“Ugh! Anchovies is nasty,” Chai complained.
“...and a thick veal chop,” the waitress continued, “flattened, breaded, and fried in olive oil, served with broccoli di rape.”
“I want the pasta,” Chai said.
I ordered the blue-cheese cheeseburger with a baked potato and salad.
“If you lost some weight,” Chai said, when the waitress was gone, “and did some weight liftin’, you’d be fine.”
“I’m gonna start my diet next week,” I said. “Monday morning. I got Special K for breakfast and seven grapefruits.”
“What kinda milk?”
“Milk milk.”
“If you gonna diet it’s got to be skim milk, fat-free.”
“Oh. Uh-huh. That’s why I was walking on the promenade today.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m starting to get healthy. I’m gonna walk up to my house on One Fifty-Eight.”
“You better walk up to one thousand fifty-eight if you gonna eat that hamburger.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”
“I want to be a nutritionist,” she said. “But first I’m gonna get into clothes design. I made my bathing suit.”
“You did?”
“Uh-huh. Made it fishnet to make you think you could see sumpin’ and then lined it so you couldn’t. You like it?”
“It’s beautiful.”
That was the only moment that Chai was at a loss for words. Her head moved back slightly, and her eyes opened wide enough that I could see them clearly through the flush of her plastic lenses.
“Where you from, Rufus?”
“I was born in Baltimore,” I said. “Then we moved to Portland and Oakland and then LA...”
“I wanna move to Atlanta,” Chai said. “Then go to LA after I get established. ’Cause you know they say LA is a hard town, and somebody black got to be ready if they want to live out there.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I was only there for a year before my mom brought me to Brooklyn.”
“And then you moved to Washington Heights?”
“Yeah. My mom made sure that I was in school at Hunter, and then she moved back to LA to live with my uncle Lon.”
The food came then. I regretted every bite of my burger. I wanted to leave some, to start my diet a few hours early, but I couldn’t stop eating. I couldn’t even slow down.
“So you alone out here?” Chai asked me.
“My aunt Beta,” I said, shaking my head, mouth full of meat. “She lives in Brooklyn.”
“What kinda name is Beta?”
“Mom is Alpha, and her sister is Beta,” I said.
“What’s that mean?”
“It’s the beginning of the Latin alphabet. A and B.”
“They named two little girls after letters?”
“My grandfather. He’s like an inventor. He said that he thought all children were like experiments, that every child born was a test of nature to make a better human being.”
“Huh. That’s weird.”
“Yeah. He said that all the tests so far had failed, mostly, and that we should keep track of the failures, that one day the government would agree with him and start naming every person so that they could see how the process was coming along.”
“He sounds crazy.”
“That’s what my grandmother thought. That’s why she left him and moved to Baltimore.”
Chai had pecan pie and chocolate liqueur for desert. I had a bite of her pie. After that I showed her all around the World Financial and World Trade Centers. She’d been in them before but didn’t know all the ins and outs the way I did.
There was an award-winning exhibit of news photography in the sky tunnel that connected the two centers. The scenes were mostly of suffering in other parts of the world. The one I remember was an African soldier raising his machete to deliver the killing blow to an unarmed man that he’d been fighting. The man was already wounded, and this was obviously the last moment of his life. I was sure that there was another photograph — a picture of the murdered man, evidence that his attacker was a murderer — but that photograph, wherever it was, was not an award winner. Chai spent a lot of time examining each picture. She was interested in photography too, she said.
I kept close to her, waiting to hear that tone in her voice again, the tone that made me feel like I had always known her.
We went to J&R Music World, and she bought CDs for her sister. And then we went to the building where I worked. She said that she wanted to see it.
After that we walked some more, and then we had tempura at Fukuda’s Japanese restaurant.
“I don’t have just one boyfriend,” she told me when we were walking down Broadway in the early evening. I hadn’t asked her, but I did want to know.
“Right now I see two guys. One’s a cop, and the other’s a ex-con. I like the cop ’cause he know what to do, and I like my convict ’cause he make me feel it when we together.”
“They know about each other?” I asked, as practical as my grandfather.
“Uh-uh. Strong men like that cain’t share without fightin’. So I just don’t tell ’em.”
It was then that she took my hand.
“Take me to the movies, Rufus. Take me to see The Thomas Crown Affair.”
“I only have enough for two subway tokens.”
“You don’t have a bank card?”
“I don’t have any money in the bank.”
“I thought you said that you work for that insurance company?”
“I do, but I just started and I haven’t been paid yet.” This was mostly true. Actually I had worked at Carter’s Home Insurance for three months, but I was just promoted to my new position two weeks ago. Before that I had only made minimum wage.
Chai let my hand go. I thought that she would leave now that she knew I was broke.
“I know somethin’ we could do, don’t cost but fifty cent,” she said.
“What?”
Again she took me by the hand. We walked farther downtown, our fingers interlaced. My hand was sweating, and even though I always thought that holding hands meant something close and special, I didn’t feel the closeness that I had on that sunbathers’ lawn. It was just two hands and some fingers pressed together on a day that was too hot.
“What’s this?” I said, holding back at the outside escalator.
“The ferry,” Chai said. “The Staten Island Ferry. It only costs fifty cent. Don’t worry, I’ll pay for it.”
We held hands up the escalator and through the swinging glass doors. She had to let go in order to pay at the kiosk. We came into a cavernous room that was over a hundred feet across, and just as long. There was a magazine stand in the center of the room and wooden benches along the walls.
“Good, it’s pretty empty,” Chai said.
Now she held my arm. I still didn’t feel that closeness I craved, but there was security in the touch. I’d never been to Staten Island and said so. She told me that her cousins lived out there in Saint George. She used to visit them when she was a girl.
At the far end of the large waiting room was a huge door that sat on wheels. Through the door we could see a crowd of people all walking in one direction, toward the exit and the city.
“That means the ferry is unloading. When they’re finished and when the cars are all off, then we can get on.”
“They take cars?”
“Uh-huh. Right down below us.”
The door was pushed open from the outside by an older, red-faced white man. The color reminded me of the man who was so angry when his girlfriend looked at me.
“Great, it’s one of the old ferries,” she said as we walked up the ramp.
It was like one of the old barges that my uncle Lon used to take me on off of Redondo Beach. Lots of old wooden benches and a galley where you could get hot dogs and sodas.