Afterburn

by Colin Harrison

  In her room she retrieved the cardboard box of pressed shirts. A small mercy they had no monogram. Five minutes later she was standing in the clothes shop holding the box.

  "How'd the dress go?" said the owner, pushing his glasses from his forehead to his nose.

  "Very successful. I might even wear it again tonight."

  He pointed at the box. "What do you have there?"

  "Shirts."

  "Men's shirts?" He yanked open the stapled flap. "These are very good." He fingered the labels. "Pressed, too. Your rich uncle gave them to you?"

  "How'd you know?"

  "A lot of people have rich uncles who give them beautiful clothes." He looked at her with a forgiving smile. "Especially rich uncles young enough to have tailored shirts with tapered waists."

  She shrugged away any further explanation. "I'd say these are sixty dollars new, anyway."

  "I'm going to sell them for eighteen apiece, which means I will give you nine for them."

  "Ten."

  "Nine."

  "Ten or no deal," she said.

  He fondled the shirts. "Okay."

  "You pay now?" she asked.

  "On consignment."

  "You're going to consign me to starvation."

  He lifted his chin and looked through his glasses. "Get a job, honey. Live like the other half."

  "I did just get a job. I don't start yet. Why don't you just be nice and give me five dollars now for each one."

  He pulled out his wallet and handed her a crisp fifty. "You're an expensive date."

  "You don't even know."

  "I have an idea."

  * * *

  THAT EVENING she flopped on the bed with The Village Voice, starting with the back page of messages:

  HIV+ and DEPRESSED?

  HARDBODIES STRIPS Great Prices

  Treatment for depersonalization. Do you frequently feel unreal or detached from yourself?

  GAY COUPLES WANTED

  Does cocaine cause you problems? Do you also have problems with attention or restlessness?

  Hondas sold for $100. SEIZED AND SOLD LOCALLY.

  RESEARCH VOLUNTEERS WANTED: Earn btwn $800 & 1200! Healthy men or women age 21-45 needed to participate in residential studies evaluating drug & medication effects. Live in research unit of a psychiatric institute.

  PENIS TALK—Men all bckgrnds wanted to discuss their penis for cable docu. Nudity not required.

  Herpes Singles Mixer Secret & Confidential Send Self Addressed Stamped Envelope

  American Strippers Fantasy shows and More

  Jeeps for $100 Impounds, IRS & FBI seizures

  Learn American Sign Language

  MASTURBATION Do you have a funny/interesting story about your 1st experience? Cable doc.

  Fellow at Angelika Theater on Monday afternoon in blue tank top and green shorts: You asked me if I was Ken, I said Ken is late. Can we chat?

  A wonderful world. She folded the pages back to the personals and dropped her eyes over the ads for escort services and Women Seeking Men and Men Seeking Women and Women Seeking Women and Men Seeking Men and Alternative Men and Alternative Women and Adult Help Wanted. Monkeys in clothes, she thought, smelling rear ends in the jungle. She could probably get a job doing something nasty or disreputable, if she wanted, but hey, she wasn't that kind of girl. She was some kind of girl, but not that kind. But she knew the type. They didn't like themselves. Wanted to, but couldn't. Kept looking for the bottom that would bounce them back up, kept not breaking until they shattered. Talked tough but spent a lot of time on their backs providing service. She'd once had a beautiful Russian roommate who performed in the fantasy booths in Times Square, back when Times Square still had such places, stripping in front of the little windows with mechanical blinds that went up when the male occupant dropped in a quarter. Whatever she did involved creams and chains and an enormous purple dildo, and when she came home each night after work, she wept for hours. She cried in Russian, Christina remembered: I guess you can actually do that. Men came around all the time for her, talking softly but secretly crazy for her broken edges. Knew they could catch a hot ride on her unhappiness. Like stealing from a bank, sure you'll get away. I'm not that kind of girl, Christina told herself again, I steal something back.

  Another ad caught her eye:

  I am a mature executive seeking a woman of child-bearing age who would like to have and care for her own child. I am willing to pay all costs of prenatal care, and delivery, and reasonable medical, living, and educational expenses until the child is twenty-one years old. This offer has nothing to do with sexual contact between the two parties. Pregnancy would be achieved through artificial insemination. I would relinquish my custody claim to the child; you would relinquish all legal claims to my estate, income, etc., and maintain confidentiality of the arrangement. Remuneration will be delivered monthly from a trust administered independently by a legal trustee. The successful candidate will be a woman who is healthy, drug-free, caring—

  And probably insane, she thought, flipping the paper aside. I need action, she thought, I need to get out of here. Mazy had been right. Of course she'd go back to men. Four years without action was too long. She might as well have died. The interlude with Pretty Boy didn't count. He was too young, couldn't figure out what she needed. But there were plenty of guys who could; there had to be one, for God's sake, and she was going to make an attempt to find him. Tonight. Someone who could talk, at least. Someone her father could have inspected, then winked, Good choice. Not that he ever did; quite the opposite. After she'd dropped out of Columbia, he'd been worried by the fact that she had no visible means of income yet was living very well indeed; worried, too, that he had never met "this Rick fellow" she occasionally mentioned. A year before he died, her father had taken her out in the old Mustang for ice cream to tell her that he'd never made much money for his family and saw no way he ever would. He and her mother would be moving to Florida soon, perhaps to open a small gift shop, but he didn't have any illusions about it. He'd spent too much of his income on things that had come to nothing—booze, gambling, cigarettes, his fishing boat, the car they were sitting in. He took her hand in his thick fingers. I'm telling you this now so that you won't make the same bad decisions I did, Tina. I'm not going to have anything to help you with. Nothing to get you started. I don't even know how we're going to make it in Florida, as a matter of fact. But there's one thing I've given you—he touched his head—I never did anything with mine, I just fixed about a million subway cars, that's all. But I know I had it and I know you have it. That's how you got that scholarship. You're going to have to use your head, Tina, it's your advantage. You're up there in New York and living your life. Stick with the good guys. The good guys are sometimes boring, but they're better in the long run. If the guy is flashy, then let him go. That's my—

  Advice, she repeated to herself as she showered and shaved her underarms and her legs, then tidied up her pubic hair a bit before leaning close to the mirror to inspect her face for wrinkles or anything else. Pimples or moles or blotches or warts. I used to have a perfect nose, she thought. Eyes, laugh lines, neck. Certainly one of the great advantages of prison was that you didn't go to the beach too often. No long afternoons on the tennis court in Bridgehampton. Closest you got to a sunburn was pushing a lawn mower in the summer. She made a fist and inspected her biceps. Not bad. Not like when she was swimming two miles a day in high school, but not bad. Good enough to push a guy away or pull him toward her.

  So where to go? Before prison she'd have gravitated toward St. Mark's Place, only a few blocks away, where all the freaks, punks, squatters, bogus Rastafarians, piercing addicts, failed models, musicians, lost Englishmen, and New Jersey teenagers found one another in the Day-Glo underground pits. She'd already walked along the block a few times, knew it wasn't for her anymore. Years had gone by, but it was the same people, the same kind of people. The girl who lets men perform oral sex on her at the bar, the motorcycle guy who needs new p
eople to frighten, the tender junkie with a puppy inside his shirt, comparing bad tattoos.

  But that was then and this was now, and so, after slipping on the same cunning black dress as before and twirling her lipstick and how's my hair, she clicked downstairs and outside and crosstown through the dusk and shadows and crowds. Wobbling on her pumps, out of practice. Yet getting a bit of action into the hips. The night remained warm, the air left over from summer. Everyone seemed in a hurry. New movies, new shows, new restaurants. Bars and cafés and bistros. Inside each, a roar of laughter and I'll have the free-range chicken. A lot of life gets lived in these places, she thought, slipping happily into a café off the corner of Thirteenth Street and Sixth Avenue. She established herself at the bar and sipped a glass of Merlot. The other single women pretended to be interested in talking with one another but keptwatch, perfumed with loneliness. It's harder to be a woman, Christina thought, you have to protect yourself, you have to be careful. You have to protect not just your body but your idea of yourself. Rick thought he knew who she was. But he really didn't, which was why she ended up in prison and he did not.

  She finished a second glass of wine and was thinking about leaving, maybe to walk up Sixth Avenue, when a good-looking man in a suit sat next to her.

  "David." He offered his hand. "I thought I'd sit down, what the hell."

  "What the hell," she agreed.

  "You don't mind?"

  He smelled good. "No."

  "I'm, I'm kind of—"

  She liked his tie. "Shy?"

  "Yes. Well, no." He frowned with great earnestness, as if they had reached a turning point in a long conversation. "I've been through all this too many times, so I'll just get it out. I'm a doctor, rather successful, I might confess, I'm thirty-eight, I'm available. I'm looking for someone to settle down with. I'm ready to be married. I'm very financially secure."

  "That's nice," said Christina, lighting a cigarette.

  "I realize this is very hurried, very fast." His eyes swept anxiously across the restaurant before coming back to her. "But it's better to be honest. I'm a guy who is ready, really ready to settle down. I saw you and thought, There's a woman who is terrific."

  He's hiding something, Christina decided. "You don't know the first thing about me."

  "I do and I don't." He smiled, as if with wisdom. "You'd be surprised what you can tell about a person."

  "What can you tell?"

  "Oh, I can tell we'd get along."

  "How?" She ordered another glass of wine and noticed the women down the bar glaring at her.

  "Well, I have a lot to offer," he said. "I'm ready to get married and have children. I have very good communication skills."

  "I'm not ready to get married," she told him. "Not even close."

  He consulted the pattern of his tie. "You're not?"

  "No."

  "What do you want, then?"

  "Hey, I'm just sitting here drinking my wine, okay? I didn't ask you to ask me these things."

  He blinked miserably. "I think we'd be very sexually compatible, just so you know."

  She laughed and realized that she was a bit drunk. "You can tell that, too?"

  "Yes—I think so," he said eagerly, lips strangely wet. "I think you would be understanding of . . . of my . . . I have a slight disorder—not physical, don't worry—a question of aesthetics, really. Habits—no, practices might be the term. A woman could marry me and be provided for, and just see my disorder as aesthetic. Harmless. Not much to overlook."

  He stopped, waited for her reaction, or perhaps a request for clarification.

  "David?" said Christina.

  "Yes?" he replied with sudden hope.

  "You've told me your occupation and financial status, you've virtually proposed marriage, you've asserted that we would be compatible, and you've alluded to some weird sexual hang-up, right?"

  "Yes, I guess—"

  "But, David, you forgot something."

  "What?"

  "You forgot to ask me my name."

  "Oh."

  "You better go," Christina said.

  He studied her. "Yes. Yes. I'm so sorry." He held out his hand. "Please accept my apology."

  She smiled falsely. "Bye."

  He slid off the stool and drifted down the bar next to another woman. Said something about sitting down, what the hell, thirty-eight years old, ready to get married.

  I'm not insulted, she thought, because I'm almost drunk.

  "You mind?" A man in a collarless black shirt dropped down on the stool next to her.

  "Why not?" she said, waving her cigarette. He was tall and altogether too skinny, with his head so recently shaved that she didn't know whether he was bald or making a statement. He wore a big chrome watch on his wrist, three different dials on it, and as signs went, this was bad. Men with big watches did not, as a rule, pan out. Nor, however, did men with smaller watches, so there you go, Christina. She tried to remember what kind of watch Rick wore and could not—probably something gold and the size of a hockey puck. She remembered her father's watch easily, however, a cheap Timex with grease worked into its scratches and rasp marks. An honest watch for an honest man. How she wished he were still alive. She knew enough now that she could have gone to him with uncomplicated affection, just be his daughter as he was just her father. She wanted to touch his face. I'd give anything for that, she thought, remembering that he'd let her drive the Mustang by herself when she was sixteen. He knew she would take it out on the highway and gun it up to one hundred and ten, roaring and vibrating, getting the speed into her to get the craziness out. Didn't really work, but she'd always felt better. Let the car ease down to eighty, seventy, sixty. He'd trusted her with the car, with herself. The only person who ever did, in a way. Well, the Columbia religion professor, maybe. Listened mostly. Yet after the first dozen times in bed, the professor had asked her why she was so experienced for a nineteen-year-old. But she wasn't, not really. He didn't mean experienced, he meant responsive. Oh, she'd said, I'm just like that. He'd walked into his study and gazed silently out the window toward Riverside Drive. I hate to do this, he said, I really do, but we have to stop. Why? she'd wanted to know. I made a mistake, he said. What? I thought I could handle you, but I can't. I don't understand, she'd cried. You'll drive me crazy, he said, you'll slowly drive me crazy. How? He'd shaken his head. You are actually insatiable. I am? Yes. I am? He'd nodded again. How do you know? Believe me, he said, I know. But I'm happy with you. For now, he said, for now. But I love you. No, I don't think so, he'd said. There's something hard in you, Christina. You know in your heart you can cut me up. She'd just stared. He was right. Something happened to you, he'd said. You haven't told me and I don't want to know, but it broke you and also made you too strong. I've been with enough women to understand this. I thought because I was twenty years older I could handle it, but I can't. I'm a fool, but I want to get out now, while I still can.

  The bald man next to her took out a pack of cigarettes and offered her one. The drama begins, she thought. She took the cigarette.

  "They're French," he warned.

  She nodded, her head light. "Then you must not be."

  "No?"

  "French people smoke American cigarettes," she said. She looked away. Across from her, two women sat at a table paging through an album full of photos of wedding cakes.

  "I guess so." He sipped his drink. "My name's Rahul, by the way."

  "Melissa," said Christina.

  "Waiting for somebody?"

  "Yes."

  "Who?"

  "The unknown man."

  I'm so witty, she thought, makes me sick.

  He tried to laugh but was uncertain. "Is the man unknown to me or unknown to you?"

  "Both, in fact."

  "What is this man like?"

  "His shoes are not worn down," she said.

  He kicked out one foot and inspected an Italian loafer. "So far I'm okay."

  Charmboat, Christina thought.

&nbs
p; "What else?" he asked. "About the unknown man."

  "Don't ask."

  He grinned. "I'm asking."

  "He can stand and deliver."

  "Stand and deliver," he repeated.

  "Yes. If he can't do that, then forget it."

  "What exactly does 'stand and deliver' mean?"

  "It has all meanings, and especially one."

  Rahul pursed his lips. He was strange, but maybe attractively strange. Maybe she wasn't sure. Maybe she was drunk. "What do you do?" Christina asked, twirling her smoke. "Are you gainfully employed?"

  "I'm a photographer."

  I like his hands, she thought. "What do you take pictures of?"

  "Why don't you come back to my place and see?" he answered with purposeful mystery. "I live just a few blocks away."

  "That was fast."

  He rubbed a hand over his skull. "That's my speed."

  "Slow is better."

  He shrugged, willing to be embarrassed. "How about it?"

  I'm not afraid of him, she thought.

  "You're curious. I can tell."

  "One quick look," she agreed. "And that will be that. I'm meeting a friend in an hour."

  "Right," he said.

  They walked out and down the street. Maybe this is how people meet each other, she thought dreamily, or maybe I'm just lonely as hell. Rahul lit a cigarette, and she asked him how long he'd lived there.