Slaves of New York (32 page)

He was very good with the dogs and took each one out in turn for its exercise so that Melinda would have more time to work on her dance project ideas. He even cleaned up the yard, which was filled with cat droppings and mud. "It's true I'm educated and you're not," Melinda told him. "And also you're ten years younger than me. I always thought these things would be a problem in a relationship. But now I see the ideal relationship is based on trust and kindness, and the rest is unimportant."

One day they discovered that the stunted rat in the aquarium was missing. Melinda accused Chicho of letting it go or somehow getting rid of it—of all the animals, the rat was the only one he didn't care for—but he assured her the rat must have escaped on its own. No doubt it was running around somewhere in the walls, or had made its way back to the streets.

She didn't really believe him, but she didn't want to pick a fight. She was thirty-three years old and Chicho was the first man who had shown any interest in hanging around. It was true he was good with the dogs, but aside from that he was a lot of work; he still could not find a job and Melinda had to give him spending money, and he expected dinner to be cooked for him whether she had to work that evening or not. But any stray, Melinda knew, was a lot of work at first and it was possible, through years of gentle persuasion, to train even the most abused and wild animal.

A short time later she came down with a mysterious disease. She grew quite ill and no doctor had any idea what was wrong with her. Finally, after extensive tests, she was diagnosed as having Weil's disease. This was an extremely rare ailment which most doctors had not seen or heard of. It was acquired from drinking liquid that a rat had urinated into. It was possible that the deformed rat had been wandering around late one night and urinated into the glass of water that Melinda always kept near her side of the bed.

She was taken to the hospital and was there for many weeks, but during that time Chicho only came to visit her once. She forgave him, however; he was like a wild animal who did not understand even the most ordinary laws of etiquette. She knew Chicho was probably thinking about her all the time.

It was not expected that she would recover; she could feel herself growing weaker and weaker and she thought how sad it would be after her death when all her stray animals and Chicho had no one to look after them.

To everyone's surprise, however, she got better. She went home in a taxi and when she walked through the door of her apartment she found Chicho in bed with her closest girlfriend. All of the animals were gone—he had apparently given them all away or let them loose—and the apartment had been neatly repainted and cleaned up. "Man," Chicho said, not even bothering to wrap a sheet around himself, "what are you doing here?"

She had to get the police to have Chicho evicted; it was expensive to get the locks changed, and difficult to accept the fact that she had been betrayed by one of God's creatures, but eventually she got a new bunch of crippled and stray dogs, forgot Chicho, and settled into her old ways, neither joyful nor despairing.

In the morning I'd go across the street to the delicatessen to get a cup of coffee and I'd see the butchers in their bloody coats, with hooks and knives slung around their belts. It was after I had broken up with Stash. I'd moved into an apartment in the meat market district; I liked it. The streets were filled with puddles and bones, and a particular variety of meat-eating pigeons, like carrion birds, that hung around the neighborhood, pecking up bits of gristle and fat.

It was hard living alone, though: I kept waiting for someone to come home and yell at me. At first I missed Stash terribly, but then one day he stopped me on the street and said that he had seen an episode of "The Mating Game" or some such program, and one of the questions asked of a woman in her late thirties was, "On what basis do you know if someone's right for you?" And she answered, "There are four categories: Spiritual, Physical, Intellectual, and Emotional."

Stash said that he had thought about this for a while, and realized that we had only been compatible in three-and-a-half categories. "Listen, Eleanor," he said. "Last week I had three dates with a beautiful Swedish model, and she wanted me to go to Czechoslovakia with her, but I realized I was only compatible with her in two of the four categories—Intellectual and Physical."

After Stash told me this I stopped missing him. I just didn't care to spend my life with a man who based the merits of his

relationships on something some woman in California had said on "The Mating Game."

I knew then it was up to me to negotiate a new life for myself. I remembered a guy I had met and I wrote him a letter. His name was Wilfredo and he was a very well-known fashion designer. Recently he had gone bankrupt, but everyone admired his work, he was talked about all the time, and I knew for a fact he would soon be on his feet again.

Wilfredo based his designs on all kinds of things: clothing he found in thrift stores, costumes borrowed from a theatrical clothing warehouse—pirate outfits and gorilla costumes and old Victorian numbers. Then he combined the various elements, had them remade in beautiful fabrics such as silk and cashmere, and faille and when the entire ensemble was together (such as a sequined vest with a cotton T-shirt and a brocade jacket and tiny wrinkled pants) the whole thing looked gorgeous and sold for thousands of dollars. He had light, brilliant brown eyes, almost yellow, and turned heads when he came into a room (I had seen him in nightclubs). When I met him I was struck by his extreme shyness: he could barely bring himself to speak to me in a voice above a whisper. About a year before I broke up with Stash, I was walking Andrew, our Dalmatian, in the courtyard one night, and this very cute guy came over to me with
his
Dalmatian, a bitch, and said he had seen me around before, walking the dog. After he started mumbling, I identified him as Wilfredo, the famous designer. I was very flattered when he said he admired my ambiance. It was late, and drizzling a little bit, and I certainly didn't look my best: I was wearing an old, dirty dress and a padded Mao jacket of Stash's (he had had Velcro sewn into the front but it still didn't close) and my hair was frizzy. I thought I looked like Elsa Lanchester in
The Bride of Frankenstein,
but maybe I was only flattering myself.

But I said to Wilfredo, "Listen, Stash and I would be delighted to breed Andrew." I gave him our phone number. Stash and I had often talked about having puppies, not that we needed another dog, but it would have been fun.

Stash was observing me out the window, and when I got back upstairs I was very excited: I told him that we were going to breed Andrew to a famous fashion designer, and that I had given the guy our phone number.

Stash got up and put Little Richard on the compact disc player. The music—"Tutti Frutti"—was so loud it hurt my ears. Then he turned and yelled across the room. "How could you have given out my number like that to some guy?" he said. "That guy could be a killer; now I'm going to have to get my telephone number changed to an unlisted one, and that will cost me forty-five dollars a month."

"What do you mean,
your
phone number?" I said. I tried to explain that all Wilfredo wanted was to breed our dog to his, and that I did have at least a modicum of sense and was able to recognize the difference between a killer and an internationally acclaimed fashion designer when I saw one. I figured that Stash was probably jealous.

As it turned out, Stash didn't speak to me for five days. I ended up apologizing, even though it was against my judgment to apologize when I didn't feel I had done anything wrong.

After the breakup, when I was settled in my new apartment, I decided to write to Wilfredo. I realized that I didn't know if he was interested in me or not. So when I wrote to him I simply explained that I had met him with my dog on the street (I included my physical description of the time, long red hair, tiny blue eyes, and an orange minidress with a peace symbol cut out over the stomach) and I said that I was a jewelry designer (in case he had forgotten) and if he was ready to breed his dog I could arrange it. Then I added, in a postscript, that I admired his work very much, and perhaps he could meet me for a drink.

I figured this way he could assume that I was interested in some kind of collaboration with him, perhaps in getting him to see my jewelry which he might possibly use to accompany his clothing. Or he could guess that I was trying to ask him out on a date.

Tons of men these days were getting married, and one of the most interesting things Wilfredo had said to me on that rainy night when we discussed breeding dogs was how much he would have loved to have kids. He had a brother who was married and raised bison in the Midwest, and sometimes Wilfredo would go there and baby-sit for him; his brother had three children, who were really great. So I thought, in retrospect, that there was a possibility of Wilfredo being interested in me, at least if he wanted to start reproducing quickly.

Anyway, a few days later Wilfredo called to tell me he had had his dog spayed. "That's a shame," I said. It was probably for the best, because Andrew was Stash's dog and Stash wasn't speaking to me at present. "But maybe you wouldn't mind looking at my jewelry—either my slides or actual pieces which I could bring by at your convenience?"

Wilfredo said that would be fine, he was looking for a new jewelry designer—he had some ideas for things himself, and maybe we could work together. Even though he was temporarily bankrupt, he was getting a new collection together to show backers in the fall.

I packed up a lot of stuff in my suitcase to take to him. I had gone to this place upstairs on Fourteenth Street, where bones and skulls were sold, and I had constructed various necklaces of small animal skulls, bracelets made of bones and forks, belts made from teeth and rhinestones and silver chunks.

I also, on a whim, brought along some hats I had made (in a fit of pique, fed up with doing jewelry, I had thought momentarily of going into the millinary line) and the hats were really neat. Some looked like pancakes, others looked like pizzas, some like cheese soufflés—made of the kind of brocade used on chairs. And they were decorated with small skulls in the front. A clothing critic might have called them African-influenced. I was a little uneasy, because the hats really smelled like mothballs: they were mothproofed. I had found most of the fabric for the hats in a garbage dumpster in SoHo. When I wore one of the hats—a turban style in the shape of a cobra,

head ready to strike—to a party someone pointed out that there seemed to be a couple of moths flying around my head. The man I was talking to pulled apart two of the cobra's coils and several more moths flew out—the hat was infested. The hostess of the party said that because of me she would have to have the place exterminated. Maybe she was just a little high; usually she was a very friendly, sweet person.

I agreed to meet Wilfredo for a drink the next day. It was great to be in love again, particularly so soon after being in despair. I didn't even care whether Wilfredo liked me or not. He had nothing to do with the way I felt in the thirty-six hours before I was to meet him. There I was, there was Wilfredo, and then there was my great love for him. The night before I was to meet him I sat in my apartment, drinking wine (Château Bonnet, $4.99) and thinking about how I had finally achieved a feeling of contentment. I put on my silver leather coat to go across the street to the delicatessen (roast beef sandwich, rye bread, Russian dressing, and tomato) and I felt pretty zippy. Manhattan was just waiting for me to conquer it. On my way back from the store the woman who lived two buildings down (she was always sitting on the stoop) started to point at me and laugh. "Look at that silver coat!" she said. I knew this was just part of living in New York, but it did bring me down.

I had to celebrate with more wine when I got back to my apartment, and the next day I puttered around, working out some new designs and generally pampering myself. My mother always told me, when there's nothing else to do and the phone isn't ringing, you can use the opportunity to pamper yourself. Finally it was time for me to leave and meet Wilfredo. I walked down the street (it was around seven in the evening) and everything seemed just great, except for my hangover. But even my hangover seemed necessary, it was a part of nature and gave me a sense of affinity with the inanimate objects such as the buildings and garbage cans around me. I passed the fat woman who had pointed at me and laughed the night before. She was sitting on the steps with some guy. "Listen, honey," she said.

"You know what? That was a beautiful silver coat you were wearing the other day." She was around fifty years old, with long gray hair and a tiny red potato face.

"Yeah?" I said. "Thanks."

"This is my friend Rico, by the way. He wants to meet you." She pointed to the stallion sitting next to her. He had a Fu Manchu mustache and limpid eyes. Well, it seemed that when I was in love everybody wanted to be my friend.

"No, I don't," Rico said.

"And it's a wonderful evening," the woman said. "And it's so nice to see you with all your energy. You look like a person who would never hurt another person."

"It's nice to hear you say that," I said. "Except if you knew the way my head feels, you would think twice about my energy level. Also, this suitcase is rather heavy." I was just saying this to be modest.

"Oh, listen, I'm tired, too," she said. "What's your name?"

"Eleanor."

"I'm Agnes. Listen, Eleanor, I stay up all night, watching TV, and I have to listen to my cocaine addict friends tell me they want seven hundred dollars to go to Seattle. And I say: Do I need this? But that silver coat you've got—when I saw you wearing it yesterday, I thought, Wow, now there's a person who doesn't mind standing out."