Eve in the City

by Thomas Rayfiel

  “Milk, I guess. For the cats.”

  It’s not like we talked. I mean, we did, but that wasn’t what was nice. It was the silence, actually. This homey sensation. What I imagined home was like, never having had one before. The apartment was always different when I got back at the end of the day. It didn’t have that dead feel that things were exactly as I’d left them. The smell of cooking. The radio. I wasn’t alone. Even when she was gone, there was this presence. I slept on the couch, and would wake up in the middle of the night and see all these things around me, rugs and chairs and lamps, little end tables, the cats, their green eyes. It felt real. Not like my old place. I wasn’t in hiding. On weekends, we’d make popcorn and watch TV.

  Brandy’s hair was trapped inside her sweatshirt. She bunched it up and shook it loose so it bounced and arranged itself over her shoulders. Then she gave herself this one rapid, admiring look. Some things never change. She noticed the dress I was still wearing every day, hanging in the bathroom.

  “No wonder you were cold. In that.”

  “I know.”

  I wore thick woolen leggings with it now, which made me look even more like a demented bride-to-be.

  We never talked about what had happened. It was this hurt we were both trying to layer over. Before leaving, she gave a last critical glance at my hair.

  “Not much longer.”

  “Good.”

  Still, it made me jumpy. I was afraid of leaving the dye in too long, afraid of not leaving it long enough. I didn’t know what to do. How to pass the time. I could eat, but that wasn’t very appealing, crouching in front of the refrigerator, wolfing down food, watching the seconds tick by. I could read, but then I might look up two hours later and discover I was bald. I was standing there, in the middle of the room, totally indecisive, when the phone rang.

  “I am looking at a very beautiful young lady,” a voice said.

  I turned to the window. It was already dark. There were curtains, but I hadn’t pulled them. Somehow that meant I was in for the night, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to be. Not yet.

  “It’s Carl Van Arsdale.” He realized I still didn’t know. “Marron’s father.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  “It’s a large portrait of you. Done by a promising artist, I’m told. I never actually met the young man in question.”

  “I have.”

  “Well, yes. That’s obvious.”

  “Wait, how are you looking at Horace’s portrait of me? It’s in a gallery.”

  “The show came down several days ago. It certainly alters the focus of the room. Which is why I called.”

  “You bought it?”

  “I purchased it, yes.”

  For some reason that sounded more delicate. No, you purchased him, I thought. That’s what you had to offer, the one thing Horace wouldn’t have considered a bribe. Because it wasn’t. It was just an artist, selling his work. For a ton of money, plus the buzz of being collected by someone so rich. It was a good career move. And who did he have to thank for it? The girl lying next to him right now. In some bed. In Tuscany. Was this the gift Marron had promised me? This cold freedom?

  “Do you like it?”

  “I’m not sure. It’s disturbing. You’re disturbing.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You disturb me.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said absentmindedly, although really, why was I apologizing for being in a painting that nobody asked him to buy? Well, she asked him to buy it, of course, but that didn’t mean he had to ruin the pristine beauty of his penthouse with this mammoth nudie shot. I’d be disturbed, too. “Is that why you’re calling? Because you don’t like the picture?”

  “I’m calling to see how you are.”

  “I’m fine. I got a job at—”

  “Bloomingdale’s. Yes, I know. Arthur has kept me current on your progress. And it is progress, Eve. I have a copy of an evaluation here from your supervisor. You’re doing well. I’m proud.”

  “You bet I’m doing well. Because I’m working like a maniac, that’s why. They’re already talking about moving me to the second floor. That’s where the designer fashions are.”

  “Is that what you really want to do?”

  “I don’t know. It might be. It’s a start.”

  “Because there are college programs you could enter. I would be willing to—”

  “The point is, I’m making it on my own. So don’t start acting like you have anything to do with it. Why are you even calling?”

  “I was wondering if you’d eaten yet.”

  “Look, if this is to threaten me with getting fired, because I never told what I saw that night, go right ahead. Have them fire me. I don’t care. I’m good at what I do. That’s what I’ve been finding out. I can be good at anything I want. God put me on this earth and I belong here. I am His Daughter. We all are, all women. And I am tired of you trying to make me feel like some kind of inferior creature.”

  “Eve—”

  “What did you say? Before?”

  “I asked if you’d eaten yet. I am threatening you with dinner.”

  “Oh.” I looked down at my robe. I loved that soft belt. The big floppy knot. Had I just been preaching, back there? That’s what it felt like.

  “There are restaurants,” he began. “I know some good ones. Or, if you prefer privacy, we could have food here.”

  “Takeout.”

  “Not exactly. A chef arrives, and—”

  “Excuse me, no offense, but I can’t even do the math. Are you three, four, or five times older than I am?”

  “We’re talking about dinner, Eve.”

  I passed the mirror.

  “Oh my God.”

  “What’s happening? Are you all right?”

  “Nothing. Nothing’s happening. Listen, I have to go.”

  “So you’re not free tonight?”

  I poked at the gel, revealing this seam of amazing color. Like finding gold.

  “I see you,” he complained. I thought he meant from his window, that he could see everything, he was so high up, before I realized he meant the painting. “It’s an amazing likeness, but, as I said, disturbing.”

  “I have to go,” I repeated. “I have something very important to do. I just remembered.”

  “Can’t it wait?”

  “No.”

  “I want to talk about your future.”

  I hung up. I had never done that before. Hung up on someone. It was strange, because the connection wasn’t really broken. I hadn’t said good-bye. So bits of him were still with me, in the apartment, in the bathroom, as I rinsed out all the junk and towel-dried my hair. He was the Devil. I knew that. He was my devil, and I would have to deal with him, but not now. Blond was never an option. Everyone was blond. I considered black, jet-black. I liked its mystery. I thought if I changed the way I looked on the outside, then change would work its way in. But Brandy said it was the other way around, that I had to find the inner me and bring her out. “Face it”— she picked a box off the drugstore shelf—“you’re a Flaming Redhead.”

  Outside, a blizzard was beginning, filling every inch of sky. New York City. It’s just not what I expected, I thought, then remembered, milk, and went down the steps, feeling each snowflake, as it landed on my hair, sizzle and hiss.

  EVE IN THE CITY

  A Reader’s Guide

  THOMAS RAYFIEL

  A CONVERSATION WITH THOMAS RAYFIEL

  Dan Chaon is the author of the novel You Remind Me of Me and two short-story collections, Fitting Ends and Among the Missing, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. A native of Nebraska, Chaon currently lives in Cleveland, Ohio, with his wife and two sons. He is at work on a new novel.

  Dan Chaon: How do you envision the relationship between the novels Colony Girl and Eve in the City? Are they, ideally, to be read as a “series”? Are they two totally separate novels that happen to feature the same main character? If they could be packaged together in a box
ed set, would you want that? Will there possibly be other Eve novels in the future?

  Tom Rayfiel: Colony Girl was meant as a single novel to stand by itself. I was always aware of the possibility, though, that Eve might reassert herself, but in a different locale. The book ends, after all, with her heading toward New York City, and many people asked me what I thought would happen to her there. Nevertheless, I was resistant. For a long time I was stuck, didn’t write anything. It was, I’m almost ashamed to say, the events of 9/11 that got me off my ass, awakened my love for this city with such a ferocity that I was determined to do my best to capture its uniqueness, pay homage to it, in response to those who were bent on its destruction. But almost as soon as I began Eve in the City I realized, with a sinking feeling, that a third and final Eve story was inevitable. Why? Because I hate sequels but love trilogies. That’s what I’m working on now.

  DC: Here’s a Jonathan Franzen quote from a 2001 New York Times Book Review of Colson Whitehead: “Although it’s technically impressive and theoretically laudable when a male novelist succeeds in inhabiting a female persona, something about the actual practice makes me uneasy. Is the heroine doing double duty as the novelist’s fantasy sex object? Is the writer trying to colonize fictional territory that rightfully belongs to women? Or does the young literato, lacking the perks of power and feeling generally smallened by the culture, perhaps believe himself to be, at some deep level, not male at all? I confess to being unappetized by all three possibilities. . . .”

  What do you think of that? (I’m obviously playing devil’s advocate with you here a bit, since I don’t totally agree with any of Franzen’s premises, but I’d like to hear what you have to say.) And I’m interested in your own process, since I too write from the female point of view quite a bit. To what extent is writing from a woman’s perspective a kind of method acting—a complex literary equivalent of drag? To what extent is it a version of yourself you’re exploring (“Madame Bovary, c’est moi,” as Flaubert says?). Are there any special difficulties or sensitivities that you are aware of as you write? Do you consult with your wife or female friends about issues of “accuracy”? Do you believe women think and react in radically different ways than men do?

  TR: Wow! That’s quite a quote from Franzen. I’ll let Marron, one of the characters in the book, answer: “I don’t believe there’s any difference between male and female. I mean, they’re useful distinctions, for bathrooms in restaurants and stuff like that. But they’re artificial. They’re imposed on us by society. Really we’re this complex mixture of both.” That, it seems to me, with all the problems it presents, is still a more fruitful approach than to regard the opposite sex as some fundamentally unknowable “other” only capable of being depicted from without. Look at the sister in Franzen’s book The Corrections. Because he’s unwilling to step into her skin, he basically relegates her to the crudest functions of “male” fiction: sex and cooking. Yes, it’s lesbian sex, and yes, the cooking is in the world of haute cuisine, but that’s just tarting up old clichés. My understanding is basically this: Inside every straight middle-aged man is a sixteen-year-old girl struggling to get out. (My female side just happened to emerge in a book and not on Vesey Street at four A.M.) By concentrating on the aspects of my personality that society deems “feminine,” I was able to discern a pattern, and finally a character, a voice, that was myself and yet not myself. As for special difficulties or sensitivities, yes, I do show my work to my wife and other women and ask, “Is my slip is showing?” I don’t always take their advice, though. There are as many different women as there are people.

  All that said, I know what Franzen means. Eve was a great way to escape the hackneyed concerns of what a man setting out to write is often faced with, that barren, overgrazed field. For me, she was like a scraper, peeling the paint off flaking surfaces, getting down to something more structural and load-bearing. The wood. The wall.

  DC: Eve seems so very real and natural that at times it’s hard to remember that there’s an author behind the book, creating her. I wondered how much of the plot and structure was in your mind when you began to work on the novel? Did you write with a general outline already conceived, or did you find yourself dreaming the story, following Eve in your imagination as she went along? Were there any scenes or character decisions that appeared as you went along that took you by surprise as you were writing?

  TR: I don’t plan ahead. I start with words, sentences that suggest other sentences, and then it accretes, like a coral reef, I sometimes think. I did have the voice of Eve, insistent but disembodied, and that Vision, of seeing a couple I thought were making love, but it was really something else. Then one thing led to another. Was I surprised by any scenes or character decisions? All of them, I hope, to varying degrees. If I, the first reader, am not surprised, how can I expect all the readers who follow to be surprised? (On a more prosaic level, yes, I plan ahead a ton, mostly to assuage the nervous hysteria of not knowing where I’m going, what I’m going to write tomorrow. But in the act of composition it always comes out different. Otherwise . . . I wouldn’t be writing, I’d be coloring in one of those paint-by-numbers pictures.)

  DC: You begin the novel with a device that immediately creates suspense: Eve witnessing a possible rape/murder—and at first many readers will think that the book is going to be a kind of thriller. But you spend much of the novel undercutting that idea—the “thriller” element keeps unraveling, becoming more dream-like and elusive, even though the mystery is “solved” at the end. Could you talk a little about this and how the “detective” element functioned as you were working on the novel?

  TR: Mystery seemed an appropriate form, since the story deals with adolescence. Looking back on that time in your life, doesn’t it “read” like a detective novel? We enter a world of clues and signs, peopled by compelling and sometimes repulsive characters, and we crave answers, resolution, a reassuringly finite explanation for a place that seems awash in uncertainty, unknowability. A lot of novels use this device but then drop it as the story goes on. I feel that violates some kind of compact with the reader. It offends my sense of craft. Mystery should have a solution, in art if not in life, and that solution should tell us something about ourselves, make the adventure of having lived through it worth our time.

  DC: So much of Eve in the City seems to be focused on the idea of “searching”—the quest for a sense of identity, understanding our place in the world, our “true selves” as well as the parts of ourselves that we sell, commodify, prostitute. At one point your performance artist Marron says, “I think there are forces that sweep you along. That bring you together . . . Invisible powers.” What are the forces that you believe are important in shaping a person’s life?

  TR: I believe we’re swept along by forces, but I don’t pretend to know what they are. Chance. Fate. Destiny. How can a member of a subset have any notion of the whole? I don’t think our brains can fit around such a concept. If they could, we wouldn’t be who we are. I think Eve finds by the end that the key is to try to discern, dimly, what those forces are and ride them, not just give up and be swept along.

  DC: In contrast to the suspense elements, another part of the plot of this novel centers around complicated, unlikely potential romantic entanglements: Viktor, Horace, Detective Jourdain, and, to an extent at the end, even the mysterious Mr. Van Arsdale. Did you entertain the possibility that Eve might end up with one of these guys, or was it out of the question for you?

  TR: In Colony Girl, Eve left home, but not a house. She left a cult. In Eve in the City, Eve marries, but not a guy. Yes, all these potential suitors come her way, but at the end, she marries the city itself. That’s why she goes out of her apartment, in her wedding dress, with snow falling like rice at a reception, and remembers the words she said when she opened the present at her bridal shower, the words she is supposed to say on her wedding night: “It’s just not what I expected.” How has she reached such a point? By discovering who she is, by deciding
to make herself over figuratively (getting a job, moving out of that strange attic room, hanging up on the Devil in the form of Van Arsdale) and literally (dyeing her hair, proclaiming herself a Flaming Redhead). All these men want to make her into something else: a muse, a daughter, a wife. Rejecting those roles turns out to be the act that enables her to define herself.

  DC: The idea of “marrying a city” is an interesting one. It makes me wonder about your own personal relationship to the geography of Eve in the City, the arc that leads from Iowa to New York.

  TR: I’m strongly affected by place. I grew up in the suburbs ringing New York City (my first book, Split-Levels, takes place there), and went to college in Grinnell, Iowa. Place, to me, is like the metrical scheme of a poem. It has a huge say in the so-called content of any work. So yes, while the gender may not be autobiographical, the geography is. That’s another reason why Eve in the City has so many mystery elements in it. Anyone who has walked the city at night, seen the almost mathematical, interlocking puzzle pieces of which it is composed, comes away with the sense of conspiracy, of hidden connectedness, that Eve, a newcomer, responds to so strongly.

  DC: Is there still such a thing as “regionalism” in the age of the Internet and satellite TV?

  TR: In this day of dumbed-down mass media, I value those who attempt it, but can’t imagine it being much of a force. As soon as anything regional gets appreciated it’s co-opted and mainstreamed out of all recognition.

  DC: But Eve is somewhat of an anomaly in this day and age, isn’t she? In his New York Times review, Richard Eder says, “Rayfiel has tried to conceive how the city might register on the imagination of a juicily budding young woman brought up on Mars or, in this case, on a fundamentalist commune.” I think it’s funny that he compares fundamentalists to Martians, and I admired the fact that you didn’t condescend to Eve’s religious upbringing. In fact, I thought you wrote beautifully and movingly about Eve’s complicated sense of God in both books. I wondered if you were raised within a religious tradition? Would you consider yourself a religious or spiritually oriented person now?