When his girlfriend rang the doorbell, he told me to hide in the bathroom. Mildew on the cinderblock walls; wet towel on the floor; beard stubble, like metal shavings, in the sink. He wore a goatee. I thought it was funny that he went to the trouble to maintain a goatee but didn’t flush the toilet. But, look, he lived alone. He hadn’t been expecting me. We’d gone off for a beer that became two, and then shared a joint in the park before I ever saw the inside of his place.
He was a Vietnam vet and lived in an English basement where he repaired electronics for people. I met him when I brought my VCR to be fixed. There was an entryway inside the front door with a curtain that hid his living space from view. He’d open the front door, you’d step into the hall and hand him whatever was broken. He’d take it and disappear behind the curtain and then come back with a receipt. My VCR was jammed; there was a tape stuck inside that wouldn’t eject. Fatal Attraction. I’d tried to extract it myself first. There was something I loved about the process of taking things apart and examining their innards. Maybe it came from watching my father try to fix things– a broken socket, a clogged carburetor. I unscrewed the VCR’s casing, and I could see the video, but I couldn’t get to it; it was in the grip of a steel trap, tape wound around spindles, paralyzed.
There were clothes and gadgets and tools scattered around the room. From his bed, I could see the pile of VCRs stacked in one corner, with a sweater tossed on top. Mine was under the sweater.
He said the woman at the door was his ex-girlfriend, and she wanted money. He sent her away.
In bed, he put a handful of my hair in my mouth like a gag and said, “Should I fuck you now?” and I nodded, because I couldn’t speak with my hair like that.
There was a Marine Corps tattoo on his bicep and a green dragon on his chest. One of his nipples was the dragon’s nostril. The dragon seemed unoriginal—I mean, a dragon must be number three on the list of most common tattoos, after a skull and a rose—but he had a good body with only the early signs of a beer gut. I tried to shut my eyes to the room and just feel his body. He smelled like Listerine or something else minty with alcohol in it; maybe it was his shaving cream. His skin was clammy. I didn’t have enough time to come, and then he did, and that was it. That was annoying. And then he lay next to me and told me his ex-girlfriend was a heroin addict, but that he’d been tested recently and he was negative. I didn’t say anything, because I was frozen with horror.
“Don’t worry,” he said, without looking at my face. “Unless you want to.”
Then he acted bored and ignored me until I said, “I’m leaving,” and he said, “Bye,” and I left.
* * *
That had to be the lowest I’d sunk. That’s what I thought, I’d finally hit bottom. I didn’t go back, not even to get my VCR, even though he left me a message a few days later saying it was ready. I thought of Glenn Close, from the movie: I’m not going to be ignored.
I didn’t have a boyfriend at the time. I was sleeping with men who didn’t want to be boyfriends. Lucas and I had conversations about this, about whether women could sleep with people and not care. It had started to feel like a challenge. I didn’t tell Lucas about the VCR guy, because in that case I seemed to have failed the challenge. I told him almost everything else, and he told me what seemed like almost everything.
Lucas was the kind of friend you could spend an intense twelve hours with the first time you met and then feel like you knew each other completely. In fact that’s exactly what had happened. Lucas and I were both working at an event his boss had catered, and my boss, an event planner, had organized. That was last fall, when I’d only been in the job for a couple of months. Lucas was a banquet waiter. It was a fancy party, and he was wearing a tux, and I was wearing a long dress, and he kept bringing me canapés, saying, in a fake mincey voice, “Would you care for a vol-au-vent—that is, one of our petit pastry shells stuffed with escargot and beurre à l’ail avec chapeau de champignon?” even though he knew I wasn’t a guest.
When everyone else had gone home, after I made sure the tablecloths I’d ordered were set aside to be returned to the rental company, and Lucas was finished packing up dishes and glassware, we got drunk together on the open booze that couldn’t be returned to the liquor supplier. We talked until four in the morning and he never laid a hand on me. This was a welcome novelty, because that night at least, I felt like I needed a break from hands and mouths and everything else. I told him I didn’t want a boyfriend for a while. I needed to be okay with just me, by myself. I needed to look inside instead of outside for contentment. I sounded like a self-help book, but he didn’t laugh at me.
Still, some things were too humiliating even to tell Lucas.
* * *
I did tell him about Gray, who came after VCR-guy.
When Gray introduced himself, saying, “I’m Gray,” I’d tried not to laugh. His hair was silver; his eyes were gray-blue.
“I’m Miranda Weber,” I said. I wasn’t sure then if Gray was his first or his last name, so I gave him both of mine.
“You’re here every morning, Miranda Weber,” he said.
So are you, I should have said. But I just blushed because he’d noticed.
I’d developed the habit of sitting in the generic café near my office before work. I drank black coffee and ate a cup of peach yogurt and a plain bagel. I’d started this about a month earlier, when eating breakfast at home became unbearable. I had no food in my apartment to speak of; I didn’t like to eat there with my roommate and her fisheye. When I first moved in, she liked me; then she tolerated me; now she was openly hostile. The last time I saw her in daylight, she was dividing the living room in half with a line of masking tape.
“This is your half,” she said. Her half had the TV.
The bagels in the café were bland and spongy, but comforting, like chewing on my pillow. I’d sit there thinking and reading the newspaper and eavesdropping, and unconsciously tear off pieces of bagel, rolling them into pebble-size balls between my fingers before popping them into my mouth.
Gray was always there with the same woman. She wore boxy skirt-suits and blouses buttoned to the neck. They drank coffee and had what seemed like a lively conversation. He was probably in his mid-fifties. He looked old to me, and distinguished, like he had an important job and some money. His life, I imagined, was a magazine ad for Johnny Walker: At home he’d put on a pair of worn leather slippers and sit in a big leather chair by a fire in a room that was painted forest green, with a built-in shelf of old books behind him, a globe on the desk, and an Irish setter at his feet.
* * *
After some weeks, I mostly gave up trying to hear what he and the woman were talking about, and then one morning he showed up without her, walked directly to my table and said, “Is this seat taken?”
He asked me a lot of questions. What was my job? What had I studied in college? What were my goals? It was like an interview. In fact, I thought it might be an interview, so I answered accordingly.
And then he said, “You’re not married?”
I said, “No.”
He said, “Boyfriend?”
I said, “Not at the moment.”
“I’m married,” he said. He wore a gold signet ring on his middle finger.
“To the woman who’s usually here with you?” I said. I think that was the first question I asked him.
He looked puzzled for a second and then his eyes went wide, and he said, “Hell no! That old bag?” He laughed so hard he had to wipe his eyes with a cotton handkerchief he kept in his suit coat. “’Course, my wife’s an old bag, too,” he said. “I call her S.T. Know what that stands for?”
“No,” I said.
“Saggy tits,” he said, and then laughed some more.
It was the second time in as many weeks that a man had managed to shock me. I glanced down automatically at my own chest, where my blouse was unbuttoned just enough. When I looked up again quickly, he was looking there, too.
“You don’t have anything to worry about,” he said. “How old are you?”
“Twenty-three,” I told him.
“Do you know where I work?” he said.
“No,” I said.
“Over there.” He pointed out the glass front of the café toward the building across the street. “The Washington Post,” he said.
I was impressed. I’d watched All the President’s Men a few months before my VCR broke. I liked the part where Woodward tells Bernstein, I don’t mind what you did. I mind the way you did it.
“That must be interesting,” I said. “Are you a reporter?” He didn’t look like a reporter. He wasn’t rumpled.
“No, I’m on the executive side,” he said. “Would you like to work there?”
“Sure,” I said. My father had laminated the famous front page that said “Nixon Resigns,” and hung it on the wall in my parents’ bedroom. If I wanted to impress them, a job at the Post would do it. They’d been markedly less than impressed with me of late, even though they didn’t know the half of what they could be unimpressed with.
What was most disappointing to them was my reluctance to spend time with my sister. Donna was five years older than me and difficult, which was a euphemism for mentally disabled and disturbed. But blood should bypass those obstacles, and I should have been trying harder to be a good sister. I should have been taking her to the movies more often. She loved to go to the movies, she only didn’t love to stay at the movies. I never knew what scene would upset her and make her stand up in the middle and walk out. At least I’d learned to always sit on the aisle. Still, she’d beg to go, as if the fantasy of another life was what attracted her, until she’d suddenly become aware that it was all a lie. She’d rail at the characters and their faulty logic.
“That’s so stupid,” she’d say. “Why would he go so close to the robot, when we could all see it wasn’t dead yet?”
When I took her to see Big, she lasted until thirty minutes before the end. I never saw the part where Tom Hanks changes back into a little boy again. When we reached the parking lot, I drove off without my sister. I circled the block four times. Each time I passed, she was standing there faithfully, on the sidewalk in front of the Uptown, with a cheerful expression on her face, certain I’d eventually stop for her. Then I drove her home and, like every time before, my parents attempted to reimburse me for the tickets, and I felt bad and said no. I should have let them, because I was waiting for all those movies to come out on tape, and now I’d also have to wait until I could afford to buy a new VCR.
In Rain Man, which I didn’t take Donna to see, a brother’s hard heart is opened to his autistic brother, an “idiot savant,” after the autistic brother wins big in Vegas. Suddenly everyone wanted to have a savant for a sibling. On the few occasions I was out with Donna since that movie became popular, people looked at us differently, as if she might be a genius. Except she wasn’t. Her IQ was well below average. She was no good at counting money, much less counting cards.
“If the movie doesn’t work out for you,” my mother had said, “why not take Donna to lunch? She loves to go out to eat.”
That wasn’t true; she loved McDonald’s. Every family dinner out began with a stop at the drive-through window, because she refused to eat food from any other restaurant. Blood or no blood, I couldn’t manage to guilt myself into these encounters often enough to please my parents. They spent much of their time and energy smoothing Donna’s path through life, and my resistance was remarkable and incomprehensible to them. When I was in their house, their disappointment was like a lingering odor. The best idea, from my perspective, was to stay away.
Part Two
“I have to get to work,” Gray said. “And you too, yes?”
“Yes,” I said.
“We can continue this conversation,” he said, standing, and joggling the waistband of his trousers.
“Sure,” I said.
“Over dinner,” he said, which sounded only half like a question.
“Okay,” I said.
“There’s a place in the next block.” I followed him out of the café with my coffee in one hand and the newspaper folded under my arm like a professional. He pointed toward K Street. “The Guards,” he said.
* * *
When I arrived at the restaurant on the appointed night, he was already in a booth, with a martini and a cigarette. He ordered me a drink and said, “Do you like fish?”
I said yes.
“It’s very good here,” he said. “They fly it in from New England.”
“As long as it’s not from the Potomac,” I said. He smiled. His face was just the right shape, a stern-jawed rectangle. The hollows of his cheeks were pitted from long-ago acne, but he was nice looking.
“Do you mind if I smoke?” he said, though he was already smoking, Benson and Hedges.
“No it’s fine,” I said.
“You don’t smoke, do you?”
“No,” I said. I didn’t want to tell him that I smoked sometimes, and that the smell of his cigarette was making me want one.
The Guards was dimly lit, and although it was fancy—white tablecloths to the floor, brass sconces on the walls, no prices on my menu—it also felt like a place in a movie, hushed and dimly lit, exactly the kind of place a man would bring a woman who’s not his wife.
I was quiet because I wasn’t sure how to behave. Of course I knew how to behave on a date, but I wasn’t sure if Gray wanted to be my lover, my mentor, or both.
For dessert, he suggested the chocolate mousse. When it came, he asked if he could feed it to me.
“Sure,” I said. I don’t know if I was more taken with him or with the attention he was paying me.
He spooned a dainty portion of chocolate into my mouth and watched me carefully as I ate. His staring made me self-conscious about my manners. I dabbed at the corners of my mouth with the cloth napkin. The confection dissolved on my tongue; at first sweet, it left a bitter aftertaste.
“I can imagine,” he said, “what it feels like to be that chocolate.”
* * *
Later that week when I had dinner with Lucas, I told him about the dinner with Gray. How he looked at me and what we ordered and how I eventually took a couple of drags from his cigarette, leaving my lipstick on the end. I didn’t tell him about the chocolate mousse or how, after we left The Guards, Gray led me into an alley a half-block away, pressed me up against the bricks and put his tongue in my mouth. He tasted like green olives. He put his hand under my skirt, and I felt him fumbling around the breathable cotton crotch of my pantyhose and then moving to the waistband, but he couldn’t maneuver his hand inside the pantyhose or take them down without unzipping my skirt, so he gave that up.
“Touch me,” he said and raked his tongue over my ear which made a sound like someone fumbling with a microphone when they don’t know it’s switched on.
I moved my hand down his shirt, along his trim enough waist, to his hip, to his belt, and I could feel his cock against my stomach, and I was about to put my hand on his zipper, but then I didn’t. I kept my hand just above his belt while I thought of all the men I’d touched there, and below there, and I couldn’t do it.
So if that meant no job at the Post, that’s what it would mean.
“I can’t,” I said. “First date,” I added. I waited for him to get angry.
He licked my neck, and his tongue went in my mouth and out again, and he said, “You are delicious.” Then he stopped and took a step back and straightened his tie, tucked in his shirt, cocked his head at me and tugged my skirt back into alignment. He looked at his watch. “We should go,” he said. “I need to get home.”
“Thank you for dinner,” I said.
“Thank you,” he said.
He hailed a cab and when it pulled over, he opened the door and helped me inside and handed the driver some money. He winked at me before he shut the door.
* * *
My apartment building was a modest brick mid-rise remarkable only for its location across the street from the new Soviet Embassy compound. It was like living in a shack outside the walls of Emerald City. The Soviets had been allowed to build their embassy on the highest hill in Washington. Only the National Cathedral had a better vantage point for spying. The embassy was currently unoccupied, because of all the bugs found in the walls of the new American embassy that was under construction in Moscow. Our embassy had to be torn out and rebuilt, and until it was done, bug-free, the Soviets were barred from occupying theirs. Even so, it was “monitored” twenty-four hours a day by men with coiled wires trailing out of their ears and underneath their shirt collars. Secret Service, they told me when I asked. I saw them whenever I came and went, including that night, when I got out of the cab under the security lights at my building’s entrance. They waved.
* * *
In my apartment, I could hear my roommate snoring. I locked myself in my room, like I might change into a werewolf and I couldn’t be trusted to stay in for the night. It was early spring, and my room was cold because I’d left the bathroom window open that morning to let the steam out from the shower. Otherwise the moisture built up and made the paint peel on the ceiling. It was a casement window, and when I went to crank it shut, I saw that some birds had started to build a nest on the exterior stone ledge. I could have opened the screen and knocked the nest off the ledge before they had a chance to finish it, and then I’d be able to close my window. But I didn’t. I wouldn’t. I pulled on a sweater over my nightgown and went to sleep.
Part Three
On Thursday morning, Gray nodded at me when he and his colleague passed my table. When it was time to go to work, and I got up to leave, he called me over.
“I’d like you to meet Ellen,” he said.
Ellen shook my hand and grinned politely as if she had no idea where my hand had almost gone nine hours before. “Gray told me about your job search,” she said. “How fast can you type?”
I didn’t want to be a secretary. I had a degree in cultural anthropology with a minor in Spanish. But I knew you wanted to get in on the ground floor, hang on by your fingernails and pull yourself up from there. I also knew that forty words per minute, my typing speed, was inadequate. So I said, “How fast would you like me to type?”
“That’s the spirit,” said Ellen. “Sixty words per minute should do it.”
“Okay,” I said.
She handed me her business card. I didn’t look at it until I was at work. She was an “Executive Administrator.”
* * *
I practiced typing on the Radio Shack Trash-80 I used at Madeline’s office, and tested myself. Forty-five. A monkey could type faster than me.
Madeline called me into her office, frantic. She was always frantic when she wasn’t in front of a client.
“How can I help?” I said. I always said that.
“I can’t find my Valium,” she said. She slammed her desk drawer. The pens and coins and binder clips rattled against the metal. “Would you find it for me?”
I found it for her. She didn’t know how good I was at finding drugs in general.
* * *
When Madeline hired me, she’d landed a contract that meant she could afford a full-time assistant, but only for one year. I took the job because the friend who introduced us told me that Madeline knew a lot of people. And because I was running out of money and didn’t want to ask my parents for help. They kept telling me to apply to the government. I’d filled out the interminable SF-171 employment form, but if there was one thing you learned from growing up in D.C., it was that government workers were lazy bums, and their jobs were regimented and dull as the Agriculture building, which was modeled after a prison. The desirable jobs went to people who were brought in from out of town, hired by congressmen or appointed by cabinet officials. Working for Madeline wasn’t bad, even if I didn’t aspire to be a meeting planner. What did I aspire to be?
“I’m a Type A personality,” she said when she hired me. “You seem like a Type B personality. You can help me calm down.”
Type B sounded like an assessment that would give my parents a fresh reason for disappointment. I was supposed to be “A” all the way. At work, I was; I was a conscientious employee. I was never late, and I never called in sick. It was in every other category that I was lacking.
Madeline thought she was teaching me valuable life lessons while stomping around the office suite, tossing papers this way and that, something always going wrong despite her best efforts.
“You must behave as if you anticipated it,” she said, “a minor difficulty, easily solved. In private, you tear your hair out. That’s called being a professional.”
* * *
Friday night, Lucas and I had dinner at our favorite place. It was probably our favorite only because it was rarely open. When it was closed, no explanation was ever provided, not even a hastily scrawled note taped to the door. When it was open, it seemed imperative to go. It was in a fashionable but edgy neighborhood where you could get a good meal and hear good music and get beaten up for looking the wrong way at someone all in the same two-block radius. But the latter was hardly remarkable in a city the newspapers had started calling the Murder Capital. Just a couple months before, on Valentine’s Day, there had been thirteen shootings in twenty-four hours.
Entering that restaurant was like entering a Middle Eastern version of Brigadoon. We sat on cushions on the floor among tasseled pillows that were embedded with rows of thumbnail-size mirrors. You didn’t recline on them so much as gaze at your broken self.
The restaurant’s owner was also the chef and the waiter. He wore an old aviator hat that he never removed, the kind with ear flaps. He stood over us and told us what to order, as if he had to leave and we were holding him up.
“Tonight,” he said, “you will have the couscous.” And then he disappeared behind a curtained wall. He didn’t come back for a long time, but we drank mai-tai’s and forgot about him. All you could ever get was the couscous, which was nevertheless so good, in its gravy of indeterminate yet perfectly slow-roasted meat with fragrant spices, we didn’t mind that there was nothing else.
After I told Lucas about Gray and Ellen and typing, he said, “Your job ends in June. It’s perfect.”
“Only if I get it,” I said.
“Not the Post,” he said. “July. Dubrovnik.”
We’d talked about going to Dubrovnik sometime. He was always bringing it up, as if it was the one thing he looked forward to, like Disneyland.
“I don’t know if I’ll have the money by then,” I said. Meaning, I absolutely won’t have the money by then. “I can’t even afford a new VCR right now.”
“I thought you were getting the old one fixed,” he said.
“That didn’t work out,” I said.
“Maybe we shouldn’t be eating here,” said Lucas. “It’s not cheap.”
“Okay,” I said. “Next time, I’ll eat that burrito that’s been in my freezer for three months.”
“Let me pay this time,” he said. “Buy me a drink when we get to Heaven.” Heaven was a bar down the block. It was on the roof of a building; in the basement was Hell.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll meet you there.”
He scowled at me. “Why?” he said. But he knew the answer. I was stopping at Remy’s first.
“Well,” I said.
“If you didn’t do that,” he said, “you’d have had the money for Dubrovnik months ago.”
I didn’t answer. He tapped his fork on the table like it was a gavel.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Forgive yourself,” he said. And then, “I’d go with you if you wanted.”
“Remy doesn’t like people to bring friends,” I said.
“I mean a meeting,” said Lucas. “I’d go to a meeting.”
“Christ,” I said. “I’m not an addict.”
“You might be depressed,” he said.
“Who isn’t?” I said.
“You could talk to someone,” he said.
“You,” I said.
He took my hand and kissed the back of it. “You have good reasons,” he said.
He was talking about the abortion. It was before we met, but I’d told him about it. About the girls in the cots in recovery, with no curtains hiding us from each other. They were all whimpering or moaning. One of them, her mother was braiding her hair. One of them was sucking her thumb. I was the only white girl. I went to a clinic in a part of town where no one would know me. I lay there in that room afterward not making a sound, trying to see how long I could be silent.
After that, I’d left my boyfriend, and I’d stopped showing up to work. They fired me, “with regret.”
“You have promise,” my boss had said. “Get your act together,” he’d said.
That’s why I was eager and grateful when Madeline offered me the job, even though it was only for a year. A year had seemed like forever. I had credit card debt and student loans, and after rent and paying those down little by little, there was almost nothing left. Dubrovnik, at $750 just for the plane ticket, might as well have been the moon. So maybe I was using what little disposable income I had for a short-lived escape from all of that. A Dubrovnik of the mind.
“You need to get out of D.C.,” said Lucas.
“I have,” I said. “I went to Spain. In college,” even though I knew that wasn’t what he meant.
* * *
“You are done.” The owner had appeared at our table, holding the check in front of our noses. “Who’s going to pay?”
“Can we split it?” I said.
“I don’t care what you do,” said the owner. “One check.”
Lucas plucked it from his hand.
* * *
Remy’s apartment always looked as if someone had either just moved in or was about to move out. There was a card table and chairs, a glass coffee table and a sofa, a TV stand and a stereo. There were no pictures on the walls, there was no rug, no knickknacks, unless you counted the scale in the center of the coffee table.
Frequent foot traffic made the neighbors suspicious, so there was the ritual to follow: Greeting, glass of wine, chatting in which Remy pretended to be fascinated by everything I had to say; and testing the product, like free samples in the cheese aisle. Remy cut his powder with benzene, which smelled like cotton candy. When I snorted it, it stabbed my sinus like an ice pick, like the first breath of cold air on a freezing winter morning. After that, a dramatic demonstration of weighing, cutting, and packaging. I was never talented with origami, and the tiny packets in which Remy distributed the goods were small miracles of folding technique.
Remy had gone to do something in the kitchen. I sat on the couch drinking wine and doing lines, per his instructions. The phone rang.
“Should I get it?” a woman’s voice called from what must have been the bedroom. I’d had no idea there was anyone else in the apartment.
“No,” Remy shouted from the kitchen, as if he’d answered the question a million times. “Come meet my friend,” he said.
A woman in a flowered silk bathrobe emerged from the bedroom. Her face was puffy and jaundiced. She was heavy and maneuvered carefully in the narrow space between the couch and the coffee table to sit next to me. Any jostling would have disturbed the mathematical perfection of the samples Remy had left on the table.
“How do you do?” She reached out to shake my hand and in doing so released her grip on the folds of her robe, which fell open. She was naked. She didn’t seem to notice. Her breasts looked like sea lions flopped on the boulder of her belly, where the skin was stretched tight. I guessed she was in her third trimester.
She asked me to pour her some wine, but “only a drop.” When she took the glass, I saw the cluster of circular burns on the inside of her wrist. She stood, and this time she held the robe closed with her free hand. Then she disappeared into the kitchen.
Why was she so pregnant? Why hadn’t she done something about it while she could? She had a better reason than I’d had to not have a baby.
I did another line. It made me think of the thin brown line that ran from her navel to her bush. I didn’t get far enough into my pregnancy to develop one of those, a longitude line marked in the flesh.
My packet was on the coffee table, but I hadn’t paid yet. It was surprising for a coke dealer to be so trusting, to leave me alone for so long, but on the other hand, I wouldn’t have wanted to cross him. When I walked into the kitchen, Remy was spooning liquid from a pot on the stove, and then heating the spoon with a small torch, the kind I’d seen Lucas use to brown crème brulée. He didn’t seem to notice I was standing there. While he held the flame under the spoon, he inhaled the smoke, sucking it all in with thorough and ravenous intensity like a person in a pie-eating contest. I thought of Richard Pryor. Remy might have burned up thousands of dollars worth of blow while I was in the next room. His girlfriend took the spoon from his hand. She spilled some.
“Stupid cunt,” said Remy. Then he noticed me.
“I have to go,” I said. “I’ll leave it on the coffee table.” Meaning, the money.
“Leave it here,” he said, pointing at the countertop with the torch.
I did. Then I took the delicate isosceles triangle he’d made for me and left.
Part Four
To get to Heaven, you had to enter through Hell and walk up a narrow, dark staircase to the roof. I almost didn’t notice the man coming toward me with the iguana on his shoulder until he was squeezing by me on the stairs, on his way down. Even though I got a close-up of its dragon face, I wasn’t sure if I was really seeing it. I was wired.
Lucas was at the bar talking to two girls, one of them was very pretty, the other was the obligatory less-pretty friend. I named them Janet and Chrissy. Chrissy was the pretty one, like on Three’s Company. Girls liked Lucas. He looked like one of the singers from Duran Duran. He was tall and on the thin side, with short dark hair and no sideburns, and a few auburn highlights, which he said were real, but I didn’t believe him. I also thought he plucked his eyebrows a little. They were too neat for my taste.
“Did you see a guy with an iguana?” I said.
“I thought that was a Komodo dragon,” said Chrissy.
“Those are deadly,” said Lucas.
“No wonder they made him leave,” said Chrissy.
“They told him to go to Hell?” I said.
Lucas laughed and the girl laughed a second later. Janet looked bored. I had that skin-crawly feeling. I had to move around or talk or something. There was dancing in Heaven, but not in Hell.
“Depeche Mode?” I said. “Let’s dance.” Lucas was usually willing to dance. Sometimes we went to Dart, the cavernous gay club near the Navy Yard. I liked to go there, because the men always wanted to dance, even with me. My theory was that if they weren’t already dancing with a man, dancing with me at least got them some attention. Usually someone would cut in. And Lucas liked it because he was gay. Although he hadn’t admitted this to me, we both understood it.
No one made a move to the dance floor. I ordered a drink from Spencer, the bartender. Spencer looked like a wrestler, that solid, stocky build; I could see him in the kooky leotard. His tie was tucked into his shirt so it wouldn’t sweep the bar when he leaned over to talk to me, and his sleeves were rolled up to expose his muscular forearms.
“He’s getting some action,” said Spencer. “If he wants it.” Ugly smirk.
“My father’s an astronaut,” Lucas was saying, when I came back with my drink.
“Really?” said Janet. “Has he been to space?”
Which wasn’t a dumb question, even though her friend said, “Duh.”
“Not all astronauts get to go,” said Lucas. “Mine did, though.”
“That’s amazing,” said Chrissy. “Did he walk on the moon?”
“Yes,” said Lucas. “Not with Neil Armstrong, though.”
“Let’s dance,” said Chrissy. As if I hadn’t already said it. She took Lucas’s hand, and they disappeared among the cherubim.
I was kind of glad they walked away, because I didn’t know how long I could keep a straight face about the astronaut story. Lucas’s father was a lawyer for the catering company where Lucas was a waiter. Lucas was always making up stories like that. Last time it happened was when we were at Dart, and he told a guy he wanted to impress that his father had been held hostage in Iran.
“What a story,” the man said. Exactly what I’d been thinking.
“Yeah,” said Lucas. “He never got over it. He always looks behind him when he’s in a room by himself. He jumps at sudden noises, that kind of thing.”
After we left, Lucas told me, “The truth is boring. My father’s a lawyer,” he said. “Everyone in Washington’s a lawyer.”
“So why not tell them your father was a famous astronaut?” I’d actually said that.
* * *
“Where’s your boyfriend?” said Spencer. He meant Lucas. Lucas had said Spencer had a crush on me, but I thought Lucas had a crush on him.
The Romeo Void song was playing, and Spencer mouthed the chorus to me, gesticulating with his soda sprayer like it was a microphone and doing little pelvic thrusts that I couldn’t quite see from my side of the bar. “I might like you better if we slept together/But there’s something in your eyes that says maybe that’s never/Never say never.”
Janet was enjoying Spencer’s performance. Maybe she thought it was for her. She swayed with the music, and then leaned up against the bar, resting her chest on top of the wet wood. She asked for another drink.
The dance floor was crowded for once, and I didn’t see Lucas anywhere. I went to the ladies’ room.
The stalls were made of wood and painted deep blue with silver stars scattered around and graffiti etched with ballpoint pens and knives, cutting across the grain. I put Remy’s art project on the small shelf created by the toilet paper dispenser. I unwrapped it carefully. The powder was pink-tinged and glistened like mica. I did a bump off the stiff corner of my credit card, and then another, the familiar sweet smell. I imagined I could feel it entering my brain, finding a space there. A couple more and everything would seem clear. I leaned over, did a last one, and then one more for good luck, and I was straightening up, about to close up the paper, when the stall door opened and there was Janet staring at me, her mouth an ‘o’ of surprise that became an evil grin. She turned and ran away. And then I was in hell.
“Shit,” I told myself. “Shit. Shit. Shit,” I said to the painted ceiling and the constellation Pegasus, which I began to think was incorrectly laid out and that I could do it better, that maybe my artistic skills were latent and I should take a class, maybe enroll in art school and also study astronomy in my free time, and then I could surely improve on this— I snapped out of it long enough to leave the bathroom, return to the bar, and pretend that nothing had happened.
Janet was sitting at the far end of the bar. When she saw me, she hopped off the stool and disappeared.
Spencer stretched across the bar and took my hand, squeezing it a little too hard, pulled me close and whispered loudly in my ear, “Are you holding?”
“You’re holding; my hand,” I said.
“Were you in the bathroom just now?” he said.
“No,” I said.
“Someone said they saw you.”
“I look like a lot of people,” I said.
“I haven’t told the manager yet,” said Spencer.
I didn’t answer.
“I won’t tell him,” he said. “But you have to do me a favor.”
* * *
“I said I’d drive him home,” was all I told Lucas before we left the bar.
“Don’t,” said Lucas. “I’ll give him cab fare. Don’t get in the car with him.”
“He just wants a ride,” I said.
“I don’t trust him,” said Lucas.
“He’s too drunk to do anything,” I said. I had no idea if that was true.
* * *
Spencer directed me, but I couldn’t believe—didn’t believe he lived in that neighborhood.
“Are we lost,” I said. “This looks bad,” I said. I drove past tight row houses with boarded-up windows, and on the sidewalk, every block or so there’d be a young guy in a knit hat leaning against a burned out streetlight, watching us. I felt like the car was moving in slow motion. It was two-thirty in the morning.
“Pull over,” said Spencer.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I said. I had no idea where I was. The street sign was missing; there was nothing but a pole. I was off the map.
“Pull over,” he ordered me through clenched teeth.
I pulled up to the curb, engine running, at an hour when decent people are home in bed, and a man I’d never seen before, a black man too skinny for his clothing, leaned through the window that Spencer had opened and said “Two rock for twenty. Two rock for twenty.” Spencer said something, and the guy jumped into the back seat of my car.
“Drive,” said Spencer.
“No,” I said.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” said Spencer. “Drive around the block. Now.”
So I drove around the block.
“Pull over,” he said. I did. The dealer got out. Spencer told me to drive again.
“Where?” I said. “I have no idea where we are.”
“Just go forward,” said Spencer. He pushed in my car’s cigarette lighter. “Why is this taking so fucking long?” he said.
“It takes that long,” I said. “How do I get to your house?” I knew he didn’t live in that neighborhood.
He didn’t answer right away. When the lighter was hot, he took it out and put one of his rocks on it and smoked it through an empty cardboard tube he must have kept in his jacket pocket.
Spencer’s crew cut was so blond you could see his pink scalp turning pinker the more he smoked. The stubble on his chin was so pale, it almost wasn’t there. He was the whitest white boy I’d ever seen. I didn’t know white boys like him smoked crack. I’d never seen anyone smoke crack before. Too many firsts for one night.
“Please tell me how to get to your house,” I said. I was afraid I was going to cry. I didn’t want Spencer to see that.
“Shut up,” he said. “You’re making too much noise. Shut up.” His voice was full of menace.
I was silent, but the tears were going down my face. There wasn’t anything I could do about that so I drove, with the smell of burning plastic, of vinyl seat-melt, of stripped inhibitions, of weak will.
Spencer tilted his head back and closed his eyes, breathed in and out too quickly, smoked some more. I followed his whispered directions to the good part of town, where the people were skinny on purpose. I let him out on a corner by a large brick Colonial. He walked off, jaunty like a sailor on shore leave, Gene Kelly in On the Town. As he approached the front steps where a lawn jockey painted white held up a ring, a motion sensor light blared on from above his head. I didn’t wait for him to go inside.
Part Five
I got home at four in the morning. I parked on the street across from the embassy. The Secret Service men nodded at me.
The light on my answering machine was blinking. I played the messages back. There were five, and they were all from Lucas, checking to see if I got home okay. The last one had been about twenty minutes ago. While I was listening to it, the phone rang. It was Lucas.
“I’m downstairs,” he said.
“Oh no,” I said.
“Let me in,” he said, “before the goons arrest me.”
I was glad the goons were guarding the empty headquarters of dispossessed Soviet diplomats and not the block where I’d just picked up a crack dealer.
I made Lucas tiptoe through the apartment to my bedroom.
“It’s freezing in here,” said Lucas. I handed him a sweatshirt. “That’s not going to fit me,” he said.
I told him about the nest. We went into the bathroom and looked out the window. It was done. There was a bird sitting on it.
“It’s a dove,” he said.
“That’s so romantic,” I said, and started to cry for real, with sound effects.
Without discussing it, we got into my bed and pulled the blanket over us. He put his arm around me, and we must have fallen asleep. When the sun came up, I awoke in the exact same position.
* * *
I didn’t get the job at the Post.
Before my contract was up, Madeline sent me for interviews at a few of her client’s companies. When the aerospace company Jackson-Furlong asked me back a third time, they took me around to meet people. I was hired to be a liaison between the contract representatives who sold equipment to the military and the engineers who designed the equipment. I wasn’t sure exactly what that would involve, but I liked the sound of “liaison.” And I liked even more that the job would allow me to pay off my credit cards. Maybe I could even begin to save some money. I told my roommate I was moving.
One of the engineers I met that day was a man named Devin Shields. He was so tall he had to bend in doorways. He had a mustache and longish dirty-blond hair. He reminded me of William Hurt in An Accidental Tourist, cute, if on the pudgy side. He was introduced to me as the brains behind Furlong’s innovative X-Series plane. I had no idea what that meant yet, but it sounded very 007 for a guy who was wearing a short-sleeved dress shirt. He had an air of always being preoccupied, and whenever I had reason to talk to him for work, he’d dash off as soon as the necessary conversation was done.
* * *
At the end of July, I met Lucas late one night, after he’d finished working at a wedding reception.
I said, “Let’s not to go to Heaven.”
“Agreed,” he said.
Instead we went to a bar on Dupont Circle called Childe Harold.
I told Lucas I was moving. “The birds are gone,” I said, “and I’m going, too.” The nest had been empty for weeks. Whoever took my place would be able to shut the window if they wanted.
“You could take the nest with you,” he said. “For luck.”
“Is it lucky?” I said.
“Doves,” he said.
Lucas had some news, too. “I’m going,” he said. “In September. It’s cheaper then, and there are fewer tourists.”
“I’m happy for you,” I said.
“I wish you could come,” he said.
We toasted his trip and my new job, and then he said, “Who is he?”
“Who?” I said.
“Come on,” he said. “There’s always someone, and you haven’t mentioned anyone in weeks.”
“There might be someone,” I said. “I’m not sure.”
“Whatever you say,” said Lucas.
* * *
In late September, I received a postcard with a photo on the front showing a jumble of red tile rooftops. Splashed across the bottom of the photo in big green letters were the words “Dubrovnik 1989.”
“You’d love it here,” said the message on the back. “Meeting fabulous people; staying longer, traveling around. Will let you know where I end up. Blowing kisses across the sea! L.”
I tacked the postcard to the padded wall of my cubicle and imagined Lucas wandering on cobbled streets hidden below those rooftops.
* * *
About a month later, I received a postcard from Oslo. “Too $$$ here, but the people are beautiful. Took a job in the kitchen of an inn at the edge of the world—going tomorrow. More soon! XOX Lucas”
* * *
That was the last time I heard from him.
* * *
A few days after I received the first postcard, Devin stopped by my cubicle. His project had fallen behind schedule. Apparently, the plane wasn’t quite working yet, but I was beginning to learn that there was nothing unusual about that. This time he didn’t run off immediately after giving me the standard paperwork, which I was supposed to organize and type and pass along to my boss.
Devin pointed to the postcard of Dubrovnik on my wall and said, “Have you been?”
“No,” I said. I started to say I was supposed to go, and I couldn’t afford it, but I only said, “I’d like to, though. A friend sent me that.”
“It’s a fascinating place,” said Devin. “A beautiful place. Pre-Christian, settled by Greek sailors.” In his voice was a hint of almost childlike excitement, as if he was eager for me to know about it–not as if he wanted to teach me, but as if he wanted me to understand so that I could feel excited about it the way he did. The real Dubrovnik.
“I didn’t know that,” I said. It was the first thing Devin said to me that had nothing to do with work.
He stood there, hands in his trouser pockets, rocking back and forth on his heels, and then nodded at the papers. “Let me know if there are any questions about that,” he said, and walked off.
The next day, he was back at my cubicle. “Am I interrupting?” he said. There was a mechanical pencil tucked behind his ear, and his hair was combed more neatly than usual.
“No,” I said. I was typing up notes from that morning’s meeting. My typing speed hadn’t improved, but no one at Furlong seemed to care about that.
“Would you like to have lunch in the cafeteria with me?” said Devin.
I could see his undershirt peeking from between the buttons of his dress shirt, the mole below his collarbone, and the blush that was creeping up his neck as he stood there over my desk like a white candle, lit.
I said yes.
