Daughters of the Revolution (12 page)

“Ow, ow!” I said.

“But it must come off,” he said reasonably.

He removed my clothes as gently as he could. He unbuttoned his shirt, knelt at the bottom of the bed and pulled my cotton pants down around my ankles.

“Don’t touch me,” I whispered. “Everything hurts.”

“It is not necessary to touch you,” he said. “Only a little,” touching.

The door to the room opened and the bellman stood there. I lunged at him and attacked his face with my hands until he ran away. Then I realized that I hadn’t moved. I was still in the bed, alone, naked under the white sheets, the blanket a tangle at my feet. The bellman entered the room, approached the bed, then went out again. He left, on the nightstand, a half grapefruit with a maraschino cherry in the center, and a serrated spoon.

Fabio didn’t come back. My skin peeled off. The kitten ran away—it flew from under the bed—the instant the bellman opened the door. I took a taxi to the airport. On the boulevard of the dying palms, the driver stopped at a traffic light and I saw a red Trans Am, driven by the one-eyed Chinese woman. In the passenger seat sat Fabio. Both of them were staring straight ahead, together in the heightened consciousness of people who enjoy being looked at.

As I returned to school, something strange happened: Jess was all over CNN. She was the headline news, wearing a turtleneck and a little woolen beanie, perfectly herself, round-cheeked and freckled, except that she had died. Not only had Jess died; she had been murdered in Colorado. Not only had she been murdered in Colorado; she had been raped, her body left on a frozen field, tortured and dead. Not only had she been raped, tortured and murdered; she had been impugned as an example of the cost of sexual freedom, a relatively new idea, an example of the result: Young women who didn’t understand limits or men, putting themselves out into the world, taking buses at night. Jess’s slacks—the CNN word,
slacks
—had not been recovered. She had been tied with the straps from her messenger bag and stabbed nine times in the back, apparently while performing oral sex on her murderer. The network displayed her parents as evidence, their mouths black holes of wonder. What had happened? The new news—CNN—tried to point to a moral, or a trend, or a metaphor, or a social disease. This was the beginning of something new—a way of making sudden, terrible, inexplicable events last all day, so that rings of possible meaning could be created around them. But the question of what happened to Jess was never resolved. Even now, twenty-six years later, the case is still cold.

A
fter college (BA, Smith College, gender studies, skin of her teeth, no distinction), EV moved to New York and found a job in retail. The store off Fifth where she worked paid the minimum; she couldn’t live or eat normally. But the job had compensations: The Beautiful Living booth shimmered with bright toys, and the Show of Shoes—a smoky-mirrored aisle of pumps, stiletto heels, slingbacks, sandals, ballerinas, t-straps and thigh boots arrayed under a hot pink satin banner,
BETTER THAN SEX: THE NEW CHARLIE JOURDANS
—distracted her from less material yearnings. She lived in a studio sublet downtown, where she could choose between coffee or a corn muffin in the morning, a tuna-salad sandwich or a bottle of wine at night. She blew out the pilot light on her old Royal Rose range—she didn’t need a stove—and never went to the movies or bought a newspaper. Six midmornings a week, she roused her adrenaline by leaving for work twenty minutes late to lurch uptown on the local. Then she ran manically down Fifty-seventh Street, rushed under the awning and through familiar stalls of shoes and boots trimmed in Carpet Python, Baltic Leopard and Brook Mink. (Even here, at the center of the universe, everything worth having came from somewhere else.) She endangered Italian pottery and glassware on her way to the Fabulous Food booth, where she worked until six, bagging expensive candy in cellophane.

One day, she noticed a pair of red suede pumps lined with a black material so shiny that it looked wet, and she felt, just beneath her heart, the chemical dilation of drugs or love. Even
with her discount, the shoes cost more than EV earned in two weeks, but she was allowed to put them on her account and take them home. For a few days, she kept them in a formal still life on the table where she ate. The shoes were too perfect and new to sully in the street; to wear them once into the store to work would ruin them forever. But then her neighbor down the hall—ancient, scary Juliet from 4C—stopped by with a tub of supermarket potato salad and ruined them anyway. “You put shoes on a table!” Juliet told her. “You just gave yourself a whole life of bad luck!”

EV seized the shoes by the heels and let them hang off her fingers. But EV’s fate was nothing to Juliet, who leaned against the rotting doorjamb and unfurled complaints about her favorite enemy, an old wreck named McCarthy, who lived across the hall.

“He pished on the floor in the bathroom!” Juliet told EV. “I cleaned it up!”

“That was rude,” EV agreed. She looked around for another place to keep the shoes off the floor, but the table and her futon were the only furniture. She laid the shoes on her futon, where they immediately appeared so horribly ordinary that she picked them up again and put them on. The smooth lining resisted her gritty toes, but the opening—the vamp—felt sensual, sucky. EV listened to Juliet’s deluded, improbable stories: McCarthy’s violent history, the landlord’s theft of a check from her mailbox, the conspiracy among the United States, Germany and the People’s Republic of China to finish off the Jews by dosing Chinese and kosher food with the poison MSG.

When Juliet left, EV locked the door with the dead bolt and walked back and forth across her apartment. The telephone rang: her neighbor from downstairs, P. Cornblum, calling to complain. “Little Angel Feet,” he said, “I need quiet for my work. Please take off your shoes when you tramp!”

EV didn’t argue. She admired P. Cornblum for understanding
and asserting his needs—for silence, as an example. Also, he was aristocratic; he had his clothes dry-cleaned. She removed the shoes and saw that the perfect black lining was dulled already from contact with her feet. She’d ruined them already.

The serious, deranging conflict in the building didn’t center on EV; it swirled around her. How would Juliet from 4C kill McCarthy in 4B and when? Suspense ran like a wire between their two front doors. McCarthy roared threats from his rooms, and Juliet performed witchy, symbolic gestures. Only EV in 4A stood between them.

McCarthy and Juliet had lived in their apartments forever. McCarthy got a monthly VA check in the mail; Juliet lived on cat tuna, potato salad and tripe. Legends of their low rent varied—twenty-five dollars, seventy dollars a month. Whatever it was, it kept both of them climbing the steep, greasy stairs and sharing their WC, a formidable sump in the middle of the hallway that provided the main provocation and bond between them. The landlord had long ago given up making repairs on either of their places. The door to the WC sometimes stuck open on the peeling linoleum, and EV could see, as she hurried past on her way to work, the terrible lip of the toilet, the pocked mirror above the tiny, filthy sink. P. Cornblum was more pointed. The whole fourth floor ought to be condemned, he told the landlord. It stank like a pisshole in France.

Sometimes, EV felt an urge to slide them on and walk around her living room with a glass of wine in her hand. The sound of her shoes on the floor made her feel alive.

One such evening, P. Cornblum called and invited EV downstairs. She went immediately, clattering across the linoleum,
and rang the bell. He opened the door and let her in. Then he turned the beam of his attention toward the ceiling and the radiator pipes. “Every sound you make comes through here,” he told her.

EV looked up at the barrier through which P. Cornblum experienced the shuddering force of her personality. But the ceiling was blank and white, and the pipes, wrapped like old athletic injuries in gauzy yellow asbestos, were quiet and dead.

He’d stuck yellow squares of paper all over his walls. Each square had a word or a few words, or else a crude sketch drawn on it. “
CHURCH BELLS
,” “
LIGHTNING CAUSED BY ELECTRICITY
,” “
SYSTEMS THEORY
”; a lightning bolt, an eagle—or some kind of bird.

EV touched one.

“These are Post-it notes,” he said. “One of the major innovations of the decade.” He bent over a pad of the notes, wrote “3M Corporation,” peeled away the note and stuck it on her chest. “There,” he said. “Go buy yourself some stock. Then you’ll make a killing and move uptown and I can get some work done.”

Sometimes at the mailboxes in the foyer, he was intimate and critical with her, as if there might already be a personal relationship between them. “You don’t even look at the
Times
,” he told her once. “How do you expect anything to happen to you? You’re not serious.”

“How do you know I’m not serious?” she asked him.

“You should get a library card, look up Susan Sontag,” he told her, snapping his mailbox shut. “Everything is a metaphor.”

EV wrote it down quickly on her hand with a pen once he was out of sight—“Serious, Sontag, metaphor.”

As usual, she left for work at the last possible moment. She drank her coffee near the window, propped her feet in her red suede shoes on the sill and watched the Italian women across the street lean out of their windows. Then she left everything as it was, her shoes on the sill, the radio on. She slid her feet into the flat ballet slippers she wore to work, pushed the heavy front door open and dug in her coat pocket for the key.

“Oh, hi!” she said in surprise, because Juliet was standing very close, at McCarthy’s door opposite, holding a claw hammer in one hand and a raw supermarket chicken in the other. A thin rope of white hair hung down her back. Juliet didn’t answer EV, but raised the chicken up against the door and tried to drive a nail through some skin with her hammer. McCarthy’s door rattled and the blows shook the hall. EV slammed her own door to close it, but the doorjamb failed; a slice of wood spongy with old nail holes dropped to the floor. Unlike McCarthy’s wooden door, which dated from a more trusting era, EV’s was heavy and metal, gouged with two Medecos and a police lock. The frame had rotted, though. The door leaned forward slowly, forcing Juliet and then EV aside. Then it burst its remaining hinges and jammed up against McCarthy’s door like a barricade. EV’s efforts to pry her door loose only made the situation worse. From behind his door came McCarthy’s thin, hysterical voice. “No you don’t!” he shouted. “You’re not taking my door! I’ll kill you first!”

“We’re not taking your door. Worse! Worse!” cried Juliet. She shot EV an incriminating, conspiratorial look, then walked back down the hall with the hammer and the chicken hanging down together from the blue lace of veins that was her hand.

“Hold on, Mr. McCarthy; I’ll go get help,” EV said, but no voice came from behind the door, just a hopeless banging, a pathetic twisting of the knob.