Just then, as I passed the rusting gate, I had the premonition that I was going to become a killer.
10
ONE OF THE REASONS I worked in the hospital downtown was to desensitize myself. I would still wake screaming in the night, feeling around my bed for their bodies. So I watched as emergency room doctors spoke to one another casually, arms swinging imaginary golf clubs while all around them short and long lives were ending. I went to work in a hospital so that I might learn the drill. That death was common and not so bad.
It didn’t work. One September afternoon a woman came to find her pigtailed child intubated. The child had pursued a butterfly across the street, away from the teachers at the playground. She’d been hit by a bus. The mother could not understand. But a bus is so big, she kept saying. The nurses didn’t get it, but I did. She meant, how could a bus only hit her daughter’s twig body? Merely hit. I begged the nurses to undo the child’s hair and they snarled at me like I was an idiot. But I knew that when the mother saw the pigtails, she wouldn’t be able to make any rational decisions.
What worked better for desensitization was kicking Tim.
Tim worked at AIG and this was during the collapse of Wall Street. So many more terrible things will come to pass after the collapse that I wonder how big a deal it will seem to you. But back then it was a dark time for dark people. The men who’d been pulling in millions a year were suddenly broke or scared. I met him in a restaurant. I was always eating alone those days before Vic.
Tim was with another man like him and they were seated beside me at the bar where, a few months later, I would meet Big Sky.
I’d heard them order a 1966 bottle of French first growth, at fourteen hundred dollars. The other man had seventeen stents in his heart. He ordered the steak and ate the fries off Tim’s plate. Elvis was playing from the sound system. The bartender poured the wine into a goosenecked carafe. It was a little darker than old blood.
They offered me a taste. I said no, no, no and they insisted. The bartender got me a glass and watched Tim to see when he should quit the pour. Think of how terrible that feels, to not even want the wine and then be metered out some amount. To be sized up. Was I worth a $100 taste, or a $250 taste?
—How do you like it? Tim asked me. He was balding and wore a shirt with a contrast collar. He had large teeth and the kinds of eyes that looked like they were in the middle of a sex act no matter what he was doing.
—It’s no Yellow Tail, I said.
They didn’t know to laugh right away. Eventually Tim did because I gave him one of my gazes.
I stayed for another glass. The bartender wiped down the bar, and the smell of rib eye faded out the door.
Back then the blue-collar men who worked at Ford would think of Wall Street and their veins would bulge. They thought of bars like that one, labels of wine that worked out to $350 a goblet. It’s not that I was sympathetic to men like Tim—there was no pitiable plight of the Wall Streeter—but the other end of it was oversimplified. The hatred was misplaced and men like Tim, if anything, wanted you to hate them. If you told them they were not evil, they would say that yes they were. Men don’t necessarily want to be the bad guys, but they don’t want to be the ordinary ones, either.
—Down here, Tim said to me, gesturing around the bar, at the bottles of men and the glasses of women, you know at the end of every day whether we had a good day or a bad day. You can tell the market by the mood of this bar. We work hard and we play hard and at night we’re either celebrating or we’re drowning our sorrows. It’s not healthy. It’s like a boxer after a round; good or bad, it makes you dysfunctional.
I suppose I liked his honesty. He was somewhat guileless and somewhat a gentleman. Vic would end up being similar. All these paltry stand-ins for my father.
When I went to pay my check that night my card was declined. This had never happened to me or, I should say, this was just the beginning of those sorts of things happening.
—I’ve got her, Tim said to the bartender. He had a platinum card between his knuckles like a blade.
It wasn’t inexpensive, my bill. I’d ordered the foie gras and the steak tartare, plus a few glasses of wine. Eating like that was the only way I knew to console myself.
He took my phone number and I took his and the next day I was about to write to him to say that I would send a check to his work address. But he wrote to me first. He asked me if I knew any women, any girls, for a friend of his who liked to be kicked.
Another message followed right away.
I’m the friend, it said, with a little winking face.
I looked around my room. It was an attractive and clean apartment that I had recently moved into and feared losing. It was barely furnished because I’d lost the job at the hospital downtown. I hadn’t lost it. The contract had run out. The previous week I’d canceled my cable service and returned two dresses I’d already worn to Bergdorf. They accepted anything in those days, with the tags gone, with the smell of cigarettes. It wasn’t without a price, of course. The women would gather the garment into their arms, sniff it, and look back at you like you were trash.
I think I have a friend who might be interested, I wrote back.
One minute later I wrote, I’m the friend.
Kicking Tim was healthier than all those steak dinners with Vic.
—Like just straight with the toe?
I was standing in his hotel room at the Soho Grand. The room was very small but tasteful and dark. He was up against a wall in his nice work shirt and tasteful boxers. Black, thin socks rose up the calves of his pale legs. I wore a pin-striped skirt suit with a high slit and a pair of heels he’d just bought me in the Meatpacking District. I was upset because I’d let him pick them out. Peep-toed black patent-leather sling-backs. Stupid.
He nodded quickly because to give instruction would have gone against the spirit of the thing.
Primly I brought my leg back, then smashed his testicles against the minibar behind him that held the Scotch decanter and rocks glasses. The room twinkled with the sound. He groaned but did not cover himself. Nor did he smile or look like he was in sexual congress with his pain.
That first night, with the Talking Heads in the background, I kicked him six times. Afterward he spooned me in bed. I felt him small and hard against my skirt suit. He moved in little increments, up and down instead of back and forth. He kept his palm flat against the side of my waist, the palm paralyzed like a stroke victim’s. We sat for an early dinner at the restaurant inside the hotel. I ate an octopus appetizer and he had the endive salad. The leaves were glossed demurely in oil and lemon. We both drank water, then he went back to Connecticut and I went home to my studio, one thousand dollars in hand.
We never know how much worse it will be. That’s the greatest gift we have in life. As a child you’ll scrape your knee and the first time will sting terribly. It will shine like mica as it starts to heal. For maybe a week you’ll look at it and think, God, that hurt. But then you will lose a child out of you. Maybe you should stop listening to me. Sometimes I think you won’t endure life without what I’ve learned, and other times I believe the exact opposite. But mostly what I think is that you won’t love me.
11
ON MY THIRD DAY AT the health café I worked alone. Natalia was gone. She and her braids and cowboy hat had gone home to Salinas for the summer.