Slaves of New York (3 page)

Luckily, when I got home Stash wasn't there, and Mikell called a few minutes later. We spoke briefly. Mikell said things would be best if we didn't speak for a while. He was talking in a whisper. I said, "But, Mikell, I must meet you to continue our mad, passionate affair."

There was a moment of silence.

"Just kidding," I said.

After that, whenever Stash was home in the afternoons I just prayed the phone wouldn't ring.

I tried to keep the apartment clean. My mother lived upstate in a one-bedroom apartment. I couldn't escape to her. I got up at seven-thirty to walk Andrew. Things went okay. Stash bought me a coat, Day-Glo orange wool with a green velvet collar. It wasn't the one I would have chosen—I guess I would have selected something a little more conservative. But it was nice to have a new winter coat.

My friend Abby called me up from Boston. She was all hysterical. It's like this. She's been living with this guy for a few years. He was an art director for an advertising agency, and she has a good job teaching at Simmons, tenure. But it's Roger's house, an old Back Bay brownstone that he's fixed up, and now he's lost his job and he wants her to start making some financial contribution, but he still doesn't want to marry her. Just at this time Abby's old flame reappears. He wants her to move to New York and live with him.

"What are you going to do?" I said.

Abby said that even though this old flame, Bruce, was a jerk, she was bored with Boston and Roger. "I could live in New York with Bruce," she said, "and fly up to Boston to teach one day a week, and maybe I'll meet someone I like better than Bruce in New York."

I said, "Abby, don't do it. In the old days, marriages were arranged by the parents, and maybe you ended up with a jerk but at least you had the security of marriage, no one could dump you out on the street. In today's world, it's the slave system. If you live with this guy in New York, you'll be the slave."

"Well," she said, "I'm used to Roger cooking for me. Would I have to cook for Bruce?"

She already knew all about my dinner menus, the frantic daily preparations. "Yes," I said. "You'd have to cook for Bruce. What are you going to do if you two have a fight and he tells you to leave? With your salary, you'll never be able to find an apartment."

"I know Bruce is a creep," she said. "But I thought I'd be with him while I looked for someone else."

I said, "Abby, forget it. You think you'll be making an improvement, but that's not the case." I didn't want to tell her this before, because I didn't know the situation with Roger, but quite frankly it didn't sound so bad. I said, "If you live with Bruce, you'll be the slave. It's not the same in other cities, the rents aren't so high. Roger doesn't have the same power over you, because you could always threaten to move out and get your own place in Boston."

"I didn't know," she said. "I'm going to reconsider. Are you sure there're no available men in New York?"

"There're women," I said. "There're hundreds of women. They are out on the prowl. And all the men are gay or are in the slave class themselves. Your only solution is to get rich, so you can get an apartment and then you can have your own slave. He would be poor but amenable."

"Are these women, the ones that are prowling—are they attractive?" Abby said.

I could tell she hadn't been listening. "Abby," I said. "It's New York. They have hundred-and-seventy-dollar haircuts and wear black leather belts with sterling silver buckles."

"Oh," she said. "How are things otherwise?"

"Stash and I are getting along very well," I said. "He just bought me a new winter coat. I should probably go. Andrew needs his walkies."

After I hung up, I thought about what I should have told Abby: See, Fat and Fat Fat fell out, and in New York all that's left is Pinch Me. But I'm not sure she would have understood. I remembered when my brother Roland was five he wore these little boots with metal toe caps, and after my cousin told him the joke and pinched him my brother kicked him. My cousin was really enraged at Roland's behavior and called up my mother to complain. He had a black-and-blue mark. My mother was ashamed: obviously she was doing something all wrong in her child-rearing practices. Now Roland is a first-year resident in obstetrics/gynecology down in Texas.

It was easy to find an apartment in New Haven, although my classes in feminist criticism were starting in a few days and most of the other grad students had arrived at Yale the week before. I rented a two-room flat, sunny but dingy, across the street from a punk-rock bar, and overlooking the edge of the ghetto. The manager of the building—I nicknamed him Père Goriot—sold me two twin beds for $10 each, and a battered fan. It was late August, the city felt airless. At the Salvation Army I discovered a shabby Victorian sofa in worn blue velvet for $60, a major investment, but I bought it anyway.

At a mixer at the Art and Architecture School, I met Ray Connors. He had small, worried eyes and fine, babyish hair, already receding. His back was hurting him; two years ago, at a New Year's Eve party, he had fallen down an elevator shaft. He was graduating from the Architecture School in January. He went off to get me a glass of wine; by the time he came back, I had practically forgotten his existence.

A few days later Ray showed up at my apartment. I offered him some Minute Maid lemonade, but Ray preferred Perrier, which I didn't have. "Listen, Cora, I was wondering," he said. "I'm going home this weekend and I wondered if you'd want to come into the city on Friday or Saturday night—you could meet my parents and see our apartment, and we could have dinner."

I don't know exactly why I agreed; it was difficult to think up a fast excuse, and I really had nothing else to do. I neither liked Ray nor disliked him—he just wasn't there.

He met me at Grand Central Terminal on Friday afternoon. I was wearing a black-and-white flowered dress with rhinestone buttons from the Salvation Army and an old forties straw hat the woman who lived next door had given me, white lace gloves, and ankle-strap sandals. I caught sight of myself as we went in the front door of Ray's parents' apartment: there were wall-to-ceiling mirrors opposite the front door. Though I wasn't wearing makeup, my face was shiny; to my surprise my outfit, which I had thought quite razzle-dazzle in New Haven, now resembled something worn by a person just off the train from Mississippi. In the mirror, with my moony, freckled face, I looked as gullible as a horse. This was not at all the image I had hoped to project.

The apartment was huge, with wall-to-wall carpeting, steel-colored, and a great view of the city. Eight or ten people were sitting on pigskin sofas around the living room, wearing frosty, pale cottons and linens, and gave off a certain New York type of elegance, as if they were in a photo session for a Blooming-dale's catalog. The room was stuffy with perfume and conditioned air. I shook hands with the various middle-aged men and women. Though the room was crowded, I felt like shouting out, "Hello, is anybody home?" These people seemed so smooth, correct, as if they were leading their lives according to standards set by
Better Homes and Gardens.

Ray's mother insisted I go with her into the bedroom. She was frisky and plump, with hair the shade of cedar chips, and told me right away that she ran an independent film company —she ran the New York office for her brother, anyway—and Ray's father designed mattresses, one of which was now in the Museum of Modern Art.

In her bedroom, clothing was piled several feet deep on the floor. That morning, she told me, she had had a woman come over and go through her wardrobe to show her how to wear her stuff: what skirts she should throw out, which old sweaters

went with newer things, what she should buy. The woman charged $150 for two hours, but her assistance was worth it. I thought for a minute Mrs. Connors was going to offer to give me her old dresses—which I would have happily accepted— but all she wanted was to show me some slacks which she still thought were nice but which the woman insisted she get rid of.

It made me nervous to think I wasn't envious of this sort of lifestyle. What could be wrong with me? Had I no cravings for a milky-white fur coat, an ice cream maker to spin gelato from invisible threads—or whatever it was those machines did—or a baby with hot, sweaty palms to cling to me like a marsupial? Aside from somebody's old clothes, I couldn't think of anything to want: I even lacked the desire to go on a macrobiotic diet and have my cards read by an Indian master. Once I had read about a person who had had a lobotomy—I could empathize with this, at least when I was in the presence of others.

We went into the terra-cotta-tiled kitchen, whose ceiling was covered with hanging stainless-steel pots and pans. Ray's father came in and kissed my hand. Mr. Connors had iron-gray hair and was really good-looking: he was taller than Ray, and very sexy. I imagined him as my father-in-law, chasing me around the sofa late at night. He made me a Tom Collins and told me how he could converse with their cat—a Maine coon cat weighing at least twenty-five pounds. I thought he might mention something about Ray, but Mr. Connors seemed almost to have forgotten him. I liked Ray's parents much better than Ray. Despite their ostentation, they seemed younger than Ray, and livelier.

When Ray came back into the kitchen, his father gave him a slap on the back.

"Jesus, Dad," Ray said. "My back! I'm already in agony, and you're trying to kill me."

Ray's parents wanted us to stay and have dinner with them after the guests left, but Ray said he was taking me out to a Japanese restaurant nearby. I had never had Japanese food before, so Ray decided to order portions of everything: chunks of raw tuna, abalone, mackerel, some stuffed into rice and

wrapped in seaweed, more lying pinkly on little wooden tablets with legs. Pieces of fish flopped from my chopsticks. To cover up I gulped the plum wine. I felt like I was being forced into recreating a bout of seasickness I had once experienced on a boat trip. "You didn't try the California-make," Ray said. He dabbed a piece of sashimi into a dish of green mustard and wiggled it in front of my nose. I realized my palms were sweating. I wondered how much this whole business was going to cost. My mother and I had been broke our whole lives; I had a loan from Yale that barely covered my expenses. Ray would probably expect some form of compensation for this meal, this much I knew from past dinners with men. I tried to put it out of my mind.

We had nothing to talk about, though Ray told me more about Max, the cat, and his younger brother. Then he fell silent and stared down at his hands. I thought of a few topics: my courses at Yale, my feminist professor. Ray didn't seem very interested. I mentioned my father, whom I hadn't seen in twenty years. My parents had been divorced when I was four. My father, whom my mother called "Captain Ahab," had remarried and moved to New Zealand in order to avoid nuclear fallout. There was a thirty-three-percent chance that New Zealand wouldn't be affected. But Ray apparently wasn't listening; his eyes wandered to his reflection in the mirror behind me and he reached across the table and jabbed my elbow with a chopstick.

I pretended this hadn't happened and Ray asked for the check. Before he paid with his charge card, I got a look at how much the dinner had cost: two weeks' worth of groceries. The food was barely touched. I wasn't used to eating so well. At night, alone in my apartment, I ate a takeout sandwich from a vegetarian place up the block, of lima beans with melted mozzarella cheese. By eleven-thirty I had said good night to Ray and was back on the train to New Haven, a takeout paper bag in my hand.

A few nights later Ray called to ask if he could drop by. I was surprised to hear from him; though I hadn't felt any elementary particles hopping between us, I decided to go to bed with him. The prospect seemed somewhat boring, but I thought I might as well get it over with. Perhaps I'd be fonder of him if something physical happened between us.

When Ray showed up, he had a carload of furniture from his apartment to give me: two chests of teak, with many tiny drawers and compartments, three chairs, an expensive floor lamp, very modern. "When will you need this back?" I said. I assumed he was just lending it to me, or storing it with me for the moment.

"No, it's for you," Ray said.

"For keeps?" I said.

"Yeah, yeah," Ray said. "My father has a whole warehouse of furniture." He looked pleased.

After carrying the furniture upstairs we went out to an espresso place a block away. Cappuccino coffee was two dollars, so I had never gone there. I had one of the coffees with whipped cream, and a big piece of carrot cake. I ate the cake eagerly, cramming it into my mouth as if it were a drug, somehow feeling this would give me strength for whatever was to happen with Ray. "I like to watch you eat," Ray said, looking at me dreamy-eyed. I wiped off my chin with a napkin; the cake had abruptly become quite tasteless.

Ray stopped at his car to get a bottle of wine out of the trunk. He put his arm around my shoulder as we walked back to my apartment. It was after midnight. I sat on one of the twin beds; it had no frame, just a mattress and box spring on the floor. Ray sat on a chair, uncorking the wine. I figured either he'd make a move and I'd go to bed with him, or he should go home. I was tired. Once again, I felt we had nothing to say to each other, but Ray told me the plot of a movie he had just seen. This is a symptom. I've noticed how any time a man tells me the plot of a movie, it is a kind of declaration of love.

After about fifteen minutes, just as I was ready to suggest