A Certain Age (28 page)

upstairs neighbor, who was on her same circuitry, had arrived from Australia and tried to turn on his air conditioner at the same time. She was fortunate he lived in Australia and kept the place only as a rarely used Manhattan pied-à-terre.

It was late August, more than three weeks since Darryl had proposed, and she hadn't seen or spoken to him since. It was just as well: if he was so easily offended by her, shocked or disgusted by her suggestion that he hold the jewelry so that she could report it stolen, she really wanted nothing further to do with him. Didn't he see that his ethics and morality were just as tenuous as hers, if he was the kind to drop someone just because he didn't agree with his or her views?

In an odd way she felt vindicated. What kind of man proposed to a woman and then, on finding she was in trouble, broke and desperate, decided to forget the whole thing? He had made up a story in his head about who she was and what she was like, and when she refused to conform to it, he had executed her—only in his own mind, it was true—as quickly as possible.

The whole point had been to get rid of him. But now that he was gone she was surprised to find she missed him. It seemed to her that he had been her only friend. She hadn't really intended to declare the jewelry stolen, but it was beginning to seem like the only solution.

Raffaello had gone back to Italy for August—anyway, she wouldn't have asked him for help; she was still too infatuated— and there wasn't one person she could think of who could help or whom she could trust. If only she had worked harder at making some real friends! August, and the phone rarely rang now, everyone had gone away; and as if they could sense or smell her despair, nobody wanted to include her in their weekend plans or midweek nights in the city. That was how things worked here: when things were going well everyone wanted you around; when things were going badly nobody wanted to catch your disease.

Almost a month later, and she was in an even worse state than she had been before. The bank had begun foreclosure proceedings, egged on by the co-op board, furious at not having received

maintenance for more than six months. Maybe it wasn't that the electricity had blown up, maybe it had been turned off, as they tried to drive her out. She had been unable to track down John de Jongh to get her twenty-five thousand back, and by the time she contacted the bank to cancel payment, the funds had been deducted. Though she realized her job search had been only halfhearted, nothing even remotely interesting or possible had come her way.

She envisioned herself as the months went by, still jobless, unable to pay the maintenance, unable to catch up with the mortgage, evicted, with not even enough money to put her things in storage. Where would she go, what would she do? She was unable to go back to sleep, the same thought repeating itself over and over as if something had gotten stuck. The phone was ringing. She looked at a clock, luminous hands creaking arthritically in the dark. Three-twelve A.M. "Hello?" Her voice emerged in a croak.

"It's me." She was silent. "Please, may I come over?"

". . . Raffaello?"

"Please, please, let me come to your place. I don't want to be alone."

"Where are you? I didn't even know you were back! I haven't heard from you in so long—"

"I just arrived today. You are the first I have called. Listen, I am at a club, it's on—" He put the phone down for a moment and she could hear him talking to someone else. "It's on Fourteenth Street, near the highway. It's about to close. I can't go home."

"Why not?"

"I will explain when I see you. Please, give me your address."

She gave him her address.

"Ciao, bella.
See you in a few minutes." His voice sounded blurry.

She put down the phone and jumped in the shower. In her bottom drawer she found her cutest pajamas, striped cotton, and a matching robe. She looked in the mirror. This was good. She wanted to look cute and adorable but not seductive, or it would seem unnatural. Her nose needed some powder. She put on some

lipstick and wiped it off, so that her lips were tinted red but didn't look made up. She wondered if she should change the sheets but decided against it. She quickly tried to straighten up the room, make the bed more inviting, plumped up the pillows. It was three-thirty in the morning. She was angry for letting him come over, but at the same time nervous, restless, excited. She fiddled with the air conditioner controls, trying to make it work. Finally it came back on, emitting a harsh, complaining whine.

She paced back and forth, despising herself for allowing him to come over so late, to show so little respect. On the other hand, she had long since gotten over her crush. She didn't care if he respected her or not. It was nice to have another body in bed; and if her infatuation was gone, she could at least take advantage of her physical attraction. It would be using him, in a sense, to have him come over, enjoy herself and send him away in the morning. It was the way she had always been treated, only now the tables were turned. Besides, they did things differently in Italy. The sort of world he inhabited was based on this kind of activity, seemingly so casual on the surface, but in fact reflecting true camaraderie and acceptance.

She had nearly given up and gone back to bed by the time the doorman buzzed her intercom and sleepily announced she had a visitor. "Tell him to come up." She tried to sound imperious, as if it were perfectly natural for a woman living in the building to have strange men arrive in the dead of night. It wasn't the doorman's business anyway. He was supposed to be discreet. But she knew when he left, at six, he would tell the day doorman the events of the night before; the day doorman would tell the janitor, and there would be smirks, and for a while she would be inspected more closely to make sure she hadn't abruptly begun a career in prostitution.

She heard the roll of the elevator as it opened and he was at her door. She had forgotten how handsome he was, how woozy she felt under the influence of his odor of aftershave and foreign ciga-

rettes. His hair was mussed, his Armani suit wrinkled, his hooded eyes half closed. He swayed on his feet as he reached out to embrace her; one hand slid over her backside.
"Bella, bella,
" he muttered in Italian as he kissed the side of her neck, her hair, her ear. He also reeked of gin and sweat. "I missed you so much."

She had no intention of letting him have the upper hand. She had planned for things to progress slowly, berating him in a teasing voice for a while, offering him a cup of tea. But now she found she couldn't be bothered—she was dizzy with the sheer physical-ity of his presence. She let him untie her robe and unbutton her pajamas; then he picked her up and carried her into the hall closet. "Your bedroom," he said as piles of clothes cascaded onto their heads. "It is awfully crowded and small, no?"

"Um, actually this is the closet. The bedroom's down the hall. It would probably be more comfortable."

"Whatever you wish." With a fake-leopard fur jacket hanging over his head, still carrying her, he stumbled down the hall, crashing into the wall and the door frame before depositing her on the bed.

"Leave me alone. I want to go to sleep."

"Oh, how selfish. You have had your fun, now you want to sleep, and you will just leave me here like this?" He pointed to his erection, then got up and paced around the room.

"I'm not trying to be selfish, but I'm sore. What time is it anyway?"

"Six in the morning. Okay, so I know I am not going to be able to get any sleep feeling like this. Let's do something. Let's go out."

"It's six a.m.!" She had never seen anything like it; he was as agitated as a trapped tiger. "There's nowhere to go. You must be jet-lagged. Can't you just lie next to me quietly, and after I've gotten a few hours' sleep, I'll be in the mood to try it again."

"No, no, I know myself when I get like this. It's no good. It will only make me more anxious, to lie still, then I will start thinking once more. I thought you would help me, to stop thinking.

Come on, I know an after-hours place—it will definitely be open by now. I am a member. It will be lots of fun. It just opened this week; everyone will be going there, in the fall."

"I'm exhausted! Maybe you don't need to sleep, but I do. I don't have the strength to get up, get dressed and go out to a club."

"You don't need to dress up. Just wear some jeans and a T-shirt. Come on, just for a little while."

"But I'm so tired!"

"Quit complaining."

"I'm not ... I wasn't complaining." She was as shocked as if she had been slapped. She never wanted anyone, especially a man, to think of her as the kind of woman who complained.

"Come on, this is one time. You can take the day off tomorrow."

"I'm in between jobs at the moment."

"So, you see? And soon you will have another job and have to get up in the morning. It's August in Manhattan, you are young, we are having fun together, maybe even falling in love, you don't need to act like such an old lady. Come and have some fun. This is the sort of place like you will never see without me. I know you are tired."

"I must look awful."

"No, no—just sexier than ever. Here, come on—smoke this." From the pocket of his jacket, flung over the end of the bed, he took a glass pipe and a tiny vial with a red top.

"That's crack." Alarmed, she propped herself up in bed.

"So? There's only a little bit. We share. Come on, don't be difficult—that way we can be together." He opened the vial with his teeth and tilted the crumbly white contents into the bowl, then placed the nib of the pipe in her mouth.

2

She hadn't known or
understood how powerful a chemical could be. It was as if a wedding had taken place, her marriage to something inhuman. A substance on the planet had been there all along, ready and waiting, wanting to marry her. She had walked into another universe, one that was icy-cold, a shifting facade constructed of geometric molecules, an ancient civilization of alchemy. They were on the floor, going at it like reptiles, two coldly slithering, hissing bodies. Or perhaps what her body was experiencing was the way a particularly malevolent virus felt as it repro-

duced, eating up some brain in the last stages of AIDS or cancer, alien, prodding its host toward death. Nothing was left of her. Whatever it was that had been Florence, a human entity, had fled. But in this icy vacuum, this void, she was unafraid; she had no feelings left.

The two bodies churned and flopped mechanically for some time before abruptly, in unison, they detached from each other and stood. Some sight returned to her and she realized she had been—temporarily—completely blind, but for how long she didn't know.

"Come on, let's go." Whatever was standing across from her was not human either. Its eyes were red, its skin covered with a waxy film of yellow grease. It pulled on an outer skin that she realized must be its clothes. The smell—that odd, weird smell— reminded her of oranges, not real ones, but those made by Martians to tantalize a human kept in a cage; it was worse than artificial air-freshener, but she inhaled deeply, she couldn't get enough of it.

"Now I know what Pandora felt like when she opened the box." It was her body speaking, the husk that had once been she.

"Are you just going to stand there? Put some clothes on."

"I feel like my blood's been replaced with formaldehyde." Her teeth were gnashing, gnashing. Even though the air conditioner had groaned to a halt somewhere along the line, she was freezing cold.

"Here, I'll help you get dressed." The entity in the room—who or what it was she was still uncertain—went to the chest of drawers and removed some items. "Put your arms over your head," it said. "You're not helping at all. Come on, pick up your legs, one at a time." She tried to lift her right leg, but it was like a frozen haunch of lamb, unrelated to her, and she fell over onto the bed. "Look, you just lie there and I'll do it myself." Whatever the entity was doing hurt her skin very much.

"What are you doing? What are you doing?" Her arms flailed and she practically screamed.

"Ssshh, ssshh, keep your voice down! I'm putting your legs into your trouser legs, what is the problem?"

"Oh." She lay clutching herself and shivering.

"Are you all right?"

"I don't know. I think I'm going to puke. How much did you give me?"

"We scarcely smoked anything at all—perhaps one puff each. You must have a very low tolerance for such things."

"I'm going to die, aren't I."

"No, no, come on, you'll be fine. We'll go out and get some fresh air and have a drink and you'll feel better."

The streets were still dark, but she had no way of knowing whether that was because it was still night or she had gone blind once more or her eyesight had been permanently diminished. They were in a taxi. The driver seemed to be a friend of the entity's. Something was happening anyway: Raffaello had gotten out of the car and she didn't want to be left alone; she kept trying to follow him and the driver kept saying, "He's coming back in a minute, just wait for him."

But she got out anyway, and walking down a narrow flight of steps that stank of urine, she opened a door. The ceiling was so low she banged her head but felt nothing except some stickiness, and curiously, when she reached up to touch her forehead, her hand came away wet with an odd red goo. She was wandering through a narrow corridor, half crouching; the ceiling was even lower here, and there were all kinds of objects in the way—pipes, things whose meaning she didn't understand—it was almost pitch-black, so narrow her hands could touch both walls.