Mondays and Tuesdays she made around a hundred dollars. Wednesdays weren’t much better. That first day she walked from Port Authority, when she felt she’d brought her breasts to the right place, had faded to a quaint memory in little over a month’s time. She was glad to be where she was, but she was surprised she wasn’t getting bigger tips, better offers. Men had looked, men gave her money, one even offered her a job to dance naked at a dive in Tribeca. But nothing felt right. Nothing had felt right since the day Rebecca took her in, and she was getting restless. Lola appreciated Rebecca, very much. But she knew it wasn’t forever.
Four weeks into the job and it was heading toward August, the July warmth giving way to a numbing, stifling hotness and filth that was, well, August in the East Village. Mars Bar had no air conditioner, and the two fans in the window whirred, loudly blowing hot air everywhere. Lola tied her pale hair back in a ponytail; otherwise, it whipped around and stuck to her moist face. Teardrops of sweat dripped into her cleavage. It was Wednesday, and the beginning of her shift, but her mind was already on the night being over. She’d have four days off to read magazines and shop. She’d clean up the apartment, too, which Rebecca liked her to do.
“What do you have on draft?” a man said, and Lola stood up right away, as if she were in the military and he’d just barked an order.
He sat and drank and looked at her breasts.
“Wipe that lipstick off your face.”
Lola took a white bar napkin from the neat pile she’d just made and rubbed at her mouth.
His name was Christopher. He was six feet three, skinny, face and arms hairless, with large, smooth hands. He had a crew cut of black hair and black eyes and a tattoo of a dragon on one forearm and the name MARCY on the other. His father was in jail, which he was annoyed about. He had a motorcycle and he smoked filterless Pall Malls. He took her home that night and it hurt, but it was the right thing to do. She woke up the next morning in an apartment very much like the one she shared with Rebecca, and only a few blocks away, but she knew her life had changed forever.
He left that day, without saying where he was going. She got to work cleaning. There wasn’t much to clean. When he got back around four in the afternoon, he did it to her again, and this time it felt good. Not as good as Rebecca, but it didn’t matter. She was his now, and that’s the way she wanted it.
Lola sat next to him on the couch where they both held bowls of canned raviolis on their laps, and she let her knees gently touch his.
“We’re going to rob that bar you work at. Tonight.”
The only thing Lola could think to say was, “Rebecca’s working tonight.”
“Who fucking cares? You got the keys, right?”
“No.”
“Well then we’ll have to do it before she closes.”
They drank on Avenue B, not far from Mars Bar. Occasionally, he leaned into her and she thought that he smelled a lot like that man in the Cadillac. Where was he now? Pulling into his driveway in Grosse Pointe, or some other posh Detroit suburb? Going home to a family? A wife who loved him? College-age children with futures? The music in the bar was loud and someone was singing, “Yeah, yeah it’s alright, yeah-ah, it’s alright. Baby, it’s alright, oh oh, baby it’s alright.” The bar they were in had air conditioning, which felt delicious to Lola, and she could feel a thin film of salt dry on her skin. Her nipples hardened up into little stiff puckers, and she leaned against the bar and arched her back a bit. Yes, Christopher had that smell, the smell of a man, a real man, the smell of something exotic, someone foreign. He’d told her he was part Cherokee and that was why he was hairless. It was destiny she told herself, it was out of her control, just like the size of her breasts.
It was nearing four in the morning and all the bars were closing. It was only three blocks away. Three blocks and everything would change. She’d have that future she always dreamed about, though vaguely.
“Hurry up.”
Lola skipped along behind him, trying to catch up with his long strides. She was wearing her boots and it still wasn’t easy catching up. But she liked the view from behind, yes. His filthy black jeans, the nunchucks sticking brazenly out of his back pocket. The way he stooped over. Did he have a gun? She doubted it. It was all about his hands, his large, hairless hands.
As they got near Mars Bar, a seemingly homeless man with white spittle around the corners of his mouth, the stench of rot wafting forth from his body and a tiny little crack vial in his hand, tried to stop Christopher.
“Man, man, can you spare some change. I’m hungry, man …”
Christopher hit the man, and Lola watched him fall to the sidewalk.
They were seconds from the bar. The lights were out. For a moment, it was as if New York had gone dark, and the only thing glowing were the man’s eyes, staring up at her from where he lay injured on the sidewalk.
“Help me,” he said, and Lola stopped for a moment before a crashing noise jarred her attention away.
It was Rebecca pulling the gate down, the metal scraping loudly as the gate fell to the sidewalk. But she hadn’t locked it yet, no, not yet. Christopher was a bit ahead now; she scurried to catch up. She saw the nunchucks come out of his pocket and for a moment, she wasn’t the woman she thought she was. She was afraid. She looked away, in fact, she looked down, and she saw that she, too, was glowing, not just that poor man’s eyes, no, but her pale breasts were glowing, and with a little effort she could hide her face in that whiteness, with just a little effort, she could close herself up in all her luck, in all that beauty.
reading to the blind girl
MAGGIE IMMEDIATELY LOVED ANYA LANDER, HER ANTHROPOLOGY PROFESSOR AT BOSTON UNIVERSITY, LIKE MANY STUDENTS DID. This was the first most important thing that happened to her at college. It was, in a way, her first chance in life. She wanted to please Anya. And she was an excellent student, but recently she’d fallen in love.
She was in love with Tony. He was ten years older than her and in a band that was going to be signed, she just knew it. Tony gave her hope, at least some of the time. And so did Anya. Anya radiated hope, as well as energy and enthusiasm and possibility. And Maggie craved hope. Her parents had died when she was seven. And her uncle and his wife, who raised her, never meant much to her. When she got the scholarship to BU, she left Indiana in a hurry.
The second week of the introductory course — which was a huge lecture with about ninety students — Anya Lander asked if anyone could volunteer to read to Caroline, a sight-impaired student enrolled in the class. The materials being used were not available in Braille. Anya (as she asked her students to call her) stood at the front of the class, looking out at the vast room of people, her long, curly, truly wild hair loose around her shoulders, a brown denim mini skirt revealing her long, shapely legs. And Maggie, sitting at the back of the class like always, felt her hand rise. Maggie could see the entirety of the students in front of her — no one else raised a hand.
“Great. We have a volunteer,” Anya said, smiling fetchingly. “Come up after class and see me,” she said to Maggie, her large blue eyes shining all the way to the back of the class. Maggie’s heart started to race. It stayed that way for the rest of the hour, thumping away, making her breathe with difficulty. She didn’t know why she’d volunteered. It had nothing to do with wanting to help a blind girl. Maggie wasn’t really that sort. Her immediate, yearning feelings for Anya were what propelled her.
When the class ended, Maggie numbly walked up to Anya Lander. Close up, Anya had acne scars, and her head seemed large for her body, but she was still a supremely magnetic person. Standing so close to Anya made Maggie dizzy. And now, here she was. She could practically smell her. One other person remained in the classroom and that was Caroline, the blind girl. She remained seated in the front row, a mousy girl — short, pale skin, unseeing blue eyes, dishwater brown hair unattractively shaped around her face. Her shirt was ill-fitting; in fact, it may have been put on wrongly.