Slaves of New York (37 page)

Nothing was working right around me. I had to replace my answering machine four times in two weeks as soon as I moved into my new apartment: it kept breaking down. Anyway, after I couldn't get the stove on I went down for a minute to retrieve the mail—a Con Ed bill for $90. I couldn't even believe it, I was certain it was a mistake, a $90 bill for one month. I was living in a studio apartment that was so small I had to buy a folding sofabed—otherwise the whole room would have been filled up with just a bed—and a folding table and folding chairs. In other words, if it didn't fold, there was no room for it. And it was early September, hot, I wasn't exactly using the stove for a lot of cooking. I had used the air conditioner for one or two nights, but not $90 worth. I could see I was going to be reduced to lighting candles at night, just to keep my bills down.

I called up the tenant who had lived here before me, and he said when he lived in my apartment if he used the air conditioner every night for a month his bill came to maybe $40. No

wonder I was so jittery! I was being utilized as some kind of outlet or channel for excess electrical energy. It was pouring straight from the walls into me. My bill said that if I had any questions, I should call up a man named Albert Menendez, so I did. "Ninety dollars, Albert," I told him. "This is crazy."

"Not to Con Edison," Albert said.

But it
did
seem crazy. This made me think about objective reality. What a shame it was that nobody had it besides me. I realized I was working myself up into a state, and the party wasn't until eight that evening. So I went out for a walk.

I was sitting on the pier and this man came over to me. "Are you playing hooky?" he said. I thought; I am almost thirty years old. But in a way I wouldn't have been surprised to find myself arrested and shoved back into first grade. I looked at the guy. He was attractive, maybe even too handsome, in a rugged, cigarette advertisement kind of way. He had blue eyes, curly brown hair, and was wearing a plaid shirt.

"Playing hooky from
what?"
I said. The man seemed chagrined. But we started talking. He was a furniture designer, he liked the furniture of Frank Lloyd Wright, though not his buildings, and the work of somebody whose name I didn't know but pretended to anyway. The man—his name was Jan —said he was playing hooky from work to ride his bike around. He had a red motorcycle—BMW 800—parked in the lot at the end of the pier.

I said I was depressed; I had gone out the night before with a girlfriend and drunk too much and now I was suffering the consequences: (1) physical symptoms such as headache, fatigue, and vitamin C and B complex depletion, and (2) anxiety. "I don't mind the physical business as much as I do the anxiety," I said. "I just keep worrying about this party I'm giving later on."

Jan sat down next to me. It was a hot, grayish day, the air smelled of turpentine. Jan said that he was Hungarian—anyway, his parents came from there, and he was an excellent cook of such dishes as goulash and paprikash—and he had

grown up in a small Hungarian community in New Jersey. He spoke a few words in Hungarian: I guess he was trying to prove his honesty to me. He wanted to know how old I was. and when I told him "twenty-eight," he peered anxiously into mv eyes. It was a weird thing but these days everywhere I went people seemed to be asking each other their age. It was like an epidemic, everyone trying to pin each other down by their age as if they were insect collectors. "How old are you?" I said.

"Thirty-four."

"That's
old,
honey," I said.

"Should I leave?" Jan said.

"No, no," I said, "I'm just kidding you." Then I told him a story: An elderly man (seventy-two) who was a friend of the family's, called up to take me out to lunch. After the meal (arroz con polio) he said that he would like to come back to my apartment and make love to me. Even though I said it was better that we remain friends, and reminded him that he was happily married, he still made a grab for me at the door. As I fled, his parting words were a compliment about a portion of my body. "Isn't that awful?" I said.

"Why do you seem so shocked?" Jan said. "You must be used to stuff like that."

"Seventy-two years old?" I said. "The animal." I tried to explain that the men I knew who were my age never laid a finger on me. "When you take someone out," I said, "if you decide to go to bed, it's pretty much mutual, isn't it? I mean, you don't attack her at the door or anything."

Jan said that this was true and he agreed. Someone was playing the trumpet, very badly, one pier over, and the sound carried across the water. The musical background gave the general atmosphere of a scene from a movie; anyway, I felt as if I were in one. I explained to Jan that I was sick of men placing value judgments on me. "Most of the men I go out with come up with these adjectives," I said. "But you can tell any man or woman that he or she is deeply upset and it will be true at least fifty percent of the time." Jan didn't seem to understand.

"You don't seem upset to me," he said.

"I'm not," I said. "Well, maybe just a little, but that's because I'm nervous about giving a party. And I'm not strange or weird, either. Everybody's strange or weird around here, but I'm not. I know the difference."

"Um," Jan said. He offered me a ride on his motorcycle. I decided to accept, even though the last time I had ridden on a motorcycle Max, my father, bumped into me on some back road—he recognized Ricky, the juvenile delinquent I was riding shotgun with, and then he recognized me. He made Ricky stop, made me get off, and forbade me to ride on a motorcycle ever again.

I figured that by now Max's statute of limitations had run out, but I did feel a little nervous. Max hadn't been entirely wrong; I knew I was doing something dangerous, possibly even pathological, but I figured on the city streets how fast could Jan drive his machine? He gave me an extra helmet, which he apparently kept locked to a front wheel, and I tried to shove my hair—it was long and red—up into the helmet. It felt like a vise clamping down. "Don't touch this," Jan said, pointing to some lump on the side of the motorcycle. "You could get burned."

Then he kicked up some kind of kick stand, started up the engine, and we took off. Driving in heavy traffic, careening between taxis and onto the sidewalk, I felt as if my knees might be shorn off at any moment. I shouted in Jan's ear to make a right down my old boyfriend's block. For a moment I pictured myself, glamorous, waving to Stash as Jan and I screamed through a green light on his bike; I could see Stash, first bewildered, then running madly through the streets after us. Of course Stash wasn't there, but it was pleasant to indulge in momentary fantasies.

Jan took me on a whirlwind tour of lower Manhattan and finally dropped me off near my apartment. I started to say goodbye, but then I had a thought. He was handsome and affable, and I figured even if I had no use for him maybe one of my girlfriends would. I considered myself to be a reasonable

judge of character, and Jan had gone to West Point and dropped out to attend Bard College. So I gave him my address and invited him to my party that night. He said he would be delighted.

Even though I had burned up quite a bit of adrenaline on the motorcycle, I still couldn't face my apartment and the impending party. I thought I'd go and get some lunch, and I walked up my street. Agnes, the psychic on my block, was sitting on the stoop and she stopped me as I went by; she pointed out her husband. He was standing in the gutter with a weary dog who resembled some old stuffed Steiff toy. "We've been married thirty years," Agnes said. "We're very compatible: he hates people, I love them and talk to everyone. He can't see very well, but he has good legs. My legs are bad, but my vision is fine. Also, we have separate apartments."

I nodded. "See you later," I said. "I'm going to get something to eat; then I have to buy wine. I'm having a party." As I turned the corner along Bleecker Street I caught a whiff of beef. Garlic, packaged onion soup mix—not bad. I had the sensation of having experienced this before. It was nearly three in the afternoon.

Then I saw two men I knew; each of them was wheeling a stroller with a baby. "Hi, Eleanor," Mark said to me. I crossed the street to walk alongside them. "Our wives went to a baby shower," Mark said. "We're taking care of the babies. You know Beauregard, don't you?"

"Yeah," I said. I looked down at the baby Beauregard was wheeling. It was exceptionally homely.

"It's not mine," Beauregard said. "It's my niece."

"How are you, Eleanor?" Mark said. He gave me a pitying look. I hadn't seen him since before I broke up with Stash.

"Great, excellent," I said. "My career's going well, got a cute apartment—"

Mark looked nervous. "That's nice," he said. "We went to see 'Goldilocks and the Three Bears.'

"Did you enjoy it?" Beauregard asked his niece. The infant

had a fat face and a sour expression; I thought she might be around one and a half.

"It was fine, thank you," she said.

The two men seemed very glum. "And how did you guys like 'Goldilocks'?" I said. Nobody answered. "There was a street fair yesterday on the next block," I said. "Maybe it's still there today. You could look." I pointed to my studded leather wrist band. "I purchased this there for a mere two dollars. I wish I had bought more. Some had spikes. Frankly, I'd like to have wrist bands up to my neck. Nobody would mess with me, then."

Beauregard suddenly perked up. "Where did you move to, Eleanor?" he said. "You look wonderful."

"Yeah, Eleanor," Mark said.

So I ended up inviting them to my party.

Then I went into a diner and selected a hamburger and French fries. I needed something to restore myself. The food seemed almost deliberately bad; this fascinated me. Ice-cold French fries, nearly uncooked; watery ketchup; a thin piece of meat between two cold slices of bread. Spiteful. I was giving off nervous vibrations—I kept looking at my watch as the hour drew late—and at this time of the day the only people in the place were precarious. I knew my atmosphere was having an influence. A bearded hippie type was harassing the waiter. "What's the matter?" he kept saying. The waiter didn't seem to speak any English, he was dark and surly. "Why are you in a bad mood?" the bearded man said. "Come here and I'll straighten you out. Where are you from?" The waiter didn't answer. "I think you're great," the hippie said. "You're sweet, but you're great."

Behind me were two women who were talking; apparently they had just visited someone in the hospital. "I think that her doctor's gone nuts," one said to the other. "Did you look at her chart? Under 'Patient's Diet' he wrote 'Bedrest.'

Finally I got myself out of there and bought the wine and went home.

There were a lot of messages from my guests on the answering machine; I had forgotten that I had left a message that said, "Hello, for breakfast today I had a doughnut, black coffee, and cranberry-apple juice. I'm having a party: please feel free to attend. Leave a message after the beep."

When I played my tape back, I had a lot of people saying. "Hi, for breakfast I had two eggs, scrambled, toast, and hot chocolate. See you later on tonight." I couldn't figure out for quite a while why all these people kept telling me what they had eaten for breakfast.

There was only one piece of bad news: all the women I had invited suddenly couldn't make it. One was sick, one had to leave town, another made up some lame excuse. They had spent so much time complaining to me about being single, I couldn't believe they would cancel on such an exciting event. But at least there would be me and my girlfriend Amy; she was in the middle of a divorce, and surely would be happy to accommodate as many men as she could, in order to prove she was on the rebound.

Before the guests came I was so jittery I felt like putting a sign on the door: died early last night, go away. But as it turned out, my downstairs front door buzzer was broken, and many of the guests didn't get in anyway. Everything was a bit skewed. I had to cover my table with a crepe-paper tablecloth (even though it wasn't Halloween the cloth was decorated with various pumpkins, it was the only thing I had been able to find) and I made a display of some hunks of cheese and some tiny triangular spinach and phyllo pastries that I had found in the freezer at the supermarket.

It wasn't the most elegant extravaganza I could have imagined.

But I myself looked splendid: I had purchased green satin Chinese pajamas and I wore these and a pair of gold sandals. I prepared my camera, with fresh film and batteries: I was definitely going to record the event.

Then the guests started to arrive: Mike, Fritz, Barry, Mar-ley, John, and Ted. And Bill, Stan, Larry, and Russell. I

seated them on the couch, on the chairs, and on the floor. Everyone seemed genuinely affectionate toward me, even though I could hardly remember who they were. The men all brought bottles of wine and flowers. Amy arrived dressed in a leopard-print see-through blouse, tights, and spike-heeled shoes. She stood at the sink, defrosting a hunk of pâté she had stolen from the caterer's where she worked. "Come in and meet Marley," I said. "He's gorgeous, humble, and heterosexual."

"I can't," Amy said. "I'm frightened. I'm the kind of guest who likes to lurk in the kitchen."

"I don't have a kitchen," I said. "Just an alcove. Why didn't you tell me this before? You're the only other woman here besides me!"

The room was crowded with cigarette smoke, men were rummaging through my refrigerator looking for more bottles of wine. I thought of myself as Audrey Hepburn in that
Breakfast at Tiffany's
movie: Truman Capote was hunched over in the corner (actually he wasn't Truman, just some male friend who liked to make fun of me) and the rest of the room was filled up with men and my one girlfriend. That wasn't exactly how I had planned things, but that was how they turned out.