There was once an ad man, a journalist, and a junkie, and they all lived and breathed like fleas in the coat of New York City. One day the ad man walked out of his office and onto a midtown avenue. It said, here. Here in the city of use where the flags of the hotels and clubs fluttered their sheets above his head, here he had a choice. Today he had a choice, voices to listen to, to weigh, and pausing on the street he felt an offering in the air. It was a clear electric blue day in April. His lover, she mingled in that thrilling corner of his heart that still wanted to destroy himself, to make himself an early grave. His lover and her drugs, there was that, or home to his wife. His choice. He did not hate his wife. He loved her in the way one might love and fear a teacher. One day they had married to end a fight. Now they were husband and wife. Lover or wife? How many times has the question been poised on a set of wet lips for the first time in creation? But he was a free man, wasn’t he? And in the scheme of things Charlie Way was a lucky man. He was young and working on the Gillette campaign. It was the Best a Man Can Get. Good work, lucrative work, but like a lot of people in the twilight of their twenties, Charlie felt his was the success of an impostor. The Best a Man Can Get. He saw the steely grays, the minted teal freshness and aquamarines of the new line, so painfully focused grouped for maximum brand approval. Sure, he had stolen some color combinations from the new warm weather NHL expansion teams, but so what. That old mantra, the Best a Man Can Get, he was giving it a face-lift, a new meaning that had met with such overwhelming approval it seemed only natural to celebrate. Drugs or wife? The competing pressure systems on this clear banner day of advertorial triumph muddled his mind. The street did not help. It was a medley of after-work sneakers on beefcake pantyhose and sirens. His day had been too busy for lunch, and now the beckoning cherry light of the overhead Sbarro pizza lamps shone down on the toppings like a Christmas offering. Sbarro pizza. It said, here, come in here, and though he knew it was going down, Charlie Way could not see the sun setting anywhere at all.
In his trench coat like the others, with his thinning blond hair like the others, and briefcase that held the work of the impostor, he stood on the street thinking of Eve like no other. He still wanted to alter his life, see what would happen to it if he tried to throw it away, and on the perimeter of Times Square he waited for a sign. Fuck it, he’d go home. It was Thursday. He’d wait until Friday. He was making the right move. He’d go home and walk the dog. He knew the other way, Eve’s way, was the wrong way, but that’s what he liked about it, and how was one to reconcile that? He disappeared into the subway.
On the same day as Charlie was making his choice, a journalist was waiting for a story. He worked in his apartment alone, and his mind was thrilled by trends and the current goings-on of urban men and women. He made a living as a freelancer, that is to say, he hustled. He scooped up music, fashion, suicides, current events that, if one thought about it, represented something in society, and he put the loose ends together so that his readers could understand them generally, so that they might be made sense of as a trend. Eric Fogleman, he was a well-respected young generalizer, and it didn’t hurt that he had an agent with a tongue like a wet whip. He did not need to look up the word “zeitgeist” in the dictionary anymore. It was the royal “we” of trend reporting where he had made his mark. For instance, he had broken the “cocooning” story.
“We are staying home and ordering out more and more these days,” Eric had written.
He was tall and chiseled-looking, and though God had not granted him the kind of looks he seemed to claim he deserved, he had little trouble getting laid. All day long one could see just how finely toothed the comb was that had passed through his hair. He groomed himself as a man who looked like he knew what was going on right now, at this very moment in time, and he cultivated this look so as to capitalize on story pitches that would lead to work, money, and fame. Once he had even been interviewed on Sonya Live. Currently he was working on a story about heroin use among a young educated class of people in New York, and he felt the story meant something about an entire generation in despair.
Though Charlie and the journalist had never met, they happened to live in the same building, and they shared an interest in a woman.
That woman, she was a little bitch, and waking, she found there was something wrong with her soul. It was nothing new for Eve. The room seemed gassed by a sad late afternoon sun. She sat up in bed feeling the mis-invitation of the city greet her with its own personal melancholy. The reap-what-you-sow principle, it was getting a little belated in her life not to have recognized its ruling principle. She was filled with a petulant whining that was irresistible to men like Charlie. She whined a lot. Not on the surface because it was too pretty, but somewhere more deeply epidermal, one wanted to slap her, right across her porcelain junkie face with its pinpointed eyes. She never left Manhattan. If she left Manhattan, her world would very nearly be over.
But what is it that has already been said about dishonesty in a woman—that it can almost always be forgiven? Charlie could always forgive Eve. Her smooth, finely shaved calves, the bathing oils, the brush strokes of conditioner that glistened in soft black hair. Before she went out to score there was her nightly tub and six or seven glasses of sweet dessert wine, or the whiskey sours she sweetened with five seconds of sugar poured from a stolen restaurant dispenser, the cotton between her toes, the red polish and the waxes, the sighs of resignation and boredom, frustration, and the half Englishisms she had the pretension to pout out even to herself in the tub. Life was so hard, and junk so easy. Or was it the other way around? She did not know. She wished she could tear her addiction out with the same zeal of self-loathing she used to wax her bikini line. But she was born into the wrong time because she could have made someone a shiningly devious wife and lived out a relatively harmless alcoholic life in a well-curbed suburb, but she couldn’t.
As she stepped out onto the street the stable of men in her life percolated in her mind. Tonight Charlie was a prominent one because he had not called. The weather, cusped between spring and summer, reminded her of his fair hair in her lap, and as she walked her neighborhood street, she wished he had called. But he hadn’t, not for a while, and since she was one of those women who had one of those relationships with the telephone, his not calling was naturally of interest to her. Eve was wearing a woolen fire-engine-red cocktail suit that had belonged to her grandmother. Its mink collar caressed the back of her neck. Someone had left a bottle of cassis in her apartment so she had a nice little drunk on. She felt wonderful and in the periphery of her mind the conglomerated attention of men hovered like servants, or were they angels fanning her self-esteem? She felt extremely pretty on the front end of her drunk. In fact, as she stood waiting for a cab, she saw herself as the wealthy wife of a Phoenician maritime trader with a husband of means out at sea. Tonight she knew where she was going, and she understood the price of what it would be, and she did not need to be reassured of why she was going because she did not ask it, and how many people can say that at the outset of a New York evening?
She hailed a cab. There was barely any wind, but what there was brushed against her face with the textured embrace of a flower petal. Was it the encroachment of summer heat or the residual exhaust of an extinguished rush hour? It was difficult to tell. Opening the taxi door, she looked overhead at the intermittent coral pink clouds that spat out along a diluted blue sky. It was a weak sky, thought Eve, meek and ready to be taken over by the night.
At Rivington Street she stepped out into Spanish drug dealerdom. With the sun racing up the street at her, she looked like a stop sign in her red dress but who cared? She felt alive, and as for her friends? They had slipped away from the matter at hand, from what they needed. Their lives were not about a moment anymore. That is what she told herself standing on the street alone, that was the difference, the moment, she still had hers and they did not. There was a bodega on the corner and walking inside to buy cigarettes, Eve thought to herself what were these places? The store sold to the drug trade, and she felt the oppressive specificity of needs it served, the idle chrome meat slicer, the butane refill canisters, the cut-rate cigarettes, Joy and bleach and other miscellaneous needle-cleaning detergents. Even the empty Laundromat across the street with its motionless little holes stood at an attentive standstill, operable only for the washing of money.
“Baby, baby,” said Big Bob, coming around a corner. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
“Hi,” said Eve.
“And going to get higher.”
The dealer’s eyes stood hatched at attention.
“There’s this guy I want you to meet,” said Big Bob.
“I don’t fix. This guy sounds like he fixes. He’s got this nice contaminated syringe and a rusty pecker that doesn’t…”
“Oh man, Eve,” said Big Bob. “It’s like how many times do I have to bump up against your paranoia.”
“What would you do without paranoia, Bob?” asked Eve. “Think about the coffee costs it cuts.”
“I know, this place is a hard nut,” he said. “I couldn’t believe it. I got here in my brother’s van this winter…”
It was Big Bob’s van story. She had friends who were worse, who repeated themselves more often. Everyone did it, and some stories one could listen to a thousand times over, but the burden of Big Bob’s winter van tale was that it illustrated the transitive power of debt. Big Bob owed his brother and Eve owed Big Bob. The transitive principle. It was pitiful. This life was pitiful, and inside her dead grandmother’s suit pocket she balled up her little hand in rage.
“Fine, let’s go see him,” she said.
“…so cold I thought my balls were going to fall off, and my brother’s van was in the city’s hands…”
“Bob.”
“Cool, you don’t fix, right, that’s OK. He can work with that, I guess. He’s just a guy I need you to meet.”
They walked over to Houston, crossed it, and moved onto Avenue B. The beginning of that street with all its hitching street barter and kinetic confrontations and greetings sickened her. It was a sentimental world these men inhabited with their spiking drug-fed emotions and dramatic bullshit. They walked on, Big Bob nearly a paternal figure now, his sweat-tinged bulk pulling her along. On the corner of Eighth Street a man on a raised scaffolding was giving a Catholic church a new coat of yellow paint. Big Bob crossed himself.
“I didn’t know we were that way, Bob,” said Eve. “I thought you would have saved that for your basic mother-worshiping Spanish coke dealer, you know, bags on Saturday, church on Sunday?”
“Who the fuck do you think you are? Joan of Arc. Miss Beacon of the Eternal Light,” said Big Bob, pulling up short. “You’re down to me, baby. But it’s like I can’t get that through your pretty little head, and it’s really pissing me off. You’re down to me five bags and a favor, you know what I’m saying? That’s just a fact. The fact. Five bags and a favor. I don’t even have to be here right now. I could leave, then you’d come running looking for a party a little later on, but what would happen if I say to Julio, ‘Julio, there’s that bitch who’s fucking you because she’s fucking me?’ You know what I’m saying? And then it’s pop-goes-the-weasel for miss spoiled junkie bitch. You’re in a carpet, and they’ve pawned your cute suit. Some other fashion bitch comes along and buys your dress. She pulls it off the rack, and you’re in a carpet. She says, ‘Wow, this is a fantastic deal, these places are great…’ ”
“What kind of carpet?” asked Eve.
Have you ever followed anyone? From the dog run, Charlie saw Eve against the day, pressed in red before the yellow of the church, coming down the street in her sickness. Though she did not see him, he did, yes, he saw her, very much he did. He saw her, and his mind was wasted on her in a dream.
And from his view out the window, Eric Fogleman saw Eve too. He smiled and poured himself a drink.
The dog squatted next to Charlie and began to take a quivering shit.
“Oh, Ralph,” said Charlie.
One night Charlie and Eve had walked together into a handful of snowballing evenings with people shuffling around some misconceived party with stamps on their eyes. Then came the loping home to his wife and the accusations and crying, the begging, the promises and degradation. But they did it again, for the last time, and a week after that, they got together when his wife was out of the country. When was it, Charlie wondered, that fun had slipped over into obliteration? When was it that this cycle had begun? Walking around New York rubbing himself out, pulling himself back together, rubbing himself out, pulling himself back together, crawling to work.
When Eve and Big Bob turned into his apartment building, Charlie tailed them inside. He did not feign surprise at seeing her and she did not register it. The elevator rose within a preordained coincidence. He gave Eve a kiss. Was that a look of submerged pleading, of desperation and yearning that flared her neck tendrils out at him, or was it her persuasive aquiline nose that shook him, that bored into his heart, dissecting his desires?
“Where are you going?” asked Charlie.
“I don’t know,” said Eve.
“I know you,” said Big Bob. “You used to come around.”
The dog, out front on the situation as usual, sniffed at Eve’s crotch and then mounted her dress on raised forelegs.
“I was thinking of you today,” said Charlie, removing the pet from Eve’s skirt. “I was going to call you.”
“But you thought enough is enough.”
“Not really. I wanted to celebrate.”
“Then why didn’t you.”
“I thought I’d call you tomorrow,” he said.
“I think something weird is going to happen to me in your building, Charlie.”
“Shut up, Eve,” said Big Bob. “I don’t move weirdness, it’s not a commodity I value.”
“I’m broke,” said Eve. “And I don’t know how to fix it.”
There was no time left now. The elevator had arrived at his floor. His wife was home. He felt her there in the apartment, waiting.
“I’m pressing ‘Door Open,’ ” announced Big Bob. “Do you want me to keep pressing ‘Door Open’? Because I’m feeling…I’m getting ready to press ‘Door Closed,’ you know what I’m saying?”
Charlie paced the hallway, leaving the dog panting at the door. He did not want to go into his own home. The thought of Eve perched above his head in such mysterious circumstances poisoned any possibility for a pleasurable evening with his wife. He looked at the animal drooling on the rug and kicked it.
“I hope this guy doesn’t deal coke,” said Eve. She had the uncanny ability of pushing one thing aside and picking up the other with a persuasive feminine bitterness that was difficult not to admire.
“Does he? Does he do that, Bob, does he move cocaine?”
“No,” said Big Bob as the elevator door opened. “He moves information.”
The door had been left open, and walking inside, Eve was confronted by an angelfish swimming the vivid blue waters of a computer screen.
“Come in,” said a man sitting in the middle of a white couch. On top of a glass table and fanned out like a tightly cropped hand of playing cards were the covers of various fashionable magazines. Big Bob walked into the kitchen and helped himself to a beer.
The apartment was a large white box with high tin ceilings. Marooned in the middle of this emptiness was a bed. The curtains were white. There were off-white pine floors that smelled of a recent scrubbing. It was not unlike an art gallery without any work on the walls, and in the gaping space Eve experienced an intense wave of urban agoraphobia. Outside and softened by the rising stories of the building, came the distant snarls of a dog fight.
“You’ve got a nice place here,” she said.
“Thank you,” said the man. “I work hard.”
“You do?”
“Yes, I do. In fact I’m rarely here.”
“Really, where are you?”
“Working.”
“That’s nice,” said Eve.
His eyes were hazel with disorderly spangles of white, as if a constellation of stars had exploded in the irises. Everything else, his apartment, his body, his close-fitting clothes had their place, and his black stereo which ran halfway up one white wall looked incredibly expensive.
“You must work really hard,” said Eve.
“She doesn’t fix,” said Big Bob from the kitchen.
The man stood up. He had creased white chinos and a black turtleneck partially opened by a rounded zipper-pull. He walked over to his stereo and pressed a button. A door slid open and flattened inside the disc well was a bag of heroin.
“This whole CD phenomenon is such a conspiracy,” he said, taking the bag out. “You know, over the years my record collection has grown into something of a library, and then they come out with the CD. You can’t get anything on vinyl anymore. But my point is that when they first came out with the CD marketing promotions, they said you could throw the things around like Frisbees and nothing would happen. Total bullshit. The things scratch more easily than records, and if you ask me, the needle carries just as good a sound if your turntable’s up to par.”
“That’s fucked up,” said Big Bob. “You should do a piece on that.”
“I was thinking about it,” said the man, reaching for the stubble of a missing beard. “I was thinking about it.”
A silence of solemn resignation for the music industry’s culpability filled the room.
“I’ve only got a taste for you, Eve, just a taste,” he said, shaking the powder onto the glass table.
The stars were coming out just above the balconied tree-tops of the park. A curtain blew into the room. Eve felt strangely in touch with the sounds below—the diminishing squelch of the basketball court, the back and forth continuum of a handball socking against a backboard wall, the intermittent cries of greetings and departures, and the peaks and valleys of the loaded car stereos building and fading into nothing. A damp air sat in with the fattening of that night charged with an unreadable meaning to her.
She snorted the heroin laid out for her on the table.
“Look,” she said, coming up. “What the fuck is going on here?”
“That’s entirely up to you,” said the man.
“I’d love to hang around to watch things play out for themselves,” said Big Bob from the kitchen. “But money never sleeps, you know what I’m saying, Eric?”
Without taking his eyes off Eve, Eric rocked back on the couch and reached into his pocket. He pulled out a silver money clip and peeled off three fifty-dollar bills.
“Thank you, Bob,” he said.
“Wait a minute, Bob,” said Eve. “I’m coming with you.”
She tried to get up, but it took Big Bob two fingers to do what he needed to do.
“Sorry, Eve,” he said. “Not unless you can come up with what you’re down to me. That’s just how it’s been laid out.”
“What?” said Eve.
“I’m a journalist,” said Eric. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Yeah,” said Big Bob. “And he never fucks his sources, right, Eric?”
“Right,” said Eric.
“No names,” said Big Bob.
“No names,” said Eric.
They both laughed.
“You know, Bob,” said Eric, “I thought we arranged for a spiker. As it stands now, the thing has less resonance, visually at least, without a needle.”
Eve sat inside a warm womb of hatred. She felt cradled in an organically conceived outrage as soft as the touch of love, and with the same pull that is not unlike love, she wanted more of what was in Eric’s bag.
“What do I have to do?” Big Bob put it to Eric. “Wrap your story up for you with a bow? I mean, I delivered. She’s perfect. She’s just what we were talking about, what you needed. So I’m sorry, you know, it’s like she doesn’t come with works included.”
“Our deal was a fixer,” said Eric. “That’s all I’m saying. Next time, find one.”
“Fine,” said Big Bob and he was gone.
Eric stood up and cracked his neck.
“Do you mind if I make myself a drink?” he said.
“Do you have a cigarette? I lost my cigarettes,” said Eve.
“I don’t smoke.”
“So what happens now?” she said. “We get to go to an ashtray switching restaurant where you have a lot of suck. Then you get to try and fuck me.”
“The only reason we’re pursuing this story at the magazine,” said Eric, “is that in this age of irony, a return to dope makes such sense. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
He began to pace, to move through the empty room, warming up his pitch.
“It’s representative of a kind of…a kind of…I don’t know…a decadent nihilism. You are. You don’t know it, Eve, but you are. You’re representative…”
“Of what?” asked Eve.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” said Eric. “I tell you what I’m going to do. I don’t smoke but I’m going down to the deli for your cigarettes. The beer’s in the fridge. I’m only doing this because I’m a straight shooter, so if you want, you can walk, and if you want, you can stay. We can have a talk. We can go out to dinner and talk. Do you have a problem with that, talking? Is that really such a big deal?”
“Talk about what?” asked Eve.
“You,” said Eric. “And what, if anything, you represent.”
She straightened her skirt and tried to look representative.
For the longest time she stabbed at his stereo trying to get something to play, anything, but she couldn’t figure it out. She pressed, she pointed, she stabbed at the black enameled buttons in a rising panic until suddenly a song came over the radio: “Hey…why don’t you play…another somebody done somebody wrong song…”
Eve melted down, folding into its melody, holding the song against her breast and crying so that it might not go away.
Charlie Way’s wife read Eric Fogleman’s article in bed. It was a funny coincidence because in the story they had changed Eve’s name to Liz, which was her name, Elizabeth Shankle, but sometimes people still called her Liz, which annoyed her no end. Up front the writer had made a big deal about changing Eve’s name in order to hide her identity, and in the photograph Eve’s hair hung down partially obscuring her face. In the photograph, Eve’s teeth pulled on a piece of surgical tubing. She was captured bent over and jamming a needle home.
“Your friend, your little drug fuck?” she said, throwing the magazine at him and then sliding underneath the comforter. “I guess she finally stamped her foot hard enough that someone listened.”
She was a small, beautiful bundle of a woman, and beneath the comforter she was crying and sinking into that almost reassuring constant of total-boyfriend-undertow. But he was not her boyfriend anymore. He was her husband. With the light from the bedside reading lamp cutting through the stitches of the comforter she could not believe he was actually her husband. She promised herself she would leave him. She swore an oath to avenge the spirit of her broken oaths to leave him, to make him leave. She made a very cold deal with herself.
“We never did anything with needles,” said Charlie.
“That’s comforting, honey,” she muffled through the blanket. “Let me tell you, that really makes me feel like frying you an egg in the morning.”
Charlie sat erect, jolted by the currents of infidelity laying a deadly grid upon the system of their bed. He knew a lawyer who knew a lawyer who’d get the divorce over quietly, quickly, and with as little mess as possible. Rationality in the face of panic, it was a male virtue, but there was no escaping the article on his lap. It was a public offering to the negligence of his desire, which as he thought about it, was the creeping endgame of his life. The photograph had an industrial strength tint of green and bore its black negative cropping, which, in the business, was considered raw. The prose spoke of “negative social synergies forged out of the meaning-lessness of a headlong consumer society.” According to Eric Fogleman, a new lost generation, a subculture of well-off kids, had cropped up. In another time, the story went, these young adults would have become leaders of their generation, but for various reasons they had opted out of a society they could no longer “negotiate.” That was the word he used, and the writer made it clear that he had been there, had ventured to the edge of that world only to come back to report on it. Flanked by an Absolut ad and his own firm’s L’Oréal spread, the Eve of Charlie’s life and the Eve of those pages seemed forged in some basic discrepancy that tagged itself to the basement of his heart and blew an evil wind through the shutters of his mind.
“I’m sorry,” he said to his wife.
“That’s just never going to be enough anymore,” she said, turning off the lights.
That winter Charlie walked through a falling snow to Eve’s funeral. It was held in the freshly painted Roman Catholic church. Her parents had refused to identify the body because, they said, it ceased long ago to be the body of their child. On the stairs of the church he turned and gazed out at the stripped trees bowing to the winter wind. Then he faced the doors of the church. They said, here you are, here, come in here and welcome, welcome to the world, and though he scanned the magazines and papers afterward, there was no follow-up story, there was no obituary, there was no news at all.