kind of insistent heat.
When I woke again, dawn had turned the sheets an eerie blue. The kitten mewed from under the bed.
I may have been delirious, sunstruck. Fabio and the Chinese woman seemed to be in my room, the Chinese woman doing exactly the things with Fabio that I had done, and Fabio repeating every gesture: his hand around her hair, his fingers in her mouth. Up close, she and Fabio were not as glamorous as I’d first seen them; they had missing teeth and holes in their heads, skin scraped off, scabs. I realized I had lost my ring of keys, so I climbed into the rickety elevator, which no longer operated smoothly on its pulley, but lurched down. When I went outside the seedy lobby, I saw my keys glowing on the dirty ground before me, a miracle.
It was only a heat delusion. I found my own keys—a differentset from the keys in the dream—safe in my straw bag. I put on my warmest, loosest clothes and kept turning pages of
Moby-Dick
. When Fabio let himself in, I got up from the bed and stumbled into him. He sat me back down and began to pull my sweater over my shoulders.
“Ow, ow!” I said.
“But it must come off,” he said reasonably.
He removed my clothes as gently as he could. He unbuttoned his shirt, knelt at the bottom of the bed and pulled my cotton pants down around my ankles.
“Don’t touch me,” I whispered. “Everything hurts.”
“It is not necessary to touch you,” he said. “Only a little,” touching.
The door to the room opened and the bellman stood there. I lunged at him and attacked his face with my hands until he ran away. Then I realized that I hadn’t moved. I was still in the bed, alone, naked under the white sheets, the blanket a tangle at my feet. The bellman entered the room, approached the bed, then went out again. He left, on the nightstand, a half grapefruit with a maraschino cherry in the center, and a serrated spoon.
Fabio didn’t come back. My skin peeled off. The kitten ran away—it flew from under the bed—the instant the bellman opened the door. I took a taxi to the airport. On the boulevard of the dying palms, the driver stopped at a traffic light and I saw a red Trans Am, driven by the one-eyed Chinese woman. In the passenger seat sat Fabio. Both of them were staring straight ahead, together in the heightened consciousness of people who enjoy being looked at.
As I returned to school, something strange happened: Jess was all over CNN. She was the headline news, wearing a turtleneck and a little woolen beanie, perfectly herself, round-cheeked and freckled, except that she had died. Not only had Jess died; she had been murdered in Colorado. Not only had she been murdered in Colorado; she had been raped, her body left on a frozen field, tortured and dead. Not only had she been raped, tortured and murdered; she had been impugned as an example of the cost of sexual freedom, a relatively new idea, an example of the result: Young women who didn’t understand limits or men, putting themselves out into the world, taking buses at night. Jess’s slacks—the CNN word,
slacks
—had not been recovered. She had been tied with the straps from her messenger bag and stabbed nine times in the back, apparently while performing oral sex on her murderer. The network displayed her parents as evidence, their mouths black holes of wonder. What had happened? The new news—CNN—tried to point to a moral, or a trend, or a metaphor, or a social disease. This was the beginning of something new—a way of making sudden, terrible, inexplicable events last all day, so that rings of possible meaning could be created around them. But the question of what happened to Jess was never resolved. Even now, twenty-six years later, the case is still cold.
1982
EV IN N EW Y ORK
A fter college (BA, Smith College, gender studies, skin of her teeth, no distinction), EV moved to New York and found a job in retail. The store off Fifth where she worked paid the minimum; she couldn’t live or eat
When I woke again, dawn had turned the sheets an eerie blue. The kitten mewed from under the bed.
I may have been delirious, sunstruck. Fabio and the Chinese woman seemed to be in my room, the Chinese woman doing exactly the things with Fabio that I had done, and Fabio repeating every gesture: his hand around her hair, his fingers in her mouth. Up close, she and Fabio were not as glamorous as I’d first seen them; they had missing teeth and holes in their heads, skin scraped off, scabs. I realized I had lost my ring of keys, so I climbed into the rickety elevator, which no longer operated smoothly on its pulley, but lurched down. When I went outside the seedy lobby, I saw my keys glowing on the dirty ground before me, a miracle.
It was only a heat delusion. I found my own keys—a differentset from the keys in the dream—safe in my straw bag. I put on my warmest, loosest clothes and kept turning pages of
Moby-Dick
. When Fabio let himself in, I got up from the bed and stumbled into him. He sat me back down and began to pull my sweater over my shoulders.
“Ow, ow!” I said.
“But it must come off,” he said reasonably.
He removed my clothes as gently as he could. He unbuttoned his shirt, knelt at the bottom of the bed and pulled my cotton pants down around my ankles.
“Don’t touch me,” I whispered. “Everything hurts.”
“It is not necessary to touch you,” he said. “Only a little,” touching.
The door to the room opened and the bellman stood there. I lunged at him and attacked his face with my hands until he ran away. Then I realized that I hadn’t moved. I was still in the bed, alone, naked under the white sheets, the blanket a tangle at my feet. The bellman entered the room, approached the bed, then went out again. He left, on the nightstand, a half grapefruit with a maraschino cherry in the center, and a serrated spoon.
Fabio didn’t come back. My skin peeled off. The kitten ran away—it flew from under the bed—the instant the bellman opened the door. I took a taxi to the airport. On the boulevard of the dying palms, the driver stopped at a traffic light and I saw a red Trans Am, driven by the one-eyed Chinese woman. In the passenger seat sat Fabio. Both of them were staring straight ahead, together in the heightened consciousness of people who enjoy being looked at.
As I returned to school, something strange happened: Jess was all over CNN. She was the headline news, wearing a turtleneck and a little woolen beanie, perfectly herself, round-cheeked and freckled, except that she had died. Not only had Jess died; she had been murdered in Colorado. Not only had she been murdered in Colorado; she had been raped, her body left on a frozen field, tortured and dead. Not only had she been raped, tortured and murdered; she had been impugned as an example of the cost of sexual freedom, a relatively new idea, an example of the result: Young women who didn’t understand limits or men, putting themselves out into the world, taking buses at night. Jess’s slacks—the CNN word,
slacks
—had not been recovered. She had been tied with the straps from her messenger bag and stabbed nine times in the back, apparently while performing oral sex on her murderer. The network displayed her parents as evidence, their mouths black holes of wonder. What had happened? The new news—CNN—tried to point to a moral, or a trend, or a metaphor, or a social disease. This was the beginning of something new—a way of making sudden, terrible, inexplicable events last all day, so that rings of possible meaning could be created around them. But the question of what happened to Jess was never resolved. Even now, twenty-six years later, the case is still cold.
1982
EV IN N EW Y ORK
A fter college (BA, Smith College, gender studies, skin of her teeth, no distinction), EV moved to New York and found a job in retail. The store off Fifth where she worked paid the minimum; she couldn’t live or eat
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