A Certain Age (29 page)

She opened a door. It seemed like an amusing adventure. After the darkness of the hall the room was very bright; a bare lightbulb swung on a cord. There was a mattress on the floor, a broken chair. Standing in the room were five or six men, who looked startled and jumpy. "Oh, hi!" she said gaily. "I'm looking for Raffaello."

One of the men detached himself from the group and she realized it was Raffaello. She was embarrassed. At least she hoped he
was
Raffaello—in fact, she wasn't entirely certain. "What are you doing here?" he said angrily. "I told you to wait in the car."

"I didn't know if you were coming back."

"I told you I'd be back in a minute."

"This is really wild! What are we doing anyway?" She held on to him like dripping wax. The group of men grinned. One of them slipped something to Raffaello, who passed back a bunch of money.

"What happened to your head?" He looked horrified.

"My brains are coming out, I guess. Look at my hands!" They were thick with a layer of soot. She held them up to the men.

"Come on, come on, we have to go. Thanks, Fafaa, I appreciate it." He pushed her ahead of him back down the hall, practically making her run. The taxi was still outside. "What is wrong with you?" He took out a handkerchief and started to wipe her forehead until she yelped in pain; then he tried to wipe her hands, but the stuff would not come off. "I told you to wait in the taxi! Don't you know what kind of danger you could have been in?"

The taxi ricocheted in the dark. She didn't know how long they had been driving. "Where were we just now?"

Raffaello laughed and leaned to the partition, muttering something to the driver. There was definitely some kind of conspiracy going on. Something was happening, or had happened, to which she was not privy. When the cab stopped at a red light, a man on the street approached the car on the passenger side of the front seat. From beneath a coat he took a rifle and stuck it through the open window, pointing it at the driver. "You want to buy this?" he said.

"Ah ... no thanks, man," the driver said. With the end of the rifle still pointing into the cab, he stepped on the gas and drove through the intersection, with the light still against them. "Whew!" he said at last. "That was kind of heavy."

"That was unbelievable."

"What happened?" Florence said. "Was he trying to rob us?"

Nobody answered. Raffaello took out his little pipe and a tiny vial with a blue cap. Then he lit up, inhaled and tapped on the Plexiglas divider between front and back. The driver pulled over and Raffaello handed him the pipe. Then the man in front passed it back to Raffaello, who handed it to her.

"Here you go," he said, flicking his cigarette lighter.

"Hey, where'd this come from?" she said. "Oh, is that what you were doing in that basement, buying the drugs? Boy, I must have been really out of it!" She put the pipe between her lips and closed her eyes while Raffaello held the lighter over the end. The icy wind that swept down her throat was like an old friend. Now she knew what it meant to go to Kelvin's absolute zero—it was an actual place. If there had been one of those pressurized containers holding vials of stored, frozen semen, a solution of nitrogen and dry ice, she could have entered it quite happily, or gone through an air lock into outer space and enjoyed feeling her body break into chunks, brittle and dry as diamonds.

She was giving him a blow job in the backseat when the car came to a halt. One piece of time was unconnected to the next, as if bits of film were connected to one another with black leader, so that the plot was lost and she had to concentrate to remember: she was in a taxi, the man whose lap her head was in was some Italian guy, they were going to a club.

The taxi driver was somehow now part of the group; he put the cab into a parking lot and got out with her. "Are you coming with us?" she called gleefully, wiping her lips. She turned around as Raffaello, still fumbling with his fly, closed the door on her side.

"Yes, he's coming with us. You've asked him that a million times."

"Yeah, I'm just about off duty. I've been here before." The cab driver was actually quite cute—she was surprised not to have noticed it before—tall, with long blond shaggy hair and a muscular build.

"Where did you say you were from, Gideon?" For some reason

she seemed to know his name. She put her arm through his while Raffaello took her arm on the other side, as if she needed assistance in standing up. "I'm okay!"

"I'm from Utah, Florence. Look at her." Gideon spoke around her, addressing Raffaello. "She's very cute. She's got a great smile. You should hang on to this one."

"I plan to," Raffaello said grimly.

"And I'm going to hang on to him. He's my Italian movie star. Whoops!" She stumbled and they hoisted her to her feet. "So, Utah! What were you doing in Utah? Tell me everything about yourself."

"Well, my parents were Mormons—"

"Mormons! And did your father have more than one wife?"

"Naw."

"And did you go on one of those things?"

"A mission? Yeah. That's how I ended up here."

"But you're not a Mormon anymore, are you?"

"No, I—" He would have said more, but it was obvious she wasn't listening.

"Look at this! Here I am, out with a Mormon and an Italian— probably the only two categories of men in the world who wear sacred undergarments."

The two men smiled complacently, bonded in their comparatively sober state. As they walked the sky changed from a murky color—blackness illuminated by the yellow light of the city—to navy, then to periwinkle blue shot with pink. The sight—a lost and wasted night turning into day—sickened her; self-disgust crept up from her toes. "Come on, it's down here." Raffaello pulled her around the corner and they descended a short flight of stairs.

3

"What's this?"
She was sitting on a barstool. It was incredibly difficult to keep her balance; she kept slipping off, first to one side and then the other.

"That's your drink."

"What kind of drink is it?"

"It's a Southern Comfort on the rocks."

"I don't drink Southern Comfort! Ugh."

"That's what you've been drinking."

"Really? I asked for it?"

"That's what you said you wanted—you seemed to enjoy the last three."

"Where's what's-his-name?"

"Who?"

"Um . . . you know."

"The Italian guy? Raffaello? Why, do you miss him?"

"He got sick and went home. You don't remember?"

She shook her head and took a sip of the drink. "I can't drink this."

"What do you want? You've probably had enough."

"I want a drink! I want ... a vodka."

"You don't need a vodka, not on top of all that Southern Comfort."

"You don't want to buy me a drink?" She puffed out pouty lips. "Maybe somebody else will." She looked around the room. It was like a miniature Roman bath: everything was tiled—the walls and floor and even the ceiling—in a gold-and-dirty-white mosaic. The ceilings were low, held up by Ionic columns, and in the center of the room was a small pool, perhaps a fountain, which explained why the room reeked of chlorine and mildew. On closer inspection there seemed to be mildew sprouting everywhere, furry and gray, but whether it was a real growth or bits of old tufted carpeting, she didn't know. The lighting was subdued—here and there various broken floor lamps had been positioned—and around the walls were overstuffed sofas upholstered in velvet on which people were seated.

There were maybe ten or twenty people in the room all together, she couldn't tell; perhaps more were hidden behind the pillars or in another room, if there was one. They seemed to be primarily men, faces a grayish hue, in black T-shirts, jeans, tattooed, with greasy hair and little goatees, all apparently waiting for something, as if the place were a brothel of satyrs-for-hire. Though in one corner a group of five—three men and two women—must have been students from an Ivy League somewhere, smug and slumming, looking like their parents had given them money for

drugs. And at another sofa two women were entwined, kissing passionately. When they took a breather Florence could see that they were young, pretty, with defiant expressions, though it was perfectly obvious that they were accepted in here, that there was nobody to defy.

The cab driver was talking to her, but the pulsating music was so loud she couldn't make out what he was saying, and it took all of her energy to stop him from splitting into two people; she had to remember to squeeze her left eye shut or she didn't know which one of him to look at. "I said, 'Why don't you have a beer?' " he shouted.

"A beer? I hate beer."

He gestured to the bartender, a boy in his twenties with short hair and wearing a pink-and-white polka-dotted-and-flounced dress. "So what do you want?"

"What about . . . you don't think I should have a vodka?" His name was Gideon, she suddenly remembered.

"You want a glass of wine?"

"Yes! I'd like a large glass of white wine, with a lot of ice and some soda." She leaned forward and spoke to the bartender intimately. "He's a Mormon named Gideon whose father had seven wives."

"My father didn't have seven wives!"

"Oh yeah?" The bartender wasn't interested; he wiggled his hips in time to the music.

"Yes. Gideon's going to deny it, but he's here on a mission. Don't let him try and convert you!"

"Cool. White wine spritzer and—"

"I'll have a Heineken," Gideon said. "That's a nice dress."

"Thanks!" the bartender said. "I designed it myself."

"You designed it yourself?" Florence said. "You're
very
talented."

They were standing on the sidewalk. The streets were crowded with people and cars, and the light was so bright it hurt her eyes.

The scurrying pedestrians, freshly dressed, carrying briefcases and take-out cups of coffee, seemed to belong to a different species entirely. "What time is it anyway?"

"I don't know," Gideon said. "I don't have a watch. Nine o'clock? Ten?" He shrugged. "Maybe later. What do you want to do? You want to go someplace else? You want to go have some breakfast?"

"I want to go home."

"Fine. I'll take you home. I just have to remember where I left the taxi."

They stumbled around for ages, trying to find the cab. She couldn't even figure out what part of town they were in. The city seemed to have changed overnight, as if she had accidentally fallen out of her own universe into one that was only slightly different. The streets were labeled with names she didn't remember ever having seen before—Mata Hari Avenue, Ketchup Street—but she didn't want to say anything in case Gideon looked at her as if she were nuts. Perhaps the streets had always been named in this fashion, or else whatever she had been smoking all night had left her brain damaged in some peculiar way.

The car didn't seem to be where Gideon remembered having left it, but when he was about to give up, he spotted it in the parking lot. "Are you sure it's the same cab?" Florence said as he waved to the attendant and they both got in the front seat.

"This is all my stuff," he said, puzzled. At that moment he looked exactly like a little kid, or a perplexed golden retriever puppy, wildly attractive, and she leaned over and stroked his blond hair. "Oh, look!" he announced. "She's petting me!"

"You're so cute!" she said. "So cute and sweet! Like a baby bird." They began to kiss, and did not stop until he had started the car and backed out of the space. They started again while waiting for the attendant to come over to be paid and open the front gate; they continued to kiss at every red light or when traffic didn't move.

"Hang on just a second!" He stopped the cab and jumped out, leaving it double-parked.

Someone got into one of the cars at the curb and began to honk. The person unrolled the passenger window and yelled over to Florence, "Hey, you're blocking me! Move your goddamn cab!" She tried to ignore the man, staring straight ahead. The man got out of his car and, shouting a string of curses, began to come through the traffic around to Florence's side of the car. "What's the matter with you? Are you deaf? Move the goddamn car out of the way!"

Gideon came back carrying a large brown paper bag. He seemed to determine immediately what was happening; he went around to the trunk of the taxi, opened it, put the bag in and took out a large wooden baseball bat, which he held up in the man's direction. "I was only double-parked for two minutes," he said calmly.

He found a space just in front of her building. "You're really lucky with finding parking places!" she said. "Unless, when you come out and try to find your car, you have to find where it's hidden itself! Does that happen to you a lot?"

"Naw. That was weird, I have to admit. So what are you going to do? You going to ask me up to your apartment?" His eyes were shiny, like a doll's eyes, bright blue. He took the paper bag from the trunk of the car and followed her into the building.

"Make yourself at home." She pulled the blinds shut in the living room; though the light was not bright—her living room was in the back of the building, with any view or sun blocked by another building standing directly behind—but even the idea that it was daytime made her head throb. "You want a cup of tea?"