Eve in the City
Page 9
“Shh. Please.”
His lips moved. Every once in a while he pulled a bill taut so it made that snapping sound. He was a kid, delighted how it didn’t tear, how American money was made of something stronger than paper.
“I’m going to wait upstairs. With the girls.”
I don’t even know if he heard, he was so engrossed. Or pretending to be.
“It was for immigration purposes. To get a green card. And I said no. Well, I didn’t say no. But I definitely didn’t say yes. I didn’t say anything. Except that he was crazy.”
“They ask you things,” Crystal warned. “Things about him. To make sure you really love each other.”
“Like what?”
“Like what kind of toothpaste he uses.”
“So how long have you two been fucking?”
“Nora!”
“It’s none of our business,” Brandy scolded. “At least two months, right? Ever since that time he drove you home?”
“I did not say yes!” I wailed.
“That’s what makes her such a little bitch.”
Crystal turned and made Nora shut up with just a look. Of course, then there was this really embarrassing silence. We all stood there, waiting for someone to change the subject.
“I think I had an orgasm this afternoon,” I announced, remembering my time with Horace. It seemed so long ago. “On the number six train. Going downtown.”
“You haven’t changed,” Brandy said.
“Yes, I have. Actually, that’s what I just realized. I’ve changed a lot. As a matter of fact, on the way over here, I decided I was going to—”
“No, I mean you haven’t changed. Your clothes. You were wearing a dress when you came in. I remember because it was kind of a strange one. Even for you. It had writing on it?”
“Oh no.”
I went back downstairs, to rescue my heirloom. Viktor had passed out. His head was down on the bar.
“Viktor?”
I went closer. He was crying. It wasn’t that dignified-little-manly-tears-brushed-out-the-corner-of-the-eye type of thing. He was weeping. These sobs, into the money that was scattered around him like wet leaves.
Please, I thought. Not this.
“If,” he said. His face was a wreck.
“If what?”
“If!”
Then I realized he was saying my name. In another language.
CHAPTER FOUR
“Start from the beginning.”
“There is no beginning. It’s more like I finally noticed.”
“Noticed what?”
“Well, I got home from work and I was sitting here.”
“Sitting where?”
“On the floor.”
He looked around. He had that pad out again. The place was a complete mess. Even the cushions were scattered. How could I have not seen? That’s what I couldn’t understand. Was I so blind? He undid his jacket and sat where I had been. He looked funny, trying to squeeze himself into the small space, bending over and sniffing a glass, careful not to touch, like it was evidence.
“That’s mine,” I said, embarrassed. “The glass.”
“Then what happened?”
“Nothing. I just realized everything was out of place. I mean I’m not exactly a neat freak or anything, but I don’t leave every drawer open, and all my clothes on the floor.”
He picked up the composition book by its edges.
“You said you were writing a letter.”
“I said I was trying to write a letter.”
“Who to?”
“No one.”
What I hadn’t told him was that I had taken off my clothes. I was just sitting, cross-legged in my underwear, when I finally realized that the apartment wasn’t a mess, it was ransacked! Someone had gone through everything. It was this horrible sensation. My privacy, the only place I had never let anyone else contaminate with their presence, was gone.
“How much do you drink?”
“Huh?”
“I said—”
“I heard. How is that any of your business?”
“It’s not. I was just wondering.”
“I’m the one who got robbed here. I don’t see what my personal habits have to do with it.”
“Robbed how?”
He put the pad away and got up. He had this kind of authority to him. Because he’s a policeman, I told myself. But it was more than that. He was very physical, the way his arms swung, like he could grab the whole room and shake it. The way he looked around, investigating me, how I lived.
“I mean, yes, your apartment’s been broken into. That’s clear. But what exactly was taken?”
“Nothing, I guess.”
“Any idea how they got in?”
“Over here.”
I went to the bathroom and pointed. The medicine cabinet door was open, all the boxes and jars dumped in the tub. Towels were on the floor. The window that looked out on the roof, that had prison bars, didn’t anymore. Instead, there was a big open square mouth with air pouring in. He came up next to me. I smelled leather. It was enveloping, the scent. Very protective. He was careful not to bump into me, not to touch. I was evidence, too.
“Maybe I scared them off.” My words sounded wooden and forced. “I mean, if they didn’t take anything.”
“Why do you think that? Did you hear them when you entered? Footsteps? Things being knocked over?”
“No, but it’s what I’m good at. Scaring people off.”
He looked at me. The same way he had before. This mix of curiosity and something else that I couldn’t quite pin down.
“Maybe they did it because they could.” I smiled to myself.
At work we had this joke: Why does a dog lick its balls? Because it can. Why do men act like jerks? Because they can.
“You mean to send you a message?”
“I don’t know.”
“So you got home,” he summarized. “You sat down to write a letter. After a while, you looked up, saw you had been the victim of an attempted burglary, and then you called me.”
He made that sound like the most interesting part. Calling him.
“Well, I had your card. You gave it to me that morning. In case I remembered something new.”
“And have you? Remembered something new?”
“About what?”
“You know what. About that night.”
“This has nothing to do with before. I mean, how could it?”
We were still standing in the doorway. I tried to walk away. I had to pass right next to him because he wasn’t moving. I caught a glimpse of a strap over his shoulder. At first I thought it was suspenders, then realized what I had been smelling this whole time was the holster that held his gun.
“I was thinking about going home,” I confessed. “That’s what I was doing on the floor. Writing a letter to my mother. Asking if I could come back.”
“Is that what you want to do? Go home?”
“I don’t know.”
He took out his pad again.
“So you’re saying that maybe someone is trying to frighten you because of what you saw that night.”
“I didn’t say that. What are you talking about?”
“I understand you’re a runaway, Eve,” he said carefully. “I understand you not wanting to give me your last name and all. Not wanting to get involved with the authorities.”
“I am not a runaway.” I was shocked he had used that word. I never thought of myself that way. “I’m just someone who came to New York City. There’s millions of people who do that every year. I’m not running away from anything. I am running to something.”
And what’s that? I wanted him to ask. What are you running to, Eve? Because I was curious to hear how I’d answer. Because I didn’t know myself. If he asked, maybe I would find out, be forced to say. Also, I wanted him to act interested in me, not in what I had seen or hadn’t seen, but in me as a person. Why? I wondered. You want him to fall in love with you?
All right, I decided. I’ll make up something else. Something new. To please him. To make this all go away, for real, this time.
But once I started, I forgot to lie. It wasn’t out of any kind of moral sense. I just didn’t have the energy. Or the imagination. And then I couldn’t stop. I actually got excited, enthusiastic, as more details of that night came back. Her face. The sounds they made together. My seeing one thing and then realizing it was maybe another. Our eyes meeting. That moment of wordless communication. Her walking off. The man falling to the ground. The blood. For a while I didn’t even notice that he had stopped writing things down, that he was staring at me. And even then, I figured he just didn’t understand. That I was explaining it badly.
“I thought they were making love.”
“You call . . .” He flipped over his pages. “You call being on the street at 5 A.M. ‘out for a walk’? And you call what you said just now, you call that, ‘making love’? Where are you from, anyway?”
“Iowa.”
He took out a folded piece of paper.
“It says here a squad car was told to swing by the corner where you reported witnessing the incident.”
“Seventy-third and Madison.”
“Right. They found nothing.”
“I thought it was a dream!” I looked at the remains of my apartment, at my attempt to live a normal life, be a normal person. “I thought it would be better if it was a dream. It would make more sense that way, if it was just . . . an External Dramatization of the Female Psyche.”
He snapped his pad shut. He was really annoyed.
“Come on,” he said, and grabbed me by the wrist.
“Let’s start with the eyes.”
There were twenty. Well, forty, really. Twenty pairs of scratched plastic souls, staring up at me from Hell.
“She only turned her head for a minute.”
“You said you got a good look at her.”
“Did I?”
“Yes, you did.”
The man who was laying out the eyes waited a minute, then swept them away, a card dealer, and laid out twenty more. They were all different, from pop-eyed to slits, from wide apart to almost touching.
“Shouldn’t this be on a computer?”
They didn’t answer. I could hear, outside the room, the sound of phones ringing and not being picked up, just ringing and ringing. Muffled, friendly shouting. Teasing someone about something. But loud. I wondered what it would be like to work here. Oh, right. Officer Eve. That was definitely my calling. You have the right to remain silent. So I better shut up. Inside, I better shut up. I knew I was in trouble. All my competing selves had to line up so I could present a united front. So I could pass. Pass for sane.
“You said she saw you. That’s when she ran away.”
“She didn’t run. She walked. Fast. And I’m not sure it was because she saw me. Maybe she just—”
“If you saw her, if you looked into her eyes, then she saw you. It’s a two-way street.”
He said something to the sketch artist. I couldn’t hear what.
Not a street, a road. A secret road that took you in a new direction, not uptown or down, not East Side or West. All you had to do, she seemed to be saying, was take this road, this hidden turn, and you could slip into a world where you would be alive in a different way. We looked at each other.
The man’s hand reached out to take away the set of eyes. I stopped him.
“Wait.”
I was in two places. You always are, I realized. There’s this other drama going on, all the time, this force that makes everything that happens in your daily existence meaningful, this power that makes your conscious life what it is, not the jumble of random events it would look like otherwise. It was the magnet slid under things that organized them into a pattern, made them stand up. She was the magnet. That’s why I had to find her, that’s why I felt, somehow, that she was looking for me, too. Pulling me toward her.
“Is she there?” Detective Jourdain’s voice asked, far away.
“Maybe.”
“Then point her out. Point her out and you can go home.”
But I didn’t want to go home.
Growing up, I was always clutching the wrong thing. When everyone else had a doll or a toy, I would fix on some object, a spoon or a pincushion, and hold that instead. People would laugh at first, then try and drag it away. The harder they pulled, the more determined I got to keep it, like their saying how wrong it was gave it this significance, this power.
“Eve, if this woman did assault a man, possibly kill him—”
“Maybe she was getting raped.”
“Was she getting raped?”
“I told you, I don’t know.”
“You’d know a rape if you saw one.”
“Would I?”
“Just give us her description and let us sort this whole mess out. It has nothing to do with you.”
I nodded. He was absolutely right. It had nothing to do with me. He had my best interests at heart. He was such a nice man. I liked his skin. There was so much of it, with that shaved head. I would invite him to the wedding. Maybe when they asked that question about anyone knowing why this marriage should not take place, he would object.
My hand moved. I followed its progress, a spectator. The world was a Ouija board.
“This one.”
“You mean she’s Asian?” he asked sharply. “You never mentioned that before.”
But the sketch artist believed me. He fit it on a board with a blank oval that was supposed to be a face and said, “Let’s move on to noses.”
She should have gone away with the others, the other eyes that got stuffed back into the worn yellow envelope. She didn’t. She smiled, grateful, but mocking, too, like she had fooled me, conned me, then turned, slowly, with all the time in the world. Had I done the right thing? I picked the rest of the fake face, faster now, wanting to go. She walked away and part of me followed. After a year of wandering, I had finally found my first clue. But now that I’d got it, I wasn’t sure I wanted it. Clue to what? Some secret I was better off not knowing.
“Why did you not tell me?” Viktor complained.
“I don’t know.”
But I did. Because I knew telling him would bring us closer together, which is just what it was doing.
“I am coming right over.”
“Don’t. I like it better on the phone.”
“So I have noticed,” he said bitterly.
Instead of the couch, I was lying on the floor. He was in that same mystery space, with its deep sounds in the background, that welling up. It intrigued me.
“Are you mad?”
“That you did not come to work? You do not have to come to work ever again, Eve. But I want to see you.”
He made it sound more than just sight. See me naked. See me whole. A threat. But maybe that’s just how I interpreted it. I always felt that my place, no matter what position he took, was to be against him. That’s why I knew that if we ever did it, it would be this struggle, like wrestling. And also that it might be great, that it might be what I really wanted, which was of course the scariest thought of all.
“Where are you?”
“It is what you always ask when you wish to change the subject.”
It is the subject, I answered silently. Where you are.
Because at the same time I could feel him on top of me, lying on my back, pressing my bones into the threadbare carpet. I don’t mean a fantasy. I could feel his weight, his body stretched out to cover mine, make it disappear. Not a daydream, a case of demonic possession.
“I could be there in forty minutes.” He was reading my mind. Well, not my mind. “Honestly and truly. Maybe fifty.”
His hands were circling my chest
. I could even feel that ugly ring of his pushing up under my ribs, spreading them apart. His mustache burrowing into my neck. I sighed and shifted to more completely accommodate him.
“Eve—”
“No.”
I was lonely and wanted to stay that way. Alone. Part of me. The part I liked.
“This is crazy. You go for a walk and see something you are not supposed to see. Instead of ignoring it, as any rational person would, you file a report with the police. Weeks later, your apartment is burgled. And now, around these two unrelated incidents, you weave a whole paranoid conspiracy theory. Don’t you see what is happening?”
“That’s just it,” I said. “I see what is happening. For the first time.”
“Wiolent attacks are part of life in this city. People are robbed every day. It would be more suspicious if you passed your time here completely unscathed.”
“I saw—”
“You saw a whore. With her customer. And then something went amiss.”
“I’ll say.”
“But it has nothing to do with you.”
“She wasn’t a whore.”
Guys might call her one, but they called you a whore no matter what, if you did it with them or if you didn’t. You were a whore the minute they decided they wanted you.
“And I wasn’t robbed. They didn’t take anything.”
“Except perhaps your critical faculties.”
“What?”
“Your brain.”
“I saw something!” I insisted. I wasn’t going to let him snatch that away from me. I held it tight.
“If you are truly concerned for your safety, then come stay with me.”
My heart beat faster. The exact opposite of the sinking feeling when he had proposed. He was offering me his place. His secret place. That appealed to me in a whole different way than the empty gesture of some stupid marriage ceremony. I wanted to immediately say, “Come pick me up,” before he changed his mind, then just lie back, let nature take its course. I had been swimming against the current for so long now. And for what? It wasn’t getting me anywhere. I was using all my energy just to stay in place, to keep my lower lip above water. I was this close to giving up. The saving grace was his not knowing. He didn’t see what moved me and what didn’t. He didn’t know me, except in this very general way, these ideas he had about women, which were right, some of them, but applied to us all equally, not as individuals, so even when he could have had me, could have pressed his advantage, he didn’t realize it. My silence, which was me holding my breath, tempted like I had never been tempted before, he heard as just another refusal.