Afterburn

Jim-Jack Bar amp; Restaurant Broadway and Bleecker, Manhattan September 15, 1999

Hiring, announced a sign on the glass door when Christina stepped out of the hot morning sunlight into the restaurant's smoky coolness to call her mother. She liked the way she could sit up at the end of the curved mahogany bar and lean against the wall while using the pay phone. The clever ease of it comforted her, and she could use a little comfort; that morning she'd woken to the sound of someone moaning down the hall, and not yet opening her eyes, she had despaired at what awaited her-the futile passage of the hours, Mazy talking too much, the unmopped floors of the nursery-a day dead before it was done. Then, rolling in her sweaty sheets, she'd seen the boxes of papers that Melissa Williams had left behind, the clothes hanging sparsely in the closet. Her new broom, a bag of apples. Was this real? The soft roar of the city seeped in through the open window. She rolled over. Below the window a shirtless man pinched up a cigarette from the gutter with the exactitude of a jeweler tweezering a diamond. If a dream, this was so ingenious as to be real, and if reality, it was yet so elusive as to be a dream. She was out of prison. She was in a bed in some room, just a crummy room, hers for now, a little creepy with the electric meter hanging from the ceiling, a room where people had probably died, or worse, whatever that was, and suddenly she wished to be somewhere that felt familiar, a place where people were around, if only strangers who knew nothing of her, and the Jim-Jack was the only spot she could think of, having stopped in there a few times already, each time having liked the joint for its ordinary coming-and goingness, its big window on Broadway. A rare smoking restaurant, and popular as such, it attracted a mix of locals, NYU students, European tourists, sailors on leave, small-time businessmen, retirees meeting for lunch, and solitary souls who ordered coffee and sat next to the windows dreaming impossible dreams while watching the action outside, which included tasty office girls (who were selling, but not for cheap), slick guys with new haircuts (who greased their eyes over the office girls), shell-game operators and their lookouts (who hoped to scam the slick guys good), and the dollar hot-dog place across the street (which, selling greasy, good-tasting food for cheap, scammed no one), the cabs meanwhile flowing and halting, then going and stopping, darting in front of the heavy trucks, which were themselves often gripped at the rear by a bicycle messenger catching a lift through the banners of sunlight that unfurled down the facades of the buildings along Broadway, turn-of-the-century structures of iron and brick, some ornate, others plain, but each having ingested and housed and expelled all manner of enterprise. She loved the repainted exhaustion of the buildings and wondered how long the Jim-Jack had existed. The long bar fit the room perfectly, which meant it probably had been built there from the first, and its ample depth and ridged lip suggested the time when men sat up on stools with their hats pushed back and ate lunch with a stein of beer, hard-boiled eggs in a dish, dill pickles served with everything you ordered. Cuffed pants, Rita Hayworth making eyes at America, the Germans are going to invade Poland, and FDR already has deep circles under his eyes. Now it was brain implants and Alaska is melting. She noticed the Jim-Jack used Mexican busboys. As for the waitresses, the management apparently hired only white women in their twenties-not men, not blacks, not older women. A further refinement was administered: The waitresses, though somewhat attractive, were never to be confused with the cheekbone girls modeling pumpkin soup and radicchio at other restaurants in the Village, which was to say that the Jim-Jack waitresses were not so attractive that they might soon be on their way elsewhere, so perky and lipsticky hot that the management had problems with the late-night crowd making endless drunken passes. No, she thought, watching from the bar, the owner of the Jim-Jack wanted to get the business in and then briskly out, and the girls slinging food to the tables looked like they'd learned much earlier to work dutifully for whatever money they could. No doubt the manager sometimes broke her own rule and hired a girl who was too pretty, who sooner or later ran into trouble; the businessmen floated cloud upon cloud of witty small talk and did not vacate their tables fast enough, feverish lovers showed up and made a scene, or drunken boys flirted with them-successfully. A smile, a phone number, a good time.

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 amp; 1200! Healthy men or women age 21–45 needed to participate in residential studies evaluating drug amp; 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 amp; Confidential Send Self Addressed Stamped Envelope

American Strippers Fantasy shows and More

Jeeps for $100 Impounds, IRS amp; 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-

Advice, she repeated to herself as she showered and shaved her underarms and her legs, then tidied up her pubic hair a bit before leaning close to the mirror to inspect her face for wrinkles or anything else. Pimples or moles or blotches or warts. I used to have a perfect nose, she thought. Eyes, laugh lines, neck. Certainly one of the great advantages of prison was that you didn't go to the beach too often. No long afternoons on the tennis court in Bridgehampton. Closest you got to a sunburn was pushing a lawn mower in the summer. She made a fist and inspected her biceps. Not bad. Not like when she was swimming two miles a day in high school, but not bad. Good enough to push a guy away or pull him toward her.

So where to go? Before prison she'd have gravitated toward St. Mark's Place, only a few blocks away, where all the freaks, punks, squatters, bogus Rastafarians, piercing addicts, failed models, musicians, lost Englishmen, and New Jersey teenagers found one another in the Day-Glo underground pits. She'd already walked along the block a few times, knew it wasn't for her anymore. Years had gone by, but it was the same people, the same kind of people. The girl who lets men perform oral sex on her at the bar, the motorcycle guy who needs new people to frighten, the tender junkie with a puppy inside his shirt, comparing bad tattoos.

But that was then and this was now, and so, after slipping on the same cunning black dress as before and twirling her lipstick and how's my hair, she clicked downstairs and outside and crosstown through the dusk and shadows and crowds. Wobbling on her pumps, out of practice. Yet getting a bit of action into the hips. The night remained warm, the air left over from summer. Everyone seemed in a hurry. New movies, new shows, new restaurants. Bars and cafes and bistros. Inside each, a roar of laughter and I'll have the free-range chicken. A lot of life gets lived in these places, she thought, slipping happily into a cafe off the corner of Thirteenth Street and Sixth Avenue. She established herself at the bar and sipped a glass of Merlot. The other single women pretended to be interested in talking with one another but keptwatch, perfumed with loneliness. It's harder to be a woman, Christina thought, you have to protect yourself, you have to be careful. You have to protect not just your body but your idea of yourself. Rick thought he knew who she was. But he really didn't, which was why she ended up in prison and he did not.

She finished a second glass of wine and was thinking about leaving, maybe to walk up Sixth Avenue, when a good-looking man in a suit sat next to her.

"David." He offered his hand. "I thought I'd sit down, what the hell."

"What the hell," she agreed.

"You don't mind?"

He smelled good. "No."

"I'm, I'm kind of-"

She liked his tie. "Shy?"

"Yes. Well, no." He frowned with great earnestness, as if they had reached a turning point in a long conversation. "I've been through all this too many times, so I'll just get it out. I'm a doctor, rather successful, I might confess, I'm thirty-eight, I'm available. I'm looking for someone to settle down with. I'm ready to be married. I'm very financially secure."

"That's nice," said Christina, lighting a cigarette.

"I realize this is very hurried, very fast." His eyes swept anxiously across the restaurant before coming back to her. "But it's better to be honest. I'm a guy who is ready, really ready to settle down. I saw you and thought, There's a woman who is terrific."

He's hiding something, Christina decided. "You don't know the first thing about me."

"I do and I don't." He smiled, as if with wisdom. "You'd be surprised what you can tell about a person."

"What can you tell?"

"Oh, I can tell we'd get along."

"How?" She ordered another glass of wine and noticed the women down the bar glaring at her.

"Well, I have a lot to offer," he said. "I'm ready to get married and have children. I have very good communication skills."

"I'm not ready to get married," she told him. "Not even close."

He consulted the pattern of his tie. "You're not?"

"No."

"What do you want, then?"

"Hey, I'm just sitting here drinking my wine, okay? I didn't ask you to ask me these things."

He blinked miserably. "I think we'd be very sexually compatible, just so you know."

She laughed and realized that she was a bit drunk. "You can tell that, too?"

"Yes-I think so," he said eagerly, lips strangely wet. "I think you would be understanding of… of my… I have a slight disorder-not physical, don't worry-a question of aesthetics, really. Habits-no, practices might be the term. A woman could marry me and be provided for, and just see my disorder as aesthetic. Harmless. Not much to overlook."

He stopped, waited for her reaction, or perhaps a request for clarification.

"David?" said Christina.

"Yes?" he replied with sudden hope.

"You've told me your occupation and financial status, you've virtually proposed marriage, you've asserted that we would be compatible, and you've alluded to some weird sexual hang-up, right?"

"Yes, I guess-"

"But, David, you forgot something."

"What?"

"You forgot to ask me my name."

"Oh."

"You better go," Christina said.

He studied her. "Yes. Yes. I'm so sorry." He held out his hand. "Please accept my apology."

She smiled falsely. "Bye."

He slid off the stool and drifted down the bar next to another woman. Said something about sitting down, what the hell, thirty-eight years old, ready to get married.

I'm not insulted, she thought, because I'm almost drunk.

"You mind?" A man in a collarless black shirt dropped down on the stool next to her.

"Why not?" she said, waving her cigarette. He was tall and altogether too skinny, with his head so recently shaved that she didn't know whether he was bald or making a statement. He wore a big chrome watch on his wrist, three different dials on it, and as signs went, this was bad. Men with big watches did not, as a rule, pan out. Nor, however, did men with smaller watches, so there you go, Christina. She tried to remember what kind of watch Rick wore and could not-probably something gold and the size of a hockey puck. She remembered her father's watch easily, however, a cheap Timex with grease worked into its scratches and rasp marks. An honest watch for an honest man. How she wished he were still alive. She knew enough now that she could have gone to him with uncomplicated affection, just be his daughter as he was just her father. She wanted to touch his face. I'd give anything for that, she thought, remembering that he'd let her drive the Mustang by herself when she was sixteen. He knew she would take it out on the highway and gun it up to one hundred and ten, roaring and vibrating, getting the speed into her to get the craziness out. Didn't really work, but she'd always felt better. Let the car ease down to eighty, seventy, sixty. He'd trusted her with the car, with herself. The only person who ever did, in a way. Well, the Columbia religion professor, maybe. Listened mostly. Yet after the first dozen times in bed, the professor had asked her why she was so experienced for a nineteen-year-old. But she wasn't, not really. He didn't mean experienced, he meant responsive. Oh, she'd said, I'm just like that. He'd walked into his study and gazed silently out the window toward Riverside Drive. I hate to do this, he said, I really do, but we have to stop. Why? she'd wanted to know. I made a mistake, he said. What? I thought I could handle you, but I can't. I don't understand, she'd cried. You'll drive me crazy, he said, you'll slowly drive me crazy. How? He'd shaken his head. You are actually insatiable. I am? Yes. I am? He'd nodded again. How do you know? Believe me, he said, I know. But I'm happy with you. For now, he said, for now. But I love you. No, I don't think so, he'd said. There's something hard in you, Christina. You know in your heart you can cut me up. She'd just stared. He was right. Something happened to you, he'd said. You haven't told me and I don't want to know, but it broke you and also made you too strong. I've been with enough women to understand this. I thought because I was twenty years older I could handle it, but I can't. I'm a fool, but I want to get out now, while I still can.

The bald man next to her took out a pack of cigarettes and offered her one. The drama begins, she thought. She took the cigarette.

"They're French," he warned.

She nodded, her head light. "Then you must not be."

"No?"

"French people smoke American cigarettes," she said. She looked away. Across from her, two women sat at a table paging through an album full of photos of wedding cakes.

"I guess so." He sipped his drink. "My name's Rahul, by the way."

"Melissa," said Christina.

"Waiting for somebody?"

"Yes."

"Who?"

"The unknown man."

I'm so witty, she thought, makes me sick.

He tried to laugh but was uncertain. "Is the man unknown to me or unknown to you?"

"Both, in fact."

"What is this man like?"

"His shoes are not worn down," she said.

He kicked out one foot and inspected an Italian loafer. "So far I'm okay."

Charmboat, Christina thought.

"What else?" he asked. "About the unknown man."

"Don't ask."

He grinned. "I'm asking."

"He can stand and deliver."

"Stand and deliver," he repeated.

"Yes. If he can't do that, then forget it."

"What exactly does 'stand and deliver' mean?"

"It has all meanings, and especially one."

Rahul pursed his lips. He was strange, but maybe attractively strange. Maybe she wasn't sure. Maybe she was drunk. "What do you do?" Christina asked, twirling her smoke. "Are you gainfully employed?"

"I'm a photographer."

I like his hands, she thought. "What do you take pictures of?"

"Why don't you come back to my place and see?" he answered with purposeful mystery. "I live just a few blocks away."

"That was fast."

He rubbed a hand over his skull. "That's my speed."

"Slow is better."

He shrugged, willing to be embarrassed. "How about it?"

I'm not afraid of him, she thought.

"You're curious. I can tell."

"One quick look," she agreed. "And that will be that. I'm meeting a friend in an hour."

"Right," he said.

They walked out and down the street. Maybe this is how people meet each other, she thought dreamily, or maybe I'm just lonely as hell. Rahul lit a cigarette, and she asked him how long he'd lived there.

"Three years. I found this place and knew I'd be there forever. What about you?"

"The East Village," she said, her arms clutched in front of her.

"Been there long?"

"No."

"Where were you before?"

"In prison." She hoped that this would bother him.

"Oh, that is very cool." Rahul nodded.

"Why?" she asked. "Why is that cool?"

"I'm into knowing different kinds of people." He inspected his cigarette, as if it might be a microphone. "Last week I met this woman whose job is to figure out how to put advertising in the sky. She's supposed to get some kind of satellite that floats around, and in the night, you see this logo up there with the stars. I have this other friend, she vacuums people's faces."

Christina winced. "What?"

"These rich old ladies on the East Side, they come in and have their faces all warmed up with hot towels, and they apply this stuff on the skin, some sort of softening chemical, then my friend uses this vacuum thing that looks like a pen, except it's got a little nozzle, and she sucks out all the gunk in the pores of these women's faces. Sometimes their backs and other parts. It's the new thing. Once a month, all your nose pores cleaned."

"That is totally disgusting," she cried, yet was intrigued.

"But these women love it. They love it because it's disgusting. They pay something like five hundred bucks a shot." He pulled out his keys and they stopped at the stoop of a townhouse. "Here we are."

She looked behind her as she entered. No one knows I'm here, she thought.

The door closed heavily and he locked it. Inside the front hall she examined the framed photographs. "They're all pills."

"Yes."

"You take pictures of pills?"

Rahul nodded. "I'm very good at it."

She looked into the living room. Retro-fifties decor, expensive and collectible, the tables and chairs and lamps all sophisticated experiments in chrome, dyed leather, and wood laminates. So stylish, so uncomfortable. Across the walls, dozens of framed black-and-white photos. All pills.

"You'd be surprised how many photos of pills are required these days." He touched his finger against one. "You have new pills coming out all the time, and the pharmaceutical companies need good pictures of them. You need lighting and a backdrop. Sometimes you have to make the pill look shinier, sometimes duller."

Christina blinked attentively. I'm getting out of here, she told herself.

"I've done almost all the pills there are," Rahul told her. "The anti-depressants, the herbs and natural remedies, birth-control pills, thyroid pills, the chemotherapy, the steroids…" He watched her expression. "The hormone medications, the heart pills, the new antibiotics, the anti-inflammatories, the ones for high blood pressure

… low blood pressure, the over-the-counter remedies, the blood thinners, the cholesterol pills, seizure-control pills, the hair-growing pills, the anxiety medications, pills so that you can take other pills, all the palliatives, like morphine. There's one that you take to forget pain from surgery, you know that? They have a new pill to make your fingernails grow more slowly." He passed through the living room into a large kitchen with an unused designer stove. "You have companies all over the world making new pills. They either send me there or the pills here. I'm flying to Germany tomorrow, in fact. Love their pills, the Germans." He pulled out two glasses from a cabinet. "Drink?"

"I'm okay, thanks," she said. "Maybe one, I guess."

She used the bathroom, locking the door behind her. It seemed perfectly normal. Perhaps a bit clean. Maybe he had a maid. Maybe he would put a pill in her drink and she'd fall unconscious. She peeked into the cabinet. Q-tips in a glass. That was all. What kind of guy kept Q-tips in a glass? She sat down on the toilet, imagined something sticky, worried, stood up, underwear at her knees, inspected the seat, wiped it off with tissue, sat down again. All that wine going piddle. I don't want to have a hard heart, she thought, I don't want to be too strong. That was the thing about Rick. He made her weak in a way she liked. Her anxiety disappeared; she would lie in bed against his huge back, smelling his T-shirt, or she would pull his heavy arm over her. That was the best she'd ever slept in her life. He took care of her hardness problem. But just for a while. Maybe the religion professor had been right. Rahul didn't seem to be so bad-no, that was just the wine. She knew enough not to trust herself. Sometimes it could just be anybody, and that scared her, that was what the religion professor had seen.

"Want me to show you around?" Rahul said when she came out.

"You want to show me?" Christina asked, her ankles feeling loose on the heels of her shoes. She followed Rahul into the bedroom. It appeared normal, except for the large circular lights above the bed. "What are those?"

"Operating room," he said, "exact kind used." He flicked a switch and the lights above the bed began to glow. In a minute they were excruciatingly bright.

She smiled casually. If she was smart, she'd be leaving soon.

"What's next?"

"Darkroom." He lifted his eyebrows. "By way of contrast."

"Oh, let's see that," she asked.

"Most photographers send out their film." Rahul pointed at his sinks and chemicals. "I send out most of my stuff, but there are certain shots I want to develop myself."

Like the ones of the dead women in the cellar-trussed, hanging from hooks, mouths stuffed with surgical gloves.

Don't think these things! she told herself. Just keep looking around. The darkroom's desk was littered with papers, keys, postcards, contact sheets, cassettes, money in different currencies, and a black cell phone the size of a pack of cards. She picked it up, liked its ingenious engineering. When Rahul turned to point out his collection of old Hasselblad cameras, she slipped the phone into her purse. I might need this, she told herself.

She noticed a little glass jar filled with Q-tips. "What other pictures do you take?" she asked, hurrying into the living room.

He followed. "What is it?"

"Nothing."

His skin was bright, pressurized. "You think I'm strange?"

"No."

"Yes, I think you do."

"Why would I think that?" she said.

"I can tell."

Maybe he had taken a pill. "We're all strange." Christina clutched the purse. I'm not scared of him, she told herself. I wouldn't sleep with him in a bazillion years, but I'm not scared of him.

"Let's sit down and talk," he suggested.

She looked at her watch. "I should go."

"I want you to stay. We've barely-"

"My friend is waiting for me."

"I was going to show you my other pictures."

"Your other pictures? Not the pills?"

He pulled a large album of photographs off a shelf. "This is the first series."

She sat down and flipped open the album. Q-tips. Forests and constellations and waterfalls of Q-tips.

"I worked very hard on that, he said, pointing at one. "The light's tricky."

"You took these pictures in your bedroom?"

"How'd you know?"

"Just a guess."

He was pleased, and again ran his hand over his head.

"How many did you take?" she asked. "Of the Q-tips, I mean."

"Over the years, probably, what?" He contemplated the question. "A thousand rolls. Thirty-six to a roll."

"You took thirty-six thousand pictures of Q-tips."

He nodded. "No one else has ever done that, I suspect."

"Rahul, I have to go."

"Please don't."

"I do." He'll lock me in the basement and I'll use the cell phone, she thought. That line about going to Germany the next day was a lie.

"Can I have your number?" Rahul asked.

"Not quite yet."

He fiddled with his watch. "I'm rich, you know."

"I can see that."

"You're very beautiful."

"Right," she said.

"I know men always say that, but I have a special ability to see things."

"Will you see me to the door, then?"

"Not yet. Please."

She stood.

"I can make you happy!"

She ran to the hallway. God, am I stupid, she thought, brushing drunkenly against the pill photos. I must be stupid and desperate to let myself-

"Wait!" he cried, following her. He caught her arm at the front door. "You can't just leave me. Wait, you-"

She opened the door, but he was stronger and pushed it shut.

"I said wait, bitch."

She lifted her knee into his crotch, which stopped him long enough for her to tear open the locks and dash down the steps and along the street, almost running, looking behind her. He didn't follow.

At the corner she stopped and lit a cigarette, her heart beating too fast. She felt buzzy and sickish, her forehead hot. Next to her, the cars blew down the avenue and people plunged confidently into the further possibilities of the evening. She breathed out the cigarette, waiting for it to calm her. It didn't. She looked back along the street. Nothing. Her fingers felt funny and she realized she was shaking. I'm out of control here, she thought, a little out of control.