When I left the car service I went up to the apartment and straight into my room. I closed my door, although I had no idea whether my father was home. I sat on the bed for about a minute and then stood, walked to the bookshelf, and turned on my radio. I had one of those ghetto blasters that looked like it had eight cylinders and an automatic transmission. The sound jumped out like a physical thing, and I immediately turned it down. I must have been in a pretty good mood the last time I’d played it. Now, nothing sounded right. After trying a half-dozen stations I turned it off. I looked through my tapes, but it seemed like my own taste in music had turned to shit as thoroughly as that of every dj in New York. I glanced quickly around the room. It looked stupid: childish and small. I opened the door again, but I still felt closed in. Walking through the living room to the kitchen for a drink, I realized that I felt like I was inside the car service. Caged. Nothing was any different up here than it was down there, and suddenly I needed to be someplace where it was different. I walked all through the apartment. My father wasn’t home. I considered heading over to Gina’s, but I knew I would feel the same way over there, and then I’d have to contend with her trying to figure out what was wrong. There was no way I could explain anything to her because—aside from the fact that I didn’t have a terrific handle on things myself—she was a part of that whole car service world out there that had me boxed-in. I couldn’t expect her to see it any more than Lou or Little Joey would.
Then I thought of Kathy Popovich. It had been almost a week since I’d stood her up at the movies. Since I’d spent an afternoon bullshitting with her in the Pub. I felt like it was last night and last year at the same time. Nicky was alive then, and I was still, in some sense, a college student. The school stuff I could do without. I’d been kidding myself from jump. But the atmosphere—the conversation—was what I missed. And now I felt like I’d miss it for the rest of my life. I looked at my watch. Sociology of Deviance would let out at a quarter to four. If I didn’t mind paying to park in a lot I could make it easily. I changed my shirt, splashed some water on my face, and left.
Traffic was nonexistent on the Gowanus at three o’clock, and by three-thirty I handed the car over to the custody of some surly thirdworlder in a lot. I hated lots, and usually left for class early enough to secure one of the dozen legal parking spaces on the street in Manhattan. Giving my car keys to a stranger felt like wife swapping.
If I waited outside the building, I ran the risk of missing Kathy if she chose a different exit. On the other hand, if I waited right outside the classroom, I might bump into some of my former classmates or even the instructor. I’d come this far, so there was little point in playing it safe.
The class ended a few minutes after I arrived. I positioned myself about fifty feet down the hall and pretended to study a flyer on the bulletin board. It was about nuclear power being the ultimate evil, and how if we got rid of all of our atomic weapons so would everyone else. As nearly as I could determine, whoever wrote it was serious. Kathy walked out of the room with two other girls and went down the stairs at the opposite end of the hall. I let a minute pass so anyone else who might want to talk would have drifted off; then I went down the stairs as quickly as I could. I caught up with them on the corner, waiting for the light.
“Kathy?” I said, walking up behind her. If she hadn’t been in the middle I would have approached from the side and just quietly asked to talk to her, but now I was going to have to do the casual-encounter-onthe-street bit until we could talk privately.
“Mike.” She turned around. “Where the hell have you been? Are you okay?”
“Yeah...um...I’m fine.” There was no question that I was a smooth operator. The only thing left for me to do was to look down at my shoes and drag one toe across the pavement while thrusting my hands in my pockets. It was pretty rare for me to go into brainlock like that. Luckily, I didn’t have to think of anything for a moment, because she turned to the two other girls and promptly excused herself. They crossed when the light changed, and we walked back toward the school.
“I didn’t mean to pull you away from your friends,” I said. “You didn’t have to do that.”
“I hardly know them. We were only going to do a little window shopping. On my budget that’s just torture. Anyway, what’s going on with you? I was pissed off Saturday when you didn’t show up. Then you missed two classes in a row and I got worried. My friend in the bursar’s office gave me your phone number, but when I tried it I got some Chinese lady and she’d never heard of you.”
“I must have given them the wrong number.”
“You wrote your own phone number down wrong?”
“I have a small problem with voluntarily giving out information. I’m working on it. It’s why I took a deviance class,” I said, smiling.
“Why haven’t you been in class?”
“I’m cured?” She didn’t laugh. “Look, it’s a fairly complicated story. I’ll try to tell it if you want, but it’s cold out. I came to apologize for not showing up Saturday. You want to get some coffee or a drink and we’ll talk?”
“All right,” she said.
We were walking into the Village and I figured we could hit one of the cafés on Bleecker where you can drink liquor or coffee and they don’t chase you off if you linger. We talked about trivial things on the way and after a couple of blocks she slipped her arm through mine. I was very cool about it. Not once did I yell yippee out loud.
“I really am sorry about Saturday,” I said, as our drinks arrived. She had a cappuccino and I had black coffee and an amaretto.
“What happened to you anyway? I mean, I was with a couple of friends, so don’t think it was anything tragic, but I was annoyed. Then after a while I got worried.”
“Well, I certainly didn’t mean to upset you. I didn’t even connect not showing up for the movies with not showing up for school or I would have gotten in touch with you. I haven’t been thinking straight lately.” I didn’t know where I was going with this, but it occurred to me that she was being really decent about everything and maybe I could stick fairly close to the truth. “Saturday night a friend of mine died.”
“Jesus, I’m sorry. My God, no wonder you haven’t been around.”
“We weren’t that close. I mean we were, but I hadn’t seen him for a few months. We’d drifted a bit; I didn’t know it was going to happen.”
“How did he die?”
“He was killed.”
“Christ, that’s terrible.” She put her hand over mine on the table. “Of course you couldn’t know it was going to happen. You can’t let yourself get into feeling guilty about something like that. It’s this damn city.”
At that moment I wanted to say that I could know it was going to happen because I drove the car carrying the people who killed him. Because I saw him going downhill and didn’t do anything about it. Because after it happened I chose to go to work for the guy who set it up. Because I’m a soulless scumbag. “Yes,” I said. “It’s this damn city. Parts of it anyway.”
She sipped her cappuccino. “Did he get mugged? Was it crackheads? The news makes it sound like Brooklyn is crawling with them.”
I had to laugh. “Have you ever been to Brooklyn?” I asked.
“Once. I dated someone who lived in Brooklyn Heights.”
“Brooklyn Heights is not Brooklyn,” I said. “It’s a little piece of Manhattan they keep on the other side of the bridge so people from Manhattan can take a cab over, put one foot down, and say they’ve been in Brooklyn.”
“I see. Good you’re not defensive.”
“Not a bit.”
She smiled. “What is it about the outer boroughs that makes people so protective of their little enclaves?”
“Maybe it’s phrases like ‘little enclaves’.”
“Sorry.”
“No. That’s okay. They’re not offensive to me. The more people who think that way, the safer I feel.”
“From whom? Manhattanites?”
“Manhattanites?” I asked. “There are ten Manhattanites in all of Manhattan. The rest of the people who live on this rock, by and large, are assholes from Cleveland who got off a bus half a year ago and pay a million dollars a month rent to share a rat-infested two-bedroom in alphabet city with three strangers. They ride the subway at night, get mugged, give money to the bums they promoted to homeless when no one was looking. In other words, they do all the things that real New Yorkers never do. They stand on endless lines for movies and restaurants like this was Moscow or something. And when they finally get into a club after it’s not hip anymore they say, ‘Well, it used to be great before the people from the outer boroughs started coming’.”
“I’m from Cleveland,” she said.
“What?”
“I’m from Cleveland.”
She was staring at me with an absolutely blank expression. Mentally, I cut my tongue out and fed it to wolves. I knew this sticking-close-to-the-truth shit and speaking openly was going to be a mistake, but I didn’t think I’d bury myself before we’d finished coffee. “When I said Cleveland I wasn’t specifically—”
“I’m joking.”
“What?”
“I’ve never even been there. I couldn’t resist.” She began giggling.
“You’ve never been there?” I wanted to choke her, but I was laughing too.
“Nope.”
“Where are you from?”
“Philadelphia.”
“A trick to see if I’ll say bad things about Philadelphia?”
“No. Philadelphia, really. Does your formula still apply?”
“No,” I said, considering my words carefully. “Philadelphia’s close enough to New York. Aside from that, it’s almost like a real city by itself.”
“Well, we lived in the suburbs.”
“Aha. That’s not what you said.”
“Everyone talks like that. If you live in Brookline or Quincy and someone asks where you’re from, you say Boston.”
“Are those places in Boston?” I asked.
“Just outside.”
“Well, are people who say Boston lying?”
“Of course not,” she said.
“Okay, that proves my point.”
“What point?”
“People from the outer boroughs are the real New Yorkers.” I smiled and held my hands out, palms up.
“Touché, and who cares? No more geography. Did you want to talk about your friend?”
“No,” I said. “That’s the last thing I want to talk about. I just wanted to let you know why I wasn’t there Saturday.”
“Don’t worry about it. You can copy my notes from the last two classes. I’m a manic note-taker so it’s almost as good as being there, except for the spelling.”
“Thank you.” Somehow I felt that this wasn’t the time to tell her that I was dropping out. It would lead to the kind of questioning and conversation that would ruin the way I was feeling. This wasn’t the same as when I avoided conversation with Gina. That was usually because it was too much hard work and her range of interests was limited, even by my standards. I didn’t want to get into anything deep with Kathy because I was afraid it would break the mood.
I wasn’t sure why I liked her. Sometimes she was witty and fast enough to make me keep my guard up. Other times she’d lapse into the airhead college student drivel that the rest of the class seemed to favor. They formed all their opinions based on other people’s theories, and had little or no experience with life in the real world. That had always infuriated me, but now, listening to Kathy, I realized hers was more a sense of innocence than ignorance. It was appealing. Maybe it was her humor, or that she didn’t try to come off like she had all the answers. Then again, maybe I just wanted to sleep with her more than I wanted a VISA gold card, and I would have made excuses for devil worship.
We talked about the class and about world events—two subjects she showed vastly too much interest in. After an hour or so I suggested we go to dinner.
“Not here,” I said. “These places are great for dessert and coffee, but they really aren’t for dinner. I know a couple of spots in Soho or Little Italy. It depends on what you want. We can go into Brooklyn if that’s all right with you. I’m more familiar with places there.”
“Mike,” she said, “I can’t afford to eat dinner out. I can barely afford the cappuccino.”
I was confused for a moment. “I asked you to come for coffee, and now I’m asking you to come to dinner. I don’t expect you to pay for anything.”
“Oh no,” she said. “That’s too much money.”
“It’s no money at all. Listen, I told you I’d be there Saturday and I wasn’t. Let me buy dinner. I’ll feel better.”
“Are you sure you want to do this? You don’t have to make anything up to me.”
“Of course I’m sure. I’m starving.”
“All right.”
When the check for the drinks came we did another Miss Manners tug-of-war. I’d never been out with a girl who tried to pay for anything. I didn’t mind the idea as long as what we could do wasn’t strapped to her budget. If it was, we’d probably be eating White Castle on city buses in the future. My father said there was nothing worse than being poor. He said it often. I always figured he was right, but I really didn’t know. I never saw my parents fight about money, or even discuss it. If I needed cash for anything when I was a kid, my father would peel it off the roll he always carried, and I was set. When I turned fourteen he insisted I get a part-time job. Going out takes money, he’d said. And you’ll be wanting to do plenty of going out. He hadn’t been wrong. I’d worked part-time ever since, full-time during summers. When I started driving, I was good for seventy-five a day off the books, and I was working four days a week. My old man paid a whopping two-seventy a month for our six-room rent-controlled apartment, and he wouldn’t take a dime from me, so whatever I earned was pocket money. If I lived on my own, like Kathy did, I’d probably be broke, too. As it was, I had the best of both worlds. My father and I both lived on our own. We just did it in the same apartment.
Kathy and I settled on Little Italy and she let me pick the restaurant. It wouldn’t have been a very long walk, but it was getting damn cold out, and besides, I kept hearing the car calling to me the farther we strayed from the lot. I suggested that we pick it up and drive downtown. I knew it was sufficiently past rush hour and that I’d get a spot.
“You drove in?” she said. “God, I haven’t met anyone who owns a car since I moved to New York. Maybe you are rich.”
I was going to point out that I’d never met anyone who took public transportation until I started college, but thought better of it. One of us was emerging as fairly provincial during the course of the evening, and I had a nagging suspicion it was me.
We parked on Hester Street and walked to Tommaso’s on Mulberry. My father had worked with Vincent, the owner’s son, in the Sanitation Department. We were seated promptly and had red wine and cold antipasto brought to us before we ordered. Tommaso’s wasn’t one of the more famous places on the tiny strip, but it was one of the few family-owned spots that had survived. It was nestled between two newer, glitzy cafes that lived off the tourist crowd.
“I like it here,” Kathy said. “I’ve only been to the area two or three times, but it’s so colorful. I wish I knew more places down this way.”
“There aren’t really that many more places,” I said. “Little Italy is only about three square blocks these days. It used to be everything above Canal and south of the Village, including Soho. The Chinese came up from the south, and the yuppies and artists moved in from the north and the west, and bingo, you’re left with four restaurants, a couple of social clubs, and a souvenir store that sells Mussolini t-shirts and ‘Kiss Me I’m Italian’ buttons.”
“Really? That’s so sad.”
I shrugged. “I guess. Everything changes, though. The Chinese pushed the Italians out. The Italians must have pushed somebody else out when they got here, though I can’t imagine who. In fifty years, people will be sitting on this spot in the last Chinese restaurant talking about what a shame it is that the Orientals were driven out by Croatians.”
“Probably,” she said, laughing. “That doesn’t make it seem so pessimistic.” She looked around the dining room. “It still bothers me a little. I know everybody moves to the suburbs in a few generations and we all become generic Americans, but there seems to be such a thinning of ethnic culture when that happens. And what if they don’t want to move? Are businesses and storekeepers actually forced out?”
“I don’t know for sure. My father says it doesn’t happen like that very much. He says that whatever the Chinese got in this neighborhood they paid for, and probably much more than it was worth. From what I know of people, anybody who can sells out the minute somebody waves money under their nose, and they jump at the opportunity to become a ‘generic American’.”
“Awfully cynical outlook,” Kathy said. “Probably too true. But what about the old people? The ones who live forty or fifty years in places like this. Can they handle the change? And the younger ones who just don’t want to go, or don’t have the education and skills to—I don’t know—assimilate, I guess. I think about people like that: the hangerson. You know what I mean?”
As she stared at me over her wine glass I had to remind myself that Kathy Popovich knew virtually nothing about me. Did I know what she meant? I couldn’t have known any better if she’d said, What about guys like you, Mike? What happens to you in this changing society? Because clearly you’re the kind of loser who’ll never be able to adapt or move on.
I looked back into her intense brown eyes and assured myself that it was I who was always making those accusations; I who felt that my chunk of the planet was being eroded from under me and that I was as ill-prepared to deal with it as any seventy-year-old gindaloon on Mott Street.
She smiled suddenly. “Hey. There’s no right or wrong answer. I was just thinking out loud. Are you in there?”
“I’m sorry. I guess you struck a nerve. I worry sometimes. I mean, about my father.”
“Oh, I didn’t realize. Do you have older brothers and sisters? Are your parents elderly? I always assume that everybody’s family is like mine. Just conceited, I guess.”
“I think everyone does that. My father is fifty-one. I don’t have any brothers or sisters.”
“Fifty-one. He’s a very young man. My father is fifty and he’s more like an older brother to my sister and me sometimes. She’s twenty-five. My parents took us both to see the Rolling Stones at JFK stadium when I was ten. He still sends tapes of any new bands he thinks I might like, but frankly I think he’s trying to steer me more to jazz and some of the experimental, intellectual stuff now. I really feel dumb next to him sometimes.”
“I feel dumb next to my father quite often,” I said. “Enough that it’s become a comfortable feeling.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean. Is he a young fifty or an old fifty? I mean, did he ever take you to concerts or anything like that?”
“No. Nothing like that, really.” I decided not to mention that he’d taken me with him and my mother to see Frank Sinatra at Carnegie Hall when I was six. They dressed formally and were even able to rent me a tiny tuxedo from a place on Thirteenth Avenue that stocked a few of the small suits for ringbearers at weddings. I’d always thought it was fairly silly, but now, hearing Kathy’s story, I thanked God that I didn’t have hip parents who did embarrassing things like take their kids to rock concerts. If my father and I did occasionally relate as brothers, it wasn’t because he was a young fifty-one; it was more that I was a very old almost-twenty. “He took me bowling a lot. We were in a father/son league.”
She rolled her eyes. “An old fifty.”
I rolled mine. “Yeah.”
Dinner arrived and we continued to make small talk through the meal. Kathy was a tough person to get a handle on. Sometimes she was out in space, sometimes right on target. The hard part was figuring which was the personality trait and which the aberration. I decided to keep playing both sides of the fence until I could sort it out.
After dinner I hung back and let Kathy steer the conversation on the walk to the car and the drive to her apartment in the East Village. We wound up on social issues again and, following her lead, I passionately endorsed affirmative action, racial quotas, abortion rights, and threw in what little anti-nuke rhetoric I’d gleaned from the poster at school. There was a sticky moment when she began talking about Israel. I knew she was Jewish, so I almost instinctively went for the poor, suffering Tribe surrounded by enemies. At the last second, though, I decided that she had, after all, voluntarily moved from some middleclass suburb of Philly to Manhattan, so instead I rambled about the land-hungry oppressors of innocent Palestinians. I was tense for a moment, but she joined in almost immediately and sang the praises of some Arabic-sounding “freedom fighter” I’d never heard of. It was a judgment call and it had been close, but it left me with the kind of giddy exhilaration I’d felt once at Belmont when I picked the winners of the first three races, knowing there were six to go.
We parked a couple of hundred feet away from Kathy’s building. It was a faded tenement-looking thing, which, I was surprised to realize upon closer examination, looked more like where I lived than I cared to admit. As we were approaching, a woman who’d beaten me to a closer spot was getting out of her battered VW Rabbit. She locked it up and walked away. When we passed the car Kathy slowed, then stopped. I followed her gaze to the rear side window and saw a rather elaborate version of a tellingly popular sign. It was hand-lettered and read: No Radio in Car or Trunk. No Spare Tire. Windows Broken Twice. Trunk Broken Into Three Times. Nothing of Value. You Got it All.
“Shit,” Kathy said, “that’s horrible.”
“It’s sickening,” I said.
“Yes.” She looked over at me. “It is.”
“How can anyone let themselves be reduced to that? Groveling, begging people not to steal from you. She probably jogs wearing a t-shirt that says I’ve been mugged twice and raped three times—nothing of value left. If I were stealing radios I’d break that window for the time I lost reading the sign.” I stopped before I hyperventilated. “No radio” signs were a pet peeve of mine.
“I was thinking,” Kathy said slowly, “that it’s horrible that our society is so degenerate that we have to live like that. I wasn’t really thinking about blaming the victim.”
Shit. Major fuck-up. It was probably the t-shirt remark. I had to retreat and regroup. We couldn’t argue now. I was almost in the goddamn apartment.
I struggled for a nice even tone, something like a radio dj. “Of course the main problem is people stealing radios, not people putting signs in their cars,” I said as I tried to get her walking forward, toward the door again. She moved, but hesitantly. “It just bothers me to see people degraded by begging criminals not to assault them.”
“Even if that’s true,” she said, “you know it’s overly simplistic. And ‘criminal’ is such a vague term. There are many kinds of people who commit crimes, and many different reasons.”
Tell me about it. “Do you think that matters to the woman who’s had her windows broken and her trunk popped?”
“Probably not. Maybe it should, though. Besides, you didn’t have much sympathy for that woman a minute ago. You were making fun of her.”
“I have plenty of sympathy for people who are victims. I just don’t approve of advertising it. People who victimize other people aren’t going to feel bad for you because you list your previous record of assaults on your car window. It just means you’re an easy mark.”
“It means you’re weak?”
“Exactly.”
“So this is about weakness. You shouldn’t let people see you as vulnerable, whether you are or not?” She stopped at the foot of her stoop, then stepped up on the first step and turned to face me at eye level.
I knew what my answer was, but I didn’t know what answer she wanted. “I’m not sure,” I said.
“Well,” she smiled. “I’m glad there’s something you’re not sure of. Would you like to come up for a little while?”
“Sure,” I said. I decided to keep my mouth shut more often.
Inside the first doorway all similarities between her building and mine ended. They had probably been identical at some point in time, but while mine had become a little shabby, this had become a slum. The inside hallway door had been removed and the hall stank of piss. There was graffiti on the walls that continued up the stairwell, and, though the mailboxes were intact, they looked like they’d been shelled for several days.
My apartment was in an eight-unit building that was structurally the same as Kathy’s: four stories, two apartments per floor. Each apartment ran front to back—railroad rooms. We were on the third floor, right. My room was in front on the street, and my father’s was in the back. Between us was enough room for a landing strip. Kathy’s building appeared to have been haphazardly chopped into about thirty units of randomly picked sizes. She lived on the fourth floor, of course, and took the stairs at a near sprint.
I tried not to seem openly exhausted, and waited patiently for my heart rate to stabilize while she opened the dozen or so locks on the dented metal door. She wasn’t winded at all. It occurred to me that if I did manage to get her into bed she’d probably kill me.
The last lock clicked, and she swung the door open to total darkness and went in. I stood in the doorway until she turned a lamp on. The apartment was small, a room and a half, but had three windows over the street, so it didn’t feel closed-in. It was furnished sparsely and—I was a little taken aback—plainly. It looked a bit like my apartment. It looked like an older person lived here. Kathy, with her all black outfits, black hair, and occasionally, black nail polish, seemed to me a little more bohemian than this.
Kathy made make-yourself-comfortable and don’t-mind-the-mess noises while she took our jackets to a closet. I moved to the bookshelves to see how her reading tastes ran. The decor had thrown me, but the books were reassuringly predictable. School texts mixed in with the obligatory pop-psych and paperback feminist stuff. A few science fiction novels, most of them dragon-and-castle looking fantasies. No mysteries, no spy stories.
I liked to read, but almost never did. For someone who didn’t accomplish anything by the end of the day, I seemed to be busy an awful lot. When I did read, it was mostly spy stuff. My father read a lot of it, and I read what was around the house and got hooked. It was the only way I could stand hearing about places that weren’t New York without them seeming boring.
Behind me Kathy put a record onto a turntable which was part of a sound system that looked like it had been thrown together out of spare parts. The sound was decent though, and the music was familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it. She went over to the kitchenette area.
“Would you like something to drink?” she asked.
“Okay. Anything you have besides scotch,” I said. “Bourbon’s great and anything else is almost as good.”
I turned from the bookshelf to see Kathy standing in front of the refrigerator holding a container of orange juice in her left hand and a bottle of ginger ale in her right.
“I was just going to have some juice. I didn’t think you’d be up for any more alcohol. I may have some vodka, though, if you want to mix it with the o.j.”
The only thing I wanted to mix vodka with right then was an ice cube and the inside of my mouth, but I declined entirely and had a glass of ginger ale instead. I’d been hitting it very light all evening, but if Kathy thought I wouldn’t want another drink it was because she thought I’d had enough already. I’d picked that less-than-subtle hint up from Gina over the years. Kathy brought the drinks to the sofa I was on and sat with me. I assumed it was a pull-out bed, unless she slept in the bathtub.
“What record is this?” I asked her. “It sounds like something I’ve heard, but I’m not sure.”
“It’s Dire Straits. The album is called Making Movies. It’s their third. I’m sure you’ve heard it; there were several singles off it that did very well.”
“I heard something by them. Didn’t they do Sultans of Swing a long time ago?”
“Ages ago. Even this is a couple of albums old now.”
“I don’t follow music much.”
“What do you listen to?”
“Whatever’s on the radio when I’m working. I’m usually behind the wheel all day. I listen to oldies, rap, a little heavy metal, some old disco.”
“What about folk or jazz? Is classical out of the question?”
“Only if there’s a quiz. I’d probably like it, but I’ve never heard much of it.”
“Hmm. I see I’ve got my work cut out for me,” she said, leaning forward a little as she put her glass on the floor.
This, I thought, was a reason for optimism. It sounded like being told there was a future here, beyond this night. I scared myself by deciding I liked the idea.
“Well,” I said, ditching my glass as I leaned the rest of the way to her, “if there’s that much work to be done you’d better get started.”
It was one of those slow motion, you-definitely-see-it-coming kisses. She narrowed her eyes to slits, but kept them open enough that she wouldn’t miss my mouth. I put my hands around her waist and she rested hers around the back of my neck, half-cupped. Her nails—covered that evening in clear polish—moved in small circles beneath my shirt collar at the top of my spine. The touch was so light as to be almost nonexistent, and in fact I gently arched back a couple of millimeters to assure myself that it was her I was feeling. We kissed like that for a long time without moving. I tasted the orange juice in her mouth and something stronger, sharper, on her tongue. Peppermint. She’d speared a lifesaver or tic-tac while she was getting the drinks. It reminded me of Gina because she popped them constantly before we kissed when she was lying to me about quitting smoking. I was pretty sure that Kathy didn’t smoke. Last minute nerves, I supposed. While it was comforting to know that she had them too, I also realized that I was nowhere near as spontaneous as I’d thought.
She moved her hands around to the front of my throat, still keeping her fingers under my collar. Then one hand moved up along my cheek with that same tantalizing, barely grazing motion, while the other moved down slightly and began unbuttoning my shirt. I slid a hand around her back, and after some searching, up under her black turtleneck. She stopped unbuttoning and both her hands lay motionless, flat against me for a moment. She drew back a little and we disengaged from the kiss.
“It’s romantic as hell,” she said, gently removing my hand from under her shirt. “But the way this thing fits it’ll take until dawn.”
She crossed her arms in front of her and held the bottom of the turtleneck in her hands, pulling it off inside-out. Underneath, she was wearing what appeared to be a small man’s athletic undershirt. I’d never seen her in anything white before. It softened her and made her look a few years younger. I leaned forward again as she draped her shirt over an arm of the sofa, but she put a hand up, stopping me.
“Your turn,” she said.
I quickly unbuttoned the rest of my shirt, failing miserably at not gawking at Kathy’s breasts. When I started to slide the shirt off my arms I turned a little so that I was facing her directly, my right side almost pressed against the fabric of the couch. This was always when I was at my most self-conscious, especially with a girl I didn’t know very well. My tattoo was high enough up my right arm that even as early as September it could be easily concealed by clothing, so I didn’t think Kathy had ever seen it.
In the past it hadn’t posed much of a problem with girls in Brooklyn or Staten Island, but it was inevitably the kiss of death with girls in Manhattan. Even the real artsy ones—and I was assuming Kathy fell comfortably into that category—only liked “new wave” style tattoos: small, Day-Glo colored things that looked to me like skin diseases from Star Trek. Mine was a cross done in black, with no other colors used at all. Two small birds held a ribbon over it that read “In Memory of Mom.” I got it a week after she died. My father never said one word about it. Gina said it was sweet. Apparently in Manhattan it was about as hip as spats.
My intention had been to kill the lights in Kathy’s apartment before we got this close, but then I hadn’t counted on her making most of the moves and me just keeping pace. I got the shirt off without a problem, but I couldn’t stay in the one spot all night. Kathy had slid down into a half-prone position opposite me. I was beginning to suspect that even if the sofa pulled open, it wouldn’t tonight. I moved forward, and when I was directly over her and beginning to lower myself, I reached out with my right arm to turn off the lamp behind her. The thing was ancient and actually had a pull cord, but it didn’t take anywhere near the seven weeks it felt like to turn it off. There was another light on in the apartment, but it was a distance away, and dim enough that we were in a shadowy semi-darkness.
“Are you trying to hide your tattoo?” she asked, when our lips were about three inches apart and closing.
“No,” I said. I didn’t move.
“Let me see it.”
I shifted a little and turned my arm so it was as visible as it was going to be without more light. She ran a hand over it and studied it for a minute, though how she could read it was beyond me.
“Your mother is dead?”
“Yeah. A couple of years.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Thank you.” The record ended then and the apartment was absolutely quiet.
“Why didn’t you say anything?” she asked.
“About what? My mother?”
“Yes. I asked you a few questions about your family. I would have thought something like this would come to mind.”
I was much too close to her eyes to think about turning away.
“Does this have to do with your ‘problem’ about voluntarily giving out information?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said, “kind of. It’s not something I like to talk about.”
“You didn’t want to talk about your friend who died, either.”
“That’s true, I didn’t. And still don’t.” I moved a few inches away from her face so that I could get a better look at it and gauge the seriousness of her mood. I didn’t much care for the direction this was taking.
“What else don’t you like to talk about?”
“I don’t know. A lot of things, I guess.”
“Do you have a girlfriend?”
“No.”
“Really?”
“Really. I was almost engaged, but we broke up a couple of months ago. Why? What’s bothering you? Is it because I hid the tattoo?”
“No. I think the tattoo is interesting. I just don’t like you not telling me about your mother when we were discussing families. It feels like you’re not being up-front with me.”
“I’m being completely up-front with you,” I said. “Some things are just hard for me to talk about. I’m sure you don’t bare your soul right off the bat with people.”
“So this is about weakness—not appearing vulnerable?”
I felt trapped. I decided that all those times when I thought Kathy was out in space she was actually taking it all in, and hadn’t missed a word I’d said or my inflection when I’d said it. She seemed angry, and I didn’t have the slightest idea what to do.
“Do you have a boyfriend?” I asked, smiling.
“I’m seeing two men, but neither thinks it’s exclusive.”
I stopped smiling. “You’re seeing two guys?”
“I’m seeing anyone I please. I go on dates. Right now there are two men I date more or less regularly.”
I hated the word “men.” Why couldn’t she call them guys, boys, dudes, anything? Men sounded like Brooks Brothers trenchcoats, gray hair at the temples, attaché cases, and the Wall Street Journal. It sounded like money and power. It sounded like not me.
“Let me ask you something,” I said. “If you were to become serious with one of these guys...”
“I don’t plan to become serious with anyone.”
“Nobody plans or doesn’t plan to become serious. It happens.”
“I plan. And I’m pretty accurate.”
I sat up. “Why don’t you want to get involved with anyone?”
She propped herself up on her elbows and kind of shrugged. “Many reasons. Exclusivity indicates ownership.”
“Come on. That crap is right off the back cover of one of those books. You didn’t even have to bend the spine.”
“You don’t agree? Do you think it’s better to have a relationship where one partner thinks it’s exclusive and the other one is deceptive and sees other people anyway?”
“I don’t have a fucking girlfriend,” I snapped.
“It was a hypothetical question,” she said very softly.
I suddenly remembered the Sundance Kid telling Butch Cassidy to save the last bullet for himself.
What had gone wrong? I was still in the ballpark. Nothing really had to change. I could just pretend it was all right, like I did with the politics and the social shit, but I didn’t want to. Besides, there was too much honesty floating around this room, and too much honesty was a very dangerous thing.
“I think I’m gonna go,” I said. “I apologize for yelling.”
Kathy looked quite surprised, but she didn’t say anything. I put my shirt back on. She got up and went to the closet for my jacket.
“How much of this has been you tonight, and how much was an act?”
“All me,” I said. “No act.”
“I’ll see you in school? I have notes for you.”
School. Jesus. “Yeah, I’ll see you in class. I want to get those notes xeroxed. Thanks.”
“Okay.” She was looking at me like she knew I was full of shit. I had to get out of there.
“Thanks for dinner, really,” she said when I was at the door. “And don’t fall off the planet like that again. Try talking to me. It isn’t so bad.”
“Yeah,” I said as she closed the door, but I knew I wouldn’t. It would be like learning a whole other language, and I was too old to try anything that new.
When I hit the street I felt safe again. It was like coming out of a coma. The air was cold and I could think straight. I almost turned around and went back, but the part of my brain that spends its life on hold kicked in and kept me moving toward the car. I’d had my ass kicked once already and discretion was, after all, the better part of valor. Besides, I was scared to death. Kathy seemed to live completely on the surface. I felt that there was nothing I couldn’t ask her; she had no masks at all. I not only couldn’t imagine living like that, I didn’t even accept that anyone else could. It was unnatural. One of the earliest rules that my father taught me, long before I understood its meaning, was: Never volunteer information. He’d drilled it into me, buried in the midst of all the standard little kid teachings. Don’t talk to strangers. Don’t cross against the light. Never volunteer information. Chew your food well before you swallow it.
I had this image of me and Kathy at age four: her father telling her that the policeman is your friend, mine telling me not to let anyone know where I lived.
It wouldn’t work out with Kathy, and that was a shame. I liked her, but to live like that would drive me nuts. Not to mention her seeing two guys. She had tossed that off like it was nothing. Still, spending time with her convinced me of two things I’d been leaning toward already. I didn’t much want to work for Tony and I really didn’t want to marry Gina. Not now anyway. Probably never. That realization made me feel pretty happy. I’d have to thank Kathy. Maybe there was something to all this openness. Apparently I’d been withholding information from myself.
Driving over the bridge, pieces of the Manhattan skyline lit up my rearview mirror. At that time of night I knew it was just under fourteen minutes from there to my door. Manhattan was supposed to be the center of the universe, but like most Brooklynites, my neighborhood, and then the borough, was my universe, and Manhattan was the playground out in the backyard. Close enough to go frolic whenever the mood struck; far enough away that you didn’t hear the noise when you came home. And like an amusement park that never closed, the skyline seemed visible from everywhere. That view at night was one of the most impressive sights I’d ever seen. I’d watched its neon silhouette grow and change from my bedroom window all my life, and I never tired of it. But I did rather like keeping it where it was, out there in the backyard, and I always felt a certain relief when I was off the bridge and back on the streets, heading home.