Authors: Rick Moody
She started down the steps toward him.
—I’m locked out here. Next door. And I got all these people coming over to see our new gallery here, and I’m wondering if
you might know someone in the building here, or maybe —
A premeditated recognition on the part of Edgardo or Miguel.
—I gotta take this over to my friend’s.
—Oh, come on.
The turntable, balanced precariously on wrought-iron railing.
—Can I get over on the roof? M. J. said.
The rashness of the proposal, maybe, persuaded him to change his mind. What white girl from the suburbs would propose
going over the roof?
A conspiratorial grin broke out on his unblemished face.
—Sure, the roof. You could go over on the roof.
She asked if he would show her how, notwithstanding political implications of wanting to be
shown how,
wherein a woman asked a man for instruction, affected an unknowing because of the stylized exchange of information that might
follow; she still liked it when a guy would
show her how,
whether it was how to program certain technological appliances, the coffee machine, the stereo, how to operate a handsaw
or how to hit a backhand, and perhaps it would
have been that way with Gerry, if he had known
how to do anything,
but he didn’t know much, a few knots from when he had taken sailing lessons in the suburbs, but he could fix nothing, and
once a couple of weeks ago she had found him, inexplicably dangling a hasp in front of the windowsill, as if one could be
used on the other,
What are you doing with that hasp?
He knew about Frege, Austin, Kuhn, but his evasions on home repair subjects were appalling.
Can’t we get someone in to fix that?
She inflated this evidence, on the front step of her building, into a notational system of romance: you and your lover showed
one another
how to,
according to diagrams, and then when you knew
how to,
you moved on to the next person, to have them show you
how.
Once an object in question was fixed, you needed it broken again, or replaced by another,
and fast.
And the question before her now, by way of reminder, was
how does a girl steal onto the roof of her building?
—Gonna put this back in the basement, Angel said. —Hang on.
Then he returned. Together they occupied the warped stairwell. Cinder block. Exposed ceiling bulbs dangling from frayed electrical
lines. Lead-based paints flaking from scuffed walls. She followed him. With each flight of stairs, their pace increased, their
gasps and exhalations, their anticipations, and she not only managed to keep up, but to drive Angel on more furiously, though
she’d eaten nothing but a rice cake since throwing up breakfast. At last, they each grabbed the banister on the red
emergency ladder;
they hoisted themselves up; at last, they pushed back an old rotting hatch; at last, they heard a scattering of pigeons.
They were on the roof.
Night had fallen across the landscape. Dramatically. Beyond the nub of green that was Stevens Institute of Technology at a
distance, night upon the World Trade Center, night upon Hoboken high-rises, night upon the spectacle of New York City, night
upon the Hudson, night upon the ships of the Hudson, night upon the garbage barges and their peppering of diapers and six-pack
holders, night upon the history and politics of the tri-state area, night upon the Newport Mall of Jersey City, night upon
Liberty State Park, night upon Edgewater, night upon Fort Lee, night upon the George Washington Bridge, night upon arteries
great and small, night upon marshes and blacktops and rail yards and baseball fields and electrical substations. Who could
turn from it? Who could neglect it? Night had come, even while the town below undulated with dispute and jubilance.
Did she say the next words before acting, on the roof, in fresh moonlight, words that had to do with kissing a complete stranger
from a different economic class and ethnic heritage
on the roof of a
known drug location,
while the guests for her party were amassing, or did they kiss first, words occurring like spontaneous, retroactive evocations
of the riptide of subcutaneous wishes? Where did the thought come from, in this furnace of retrospection? What made her do
these incredibly stupid things? Because she’d been hung up for so long, out in front of the building, and was just grateful,
at last, to have
gotten her ass indoors?
Or was it some quality in Angel himself? Wasn’t there a moment when she’d thought about it and realized that this might not
be the smartest decision she ever made? No. Things had been connected together, conjoined. There was no fulcrum
with which to pry them apart. This was part of what had come before. How blissful not to have to make a particular decision
but to yield to what was already as obvious as if it were mixed up with propositions of physics. She thought, or she said
aloud,
Let me kiss your spectacular Caravaggio mug,
and she knew that he knew they were going to kiss too, like candidates for elopement; the kiss was unclear as a romantic
gesture, but forceful as an observation on the nature and duration of the month of October and what the end of October meant:
onslaught of holiday madness, mixed precipitation, folly in the street,
We’re young! We’re beautiful! We’re supposed to make out!
He held her off.
Let’s get over the fence.
Barbed wire, rusted by age and emissions of sulfurous compounds, separated her building from the
known drug location.
Coiled above the flush edges of the two buildings, bolted into cement. Remorseful visitations of conscience implicit in the
difficulties of barbed wire. But these visitations of conscience didn’t last very long. Angel (real name Mike) seemed, of
course, as if he was made to go over barbed wire, which was a generalization on M. J.’s part about things she didn’t understand,
to which people who had a lot of stuff were given in the consideration of those who didn’t have as much. Nevertheless, Angel
simply found a spot that was well traveled, and he pulled some heavy work gloves out of the pockets of his windbreaker, set
them down, took off his windbreaker, tossed it like a proverbial cape so that it draped on the fence, gripped the fence in
work gloves, vaulted over. Plucked the jacket from the barbs. Now the fence separated the two of them.
—I can’t go over
that,
M. J. said.
What about the party? What about the people gathered in the street outside? What about her career as a dancer? Did she want
to marry? Did she mean to procreate? Had she been a good friend to her good friends? Had she attempted to remember the kindness
of parents, for whom she was an only child? Had she taken in stray pets? Given to charity? Looked for the good in others?
—I’ll lift you over, Angel said.
—You weigh about ten pounds more than I do.
—
No problem.
—You can’t.
He stood at the spot where he had climbed over himself. The barbs were speckled with gouts of blood. Maybe it was the light.
Blood of the fiscally challenged, blood of laborers, blood of suffering addicts who flocked to the
known drug location.
While their wives or parents slept, when the attention was off, they came up Madison Street, incanting, skulking, sweaty,
desperate, to 619 Madison. They banged upon the door. They didn’t own enough layers to put off the cold. It was no fashion
statement. Angel reached out his arms. She didn’t have much faith. She climbed up on the ledge that separated the buildings,
and with an expressive
saltation,
a
frisson,
she landed in his hands, arms around his neck; she could smell him now, and he smelled funky, like a human, and up close
she could see the planes of his cheeks, hairless and boyish. It was true. He could lift her up. She was air, she had perfected
the designs of the universal choreographer and made her body insubstantial like a bird’s,
A bird is a messenger of death for people who have no
feeling.
There ought to have been even more splashy lifts and embraces, but instead the sequence culminated predictably. That is,
her black miniskirt became entangled upon barbs, and there was the shredding of fabric giving way, a sliver of her miniskirt,
and her tights too, and then she felt the sting of it, the barb, and she thought about her immodesty, her exhibitionism, about
tetanus.
That skirt was expensive.
He put her down, she touched herself on her thigh, with the shyness that had overwhelmed Anthony at the apperception of his
sprained ankle,
What was she doing here?
She recognized, on her own roof, a dismal arrangement of browned spider plants and expired geraniums irresolutely tended
here by the cat lady up on the third floor. M. J. was bleeding.
And he was all over her, suddenly. His brutish hands upon her caressing. There were endearments,
You are the prettiest girl I ever seen. Never kissed any blond girl before, so pretty like you.
His hands like sandpaper, like a
hasp.
The excesses of a Manhattan skyline, at this remove, like a Big Bang inconceivably past; a blanket had been thrown over something
more perfect, of which the stars were an indication, perforations of night.
What was the thing that endeared Gerry to her,
back when he still endeared himself, and why were endearments of people she loved so inaccessible? Objects always stood in
for what was missing, a certain slutty color of nail polish that he bought for her one Passover that she had never worn, but
which she kept at hand. Objects were like orange traffic cones on the right shoulder of the highway of intimate relations.
That’s why she was here on the roof, with a Hispanic boy in his late teens kissing her
neck in a way that was sort of unpleasant now that she was thinking about it. It was hasty, not like the long, slow tentative
daubs that Gerry favored.
—Hey she said. —Slow down, okay?
He was pushing down the strap of her silk blouse, trying to get at her breasts. Maybe it was romance, and maybe romance was
exactly like
the dance,
maybe its gestures were that familiar, that immutable, even if everyone felt that they arrived at these gestures through
their own impulsive ramble. Maybe the arabesques, the fouettes, the plies of dance could be superimposed on love; maybe these
gestures of dancing were just love in a deconsecrated space. The way a certain brushing of lips against a cheek then led to
a collision of pairs of lips, the way the lips then moved toward a nipple, it was as reliable as the movements of
Ballets Russes.
She tried to distract herself with terms of her childhood education,
maître de ballet, port de bras.
She tried to think of other possible interpretations for brutishness, until
a terror started to swell
in M. J. Powell. It started small, as discomfort, swelled into revulsion, and then assumed the
actual size
of terror, which is always one size larger than its container. Maybe terror is implicit in all anonymous sexual encounters.
Maybe that’s what’s good about these encounters, maybe that’s what made degradation, when consensual, effective. But she felt
nausea, a faintness. He turned her around a few times as if this were a child’s game. Which direction did she face? It was
wet, on the roof; there were puddles from the last storm. There was the stench of wet towels.
—Not here,
please,
come on.
His manual circulations upon her became more urgent. Here, on her exposed shoulder, he romanced a certain mole. Her nipple,
at the summit of a faintest incline, was now exposed to the air. His hips were fast against hers.
—I want to show you our place. I want to show you our gallery, she said,
reaching for a sequence of words that might put a stop to it.
He showed no indication of understanding the
we
implicit in
our,
that locution with which couples reinforced their reign over single persons.
—
Stop,
she said.
She pushed against him. He resisted. She pushed harder. He pushed back. She pulled away. He held on. She pushed again. He
pulled away, holding on. He pushed back. She fell away. He held on. She pushed. He resisted. He pushed. She covered herself.
She pulled away. She changed directions. He held on. She pushed against him. He resisted. She pushed. He resisted. She pushed,
he resisted. And suddenly, disgustedly, he put a shoulder against her, the whole of his upper body, and she was free,
and her liberty was foul.
She bolted for the door at the far end of the roof. But before she could get there, there was a commotion behind her. A neglected
attic closet of memory opened, forth came the image of a blanket, left from a picnic up in the north during a summer visit
to the Green Mountains, a blanket, at dusk, aired on a laundry line, at night, disturbed by heavy wind. She was out with a
friend, and behind them they saw it, the blanket, and its
animus
was expressed by the gust, a malevolent spirit that sent them, as girls, howling into the pantry, inconsolable. It was behind
her, this very
entity,
tackling her now, and she was on her back. How horrible the words in the moment that they
appeared in her mind,
You are on your back,
while another part of her noticed the masonry on the edge of the building. It needed attention. And there were car horns,
in the distance; her hand dipped in the meniscus of a puddle; her own hyperventilations, sixteenth notes, remarkably constant.
This was simply an arrangement of bodies she had once experienced, during an audition, nothing more, and just when her sorrow
was beginning to accompany her terror, just when she was beginning to wonder what threat would be used to ensure silence,
he whispered,
I
ain’t gonna hurt you,
and she found, instead, that he was rolling over her, hefting her up, she went over onto her right side, and then
onto him,
and she was on top, and the first thing she did was slap him hard across the face,
You already hurt me, you fuck,
she said, and he did nothing, didn’t smile, didn’t speak, and then he took her hands, coinciding, she noticed, with an infrastructure
of spotlights scintillating in the heavens on the Manhattan side of town, near the Maxwell House factory, where there had
formerly been a robust,
good-to-the-last-drop
fog, all days, all times; he took her hands; he
fitted them around his own throat,
tightened his grip on her hands on his throat; there was no swiveling of hips, there was no grinding at her, there was no
recognition, no sexual anything; only hands on her hands, and the tightening at his throat. She struggled to pull away,
What are you doing?
He struggled to keep her hands around himself, and his breathing became labored, if only she could see better in the dim
light of the roof, she was murdering him, he was slipping away, and yet he was tightening the grip,
Let me go,
she angled her legs off of him, began to pull away again,
Are you out of your mind?
Looking up at her, plaintive. Suffocation
of the earth, putrefaction of the land, foulness of marshes, reeds and egrets and muskrats and snappers all replaced by the
even fouler
rattus norvegicus
to make this town of Hoboken, so cars could be stolen, substandard buildings constructed, bribes paid, drunks displaced,
so bond traders could purchase their condominiums. Then she was
off,
heading for the door, racing for the door, expecting him to finish her off in the stairwell, to impale her through the heart
on the diamond stylus of his stolen turntable, to fire the exploding bullet of his class war into the base of her skull. But
when she tried to ascertain his whereabouts,
he was gone,
except for his voice,
It’s your town now,
calling after her,
Your town now.