Over My Live Body

by Susan Israel

  There’s Curtis behind the tinted glass of the bookstore entrance watching me, waiting for me to get on this bus so he can get on too, so he can follow me to my destination, so he can– God, what does he intend to do to me? My hands grip the handles of the sculpting tools in my pocket. I feel like I’m traveling blind, not able to see which tool is which, not able to know which one will do the most harm. My first choice would be to go for his eyes with the zig zag saw, if I could keep my eyes open long enough to do the deed. So he can’t see what he’s coming after. But chances are I’d only have one shot at one eye, and unless he’s already blind in the other, that’s not going to be much help. The fettling knife or sabre saw could draw blood; just how much hinges on how much of a chance I have to strike before he springs on me. The cut-out tool, pointed at just the right place, could puncture an artery.

  “You getting on this bus or ain’t ya?” the driver snarls at me.

  “No, no…sorry,” I back away from the stairs and wave the bus away. I start walking north up Third Avenue, then spin around like I’m spotting a dancing step. As expected, Curtis barges out of the bookstore once I’ve gained about a half block on him. My hand grips the handle of one of the tools so hard that my knuckles throb. I don’t know what I’m dealing with here. I don’t see any uniforms on the street now. I wish to hell I did. It’s the beginning of rush hour and I just passed up the last non-rush-hour bus and I’m sure going to be late getting to this class. If I get there at all.

  I run up Third Avenue gasping for breath, looking over my shoulder to see how fast Curtis is catching up to me. I track his distorted reflection as it bobs from window to window, coming closer. Nobody pays any attention except when I bump into them. “Hey, look where you’re…”

  A gaggle of gum-chewing girls glare at me. I dart around them and trip on the curb and into the street. A taxi careens around the corner, brakes screeching. The driver screams something that sounds like “Bint!”, whatever that means, and babbles on incomprehensibly when the cab stalls, blocking eastbound traffic. I don’t dare look back until I get across the street. A clot of people at the curb momentarily blocks movement around the stalled taxi. I’ve lost sight of Curtis. Big blob that he is, I doubt that he can squeeze through, but I keep moving, just in case, my fingertips still brushing against the light wooden handles in my pocket. I take a time out before the next cross street to catch my breath and spot Curtis’ stained Browns parka reflected in the window of a greengrocer halfway down the block. The light is with me this time, and I run the full length of the next block, bumping into more people, not looking back at all until I reach the curb and stop to catch my breath.

  He’s gaining on me.

  Maybe he once played for a team called the Browns or he’s a wannabe on that score too. I’ve underestimated his athletic prowess; this man can move. I sprint across East Thirteenth Street. in the path of another approaching taxi. Brakes shriek. I can’t make out what this driver calls me. In an effort to avoid me, he erringly swerves toward me and his dented fender scrapes against my leg before I can make it all the way across. Another fever pitch of horns echoes behind me. I hear the crunch of metal hitting metal. More horns.

  “Stop her!”

  I don’t know who’s doing the shouting and I’m not turning back to look because I can tell by the diction it’s not the cabby who’s in close pursuit, who I need to trip up. My leg smarts where the cab hit me. I can imagine the bruise in the making. What I need is some ice. And there it is, right on cue, right in front of me, a greengrocer’s fruit stand packed with ice, perfect little uniform cubes crammed around plastic cups filled with fruit cocktail. I scoop up a handful as if I’m going to press it against my throbbing calf and cup my hands in a funnel. The ice slithers through and out on the sidewalk in Curtis’ anticipated path. I grab more ice and start throwing it, one handful after the other, creating a hailstorm underfoot. Passers-by rush around the squall. Some look at me warily; some don’t dare. It’s not me that you need to worry about, I want to scream, it’s him. I see another M102 bus approaching the corner. This is it, my only chance, I’ve got to get on that bus now. I take a deep breath and the biggest armful of ice I can grab and heave it in front of me just before my retreat. Grapes and giant chunks of chilled pineapple fly through the air too. For added insurance, I grab a banana propped on the other side of the stand, quickly strip its peel, and toss it as Curtis comes closer. He starts to skid. I don’t wait for him to fall. I scamper to the curb and jump on the first stair of the bus just as the door starts to hiss and closes behind me.

  “You crazy, girl,” the bus driver admonishes me. “You know that?” By talking to me like this, I know he knows that I’m not crazy enough to take a weapon out of my pocket and start slashing at him. Not that I couldn’t if I wanted to. Maybe my behavior reminds him of something he’s familiar with, a victim he knows. A sister. A wife.

  The passengers avert their eyes, looking every which way but at me, like I’m not there. The driver looks at me nervously until I drop the exact change in the coin box, then figuring a fare is a fare, he directs his attention to the traffic ahead and ignores Curtis’ dirty scraped knuckles banging on the door. The Korean grocer is there now too, waving his fists as the bus cuts away into the next lane.

  “Thanks,” I tell the driver. He ignores me. I edge away from the front of the bus and slide into an unoccupied handicapped seat, grimacing enough to make it seem legit. My calf really could have used some of that ice. Even if Curtis waits to board the next uptown bus, it’s rush hour and the M102 makes limited stops during rush hours. My eyes skim street signs as they flash by so I can get off before the bus overshoots my stop. I don’t want to have to do much backtracking. When the bus whizzes by East Twentieth Street, I get up and hover near the stairs just as it swerves to a stop at Twenty-Third. I wait until the door opens with a hydraulic wheeze and jump off, then turn to the bus driver to thank him one more time; he continues to stare straight ahead and the words get caught in my throat. I cough as the departing bus discharges exhaust in my face and back off, batting away the noxious fumes with both hands. I spin around and walk back toward the building on East Twenty-First where Heidi Obermeyer and her students are expecting me, where for two hours I can safely strip myself of my clothes and my defenses.

  I’m already starting to unbutton my coverall as I walk into the studio, ready to mumble an apology for being late. My fingers yank off a button when I see Heidi Obermeyer in front of the window wearing a black vinyl peek-a-boo get-up that so cleaves to her that it makes her look like she’s wrapped in cellophane. These students, given a choice, would probably much rather draw her.

  “You’re out of breath,” she proclaims, oozing concern. I can tell by looking around the room that this condition isn’t unique to me, just the mad chase down Third Avenue that it took for me to get here. The other spellbound students ogle her eagerly, waiting for her to bend over or stoop. She’s used to the attention; she’s knocked herself out to get it and now she’s accepting it as her due and blissfully ignorant of it, or at least pretending to be. She puts her hand on my arm as I step out of the coverall . As expected, there’s a huge all-the-colors-of-the-rainbow bruise on my calf. My shaking fingers go to work on the tiny mother-of-pearl buttons on my jersey. Nobody in the room is even looking at me.

  What about somebody out there? There are no shades to draw, no partitions to pull in front of the picture window. What a picture this makes. The floodlights that Heidi has clamped onto several easels in the room are arranged like candles adorning a centerpiece, and I’m it. I fall to my knees ready to assume a reclining position, hoping that that will make me not visible to anyone in the building next door, that all any peeping Curtis can see is plastic-coated Heidi slinking from easel to easel. I settle into an a la Ingres pose, my right foot crossed over the massive bruise on my left calf, my head looking over my shoulder, more wary than come-hither. Can anyone out there see me?

  Heidi sashays up to me durin
g my first break. “You seem up-taght,” she drawls, the gold stud at the tip of her tongue still making her sound like she’s deep in the heart of Texas.

  “I had a little problem getting here,” I tell her. “Some guy who’s been harassing me followed me.” After I’ve pulled my jersey on, I look out the window again at a tier of fluorescent lights shining on bobbing heads. I can’t make out any of their features; I wonder if any one of them can make out mine. “I wondered if he could be over there…”

  “Not lahkly. Just a bunch of randy cops in training. That’s the police academy for the city of New York over there. Don’t pay them any heed. They lahk to look, that’s all. Ah’d say you couldn’t be safer raght about now.”

  It’s later that I’m worried about, and even now I don’t feel cavalier about the surveillance, even if it is by New York’s soon-to-be-finest. Quick had to know about this; he wasn’t just thinking about Curtis when he suggested I insist that the windows be kept covered. I would, but there’s nothing to cover them with. It’s one thing to be looked at by artists who paint a bowl of fruit with the same detachment and quite another to be slavered over like an overripe peach. I don’t feel comfortable with this and it apparently shows. “You’ve moved,” several of the artists in the class complain when I get back into the pose. “You weren’t so hunched over before.”

  I gesture to my injured leg. “Sorry. I guess the pressure is getting to me.”

  “Oh my God, how’d you get that?” Heidi huddles over my leg, twisting her barely covered butt toward the exposed window. She cups the welt on my calf with the palm of her hand caressingly, mirroring the way I imagine those gawking in the building next door would spoon her buttocks after gleefully unwrapping her.

  I wince. “While I was trying to get away from that guy I told you about, I got bumped into by a cab. I wasn’t looking where I was going. I just had to keep moving.”

  Nobody in the room has stopped drawing. My guess is that Heidi has become a dominant part of the picture, a handmaid offering supplication. She rises slowly, then struts to a cabinet at the far side of the room and bends again as she reaches for something on a bottom shelf. She’s wearing a black lace thong under this get-up and bends over just enough to let everyone in the room know it. She comes back with a grungy fuzzy pink blanket and wads it between my legs. “Does that feel bettah?”

  I prop myself back into the original pose and concentrate on the adjacent white brick building as one light after the other flicks off. They remind me of winking eyes. I wonder how many recruits are still there in the dark staring into this studio with relish, maybe justifying their voyeurism by convincing themselves that it’s part of the job, live theater training them how to recognize vice. I bet more than one trainee has had his hand in his pants by now. By the end of the class, all of the lights are out but I can’t help but wonder if somebody’s still home over there, waiting for a last flash of naked flesh. I crawl to a blind corner before climbing to my feet to dress myself. Heidi sidles over to me, a worried look on her face, a strand of her purple streaked hair standing up on end as if electrified. “Ah you going to be okay? Do you need some protection?” I hope she’s not thinking about going out and calling over some of those recruits.

  “I’ll be okay,” I say, not sure whether I’ll be okay at all. I grab the handles of my sculpting tools in the palm of my hand and show them to her. “I brought these with me.”

  “By the time you get those out of your pocket, that guy’s hands will be in your pocket and wherever else he wants them to be,” she says. “Ah can get you something bettah. A gun. A nahce little LadySmith. It’ll fit snugly raght in there.” She points to my fanny pack. “Ah carry mine with me all the time.”

  I look her over from head to toe, wondering where can she possibly conceal any kind of weapon, no matter how small. She’s got dipped-in-chocolate ammo dangling from her earlobes, and the laces on her Doc Martens are strung through what could be spent casings, but I can’t even guess where she’s packed this ladylike gun of hers and I don’t intend to ask.

  “In here,” she says, reaching into the supply cabinet and dangling a purple satin pouch from its black cord strap. “That’s how small it is.” She unzips the pouch and pulls out a tube of hair pomade, a set of keys, a wad of silver foil packets branded TROJAN and RAMSES, and then her hand fits nicely around the rubber hand grip of a pistol that seems custom made for her, the perfect fashion accessory for a kinky Barbie doll.

  “Where’d you get that?”

  “Ah’m from Texas, remember? Here, see how easy it is to hold.”

  “I don’t think…”

  She pulls the cartridge out of the handle nonchalantly, like this is no bigger a deal than taking the refill out of a pen, and flicks a bullet out of a nook in front of the firing pin, then jams the empty gun into my hands. “See, it’s not loaded and the chamber isn’t rounded raght now. You’re not going to shoot me, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  The only gun I feel comfortable with is the green water pistol I use to shoot water at my sculptures to make the clay malleable, not this. Sweat from my palms makes the handle slippery, rubber grips or not. It may be small, as advertised, but even squeezing it with both hands, it feels as weighty as the charges against me would be if I were caught carrying this thing. I wonder if anyone from the academy is still looking over here now that the peep show is over. It would give them probable cause to stop and frisk both of us on our way out, something I’m not sure Heidi wouldn’t immensely enjoy. I know I wouldn’t.

  Unless maybe it were Quick doing the frisking. Just thinking this makes me flush.

  “You’ve got a real nahce hold on that. Stop shaking so much. You saw for yourself, it’s not loaded. Here,” she steps behind me and holds my wrists steady. “Take aim at that painting on the wall over there and just laghtly squeeze the trigger. Lahk this.” She makes a popping sound with her pursed lips.

  “No…I can’t…I can’t shoot a Renoir, I mean, I can’t do this. I can’t shoot a gun; it isn’t in me.” I drop my hands, pointing the gun to the floor.

  “Well, at least you know what it’s lahk.” Heidi takes the gun from me and slides the cartridge back in with a thrust of a vampish nail until it makes a satisfying click. She drops the loaded gun in her satin bag the same way she’d probably toss a lipstick. “But if things should get worse and you change your mahnd, let me know and ah can take you somewhere to practice shooting real bullets. Ah promise you won’t be defacing any great mastahs.”

  “Thanks,” I say, “I will.” I know I won’t.

  Heidi walks me through the corridor like a school monitor. When we get outside, she waves good-bye and heads east down Twenty-First Street, her purple satin pouch filled with condoms and hair goo and a gun swinging benignly around her neck like a sightseer’s camera case.

  I turn away and see a familiar dark car parked curbside, its driver beckoning me toward him with a hand gesture that isn’t quite a wave, his gold shield beaming amber, reflecting the overhead mercury vapor light straight in my eyes. “Delilah!” he shouts at me as if I haven’t noticed him. If he yelled “Freeze!” and pointed his gun at me, he couldn’t have rendered me more immobile than he has by calling me Delilah. My heart starts beating the way it does when I gulp down a triple cappuccino. I wonder what he’s doing here, what he’s seen. He gestures toward the passenger door, reaches over, and pushes it until it’s wide open, like a gaping mouth. He pats the torn upholstery of the seat next to him. “Want a ride?” I better make it quick is what he’s implying. There is no question whatsoever that I’m going to take him up on the offer without even asking him where it is he’s taking me.

  27

  The first red light he stops at gives him the green light to turn to me and start talking. “I’m taking you to the First,” he says. “I want you to look at some pictures.” Tucked in the console between the seats is a manila envelope marked CITY OF NEW YORK: OFFICIAL USE ONLY.

  “Of Curtis?”<
br />
  “That’s what you’re going to tell me.”

  I gesture toward the envelope. “Is this them?” I ask. He nods. I reach for it. “Not here. When we get to the First.” He gently pushes my hand away. “I can’t just show you these pictures. I’m going to show you several pictures of several perps and you’re going to try to pick him out of the pile. Like you would in a line-up.”

  “Those are pictures of him. You’re sure of it or I wouldn’t be here,” I say. “If those are pictures of him, it means they had to be taken for a reason. What reason? What did he do?”

  Quick runs the next red light and glares at me like I’m to blame. “We’ll discuss it when we get downtown,” he says, and turns on the radio to some the-doctor-will-see-you-now music. The kind of music Sauer told me his father listened to after dealing with street crap all day. The kind of music I hang up on when I’m forced to listen to it when put on hold. Quick scowls at it too. “Royko,” he grumbles barely audibly and pops the buttons under the dial until he finds a station he can live with for the rest of the ride. Willie Nelson appropriately enough croaks ‘On the Road Again.’ I try to picture Quick relaxed and on the open road, his hair tousled from the breeze, his shirt unbuttoned, his tie tossed on the back seat. I know what it would take to get me to relax and that what Quick is bound to tell me when we get to the First is likely to have the opposite effect. It’s something he doesn’t dare tell me in a moving vehicle.