Eve in the City

by Thomas Rayfiel

  “I mean, what if she was just defending herself? That’s not a crime. She shouldn’t have to pay for that.”

  “I already said, she has a history. She puts herself at risk, all the time. For all sorts of things. She needs to be monitored.”

  “No offense, but why should I believe you?” I turned to Arthur. “Maybe she just walked out on him. Did you ever think of that? Maybe this guy is just some horny control freak trying to turn his ex-girlfriend into becoming an all-night live-in concubine.”

  They stared. There was this silence.

  “Concubine?” I asked, suddenly not sure. “Is that the right word?”

  Detective Jourdain took a step forward, but Mr. Van Arsdale said, “Arthur,” very mildly. He was looking at me, looking into me. He had this tender blue gaze. It trapped me. The way it did her? And then she escaped. Escaped into what? A nightmare. Which maybe now she wanted to wake up from. But doesn’t part of us want to be trapped, to be taken care of? I knew part of me did.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, while this voice complained, Why are you always apologizing? “But I couldn’t do a thing like that to her. No matter what she did. We had this moment back there. You wouldn’t understand. It’s a girl-type thing.”

  “If you two met, if you spoke with her, you would see why what I’m proposing is really for the best. Would you do that for me, Eve? Would you meet with her?”

  His eyes held me. Maybe this was a mistake, but there was no way I could refuse. It was my destiny to meet her, to find out what happened.

  “Sure,” I said.

  Detective Jourdain cleared his throat, loudly, the same as when he had seen Viktor kissing me in front of the building. Trying to express this deep disapproval.

  “I’ll arrange it, then. The next time she gets in touch with me.”

  “You mean you still talk?”

  “Oh yes. Daily. Nothing’s changed between us. Nothing important. In a way, this has just brought us closer together. Strengthened our bond. She’s just a little flighty, that’s all.”

  I would be, too, I thought, looking around at the penthouse one last time. It was so modern. So quiet and rich. You could fly in here a long time before realizing it was a cage.

  Outside, I started walking. Detective Jourdain came trotting after me. I didn’t look at him. I waited until he got close.

  “You’ve been lying this whole time! About everything! All those conversations we had, you were testing me, to see how much I knew.”

  “You’re the one who kept calling,” he pointed out. “Because you had a guilty conscience.”

  “I did not. I was lonely. And scared. And you were leading me on.”

  “All I’m interested in is justice.”

  “Oh, right. You used me.”

  “I got you to see what you already saw. Got you to face things. Hell, you should be thanking me. I don’t know why you’re so mad. All along, I’ve been the one protecting you.”

  “Well, who asked you? I can do a pretty good job of protecting me all by myself.”

  “Are you serious? You can’t deal with the Carl Van Arsdales of the world as if they’re regular people. They’re not.”

  “He seemed all right. I mean he’s a creep, but I work in a bar. I know the type.”

  He caught me by the shoulders and spun me around. I flinched, but he wasn’t violent. He was pleading.

  “You should have told him what you saw and got out, like I said. I’d have taken care of you. Now he expects something.”

  “What can he do to me that’s so bad?”

  He wiped his face clean, like his hand was a wet sponge.

  “Listen, I shouldn’t be telling you this, but your bar tonight? It didn’t just get shut down. The Sheriff’s Office didn’t just happen on by. You understand? He had it closed. He has that kind of pull.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “To cut down on your options, of course. So you’d be out of a job. To soften you up. Don’t you see?”

  I thought of Detective Jourdain trailing after me in his car, watching me about to cross the street, then trying to cut me off, block me from where I was going. I tried to see it from his point of view. My face looking brave? Scared? Lost? And then, after, how terrified he had been, how mad at me. Why? For making him feel? And that sad sweater he kept in the backseat.

  “So you did rescue me.”

  “Rescued you from embarrassment, maybe. Do you even know where you were heading?”

  “Just some special-looking place. A hangout.”

  “For drag queens.”

  I frowned.

  “There were no cars there. There were only—”

  “Drag queens. Not drag racers. Those were guys, Eve. All of them.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. There were these women with me. I saw them.”

  “It’s what I’ve been trying to tell you all along. Between what you see and what you think you see, there’s this space. More than with anyone else I’ve ever known. That’s why I keep wanting to help. You are not equipped to deal with things on your own, here.”

  “Yes I am!”

  I started moving away again.

  “Where are you going now? To that boyfriend of yours? His place is all closed up, remember? What’s he got to offer you?”

  “He’s treated me nicer than you,” I said slowly. “He never lied to me.”

  “You think the truth is so great? Go see him, then. Go see what the truth gets you.”

  “I’m going home.”

  “Go visit your boyfriend, Eve,” he mocked, and then announced to the world, like there was an audience: “Women! The choices you make.”

  They’re not choices, I felt like answering. That’s the problem. We never get to choose. It’s an illusion. Choice.

  I looked back once. He was standing, his arms curved, flexing their muscles, working out some rage. When men were in the wrong, they found a way to get mad. Anger was to them what love was to us, this thing they were good at, that they had a talent, a weakness, for. I turned away again. He wasn’t going to come after me. He was too busy being pissed off. I went around a corner. Now you can lose it, I told myself, now that you’re finally alone, now that the last man is gone. But I didn’t. I touched my side, where the car hit me. It hurt, meaning I was here, in this world, with all its necessary pain. Give me more necessary pain, I thought, holding my hip, feeling the bruise. So I’ll know I’m still alive.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “Port Authority Bus Terminal,” he told me. “Second floor. At the top of the escalator.”

  I went expecting to find him waiting for me, but of course he wasn’t. So I looked at the store windows. Now that I wasn’t making any, I saw how everything was made of money. Not just items, but places (Boston $75, Phoenix $120), bodies (“Because I’m Worth It”), even thoughts, what you allowed yourself to think. I can have this. I can’t have that. Money was the stuff of the universe. Ideas covered it, clung to its surface like lint or dirt, but the inside, the essence of anything, was how much it cost compared to how much you had. Which in my case was less and less. It kept leaking out.

  I liked the bus station, though. It was different from Grand Central, more my speed. People’s lives happened here. It wasn’t about commuters and tourists. Whole families camped out with suitcases held together by tape. Little girls were dressed up for trips. An old lady used a walker. I watched her set it down and heave herself forward, again and again. The ceilings were low. Whatever was for sale was cheap. And I wanted to buy. I wanted to spend. It was a bizarre urge, considering how careful I had to be now. Let’s get it over with. That’s what part of me felt. Let’s throw away these last few fig-leaf bills and see what’s underneath. Because if I’m right, if everything is money, then when I reach zero, what will happen? Will I magically merge with the chaos all around me and cease to be?

  I tried lifting my brain firmly with both hands and setting it back down into some kind of groove, but there was none. I was skitter
ing along, sleepless and staring. Someone had set up a shrine. It was strange to find religion between a magazine stand and a drugstore, but why not? A million Manhattans were arranged on shelves. They were all the same, some big, some small, but the same repeating skyline, each separate, kept in the beautiful clear crystal case of its own personality, row after row of them, as many cities as there were people in it, showing how, together, we were more than just the sum of ourselves, how we formed something beautiful and unique. I even saw one—maybe it was just the way the light was hitting it but how could that be? There was no direct light, no shaft of sun, I was as inside as I could get, at the very heart of things—lit up for me especially, my Manhattan, the one I had come for, the one my presence created. I reached out. I didn’t know what to do, how you were supposed to worship here. I took it in my hand and spread my fingers wide over the Brooklyn Bridge, the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, but also over the little figures below, this microscopic crowd I hadn’t noticed before, and at my touch they began to dance! I must have been shaking, because these angels, all in white, were swirling in the liquid air, level with the tops of the make-believe skyscrapers, greeting me, accepting me.

  “Eve,” a voice said, “you are in the Gift Shop.”

  “I know.”

  I did. I was perfectly aware. But a place can be two things at once. When you start your own religion, you don’t go to church. There are none. You make a church. And how do you do it? By an act of will. A way of seeing. But the places don’t stop being what they were before. They don’t stop being what made them special to begin with. I looked up and saw a banner saying, WELCOME TO NEW YORK.

  “I want to buy this.”

  “You want to buy a snow globe?” Viktor asked.

  “Is that what it’s called?”

  He thought a minute.

  “Snow globe. Yes, why not?”

  It was a big one. I emptied my pockets, gave the lady more than I needed to. When she tried giving some back, I shook my head. I wanted to be absolutely free. Pure.

  He stared at me.

  “You look different.”

  He did, too. He wasn’t wearing a colored undershirt. I guess that had been his uniform, as much as the leotard and hot pants had been ours. I had only seen him at work or right after, except the first time, in the coffee shop, when he chose me, and that’s what this reminded me of. In an ordinary place he looked human. He was dressed in a white shirt and blue pants. His mustache was less threatening, more moody, something to chew on. Even his eyes weren’t glaring. They were sad, philosophical. He actually looked attractive.

  “So,” he said.

  I threw myself into his arms. We were the same size. It was such a relief after all these tall people.

  “Hold me?” I asked, and he did, in the middle of everyone, in the middle of the announcements about arrivals and departures. He held me so unashamed. We knew so much about each other. Things no one else would ever guess. I breathed in his after-shave or cologne or whatever it was, that medicine smell I’d never known was his before, that was part of work, that stayed with me after, was part of my life, that I hated, but now, I realized, was gone, lost forever.

  “They closed down the bar!” I wailed. “I went there and—”

  “I know, I know.”

  Of course he knew. But I had to get it out, saying how I tried to pry apart the walls, how all the time I was there I was desperate to get to the garden in back, but never had and now I never would. How those greedy weeds always looked so dark green in the electric light.

  “They were armed!” he complained. “Armed men! The sheriff of New York City. That’s what he calls himself. I did not realize the national childishness here extended to the titles of your elected officials. They broke down the door and had a locksmith right behind them to put it back up again. You never saw such a waste of tax dollars.”

  “And, uh, did they say how they knew about the place?”

  I kept my head buried, trying not to look up.

  “One of those periodic crackdowns, no doubt. I disclaimed all knowledge. Said I was the janitor. A dumb émigré. That is the problem, though. Your sheriff turned my name over to the INS.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The Immigration and Naturalization Service. They have begun deportation proceedings.”

  I nodded slowly. So it was my fault.

  “I have been watching you window-shop.”

  “From where? You live here?”

  “Well, not on a bench.”

  I wouldn’t have minded if he was homeless. It would have made me feel like we had even more in common. This place seemed very close to something. The true city I had come for.

  “So where do you sleep?”

  “In there. Come.”

  He led me through a set of heavy glass doors opposite where I had been standing, where I had been lingering, basking, without realizing, in his attention. Or had I seen him out the corner of my eye? Did I know what I was doing on some semi-conscious level? Is this flirting? I asked, and a sound hit me, a light shattering, not of destruction, more like liberation, a breaking free. Where was I? It was all so familiar that for a minute I had no idea, just someplace I knew, intimately. A heavy ball bounced once, wobbled on oiled wood, then settled down and came rumbling toward us.

  “A bowling alley?” I asked stupidly.

  “Port Authority Lanes. Didn’t you see the sign?”

  “You live here?”

  “I manage it. For a friend. The bar was always, what do you call it? A sideline. A place where I could dispose of leftover supplies.”

  “You mean you stole liquor from your friend and sold it there?”

  “Yes, well it is more complicated than that, of course. I was compensating myself. It was a form of self-pay. There is an office in back. With a sofa. Since I work nights—since I worked nights,” he corrected, “it was cheaper to take naps during the day.”

  “You live in a bowling alley?” I repeated.

  “It is a bourgeois concept. Permanent housing.”

  “This is where you call me from.”

  It never occurred to me there was a bowling alley in the middle of New York City. Now I understood why his calls had that magic. He was talking about the raid, its aftermath, all the legal and money troubles he was having, but all I could do was look at the men in their loose colored shirts, the women with wide hips and high hair. It was so Midwest, right down to the counter with the hundreds of pairs of shoes, the snack bar, the pro shop.

  “It’s League Night!”

  “Maybe you should sit.”

  “I never played. We weren’t allowed. But I used to go and watch. I sneaked in. It was the coolest place in town, when I was a little girl.”

  “You were not allowed to bowl?”

  “No bowling in the Bible.”

  I could see he was going over the four Gospels, all the books of the Old Testament, then the Apocrypha, looking for bowling references. Well, maybe he wasn’t. Maybe I really didn’t have a clue what went on in other people’s heads. I just always assumed they were like me. He guided us past vending machines, through a passageway that turned, so we weren’t in the public part of the lanes anymore.

  “Where are we going?”

  We went down a staircase, not a full staircase, not the kind that takes you to another floor, only four or five steps, then we had to duck, so we were halfway between things, before turning and ending up in this windowless room, more like a closet, with shag carpeting, a desk with food on it, a lamp with a dirty shade, and a couch.

  “This is where I call you from.”

  Just then another bowling ball started its journey. Several, actually. They hit the boards over our heads and slid for a moment—I thought of my brain back there, how I had tried to launch it that same way—before something took over, before they all straightened out and started racing for the pins. The vibrations echoed off each other in the little box of an office. We sat on the couch. He p
oured me a drink. There was no ice. We clinked our glasses and looked at each other, suddenly serious, swearing a suicide pact. More bowling balls were hitting the ceiling, at regular intervals. Not regular enough, though. You couldn’t get used to them. At least, I couldn’t.

  “How can you sleep here?

  “I have slept in much worse.”

  “Me too, I guess.”

  “You get used to things.”

  I nodded.

  We drank.

  It was so dependable, that first sip. The space inside me expanded. All my interior walls were knocked down. I was an empty room, ready to echo. Now that I knew where he called me from, now that the mystery was solved, I liked him more. He wasn’t some sinister creature loaded down with all the scary clichés I had about the big bad city. He was just someone who came here from far away, trying to make it. Like me.

  “I’m broke,” I pronounced. I wanted to hear it out loud. I wanted to get used to the fact in advance. The words were less scary once they hit the air. I had put the snow globe down on his desk. “I mean, I still have money. But I’ll be broke, soon.”

  “What will you do?”

  “Get a job.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Waitressing, I guess.”

  “You will find it is not so easy. And won’t pay. Not the way I did.”

  “You didn’t pay so much.”

  “I let you steal.”

  “Taking money instead of pouring a free drink is not stealing.”

  “A wife of mine,” he said carefully, “would not have to work.”

  “What?”

  “A wife. There is something to be said for the old system. The husband goes off to work. The wife, who is not good at this thing, who does not meet with such attractive opportunities, provides the ‘home’ you are so shocked I have, so far, been able to do without.”

  “And what does she do there all day? Mop? Watch TV? Make dinner?” I listened to the crash of the alleys. “Reset the pins?”

  He reached over and took my glass.

  “She spends her day being my wife. The mother of my children.”

  “Oh.” I laughed. “Children, right. Getting a little ahead of yourself there, aren’t you?”