“Am I being disciplined?”
He pushes my face forward again.
“Don’t talk.”
He fucks me so angrily he comes in a second.
* * *
I was on the subway without my mother and in the crush before the doors opened a man stuck his hand up my skirt and grabbed my crotch and asked me how much I cost. I was wearing one of my outlandish outfits but in an instant all my confidence disappeared. I knew it was my fault. I had rolled the waist on the skirt, twice. I remember his hoarse, bossy whisper in my ear. I remember it being a new sound. I was ten or eleven.
* * *
The window-unit AC is not Friedrich, it’s LG. It blows black dust around my apartment. I leave it on, set at sixty, even when I’m gone because I can. On the street it’s dark but it’s loud. It’s really summer now, I think, not like a child.
* * *
“Do you want some of them closed?”
I’m getting evil eyes. I look at the nail girl like she’s an idiot.
“What good would that do?” I say.
40
At the Polish diner it’s only the waitress.
“Where’s your mother?” I say.
“In the hospital.”
I look at her.
“Beth Israel?”
“We live in Jersey,” she says.
* * *
The floor of the elevator, not the clams, is what’s gelatinous. It’s sticky with spilled drinks. It’s after hours at the dim-sum parlor and I ash on the carpet. I’m giving the calf’s brain guy the cold shoulder.
“I can’t go higher than two, come on,” he says.
“I don’t know anything about you. I can’t even picture where you work all day and you want me to give up all my relationships with my other clients,” I say.
Then a song comes on and I turn my back to him and float my arms up like the other girls, but better, two beats slower.
* * *
The art guy’s office is actually on Wall Street.
“Retro,” I say.
He sneaks us in at three a.m. We run down a hallway holding hands and giggling. His father’s desk is a mess. He clears a space for me. From up here, on my hands and knees, I can see both rivers. They are the black bands, to the west and the east, between the glittering.
“Put some coke in my asshole.”
“I have never been this hard,” the art guy says.
* * *
“I love your everything.”
I look at what I’m wearing, which is monochromatically white. I smile at the cashier.
“Just this,” I say.
I’m careful not to give her my evil-eye nails when I hand her the spicy tuna.
* * *
I wonder what the laundry lady thinks. Every week lately the only panties are five white pairs, progressively more ripped. But I have my laundry picked up and delivered so I don’t know. The dry cleaning I take myself. The dry cleaning lady is holding up a dress.
“We had to run it twice. Something on it we couldn’t get off,” she says.
She draws her finger down the sides of the long V, the neckline cut all the way to the waist.
“See? When I turn it in the light? What is that?”
It’s come.
“No idea,” I say.
* * *
As an exercise I try to stay away from the ex-Ranger.
* * *
“What?” I say.
The ex-Ranger is pretending to be asleep.
“What?” I say.
I straddle him. He won’t open his eyes.
“What?” I say.
“Stop it,” he says.
He puts his hand flat against my sternum but he doesn’t push.
* * *
We are spoon-fed what looks like chocolate cake at the end of the show but inside, deceptively, it’s tiramisu, which I hate. I open my mouth and spit it out. The guy who buys me things does the same. The actor feeding us looks annoyed.
“Please don’t spit on the floor,” he says.
“Fifty thousand,” the guy who buys me things says.
“I’ve had a much higher offer,” I say.
I watch the guy who buys me things get mad and then control it.
* * *
The junk-bond guy leads me by the hand to the master bedroom.
“This is where you belong,” he says.
I wonder if he’s as exhausted as me, with all the calculations he’s been making. I stand on my toes and touch my forehead to his forehead.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“For what?”
I don’t say anything.
“It’s okay,” he says.
* * *
“They think money makes them interesting. It’s not hard to work that.”
He is listening intently to me. He is young and pretty. I look him up and down.
“It used to be easy to steal from Century 21. It probably still is,” I say.
The ex-Ranger walks in. I look at NY1 on one of the TVs and it says 9:23 a.m.
“What are you doing here?” I say.
“I’m here all the time, not just Wednesdays. Who’s that?” the ex-Ranger says.
I sigh at the street kid. I wanted to unwind. I give the street kid a couple of twenties.
“Go get a manicure,” I say.
* * *
“You make me feel lawless, like I could take any shape,” I say.
The ex-Ranger pushes his fingers into my hair.
“But it’s not true,” I say.
* * *
At first I got hurt. Strangers are rough. I didn’t yet understand that it makes all the difference to be loved. I told the Sheikh that.
“That’s not love,” he said.
* * *
I buy a light switch, a cable, a paint roller from the hardware store in my neighborhood. I look at the hardware guy and sigh.
“Do you need a handyman?”
“No,” I say.
41
“I don’t think Katushka is your real name,” the calf’s brain guy says.
I eat a piece of rabbit. It’s gamey, like I’m really eating another mammal, and I feel my true human nature, which is barbaric survival at all costs. I feel grossed out.
“What is it?” he says.
“Whatever you want it to be, baby.”
“I don’t know anything about you either.”
* * *
The art guy taps the coke guy’s limousine business card on his island.
“I can’t pay you both,” he says.
I look at the scraped vial in disbelief. Immediately I start recalculating.
“You got fired. He saw the security tape of his desk,” I say.
“No. I’m just going on a trip in a few weeks and I need to keep my expenses down,” the art guy says.
I pick up my purse that I just put down.
“I don’t know why I even bother with you,” I say.
* * *
The city is expressing its musk. Urine is still its base. Between the sidewalks the points of my heels stick in the tar like the animal blood after Eid. In Dubai it was supposed to be illegal to slaughter at home. It grossed out the expats like me. It was only lawful to use abattoirs. But still it was a Muslim country. I want to climb out of my skin and leave it on the street.
* * *
The delivery guy sits on the couch next to me.
“What’s your interest in the Middle East?” I say.
“It’s just where the fucked-up shit’s going down right now. And y’all junkies like that death shit.”
I accept his answer as making sense.
“It’s more like utterly not caring so dying’s okay.”
“That’s why I don’t fuck with that shit,” he says.
I look at the JIHAD bricks on the coffee table.
“Do you want any of this furniture? I’m sick of it,” I say.
* * *
The ex-Ranger’s wearing gym shorts and a
dress shirt with the buttons done up at the wrists.
“Nobody cares about your track marks.”
“I care,” he says.
* * *
I hold the ex-Ranger’s head on my chest and I think please surprise me.
* * *
The guy who buys me things sleeps with his back to me. I move close so our backs are touching. I think I’m always close to fucking everything up. I think if I’m actually still the same then I’ll just give in. I’ll take the money that’s on the table.
* * *
Morning movies are empty. I get up and climb between the junk-bond guy’s knees and sit on his dick. I hold the seat in front of me and watch the screen and after a little while I look over my shoulder to see his complete bliss.
* * *
He wasn’t really my boyfriend but it depressed me too much to think of it any other way. We had sex in his apartment while the woman he lived with was at work. One day, after three years, she came home early. At that point in my life I had never been more scared. I jerked up the covers to hide my naked body. He sat up and looked over his shoulder with resignation.
“Okay, baby, that’s it.”
He lived in the projects on Avenue D and like always he had one of the boys who worked for him take me down on the elevator. I was seventeen and this boy was probably twelve.
“What’s wrong with you, fancy?” he said.
* * *
On my stoop I drink a tall boy and listen to the fireworks on the East River, past Avenue D. They sound small and harmless. The streets are smokeless, lawful. There’s nobody setting off anything illegally. There’s nobody sitting on the street all day in folding chairs. One day in Dubai I Googled him. He was in federal prison for transporting heroin across state lines. In the mug shot he looked bloated and he had tattoos on his face. I felt that his power over me was gone completely. He was one reason I left New York, like the Sheikh was one reason I left Dubai, but not all the reasons. A man from the building sits down beside me.
“You can see everything from the roof. It’s like they’re exploding right over your head,” he says.
“I like it better down here.”
42
I get an actual coconut, with a hole bored through it, and a straw. I must look tropical because on the street even women smile at me. But really I want the meat. I go into the bodega and ask to use their machete.
“No machete,” the bodega guy says.
“Come on,” I say.
* * *
This boat is docked off Tribeca. It’s for stationary oyster-eating and martini-drinking in the summer night air. It’s sunset.
“You’re planning to be a hooker until you die?”
“What’s wrong with that?” I say.
I smile at him serenely.
“Well, for one thing the biological fact that no woman over fifty is sexy,” the calf’s brain guy says.
I flip over a shell on the ice.
“Great, I thought it was forty. More time before I have to kill myself.”
He makes an anguished face. I look at the Hudson and feel seasick even though this is a restaurant that does not move.
* * *
One room is six-foot-tall newsprint photographs of people killing themselves. They’re all jumpers. Conceivably some of them are fleeing fire, saving themselves. In all the photos the distance to the ground is cropped out.
“Could you do that?” the art guy says.
“I don’t know. Could you?” I say.
We’re at the New Museum again. I’m bothering with the art guy again. On the new condition that he pay me at the beginning of a date instead of the end. Because the thought of starting over, of hour after hour in one of those chilly strip clubs, is too much. The art guy knees me so my leg buckles.
“You’d have to push me,” he says.
* * *
I do everything for the ex-Ranger’s dick and it does nothing for me. I sit up on his stomach but my back’s still to him. I imagine a still of myself, blown up larger than life, hung on a wall for paying people to see.
“It’s the drugs.”
“I get it,” I say.
He puts his ten fingers on my ass. I jiggle it idly.
* * *
At the gym, in the shower, some money falls out of me or off of me. Two quarters swirl around the drain with my hair. I laugh at myself. I walk up naked to the TODAY girl.
“I’m a prostitute. That’s what I do.”
She looks at me in the locker room mirror. Her expression stays the same.
“I’m an art director,” she says.
* * *
At the end of a Chinese movie that is otherwise dirtily realistic there is a scene of a man on a tightrope walking fantastically between two buildings. He steps out into the open air and doesn’t fall. He is in the background and is not the main thing that is happening, as if there are wonderful things to see if I just shift my focus. I look at my ceiling. Redemption is a smug word, I think.
* * *
I complain that I’m hungry until the guy who buys me things buys me a Sabrett on the street, outside his office. I look at the street-cart guy. He avoids my eye. He speaks to the guy who buys me things.
“Lucky man,” he says.
The guy who buys me things turns his back so that he’s blocking him.
“I’m having a hard time getting over this higher offer bullshit,” the guy who buys me things says.
I eat the hot dog unhappily.
* * *
I look at the junk-bond guy.
“Once when I was a little girl a wild dog chased me all the way down Avenue C.”
He smirks.
“You’re lying,” he says.
“Yes.”
I combine our feet on the big bed.
“I love you. Can I say that?” the junk-bond guy says.
“Yes,” I say.
* * *
It was my first time overseas. I had never before seen real palm trees or the lavender light of the desert and there was something whimsical about it, like an untrue story. The woman who had picked me up at the airport put her hand out. She was wearing a silk headscarf with a gorgeous print and nothing black at all.
“Passport,” she said.
I shifted my focus from Dubai rushing past the car’s window.
43
“I’m not leaving my wife for you if that’s what you’re getting at.”
He’s making me stand on line, outside, in syrupy heat, for spicy chicken sandwiches. I twirl my hair up on top of my head and cock out my elbows and look at the calf’s brain guy.
“That’s not what I’m getting at,” I say.
“It’s way more than my interest. Interest rates are shit right now.”
“I need air-conditioning.”
“Whatever,” he says.
* * *
The art guy also seems uptight. I think not him, too. The tension is already so high. I slide my hand in his pocket and rub his cock.
“You know you can do whatever you want with me.”
“That’s not really true,” he says.
“No choking, defecating, or death,” I say.
“I remember.”
* * *
I open the art guy’s door for the zombie girl.
“Yeah, hey,” I say.
* * *
I have often thought that some beauty brand should formulate a come face mask. The way it dries so fast and tight. I look at the zombie girl sleeping beside me. Right now we could sneak out into the living room, huddle over our phones, and max out all his credit cards. I don’t wake her up.
* * *
I’m drawn across the Whitney to hundreds of VIA AIR MAIL stickers stuck in red, white, and blue rows. It reminds me of my wall of dope bags as interpreted by the ex-Ranger, because the rows are uneven. From far away it makes a pretty, swirling shape. The Whitney is not where it used to be either.
* * *
That night I go to a modern b
allet at the Joyce and all the patterns are off-center like a bad print. I don’t hate it.
* * *
I throw a Cherry Bomb cup at the ex-Ranger’s arm and it falls on the floor.
“Right now we could fly to a tropical island and sleep on the beach for three weeks.”
The ex-Ranger shakes his head.
“How would we cop down there?” he says.
I sour my lips.
“Since when are you the realist in this relationship?” I say.
* * *
“In my head I call you the Sheikh.”
The Sheikh laughed as I drew my finger over his princely profile.
“What do you call me?”
“My secret wife,” he said.
I blow smoke at the ex-Ranger’s closet. He has a hatchet in there, along with all his guns. Those tropical vacations never go as planned.
* * *
In the morning he was no longer terrifying, the first man who paid me. He praised me like I had performed well. The cash in the envelope appeared astronomical. I took the elevator to the lobby and the hotel staff weren’t frightening anymore either. They all smiled at me. I walked out into Dubai, a gleaming paradise, where everything looked unused, and I never felt so empty.
* * *
After he’s come but while we’re still linked together I start crying. It’s silent and if the guy who buys me things can feel the warm tears on his chest he doesn’t say anything. I just need a break.
* * *
I hold the junk-bond guy’s cock between my legs and we softly sway.
“Amy’s going to Africa for three weeks. Stay here with me,” he says.
I open my eyes on his neck.
“When?”
44
“What pattern do you want?”
I give the nail girl a harsh look.
“That’s a weird way of putting it,” I say.
I get the rectangles of a crocodile and precisely.
* * *
We are in a narrow black box and there is no ventilation.
“You’re smothering again.”
“Again?” he says.
The calf’s brain guy smashes my head into the wall of the bathroom and fucks me that way. I think I don’t want to be in this coffin with him.
* * *
At PS1 glass marionettes are slaughtering each other. They are reenacting the Crusades from the Arab perspective.
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