And Now You Can Go (6 page)

"Ghosts?" I asked. "Of the female form."

We've said we'll get dinner at eight thirty, that he'll call before and we'll decide on a place. It's eight forty-five and my roommate knocks on my door and says she forgot to tell me, but he called over an hour before, when she was on the other line.

I call him back but the phone rings and rings. I call him back at nine and the phone's busy.

I'm restless and, for the first time in a long while, hungry, so I walk over to his apartment and ring the bell. I'm relieved to hear his footsteps. He opens the door and he looks at me with suspicious eyes. "What?" he says.

"Excuse me?" I say.

He flings open the door. "Look around, feel free to. I don't know what exactly you were hoping to catch me doing here."

"Nothing," I say, and explain that I didn't get the message he'd called. As I'm talking, I feel my own face reddening to the point that I imagine it matching his. Maybe it's catching.

Maybe people with suspicions have red faces. Maybe we're meant to be together, me and this long-haired man, and have red-faced children.

"Do you still want to get dinner?" I ask.

"Sure," he says. He goes inside and gets his scarf and coat. He stands on the threshold before stepping out into the hallway where I'm waiting. "Sorry," he says.

Before I can say anything he pulls something out of his pocket.

"It's pepper spray," he says and places a red-leather-encased bottle, with a key chain, in my hand.

"Thanks," I say.

"I don't know if it would have been of help—" "Thanks," I say again, cutting him off.

"It's not the most romantic of gifts," he says.

I lean in and inhale as I kiss him. I want to stick whatever soap he uses up my nose.

We walk a few blocks to an Italian restaurant, where the waiters know him. "You're early tonight," two of them say.

"I usually come here at eleven or twelve," the representative of the world explains. "Every night, I almost forget to eat. It's the only place around here open late."

"How can you forget to eat?" I say.

I hardly remember anything I've eaten since the man and the park and the gun, except the chow fun at the Chinese restaurant, the pizza I ate with my student, and vanilla yogurt I've spooned into my mouth while standing in front of the open refrigerator.

"I think I need a stable force in my life," he says. "You?" I say. My napkin drops to the floor.

"It's been a while, but I think it's time I settled down."

"You mean buy a house? Get a dog?" I say, and smile. His eyes are the same pale blue as my mother's.

"No, just …"

I stare at his ear; he has a hole but no earring.

"Just this," he says, and looks at me. "This is good."

We go back to his apartment. It's a basic apartment: living room, small kitchen, bedroom. "There are two different floor plans in this building," he tells me. "Floor plan A and floor plan B."

"Which is this?" I ask. "B."

I sit on his futon couch and he sits in his desk chair. From a shelf above the desk he hands me a book with an essay he praised over dinner. I read the first page. It's about the word "jejune."

"I like it," I say.

He hands me a ketchup bottle that was given to him by an artist he admires. I hold it, examine it, and hand it back. "Heinz," I say. "That's the best."

"Hmm," says the red-faced guy. He's looking for something else in his desk drawers.

I talk generic talk to fill the silent space between us. I tell him how I went to a restaurant downtown a few weeks before where there were Heinz bottles on the table, but the ketchup didn't taste like Heinz. I asked the waiter and he said they just pumped generic ketchup into the Heinz bottles.

The representative of the world is on his knees, searching through the bottom drawer of a file cabinet.

"He told me I had good taste buds," I say.

"Look at this," he says. He hands me a photo of Jackson Pollock. "That was taken a few days before he died."

"Wow," I say.

Then he shows me a picture of his siblings: three brothers who look like him, and a sister who doesn't.

I point to the sister. "She lives in England, right?" "Yeah," he says. "She works at the Tate."

"You already told me that," I say. But then I feel bad, so I ask, "Where was it taken?" "At a family reunion in Ohio. That's where my grandparents live."

"Ohio," I say. "Home of more presidents than any other state." "What do you mean?"

"Eight presidents came from Ohio." "Really?" he says. "Interesting."

I'm saddened that I've used this information I've learned from one man to impress another. For a brief moment I wish I were with Tom, his green-tinged hair in my eyes and his large mouth encasing my entire ear.

The representative of the world claps his hands as if to say, Well, enough of that. "Ready for bed?" he asks.

"Sure," I say.

I go into the bathroom to brush my teeth. I'm tempted to check the medicine cabinet, but don't; the walls are so thin I'm afraid he'll hear the creak. I come out into the bedroom, smile. On his way into the bathroom, he eases past me, careful not to touch.

Above his bed hangs a cross. The last time I slept beneath a cross was in Portugal, where I stayed in a youth hostel that had been a monastery. I'd always wanted to see the architecture in Lisbon—the sister city to San Francisco, some said. My senior year of college I finally got there with the money I made selling my eggs.

Week after week, the ad had run in the campus paper: "Infertile New York couple seeking healthy female student to donate eggs." When the price went up, I answered the ad.

The couple wanted to see me in person. I took an early-morning train to New York. The agreed-upon meeting spot was the docked ship, the U.S.S.
Intrepid
, off the West Side Highway—they didn't want me to know where they lived. The woman was thirty, the man in his twenties. They held hands tentatively, as though their nonpregnancy had fragiled their marriage. Both wore large sweaters, like they were already pregnant and making room. When they saw me their eyes filled with so much expectation, I had to look down and pretend to examine a stain on my coat.

They liked that I had blue eyes (she had blue eyes) and had scored high in math on my SATs (he had been an economics major at Penn). I stopped drinking, for a month injected shots into my hip, shots that would make me produce more eggs, until the doctor told me I was carrying twenty-five.

"No wonder I have a stomach," I said, jokingly. The doctor looked at me, puzzled.

Thirty-six hours before the operation I was supposed to inject a final shot into my behind. I called Sarah over—this was months before we graduated and she moved to Ireland. She downed four shots of Ketel One and then gave me the injection. "On the count of three," she said. She had to count to five before she could summon the courage.

The chances for success were slim, but it worked. They got pregnant and I went to Lisbon. A clause in the contract I signed stated that I would never try to contact the child.

Sometimes I thought I saw her.
Why did I always imagine her a girl
? It was impossible to think that eggs inside me could carry the blueprint for a boy. But whenever I looked at girls and thought they might be
her
, I'd have to remind myself of the math. No chance an eight-year-old could be mine, no matter how much she looked like me, no matter how close to her bottom lip her freckle might be.

. . .

The representative of the world comes out of the bathroom with fresh breath. He crawls into bed and I get in next to him. I have to pry loose the sheets, the bed's been made so tight.

Old
Texas Monthly
magazines are stacked on the bedside table, and next to them are photos. In one picture, he's on a beach with family. His mothers wearing a bikini.

"Your mom's hot," I say.

He takes the picture and turns it around so it faces the lamp. The price tag is still on the back of the frame.

"Oh, wait," he says.

He gets up—he's wearing the same funny British underwear, but this time it's blue. He goes into the living room and comes back with something in his palm: a lighter. His back is to me, and when he moves away, a candle on the dresser glows. The candle is red and blue and turquoise, a mosaic pattern. It's burned halfway down in its glass votive.

"I understand," he says, "if with everything that's happened you don't—"

"Thank you," I say. I don't want to hear the rest of what he's going to say. I don't want to be there, in the park. "That is so sweet." I kiss him hard and with meaning. He didn't smoke through dinner, or after, I realize. "That is so, so sweet," I say.

My affection is nonspecific, too. I've swallowed all the longing and loneliness that's been thrust upon me and it streams out of my sweat, my saliva, my words, onto and into those I touch.

Afterward, in the dark, he pulls away from me to sleep. Something starts clanging, loud, and still he sleeps. I wake him up.

"What's that sound?" I say.

"It's the heater. It's an old building and the pipes make that sound." "All night?"

"Yeah."

I wonder if I'll ever fall asleep. "It sounds like someone's in the basement, trying to get out," I say. "Listen. The clangs are like Morse code."

"Who would be in the basement?" he says.

In my mind the taps are spelling out "H-E-L-P." "I don't know," I say.

He gets up to go to the bathroom and when he comes back into the room he sneaks down to the foot of the bed and grabs my ankles. "Boo," he says, and I scream and then giggle. The representative of the world tickles me all the way up to my armpits. I writhe and turn and he ascends until his head is above mine. I haven't laughed like this in days, in weeks. When I finally turn my head into the pillow for sleep, the pillowcase is wet with tears of relief.

I've been sleeping when the phone rings. It's still dark in the room. A voice comes on the answering machine: "Are you there? Hello? Are you there? It's Nina. Hello, hello."

The woman's voice laughs. The red-faced representative makes no move to get up. There's a click and the answering machine rewinds.

"Who's Nina?" I say into the dark. "Samantha," he says, and sighs. "What?"

"Her name's Samantha. She calls sometimes and says she's other women. She's messed up." "But who is she?" I look at the candle.

"We dated in college." "In Austin?"

"Yeah. I'm sorry about that," he says. He pulls me close to him, but not close enough. The heater starts clanging again.

"What happened to her?"

"She kept getting pregnant. We were young then and … She had three abortions in eleven months. It screwed her up."

"Jesus," I say. "I'm sorry."

"We didn't listen to the doctors. They'd tell us not to have sex for a week after the operation, and we'd just … that was all a long time ago. When I was into the coke. Twelve years or so."

I silently do the math.

"But I thought you were twenty-eight," I say. He sighs. "I lied."

"Why?"

"Because you're twenty-two or something." "Twenty-one," I say. "I skipped a grade." "Well, that's even worse. I'm thirty-one." My mouth drops open.

"I didn't want to scare you." I stare at him.

"Which grade?" he asks.

"Second," I say. "That's why my handwriting is so messy. They teach you penmanship in the second grade."

"Hmm," he says, and then he falls back asleep.

In the morning, he makes the bed and then makes coffee. He fills my mug so high it spills over when he brings it to me. The mug says "Le Metro" and a map of Paris curves around it. We've resumed our positions: I'm on the futon; he's sitting in his desk chair. He asks if I want to have dinner again that night.

"Okay," I say. "Nine?" he says.

"Okay," I agree. "I'll meet you here so I can spy on you and see what you've been up to." I say it like a joke, but he doesn't laugh.

"Why don't we meet at the fish restaurant on 110th," he says.

Laugh
, I want to say.
Please, laugh. I was joking and you are the representative of the world and I need you to laugh
.

But no words come out of my mouth. I grab my coat, the same blue one with the plaid pockets. I kiss him good-bye. With one hand he slips down past my belt, grabs my underwear, and pulls me into him. In his other hand he holds a pack of cigarettes. He's waiting. I leave.

On my way home I think I see the man with reddish hair and the gun. He's walking down the street, toward me. He's wearing the same leather jacket. To my left is a pharmacy, and one building back is a women's clothing store. Women's clothing, I decide. I run in and duck.

The shop sells lingerie. I spend almost a half hour there, pretending to admire different bras the saleswoman is pointing out to me. Strapless, wireless, backless, stick-on.

I think about calling the police.
I should call the police
, I think.
But was it him
?

"Are you looking for something for a special someone?" the saleswoman asks. Her shirt is way too low-cut and she doesn't need to wear a bra.

"No," I say. "I'm just looking." I've spent so much time in the store I feel I should buy something. On the counter is a basket full of underwear, on sale. The woman takes my money and wraps up the five-dollar underwear in tissue paper. She wraps it so neatly, as if I've spent four minutes in the store and made a two-hundred-dollar purchase. I love her for this, for the way she wraps it in plum-colored tissue paper.

"Hey," says Danny as I'm entering the building. "It's the Frisco kid." There's rum on his breath.

"No one calls it that," I say.

Upstairs, boxed in the fridge, is a leftover cake with all the roses picked off. I remember it was my roommate's birthday two days ago. I knock on her bedroom door. "Happy birthday!" I say, and hand her the wrapped underwear.

Susan opens it too quickly. If only she knew all the effort the woman at the store put into the wrapping.

"But I'm a size
small
," she says.

I go into my bedroom. It's garlic. That's the smell. Fucking garlic. I take a shower and wash my hair onetwothreefourfive— five times.