But now I thought, if the angel’s not coming back, why should I keep so clean for him? I decided the next time Jim tried to kiss me I would let him. The strange thing was, the next night he tried again—we’d gone to the movies and Howard Johnson’s, and Jim stopped to show me some craters on the moon on the way home, though we both knew he didn’t care about them any more than me—and still I pushed him away. I couldn’t make myself do it.
Jim shrugged. “I’m sorry,” he said in a voice that really meant “Screw you.” He started walking away from me but I called him. In fact, I called him in a really strange voice, like I’d taken charge, which surprised me as much as him. He came back and held my shoulders and for a moment we looked at each other—not for any real reason, I think, but just because people in the movies always look at each other before they kiss. Part of me wanted to stop, to shove him really hard and run away, but I wouldn’t let that happen. I made myself stand there, and when his mouth, already half open, came down towards mine I closed my eyes and kissed him.
I never felt such pain in my life. Like some burning knife coming right up my insides all the way to my face. I screamed, and then I did shove Jim, so hard he fell right on his backside. For a moment he lay there, all bent over, holding his stomach with his face all screwed up and wet with tears or sweat, and I knew the pain had hit him too. He kind of gagged and got to his feet. “You’re sick,” he said, “you’re really, really sick.” He had to keep himself from running as he got away from me.
I walked home slowly, making dumb whimpering noises. Inside I became like two people, one of them miserable that Jim had run off and now no one wanted me, and scared because he was right and they’d lock me up screaming in a strait-jacket—and the other shaking with joy because the angel was real, the fire had come because his power had worked its way deep inside me and any day now the angel would come back and give me its baby. And I knew, too, that the first me, the unhappy one, was a fake, built up out of years of acting normal to satisfy my mother and the kids and teachers at school. I’d almost let it take over, convince me the real one had never existed. But the angel had saved me.
Graduation came soon after, saving me from my mother as well, and her constant asking what had happened with me and “James.” I’d applied to college, mostly because everyone else did, and when the fall came I went off to Albany State. I didn’t stay long. The stuff there didn’t mean anything more than the stuff in high school. Maybe the other kids got something out of it. But I was waiting for the angel to come back.
I moved down to New York. No reason really. I got a job in the city tax department, sorting forms, making spot checks on people’s income tax returns, things like that, and I found an apartment in Queens, one of those streets with six-story apartment houses where rich people used to live. (My building had a big lobby with even a picture made of tiles on the floor, but the tiles were too faded or broken for me to make it out. The elevator never worked.) And I waited.
Months went by, almost two years really. I’m not sure what I did all that time, how I managed to use up the days. I watched TV, read the paper, sometimes went to people’s houses, or movies, or even parties. It didn’t make any difference. Now and then one of the men, one of the shy or ugly ones, asked me out, or even made a pass. I never got nasty or aggressive, but none of them ever tried anything again.
Then one weekend I went for a walk in Greenwich Village. I’d taken to walking a lot, all around, though mostly Manhattan. I liked looking at the buildings, sometimes staring up just like a tourist. I liked the way they were so big, so heavy. That day in the Village, they were having one of those sidewalk art shows, with the painters standing alongside trying to look relaxed while they watched everybody passing by. I thought of Jim and his poems.
Then, on Bleecker Street, I came to an exhibit of photos. Most of them showed buildings or people bent over in funny ways, or tricks, like a cat jumping out of someone’s chest, but one of them—I almost didn’t see it, or maybe I saw it subconsciously, because I walked right past it at first, then stopped just like a hand had grabbed my shoulders and turned me around. The picture wasn’t large, 8" by 11" I later found out. It showed nothing but light. Wavy sheets of light with slivers of dark buried inside them.
I just about grabbed the woman standing beside the photos. “That picture,” I said. “Did you take that?”
“No,” she said, frightened I was going to attack her, or the exhibit. “No, they’re all by different people. I’m just taking a turn—”
“How much is it?”
“Fifty dollars.”
I checked my wallet though I knew I’d only brought fifteen. “Shit,” I said, then I did grab her jacket. “I’m going home to get some more money. Don’t sell that picture to anyone else. Do you understand?” She nodded, her mouth hanging open.
I had to meet the person who’d taken the picture, but first I had to get the thing itself. I couldn’t stand the idea of someone else buying it. Someone who didn’t know. It would have taken too long to go home, but I knew someone who lived pretty close, on East 6th Street. I pushed through the crowds, begging God to make Joan be at home. She was, and loaned me the money. I think she was scared not to.
When I got back the photo was still there, but the woman had put a little sign next to it saying “Sold.” I must have scared her too. I gave her the money and stood shifting from one leg to the other while she carefully wrapped it for me.
“Listen,” I said to her once I had it in my hand, “the person who took this, where can I find her?”
She looked scared, her eyes moving away from me to see who might help her if I got really crazy. “How do you know it’s a woman?” she said.
“Please,” I told her. “You’ve got to help me.”
“Well,” she said, “I guess it’s okay.” She gave me a name and an address near Wall Street. I nearly knocked over some people looking for a cab. The building turned out to be an old office building reaching some twenty stories above the dirty luncheonettes and cheap clothing stores. I stood there staring at it, thinking the goddamn woman had lied to me, until I looked in the lobby and saw the doorman sitting on a wooden stool and reading the Post. Then I realized it must be one of those places where they’d converted some of the empty offices into apartments.
The doorman didn’t wear a uniform or anything like that, just jeans and a dirty sweater, but he still wouldn’t let me up until he’d checked with the woman. I didn’t know what I’d do if she didn’t answer. I had planned to sit by her door if she wasn’t there but the doorman wouldn’t let me do that, I knew, and I didn’t want to have to stand on the street.
She was there. When the doorman asked who I was I told him, “Just say I want to ask about her picture. Her photo.” He made a face and repeated it. It seemed like a whole minute before the scratchy voice said to come up.
When I got off the elevator she was already standing in the faded yellow hall, looking a little sick in the fluorescent light. She was tall, much taller than me, with a wide face and straight dull brown hair that didn’t help it any. I only noticed these things, and her loose blue cotton dress and white plastic sandals, because it’s the kind of thing my mother used to point out. But really I watched the way her hands jumped about looking for a relaxed way to hold themselves, while her eyes, looking very glary behind blue-tinted glasses, jumped onto the package I held. “You said photo,” she said. “Just one? Which one do you mean? Where did you get it?”
I tore off the wrapping and held it up. Her breath sounded like something jumping down her throat. “Where did you get this?” I said. “Tell me what it is.”
She started telling me all sorts of things, about light, and filters, and double exposures, all sorts of things, talking very fast, like she didn’t want me to interrupt. But I said nothing, just held the photo, refusing to give it up to her hands that kept clutching at it like she didn’t even know they were doing it. And she wouldn’t look at me, not for more than a second, ex
cept she kept doing that, looking at me, then jumping her eyes away again. And suddenly she stopped all the stuff she was saying, because she knew, and I knew, she could have taken that picture with a snapshot camera, with an old Brownie like the one my mother kept in her bedroom because my father had used it as a kid.
I said, “It’s him, isn’t it? It’s him.”
And suddenly she started saying how she shouldn’t have sold it, she never meant to sell it, she still kept the negative, she just needed money so bad, she never thought anyone would know.
I don’t know who grabbed who first, but somehow we were holding each other and kissing, and couldn’t stop, and crying. And the fire didn’t hurt, or not so much as that other time, with Jim. It hurt, it hurt her too, she made a kind of choked sound, but it hurt more like lowering yourself into a hot bath where it comes up first around your legs and then your groin and finally your breasts. And then the fire is gone because you’ve made it all the way in, and it feels so good, so strong, stronger than anything, with the sweat pouring off your face and the steam beating the breath out of you.
Her name was Jo, short for Josephine I thought, but she said no, it was always Jo, and we sort of moved in together, even though we both kept our own places. You’d think I would have worried about us being, you know, both girls, but that never bothered either of us, it was the angel that brought us together, not anything else. When I touched her, her breasts or below, it felt really nice, very soft and warm, but also I saw it as somewhere the angel had touched. Sometimes one of us would make claws with our hands and run it down the other’s stom ach, but we always stopped that right away, like it embarrassed us. I never showed her the claw I’d made.
The really strange thing was, neither of us ever talked about it. We just kept copies of the photo up in each of our apartments, facing the bed in mine, over the refrigerator in hers because even though she wasn’t fat she said the kitchen was her favorite room, and sometimes we’d sit or lie together, staring at it, even make love after looking at it. But we could never make ourselves talk.
We wanted to. At least I did. Sometimes, usually at breakfast for some reason, like the morning gave me a new start, I would try to think of how to begin, and Jo would also look like she wanted to say something. Then one of us would talk about the weather or the brand of orange juice or someone at work, and that was it for another day. I never even found out when the angel had come to her or where.
Maybe if we could have talked about the angel we would have stayed together longer. I don’t know. In everything else we were so different. Jo was very artsy. She did television things, not programs or stories, just pictures of her moving very slowly or even standing completely still, all wrapped up in aluminum foil. She did it herself of course, she’d gotten her own camera, and then she sent tapes to art galleries, where I guess they showed them instead of pictures. And she used to wear those old saggy dresses she got in some filthy shop on St. Mark’s Place, not just because they were cheap, I offered to give her money for real clothes, but because she liked them.
Her friends were artsy too, doing things like writing stories that made no sense, and they had to publish them themselves on really cheap paper because no regular magazine wanted to buy them. Her friends all thought of me as weird or funny or something, because I worked in an office and didn’t wear torn clothes, and they didn’t understand how Jo and I had gotten together. But that didn’t matter. I knew that Jo didn’t care about her “friends” any more than I cared about mine. It was just a game she was playing while she waited for the angel to come back.
For the first few months we were very careful with each other, very polite, except when we looked at the picture or made love. But after a while, we started to fight. About clothes, or where to go to eat, or people we knew, never anything that mattered. Because only the angel mattered. And we didn’t talk about that.
So we started fighting, and then making excuses not to see each other, and finally one night I went to her place after work and let myself in with the key, and there over the refrigerator door was a note saying she’d gone to San Francisco for some “video festival” and didn’t know when she was coming back. She’d taken the picture.
I got angry. I called up her friends and asked for her address but they said she didn’t have one yet and of course she’d send it to me. I got really depressed too, thinking of how to kill myself without any pain. Yet at the same time I knew it didn’t matter. I still had my copy of her picture. That’s what really counted.
I don’t mean my anger or depression were nothing or they went away just like that. As far as I can tell it hit me as hard as anyone else who’d gotten dumped like that, and it lasted almost longer than the actual time we’d spent together. The thing is, for other people those sorts of feelings are all they’ve got. But I was waiting for the angel, and anything else just got added on top of that.
The experience with Jo did have one big effect on me. I didn’t want to be alone any more. Like when I decided I couldn’t give up feelings if I couldn’t keep the angel language, now I knew I wanted people, lovers, at least if the angel wasn’t coming back. I didn’t forget my promise and keeping myself clean. I just figured that if I didn’t really care, if I remembered I was only doing it “until,” then it wouldn’t change anything.
So I began to date, not just to pass the time or see a movie, but for the person. The first time some guy tried to kiss me, a divorced guy named Bobby, I didn’t know what to do. Would the pain hit me? Maybe it went all right with Jo only because the angel had also come to her. But no. Being with Jo had already changed me. I could kiss or let someone touch me—or more—and nothing happened. I mean no pain.
One thing—I made sure not to get pregnant. I used a diaphragm but I also took the pill, secretly, so people wouldn’t know I did both and once some guy discovered my pills and he called me sick, like Jim had done, and said I should see a shrink. I told him to go to hell and it was worth any trouble not to get anything of his growing inside me.
Sometimes I wondered, what if the angel came back and the pills made it so I couldn’t get pregnant with him either? But I didn’t think a bunch of pills could stop the angel.
I didn’t really live with anybody, though I sort of went steady a few times, once with another girl, a typist from work named Karen. Karen worried a lot about people at work or her family finding out about us. Once we went away to a hotel for the weekend and she brought along her cousin who lived with a guy, so we could make it look like two normal couples, even registering that way, then sneaking into the right rooms when no one was looking. I didn’t really mind, though it bothered me that I had to watch the way I looked at her in restaurants or places like that. I knew how to hide things myself.
One guy even wanted to marry me. His name was Allen and I met him in my cousin Jack’s house. He’d spent some years in the navy which was why he’d never gotten married, he said. He liked to show slides of all the countries he’d visited, and sometimes he imitated the funny way the people talked. He said it amazed him how many languages there were. Without thinking I said, “They’re all just human languages.” He looked at me funny and asked what I meant. I told him nothing.
When Allen said we should get married I didn’t know what to do. I really like him a lot, he was the only person I knew who enjoyed walking around the city as much as me, he could even show me things I’d missed. And I was sick of my crummy apartment.
But I didn’t know what marriage would mean. Did it count in some way that dating and sex didn’t? Allen wanted to get married in a church. His brother Michael was a minister and Allen liked to joke about Mike needing the business. Would that mean more than marriage by a judge? I didn’t think so. Marriage was still something two humans did, whatever the church said. Why should the angel care about marriage any more than he cared about two people riding the subway together? Nothing humans did meant anything. Or maybe the other way around. Everything humans did had to mean something because hum
ans couldn’t stand it otherwise. Only the angel did things that didn’t mean something else, something explained in words or feelings.
Still, when Allen insisted I give him an answer I said no. He got really angry, said I had to tell him why. Give him a reason. I told him I didn’t have one and that was the truth. Refusing to marry Allen was the closest I ever came to angel talk, because after I’d gone through everything in my mind, I ended up saying no, for no reason at all.
Of course Allen didn’t understand that. He’d go back and forth between begging me and screaming at me, sometimes calling me up late at night and just about biting through the phone. He got my mother on his side and the two of them went after me so much I sometimes thought of going to San Francisco like Jo and leaving a note on the refrigerator. Later, when I got pregnant, Allen figured I’d said no because I was already screwing someone else, and he sent letters to everyone calling me a prostitute in about six or seven languages. “Prostitute” was the one word he’d learned in all the countries he’d visited.
The angel came on Saturday morning when I couldn’t sleep. Sometimes I wonder, if I’d stayed in bed would the angel have broken through the window, or would he have flown right past the house, and I’d never have seen him again? But the rash had stopped me from sleeping, and maybe the angel made the rash in some way.
The thing was, the night before the angel came, I’d spotted some funny red bumps all over my stomach and backside. They didn’t itch, but I still spread Calordryl all over, and I guess I didn’t wait long enough for it to dry because the sheets got all sticky. That, and thinking about Allen, woke me really early. When I couldn’t get back to sleep I decided to go for a walk. It was late May and sunny, very pretty with all the trees full of leaves, especially a few blocks away where the houses got much fancier, with regular lawns, almost like Long Island.
Future on Fire Page 18