Afterburn (36 page)

Advice
, she repeated to herself as she showered and shaved her underarms and her legs, then tidied up her pubic hair a bit before leaning close to the mirror to inspect her face for wrinkles or anything else. Pimples or moles or blotches or warts. I used to have a perfect nose, she thought. Eyes, laugh lines, neck. Certainly one of the great advantages of prison was that you didn't go to the beach too often. No long afternoons on the tennis court in Bridgehampton. Closest you got to a sunburn was pushing a lawn mower in the summer. She made a fist and inspected her biceps. Not bad. Not like when she was swimming two miles a day in high school, but not bad. Good enough to push a guy away or pull him toward her.

So where to go? Before prison she'd have gravitated toward St. Mark's Place, only a few blocks away, where all the freaks, punks, squatters, bogus Rastafarians, piercing addicts, failed models, musicians, lost Englishmen, and New Jersey teenagers found one another in the Day-Glo underground pits. She'd already walked along the block a few times, knew it wasn't for her anymore. Years had gone by, but it was the same people, the same kind of people. The girl who lets men perform oral sex on her at the bar, the motorcycle guy who needs new people to frighten, the tender junkie with a puppy inside his shirt, comparing bad tattoos.

But that was then and this was now, and so, after slipping on the same cunning black dress as before and twirling her lipstick and how's my hair, she clicked downstairs and outside and crosstown through the dusk and shadows and crowds. Wobbling on her pumps, out of practice. Yet getting a bit of action into the hips. The night remained warm, the air left over from summer. Everyone seemed in a hurry. New movies, new shows, new restaurants. Bars and cafés and bistros. Inside each, a roar of laughter and I'll have the free-range chicken. A lot of life gets lived in these places, she thought, slipping happily into a café off the corner of Thirteenth Street and Sixth Avenue. She established herself at the bar and sipped a glass of Merlot. The other single women pretended to be interested in talking with one another but keptwatch, perfumed with loneliness. It's harder to be a woman, Christina thought, you have to protect yourself, you have to be careful. You have to protect not just your body but your idea of yourself. Rick thought he knew who she was. But he really didn't, which was why she ended up in prison and he did not.

She finished a second glass of wine and was thinking about leaving, maybe to walk up Sixth Avenue, when a good-looking man in a suit sat next to her.

"David." He offered his hand. "I thought I'd sit down, what the hell."

"What the hell," she agreed.

"You don't mind?"

He smelled good. "No."

"I'm, I'm kind of—"

She liked his tie. "Shy?"

"Yes. Well, no." He frowned with great earnestness, as if they had reached a turning point in a long conversation. "I've been through all this too many times, so I'll just get it out. I'm a doctor, rather successful, I might confess, I'm thirty-eight, I'm available. I'm looking for someone to settle down with. I'm ready to be married. I'm very financially secure."

"That's nice," said Christina, lighting a cigarette.

"I realize this is very hurried, very fast." His eyes swept anxiously across the restaurant before coming back to her. "But it's better to be honest. I'm a guy who is ready, really ready to settle down. I saw you and thought, There's a woman who is terrific."

He's hiding something, Christina decided. "You don't know the first thing about me."

"I do and I don't." He smiled, as if with wisdom. "You'd be surprised what you can tell about a person."

"What can
you
tell?"

"Oh, I can tell we'd get along."

"How?" She ordered another glass of wine and noticed the women down the bar glaring at her.

"Well, I have a lot to offer," he said. "I'm ready to get married and have children. I have very good communication skills."

"I'm not ready to get married," she told him. "Not even close."

He consulted the pattern of his tie. "You're not?"

"No."

"What do you want, then?"

"Hey, I'm just sitting here drinking my wine, okay? I didn't ask you to ask me these things."

He blinked miserably. "I think we'd be very sexually compatible, just so you know."

She laughed and realized that she was a bit drunk. "You can tell that, too?"

"Yes—I think so," he said eagerly, lips strangely wet. "I think you would be understanding of . . . of my . . . I have a slight disorder—not
physical
, don't worry—a question of aesthetics, really. Habits—no,
practices
might be the term. A woman could marry me and be provided for, and just see my disorder as aesthetic. Harmless. Not much to overlook."

He stopped, waited for her reaction, or perhaps a request for clarification.

"David?" said Christina.

"Yes?" he replied with sudden hope.

"You've told me your occupation and financial status, you've virtually proposed marriage, you've asserted that we would be compatible, and you've alluded to some weird sexual hang-up, right?"

"Yes, I guess—"

"But, David, you forgot something."

"What?"

"You forgot to ask me my name."

"Oh."

"You better go," Christina said.

He studied her. "Yes. Yes. I'm so sorry." He held out his hand. "Please accept my apology."

She smiled falsely. "Bye."

He slid off the stool and drifted down the bar next to another woman. Said something about sitting down, what the hell, thirty-eight years old, ready to get married.

I'm not insulted, she thought, because I'm almost drunk.

"You mind?" A man in a collarless black shirt dropped down on the stool next to her.

"Why not?" she said, waving her cigarette. He was tall and altogether too skinny, with his head so recently shaved that she didn't know whether he was bald or making a statement. He wore a big chrome watch on his wrist, three different dials on it, and as signs went, this was bad. Men with big watches did not, as a rule, pan out. Nor, however, did men with smaller watches, so there you go, Christina. She tried to remember what kind of watch Rick wore and could not—probably something gold and the size of a hockey puck. She remembered her father's watch easily, however, a cheap Timex with grease worked into its scratches and rasp marks. An honest watch for an honest man. How she wished he were still alive. She knew enough now that she could have gone to him with uncomplicated affection, just be his daughter as he was just her father. She wanted to touch his face. I'd give
anything
for that, she thought, remembering that he'd let her drive the Mustang by herself when she was sixteen. He knew she would take it out on the highway and gun it up to one hundred and ten, roaring and vibrating, getting the speed into her to get the craziness out. Didn't really work, but she'd always felt better. Let the car ease down to eighty, seventy, sixty. He'd trusted her with the car, with herself. The only person who ever did, in a way. Well, the Columbia religion professor, maybe. Listened mostly. Yet after the first dozen times in bed, the professor had asked her why she was so experienced for a nineteen-year-old. But she wasn't, not really. He didn't mean experienced, he meant responsive. Oh, she'd said, I'm just like that. He'd walked into his study and gazed silently out the window toward Riverside Drive. I hate to do this, he said, I really do, but we have to stop. Why? she'd wanted to know. I made a mistake, he said. What? I thought I could handle you, but I can't. I don't understand, she'd cried. You'll drive me crazy, he said, you'll slowly drive me crazy. How? He'd shaken his head. You are actually insatiable. I am? Yes. I
am
? He'd nodded again. How do you know? Believe me, he said, I know. But I'm
happy
with you. For now, he said, for now. But I love you. No, I don't think so, he'd said. There's something hard in you, Christina. You know in your heart you can cut me up. She'd just stared. He was right. Something happened to you, he'd said. You haven't told me and I don't want to know, but it broke you and also made you too strong. I've been with enough women to understand this. I thought because I was twenty years older I could handle it, but I can't. I'm a fool, but I want to get out now, while I still can.

The bald man next to her took out a pack of cigarettes and offered her one. The drama begins, she thought. She took the cigarette.

"They're French," he warned.

She nodded, her head light. "Then you must not be."

"No?"

"French people smoke American cigarettes," she said. She looked away. Across from her, two women sat at a table paging through an album full of photos of wedding cakes.

"I guess so." He sipped his drink. "My name's Rahul, by the way."

"Melissa," said Christina.

"Waiting for somebody?"

"Yes."

"Who?"

"The unknown man."

I'm so witty, she thought, makes me sick.

He tried to laugh but was uncertain. "Is the man unknown to me or unknown to you?"

"Both, in fact."

"What is this man like?"

"His shoes are not worn down," she said.

He kicked out one foot and inspected an Italian loafer. "So far I'm okay."

Charmboat, Christina thought.

"What else?" he asked. "About the unknown man."

"Don't ask."

He grinned. "I'm asking."

"He can stand and deliver."

"Stand and deliver," he repeated.

"Yes. If he can't do that, then forget it."

"What exactly does 'stand and deliver' mean?"

"It has all meanings, and especially one."

Rahul pursed his lips. He was strange, but maybe attractively strange. Maybe she wasn't sure. Maybe she was drunk. "What do you do?" Christina asked, twirling her smoke. "Are you gainfully employed?"

"I'm a photographer."

I like his hands, she thought. "What do you take pictures of?"

"Why don't you come back to my place and see?" he answered with purposeful mystery. "I live just a few blocks away."

"That was fast."

He rubbed a hand over his skull. "That's my speed."

"Slow is better."

He shrugged, willing to be embarrassed. "How about it?"

I'm not afraid of him, she thought.

"You're curious. I can tell."

"One quick look," she agreed. "And that will be that. I'm meeting a friend in an hour."

"Right," he said.

They walked out and down the street. Maybe this is how people meet each other, she thought dreamily, or maybe I'm just lonely as hell. Rahul lit a cigarette, and she asked him how long he'd lived there.

"Three years. I found this place and knew I'd be there forever. What about you?"

"The East Village," she said, her arms clutched in front of her.

"Been there long?"

"No."

"Where were you before?"

"In prison." She hoped that this would bother him.

"Oh, that is
very
cool." Rahul nodded.

"Why?" she asked. "Why is that cool?"

"I'm into knowing different kinds of people." He inspected his cigarette, as if it might be a microphone. "Last week I met this woman whose job is to figure out how to put advertising in the sky. She's supposed to get some kind of satellite that floats around, and in the night, you see this logo up there with the stars. I have this other friend, she vacuums people's faces."

Christina winced. "What?"

"These rich old ladies on the East Side, they come in and have their faces all warmed up with hot towels, and they apply this stuff on the skin, some sort of softening chemical, then my friend uses this vacuum thing that looks like a pen, except it's got a little nozzle, and she sucks out all the gunk in the pores of these women's faces. Sometimes their backs and other parts. It's the new thing. Once a month, all your nose pores cleaned."

"That is totally disgusting," she cried, yet was intrigued.

"But these women love it. They love it
because
it's disgusting. They pay something like five hundred bucks a shot." He pulled out his keys and they stopped at the stoop of a townhouse. "Here we are."

She looked behind her as she entered. No one knows I'm here, she thought.

The door closed heavily and he locked it. Inside the front hall she examined the framed photographs. "They're all
pills
."

"Yes."

"You take pictures of pills?"

Rahul nodded. "I'm very good at it."

She looked into the living room. Retro-fifties decor, expensive and collectible, the tables and chairs and lamps all sophisticated experiments in chrome, dyed leather, and wood laminates. So stylish, so uncomfortable. Across the walls, dozens of framed black-and-white photos. All pills.

"You'd be surprised how many photos of pills are required these days." He touched his finger against one. "You have new pills coming out all the time, and the pharmaceutical companies need good pictures of them. You need lighting and a backdrop. Sometimes you have to make the pill look shinier, sometimes duller."

Christina blinked attentively. I'm getting out of here, she told herself.

"I've done almost all the pills there
are
," Rahul told her. "The anti-depressants, the herbs and natural remedies, birth-control pills, thyroid pills, the chemotherapy, the steroids . . ." He watched her expression. "The hormone medications, the heart pills, the new antibiotics, the anti-inflammatories, the ones for high blood pressure . . .
low
blood pressure, the over-the-counter remedies, the blood thinners, the cholesterol pills, seizure-control pills, the hair-growing pills, the anxiety medications, pills so that you can take other pills, all the palliatives, like morphine. There's one that you take to forget pain from surgery, you know that? They have a new pill to make your fingernails grow more slowly." He passed through the living room into a large kitchen with an unused designer stove. "You have companies all over the world making new pills. They either send me there or the pills here. I'm flying to Germany tomorrow, in fact. Love their pills, the Germans." He pulled out two glasses from a cabinet. "Drink?"