Lucy smiled.
“Can I get a hit of that?” she said. She realized it was the first time since getting here that she felt confident enough to ask for something, not to wait for it to befall her, and as she sucked the smoke into her lungs she felt good, and alive, and she said to Randy, “What’s the job?”
He told her it was at a bar. A bartender job.
Lucy looked, glassy-eyed, over at Jamie, who gave her a sad smile.
“Don’t be an asshole, Ida,” Jamie said. “This city is built off of people doing things they don’t wanna do.”
Jamie, Lucy had found out, worked as a massage therapist in the financial district. “The men get really tense,” she had said. “All that money, all that trading.” She had said the words money and trading as if she were running out of breath, and Lucy understood that Jamie’s massages sometimes, if not always, ended up being more than just massages. Jamie also tended to work overtime, from her “home office,” and Lucy often heard the exchanges taking place: the trading, she assumed, then the money.
Lucy gulped. She felt simultaneously depressed and excited. She imagined herself in high heels, serving fancy people fancy cocktails. It would just be temporary. She could do it for a while — work on her feet until she got on her feet, so to speak. She pushed away an impulsive thought of her mother, what her mother might say about her working at a bar, which went something like: You move all the way out there, so far from your mother, to…
Randy sighed. “Jamie, why you gotta knock my place of employment like that? It’s an upstanding place. Right, Rob? Rob’s there every night. Right, Rob?”
“I’ll take it,” Lucy said quickly, sipping from a beer Jamie had handed her. “I mean, if Rob’s there every night…” She winked at Rob in a way she figured was cute.
“There’s a place where you can buy live snakes down on Canal,” Randy said, out of nowhere. “I was thinking about getting one.”
They all laughed, which made Lucy feel okay about things. Thinking about being part of a group of people sitting together and laughing. She imagined Randy with a snake around his neck, serving someone a raspberry martini.
And so Random Randy, as Jamie and Lucy would start to call him because of his propensity to bring up totally irrelevant subjects at odd times, took her to the Eagle, an underground (both figuratively and literally) bar in the West Village. It was a kitschy, divey place, where the walls were made of fake stones, and there was the vague sense that the bar itself was tucked inside of a log cabin. Randy bent over a plug and a string of red chili pepper lights went on around the windows, though in the daylight you couldn’t really see that they were on. The chili pepper lights made Lucy want to get back on a plane to Idaho, where she would be working for Randall, the lawyer, not Randy, the bartender. She agreed with her mother’s imaginary critique: she did not move to New York City to work in a bar. But then again, what did she move to New York City to do? And what else was there? Randy intercepted her with an arm thrown around her waist, guiding her back behind the bar for what he called the “grand tour.”
“This is the ice,” he said. “And here are the wells. And the glasses rack up like so. And you want to be sure not to use the Coke button here. ’Cause Sprite comes out.”
Lucy took the soda gun in her hand. She tested the sprayer tentatively, coaxing a foam of Coke from its mouth, which landed in a stainless-steel sink.
“And here are Jamie’s matchbooks,” Randy said, pulling one of the white squares from a candy jar and tossing it to Lucy. She carefully fingered the little booklet, and when Randy told her to, opened it. On the inside was a message: DON’T BE CRAZY. BE WILD.
Lucy laughed once but then didn’t know if she should be laughing, so she stopped. “What are these?”
“One of Jamie’s projects,” Randy said. “She writes down the things that the guys say to her, the guys she sleeps with. She’s one of those creative types, you know? Not like me. I’m just… regular.”
“Oh, you’re not regular, Randy.”
“It’s fine,” Randy said. “I don’t mind. I don’t need to be an artist. There are enough of those in this city, I’ll tell you that.”
“So Jamie is an artist?”
“Let’s just say she’s not sleeping with those guys for the money. Although there’s that, too, I guess. I’m not one to explain it, but it’s all part of some big art project. She tapes them. Sets up a camera. Then she sort of leads them into things. Put on my lingerie, do a dance, cry like a baby. She’s got these miserable Wall Street guys on tape, acting like fools.”
“Isn’t that sort of… fucked up?”
“Isn’t life sort of fucked up?”
Lucy smiled down at her matchbook, then tucked it into her pocket. So Jamie was an artist. She lived with an artist. The thought made her heart quicken.
“But don’t bring it up with her,” Randy said, now sounding tentative, rubbing the part between his nose and his mouth. “She’s not into talking about it. I guess you could say she’s not really into the whole artist thing, you know? She’s more of a lone wolf. Says she wants someone to find the tapes when she dies.”
Lucy was quiet; she watched Randy suck in a batch of stale air and raise his arms to stretch.
“That’s about it for the tour, really!” Randy said. “If you don’t know what’s in a drink? Ask your customer. Your customer always knows.”
But there were no customers yet, at four in the afternoon, and Lucy stood behind the sink wondering if this was indeed her fate: an empty bar with dust shimmering in the sunlight, an empty life.
But quickly the empty life began to fill with bar regulars (Sandy the shoe-repair guy and Pat the failed writer and Gabby the hickey-boasting hooker), and Jamie’s crew of men friends, and bits of toxic white powder and slices of the moon, spotted in the valleys between the buildings after her shifts, close to 4:00 A.M. She began to know the streets (Sullivan, Delancey, Mott) and the subways (screech, ding, swoosh, spark) and the outfits (big boots, big shirts, small pants or small boots, small shirts, big pants). And with her post at the Eagle came extraordinarily easy access to one of the things New York had in as much abundance as pretzels: men.
Bret with one t. Large loft, small penis, too many candles, who cared, she liked him. Small penis or not, he didn’t like her enough not to move to California three days after their meeting, for a job at a computer company that had been started in someone’s garage.
Tom with no shirt on, offered to help her carry a mattress up to her apartment. Fell onto the mattress and fucked; when Lucy woke up, he had migrated to Jamie’s bed.
A woodworker whose name she didn’t know who took her to pancakes at Pearl Diner and kissed her in the subway, who when she asked him his name at the end of the night said: married.
And on and on; the men adored and then disposed of her. With each of them she felt briefly and tightly tethered, hopeful that they would deliver her to that place that she craved: the deep dark cavern of love and lust, the place where longing stopped. But none of them did, and in between her encounters with them, and usually even during, she felt deeply alone. And besides, when she thought about it hard enough, from the part of her that craved something beyond just a body in the bed, she knew they did not interest her. She briefly tried to turn her experiences with them into a project, like Jamie had, but she knew it wasn’t hers. What was hers? She didn’t know. For now it was the twelve-foot expanse of mahogany that she wiped a hundred times a night, behind which she had started to feel almost, if not totally, at home; by December the smell of the old limes didn’t bother her anymore.