Eve in the City Read online

  ...can’t tell if what? I panicked. I didn’t know what I was talking about. What was happening? At the bar I was usually considered the smart one, at least by me. Plus, as usual, it wasn’t even true. I had never done that, seen a picture in a magazine and then thought it looked like me. I didn’t even read magazines anymore. They were evil. Then I realized she was joking, making fun of me. Do you model? And I had taken it seriously. I tried changing the subject.

  “So, didn’t it fog up?”

  “What?”

  I pointed to the big photograph.

  “The camera. The lens.”

  She turned and looked with me for a moment. She had a nice head, on a very long neck, like a swan, which are actually snakes, I remembered thinking, the first time I saw them. Swans were snakes that had grown feathers and turned their ugliness to beauty, but they were still creepy. A creepy beauty, that’s what she had. And anyway, what kind of name was Marron?

  “I wanted them to respond,” she said, as if I had asked a completely different question. She had these memorized speeches. You could tell by the way she delivered them in a singsong voice. “To respond without knowing it. To manipulate a response. I mean, it doesn’t look like me. It’s completely abstract when you enlarge it that much. Just dots. But look how sexual what they wrote and drew is. Like they were enthralled.”

  “Who’s they? Men?”

  “Men and women. The Male Gaze. We all look at things through the eyes of men. Whether we admit it or not.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Then you do, if you think you don’t. It’s only when you realize you do, that you might not. I wanted to show a glimpse of the world. The world we live in, not the world we make.”

  I had no idea what she was talking about. I was the foreigner, I realized. Our eyes met. Or rather, mine looked into hers, which were just these empty suckholes, devouring everything. Then they turned away. I didn’t exist anymore. They’d gotten what they wanted, which was the admission that I was an idiot, I suppose. More people came. With roses. Calling her a genius. She took the flowers and cradled them in her arms. I watched the thorns rub against her skin. It was a contest, who was going to scratch who. While they talked to her, I managed to slip away, but just as I reached the door I heard her call.

  “Eve!” It surprised me, that she remembered my name.

  I waved like I had to go, which suddenly I realized I did. I was late. It’s weird how lies, the lies I told myself, at least, really turned out to be the truth. Did that mean the things I took for granted as true were really lies? She gave me one last ultra-intense stare.

  “See you,” she said, then smiled, like she wanted to be friends.

  It wasn’t until I was outside, three blocks away, that I stopped dead, so suddenly the momentum pitched me forward. She had hypnotized me! She had made me walk out forgetting all about him, the love of my life, the handsome man who was tall and smelled of sandalwood. What was his name again? Horace. How could I have done that? And where had he gone? While I was talking to that cold bitch whose cunt was all over the subway, he had disappeared! Just as miraculously as he had materialized by my side in front of those bars of soap. I shook my head. He had been trying to ditch me. That’s why he led me over there. I must have been boring him stiff with my talk about lying on the couch all day doing nothing. I thought I had been in love, for maybe fifteen minutes, but now I saw it was more like a seizure. I had wanted to love so badly that I had taken it out on some innocent bystander. Like those crazy people who go berserk and shoot up a commuter train, except I did it with my heart, and to myself.

  Bars are just rooms. That’s what most people don’t realize. They think they’re these special places, full of possibility. Viktor’s was a cellar, though when I once called it that he was annoyed. “This? This is a garden apartment.” He looked over the place proudly. It was a cellar. You went down steps to get to it. It was in a house on a side street off Times Square, ordinary from the outside. Tourists were buzzed in and then had to duck, so they had this bowed, hunched quality when they appeared. There was one big space with tables, chairs, a jukebox, and, instead of windows, posters of the city. The Empire State Building. The Statue of Liberty. There was a bar, but no register, just an adding machine with a roll of tape, and a cash box. It would have been so easy to steal, except Viktor watched. Even when making drinks, he stared. You got the sense he was monitoring every transaction. Our big claim to fame was that We Never Close. Which wasn’t true. But we did stay open way past the last legal places that had signs, and doors on the street, and liquor licenses, until five, sometimes six in the morning. Viktor paid those bartenders to tell their customers where to go. Sometimes they came in, too, the bartenders. They got to drink for free. But mostly it was conventioneers from Kansas City, college kids, French people or Germans. We were a tourist trap.

  I got there in a bad mood, a little late, not much, and no one else had come before me. Still, he was furious. The room in back was stacked with cases of beer and boxes of liquor bottles. You could see through a dirty window to the “garden” Viktor had talked about. It was this completely wild junkyard, about the size of a postage stamp, with big chunks of cement overgrown by three-foot-high weeds. People hung their clothes on lines or off fire escapes. From that far down I could look straight up and see underwear flutter, glow, in the night.

  “Eve!”

  “I’m coming.”

  I tried not to look at myself. There was no mirror, but I tried to not even look down. The heels were the worst. I hated the sound they made, like I weighed two hundred pounds.

  “I don’t like you looking,” he called.

  “Well I don’t like you looking.”

  “I don’t look. I—”

  I opened the door. He was blocking my way. Whatever he was going to say he stopped, then stepped to one side.

  “What?” I asked.

  “You look nice,” he said.

  “Yeah, right.”

  I swept past him.

  It wasn’t fair. I wanted to choose. Was that such a crime? To want some control? It seemed to me that if you loved someone they should love you back. I mean it was just common courtesy. But reality was almost the exact opposite. Loving someone pushed him away, and then when he withdrew he left this vacuum and Mr. Wrong got sucked in, liking you because you were busy loving someone else. It made no sense.

  Viktor got back on his high stool, his little throne, and watched me do chores, set out ashtrays, wipe off the smudged top of the jukebox. I knew all the songs, not by title but by what buttons to push. B11. J18. M2. It was like quoting Scripture, the snippets of music that went through my head. I smiled, thinking how far from God I was. Though everything I did—it was all so ritualized—still had for me a religious significance. Even the feeling of Viktor’s stare as I bent over to wad napkins under a shaky table leg.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “I said you looked nice.”

  “Exactly. I look nice to you.”

  He scratched his arm. He was such an unattractive man. It was almost a selling point. You knew you weren’t being blinded by beauty.

  “Look at me,” I said, straightening up, forcing myself to do just that. Here, mirrors were all over, reflecting each other, to hide the ugly surroundings. Everywhere you looked you saw a million of you getting smaller and smaller, being minced by a giant knife. “I’m dressed this way, in clothes you picked out, and you said I looked nice.”

  “So if I said you looked bad, that would be a compliment?”

  “Yeah. I guess.” I looked around for something else to do. I really wanted to quit. I think he sensed it, too. I was tired of losing arguments.

  “It is a job,” he said gently. “You dress in provocative clothes. It has nothing to do with anything.”

  I was trying not to cry. A bottle had rolled into the corner. We’d missed it, cleaning up last night. It lay there. I focused all my attention on it.

&nbs
p; “Where I come from,” he went on, “there is a flower you pick. It is quite common. It is used as a symbol. A message. You put it in your hair if you are a woman. In the lapel of your jacket if you are a man.”

  “And what does it mean?”

  “That you like to be fucked up the ass.”

  I started laughing. I don’t know why. Viktor maintained this perfect poker face, but I could tell he was pleased. I couldn’t stop. Brandy came in. First her heels, then her legs, then, much later, the rest of her.

  “What?” she asked. “What’s so funny?”

  I tried to breathe, but that just made it worse. Tears were rolling down my cheeks. I was so far from God.

  “What is it, Eve?” Brandy demanded.

  “Eve is happy,” Viktor said.

  When I first came to the city, I hadn’t been anywhere besides a tiny religious colony in the middle of Iowa since I was seven years old. I knew there were all these mistakes I could make, all these traps out there, waiting for me. I also knew I had come for a reason, that I was on a mission, though a mission to do what I couldn’t have told you. So I wasn’t scared. It would descend on me, a sense of purpose, of vocation. All I had to do was live my life.

  I started looking for a job right away. Even stocking shelves at one of those fake drugstores, the kind that doesn’t have a pharmacist in back, sounded exciting. You got to use a price gun and wear this blue smock with a nameplate. EVE. I really wanted to see my name in raised letters. But when they asked, “Eve who?” I didn’t know what to do. Lie, of course, part of me said. Look around and choose something, anything. Eve Candy. Eve Wart Remover. Eve Incredibly-Gross-Looking-Boss. But I couldn’t. My mind went blank. I was so good at naming the world, but I couldn’t name me. That had to come from outside. Anything I chose would diminish me, make me less special, more like them. “Just Eve,” I repeated, and they looked. I saw this wedge being driven between my life and the normal daytime world. But I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t betray me. Not for $5.50 an hour.

  That’s why, when Viktor came up in a coffee shop and started talking, saying how he saw I was looking at the Help Wanted ads and that he knew about a job, my heart gave a little leap.

  “It is not regular,” he warned. “It is off the books.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means I do not want to know about you.”

  “I already told you, I’m Eve.”

  “Yes, but that is all I want to know.”

  “Why?”

  “For legal reasons. We pay cash at the bar. Nothing exists on paper. I do not want to know your last name, your zip code, your age . . .” He looked me over. “Especially your age.”

  “I’m sixteen.”

  “. . . or anything else personal. In fact, it would be better if you came up with another first name entirely.”

  “Like what?”

  “Something sexy. We already have a Brandy and a Crystal. The girl you are replacing, her name was Amber. Do you want to be Amber, too? That would be convenient.”

  “I’m Eve,” I reminded him.

  “Yes, I see that.”

  I could tell he was already having second thoughts. I needed the money. I had been wasting my savings on the dormitory room of a scary hotel. I was almost broke, so I went on quickly, “What do I have to do on this job, anyway?”

  “Nothing you don’t want.”

  “How do you know what I want?”

  “I said nothing you don’t want. What you do want is another area with which I am not concerned.”

  “But you came over here,” I pointed out. “You’re the one who decided to talk to me.”

  “So I did.”

  And that was how I got started, how I found my way. Before, New York was all locked doors and shut faces. Once I began to work at the bar, everything else fell into place. I heard about an apartment that wasn’t legal either. It was too high a walkup for fire code regulations, so there wasn’t a lease or a security deposit. It even had electricity and a phone, from the last tenant, which I continued to pay. To me it was perfect. I was here and not-here. The first week, I cleaned and decorated. I felt like I was discovering my true self. I began to go out and walked for miles. One day I looked up and the city wasn’t a maze anymore. It was an island. The streets ended in sky.

  “It has to do with past lives,” Crystal explained. “See, there are these points where something in your present life connects with something in your past. A face. Or the way someone talks. And then it’s like a door you go through. Suddenly you’re existing out of time. It’s a portal.”

  “Portal to what?” Viktor wanted to know.

  “The Infinite.”

  “You mean past lives like when you were a kid? Or past lives like ancient Egypt?” I asked.

  “That depends.”

  “Depends on what?”

  “How evolved you are.”

  She put three bottles of beer on her tray and walked off. Viktor shook his head.

  “Crystal is a Buddhist.”

  “She is not.” Brandy was very loyal. “She’s a Scorpio.”

  “But that can’t be falling in love,” I argued. “Then it’s totally random. Just a big coincidence. Someone looks a certain way, or does something special, without even realizing it, and you fall in love because of that?”

  More people came. I got up. Customers had to be led in. That was the rule. They usually hesitated when they actually saw the place. It was so run-down and unexotic. Just candles flickering in bowls, posters, the jukebox, and their fellow tourists, eyeing them as they arrived, thinking maybe these were the real Manhattanites, the subterraneans coming out after midnight and living wild lives of sexual perversion. Personally, I would have thought encountering one of us, a bored, bleary-eyed girl in gold nylon pants, black stockings, and a scoop-necked top, would have been the last straw, that they would have run up the sagging wooden steps two at a time back to their nice clean hotel room, which at least had cable and a little refrigerator and more opportunities for genuine sin than anything they could find here. But they never did. Viktor told us to walk up to them, not say a word, not smile, just turn right around again and lead them to a table. “And don’t look to see if they are following.” The first few times, I was sure they had left, that I was making a fool of myself. When I got to the table I was always shocked to see them right behind me.

  “It is the Air of Mystery you project.”

  “You mean it’s my ass,” I had realized by then.

  He looked hurt.

  “Why talk that way? You say ‘hips,’ don’t you?”

  “We say ‘hips’ but we mean ass.”

  “Ah. Well, then I say, ‘Air of Mystery.’ And don’t you think I should know? After all, I am a man.”

  But I wasn’t sure about that. He liked to hang out with us and listen to our conversations. He liked to talk about things, which I wasn’t used to in men. American men. I took the new people’s orders and came back.

  “Then you have no control. It’s all just a big accident, like a car crash.”

  “It’s fate,” Crystal said. “You’re fated to love someone.”

  “But are they fated to love you back?”

  She had thick shoulders. It was funny she acted so mystical because she was actually the toughest, most take-charge of all of us. Her legs were always set slightly apart like she was daring you to try pushing her over. She put her hands on her hips a lot. She had this piggish look of defiance. She thought we were making fun of her, though we never did. She had enormous breasts and guys stared at her.

  “It isn’t about him,” Brandy tried to make me understand, like I was the idiot.

  “Of course it’s about him. He’s everything. He’s how you’re going to live, and where, and even what kind of meals you’re going to eat at night. He is the color to every object.”

  The jukebox was playing. S15. I noticed because no one else was talking. They were all looking at me.

  Finally, Nora
announced, “I need a Rob Roy.”

  “Who,” Viktor asked, not turning, “ordered a Rob Roy?”

  “No one. I said I need a Rob Roy.”

  “It is not a drink with which I am familiar.”

  “Just give me a scotch.”

  She stared across at me. She didn’t usually talk. She was so much older. None of us understood what she was doing here, either from her side of it or Viktor’s. She couldn’t have made much money (when customers bought her a drink she drank it, a double), and he couldn’t have gotten much satisfaction bossing her around. She did what he said, but acted like she didn’t have to, like she was humoring this little boy. When she got up, even after sitting for just a minute, she always stretched, a long yawning stretch like she had just woken from a really great dream. She was still spectacular-looking. She really could have modeled, even though guys never tried that line on her. But her face, beautiful as it was, had this tragic-roadmap look to it. You could see all the broken promises, the bad decisions, a whole season of suffering.

  “So anyway,” Brandy went on, which you’d think would have been the start of a sentence, but you would have been wrong.

  She teetered off to lead in another customer. The place was beginning to fill up.

  “And of whom do I remind you?”

  “What?”

  I had fallen asleep. It happened, even after all this time. I wasn’t totally on nights. I would close my eyes, skid off into a dream, then jerk awake, usually in the act of tumbling off a stool or walking into a wall.

  “Clearly I remind you of someone. That is why you react to me so wiolently.”

  Crystal had gone off, too. Nora was there, but he talked this way in front of her. I noticed that if you didn’t make any noise yourself, people acted as if you weren’t there, like if you couldn’t talk, you couldn’t hear, either. I fantasized about being one of those silent mysterious types, but I could never keep my mouth shut.