Daughters of the Revolution (13 page)

She ran downstairs and knocked at the door of 3A. She knew P. Cornblum would be at home. He lived and worked at
home, in a bubble of silence, ripe for disruption. He appeared at the door with a finger on one temple, as if holding something in. Behind him, the Post-it notes were gone. Rows of books in wooden shelves held up the sources that validated his opinions. P. Cornblum was pasty from his indoor life. A set of earphones hung from his neck, hooked up to nothing. He had beautiful, soft, full lips, chilly, myopic eyes and black-framed glasses. He disliked EV in an almost impersonal way that she respected. Often, at night, she dreamed of him.

“Banging away early today,” he said.

“I was on my way to work,” EV told him. “My front door came off—fell over. It’s stuck up against McCarthy’s front door.”

“What do you mean, ‘stuck up against’?”

EV tried to describe the imperfect phrase with her hands. “He can’t get out. The door fell off and now it’s stuck.
I’m
stuck.”

He wore a pair of indoor-outdoor slippers, rubber-soled and shearling-lined. He climbed the flight of stairs to EV’s floor and, waving EV away as if she were an insect, prized the door free. “I won’t ask how you managed to achieve this,” he said.

EV smiled and hung her head in shame.

Her apartment stood agape. Instead of going to work, she had to call the super, who lived in a building a few blocks away. It wasn’t the first time she had broken something unbreakable. At her job, EV routinely did damage to liqueur-filled bonbons and fancy boxed lunches. She’d also broken the pneumatic tube the store used for all its money transactions, blocking the urgent traffic of money and receipts. In seventy-five years of business, this had never happened before. Her boss, the candy buyer, blamed EV, and actually stopped speaking to her. This led to some confusion about the size of the bags EV was supposed
to use for packing a new breed of chocolate dog, and she had to spend hours repacking them all.

“Are you for real?” the candy buyer asked EV. For some reason, the remark stung.

“And don’t write stuff on your hand with a pen,” the candy buyer added. “It looks trashy.”

All the salespeople at the store had a Look—hair short and moppy, or long and pulled back severely; black-black or bleached white. The candy buyer was pale and stick-thin, with short, vigorously ratted, very black hair. She was a vegetarian and ate nothing but candy all day, standing up and pacing around the Fabulous Food booth like a nervous animal.

As a new hire, EV was entitled to a haircut in the store’s salon. “Go ahead,” the candy buyer urged her, “Do some damage.”

The haircut came free, a benefit instead of Blue Cross. So EV booked an appointment at the salon and put herself in the hands of a Dr. Johnson, who refused to cut EV’s hair until his associate had put color in it. A child-size woman who spoke a rapid-fire Slavic language appeared with a muddy blue substance in a ceramic bowl. “I don’t want blue hair!” EV protested, but the woman merely shrugged, as if EV had spoken some arbitrary words about the weather. The dyeing and cutting took three or four hours. EV sat in a chair in front of a mirror while Dr. Johnson shaved off part of her hair with a razor. He chatted philosophically while he worked: “Sometimes I see a boy who looks cute and then I realize that the boy is a girl dressed like a boy, walking like a boy, with the attitude of a boy and yet is a girl, slight and not too hairy, and I think how happy this would make my mother if she knew.”

Her hair turned out not blue, as EV had feared, but bright pink. “Is better,” the colorist assured EV. “Is radical.”

The haircut—wild and rather flattering, EV thought—was free, but the color cost big money, a list of charges on a tag that
Dr. Johnson waved in front of her face. EV apologized; she had four dollars in her wallet. Dr. Johnson left her, to call the police, EV assumed. Instead, he arranged to have the bill and a tip put on EV’s account.

She took the elevator downstairs. The candy buyer said, “You took too long and you look like hell. I should fire you right now.”

Instead, she sent EV up to the windowless storeroom on twelve, where the air was gritty with sugar. EV sat on the floor and filled a hundred bags with dogs. She thought of Karim Brazir, living in his box in Egypt or bathing lepers in India—she could be like that. Or she could simply be a hunger artist, a self-denier, and discipline herself that way.

She tied bows around the tops of the bags and carried them all downstairs in a metal handbasket. The candy buyer lifted one of the bags from the basket and let it drop. “These bows are shit,” she said.

EV looked at the bags already nestled into their expensive display and saw that it was true. The candy buyer’s loops were tied shiny-side up, her bows expert. EV’s looked as if a child had tied them. The candy buyer reached behind her and unfurled a piece of ribbon from a winch on the wall. Her fingers worked at manic speed, doing four or five things at once, twisting the bag, looping the ribbon around the neck and tying a bow roughly—but perfectly—so that the whole package was unified and all the chocolate dog muzzles faced front. “Like
that
,” the buyer said. “One step. Can you do it?” Her eyes had a crashed, glassy look.

“So you make the bow
while
you twist the bag,” EV said, trying to sound teachable. Maybe she could be a teacher.

“Can you do it?”

EV took up the ribbon. “I think I can,” she said.

While EV worried about the time and her job, the super nailed the old frame back into the wall and rehung EV’s door. McCarthy, liberated finally, emerged from his prison wearing gray undershorts and an undershirt, and lurched down the hall into the WC. EV locked up, then rode the subway uptown, although she had a vivid premonition she’d be too late, that the incident with the broken door would be the last straw, something unforgivable, and it was.

“My front door came off,” EV told the candy buyer when she rushed up to the booth, wheezing out the string of words she needed to explain herself. “I had to stay until the super came to rehang it. It’s this heavy metal door, and it wasn’t the door so much as the wall, the wooden piece attached to the wall with the nails and the hinges in it? That part was all rotten, and he had to make a new one. But in the meantime, my door was wide open, and I couldn’t leave.”

The candy buyer didn’t even look up. “I fired you two hours ago,” she said. “You’re history. I went to have them get your check ready, but it turns out you owe the store. So my advice is, clear out fast and don’t come back. I’ll tell them you moved back to New England or whatever.” This small kindness was too much. EV was seized by fury. She backed into the Beautiful Living booth, shaking loose a Provençal plate, which shattered on the floor.

A pair of hairless male hands, the hands of an assassin, reached out from the Beautiful Living booth. EV turned and ran.

She ran out the front doors of the store, down Fifty-seventh Street, then down Sixth Avenue. The city seemed fresh and brilliant; her feet, in ballet slippers, rose lightly from the hard pavement. She ran over forty blocks, until a sole tore open on a steam grate, and the suede pad flapped like a tongue. This slowed her down as she approached the branch library, which stood imposingly at the fork of two streets—the famous Gothic
tower of the former women’s prison. A voice called to her: “Hey, pink-haired girl.”

She stopped, looked around and saw a guy about her own age—a large man, excruciatingly handsome—on the library steps. “You okay?” he asked her.

“Yes,” said EV.

“Oh, because you look like you’ve had a terrible shock.”

She smiled at him and started walking.

“I like your pink hair,” he said, and then, more loudly, added, “Wait a minute. Have a little faith in human nature.”

EV turned. “I have a little faith in human nature,” she said.

The stranger descended to the sidewalk. “Give me your phone number, then. We could do something.”

She dug into her pockets, found a pen and a yellow square of paper and wrote her name and telephone number.

He turned the paper over in his hands, read both sides. “ ‘Serious, Sontag.’ I like it.”

“Thanks,” she said, and hurried back to her apartment to wait.

A raw chicken hung from the cross of wood that joined the four panels of McCarthy’s front door. EV touched the breast—or was that the back? Whatever it was felt warm and poisonous. She tapped his door with the sawed-off teeth of her key. She thought he should know.

But McCarthy wouldn’t answer. It wasn’t unusual for him to hole up for a day or two, drinking or drunk, ‘pishing,’ Juliet had told her, in his kitchen sink.

For two days, EV stayed in. She tapped out small communications with the heels of her shoes, but for once P. Cornblum didn’t call to complain. On the third day, she heard a rustling of plastic in the hall and went to the peephole to look. It was he—Cornblum—his face pasty and grim, his hands covered
up in yellow rubber gloves. EV watched through the peephole while he pulled the soft body from the nail and dropped it into a black trash bag. She felt McCarthy’s and Juliet’s eyes watching through their peepholes, three eyes examining the downstairs neighbor through the deforming lenses in their unreliable doors. At least she hoped Juliet would see that it was P. Cornblum undoing her work, and not suspect EV herself.

When he’d gone, EV pulled her pink bathrobe more tightly around herself and opened the front door. McCarthy stood in the hall wearing long underwear and a yellow undershirt, his eyes red and webby with exploded capillaries. He held a saucepan in his hand as if it were a weapon. The nail in the door remained; he ran a finger over it, testing reality. “Crazy witch! She put a spell on me!” he shouted. Then he peered accusingly at EV. “Why don’t you go to work?” he asked her.

“I lost my job,” EV told him.

McCarthy made a noise in his throat, which might have been sympathetic, and then lurched down the hall to the WC. EV closed her door carefully. Through the metal she heard Juliet’s voice ring in the hall. “Why isn’t she at work? What’d she tell you?”

P. Cornblum turned Juliet in to the landlord. The episode with the chicken crossed the line.

“What line is that?” EV asked him as they crowded together in the foyer, checking their wrought-iron mailboxes. He tapped a fingernail four times against his mailbox and said, “Civility, decency, safety, sanitation.”

The landlord claimed that a relative had made arrangements for the witch in 4C to go to a city home. McCarthy stood in his yellow undershirt in the doorway, clucking like a respectable citizen. “It’s not right to throw her out,” he told EV. “She’s lived here all her life.”

“We should do something,” EV agreed. She clutched the drooping lobes of her pink bathrobe in one hand; the ends of her fingers felt numb.

The door to the WC swung open suddenly. “Are you kidding?” Juliet yelled down the hall. “I can’t wait to get out of this stinking hellhole.”

“Where will you go?” EV called back.

Juliet didn’t answer, just slammed her door and clanked her police lock into place.

Then one morning, Juliet was gone. Workmen came with crowbars and hammers and tore out kitchen hardware, linoleum and plaster walls. Later, they carried in a floor-sanding machine, a pedestal sink and a toilet. McCarthy—who would never again compete for his bathroom in the hall—stood in his doorway in gray underwear, his mouth open in horror and yellow tears in his eyes.

Within a week, she’d broken her lease, packed her clothes and books. She asked McCarthy if he wanted her futon (he didn’t). One night during these preparations, she had another phone call—the stranger from the library, Hans. He wanted to know if she could meet him that evening—right then, actually—at the pub down the street. He pronounced his name “Hands”—Hands Holderman. It sounded like a joke, although EV chose not to succumb to a cynical attitude. She had a little faith in human nature. The whole point of living in a difficult and dangerous city was to take risks and survive.

For the first time she wore her red shoes outside—red shoes, and a pair of jeans. Hans sat at the bar, saw her in the door and waved. She waved back. The red shoes carried her forward; her body purred like a machine. He took her hands in his and then, in a forward and romantic gesture, gave her a
long, penetrating kiss. His tongue assaulted the portcullis of her teeth, and his hand on her back pulled her hair. His eyes peered insolently into hers. EV allowed it. This was experience, life. He bought her a drink, and she bought him a drink, because she did not want to be a person who simply traded something personal for something material. He didn’t ask her the usual things about herself, or tell a personal story. Instead, he talked about different forms of human emotion and sexuality—affinity, attachment and limerence—the overwhelming and uncontrollable feelings of joy or despair that virtually defined the Western experience of romantic love and amounted to a compulsive avoidance of reality—versus polyamory and polyfidelity. Had she studied human sexuality at all? His own sexual makeup was that he needed a harem around him, a collection of women. Someday he would have a party and they would all meet one another, and they would not resent him at all. They would be grateful; they would see.