“Jewish?” asked the woman, waving her cigarette smoke around with a thick, grubby hand. She seemed a little drunk to me. She asked again. “No Christmas for you. So, Jewish?”
“Well, half,” I said.
She put a cocktail napkin on the bar. Her face under the strange pink light was yellowish and waxy, her hair purple, slightly bouffant, but she was not unattractive for a woman her age. “Half is good. You have both sides. What will you? Beer?” She lowered her voice mockingly. “Ho ho. You are a beer man?” I sat on the stool, put my plastic bag from the bodega on my lap. “Or for your Chrystus half, maybe we celebrate tonight. You know slivovitz?” She didn’t wait for an answer. She poured out two shots from an old water bottle. “This is coming from Warsaw. Homemade,” she said, sliding my glass toward me. “The best.”
“Thank you,” I said, smelling it.
“Very good. Na zdrowie. Ha!” She swallowed hers in one gulp, then coughed and belched. Her eyes filled with tears. “Now you,” she said, pointing her thumb at me.
I drank mine and coughed and cried, too. The stuff was like perfume mixed with battery acid and lighter fluid. She gave me a pint glass of water and offered me a cigarette. I took one. We sat quietly, smoking, me fingering the plastic bag in my lap, her tapping a finger on the bar in time to nothing. After a few minutes, she blew her nose and stared into the crumpled tissue. “I see blood,” she said softly, then tucked the tissue into the cuff of her sweater.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
She snorted and poured out two more shots. We drank and coughed and cried again, the woman eyeing me comically, her gaze distant and soft now in the weird light. My eyes paced the shiny surface of the bar. The cat purred. Then the woman went to the bathroom. A few minutes passed. I thought to leave, to go home to check my e-mail. If Britt Wendt had written to me, I’d have to be careful not to write back too quickly. The last thing I wanted to do was send her a drunken e-mail. Then I pictured Lacey Freeman’s buffet spread—roasted suckling pig with an apple in its mouth, whiskey-laced yams, German chocolate cake. I was hungry. I ate a piece of jerky and listened as the woman flushed the toilet and blew her nose again. When she returned, she poured out two more shots, and this time when we drank them we winced and moaned, but we didn’t cry.
“You like it here?” she asked. “Nobody comes here. But you? You like it?”
“It’s great,” I said.
She nodded, folded her arms, and rested her elbows on the bar. Swaying absentmindedly, she started singing an out-of-tune folk song, then caught herself and laughed. She seemed deep in thought for a while. I can’t really say what her deal was. It was like I had walked into some kind of cosmic warp zone. Then all of a sudden she looked up at me. We locked eyes. When I blinked, she smiled cruelly and squinted, as though calling me a coward. What nerve, I thought, to try to take me down, her only customer. I felt insulted by her bravado. And so we had a staring contest, like a game of chicken, to see who was the least penetrable, whose mind would conquer whose. I cleared my throat and stared long and hard. I felt my face go cold, my teeth clench. Her face remained relaxed, eyes open wide. Even when she puffed on her cigarette and the smoke rose up, she didn’t blink. She was amazing. There was nowhere to hide in the eyes of this woman. I could see that she was reading me, and my challenge was to resist her taunting expressions and try to read her even more deeply, with even more scorn and disgust than she had found for me. I tried as hard as I could, but all I came up with was my own foolishness. I blushed. It was like I was naked before her, holding my own limp dick in my hand.
She sucked her teeth and stubbed her cigarette out in the ashtray, still staring. It was clear that she had beaten me. But I didn’t want to look away. Nor did I want her to. I enjoyed the attention, the scrutiny. So much of my life I’d been faking my reactions, claiming to myself and others that I liked what I liked because I believed it was good for me, while in fact I didn’t like that shit at all. This woman could see that I wanted to be ruined. I wanted someone—Britt Wendt, maybe—to come and destroy me. “Murder me” my eyes said to the woman. She laughed, as though she heard my thoughts and found them ridiculous. I laughed back at her, a false, triumphant laugh, as though she were a bitter ex-lover come to dance on my grave and mine was the zombie hand rising up out of the earth to strangle her.
“Psss,” she said, and looked away finally. She poured two more shots. We drank. Wordlessly, we mended our rapport. Then she offered me another cigarette and I lit the wrong end. That did it. “You waste,” she said and clucked her tongue. She put the bottle away. When I took out my wallet, she just waved her big fat hand. “It’s nothing,” she said. In perhaps my first genuine expression of gratitude, I leaned over the bar and tried to kiss her cheek. She moved out of the way and laughed at me again, this time with great satisfaction, like a rare, wondrous beauty, arrogant and magical. She pointed to the door.
Later that night, leaning against the crumbling, mildewed tile of the shower stall back home, I looked down at myself. I was beautiful, I thought. Legions of curious fingers should be reaching out to touch me. My arms were thick and strong. A spurt of wiry black hair rose from my wrist, trembling in the warm spray like a delicate morning tendril in the dew. There I was, spectacular and alive, and the whole world was missing it. Britt Wendt was missing it most of all. I thought I heard someone call my name, some sweet angel descending from heaven just to appreciate me—I was that great. But of course, when I stumbled out into the dark hall, there was nobody. No one in that flophouse even knew my name. The only faces I could ever hope to recognize were of the lovers on the other side of the gypsum. I’d seen them entering their room once on my way back from the toilets. Where were they now? I wondered. Dancing in the fucking moonlight? I stumbled back to my room, lay on my bed, checked my e-mail, and, finding nothing, cried a little with loneliness, and then a little more with hope. I fell asleep naked in front of my space heater.
• • •
“what are dimensions”
All lowercase, no punctuation. These were the words Britt Wendt had e-mailed back to me on December 26, seven minutes past midnight. I read them in the early dawn, my eyes still crossed with slivovitz, but the meaning was clear: she was interested. I rubbed my eyes, read her e-mail again, praised Jesus, then ran to the toilet and vomited with joy.
By noon I was on a Chinatown bus to Rhode Island. My message to the anonymous Craigslist-generated e-mail address had resulted in a tense and flurried correspondence with one “K Mendez” who would happily meet me at the Providence bus station to exchange the ottoman in question for fifty dollars cash, a sum more than three times the original amount listed. “There are other interested parties,” he’d threatened. My e-mail at the crack of dawn, “IS THE OTTOMAN STILL FOR SALE???????!!!!” might have come across as a bit desperate. I had to pay him what he wanted. After spending twenty dollars on my round-trip bus ticket, I’d have only five dollars and change through the New Year. I’d never been that broke before. I’d have to live off ramen, give up a few days of cappuccinos, but it was worth it. “What are the dimensions?” I’d e-mailed K Mendez. He answered that it was about a foot high and weighed around twenty pounds. “I’ll take it!” I replied. I figured I could go to Providence, buy the ottoman, turn around, get on the next bus home, and e-mail Britt Wendt back by nine. I closed my eyes as the bus veered out of town. I would have no book, no earphones, nothing to distract me from my thoughts and thirst and hunger and headache for three hours and seven minutes. I could live on cold, potty-scented air for as long as it took, I told myself. Soon, Britt Wendt would be safe in my arms forever.
Halfway to Providence, the bus stopped at a McDonald’s outside New Haven. It had been more than a decade since I’d set foot in that town. In the bathroom, I studied myself in the mirror. If my twenty-two-year-old self could see me now, I wondered, what would he think? What would he say? I wore my double-breasted cashmere peaco
at from Junetree, a two-ply cashmere turtleneck from Boxtrot, a vintage Fendi belt, my usual black jeans, my Amberline boots, the hat from Japan, my Yasir Arafat scarf, the rabbit fur–lined gloves. “You look like a tool” is what I imagined Nick at twenty-two would say. “But my hair,” I’d protest. “Would a tool have Jesus hair?” I debated back and forth at the urinal. My piss smelled like toxic waste. “Yes,” Nick said in the mirror on the way out. I imagined what I must have looked like to the woman at Iga the night before. She must have thought I was one of those rich jerks ruining the neighborhood.
I got back on the bus.
• • •
In Providence, I waited, paced, and fumed, and when K Mendez turned up at the bus station thirty-six minutes late in a taxi, I was ready to crumble. The kid appeared to be in his early twenties, tall and thin, wearing baggy jeans, a Thrasher T-shirt, and an unzipped ski jacket with a fake fur–lined hood. He barely looked at me as he set the ottoman down and straddled it between his Vans. I worried that the upholstery would get stained from the dirty, salted layer of slush on the ground, but I was too stunned by his pluck and swagger to air that concern. I held out his money. He turned away and spit and lit a cigarette and told me, in a passionless monotone, “It’s two hundred bucks now. Plus the cost of the taxi.”
“That’s insane,” I argued. “I have fifty-five bucks. And a fifteen-dollar Burger King gift card. It’s all I’ve got.”
“Fuck Burger King,” he answered. Without another word, he picked up the ottoman and headed back to the taxi stand in front of the bus station.
“Wait!” I cried out, shuffling after him. He was a fool, a punk, privileged and greedy, but he had what I wanted. “I’ll give you this!” I said, pulling the scarf off my neck as an offering. K Mendez paused and turned back to face me. His cheeks were riddled with soft, red acne scars. His teeth were like fangs. His eyes, indecipherable. He was probably selling his furniture for drugs. What else?
“Yeah, okay,” he said, surprising me. “Plus your hat. And your coat. That should do it.”
“This coat is worth twelve hundred dollars.” I laughed. I held out the scarf and waved it around. “Here. And the money.” He turned his back and got in line for a cab, looking at me surreptitiously now and then, like a dog. It was a bizarre standoff, and I probably would have won out if I’d stood my ground. But I was impatient. My future was at stake. I came away barely clothed. He even took my Burger King card. The ottoman was a piece of shit, but that didn’t matter in the end.
• • •
Back in Brooklyn that night, walking home from the subway with my ottoman, I couldn’t help but smile at all the nice, happy people. Each face seemed spectacular in its originality, like a walking portrait. Everyone was beautiful. Everyone was special. It was cold and windy, and I had just a T-shirt on, but the moon was full, the sidewalks cleared of snow and sparkling with salt. A fleet of fire trucks blared by, deafening and cheerful. When I turned onto my street, there they were again. The flophouse billowed with smoke. Firemen strutted around the area, looking, I guessed, for a hydrant. My neighbors, the lovers from through the gypsum, stood together across the street from the blaze, naked but for towels, watching as flames leaped from an open window like a red flag. As I approached them, I could see that the girl’s eyes were pink and teary. She was thin and short, nose warped like she’d been punched, shoulders concave and white and goose-pimpled in the frigid air. Her skinny legs were plunged into mammoth black motorcycle boots, presumably belonging to the boyfriend, who stood beside her in the snow. He was perversely tall and lanky, his sinewy torso spattered with black moles like flecks of mud. He coughed and reached an arm down around the girl. The vertical disparity between their bodies made me wonder how they’d managed to have so much effective intercourse. An EMT came and gave them each a thick gray blanket. I wished for one myself but was embarrassed to ask.
“They think someone left their heater on,” the girl said to me, arranging the blanket over her shoulders, trembling.
My heart sank, but not completely.
“Was it you?” asked the boy. His mouth was like a horse’s mouth, frothy and shuddering with plumes of white vapor and spittle in the frozen air. “Did you start the fire?”
“Come on,” the girl said gently. “Don’t get feisty. It’s just a bunch of crap burning up. Who cares?”
The boy spit and coughed again and hugged her, his wide nostrils flared and dribbling with mucus.
I set the ottoman down in the snow and considered the boy’s question.
“I didn’t start the fire,” I said, like the dumb man I’d become. “This is an act of God.”
THE SURROGATE
“This suit will be your costume.” Lao Ting pointed to the black skirt and jacket hanging from the coatrack in the corner of his office. “You will tell people you are the vice president of the company. They may see you as a sex object, and this will be advantageous in business negotiations. I have noticed that American businessmen are very easy to manipulate. Has anyone ever told you that you resemble Christie Brinkley, the American supermodel of the nineteen eighties?”
I said a few people had. I did look like Christie Brinkley, and like Jacqueline Bisset and Diane Sawyer, I’d been told. I was five foot nine, 116 pounds, with long, silky light brown hair. My eyes were blue, which Lao Ting said was the best color for someone in my position. I was twenty-eight when I became the surrogate vice president. I was to be the face of the company at in-person meetings. Lao Ting thought American businessmen would discriminate against him because of the way he looked. He looked like a goat herder. He was short and thin and wore a white linen tunic and a belt of rope around his beach shorts. His beard was nearly white and hung down like a magical tail from his chin to his pubis. My previous job had been as a customer-service representative for Marriott Hotels, taking reservations over the phone at home. I’d been living in a studio apartment above a Mexican bakery in Oxnard. The view out my window there was a concrete wall.
“Your last name will be Reilly,” Lao Ting told me. “Would you like to suggest a first name for your professional entity?”
I suggested Joan.
“Joan is too soulful. Can you think of another?”
I suggested Melissa and Jackie.
“Stephanie is a good name,” he said. “It makes a man think of pretty tissue paper.”
The company, called Value Enterprise Association, was run out of the ground floor of Lao Ting’s luxurious three-story family complex on the beach in Ventura. It was a family business and had an old-fashioned quality that put me at ease. I never understood the nature of the company’s services, but I liked Lao Ting. He was kind and generous, and I saw no reason to question him. The job was easy. I had to memorize some names, some figures, put on the suit, makeup, use hair spray, perfume, high heels, and so forth. Everybody at the office was very gracious and professional. There was no gossip, no fooling around, no disrespect. Instead of a watercooler, they had a large stainless-steel samovar of boiling-hot water set up in the foyer. The family drank green tea and Horlicks malted milk from large ceramic mugs. Lao Ting’s wife, Gigi, gave me my own mug to use, like I was part of the family. I spent a lot of time sitting on the deck, looking out at the sea. It felt good to be out during the day, and to be appreciated. Lao Ting assured me that he would never expect me to engage in unprofessional activities with clients or vendors, and I never did. Everything was handled very honorably.
• • •
The surrogate position paid six times what I’d been making answering phones for the Marriott. I quickly paid off my credit-card debt and moved into a converted loft in an industrial area of El Rio. I furnished it with rentals and little decorations from gift shops. I was relieved to sell my car, a huge white Cadillac that had been on the brink of engine failure. Lao Ting employed a service to drive me everywhere I needed to go for work, and when I went out to clubs and parties o
n the weekends, I called cabs. I could afford it. I mostly went to the underground clubs and after-parties downtown or out in the desert. It was a weird crowd—freaks edged out of the LA scene, kinks from the valley, middle-aged ravers, tech rats on acid, kids on E, old women, the usual hustlers. I got dressed up special on the weekends. I liked to wear a trench coat, an old hat like a detective’s, and large, tinted eyeglasses. Underneath my coat I wore a lacy red teddy. I’d snipped at the fabric around the crotch to accommodate my genitals, which were abnormally swollen due to a pituitary situation. Underneath the teddy, there were pennies taped over my nipples and a cutout photo of Charlie Chaplin’s face taped across my pubis. I felt good wearing all that. Even before I got the job as the surrogate, I felt like normal clothes were all just costumes.
I’d been ashamed to bring men back to the studio in Oxnard because it smelled like a deep fryer, and there was no place to sit but on the grubby carpeted floor or on my bed, which felt too intimate. When I took men home to my loft in El Rio, which I didn’t do often, they looked around at my stuff and asked me what I did for work.
“I’m the surrogate vice president of a business enterprise,” I’d say. I’d sit them down on the rented couch and give them a clear plastic bag to put over their heads if they so desired. When my swelling was particularly bad, I got a little uptight. “I do not want to make love,” I said to one man I remember. He was handsome and tan. He wore white clothes for dancing the capoeira, which is what drew me to him.
“‘Do not want,’” he repeated, chortling under the plastic, his eyes sparkling.
“I don’t do sex,” I explained. “I just want to strip.”
During the long cab ride from the club, he’d talked like this: “My work pays for everything—drinks, meals, travel, hotels. I go to Canada all the time. Coffee shops, theater tickets, everything. I get reimbursed,” he was saying. “Quote unquote,” he said over and over. His hands twitched and his eyes were hot-wired and roving, like there was lightning trapped inside of his eyeballs.
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