ken Kennedy, to you.

  “It’s so great we can’t talk,” I finally shouted, ruining it. I had to, for some reason. It was so good it was scary.

  “What?”

  “I said, It’s so great we can’t talk!”

  The train slowed. He nodded, that I should open my door. I didn’t get it at first. What he was trying to say. We had been communicating so perfectly, but only about what we already knew, which was that there was something between us. It was almost like the perfection of that mutual desire made every other part of our relationship, even the smallest things, full of misunderstanding.

  “We’re here,” he said.

  I nodded. Of course we were. Here we were. In love. It was so beautiful.

  “This is our stop. This is where we get off.”

  “Oh.”

  When we got up the steps, he didn’t take my hand again. He didn’t have to. He wasn’t leading me. We walked at the same exact pace. We settled into a rhythm. There was this deepening. The air had turned violet. Traffic lights were ice cubes at the bottom of some really fancy cocktail. He was so clean and light and right. He brought out the healthy side of me. He would lead me out of darkness, out of my own unhappiness. And I wanted to do the same for him. He was imprisoned, too, in a jail of his own making. We all were. I wanted to bust him out.

  “How’s the painting coming?”

  He frowned, surprised, like he didn’t remember telling me that’s what he did.

  “The big one. For your show.”

  “Slow,” he admitted.

  I wanted to reach out and touch him, but that would destroy this beautiful sound we were making, our feet, on the pavement, in harmony.

  “Listen, don’t you have some fantasy? Something that you’ve always wanted to do, but been too shy to ask for?”

  He coughed.

  “I’m serious.”

  “I’ve never been asked that before.”

  “Sure you have. Just not out loud. That’s what everyone asks everyone. That’s really all we have to offer each other.”

  “Is it?”

  We kept walking.

  “If I did,” he finally risked, “that’s all it would be. A fantasy.”

  “Well, I thought maybe we could—”

  “Fantasies are like those stones you find on the beach that look so beautiful and special. That glow. But if you bring them home, they turn into dried-out pebbles.” He was all disapproving. “You have to leave fantasies where they are. You can’t bring them into the real world.”

  “Why not?”

  “Then they’re not fantasies anymore.”

  “So you want to go to Coney Island?” I tried understanding.

  We walked more, in silence.

  “I want this.”

  “This what?”

  “To be here. Now. With you.”

  It wasn’t some grand declaration. He didn’t stop, or look at me, or say it any differently than he’d said anything else. It was just this matter-of-fact remark, like, I want a glass of water. But it hit me so hard. I’d never heard anyone say that. That they wanted to be with me. I never realized that’s what I wanted to hear.

  I found the belt loop in his pants, hooked my finger through, and tugged, hard.

  I wasn’t going to answer. I wasn’t going to respond in any way. I was going to let the moment collect and thicken, let the tension build until it was unbearable. I was going to be the kind of girl I always wanted to be, mysterious and silent and intriguing. This was going to be a Great Love. We were going to climb that tilting staircase, cross his endless empty space, lie down on his low, low mattress, and watch all the clean white sections of floorboard shoot away.

  Oh my God, I thought, this is actually the way it’s supposed to happen. For once.

  He opened the door to the studio. Marron was there.

  “Wow,” she said. “Cool dress, Eve.”

  “You’re early,” Horace called.

  “Did you get that at a vintage clothing store?”

  He wasn’t next to me, anymore. My finger was closed around air.

  “We were going to Openings tonight,” he explained, from the kitchen area.

  “I guess I’m early.”

  I noticed she didn’t say, I’m sorry. And then I realized she was inside, waiting. So she had a key.

  I tried not looking at her. Meaning I stared. She was all in black, sitting at his drafting table chair but turned around so her legs straddled the shiny metal stem that came up the back. It was such a lounging around, I-own-the-place pose. The chair was on rollers. I wanted to walk over and give it one sharp shove, so she would wheel across the rest of the room, hit the wall, and flip right out the window onto the West Side Highway.

  “You going to come with us, Eve?” she asked. “You want to look at art?”

  “No. I have to work.”

  “That dress is so hot.”

  “It was my mother’s.”

  “Really? Did she sleep with him?”

  “Who?”

  “John F. Kennedy?”

  Right. And then he gave her this dress. This really subtle memento. A souvenir. From a big box he had.

  “No. Ken Kennedy.”

  “Oh.”

  “Well, I mean I’m not sure. It was before I was born.”

  Obviously. Otherwise how could I be His child? Whoever exactly He was. I wasn’t too good at American history. Even though it was turning out to be the story of my life.

 
“You want coffee?”

  Horace was fiddling with beans and a filter. There was no place to sit. Except the bed, and if I plopped down there I’d be shorter than she was. That was my one advantage. It was like a duel. We were about to choose our weapons.

  “You have anything to drink?”

  “You mean alcohol? I don’t think so.”

  “Sure you do,” Marron said. “You have that scotch I gave you. Remember?”

  “Oh. Right.”

  We looked at each other.

  “Here,” he said, bringing out this really fancy bottle.

  So, you’re pretty, I thought. And talented, apparently. But there’s one thing I can do that you can’t.

  It was the kind that came in a blue velvet bag. Rich people’s liquor. It wasn’t even opened.

  Drink like a fish, I smiled triumphantly.

  “Of course it was a dream. It was an External Dramatization of the Female Psyche.”

  “She actually went to the police,” he pointed out.

  “I know. That’s what’s so great. She acted on it. She wasn’t passive. You must be so in touch with your subconscious self that it becomes your real world, Eve.”

  “I just haven’t been sleeping enough,” I said. “My biological clock is all screwed up from working nights.”

  Wait. Was biological clock about having babies? Had I said the wrong thing? Gee, that would be a surprise. Of course, it didn’t really matter since neither of them was listening.

  “Not just her own subconscious but the Universal Subconscious.” Marron was getting excited. I couldn’t tell if she was making fun of me or not. “I mean, that dream is probably what the female side of every person in America was seeing at that moment.”

  “The female side of every person? But you said we all look at the world through a man’s eyes. The Male Gaze,” I remembered, shocked at seeing the words themselves, the words she had used that night at the gallery, come out of my mouth and glow in the air. I was plowed.

  “When we’re awake, we’re men. When we dream, we’re women.”

  “Everybody? Him, too?”

  I nodded to Horace.

  “I don’t believe there’s any difference between male and female,” she said. “I mean, they’re useful distinctions, for bathrooms in restaurants and stuff like that. But they’re artificial. They’re imposed on us by society. Really we’re this complex mixture of both. Take me, for instance. Supposedly, I’m female.”

  “Supposedly?”

  “But there’s plenty about me that’s male, too.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, I like to be on top, for one thing.”

  I choked. He’d given me a glass, but it was this clunky jam-jar type, with a thick rim. The ice cubes that came from his tiny freezer compartment were the size of aspirins. Which you’re going to need, I thought, noticing how low the level in the bottle had sunk.

  “Eve’s from Iowa,” Horace explained.

  “You have a vagina,” I managed to cough.

  I’d seen it. Blown up. Poster-size.

  “The vagina and penis are really the same thing. Anatomically. A penis is just a vagina that’s been pulled inside out.”

  She was leaning forward, completely serious. She was her own best listener. You got drawn in because she believed her own act. I could see how guys would think she was beautiful. It was a question of confidence, really. It was just so unfair that she had breasts, too.

  Horace kept trying to move the conversation along. Like I couldn’t speak for myself.

  “She wants to know how she got invited to your Opening.”

  “You must be on my list.”

  “But how?”

  “I don’t know. I get names from all over. I trade with other artists, with galleries, with photographers. Maybe it was from some modeling job you were on.”

  “I told you, I do not model.”

  “Are you sure? I thought that’s why you were just ‘Eve.’ That it was a professional name.”

  “That’s just about the stupidest thing I ever heard.”

  “Why does it bother you so much?”

  “It’s just irritating that you keep saying I model when I’ve never even let anyone take my picture!”

  They both looked. I knew I’d made a mistake—by being born, for starters—but there was no going back. A monumental blunder was coming, and all I could do was get out of the way and watch with the rest of them.

  “You’ve never let anyone take your picture?” Horace asked.

  “Where I grew up, we didn’t have cameras.”

  “They don’t have cameras in Iowa?”

  “Cameras are bad.”

  “Because they steal your soul?”

  “It takes more than a camera to steal my soul,” I snapped, getting mad, for no reason, at the wrong person, as usual.

  “Then why?”

  “Because they’re the work of the Devil, all right? They’re instead of seeing. They’re a crutch. Instead of remembering what a person really looks like, or what kind of time you had, or how you felt, you get this crude little arrangement of colors and shapes. A camera tempts you to be less than human. Part of your brain shuts down. All pictures are Satanic. All images. That’s why what you guys do, with your paintings and photographs and stuff, is such bullshit.”

  I sighed. That hadn’t come out right. They didn’t seem to mind, though. But “they,” that was the problem. I had lumped them together and made me the outsider.

  Good work, Eve.

  “Excuse me,” I said.

  In the bathroom, sitting there, I saw a square in the tiles where the soap dish must have been. Where she had taken that little bit of him, without his even noticing. It made me feel so hopeless. It was voodoo. She wasn’t an artist, she was a witch! But maybe that’s what a woman artist really was. Maybe that’s what they had all been, before they came out of hiding, before they’d been allowed to make boring, blah-blah paintings, just like the men, and now they were trying to get back to what made them special to begin with. Black magic.

  What are you doing here? a voice sneered. You are so totally out of place.

  But that’s what he likes about me, I argued. That I am not her.

  But the more you try and fit in, the more like her you’ll be, and the less he’ll like you. So you’ll never be anything but uncomfortable. And he’ll always be disappointed. It’s a lose-lose situation.

  Which is why I’m so suddenly desperately in love.

  Are you? In love?

  I don’t know. Maybe.

  Well, if you are, if this isn’t just you playing a game with yourself, then what are you going to do about it?

  Oh, that’s easy. Screw it up.

  When I came out, Horace was waiting.

  “Sure you don’t want to come with us?” He nodded to Marron, who was across the room. “I forgot we were going to meet up. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have brought you.”

  “Forget it.”

  I walked away, not looking back. If I could just apply the Rules of Cocktail Waitressing to my private life. Treat him like a customer. And then, to compensate, at work maybe I could date all the guys who came down the stairs. Maybe that was the way to have fun.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  Like an idiot, I turned.

  We were in front of his painting. We both looked at it. It was further along than before, still with lots of empty space but full of scribbles and signs. He started to explain that it was all formulas, from physics and chemistry and math, jammed together to make patterns, very thought out and geometrical, but also based on color, these muted shades and bright patterns. There were passages of books he had copied out, too, but so small, and in different shapes and type, that they became stretches of texture, part of something bigger. Everything was part of something bigger, he said, but itself, too. And there were pictures, pictures inside the picture. It was only now, when I was right up against it, that I saw how meticulous it was, like the teeth of a mi
llion tiny gears. I locked into them and for a minute felt my own million tiny gears, the bent, sticky gears of my drunken brain, grinding slowly to life. I didn’t really understand. Mostly what I took away was that he cared about it more than he cared about anything else in the world. He’d channeled his feelings into it. Which was what made him so tantalizing. That you couldn’t have that part of him. I put my palm flat against the canvas. He jumped, like I’d touched his skin. I pushed. It looked solid but it wasn’t, really. It gave.

  “She’s better for you,” I decided.

  “Who? What are you talking about?”

  “She probably sees what you’re trying to do. More than me, anyway. Thanks for today, though. For coming back to that corner. You saved my life.”

  “Eve, wait a minute.”

  “I have to go now.”

  “I’ll call you.”

  “No. Don’t call me, please.”

  “Why not?”

  “Good-bye.”

  We’re breaking up! I thought, as I walked, for several miles, over the glossy white floor. We’re breaking up and we were never even together! It was thrilling. Don’t look back. Remember the rules. I got to the door. Don’t look back, and then, when you turn, when you finally get to where you’re going, he’ll be right behind you, following. Remember, it’s your Air of Mystery.

  I kept walking.

  This is a Great Love, I repeated to myself. Any minute now he’s going to put his hand on your shoulder and spin you around and a whole new period of your life is going to begin. Any minute now.

  I got outside. The door closed behind me. I didn’t even bother to look. I knew I was alone. Still, I kept sensing something momentous was going to happen.

  Any minute now . . .

  I hadn’t talked to Jesus in a long time. It was nobody’s fault. We were both busy. I felt like praying, but didn’t know where to go. Not a church. I had checked them out when I first got here, the big stone castles with organs and marble, where the ladies wore stockings and all the men had titles, Deacon, Reverend, Doctor. They were traps. Traps for God where you were the bait. You really think you’re going to lure Him in with stained glass and pretty music? I felt like asking. I mean, look at your altar, it’s a Plexiglas donations box, for crying out loud. All those bills, presidents’ heads, jammed together like the inside of a cannibal’s belly. This is where you worship? After a while someone came over and explained I was in the Gift Shop again, but even when I stood where I was supposed to, I felt the same thing. It was a Christ-Free Zone, the last place on earth to be surprised by grace. Instead, I’d been making my own spiritual map of Manhattan, finding spots that called to me, some of them because things had already happened there, but most because they had a feeling of promise, a sense that something was going to happen, if I was patient and stayed alert.