Slaves of New York (17 page)

"Well, would you consider my project? Just consider it before making up your mind? I'll send you the complete prospectus, and slides of the altarpiece that's already finished."

"I tell you what: I'll do that."

So I was pleased. For I knew that even though Ginger would let Chuck talk her down some on the price, I would still see enough on the deal to pay my rent for the next couple of months—and still have something left over to eat with besides, if I ever felt like eating again. And in the meantime I would figure out a way to make Chuck come around to my point of

view, even if it meant holding Ginger hostage or doing away with the woman making the videotape while handcuffed to the Korean and the dog.

Just as I was about to snap the leash onto the dog's collar to take her out, Chuck called, "Maybe you'll walk off a bit of that food. Come back and have another cup of coffee and we'll start on lunch. Or you'll have a piece of goddamn apple pie. Baked it myself from the finest apple trees in New England. Let me tell you, some people call me an artist, an artist who works in food."

"Where do you want me to take the dog?" I said.

"Let me show you something, Marley," Chuck said, coming over to the door. He lowered his voice from a bellow to a whisper. "Sit, Princess," he said. The dog looked at him but didn't move. "She's a fighting dog, Marley, so be careful out there with her. See, a dog has got better hearing than a human being."

"So will she attack or something?"

"Could happen. When you get out there with her, don't raise your voice or you'll be in trouble. There's no need to shout at her. Just take her around the block."

I was prepared for the worst; but on the street I realized that the dog was so fat all she wanted to do was snuffle up a few droplets on the pavement and go back home to sleep.

Maybe the old guy really had gotten the best of me. All I knew was that if I went back into that kitchen to eat some more, I was going to die.

I crept into the living room to find Ginger, sitting knitting on the pigskin sofa. The place was done up like a hunting lodge, circa 1910: all that dark wood, everything manly and antique, except for the big pictures studding the wall, work by Sol LeWitt, Alfred Jensen, Neil Jenney, a curious jumble of stuff, some junk, some not so bad. I wouldn't have minded looking around; it was the sitting down to eat I couldn't take.

"Ginger, I have to get out of here," I said.

Ginger nodded. "I'll tell him you had to meet some friends for lunch," she said. "See that moose head?" She pointed to a

big animal above the fireplace, with one antler askew. "I keep that up there as a reminder to Chuck of what he was like before he gave up drinking—he got mad at me one night and threw a pewter mug at me, but he missed and hit the moose. Since he stopped drinking he took up collecting art. Marley, you didn't try and tell him about your chapel, did you?"

"I tried to," I said. "I don't know if he was listening."

"Because he's been seriously thinking of converting to Catholicism. His daughter's Catholic, he's very close to her."

"Well then, he'd like my chapel."

"I don't think so—many people may be offended. I'm just telling you this so that your hopes aren't dashed."

"I don't buy that," I said. "I didn't realize that Chuck was the guy you were going out with, by the way." It occurred to me I had never bothered asking Ginger anything much about her life before; I was more concerned with the job she was doing in looking after me. Well, this just went to prove I was getting to be a better human being.

"I really do love Chuck," Ginger said. "For years I've stayed with him several nights a week. He always brings me breakfast in bed, but he can't make any kind of commitment to me . . . I think partly because of his daughter. She doesn't approve. Besides that, he's been having an affair with the woman next door for years now, so on the nights he's not with me, he's with her. And she's trying to convince him that I'm not a good adviser to him. She says I'm just using him to buy work from the artists I handle ..."

"Marley!" Chuck bellowed from the kitchen. "You back with that dog yet? How about having a drink and coming on in here for some of that pie I was telling you about?"

"Quick, you better go," Ginger said. "I'll try and explain to him why you had to leave."

"But maybe he won't buy my painting then," I said.

"Marley, go!"

So I snuck off fast, to walk downtown. This would give my skinniness a chance to rest, and thus I could cultivate my thoughts at their ease. For I was certain that Chuck had indeed

taken a liking to me, and soon I would have his financial endorsement to buy a site in Rome, where I would live happily, building my chapel. I don't know why, but I have always counted on my intuitive knowledge. I was so certain of all of this it occurred to me I should have asked Ginger for a little advance money; it probably would have been possible to have gotten a substantial check from Chuck that very morning, had I pressed the point.

A great sense of joy rose up in me. To my surprise I was getting hungry: to me this was what joy had always been. With the last buck in my pocket I darted across the street to a pizza joint; stuffing the cold slab in my mouth, I began to tell the guy flipping the dough about all of my plans.

After I got my hair cut at High Style 2000 on Lexington Avenue, I was hit by a car. It wasn't even a very nice vehicle, just a blue-and-white Chrysler. I was trying to cross the street in the middle of the block, and the car backed up and hit me in the legs at knee level. I didn't realize that I'd been struck by a car; it felt more as if someone came along and punched me in the legs. Then it pulled forward. I was stunned. I kept staring at the license plate: it said 867-UHH. I tried to memorize it. The car wasn't going anywhere—I guess the driver was waiting to see if I was seriously damaged. I was angry, even if it
was
my fault. I glared at the car and tried to give the driver the evil eye. He leaned out the window and yelled at me, "You stupid, or what? Did you see how many feet from you I was?"

Now, I am a word person and have never been good with mathematical problems—how many miles a train can travel in five hours if its speed is forty miles per hour, and so forth. I always think, What if a cow gets in the way? Probably because of this, I almost flunked high school physics. Every night my mother made me memorize phrases from the textbook, but it didn't do any good. The teacher tried to help me after school, but I still got a D. Faced with the driver's hard question on Lexington Avenue, I wanted to do something—to scream at him, for instance—but I was afraid.

I remembered my mother telling me how, at age two, she

was taken on a trip from Atlanta to Manhattan and when her mother took her outside to play in the courtyard of the building they were staying in, someone opened a window and poured a pail of water onto my mother's head. Whoever it was didn't like the fact that my mother was singing under the window at nine o'clock on a Sunday morning. Of course my grandmother dried her off (or the water evaporated quickly or slowly, depending on the coefficient of diffusion), and called the police and the newspapers. My mother still has the clipping with the photo from the
Herald Tribune,
captioned a minute mystery. It showed my mother in Shirley Temple ringlets, with chubby legs, and the article described how little Sonia Silverman, up from Georgia on a visit, had been the victim of a nasty prank.

I stood in the gutter. I was trembling. Either I was extremely happy, or I had just received a jolt of adrenaline from being hit. It was hard to tell the difference. I wasn't dead. It was like finding $20 in the gutter. What a thing I was! Finally I went across the street and into a pizzeria, and I ordered a piece of pizza—pepperoni, mushrooms, onions, and peppers. I had to wait on line while it was heating in the oven.

There was another girl waiting ahead of me, and when the chef finally took out her slice, I tried to reach for it. But she reached first and the chef handed it to her. "Is this the type that you ordered?" I said. I rarely speak to strangers, but I had to say something. I didn't believe that the girl had gotten the same type of pizza as mine because (a) it was an unusual choice to make and (b) almost everyone else seemed to be ordering the plain slices.

The girl gave me a dirty look. "Yes, it is," she said snippily.

The cook said to me, "Don't get impatient, honey, just relax." This only made me feel more foolish. The slice that he gave me, however, was really sparse. Most of the ingredients had slid off into the oven. I was embarrassed and would have said something along the lines of "I can assure you I'm not impatient," but nothing came out of my mouth. The cook, I was certain, had gone out of his way to make me look pushy, when obviously it was unintentional on my part.

The pizza was like a metaphor for my entropic life. The girl whose piece of pizza I tried to steal was carrying one of these trashy novels about Hollywood. I was incensed. This was her reading material, yet she still felt superior to me. At first I thought she was about to sit down at the only table left and I would be forced to sit with her. My hot pizza was leaking through the paper plate. But finally I found another seat. I felt so grateful I almost threw myself into my seat. At the next table was a woman with a crewcut, a kid about six years old, and a guy with pale-blue hair who looked like the woman's brother. He kept taking food from the little kid's plate and the kid said, in a fury, practically heartbroken, "Leave my food alone." He was eating spaghetti; I wondered if it tasted as good as my pizza, which was absolutely delicious—chunks of chewy mushrooms, dense and meaty, cheese like stringy bubblegum, and salty, sparky bits of pepperoni.

On the ceiling, over the steam trays, giant papier-mâché haunches of meat were hanging from ropes. I kept thinking, "I was just hit by a car."

On the bus home, I reminded myself not to tell Stash about what had happened or he would kill me. How would it be if he picked up the
Post
and saw jewelry designer, 28, killed by hit and run? First of all everyone would know that I got my hair cut in a cheap joint on Lexington Avenue and not at some SoHo or East Village spot. Plus, who would come to my funeral? I had no friends. All the other jewelry designers I knew had plenty of friends. They threw big parties for themselves at various clubs and their pictures were published in the most fashionable magazines. Maybe they were receiving outside financial assistance. I had no money to throw parties, although I had a hunger for things I knew realistically I didn't actually care for.

When I got in the door, Stash was lying on the bed next to Andrew, our Dalmatian. Stash's thick blond hair, loose from its ponytail, was practically covering his face. He had an ominous, unshaved look. He wasn't wearing a shirt; his hairy chest

had an animal ferocity. Andrew's legs were sticking up in the air and his neck was resting on Stash's arm. Andrew had a snoring problem; he snored so loudly that he used to wake Stash and me several times a night, until Stash devised a solution. He attached a rope to Andrew's bed, and during the night whenever Andrew began to snore Stash would yank the rope and the abrupt movement would wake Andrew and he would stop snoring for a while. I used to tease Stash, telling him this was cruelty to animals—after all, would he have liked it if someone tied a rope to our bed and gave it a jerk every time we drifted off to sleep? But Andrew was so good-natured —or dumb—he didn't seem to mind.

Stash and Andrew didn't even look at me. I felt left out. "Hi," I said. "I got my hair cut." I had red, corkscrew curls, almost to my waist: my hair didn't have a real style, it was just a mess. Stash had begged me never to change it. "It doesn't look one iota different, does it? I spent ten dollars and told them to snip the ends. What do you think? Will I look nice tonight?"

Stash didn't answer.

"Is something wrong?" I said.

"No."

"Are you sick? You have an earache?"

"No."

"Did you eat today?"

"Yes."

"What did I do?" I said. "I forgot to defrost the refrigerator? Is that it?
You
defrost the goddamn refrigerator."

"Eleanor, I would have defrosted the refrigerator, but you've got too much stuff in there. You made me help you pick eight quarts of cherries last summer and you never made pies. Why don't you throw them out?"

"I didn't make pies because you said we were on a diet. I come home and you're mad at me about the refrigerator?"

"I wasn't even thinking about it until you reminded me. I'm mad about that article on the table. Go look at it." Sometimes I felt as if I were the sole member of the Bomb Squad: I had

to defuse Stash. I picked up the magazine lying on the table. It was a nice table, like something that might be found in a camper's dining hall. Stash had bought it for me a few months back, saying that since I complained so much about not being able to have anyone over to dinner he would get me a table. So far, though, every time I suggested we invite someone over, he said the house was too messy and gave examples. Number One, I had stuck black and white adhesive tiles in the space between the kitchen counter and the cabinets, and when they peeled off, a short time later, all the paint on the wall peeled off with them, leaving brown spots.

In the magazine was a reproduction of one of Stash's paintings, "The Wisdom of Solomon," in which Quick Draw MacGraw and Babalooey are sawing an Eskimo baby in half. Underneath the picture was a long article. In the first paragraph the man said that while he couldn't dismiss Stash's work entirely, it was nevertheless the mindless scrawling of a Neanderthal.