He made himself a quick dinner of packaged vegetable-flavored Indian noodles with butter. Then he opened a can of sardines and took them into his bedroom to eat in front of the TV. The best thing that he found to watch was a talk show featuring a beautiful teenaged movie star who had recently performed an erotic nude scene in a box office hit. He liked to watch her. Her precise, careful manner would have seemed stiff in a grown woman, but was charming in a child sex star. Half-formed illusions about meeting and seducing her absorbed him as he ate his noodles.
He went to bed early. When he woke up, he realized that he’d been dreaming. A fourteen-year-old girl had been given to him to take care of by some vague authority. She was a lovely tall child with wide solemn eyes and long dark hair. She hated clothes and walked around the apartment naked. He was not just excited by this, he was exhilarated and moved by her innocence. He remembered an image of her bicycling down the block in unconcerned leggy nakedness, her hair catching the sunlight. The dream then took an unfortunate turn. She was chased by a host of anxious neighbors, all trying to drape her with garments. They caught her and wrested her from his care with accusations of indecency and child molestation.
The dream left him with a sense of irrational discouragement and a mosquito-bite feeling of loss. He moped as he brushed his teeth. He wished his roommate would come back from Italy. He had never been to Europe or anywhere else, and was sick of people going.
He walked the unusual route again. Again he saw her, in almost exactly the same place. This time she looked directly at him and even showed a slight smile on her face. She nodded shyly at him. Not meeting her look, he half nodded and she was gone. Her severely bobbed hair was pretty, but not as pretty as her long hair had been.
He had lunch with Cecilia that afternoon. They ate their corned beef on rye and cream cheese with lox in a diner peopled by waiters who looked like they’d met with utter disappointment and became attached to it. Cecilia was reassuring. She was not small or theatrical. Her shoulder-length hair was blond, her plump body calm. She had a long way of saying her words, a relaxed but vaguely predatory way of turning her head. She came from a wealthy family, and he supposed that was where she got her assurance. Her background was part of what made her attractive to him. He wasn’t after her money (although he wouldn’t mind, certainly, if one day she spoke to her parents about financing a film project of his own); there was simply something foreign and delightful about this rich girl who
had been safely surrounded by money all her life. The perfume of wealth graced her casually, like grass stains on the skin of a lazy child sleeping in a garden. He pictured her as an adolescent, lounging on her huge unmade, canopied and silk-sheeted bed. She was in her underwear, she was reading Tolstoy, occasionally scratching herself and eating from a box of chocolates, although he knew that Cecilia didn’t like candy and never had.
“It’s so interesting,” she said. “Now that I’m closer to success, I’ve become much less interested in it. I’ve always known that I would be successful, that I just had to work for it. But it was always out of reach, so I obsessed about it all the time. It was a goal. Now it’s more like a natural outcome, another element of my life to be experienced. It’s not even important anymore. There are so many other things in life. It’s silly to be so narrow.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” he said. “Things are always less important once you’re assured of having them.”
“It’s not that it isn’t important, it’s just that I’m not focusing on it to the exclusion of everything else. But I’m sure I’ll enjoy it when it happens. If anything, it’s more real to me now, not like something I’m going to acquire.”
He chewed without answering, and she flicked the corners of her mouth with her tongue.
“I think I’m going to Italy in a few months,” she said. “I’m really excited about it. I want to meet an Italian film producer and have an affair with him.”
“My roommate is in Italy,” he said.
“You told me.”
In a few months he would say, “My friend Cecilia is in Italy.” He looked at her serene face, her resting throat, her slightly upturned chin. He had slept with her for almost two years. She had sucked him off with that mouth. He thought: My friend, Cecilia. My friend.
When he returned to his office he got on the WATS line and called Wilson. Wilson had been a close friend while they were in Ann Arbor. Now he was stuck teaching undergraduates in a geology
department in Washington, D.C. Joel called him about twice a month to gossip about other people they’d gone to school with. He knew Wilson kept in touch with the woman he’d seen again this morning.
“Do you know what Sara’s doing? Do you know where she’s working?”
There was a breath of silence before Wilson answered. “She’s all right. I think she’s still working in a bar in the East Village.”
“Has she gotten anywhere with her painting?”
“I don’t think so. Not since the little show she was in at that club. Why?”
“I’ve seen her twice on the street this week. We haven’t had a chance to talk. I just wondered what she was up to.”
Wilson had disapproved of Joel’s relationship with Sara, even though he’d been morbidly fascinated by it. Even though it had raised Joel in his esteem.
Joel got off the phone and gazed at the morose buildings standing in a clump outside his window.
Interrupted, static-ridden commercials for memories of Sara flitted mutely through his mind, chopped up and poorly edited—Sara before he knew her, a small slender person walking down State Street with her books, wearing jeans and fawn-colored boots. She had a very stiff walk despite her round hips, a tight sad mouth and wide abstracted eyes. She was always alone whenever he saw her, and always appeared vaguely surprised by everything around her. He saw her propped up in his bed, reading a book about South Africa. He saw her sitting across a table, a sauce-red shrimp in her fingers, chatting about her experience as a hooker, oblivious to stares from the next table. She appeared seated in the dark of the film auditorium, her hand at her jaw, her booted legs tossed over the next few chairs, her tongue snapping sarcastically.
“It’s so dishonest, it’s so middle-class. Who does he think he’s shocking? It’s such a reaction to convention. It’s babyish.”
“You don’t understand the concept of subversion,” he said.
“I know more about subversion than anybody else in this stupid town,” she said.
The clips sped up and blurred into glimpses. Her melancholic paleness in the dark, the sheets rumpled to reveal her gray-tinged mattress. The stark lumpiness of her spine and shoulder blades as she reached across him to snatch a “snot rag” from its box. The dry toughness of her heels. The nervous stickiness of her fingers. “Hurt me,” she said. “Hurt me.”
He could feel his eyes become clouded with privacy as he slipped discreetly into a sheltering cave of sexual fantasy. His focus wobbled, he slipped out again. In Ann Arbor he had pierced his ear, he had worn a beret sometimes. He had written articles in the student paper on labor unions. He had brought Andy Warhol to Cinema I. He saw himself drunk on the curb outside the Del Rio, talking with Wilson and vomiting. They were talking about politics and sex, Wilson mainly talking politics, since he rarely fucked anybody. Joel had just met Sara. “She’s great. She’s every man’s dream. I can’t tell you how, because she made me promise not to.” He turned and barfed.
Everything was so important in Ann Arbor, so fraught with the tension held tight in the bud of fantasy before it bursts into gaily striped attempt. “I have this fantasy of becoming an anarchist on the Left Bank,” he said to Sara. “Throwing bombs and creating a disturbance.”
“I want to become a good painter,” she said. “Or a great painter.”
“Listen,” he said, raising himself above her on his elbow. “I want you to be strong. You’ve come so far in spite of everything. I want you to be successful.”
“I am strong,” she said. Her eyes were serene. “I’m stronger than anyone else I know.”
He cleared his eyes and looked once more at the querulous buildings sweating in the afternoon heat. Of course, she hadn’t been strong at all. He remembered the tremulous whine coming out of the phone during their last conversation. “I’m scared,” she’d wept. “I feel like I don’t exist, I can’t eat, I can’t do anything. I want to kill myself.”
“Look, I grew up in a normal, happy family,” he’d said. “I’m
well adjusted. I can’t identify with this self-esteem crisis, or whatever it is you’ve got. Anyway, we’ve only known each other for a few months and I’m not obligated to listen to your problems. You should call a psychiatrist, and anyway I have to take a bath right now.”
He couldn’t stand weak women.
He went to a nightclub in the evening with his friend Jerry and two of Jerry’s hulking lawyer friends. They went to a club that made them and a lump of other people line up outside the door for inspection by a haughty doorman who might or might not admit them, depending on whether or not he liked their appearance. Joel and Jerry, with the lawyers, had to wait an inordinate length of time while a series of habitual clubbers insouciantly gained entrance. It could’ve been humiliating, but instead it was an intriguing form of entertainment, a piece of behavior to be observed. One of the lawyers kept saying, “I don’t want to go in there anyway. This is a drag. Let’s go somewhere else.”
“No, it’s really good in here,” said Jerry. “You’ll see.”
They eventually gained admission and roamed the three floors of the club, greedily looking around. Joel drank one paper cup of watered-down alcohol after another and stared at the moiling sweat-dampened crowd with an attitude of wistful contempt. They were coiffed like Dr. Seuss characters and dressed like children in their parents’ clothes. At one time he had wanted to be like them. Now he thought they were stupid, although he still liked to look at them. He saw a girl standing alone at a bar, dressed like a twelve-year-old’s idea of a hooker. Tight black bodice, short flared ballerina skirt. She was small, she stood with her ankles together. He edged along the wall, pretending to study the material hung up as art. He remembered the blow-up doll he had once hung up in his Ann Arbor apartment as a party decoration. It wore Sara’s clothes and bore, with Scotch tape, a sign that read “Hurt Me Beat Me Fuck Me.” Wilson had said, “Joel, come on. This is too much. It’s not funny.” Joel continued toward the girl at the bar, fighting the anxious crimp in his shoulders.
The terse conversation with her didn’t result in her phone number on a piece of paper in his pocket. He found the lawyers again and stalked around with them, making jokes. They couldn’t find Jerry, so the three of them got into a cab and left together, a trio of masculine shoulders filling the paned-in back seat with gruff laughter and blurted comments.
He entered his dark, narrow-halled apartment in a grainy mental state. He stopped briefly before the toilet on his way to bed. He stripped off his clothes and dropped them in the middle of the floor. He lay on his back and put one hand on his cock. He imagined dozens of intriguing images, perusing the possible nuance of each circumstance. There was Cecilia. There was the girl at the bar. There was Sara. “Get my belt,” he had said to her. She hesitated. “Don’t you think you deserve it?” He masturbated watching spread-legged Sara arch her neck and rub her injured-looking vagina. He finished. He mopped his abdomen with a “snot rag.” A memory separated from the fantasy and lingered.
“I love you,” said Sara.
“It’s not real,” he said. “It’s puppy love.”
“No. I love you.” She nuzzled his cheek with her nose and lips, and her tenderness pierced him.
The image became tiny and unnaturally white, was surrounded by darkness, then faded like the picture on a turned-off TV.
S
USAN HAD NOT
been in Manhattan for five years, and she had been looking forward to this visit as a gorgeous wallow in sentimentality and the mild pain of déjà vu. The first three days had been just that. She had gone on long walks, visited with old friends and sat in cafés she’d once frequented as a thin, long-haired girl, lonely and worrying over tea. She had wandered through these days desultorily, enjoying the odd mix of memories and emotions that playfully showed their shadows and vanished again.
She had been walking on Bleecker toward Lafayette when a tiny, youthful bag lady entered her vision. She was standing still in the middle of the sidewalk, one hand out, the other daintily holding a small plastic garbage bag as though it were a pocketbook, begging from everyone and looking at no one. Her torn sweater, ragged skirt and wool socks were drably color-coordinated; her small head was tilted at an odd birdlike angle that was an unintentional caricature of childlike curiosity. Her clearly once-beautiful face was as still as her body; her full lips, potentially so expressive, were held fixed and tight. Her stillness amidst the march of New Yorkers made her look lost and groundless, but there was an intensity about her, and a feeling of heat, as though she were exuding some sticky substance from her pores. The quick feeling of panic in Susan’s stomach made her turn and walk the other way before she had a mental reaction; when she figured out why she was upset, she felt even worse. The bag lady looked exactly like Leisha, her best friend many years ago. Her face, posture, even the style of her rags recalled Leisha.
Susan turned a corner and stopped against a wall, her heart beating
miserably. She remembered an article or a talk show or something where a smug somebody discussed the problem of chance meetings with old friends who were not as successful as you, and how you could avoid rubbing it in. She thought: This could not be Leisha. She had not seen or spoken to Leisha since their unhappy falling-out six years ago. The last time Susan had heard from her was when she received an invitation to Leisha’s wedding (she was marrying an attorney at a country club), which Susan had scornfully thrown in the trash. Surely even Leisha couldn’t have gone from being a well-off wife to a bag lady in six years. And even if she had, she had a middle-class family ready (and alert for just this purpose) to sweep her into its bosom. Still, anything was possible, and, as Leisha herself had constantly pointed out, she was very unstable. She was unskilled except as a waitress, and Susan had always worried about what would happen to her once she lost her beauty.