Lowboy (13 page)

“Cupcakes,” he said, pointing at the display.

The girl sighed and propped her elbows on the counter. “What can I get you?” she said a third time, as though he hadn’t spoken. He felt like the stranger in the first scene of a Western. The encounter at the saloon. When he repeated his order her head rolled lackadaisically to one side.

“Cupcakes is the only thing we sell.”

“Those,” said Lowboy. He tapped the case with his knuckles. “The pink ones and the green.”

Her head clicked woodenly into place. “Angelfood cake and red velvet.”

Lowboy blinked at her and nodded.

“Which do you want?” said the girl. “What kind?” A second girl slid into view behind her. Not a girl at all but a woman with a wrinkled mouselike face.

“Give me the cupcakes,” he said under his breath.

The girl’s eyes dug into him. Her pink mouth hung open. “Red velvet’s the favorite.”

“Give me those. The red velvets.”

“How many would you like, sir?” the woman cut in. The girl moved the least possible distance away from the glass. Gawking at him pigeon-eyed and leering.

“How many?” said the woman. “The red velvets are $2.75.”

Lowboy considered her question. The sun through the window made the two of them look spotlit. “I don’t know the answer to that,” he said finally.

The girl started laughing. The woman turned toward her and she stopped, staring slyly at the other customers. Everybody held their breath at once. The woman licked her lips and frowned at him. “Why don’t you tell me how much you want to spend,” she said. Leaving off the “sir.”

Lowboy put his hands into his pockets. He squinted at her and looked around the room. He was careful not to look over his shoulder. “I have $640,” he said.

Someone behind him laughed next. A grown woman or a little girl. The laugh was muffled and lilting, not necessarily unkind. At first he thought of Emily but he knew her laugh too well. Maybe she has two laughs now, he thought. Maybe she has dozens. He was afraid to look behind him then: afraid that she was watching him, afraid that she was gone. But he was afraid of the woman’s question even more. A man to his left took a few paces backward. Women and
children whispered as they will. He touched each of his fingers to the glass.

“I’ll take five.”

“Five red velvets,” the woman said. She seemed to approve. The girl hovered at her elbow with an open paper bag. Her face looked bloodless and surprised. Because I gave the right answer, Lowboy thought.

“$13.75,” the woman said.

Lowboy bit his lip and counted out the money. The bills were moist and rumpled in his hands. The girl slipped the cupcakes into the bag with inexplicable delicacy and care. As though they were hazardous objects. He caught the girl’s eye and she looked away at once.

“What’s she doing with that bag,” said Lowboy.

“What do you mean?” said the woman.

“What’s she putting inside it.”

The woman opened her mouth but the girl answered first. “Just your cupcakes,” she said. “Your five velvets. That’s all.”

Lowboy looked at the girl more closely. He took his time about it. She was not as young as he had first supposed.

“How old are you?” said Lowboy. “Have you ever been hot?”

“Your change,” the woman spat out, snatching the bag from the girl. That brought him some relief but not enough. The room had the same theaterlike calm that he remembered. The hush beforehand. The smells were being sucked back into the ovens. The woman cupped the bag tenderly, protectively, her mouselike face gone featureless and stiff. What’s in the bag, Lowboy said to himself. What’s in it. Her damp varicose palm cradling the bottom. A faint but unmistakable sound of ticking.

“Put the bag down,” Lowboy said to her. “Step away.”

They were wondering about him now: they couldn’t help it. He was wondering himself.

“Put that fucking bag down. Take out the machinery.”

He drew himself up straight and made his inquisitor’s face. He
stood righteous and clear-eyed and unafraid and he scared them to death.

“Out,” the woman stammered. “Get out of my store.” Holding the bag in one hand and his money in the other. Sword and scale, mirror and scepter. Suddenly he recalled that the rest of the world was behind him. He saw the shop as Emily was seeing it: the pastels, the clustered heads, the jars arrayed in cold bilateral symmetry. The order of the world is not my order. He left the bag where it was and retreated. He moved surefootedly and smoothly, letting himself be sucked backward, the last five minutes playing in reverse. Eyes on the floor like a minesweeper. Ears alive to the tiniest tick. Passing out through the door he felt a dryness, a sterility, a high desert wind. The pavement coated with dust as in the last scene of a Western. Emily long since swallowed by the sunset.

He found her at a payphone across the street. She was searching for something in the bottom of her bookbag. When she saw that he was coming she zipped it up and waved at him to hurry.

“You found me,” she said brightly. “Any luck?”

“Uhhh,” he said.

“What happened, Heller? Did something go wrong?”

“Sold out.”

She picked the bookbag up and started walking. “I didn’t want one anyway. They sweat.”

He turned her answer over for a time, reviewing it from every side, trying to find some way inside it. “What does that mean?”

“The frosting.” She was walking faster than he was, a full step ahead now, not looking back to see if he was following. “You have to eat them quick. On hot days you’ve got maybe a minute.” She was talkative now, reciting meaningless phrases, chirruping little false notes. “We could have split one, I guess. That would probably have worked.”

“You said it wasn’t hot today,” he mumbled. “You said that it was forty-five degrees.”

“Huh?” she said. Not paying attention.

He took a deep breath. “You told me—”

“Here we are,” she whispered, tugging at his sleeve. “Stop walking, Heller! This is the place.”

He teetered to a halt and looked around him. A low and graceless brownstone with a skin of withered paint, its left side buttressed by a padlocked church. Hudson in front of them, Charles Street behind. Between the brownstone and the corner a bright purple storefront selling latex chaps.

“In there?” he said.

She rolled her eyes. “Sorry, gayboy. Over here.”

He turned away unwillingly to a narrow staircase leading underground. A handpainted sign read
SAINT JEB S BUY*N*BARTER
. Dust-covered windowpanes lit by anemic fluorescents.

“What did we come here for?”

“For clothes, André Benjamin. You look like an usher at the Special Olympics.”

“Oh,” he said. He nodded reasonably.

“Come on, then.”

“Who’s André Benjamin?”

He let her pose him and twist him like a dressmaker’s dummy. He let her muss and rearrange his hair. Her fingernails sharp and cool against his scalp. Her breath coming in flutters through her teeth. A corner of the store was curtained off for privacy but she followed him in and cursed and fussed and fretted. His corduroys were elastic at the waist and she laughed softly at that, sliding her thumbnail along his hip. “Sansabelt no good,” she said, pulling them down with a jerk. “Sansabelt for men with bladder troubles.”

“The school made me wear them, actually. Everybody’s pants were like that there.”

“What the hell for?”

“Safety reasons,” he said, smiling down at her. “No belts. No laces. Nothing anyone could use.”

She stopped what she was doing and frowned at him. “Okay,” she said at last. “I get it.” It didn’t seem to bother her at all.

She came and went in businesslike rushes, draping things across his chest and disappearing. Giggling and unamused at once. The smooth-faced dandy at the register ignored them. She came and went faster than his dazed eyes could follow and smiled and hissed at him to stop his fidgeting. He thought about his mother painting eyes and lips on mannequins. Had she taken the day off, he wondered. Of course she had. Was she still out looking for him or had she quit. He pictured her having lunch with Skull & Bones.

“All set,” Emily said. He took a step toward her but she held up her hands. “Stop right there.” She squinted at him. “Okay, Heller. That’s a billion times better.” She tipped an imaginary hat. “Allow me to welcome you to New York City.”

What do I look like, he asked her. What person place or thing do I resemble.

She steered him toward the mirror but he pulled free of her grip. “Tell me,” he said, stepping back and standing at attention. “I want you to tell me.” A lock of her hair still connected them. She made a face at him in a proprietary way. A grocer’s face.

“All right,” she said severely. “Here we go.” She was willing to do it because it was part of the game.

“You’ve got on sixties-style jeans with a little pair of dice on the back pocket. It looks like somebody stitched them on themselves. Straightcut jeans, not the tapered fairypants the college boys are wearing. These sit low on your ass. They’d look even better if you had a skateboard.”

“I used to have one.” He wrinkled his nose. “I never really knew what it was for.”

“Shut up. A blue gingham shirt with a buttondown collar, tucked in in front but not in the back. A black crewneck sweater with moth holes in the sleeves. I didn’t want that but you’ve got to have a
sweater. Because it’s cold outside, Heller. Koko says it’s forty-eight degrees.”

“Koko?” Lowboy said, looking around him. The dandy raised a liverspotted hand.

“I kept the shoes because they’re so totally hideous that it looks as though you’re wearing them on purpose.” She nodded to herself. “Also they look sort of comfortable.”

“They
are
comfortable. I like these shoes.”

“Come back in here,” she said. “I want you to try one more little thing.”

She guided him into the corner and pulled the sheet closed after them. She had a belt in her hand, green with black enameled rivets, but she didn’t give it to him. She seemed to have forgotten it existed. Her small round face was flushed and close to his. Her lips were chapped and parted. Tomboy’s lips. The teeth behind them sharp and closely set.

“Should I put on that belt?”

She pressed two fingers to his bottom lip. Her dark hair clambering up the wall behind her. The ancient tubelights muttering. The damp discolored wallpaper alive now and a witness to their secret. His mouth filled with breath. He saw what was behind her so clearly, saw all of it at once, as though she were a detail in a painting. Blackhaired Girl with Curtain. Like everyone else she was part of the visible world. Girl with Mouth Open in Yellow.

Behind his own head everything was white.

“You almost killed me,” she said sweetly. “Did you know that?”

He said nothing. The wallpaper rustled and hung from the ceiling in coils.

“I could have been cut in half, Heller. You did that to me.”

What could he say to that but I’m so sorry. She took his hand in both of hers and brought it to her stomach. She made a place for it under her shirt. His hand felt a current: a mustering there. Her ribs shifted upward with three precise clicks, like the bones in the back of a snake. His hand found her hip, no thicker than a doorhandle,
and she gave the least imaginable shiver. His weight carried him toward her. Her thumbnail caught the hollow of his neck. His lips came apart and a small defenseless thing was lost forever.

“Open your mouth wider,” she told him. “Let your tongue out.”

He fell back against the wall and did exactly what she told him. He was falling in slow motion. His body didn’t know that it was falling but there was no doubt whatsoever that it was. She took a half step forward, a self-conscious shuffle, and let her knuckles catch under his jaw. A stricken feeling and a voluptuousness. To put your tongue where another tongue was kept. There was no way of telling was it the best thing or the worst thing that could happen.

“You see now,” she said to him once it was done. Her voice was strange and dull and out of focus. “You see now. Don’t you, Heller?”

He smiled and nodded and kept his lips shut tight. Now that it was over it had been a good thing without question. A ticklishness inhabiting the teeth. A prickling against his gums like soda water or like Perrier. That was the reason it was called French kissing.

When Lowboy’s eyes came open he was alone behind the sheet. He looked down at himself: the loose jeans, the black sweater, the green belt curled around him like Ouroboros. To his surprise the world appeared unchanged. He heard her laugh, then curse, then laugh a second time. He breathed but it was hard to fill his lungs. She was at the counter talking business with the dandy. Their voices carried softly through the rows of pleated pants and ruffled blouses and by the time they reached him they were barely whispers. He passed the belt through his beltloops. It fit perfectly. He’d just gotten it buckled when her arm came around the sheet, casting for him blindly, fingers flapping like a hand without a puppet.

“$37.20,” she said. “The $.20 is optional.” Laughing from some as-yet-unfinished joke.

He laid his cleanest bill across her fingers and they shut and withdrew with hydraulic precision. He remembered that she used to do the Robot when she was happy, to commemorate certain pivotal events. Watching her slight body rotate and tilt had thrilled him in a way he’d had no words for. A sense of some momentous thing impending. The answer to a question. He wondered whether he could name it now.

When he got to the counter with his clothes under his arm she was doing the Robot gravely for the dandy. He stood beside the register holding the clothes out in front of him but he couldn’t seem to catch the dandy’s eye. Emily was lost to the world, shooting down flying saucers, and the dandy was watching her do it. Lowboy wondered what his real name was. To the left of the register stood a crepe-lined case cracked and yellow with neglect and inside it paste jewels and Bakelite clasps were laid out like exhibits from forgotten murder trials. He set the clothes down as discreetly as he could. His giddiness had passed and he felt small and insignificant and content.