Kissing in Manhattan (12 page)

“I can,” she whimpered. “I want to.”

Patrick sniggered. His teeth flashed in the mirror, while his hands clutched Rally’s wrists.

“Nope,” he said.

Rally wrenched back and forth. Pressure built in her eyes and groin. She squeezed her thighs together, gritted her teeth, felt herself giving in to something unnameable.

“I can,” she hissed. “I’m going to.”

Patrick kept laughing. Rally’s nails were digging at his hands now, clawing him. Her eyes were wide in the mirror, and her leg muscles were hard, twitching.

“Please,” breathed Rally. “Yes. Yes.”

“No,” ordered Patrick.

Rally whimpered and fought. She had sweat on her brow, felt pleasure rising in her thighs.

“Please,” she begged. Patrick stood firm, telling her no.

“Please,” cried Rally.

But then, just as Rally’s breathing hit its stride and her begging found a new pitch, Patrick released her wrists with a cackle. Rally stumbled forward, tripping to her knees, one of her heels flying off. Rally’s hands splayed on the ground, arresting her fall.

“Ow.”

Rally looked up at the mirror. She saw herself on her hands and knees, panting, her braid thrown forward over one shoulder, her breasts, cupped in white, pointing neatly down. Her scarf was still tight around her neck. It extended down to the floor and coiled there, but it looked awful to Rally now, like a leash. Patrick stood over and behind Rally, chuckling, his hands on his hips.

“Ow,” said Rally again.

Patrick made no move toward her. His eyes blazed with a pleasure and a triumph Rally had never seen before.

“I hurt my knee,” said Rally.

Patrick nodded. “I expect you did. You can go home now.”

The lust drained from Rally’s mind.

“What?” she whispered.

“You heard me,” said Patrick sharply. “Go home.”

Rally stayed on her hands and knees, wondering if he wanted her that way. Angry tears filled her eyes.

“What are you doing?” she whispered.

“I’m going to have a drink,” explained Patrick, “as soon as you skedaddle.”

“No,” snuffled Rally. “What are you doing
to me
?”

“Go home,” ordered Patrick.

Rally sat up. She turned her eyes from the mirror.

“Is this what you think about during the day?” she said savagely. “Doing this to me? Making me want . . . this?”

Patrick pulled sweatpants and a T-shirt from a drawer, dropped them on the floor near Rally.

“During the day,” he said, “I think about money.”

Rally got to her feet. She yanked the silk from her throat. She got furiously, shakily dressed, her mind throbbing with a redness, a color that could have been blood.

“Does it turn you on?” asked Rally. “Sending me home at midnight, then calling me again next Friday and doing it all over again?”

“I won’t call you next Friday,” said Patrick. “You’ll be in France. Now, get out of here.”

Rally’s chin was quaking.

“You’re a fucking nutbag,” she said.

Instantly, Patrick was in Rally’s face. He had rage in his eyes. He hammered one hand on his suit coat, thumping his chest over his heart.

“Do you know what’s going on here?” yelled Patrick.

Rally gasped, backed away. She stared at the bulge in Patrick’s coat, the lump she still thought was a gun.

“I’m sorry,” she stammered.

“Do you have any idea who I am?” Patrick’s voice was splitting. His shoulders were hunched like a bear’s.

“Ye—yes. I mean, no.” Rally ran from Patrick’s room, out his apartment door, sobbing,
No, no, no
.

“Cut it off,” ordered Rally.

Kim sat close to Rally on the couch. On the coffee table beside them were Kim’s scissors and other salon weapons. Rally’s hair was wet and she had a towel around her shoulders.

Kim stroked Rally’s hair, which fell clean to the couch cushions, even covered them a little.

“Men are brutes,” said Kim gently. She petted Rally’s neck, rubbed Rally’s back. “You don’t have to do this.”

Rally held herself archly, staring straight ahead. “Cut it off. Make it short and funky and whatever, but cut it off.”

“Shhhh.” Kim fought to make her voice soothing. She was trying to save something rare, something beautiful. “Just because some jerk liked your hair one way doesn’t mean you have to—”

“Cut it off,” shrieked Rally.

Rally went to Beaujolais, France. She walked down quaint, ancient streets, visited wine masters, tasted what they offered, floated from one vineyard to another. She sat on stone fences and gazed at sheep. She wore sturdy, roomy American blue jeans and baggy sweaters that didn’t accentuate her figure. Her hair was cropped at the neck in a fashion that required no tending or thought. She spent each night in the restaurant of one inn or another, eating chicken and beef entrées, prepared with simple sauces. As she wrote and drank Beaujolais, Rally jotted down observations about the land and the wine. When it came time to write about the people, Rally did something she never had. She ignored the truth she saw around her and transformed everyone she met into a stock fairy-tale character. She wrote of polite men with wine-stained, crooked teeth, of buxom, helpful women, of children who carried baguettes and stomped on grapes. Everything was wholesome and pleasant and continental, until one night Rally drank far too much wine at a bar. She found herself dizzy and outside under the stars, her body being pressed against a rough-hewn rock fence by an eager young man named Olivier. Olivier kept making sexy French whispers and stroking the waistline of Rally’s blue jeans. The mistake came when Olivier put his lips to Rally’s, eased his tongue into her mouth, and kissed her. For a second Rally gave in to the swirling, crafted sky, and kissed Olivier back. She joined her mouth with a stranger’s and tried to be a happy, fleeting thing, as fleeting as wine. But repulsion came. Rally was aware not only of her tongue, but of her entire self beneath her clothes, and she pulled herself away from the man, as if she’d betrayed a jealous, omniscient lord.

My name is Patrick Rigg, and I’m thirty-three years old. I’m also a millionaire, because when I was six, my older brother, Francis Rigg, was killed unexpectedly by Guppy The Wonder Fish. My family lived near Chicago at the time, and Francis and I always begged our parents to take us to Guppington Estates, a theme park on the city’s outskirts. Guppington Estates was one of these bizarre start-up American theme parks. Guppy, the central character, was a stout orange fish who wore a black tuxedo and a monocle. He spoke impeccable English and munched on pralines, but he also knew jujitsu. Guppy’s afternoon cartoon show aired in Chicago and maybe everywhere. Each episode started with Guppy minding his own business, browsing through a bookstore, drinking latte, looking for collectible editions of Joseph Conrad titles. Usually, Guppyhad by his side his classy fish girlfriend, Groupy. Groupywas incredibly well read, with a killer figure. She and Guppywould exchange witticisms and hold fins until the Largemouths showed up. The Largemouths were rough-cut, troublemaking bass, who, for reasons unclear to me as a child, followed and tormented Guppy every episode. They seemed to resent that Guppy was well born, and that he had a sexy girlfriend, while they were just punks as far as fish went. Bear in mind that none of this made any sense whatsoever. In any case, the Largemouths would pester Guppy and shove him around and call him a square, but their big mistake—which they made unfailingly every episode—came when they began insulting Groupy. As soon as that happened, Guppy would remove his monocle, hand it to Groupy, and say quietly: “This I cannot endure.” Then, with lethal exactitude, Guppy would kick the living snot out of the Largemouths. He employed elegant, bone-crushing jujitsu moves, and when he was finished, there was a pile of dead fish carcasses on the floor beside him.

Francis and I worshiped Guppy. Francis, who was three years my elder, would sit with me every afternoon to watch Guppy on TV, and after the show we would act out the carnage we’d just witnessed. Francis was always Guppy by virtue of seniority, and I was a Largemouth. Basically, my brother and I just pounded on each other till one of us bled or cried or it was time for dinner, but I always resented being labeled a Largemouth. The punches I threw were real, indignant and sloppy, and they cost Francis one tooth and two black eyes in the years before our last trip to Guppington Estates.

The Estates was a fancy theme park. It featured the Hard Rock Bass Café, and Blowy’s Bookstore, and all the other places that some marketing genius convinced me were normal fish hangouts. I might’ve asked my parents a million questions about why Guppy didn’t live underwater and why he adored pralines, but I don’t remember such questions. All I remember are the utterly kempt streets of Guppington Estates, and most especially, Guppy’s mansion. The mansion was the coolest part of the park. Inside it were dazzling chandeliers and a wet bar where you could purchase pralines and imitation champagne. In the mansion’s backyard was a giant Plexiglas fishbowl, Guppy’s swimming pool. The bowl was probably thirty feet high and just as wide and it was filled with blue foam to simulate water. The idea was, your parents bought you a ticket and you were issued a Largemouth fish-head helmet. Then you climbed a staircase to the rim of the bowl and waited in line on a platform. Some guy in an eight-foot-tall Guppy suit stood at the head of the line. When you got up to him, you could throw a couple punches at Guppy and he’d fake some whimsical groans and moans, so your parents could get their money’s worth. Then Guppy would holler, “This I cannot endure!” and swat you across the butt with a fin, sending you over the rim of the bowl into the pit of blue foam. You got to clown around in the foam for a while with other kids and then an attendant plucked you out.

If it sounds dangerous, it was. The platform was high, and poorly fenced in. Also, it’s amazing that no kid ever asphyxiated in that foam. Bear in mind, though, that this was the early 1970s, and neither parents nor children were very clear about what the hell was going on. You had to be eight years old to dive into the bowl, and you had to wear a helmet, but that was it. I’m sure theme-park ordinances are far more rigorous now, but back then, standing on the rim of Guppy’s sky-high fishbowl seemed like a perfectly sanctionable activity for a child. At least, it was sanctionable until Guppy swatted my brother Francis too hard and Francis glancedoff the bowl’s outer rim, plummeted thirty feet, and crashed headfirst into the ground in front of my parents and me. I’d been sulking around the base of the bowl, bitter that I was too young to be swatted by Guppy. Francis landed three feet from me. He was wearing his Largemouth helmet when he fell, but I heard his neck crack. It sounded exactly like it sounds in the movies, quick, clean, and sure, like a snapped wishbone. I knew he was dead as soon as I heard that sound and saw the weird twist in Francis’s neck. I knew it before my mother screamed, before my father raced to his limp, fish-headed son. I knew my brother was dead, and in that moment I knew something else, something that a lifetime of nightmares and bullshit therapy and millions of sympathy dollars bequeathed to me by the defunct Guppington Estates Corporation has never been able to erase or rectify. My brother’s death was absurd. It was an accident, yes, a progression of unforeseen, unfortunate split seconds in time, but when all was said and done, my brother was lying there dead with a fish helmet on, and his head was twisted in a silly way that heads shouldn’t twist, and it was absurd.

Later, when I saw Francis in his coffin, I cried, because I understood that he would never punch me again. Today I live in Manhattan and trade millions of dollars in stocks every day, and Francis will never get to know this city—the glory of its money or the smell of its women. If your first temptation is to say,
How tragic,
my first temptation is to stick a gun down your throat and pull the trigger. You weren’t there. You didn’t see the twist of Francis’s neck or his stupid fish helmet. Your mother didn’t die of depression because of that twist and that helmet. Your father probably doesn’t live as a recluse in his Adirondack hometown, and you probably don’t send him checks every month to keep him in his deer-blind bliss. My brother’s death wasn’t tragic, it was ridiculous. It was point-blank absurdity, Francis’s death was, and it wrapped itself around my life forever, like a straitjacket with clunky buckles.

So that’s how I wake up every day, with the straitjacket—the absurdity of Francis’s death and the absurdity of just about everything—tight around my skin. I brush my teeth, I eat Special K, I make money, I drink whiskey, and I’m capable of laughing. But none of these things ever loosens the straitjacket. There are only three things that accomplish that feat, three things that I take seriously, three things that let me relax a little. I do these three things without fail. Here is what I do. I carry a gun every day, I listen to a priest every evening, and, almost every night, I tie up beautiful women in my bedroom.

The gun’s easy to explain. It’s a licensed black SIG, and I carry it in the left breast pocket of whatever suit I’m wearing. My suits are expensive, always black or charcoal, and I’m handsome enough that people always check me out. They notice the bulge in the breast of my suit, the lump over my heart. They know it’s a gun, and they watch me with fear and interest, wondering if I’ll take out my gun and fire it. This doesn’t thrill me, having strangers fear me, or knowing my coworkers worry that I’m packing heat. What thrills me is that I’m not what these people take me for. They believe I’m predictably dangerous—I can tell from their handshakes, their eagerness to accept when I insist on picking up the tab. They think me a strong, well-dressed character, a man of a certain code. I am cordial and principled, they think. They believe that I’m like Guppy, or some mobster, that I’ll only resort to violence if my honor or the honor of someone I cherish is compromised. My weapon, they suspect, is my instrument for executing justice.

Lucky for me, that is bullshit. What keeps me breathing in and out is knowing that I am not enslaved by principle at all. I can produce my SIG any time I want and snuff out the fourteen lives in closest proximity to me and still have one bullet left for myself. I can kill the Ukrainian woman sitting beside me on the uptown train, or Harrison Phelps, the shy man in my company’s bonds department. I could buy a dozen roses for nobody, then plug a hole in the heart of the salesgirl who sold me the roses. With my SIG I can leap at any second into the absurd abyss that swallowed up my brother, and if you’re too close to me when I leap, I might yank you in with me.