Blasphemy: New and Selected Stories

NIGHT PEOPLE

Across the street from my apartment there is a twenty-four-hour manicure joint. This is only possible in New York City. Amazingly enough, there are a few other twenty-four-hour salons in town, but those are modernist little palaces. The joint across the street looks more like a 7-Eleven — brightly lit, inadequately mopped, and likely to be robbed soon. When it first opened, I was convinced that it was a front for a drug and/or prostitution ring. But, night after night, I sat on my minuscule terrace (I fit into it like it was a bathtub) and watched through the large picture windows as women — and men dressed as women and/or on their way to becoming women — arrived in the middle of the night to get their fingers and toenails done. Who knew there were so many insomniac transsexuals and transvestites?

The manicurists were all Asian women, most of them older than fifty and battered by their graveyard-shifted lives. But there was one twenty-something woman who fascinated me. She was plain-featured and plain of dress, but she gave the appearance of beautiful without being beautiful. I wasn’t the only male fascinated with her confident mirage. My building’s night doorman, a polite and quiet man otherwise, shouted street poetry at her and tried to find every rhyme and half rhyme for “Japanese,” though I’m pretty sure she was Korean. She’d always smile and wave, but would not acknowledge his advances in any other way. I don’t know if she ever looked up from my doorman to see me watching her from my third-floor terrace. Could I be seen in the dark?

And so I watched her ply her trade. While her coworkers labored with a silent hostility that I could feel from across the street, she was animated. She seemed to enjoy her customers. She laughed often and made them laugh as well. What kind of person can be that charming at 3:33 A.M.?

After months of this surveillance, I decided that I needed to see the woman up close. I needed to speak to her. I needed to get a manicure, though I knew I could never get a pedicure. A manicure seemed like a public act but a pedicure felt like something private, even sexual. I felt like I’d be cheating on my girlfriend if I got my toes done. But I had a bigger problem than podiatric infidelity. I’m a nail biter. A nail chewer and eater. I was too embarrassed to walk into a manicure place with disfigured nails. So I gave myself an amateurish manicure, worried that my clipping and sanding would wake my girlfriend, and then left my apartment and walked across the street for a professional one.

“Hello, sir,” the receptionist said. “How can we help you?”

“I want her,” I said, and pointed at the subject of my affections.

She saw me pointing at her, smiled, and waved me over. Her name tag told me that her name was Saundra. Underrated how name tags give a man permission to briefly study a woman’s breasts.

“Hello, Saundra,” I said. “Can you fix these?”

She took my hand and carefully studied my nails.

“You just cut your nails?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

Her voice was teen pop culture American with a hint of Queens.

“You sanded them, too?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Like, two minutes ago, right?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“You’re a nail biter,” she said.

“Yeah, how’d you know?” I asked.

“We get them all the time,” she said. “I’m a biter, too. That’s how I fell into this job. To stop biting. I started getting really expensive manicures. I figured I wouldn’t chew on my nails if I’d paid a hundred bucks to make them look good.”

“Did it work?”

“No,” she said. “So I started coming to cheap places like this one.”

“And how’s that going?”

“Still chewing my nails. But I’ve got a job.”

Saundra placed my fingers in a warm, soapy liquid. And as I soaked, she prepared her tools.

“We use a cold bath on these,” she said. “Kills everything.”

I imagined a tiny freezer filled with nail clippers and files.

“The subzero is better than heat,” she said. “I think dentists use them, too. Dentists and manicurists. Dirty, dirty jobs.”

“You’re funny,” I said, instead of just laughing, which was, I admit, pretty damn weird. But she didn’t seem to notice. She took my hands from the soaking bowl and began her work. It felt amazing. It had been months since I’d been touched with any real kindness. And even that slight, professional intimacy was exhilarating.

“You must get some bizarre folks in here, right?” I asked.

“Not as many as you’d think,” she said. “I think even the crazy people are kind of freaked out that we’re open all night.”

“Even crazy people have standards,” I said.

“You’re funny,” she said, also without laughing. Then there was that quiet, charged moment in which a relationship’s romantic possibilities become clear.

“So what do you do for a living?” she asked.

“I do lighting for stage plays,” I said.

“For Broadway?” she asked. She was obviously excited by the thought of Broadway. Most people are. But they were thinking of the people in the spotlights, not the guys working in the rafters.

“I work Broadway sometimes,” I said. “But mostly for off-off-off-Broadway stuff. If it involves naked people dancing with puppets, then I’m probably lighting it.”

“Does that pay well?” she asked.

“Not enough to live in New York.”

“Nobody can afford to live here,” she said.

“And yet, there are millions of us poor bastards,” I said.

She pushed back my cuticles. She buffed my nails. She massaged some oil into my fingers.

“We get actors in here all the time,” she said. “Lot of night people in show business, huh?”

“There’s a lot of time between jobs,” I said. “So you have to fill it up. And a lot of us fill it with lonely.”

“Tough to sleep when you’re lonely,” she said.

“How long have you been insomniac?” I asked.

“I was a good sleeper until I took this job. And now, it feels like I’m always awake.”

“Me too.”

She massaged my hands. Her fingertips on my palms. It felt so good that I closed my eyes and kept them closed.

“I live in this one-room apartment,” she said. “I grew up there with my parents and three brothers. Six of us in one room. But my parents bought it. They owned it. Amazing, huh?”

“I’ve got friends who have a bathtub in the middle of their kitchen,” I said. “They throw a thick slab of wood over it and use it as a table.”

“Crazy. But that place is all mine now. My family moved back to Korea. Even my brothers. They were born here and lived their whole lives here, but they moved back.”

“Restless,” I said. “Everybody’s restless.”

“When I can’t sleep, I just walk around the edges of my apartment like I was in solitary confinement, you know? I’ve got this Murphy bed but I never pull it out of the wall. I keep this big couch pushed up against it. And I’ve got two other little couches. Three couches in a studio? I’m crazy, right? I just move from couch to couch. One couch after another. Trying to sleep.”

“Lucky couches,” I said.

“You’re a flirt,” she said. “How does your girlfriend feel about that?”

“How do you know I have a girlfriend?” I asked.

“All you flirts have girlfriends.”

I opened my eyes.

“You’re a flirt, too,” I said. “Do you have a boyfriend?”

“Of course,” she said. “But he hardly ever stays at my place. He sleeps too easy. He can even sleep while I’m pacing around the room. Pisses me off.”

“Have you ever lived with another insomniac?”

“No,” she said. “Have you?”

“If two insomniacs fell in love, you know there’d be a murder-suicide.”

“That’s sad,” she said.

“Sorry,” I said. “It’s not going too well with my girlfriend. She falls asleep two seconds after she closes her eyes. I hate it.”

“My boyfriend ignores me. And I keep auditioning for his attention. Maybe you should come over and light me up all pretty.”

“Mine teaches community college out on Long Island,” I said. “I never see her. Except when she’s sleeping and I’m not.”

Saundra rubbed some other kind of moisturizer into my hands.

“My boyfriend and I haven’t had sex in five years,” she said.

“Wow,” I said. “Wow.”

I thought he had to be a gay man hiding in the closet behind the closet. Or maybe he’d been molested as a kid and couldn’t deal with it. Or maybe he was just a drone, one of those strange and lucky people whose engines are not completely powered by various body fluids.

“My girlfriend and I haven’t done it in six months,” I said. “And it was three months before that. I get sex twice a year, like Catholics who only go to Mass on Christmas and Easter.”

She laughed and slapped the table. And spilled a bowl of soapy water. As she cleaned up the mess, she blinked back tears.

“Why don’t you leave her?” she asked.

“Why don’t you leave yours?” I asked.

Neither of us had the answer.

I suppose I stayed with my girlfriend because I hoped we’d fall in love with each other’s bodies again. I wanted her to lust for me again. In bed, I wanted her to crawl on top of me and grind so hard that her sweat fell into my mouth. But I couldn’t say such things to her after so many years of honor and respect. I was too damn polite to tell her what I wanted. She might say no. She might laugh. And I was more afraid of being rejected by her than I was of dying.

“And now you’re done,” she said.

She meant that my manicure was finished.

“I live across the street,” I said

“Oh, that’s subtle,” she said.

“No, I didn’t mean it that way,” I said. “Or maybe I did. I don’t know.”

“You have that creepy doorman, right?” she asked.

“He’s okay,” I said. “Except when it comes to you. Then he gets creepy.”

She looked confused.

“I’ve heard him talking to you,” I said. “I’ve been watching you for months.”

“Okay,” she said. “So you’re the creepy one.”

She rolled her chair back.

“You’re not a stalker, are you?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “I’m a night watchman.”

She didn’t say anything. She studied me, looking for signs of real danger, I suppose. I knew I wasn’t dangerous. And I think she knew it, too.

“Okay,” she said. “You can pay the receptionist. Tips are happily accepted.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I won’t come back. And I’ll stop watching you.”

She just nodded her head.

I wanted to say something profound to her — give a name to our separate loneliness, a metaphor that described the abysses that can grow between people in love. But I had only my most basic desire.

“If I could only sleep,” I said.

“Yeah,” Saundra said. “I know.”

I paid for my manicure and walked back toward my building. As I noticed that my doorman was absent, I also realized that I’d forgotten my keys in the apartment. I’d have to wake my girlfriend. And she’d be angry that I’d gone missing and jealous that I’d been talking to another woman. My girlfriend wouldn’t fuck me but she didn’t want anybody else fucking me, either. After the inevitable argument, she and I would lie in the dark, with her worried that she’d be too tired to teach well later that day and me too terrified to reach across the bed and touch her.

I wanted none of that to happen. I didn’t want anything to happen. So I stopped in the middle of the street. Amazing how quiet eight million people can be. I wondered if I should just walk over to that twenty-four-hour deli on Canal and wait for sunrise. But then I looked up toward my apartment and saw my girlfriend standing on our little terrace. I could see her through the dark. I wondered how long she’d been watching me. I wondered if she wanted me to walk toward her or to walk away.