by Danzy Senna
She glanced over at him. “He looks like an inmate, with that crazy pickaninny hair—”
I put a hand on her shoulder. “It’s okay. Please. Just go upstairs. Let me handle this.”
She threw me one final disapproving look as she went inside.
IVERS WAS SO FOCUSED on the yo-yo he didn’t seem to see me.
“Hey,” I said, when I was directly in front of him.
He didn’t look up at me. Just said, “You know how to get these knickknacks to work?”
The yo-yo hung limply at the end of its string. Ivers groaned and began to wind it up. When he was done he put it in his pocket and only then did he glance up at me. We both kind of laughed when our eyes met, as if the other had told a mildly funny joke.
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m freezing my butt off. That’s what.” He struggled to look serious. “Listen. About yesterday. I was just trying to make you laugh. But I pissed you off instead. Or something. Sorry. I’m not good at interviews. Can we try again?”
I hesitated, then glanced over my shoulder. “There’s a café across the street. I’m not going back to Roylstons.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he grumbled. “This’ll be just fine.”
We started down the block the way I’d come. As we passed the office lobby, I glanced inside. Greta stood huddled behind the glass, watching us, her arms folded, her eyes great black pits of worry. I waved my hand—part greeting, part dismissal—but she didn’t move or blink. She just continued staring at us, wide-eyed, as if she were witnessing extraterrestrial life strolling down Madison Avenue.
THIS TIME Ivers answered my questions. All of them. He sat stiffly across from me in the crowded French café with his hands folded on the table, talking loudly and precisely into my tape recorder’s microphone. I told him he could relax and sit back, the tape would pick him up. But he didn’t seem to believe me and remained hunched over the small black box ar-tic-u-lat-ing very slowly and clearly as he answered each question. He told me who his influences were (the late, great Houdini and the filmmaker Roman Polanski), what he was working on now (a project involving stolen hospital goods), and where he’d thought up the creature Menchu (it was named after the Guatemalan peasant and memoirist Rigoberta Menchú).
When I asked him about his childhood, where he was from, he leaned away from the tape recorder. “I grew up under a rock. An earthworm.”
I nodded. “Great. I’ll be sure to mention that.”
As I started to put my tape recorder and notebook away, he said, “Hey, you know who you remind me of?”
I stiffened. “No. Who?”
“Kristy McNichol.”
“As in the actress?”
“Yeah. From Little Darlings. I don’t know why. It’s just—I don’t know. Something about you. Real seventies. Like, your hair isn’t feathered, but it should be.”
“Well, thanks, I guess.”
I reached across the table for my pen, and he pointed at my arm. “Plus, you got hairy arms.”
I glanced at my arm. I’d rolled up my sweater sleeve, and my forearm was exposed. He was right: I’d always had hairy arms. I’d always been ashamed of them. Tried different methods of removal, including bleaching. But since I’d left Andrew, I’d let myself go. Nobody to witness my body. Nobody to praise my efforts, so why bother. And so here the hair sat, weeds in an untended garden: dark hairs that lay against my pale skin.
I pulled my arm away and quickly rolled down my sleeve, cheeks burning.
“It was a compliment. Hairy arms are nice.”
Outside on the sidewalk we stood awkwardly facing one another, but both reading the pavement. The snow was sticking. I glanced across the street trying to think of what to say next.
A person dressed in a purple ski cap and a beige trench coat darted behind a parked van, hunched down low behind the passenger-side window, watching us through the glass.
“What’s the matter?”
I looked back at him.
He frowned, quizzically. “You changed just then. What is it?”
I glanced back at the van.
“Um, nothing.” I scratched my head. My words were a desperate rush. “Listen, you want to go out sometime? I mean, just hang out. I only moved to the city, well, pretty recently. Actually, this past summer. But I don’t know that many people my age.”
I felt stupid after I said it, but also distracted by what was going on across the street.
From behind the van, the person was bobbing his or her head—I couldn’t tell if it was a he or a she—trying to get a better look at us.
Ivers smiled slightly. “Um, okay. Sure.” He laughed. “Listen, it doesn’t matter much to me, but I’m just curious. Is that allowed? You know, the journalist and the subject—”
The person crouched down low now out of sight.
I looked back at him. “So, listen, I’ll call you.”
He laughed. “You’re strange—but yeah, call me.”
He backed away from me, waved his hand, then turned and was gone.
I waited a moment to see if the person would come out from behind the van. But nobody emerged. After a moment, I ducked my head and started across the street, telling myself it was nothing. Just another weirdo getting his rocks off.
Upstairs in my office I closed the door, sat in my swivel chair in the dark, put on my headphones, and listened to my interview with Ivers Greene. Whom I’d just asked out on a date. It sounded remote, the recording of our voices, like something that had happened a long time ago. And listening to it, I forgot about the person behind the van. I felt giddy and foolish and a little bewildered. I couldn’t see the end of the story.
16
D ONE?”
Greta stood in the hallway, dripping wet. Her hair had frizzed up from the melting snowflakes and hung around her face in wiry curls.
I had just finished my article about Ivers. It was ten o’clock at night.
“I thought you’d never finish.”
She was wearing a beige trench coat. She had not been wearing it at lunch.
“What are you still doing here?”
“I was waiting to celebrate.”
“Celebrate what?”
“You. You finishing the article.” She sniffed. “Took you long enough.” She rubbed her nose hard with the flat of her palm. “So you coming? We need to get there before they all go home.”
“Who goes home?”
“The horsemen at Central Park. I was thinking we could go for a ride. To celebrate.”
“At this hour?”
“Come on, don’t be a bore. This is New York City.”
I felt something—that bug again—crawling along the back of my neck, but I didn’t move to swat it away this time.
“No,” I started to say, but something on her face made me think better of it. I wanted to keep the peace. Anyway, as far as I knew, the horse-drawn carriages had already gone home—and so if I made the effort of going all the way to the park, I would be off the hook.
“All right,” I said. “But just a quick ride.”
She didn’t break into a grin the way she ordinarily did when I accepted her invitations. She just crinkled her nose and sawed at it harder with her finger, as if she were trying to rub it loose. “Hurry. They’re gonna go home soon.”
AS I’D HOPED, we were too late. The horses and the carriages had already been dismantled. An old grizzled man dressed up like a leprechaun in a green pointed hat and vest and shoes that turned up at the toes stood counting money in front of his forlorn beast, as if he were preparing to split the earnings between them.
I hung back while Greta begged him for a ride.
“Come on,” she said. “My friend here just finished a big assignment. Can’t you take us around once?”
He had an accent thick as a rind. Rolling and rising in soft lilts. “I’m sorry, lass, but I’ve got to go home. Already packed up. Besides, look at this weather. We’ll catch our death out here.”
> Greta didn’t budge. She stood, head bent toward the ground, staring at the old man’s leprechaun shoes.
“Please? We’ll sit under a blanket. We’ll be warm enough. Just take us around once.”
“So sorry, m’dear, but I can’t do it. Come back a bit earlier tomorrow and I’ll gladly take you around. Twice.”
“No. Not tomorrow.” I heard the escalation in her voice. “Tonight.”
I intercepted. “It’s okay, Greta. Let’s do it tomorrow. We can get a drink. Over there. Look, there’s a hotel. I’m sure the bar’s open.”
She glanced in the direction I pointed at the golden glow of the Ritz-Carlton across the street. She shot the old man a hateful glance. “All right, fine. Thanks a lot, Mickey Rooney.”
The old man’s face smarted as if he had been slapped, but he didn’t say a word.
HER MOOD SEEMED to lift once we were inside, seated across from each other in velvet armchairs. She puffed on a Benson & Hedges Menthol, eyeing me through the haze.
When the drinks came, she held up her kamikaze and said, “To Ivers Greene—major asshole that he is. And to the loveliest, brightest Riggs Fellow ever. A rising star in our midst.”
I lifted my glass weakly.
The drink itself was the only thing that felt good at that moment.
“What did you write about the great ghetto artiste anyway?”
I ignored the sarcasm and tried to sound normal again as I described my article—how I’d opened it, how I’d described Ivers, how I’d closed it.
She nodded as I spoke, a crooked smirk on her face.
When I was finished, she picked up her drink and took a gulp, placed it in front of her, and stared off, over my head, at the snow falling outside.
I tried to fill the silence. “I hope Rula likes it. I tried to keep to the tone of the magazine, but at the same time—”
She interrupted me. “So you’ve got a boyfriend now.”
“Excuse me?”
“Do you love him?”
I laughed a little. “Greta, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I wrote an article. It was an assignment. Didn’t you hear a word I said?”
Her eyes flickered across my face, but then away again. “Yeah. I heard,” she said. “You finally got laid by a horse-hung Negro. Pure, uncut, grade-A nigra meat. How did it feel to be penetrated by ole King Kong himself?”
I bit the ice like a piece of glass. My fingers twitched on my knees. “I don’t know what your problem is today, Greta. Ivers is not my boyfriend. That’s absurd. He’s an artist I was assigned to write about.”
Greta snickered. “Well, he might not be your boyfriend now, but he will be. Tomorrow or the next day or the day after that. Mark my words. I can tell. You’ve got that look. Like you’re on the prowl. If it’s not him, it’ll be somebody else. Not a white boy. You’re done with that. It’ll be some coon with a hankering for high-yella ass. You’ll fall head over heels and next thing I know you’ll be doing the jitterbug up in Harlem with Mr. Milky Way, discovering your black heritage astride his dick. And I’ll just be some sandpile you used to play in.”
At a table nearby, a businessman laughed so hard his face turned purple. At the bar, a guy was sticking his tongue into a woman’s ear, flicking it in and out like a snake. His tongue had black spots on it—the shape of countries on a map. Was that a disease I hadn’t heard of—geographical tongue?
“It’s two-faced bitches like you that give us a bad name.”
I looked back at her. She was staring so hard I could actually feel it on my forehead. I stood in a rush and made my way across the polished ivory floor toward the ladies’ room.
It was posh, marble, with mirrors on all sides. I went into the first stall and bent over the toilet. I began to retch. I hadn’t eaten, so it was an empty, violent gagging that brought up only a thin, bitter mixture of coffee and alcohol. Afterward, I leaned against the door, held my stomach, and began to cry quietly. With a sudden, childish hunger, I missed my family, missed the sounds of my parents’ voices and my brother’s teasing and even the sound of their laughter, mocking me and all my aspirations. I even missed California, Berserkeley, with its ridiculous, dusty idealism. Outside, I could hear the bathroom door swinging open and closed. Women entering and leaving, with their endlessly full bladders.
After a while I came out of the stall, wiping my cheeks.
And there she was, standing at the sink, washing her hands. She stared at me in the reflection. “Oh,” she said when she saw I was crying. “You all right?” Her mood had changed again. She turned to face me, wiping her hands on a paper towel.
“Hey there now,” she said, tossing the paper towel on the floor. “I was just kidding out there. You don’t know how to take a joke.”
And through a blur of wetness I saw her swimming toward me. Felt her arms embrace me, her hair tickling my cheek, and the softness of her bosom pressed against my chest. I heard her whispering in my ear, “You’re not alone. I’m here. I’m here now.” I could smell the cocoa butter on her skin. I felt her hands massaging the back of my skull, its cranial hardness.
“I didn’t mean to upset you. God, that’s the last thing I wanted to do, it’s just I’m so worried about you. I don’t want to see you get hurt. I know these guys. They come across so hip and happening, but they always turn on you. They turn on you and—”
Her voice sounded different, thicker. I managed to pull away to see that her eyes were tear-stained, murky, black stones at the bottom of a dirty river, and the skin around them was smudged with wetness. She laughed. “Look what you’ve done to me. I’m a faucet.”
She bit her lip, looked at the floor, then peeked up at me. She seemed to want to say something, but was trying to decide if she should. Finally, she said, “Hey, have I told you my plans for tomorrow night?”
I shook my head.
She shrugged and rolled her eyes and said with weary resignation, “I’ve got to go to this friend’s house and cook her supper, if you can believe it.”
I felt relief rush through me. She had another friend. She had plans.
“That sounds really, really nice,” I said, stepping backward and leaning against the sink behind me. Water from the counter seeped into the back of my pants, but I didn’t move.
She glanced over my shoulder at the mirror behind me, her expression self-conscious, slightly conceited, the way people’s expressions tend to be when they are aware of their own reflection. Mirror-face. “This friend of mine? You’d love her,” she said, tilting her head down and batting her eyelashes at herself. It was giving me the strange sensation of being surrounded by her—one version of her in front of me and the other behind. “She’s wonderful,” she said. “Most of the time. But right now? She’s having a hard time. She’s sad and she’s sick, and that’s why I’m going to cook for her. She’s, like, so sick she can’t even cook for herself.” She looked back at me and her mouth curled into a teasing smile. I felt a prickle of discomfort return. She continued, “My friend? She thinks she’s all alone. She doesn’t realize that somebody out there cares about her so much it’s breaking that somebody’s heart. She doesn’t know what a special person she is.” She was grinning with her mouth, but her eyes stayed hollow and scared.
I scratched my head. Swallowed. Listened to the sounds—pedestrian, familiar—of the ladies’ room. The tinkle of somebody peeing nearby. A cough. An unraveling of toilet paper. The flushing.
Greta raised her eyebrows. “So. Have you guessed who my friend is?”
I didn’t say anything, just stared at her.
She whispered, as if to a small child, “It’s you. The special girl I have plans to cook for tomorrow night.” She reached out and tapped my shoulder with her finger. “You.”
I shook my head. “Actually, I’m busy, I have plans to go out—”
She shook her head. “No. No you don’t. Not in your condition.” She said it like a doctor. “Now why don’t you just relax and stay home for once and let som
ebody take—”
I cut her off. “I’m not in any condition. I’m fine. Really. I’m sorry I broke down.”
She smiled and pursed her lips in affectionate disapproval. “Know what? I’m gonna call you Rocky from now on. ‘Cause you’re tough. Rocky Balboa. Yeah.” She put her hands on her hips and puffed out her chest and furrowed her brow and said in a deep voice, “I’m fine. I’m sorry I broke down.” She relaxed her affect and shook her head. “You don’t have to pretend with me. It’s okay to lean on somebody once in a while.”
I heard a violent blast of diarrhea from behind one of the stall doors, and an awful smell wafted over to us.
“I’ve got to get going. I’ll be okay. Really.” With that, I turned on my heel and started out of the restroom.
She followed, quiet now. She didn’t say another word—just picked up her coat when I picked up mine, put on hers when I put on mine, and followed me down the escalator and outside, to the street, where I stood at the curb waiting for a vacant taxi. I held my arm raised high and straight so that a cab would be sure to see me—and when I glanced beside me I saw she was imitating me. She was raising her arm high and straight just like mine, and her face was screwed up in a fierce frown.
She caught my eye and cracked up laughing. “I’m only fooling,” she said. “You just look funny.”
I turned away. It was freezing, but my cheeks were burning. I saw a cab with its light on and waved at it. In my peripheral vision I could see her still imitating me.
Before the cab had come to a full stop, my hand was on the door. I glanced behind me before getting inside. She was standing there now on the curb, hands returned to her pockets. She looked frumpy and nondescript, and for a moment I wondered if I was overreacting.
“Well,” I said, “good night.”
“Was it?” she asked, eyes sparkling with meaning.
I got in and slammed the door, and the cab began to move forward, but at the corner there was a red light, and so we idled. I twisted around in my seat and breathed in sharply. There she was, following the car. Jogging after us, with her arm held out in front of her like a cartoon character who has missed a train. She was only a few feet behind us. When she saw my face peering back at her she began to wave and mouth something. I couldn’t make out what she was saying, but her lips moved. Something about “I forgot” and “rent”? Or was it “bent”? Before she could reach my window, the light changed, and the cab was moving forward and away. I didn’t tell the driver to stop, and I didn’t look back again. I just slid down low in the vinyl seat and watched the chaos of colors and motion outside my window.