Afterburn (35 page)

Maybe I could work here, Christina thought. But I might actually be too pretty. She took a napkin from the bar and wiped off her lipstick, flipped the napkin over, and smoothed away the eye shadow she'd so carefully put on an hour before. She found a rubber band in her bag and pulled her dark hair up, hiding it. That would probably do the trick. A regular girl, she thought, I look like some regular girl who just happened to walk in.

But first she needed to try her mother again. It was the only number she knew by heart, and even though she hadn't been to Florida for years, she imagined the two phones ringing in the little bungalow on the Gulf Coast, the one on the kitchen wall and the pink one in her mother's bedroom, where everything else was pink, too—the curtains, the carpeting, the flamingo-print bedspread, the soft sheets and satiny pillows—entering the room, one seemed to enter something else, too, which, knowing her mother's fondness for gentlemen callers, was a frequent and nearly simultaneous occurrence. But it makes her happy, decided Christina; it makes her happy and she's a widow and doesn't have much money and her only daughter is no help to her, so let her have her pink wallpaper and anything else the poor lonely woman wants. She probably wished to escape the old photos, the work boots, the hand tools. She loved Dad so much, Christina thought, I don't know how she can stand it. His clothes probably still hung in the closet. And in the garage, the old sky-blue Mustang sat on blocks, its backseat piled with boxes. She
assumed
. She'd worried the question every day for four years, since the moment she was arrested. Mom will leave the car there forever, she told herself, let the tires go flat, let mice eat up the bucket seats. The garage stood behind the bungalow, trumpet vine and bougainvillea overrunning both buildings and hiding the termite damage and dry rot. Her father had hit the trifecta with ten identical win tickets at Brandywine Raceway twenty years back and, in an infrequent moment of foresight, purchased the property but not really fixed it up over the years on trips south from Philadelphia. A week after Christina was arrested, her parents moved down there permanently, dragging the Mustang and her mother's antique doll collection and God knew what else with them, and her sweet father, who had labored thirty years fixing Philadelphia's subway cars, finally rising to chief assistant engineer, was supposed to rest there in the sun—supposed to sweat out the grease and solvents and carbon dust. It was in his hands and lungs and skin. Instead, he'd died, sickening so quickly that he had never taken the boxes and other junk out of the Mustang, her mother had written, and Christina had tried not to wonder if she'd killed him with her arrest.

Now, for the fourth time in as many days, her mother's answering machine came on: "If you're calling at a decent hour, then I am somewhere else and will call you back. If you are calling at an
indecent
hour, then I may be indecently busy,
sugar
." Christina hung up. Maybe she could be amused by the message. Maybe, but actually not. Who was this message for? No one as good as her father. Florida was full of old tomato cans, men with a dent in them, a lot of rust, the label long worn off. Long-distance truck drivers, retired guys sneaking around. She hoped that they didn't start poking too close to the Mustang. Where was her mother? Sometimes she went next door, to Mrs. Mehta's, an Indian woman who kept bonsai trees, just to chat. Tea and cookies and the mailman is late today. But it wasn't even ten in the morning yet. Her mother could be anywhere, anywhere and nowhere. She liked to take trips with men who had the time but not the explanation. Who knew the major highways of the West. Who'd smoked disastrous mountains of cigarettes, whose clothes were as wrinkled as their necks. Who didn't read newspapers anymore and kept their money in a wallet on a chain. Her mother could be away with them for a week or two at a time. Even a month—fishing, driving, rodeos, more driving. Sex in the motel room, love me tender, love me true. Her mother, she bet, knew how to pick them.

She caught the eye of the bartender, a blond woman with eight or nine rings in each ear, and asked for change. The bartender returned with a handful of quarters. "This place really hiring?" asked Christina.

The bartender nodded. "We lost two girls yesterday."

"I'd like to apply."

"I'll get the manager when you're done."

She called her mother back and after the message said, "Mom, it's me. I've been trying to call you, but haven't left a message. Things have changed. I'm out. I got out." Why did she want to cry? "I'll tell you about it when I talk to you. I just wanted you to know that I miss you, Mom. Been thinking about you."

As she hung up, the manager came out of the swinging kitchen doors, wiping her hand on a cloth, shirt damp from oven heat, eyes tired. "You ever work as a waitress?" she asked.

Christina nodded. "Upstate."

The woman looked skeptical. "Where upstate?"

"About an hour north of the city, big place."

The woman watched a busboy clear a table. "What was the place called?"

"Dep's."

"Dep's?" A name strange enough to be true. "Can you bartend?"

People always answered yes, to get the higher tips and steal from the register. "No," Christina said.

"Ice," the woman instructed one of the busboys. She turned back to Christina. "How are you with adding up numbers?"

"Try me."

The woman started to write down a series of numbers.

"No, I mean just say some."

The woman pulled out a completed tab from her ordering pad. "Just say them?"

"Yes."

"Six dollars, $2.75, $4.75, and $3.75."

Her eyes went unfocused; she saw numbers in a column, including the answer. Her father had discovered this ability in her when she was seven. "With the sales tax that's $18.72."

The woman frowned, as if Christina had read the numbers upside down, and flipped over a sheet. "Six-forty, $8.80, two times one dollar, $3.15."

"Okay—with tax, $22.08."

The manager looked at her. "I've seen girls who have all the taxes memorized, but never anybody who could add like that."

"I always liked numbers. I get it from my dad."

"Right." The manager watched a waitress refill the Bunn-o-Matic coffee machine. "Ever steal, do drugs?"

"No."

"Ever arrested? Mental illness problems?"

"No."

The manager silently inspected Christina, her face and hair and eyes and hands.
Not too pretty
. "Okay, we'll try you out for three days. If you do okay, you can stay. If you screw up, then that's it, you're gone. Now tell me your name so I can put it on the schedule."

"Melissa," Christina said, "Melissa Williams."

"Tips are split each shift, checks are every other Friday," said the manager. "Okay?"

"Sure." She'd sign the bogus paycheck over to herself, then cash it at one of the check-cashing operations.

"You start tomorrow, Melissa, lunch shift. We'll see how you do."

SHE STILL NEEDED ANY MONEY SHE COULD GET
—the five hundred she'd taken from the pretty boy was going fast. The secondhand clothing shop opened at noon, and she guessed the owner would like the shirts she'd stolen. With five or six shifts at the Jim-Jack, a few fresh vegetables, and a couple of books from the Strand every week, she could cope. I'm going to lay low, she told herself. Be the girl with no name. If I run, they'll know I did it. If I stay put a couple of months, then maybe I didn't. I can maintain that discipline. If anybody is watching, they'll see I'm living on quarters and dimes here. My room is cheap, my clothes are cheap, my job is cheap. My men will probably be cheap.

She floated home through drifts of street vendors' incense, past the Pakistani cabbies pulled up on Bond Street for an off-duty smoke, the black guys peddling dance tapes, the man leaning against the layers of movie posters selling stolen smoke detectors, past the young, first-time lesbians with hiked-up men's underwear, and all the other moodsters, self-talkers, and never-did-never-wills, each mere smudges of light and flesh and color against the city geologic, the marble and copper and brick, the cornices and doorways, windows and steps. A hundred thousand people have lived on my street, she thought as she slipped her key into the door to her blue apartment building, thousands have walked up these exact stairs, maybe a hundred have stayed in my room, a few dozen slept in my bed. Talked and dreamed, remembered and forgotten. When I die, my space will be filled right away, others will sit in the subway seat, wear the shoes I would have worn, bite the apple I would have bitten. Like I was never there. It does not matter that I've gone to prison, or that my mother was a shitty mother and I love her anyway, or that Rick should have gone to prison, too, it simply does not matter.

In her room she retrieved the cardboard box of pressed shirts. A small mercy they had no monogram. Five minutes later she was standing in the clothes shop holding the box.

"How'd the dress go?" said the owner, pushing his glasses from his forehead to his nose.

"Very successful. I might even wear it again tonight."

He pointed at the box. "What do you have there?"

"Shirts."

"Men's shirts?" He yanked open the stapled flap. "These are very good." He fingered the labels. "Pressed, too. Your rich uncle gave them to you?"

"How'd you know?"

"A lot of people have rich uncles who give them beautiful clothes." He looked at her with a forgiving smile. "Especially rich uncles young enough to have tailored shirts with tapered waists."

She shrugged away any further explanation. "I'd say these are sixty dollars new, anyway."

"I'm going to sell them for eighteen apiece, which means I will give you nine for them."

"Ten."

"
Nine
."

"Ten or no deal," she said.

He fondled the shirts. "Okay."

"You pay now?" she asked.

"On consignment."

"You're going to consign me to starvation."

He lifted his chin and looked through his glasses. "Get a job, honey. Live like the other half."

"I
did
just get a job. I don't start yet. Why don't you just be
nice
and give me five dollars now for each one."

He pulled out his wallet and handed her a crisp fifty. "You're an expensive date."

"You don't even know."

"I have an idea."

THAT EVENING
she flopped on the bed with
The Village Voice
, starting with the back page of messages:

HIV+ and DEPRESSED?
HARDBODIES STRIPS
Great Prices
Treatment for depersonalization. Do you frequently feel unreal or detached from yourself?
GAY COUPLES WANTED
Does cocaine cause you problems? Do you also have problems with attention or restlessness?
Hondas sold for $100.
SEIZED AND SOLD LOCALLY.
RESEARCH VOLUNTEERS WANTED
: Earn btwn $800 & 1200! Healthy men or women age 21-45 needed to participate in residential studies evaluating drug & medication effects. Live in research unit of a psychiatric institute.
PENIS TALK
—Men all bckgrnds wanted to discuss their penis for cable docu. Nudity not required.
Herpes Singles Mixer Secret & Confidential Send Self Addressed Stamped Envelope
American Strippers Fantasy shows and More
Jeeps for $100 Impounds, IRS & FBI seizures
Learn American Sign Language
MASTURBATION
Do you have a funny/interesting story about your 1st experience? Cable doc.
Fellow at Angelika Theater on Monday afternoon in blue tank top and green shorts: You asked me if I was Ken, I said Ken is late. Can we chat?

A wonderful world. She folded the pages back to the personals and dropped her eyes over the ads for escort services and Women Seeking Men and Men Seeking Women and Women Seeking Women and Men Seeking Men and Alternative Men and Alternative Women and Adult Help Wanted. Monkeys in clothes, she thought, smelling rear ends in the jungle. She could probably get a job doing something nasty or disreputable, if she wanted, but hey, she wasn't that kind of girl. She was
some
kind of girl, but not
that
kind. But she knew the type. They didn't like themselves. Wanted to, but couldn't. Kept looking for the bottom that would bounce them back up, kept not breaking until they shattered. Talked tough but spent a lot of time on their backs providing service. She'd once had a beautiful Russian roommate who performed in the fantasy booths in Times Square, back when Times Square still had such places, stripping in front of the little windows with mechanical blinds that went up when the male occupant dropped in a quarter. Whatever she did involved creams and chains and an enormous purple dildo, and when she came home each night after work, she wept for hours. She cried in Russian, Christina remembered: I guess you can actually do that. Men came around all the time for her, talking softly but secretly crazy for her broken edges. Knew they could catch a hot ride on her unhappiness. Like stealing from a bank, sure you'll get away. I'm not that kind of girl, Christina told herself again, I steal something back.

Another ad caught her eye:

I am a mature executive seeking a woman of child-bearing age who would like to have and care for her own child. I am willing to pay all costs of prenatal care, and delivery, and reasonable medical, living, and educational expenses until the child is twenty-one years old. This offer has nothing to do with sexual contact between the two parties. Pregnancy would be achieved through artificial insemination. I would relinquish my custody claim to the child; you would relinquish all legal claims to my estate, income, etc., and maintain confidentiality of the arrangement. Remuneration will be delivered monthly from a trust administered independently by a legal trustee. The successful candidate will be a woman who is healthy, drug-free, caring—

And probably insane, she thought, flipping the paper aside. I need action, she thought, I need to get out of here. Mazy had been right. Of course she'd go back to men. Four years without action was too long. She might as well have
died
. The interlude with Pretty Boy didn't count. He was too young, couldn't figure out what she needed. But there were plenty of guys who could; there had to be
one
, for God's sake, and she was going to make an attempt to find him. Tonight. Someone who could talk, at least. Someone her father could have inspected, then winked,
Good choice
. Not that he ever did; quite the opposite. After she'd dropped out of Columbia, he'd been worried by the fact that she had no visible means of income yet was living very well indeed; worried, too, that he had never met "this Rick fellow" she occasionally mentioned. A year before he died, her father had taken her out in the old Mustang for ice cream to tell her that he'd never made much money for his family and saw no way he ever would. He and her mother would be moving to Florida soon, perhaps to open a small gift shop, but he didn't have any illusions about it. He'd spent too much of his income on things that had come to nothing—booze, gambling, cigarettes, his fishing boat, the car they were sitting in. He took her hand in his thick fingers. I'm telling you this now so that you won't make the same bad decisions I did, Tina. I'm not going to have anything to help you with. Nothing to get you started. I don't even know how we're going to make it in Florida, as a matter of fact. But there's one thing I've given you—he touched his head—I never did anything with mine, I just fixed about a million subway cars, that's all. But I know I had it and I know you have it. That's how you got that scholarship. You're going to have to use your head, Tina, it's your advantage. You're up there in New York and living your life. Stick with the good guys. The good guys are sometimes boring, but they're better in the long run. If the guy is flashy, then let him go. That's my—