I told him what it was, and he smiled again, this time a sweet, open-mouthed smile that revealed his front teeth, the way one overlapped the edge of the other. He said, “You’re a long way from home, Carrie Bell. What brings you to wretched New York?”
“Why is it wretched?”
“Oh, you know—it’s wretched, it’s wonderful, it’s disgusting, it’s divine. All at the same time, usually, which is why I love it so.” He gave me an ironic look, as if to suggest that in fact he didn’t love it so—or that if he did it was for nothing so simple, nothing he’d be so glib about. He
gestured at me with his chin. “But you haven’t answered my question. Carrie Bell the Evasive. What’s a nice Midwestern girl like you doing in big bad Manhattan?”
“What makes you so sure I’m nice?”
“You’ve got it written all over you. It’s right there on your face next to sweet and good.”
I thought of what I’d done, run out in the middle of the night on people who counted on me, and I felt shaky suddenly, ready to cry. I hadn’t called anyone in Madison, had no idea what was going through my mother’s head, Jamie’s. Mike’s.
“Oops,” he said. “I sense a story. Can I buy you a beer? Or do you want to pretend this never happened, we never ran into each other?”
I looked at the door to McClanahan’s. It was four-thirty in the afternoon, and I wondered how long he’d been in there. There were three or four tiny blond hairs growing out of his cheek, up near his left eye, and I longed to reach up and stroke them. “Sure,” I said to him. “I’ll have a beer.”
That first day we talked for four hours, or rather I talked: I told him all about the summer, the jerky slip-slide of my feelings, the weeks and weeks of it. And how since leaving I’d been on a speedway, careening from guilt to remorse to relief to exhilaration, with New York standing right outside it all: massive, impassive, just there and there. I even told him about the last night with Mike, his
We’ve had it, haven’t we?
, and the way I waved to him from the door as I was leaving, a finger waggle, a light, entirely untruthful wiggle of the fingers of my right hand, as if either of us had any idea what we expected next, let alone what would actually happen.
“You flew the coop,” Kilroy said. “You had to.”
We were sitting on a bench in Washington Square Park by then, the night black and heavy around us, a pair of pigeons bobbing at our feet. We’d stayed at McClanahan’s until it had gotten so crowded we couldn’t hear each other, then we’d eaten pizza slices standing at the counter of a place open to the din of 8th Street.
“I think it was brave of you,” he went on. “It must’ve been a very hard thing to do.” He turned so he was facing me, one knee up on the bench. “Harder than staying.”
“Staying felt impossible.”
“Yeah, but staying was static. You acted. I admire it.”
I was surprised, and for the first time since we’d begun talking I felt self-conscious: in the bar, with voices rushing past us, it had been easier.
The park was bright with activity—a gang of kids on skateboards, a knot of teenagers around a tiny ember, a tall man swooping by on Rollerblades—but it was all far away, modulated, no competition for the sudden strangeness that overcame me.
Kilroy grinned. “You can’t believe you’re talking to me like this when you don’t really know me.”
“I don’t
really
know you?” I said with a laugh. “I don’t know you at all.”
He lifted one shoulder. “What’s knowing someone? You may not know where I grew up or what I do from nine to five every day, but you know what it’s like to be with me for several hours. Doesn’t that tell you more than information would?”
“I guess,” I said, but I was thinking,
Where
did
you grow up? What
do
you do from nine to five each day—drink?
He looked at me and laughed. “Go ahead.”
“OK, easy one first,” I said. “Is Kilroy your first or last name?”
“It’s neither.”
“It’s your middle name?”
“My name is Paul Eliot Fraser. There’s no Kilroy in there at all, it’s just what I’m called.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s not in there at all.”
Score one, Kilroy, I thought. “All right, where
did
you grow up?”
Smirking, he lifted a finger to his lips. “I didn’t. Don’t tell.”
“Paul Eliot Fraser the Evasive,” I said, and he gave me a big smile that lasted and lasted—a smile that anointed me.
“New York,” he said. “Born and bred. And the thing I do from nine to five is I work for a temp agency. I get hired out to businesses who need a week or two of word processing done because someone’s on vacation, or I go answer the phones while someone’s sick. I’m the rambling man of office work, I never stay anywhere very long—I put that Dictaphone behind me and saddle up for the subway ride to the copier on the horizon.”
I smiled, but I was surprised: I’d figured he was a struggling something or other, like Simon and his friends. Maybe he
was
a struggling something or other and just wasn’t saying.
“Happy now?” he said. “Feel you know me a whole lot better?”
I lifted one shoulder. “Do your parents still live in the city?”
“If you could call it that.”
“What—they live in one of the other boroughs or something?”
“Living,” he said.
Something in his expression warned me not to ask more. He took his keys from his pocket and began fiddling with them, pulling them around the key ring one by one. Uncomfortable, I looked away, at the teenagers behind us. They seemed so veiled: their faces by their hair, their bodies by their dark, shapeless clothes. A bit of light glinted off a nylon jacket, but otherwise they were barely more than silhouettes.
I turned back and found Kilroy studying me. “Are you an alcoholic?” I asked, no idea where I’d gotten the nerve.
“What gives you that idea?”
“You were at that bar in the middle of the afternoon.”
“I’m just a guy who likes bars,” he said. “And McClanahan’s is about as good as it gets these days, though the yuppie hordes are making inroads.” He smiled. “Next time we’ll have your first lesson.”
“My first lesson?”
“Your first pool lesson—I’m sure I remember that you’ve never shot pool.”
“You have quite a memory.”
“I’ve heard that said before.”
By whom, I wondered, but he was getting to his feet, so I stood, too, and all at once everyone stood with me—Mike, Jamie, Rooster, even my mother, everyone I’d been talking about. Why did I have such a crowd along when Kilroy was so obviously by himself?
“Shall we?” he said.
We’d entered the park through an opening on the side, but we went out past the arch, at once massive and curiously ghostly against the night sky. It was my first time on lower Fifth Avenue, and I walked with my head tilted back, the skyline jagged with roofs and lit windows. Far ahead, the Empire State Building was limned with white lights.
“Do you like to walk?” he said.
I nodded.
“That’s good. New York is a walker’s city, that’s the only way to get to know it.”
We turned onto 14th Street and went past gated storefronts and tiny bodegas crowded with men. Cold fluorescent light spilled onto the sidewalk. In Madison there would have been a stillness to the night, but here even the garbage in the gutter seemed active, jittering in the wind, ready to dart away. A police car with its red and blue lights swirling shrieked past us and turned at the far corner.
“I love sirens,” Kilroy said. “The sound of them, especially at night.”
I looked at him.
“I do. My bedroom’s an especially good listening point for sirens—it’s got my only window onto Seventh Avenue. You’ll see.”
I stopped walking, and he stopped, too, and smiled at me.
“I’ll see?” I said. “I’ll see your bedroom?”
He shook his head gravely. “Don’t be offended by the truth, Carrie. That’s an untenable position, don’t you think?”
It was, and it was only a week later that I saw his bedroom, a week later that I stood beside his bed while he unbuttoned the row of tiny buttons down the front of my sweater, methodically, not a touch through the lengthening opening until the whole was undone. But first we walked. Through the teeming East Village; up and down the wide, traffic-clogged avenues; along the grimy, redolent streets of Chinatown. I couldn’t get enough of it, of the crowds, the purposefulness. In Midtown I stared upward and felt awed, filled with vertigo by the clouds rushing between the skyscrapers. The steps into the subway fascinated me, and I asked Kilroy to stop at station after station while I looked down, simultaneously appalled and intrigued by the stench. “Gol-lee,” he said, “we don’t have these in Wisconsin,” but he said it kindly, and I just laughed.
He was a good guide. He pointed out junkies and prostitutes, stockbrokers and undercover cops as if they wore uniforms, as if they held aloft signs only he could see. A good guide but also opinionated: passing restaurants I thought looked interesting, he said, “This is where the hipsters hang out,”
“This is where the media people eat.” Nowhere he’d go, was the implication. We ate in coffee shops, in little dives you’d hardly notice from the outside. He said they were honest.
He lived near McClanahan’s, in a blocky, red-brick apartment building on West 18th Street. His apartment was on the sixth floor, three blank-walled rooms I assumed at first he’d just moved into, there was so little in them. He’d been there for years, though, and there wasn’t a picture in the place, a single knickknack. He had no more furniture than was absolutely necessary, and each piece was spare, purely functional: an unfinished pine bookcase, a futon couch with a plain black cover and no throw pillows, a rectangular wooden table with four folding chairs. There’s a kind of spare you see in magazines that’s studied and elegant, each thing an
objet
, a strategically placed sculptural vase holding an arrangement of perfect white tulips. Kilroy’s apartment wasn’t like that. It was more as if he were camping there, poised to make a move. When I asked him why the place was so empty, he just laughed.
The bedroom. Box spring on the floor, mattress on the box spring,
white sheets on the mattress, white pillows on the sheets. And Kilroy standing in front of me, his fingers just finished with the buttons on my sweater. There’d been a kiss already, or more like four or five, out walking that afternoon, in the elevator, just inside the front door of his apartment. Really one long kiss interrupted by conversation, by the need to keep moving until we were here.
We were here. He kissed me again and then traced a line from my throat to the top of my jeans and back up, to the clasp of my bra. My breasts fell out and he opened his hand to span them, his thumb on one nipple and his little finger on the other, tiny circles and then he stroked down the undercurves.
I tried closing my eyes, but his hands came up to my face, thumbs at my lashes, and I had to look again, had to see that it was he, Kilroy, eyes dark and gray-blue, black-banded, flecked with the color of the sky. His thin lips, the crease at the tip of his nose. His narrow hands and his long fingers, on my shoulders now, pushing the sweater off, the bra straps.
His lips were still cold from outside, late September and windy, like in Madison but also different, a lower, more subversive wind, not your hair but your body, the very center of you. It was touch, touch, slide open, and his tongue on my lower lip, sweeping from side to side.
I had to yank to untuck his shirt, a stiff denim one, one shirttail and then the other, and then the warmth underneath, the hair on his belly and chest, my fingertips plowing through it, raking up and down, around, down into the back of his jeans, tight, all the way down until each hand was full of buttock, my fingers just at the tops of his legs, finding the lines of sweat.
He unbuttoned his own shirt. Tossed it toward the dresser. Held me skin to skin, his hands alive on my back, coming around under my arms, thumbs on my nipples, mouth, mouth, the bed coming up under me, zippers, jeans, and then suddenly the room, the apartment, the world, my face in my hands.
And his hand on my face, his eyes on my eyes, asking:
Are you OK?
I was. I pulled the sheet aside, the
we’re doing this
of it, sweeping the thing out of the way. And I closed my eyes and felt him hard against my leg, the satiny softness of it, against my thigh, pushing to get in, and then it was
this, yes:
familiar and strange, old and new, me and not me.
C
HAPTER
16
It was all I wanted to do. Morning and night, at dusk when he’d just gotten home from work, early on a weekend afternoon. I came up behind him and circled his waist with my arms, then slid my hands down the front of his pants. He was at the sink washing dishes when I did this, or he was on his couch and I went straight for his crotch, kneading the front of his jeans until he was so swollen I had to press myself against him, right then.
He kissed me on my lower back, on the sweaty creases under my breasts, in a line from my shin to my inner thigh. “What are you thinking?” I’d whisper half into sleep, and his index finger would stroke so slowly down my belly that I’d be wet when it got to me, wet and ready for him.
His mouth there. His tongue reading me like Braille, like he didn’t want to miss a word. Mike—well, he’d been reluctant. On my birthday, maybe after we’d fought. For a special occasion, a contribution to an annual fund—
there’s
money in the bank. But not because he wanted to.
Kilroy wanted to. The first time I tensed up, guarded, thinking
Don’t
, wanting to say he didn’t have to, but one hand stroked my thigh reassuringly while his tongue lazed along, and I let go of the clenched muscles and turned inward, and something that was half scream and half moan came together and started toward my vocal cords, but so slowly the wait itself was worth a scream, a long, rising scream barely heard from over a distant horizon, and then louder, and louder.
It was fierce between us sometimes, his stubbly face abrading mine, times when I just wanted him to
fuck
me. Other times it would go on so long I’d start to hyperventilate, this tingling on my cheeks, my forearms.
What are we doing?
I’d want to know.
Who are you, what is this?
He’d respond by pushing my head downward, my tongue swiping his furry chest until my face was at his erection and I didn’t know what to do because I wanted to rub him against my ears and over my eyelids, and I wanted to burrow deeper into his smell, and I wanted him forcing my mouth open wider than it could go—and I wanted it all at once.