And Now You Can Go (5 page)

He looks above me—
Please look back at me
—at a round mirror above my head. It's the size of a large pizza.

"I used to have a mirror just like that," he says. "I kept it in the back of my truck." "Really?" I have no idea what he's talking about.

"That's when I was way into coke."

"You must have been really serious," I say, and look at the mirror, because that's where he's looking.

The representative of the world catches my eye in the reflection. "No, not serious. Just eighteen."

For no reason, I smile.

On my way back into my building, Danny, the night doorman, stops me by the elevator. "Hey, I've got something for you," he says.

Whatever it is, a package, mail—I don't want it. "A friend of mine wanted me to give you this." I have to pee.

"My friend said, 'Tell her I'm looking out for her.' " I shake my head.

Danny hands me a baseball card with a picture of Barry Bonds on it. "He told me, 'I'm from San Francisco, she's from San Francisco. I look out for my own.' "

"Thanks, Danny," I say. He's joking, of course. The card is from him. The truth is, I feel bad for Danny. He drinks. I've seen him drinking on the job. His wife and daughter left him, the story goes.

"You're a smart girl," he says. "Thank you," I say.

"Did I ever tell you I made call-backs for
Jeopardy
?" "Really?" I say. One of the other doormen has told me this. "Know the question that stumped me?"

I've heard this too. "No," I say. "Actually, it was the answer." I nod.

"The male host on the
Today
Show."

I hold the picture of Barry Bonds in my hand, wondering what I'll do with it. "Fucking Matt Lauer!" he booms.

Then his face changes. "You want to see a picture of my Daphne?" "Sure," I say, unsure of who Daphne is—girlfriend, ex-wife, dog.

From his wallet he pulls out a photo thinned and faded with age. It's of his daughter, looking about eight.

"How cute," I say. "When was this taken?" "About twelve years ago."

"Really," I say. The picture shows her on a swing, a woman's legs behind her, adult arms pushing. "So now she's how old?"

"About your age," he says. "She'll be twenty on April 27." I don't know what to say.

"That's right," he beams. "A Taurus, just like her father."

He wishes me a good night. "Don't let the bed bugs bite," he adds as I'm stepping into the elevator.

Upstairs on the bathroom mirror is a Post-it note with a message from Susan: '
Cording to ancient lore

She who doesn't wash the floor Owns evil in her true heart's core

O! Won't you won't you do your
?

I wake up early. I go out to try to find a newspaper and a muffin. I have to walk for blocks to find a store that's open. A familiar figure in a peacoat ambles toward me: the ROTC boy.

"What are you doing?" I say. "Man, what a night."

"What happened?" He looks awful. "Is that a black eye?"

He ignores my second question. "I was looking for the dude." "What dude?"

"Your dude, the one with the gun."

"You were?" I'm flattered and surprised and sick to my stomach. "Did he do that to you?" I say and try to look him in both eyes.

"No, I never found him. I accidentally went into this trans-vestite club and got in a fight with some moron. I got knocked through a car window."

"What?"

"I just got back from the emergency room. They were pulling shards of glass out of my back. Hurt like a mother."

I'm not sure if I believe him.

"But the nurse was really hot," he says.

I can't resist chiding him. "Did she have lips and skin like mine?" I ask. "No, she was from Venezuela."

"I'm talking about the story you wrote, how I was the girl." "What girl?"

"You know, with the skin. And the lips."

He looks at me and touches the area around his eye, which is turning the colors of a gasoline spill in sunlight.

"I can't believe you actually fell for that," he says, and shakes his head.

I go to a lecture for my Portraiture in Painting class. The professor turns on the slide projector and switches off the lights. I've made a point of sitting by the entrance to the room, where the strip of light from the hallway slides under the door.

The professor clicks through the slides: Ghirlandaio's portrait of Giovanna Tornabuoni; Raphael's depiction of Baldas-sare Castiglione; El Greco's painting of his friend, the theologian and priest Fray Hortensio.

Each time a new portrait is projected I wonder,
On a scale of one to ten, how much do the people in the painting resemble what they looked like in real life
?

There's no way of knowing.

I decide to go to a Christmas party another student is having. I've heard the red-faced representative of the world is going to be there. I take the subway to where the nice stores are. I try on a black velvet dress I can't afford, and buy it. My plan is to leave the tag on, abstain from red wine, and return the dress the next day.

I arrive at the party late, hoping the representative might already be there. He isn't.

I talk to a woman in her forties who's wearing a sequined skirt. Sequined in the back at least; in front, most are gone.

"I used to wear this skirt when I performed with a guitar," she says. "I wish I could play guitar," I say.

"Red wine?" she asks. "Sure."

I talk to a guy I know and his girlfriend, who's just flown into town. He has a politician's smile and, thinking no one can see where his hand is, is stroking the crack of her butt.

I talk to a woman with too-long hair. She knows about the man in the park. Everyone knows. "I was thinking," she says to me. "Now, with all this going on, do you still want your tutoring job at the Learning Center?"

I hadn't thought about quitting.

"Because if you want a break or something, I could take over for you."

"I'm totally fine," I say. My job is the first thing in a while I've felt like fighting for.

Frustrated that the guy I have come to find, the guy for whose sake I've bought a dress I can't afford, hasn't shown up, I sneak away to find my coat and there, in the bedroom, is his green coat. It's on him and his back is to me.

"Hey," I say.

"Hey," he says. "Are you leaving?"

"No, no. I just came to get something."

He looks at the coat in my hand. "I'll walk you home," he says.

"Don't you want to stay?" I ask. "You just got here." "I came to check up on you." We go back to my apartment and, once inside, I put on a sweatshirt over my dress. "I don't get it," he says.

"What?"

"You wear that dress and look like that in front of other people, but when it's just the two of us, you cover up."

"Yeah?" I say. "Your point?"

When he goes to the bathroom I take off the sweatshirt and then the dress and then put the sweatshirt back on. I put on pants. I change and put on sweatpants. I fold the dress over my desk chair. Then I hang it up in my closet because I don't want him to see the tag, or worse, rip it off.

He's taking a long time. When we were teenagers, Freddie said, "You know in old movies when the women say they're going to go into the bathroom to slip into something more comfortable? That means they're putting in their diaphragms."

When he comes back into the room his breath is fresh. "Which color toothbrush did you use?"

"I used my finger," he says.

He sits on the bed next to me and then kisses me. His tongue tastes of Aquafresh, but his lips smell like cigarettes.

"I didn't know you smoked," I say. "I know. Is it that bad?"

"No, it's okay." Close-up, his face has little diamond marks, acne scars. Maybe from when he was eighteen and a coke fiend. I kiss his cheek, my lips touching at least ten of those diamonds.

"Your skin smells good," I say. "Like soap."

He takes off his shirt, his pants; he removes the rubber band from his hair.

His underwear is forest green and a cross between boxers and briefs. "My sister bought me these in London," he says. "She works at the Tate."

"They're nice," I say, wondering if he's gay.

He puts his hand on my stomach, his fingers spreading out like a starfish. I put my hand on his stomach—he has a beer belly.

We kiss for a while and it's a little smoky but nice and then he says he has to go. "I have to wake up early in the morning and don't want to wake you."

I nod. He puts on his pants. "Church," he adds.

In the morning I take the subway to the nice stores. The dress has a split at the base of the zipper and I wonder if it was like that all along. I'm worried the store won't take it back. But the saleswoman doesn't notice. She doesn't notice the split, or that the dress has been worn, or my anxious face.

"Sign here," she says, "for your refund."

When I leave the store I feel like I've just won the money. It's in my pocket, heavy and thick. I stop by a drop-in hair salon and pay forty dollars, with tip, to get my blond-streaked hair dyed a dull shade of brown.

"If you don't want to be alone," the therapist says, "maybe there are some girls you can spend the night with? Or who can stay with you at your place?"

"There isn't anyone," I say. "You're sure?"

"My best friend Sarah lives in Ireland. My sisters in England. Other than them, there's no one really. People I grew up with are in California. My college friends mostly moved to Providence or D.C.—I'm the only one who moved to New York. That was just in September and all the women I've met here tell me I shouldn't have been in the park."

"Well, I was just wondering, because you hear lots of stories." "About what?"

"About date rape," she says.

"Yes," I say, "you do hear all these stories," and I realize that's part of the problem. They're always the same story—rape, date rape, mugging, angry ex-boyfriend seeking revenge. No one knows what to do with a story like mine.

"It just seems …" she says, and sighs. "What?"

"It seems like there are too many men. I can't keep them straight."

She looks at my chest. I've deliberately worn an extra-large sweatshirt that says nothing. "I just wonder," she says, "if maybe they're taking advantage of you, of your situation."

I look out the window at the students in red or blue or black jackets walking across the thinly snow-covered campus.

"I didn't seek him out," I say. She looks up from her notebook. "I didn't seek any of them out."

"Can you elaborate on that?" she says.

"It's all nonspecific, this affection, this longing." "Excuse me?"

"Nothing is personal," I say. "Not who you want to die with or who you want to love. It's all nonspecific."

Tom calls me five times an hour and I don't pick up the phone. He starts ringing my doorbell in the middle of the night and the doorman won't let him up. On the intercom I tell him I'm scared.

"Of what?" he says. "I don't know," I say.

"Will you let me in?" he says. "I need to talk to you."

I listen but say nothing. I've heard the rumors that the doormen, all four of them, think Tom is the one who held a gun to my head because no one believes that someone I don't know would do this. But rumors and miscalculations are comforting to me now because I know that the doorman on duty is watching him, waiting for him to step out of line.

"I know you're not spending the night at Theresa's mom's house," Tom says. "Congratulations," I say.

The ROTC boy calls me from a bar, where he's drinking with teammates after a hockey game. "I've got tacks in my face for you," he yells into the phone. I look at the clock. It's after midnight.

"What?" I say.

"Some of them are yellow, but most are red, I think." "What?"

"Hey Tice," he calls out to someone else. "What color are the tacks?" I hear yelling, music, a game on TV, a cheer.

"Tice says there're some blue ones too." "In your face?" I say.

"Yeah."

"How many total?"

"Like twenty. There's one inside my nose." "But why?"

"Because," he says, shouting, it seems, more at me than into the phone, "I wanted to show my devotion to you."

"Can you put Tice on the phone?" I say. "I need to ask him something." "Sure," he says. "Then you'll believe me?"

"Yeah," I say.

"Tice," I hear him yell. He puts the phone down and I hear his voice from a few feet away. "Hey Tice, get over here."

I hang up.

Tom calls me and tells me he wants his lamp back. He brought it over one night so we could both read in bed. On another night, when stripping down for sex, he threw his T-shirt over it. The shirt was purple and our bodies looked like we were in a greenhouse.

"I'll leave it downstairs with the doorman," I say. "Fine," he says. "I'll be over to get it in ten minutes." I hang up and unplug the lamp. The elevator is being held on the tenth floor and I don't want to wait, so I take the stairs. Just when I'm running down the final flight, I see Tom enter the lobby. The liar, he must have called from the pay phone outside. He walks toward me, grabs the lamp out of my hands with such force I stumble backward.

Without saying a word, he leaves. The lamp's cord drags behind him like a leash.

It's Tuesday, which means it's plant-watering day. I rejoice in having remembered this: it's a sign that things are back in order, on schedule. I dump out the contents of the wastebasket in the bathroom. I notice that my roommate is an excessive flosser. I fill the wastebasket with water from the kitchen sink. Above the faucet is a note from Susan:

Please heed my wishes And do the dishes!!

We have three plants. I start watering the one in my bedroom, the squat one with curving leaves, like extended tongues. I can't remember how much water it needs and so I pour and pour until I see it's leaking out of the bottom. I mop up the spill with a clean, unmatched sock.

The fly strips I've bought hang in spirals, like DNA, from a ceiling lamp's cord in the kitchen, from a curtain rod in the dining room, and from a nail in the hallway. No flies have been caught.

The red-faced guy, the representative of the world, asks if I want to get some dinner in the neighborhood. He lives four blocks away. He's recently moved from the Lower East Side and, before that, Texas, because his life in both places was too stressful, too full of bad people and ghosts.