Emerald City Part 3

While I was dressing for school one day, my mother came into my room. Her face was puffy with sleep, her lips very pale. It still amazed me to think that she and Julius shared the big bed where she had slept alone so many years, where I had slept, too, when I had nightmares. I imagined an extra room where Julius slept, an inner door outside which he and my mother kissed good night and then did not meet again until morning.

"It's cold outside," my mother said.

I nodded, scanning my closet for a sweater. I could feel her watching the coat. She was quiet while I pulled on my kneesocks.

"You know," she said, "Julius really likes you. He thinks you're terrific." Her voice was filled with pleasure, as if just saying his name felt good.

"I know it," I said. And I did-he fixed me pancakes in the morning and had offered many times to take me to his warehouse, where I pictured row after row of soft, beckoning furs. "Pretty soon," I would mutter vaguely.

"Sarah," my mother said, and waited for me to look at her. "Please won't you wear it?"

She had flat hair and an open, pleading face. When she was dressed up and wearing her makeup, my mother could look beautiful to me. But now, in the early white light of a winter morning as she balanced her cup on her kneecap, she looked worn out and sad.

"I will," I said, meaning it now. "I'll wear the coat when it's freezing."

Two weeks before the start of Christmas vacation, Amanda wasn't in school. When I saw her empty chair, I felt a flicker of dread. I came inside the cla.s.sroom and sat at my desk, but without Amanda to hook my attention to, the room felt baggy. I worried, before the teacher had even called her absent, that she would not be back.

A special a.s.sembly was called. Our headmistress, Sister Brennan, announced to the school that Amanda had run away from home with her brother, a high school dropout who worked at Marshall Field's, and several stolen credit cards. As Sister Brennan spoke, there was a vast stirring around me, like on the day when we learned that Melissa Shay, two years below me with long gold braids, had died of leukemia during summer vacation. This stir was laced with delight, a jittery pleasure at news so shocking that it briefly banished all traces of normal life. I twisted around with the other girls, exchanging pantomimed amazement. It comforted me to feel like one of them, to pretend this news of Amanda meant no more to me than a shorter math cla.s.s.

After that, I couldn't concentrate. I felt physical pain in my stomach and arms as I walked through the doors of Sacred Heart, this place Amanda had discarded. She'd left me behind with the rest: Father Damian in his robes, the old chalkboards and desks, the solemn chapel with its stink of damp stone and old lint, its stale echoes of the same words endlessly repeated. As Father Damian lectured to us on Amanda's sin, I noticed how the clerical collar squashed and wrinkled his neck, so it looked like a turkey's, how his eyes were thick and clouded as fingernails. I looked at Jesus and saw, where His crossed ankles should have been, the neatly folded drumsticks on a roasting chicken. I stopped looking at Him.

What compelled me instead was her desk. For weeks and weeks-who knew how long?-Amanda had sat there, twirling her pen against her cheek and planning her escape. After school sometimes, when the shadowy halls had emptied, I would sit in her chair and feel the ring of her absence around me. I opened the desk and fingered her chewed pencils, the grimy stub of her eraser, a few haphazard notes she had taken in cla.s.s. One by one I took these items home with me, lined them carefully along my windowsill, and watched them as I went to sleep. I imagined Amanda and her brother padding over thick dunes of sand, climbing the turrets of castles. In my thoughts this brother bore a striking resemblance to Jesus. As for Amanda, she grew more unearthly with each day, until what amazed me was less the fact that she had vanished than that I had ever been able to see her-touch her-in the first place.

One night, when my mother had gone to a meeting and Julius was reading in the den, I took a razor blade from the pack he kept in the medicine cabinet. I held it between my fingers and carried it to my bedroom, where I sat on the edge of my bed and took off my sweater. I was still wearing my school jumper with the short-sleeved blouse underneath, and I placed a pillow across my lap and lay my bare arm over it. My forearm was white as milk, smooth, and full of pale blue snaking veins. I touched it with the blade and found that I was terrified. I looked around at my childhood bears, my bubbling aquarium, and my ballerina posters. They were someone else's-a girl whose idea of mischief had been chasing those fish through their tank with her wet arm, trying to s.n.a.t.c.h their slippery tails. For a moment I felt her horror at what I was about to do, and it made me pause. But I had to do something. This was all I could think of.

Gently but steadily, I sank one corner of the blade into the skin halfway between my elbow and wrist. The pain made tears rush to my eyes, and my nose began to run. I heard an odd humming noise but continued cutting, determined not to be a baby, set on being as fierce with myself as I'd seen Amanda be. The razor went deeper than the pin had. For a moment the cut sat bloodless on my arm-for an instant-and then, like held breath, blood rose from it suddenly and soaked the white pillowcase. This happened so fast that at first I was merely astonished, as though I were watching a dazzling science film. Then I grew dizzy and frightened by the mess, this abundance of sticky warmth I could not contain.

I'd done something wrong, that was obvious. From the kitchen I heard the kettle boil, then the creak of Julius's chair as he rose to take it off the stove. I wished my mother were home. I tried to go to Julius and ask for help, but my arm felt so damaged, sending blood wherever I looked, and I couldn't seem to lift it.

"Julius?" I called. The name sounded unfamiliar, and it struck me that I hadn't said it aloud in nearly a year. The kettle was still whistling, and he didn't hear me.

"Dad!" I hollered, and it sounded even stranger than "Julius" had.

From the next room I heard the stillness of a pause. "Dad!" I called again. The wet warmth was soaking through to my legs, and I felt lightheaded. As I leaned back and shut my eyes, I remembered the Devil's Paint Pots with their wisps of steam, the man beside me on a donkey. Then I heard the door to my room burst open.

I was s.h.i.+vering. My teeth knocked together so hard that I bit my tongue. Julius wrapped me in the fox-fur coat and carried me to the car. I fell asleep before we reached it.

At the hospital they st.i.tched my arm and wrapped it in white gauze. They hung it in a sling of heavy fabric, and despite my shock over what I'd done to myself, I couldn't help antic.i.p.ating the stir my sling would cause in homeroom. Julius spoke to my mother on the phone. I could tell she was frantic, but Julius stayed calm throughout.

When we were ready to go, he held up the coat. It was squashed and matted, covered with blood. I thought with satisfaction that I had ruined it for good.

"I think we can clean it," said Julius, glancing at me. He was a big man with olive skin and hair that shone like plastic. Each mark of the comb was visible on his head. I knew why my mother loved him, then-he was the sort of man who stayed warm when it was cold out, who kept important tickets and slips of paper inside his wallet until you needed them. The coat looked small in his hands. Julius held it a moment, looking at the matted fur. Stubbornly I shook my head. I hated that coat, and it wasn't going to change in a minute.

To my surprise, Julius began to laugh. His wide, wet lips parted in a grin, and a loud chuckle shook him. I smiled tentatively back. Then Julius stuffed the coat into the white cylinder of the hospital garbage can. "What the h.e.l.l," he said, still laughing as the silver flap moved back into place. "What the h.e.l.l." Then he took my hand and walked me back to the parking lot.

Months later, in early summer, Sacred Heart and St. Peter's joined forces to give their annual formal dance. I was invited by Michael McCarty, a handsome, sullen boy with bright blue eyes, who had the habit of flicking the hair from his face more often than necessary. He seemed as frightened as I was, so I said yes.

I needed white shoes. After school one afternoon in our last week of cla.s.ses, I went to a large discount shoestore downtown. I walked through the door and shut my eyes in disbelief.

Amanda was seated on a small stool, guiding a woman's foot into a green high-heel. There were crumpled tissue papers around her. I noticed her hair was longer now, and she was not so thin as before.

I had an urge to duck back out the door before she saw me. Although I hardly thought about Amanda anymore, I still clung to the vague belief that she had risen above the earth and now lived among those fat, silvery clouds I'd seen from airplane windows. What I felt, seeing her, was a jolt of disappointment.

"Amanda," I said.

She twisted around to look at me, squinting without recognition. Her confusion shocked me: for all the time I'd spent thinking of Amanda, she had barely known who I was.

"Oh yeah," she said, smiling now. "Sacred Heart."

She told me to wait while she finished with her customer, and I went to look for my shoes. I picked white satin with tiny pearl designs sewn on top. I brought them to the cash register, where Amanda was waiting, and she rang them up.

"Where do you go to school?" I asked.

She named a large public school and said she liked it better there. Her fingers moved rapidly over the keys.

Lowering my voice, I asked, "Where did you go?"

Amanda flipped open the cash drawer and counted out my change, mouthing the numbers. "Hawaii," she said, handing me the bills.

"Hawaii?" It was not what I'd imagined.

My mind filled with a vision of gra.s.s skirts, flower necklaces, and tropical drinks crowded with umbrellas and canned cherries. Julius had been there, and this was how he'd described it.

"We were there two weeks," Amanda said. "Then my dad came and got us." She did not sound ashamed of this in the least. As she handed me my box in its plastic bag, she said, "He came all the way over, he had to. Or else we would've stayed forever."

Amanda closed the register drawer and walked me out to the street. The day was warm, and we both wore short sleeves. Her arms were smooth and lightly tanned. On my own arm, the scar was no more than a thin pink line.

We stood a moment in silence, and then Amanda kissed me goodbye on the cheek. I caught her smell-the warm, bready smell that comes from inside people's clothes. She waved from the door of the shoestore, then went back inside.

I felt a sudden longing not to move from that spot. I could feel where her arms had pressed, where her hands had touched my neck. The smell was still there, warm and rich like the odor a lawn gives off after hours of sunlight. I tried to spot Amanda through the store windows, but sunlight hit the gla.s.s so that I couldn't see beyond it.

Finally I began to walk, swinging my bag of shoes. I breathed deeply, inhaling the last of her smell, but it lingered, and after several more blocks I realized that what I smelled was not Amanda. It was myself, and this day of early summer-the fresh, snarled leaves and piles of sunlit dirt. I was almost fifteen years old.

EMERALD CITY.

Rory knew before he came to New York what sort of life he would have. He'd read about it in novels by hip young authors who lived there. He saw the apartment, small but high-ceilinged, a tall, sooty window with a fire escape twisting past a chemical-pink sky. Nights in frantic clubs, mornings hunched over coffee in the East Village, warming his hands on the cup, black pants, black turtleneck, pointed black boots. He'd intended to snort cocaine, but by the time he arrived, that was out. He drank instead.

He was a photographer's a.s.sistant, loading cameras all day, holding up light meters, waving Polaroids until they were dry enough to tear open. As he watched the models move, he sometimes worried he was still too California. What could you do with sandy blond hair, cut it off? Short hair was on the wane, at least for men. So there it hung, golden, straight as paper, reminiscent of beaches he'd never seen, being as he was from Chicago (in Chicago there was the lake, but that didn't count). His other option was to gain or lose some weight, but the starved look had lost its appeal-any suggestion of illness was to be avoided. Beefy was the way to go; not fat, just a cla.s.sic paunch above the belt. But no matter how much Rory ate, he stayed exactly the same. He took up smoking instead, although it burned his throat.

Rory stubbed out his cigarette and checked to make sure the lights were off in the darkroom. He was always the last to leave; his boss, Vesuvi, would hand him the camera as soon as the last shot was done and then swan out through the sea of film containers, plastic cups, and discarded sheets of backdrop paper. Vesuvi was one of those people who always had somewhere to go. He was blessed with a marvelous paunch, which Rory tried not to admire too openly. He didn't want Vesuvi to get the wrong idea.

Rory swept the debris into bags, then he turned out the lights, locked up the studio, and headed down to the street. Twilight was his favorite hour-metal gates sliding down over storefronts, newspapers whirling from the sidewalk into the sky, an air of promise and abandonment. This was the way he'd expected New York to look, and he was thrilled when the city complied.

He took the subway uptown to visit Stacey, a failing model whom he adored against all reason. Stacey-when girls with names like Zane and Anouschka and Brid regularly slipped him their phone numbers during shoots. Stacey refused to change her name. "If I make it," she said, "they'll be happy to call me whatever." She never acknowledged that she was failing, though it was obvious. Rory longed to bring it up, to talk it over with her, but he was afraid to.

Stacey lay on her bed, shoes still on. A Diet c.o.ke was on the table beside her. She weighed herself each morning, and when she was under 120, she allowed herself a real c.o.ke that day.

"What happened at Bazaar?" Rory asked, perching on the edge of the bed. Stacey sat up and smoothed her hair.

"The usual," she said. "I'm too commercial." She shrugged, but Rory could see she was troubled.

"And that was nothing," Stacey continued. "On my next go-see the guy kept looking at me and flipping back and forth through my book, and of course I'm thinking, Fantastic, he's going to hire me. So you know what he finally says? I'm not ugly enough. He says, 'Beauty today is ugly beauty. Look at those girls, they're monsters-gorgeous, mythical monsters. If a girl isn't ugly, I won't use her.'"

She turned to Rory. He saw tears in her eyes and felt helpless. "What a b.a.s.t.a.r.d," he said.

To his surprise, she began to laugh. She lay back on the bed and let the laughter shake her. "I mean, here I am," she said, "killing myself to stay thin, hot-oiling my hair, getting my nails done, and what does he tell me? I'm not ugly enough!"

"It's crazy," Rory said, watching Stacey uneasily. "He's out of his mind."

She sat up and rubbed her eyes. She looked slaphappy, the way she looked sometimes after a second gin and tonic. Eight months before, after a year's meticulous planning, she had bought her own ticket to New York from Cincinnati. And this was just the beginning; Stacey hoped to ride the wave of her success around the world: Paris, Tokyo, London, Bangkok. The shelves of her tiny apartment were cluttered with maps and travel books, and whenever she met a foreigner-it made no difference from where-she would carefully copy his address into a small leatherbound book, convinced it would not be long before she was everywhere. She was the sort of girl for whom nothing happened by accident, and it pained Rory to watch her struggle when all day in Vesuvi's studio he saw girls whose lives were accident upon accident, from their discovery in whatever shopping mall or hot dog stand to the startling, gaudy error of their faces.

"Rory," Stacey said. "Look at me a minute."

He turned obediently. She was so close he could smell the warm, milky lotion she used on her face. "Do you ever wish I was uglier?" she asked.

"G.o.d no," Rory said, pulling away to see if she was joking. "What a question, Stace."

"Come on. You do this all day long." She moved close to him again, and Rory found himself looking at the tiny pores on either side of her nose. He tried to think of the studio and the girls there, but when he concentrated on Stacey, they disappeared; and when he thought of the studio, he couldn't see Stacey anymore. It was a world she didn't belong to. As he watched Stacey's tense, expectant face, Rory felt a dreadful power; it would take so little, he thought, to crush her.

"Never mind," she said when Rory didn't answer. "I don't want to know."

She stood and crossed the room, then leaned over and pressed her palms to the floor. She had been a gymnast in high school and was still remarkably limber. This limberness delighted Rory in a way that almost shamed him-in bed she would sit up, legs straight in front of her, then lean over and rest her cheek against her s.h.i.+ns. Casually, as if it were nothing! Rory didn't dare tell her how this excited him; if she were aware of it, then it wouldn't be the same.

Stacey stood up, flushed and peaceful again. "Let's get out of here," she said.

Her apartment was right off Columbus, a street Rory scorned but one that nevertheless mesmerized him. He and Stacey walked arm in arm, peering into the windows of restaurants as eagerly as diners peered out of them. It was as if they had all been told some friend might pa.s.s this way tonight and were keeping their eyes peeled.

"Where should we go?" Stacey asked.

Rory cracked his knuckles one by one. The question made him edgy, as if there were some right answer he should know. Where were the people who mattered? Occasionally Rory would be stricken with a sense that they had been exactly where he was only moments before, but had just left. The worst part was, he didn't know who they were, exactly. The closest he came was in knowing people who seemed to know; his roommate, Charles, a food stylist who specialized in dollops, and of course Vesuvi. Vesuvi was his main source.

They headed downtown, enjoying the last warm days of fall, the pleasant seediness of Seventh Avenue. They pa.s.sed intersections where patches of old cobblestones were exposed beneath layers of tar, relics of another New York Rory dimly remembered from novels: carriages and top hats, reputations and insults.

"Rory," Stacey said, "do you feel more something, now that you've gotten successful?"

Rory turned to her in surprise. "Who says I'm successful?"

"But you are!"

"I'm no one. I'm Vesuvi's a.s.sistant."

Stacey seemed shocked. "That's not no one," she said.

Rory grinned. It was a funny conversation. "Yeah?" he said. "Then who is it?"

Stacey pondered this a moment. Suddenly she laughed-the same helpless way she had laughed on the bed, as if the world were funny by accident. Still laughing, she said, "Vesuvi's a.s.sistant."

At Stacey's suggestion they took a cab to a TriBeCa bistro where Vesuvi often went. It was probably expensive, but Rory had just been paid-what the h.e.l.l, he'd buy Stacey dinner. Maybe he would even call Charles to see if he was back from L.A., where he'd been styling all week for Sara Lee. Rory didn't envy Charles his job, although he made good money; sometimes he was up half the night, using tweezers to paste sesame seeds onto hamburger buns or mixing and coloring the salty dough that looked more like ice cream in pictures than real ice cream did. Rory had been amazed to learn that in breakfast cereal shots it was standard to use Elmer's glue instead of milk. "It's whiter," Charles had explained. "Also it pours more slowly and doesn't soak the flakes." Rory had found this disturbing in a way he still didn't quite understand.

Inside the restaurant, Rory spotted Vesuvi himself at a large round table in back. Or rather, Vesuvi spotted him, and called out with a heartiness that could only mean he was bored with his present company. With a grand sweep of his arm he beckoned them over.

The waiters pulled up chairs, and Rory and Stacey sat down. Stacey ordered a gin and tonic. Rory could see she was nervous-the girls at the table were faces you saw around a lot: red-headed Daphne, Inge with her guppy-face, others whose names he'd forgotten. What distressed him was seeing Anouschka, a moody girl whose journey from some dour Siberian town to the height of New York fas.h.i.+on seemed to have happened in an afternoon. Once, she had lingered at the studio while Rory cleaned up after work, humming a Fine Young Cannibals song and flipping aimlessly through his copy of The Great Gatsby. "My father is a professor," she told him. "He teaches this book." "In Russian?" Rory asked incredulously. Anouschka laughed. "Sure," she said, curling the word in her accent. "Why not?"

Outside the studio, Rory and Anouschka had hovered uncertainly in the dusk. Rory was supposed to meet Stacey, but felt awkward saying so to Anouschka. Instead, he blundered forward and hailed a cab, leaving Anouschka standing on the curb, then paid the driver three blocks later and took the subway to Stacey's. He arrived shaking, mystified by his own idiotic behavior.

Anouschka had frightened him ever since; last week, while he was loading Vesuvi's camera, she had casually reported the numerical value of her IQ, then subjected him to a humiliating quiz on the Great Books. "Have you read much Dostoevsky?" she called up the rickety ladder, where Rory was grappling with a light. "The Brothers Karamazov? No? What about War and Peace?" When Rory called back down that War and Peace was by Tolstoy, Anouschka colored deeply, stalked back onto the set, and did not speak to him again. Rory felt terrible; he'd never read a word of War and Peace. He even considered confessing this to Anouschka after the shoot as she grumpily gathered her things. But what the h.e.l.l, he decided, let her think he was brilliant.

Now Rory looked at Vesuvi sprawled amid the models: sphinxlike, olive-skinned, his close-cropped beard peppered with gray, though his wild curly hair showed no sign of it. He was short, and wore high-heeled boots that Rory found spectacular. Vesuvi was a man of few words, yet he often gave the impression of being on the verge of speech. Conversation would proceed around him tentatively, ready to be swept aside at any moment by whatever Vesuvi might say. Rory watched him adoringly over his gla.s.s of bourbon, unable to believe he was sitting with Vesuvi after all the times he had watched him glide away in cabs, feeling as if most of what mattered in the world were disappearing with him. Yet Rory wasn't entirely happy: everyone at the table was watching him, especially Anouschka, and he felt that in return for being included, he was expected to do something stunning.

He glanced at the next table, where conversation seemed more lively. It was a group of downtown types, the men like deposed medieval kings in their bobbed haircuts and gigantic silver medallions. During his first month in New York, Rory had gone out with a girl like the ones at that table-Dave, she'd called herself. She wore nothing but black: bulky sweaters, short loose skirts, woolen tights, and round-toed combat boots. The thrill of the relations.h.i.+p for Rory lay mostly in watching Dave undress-there was something tremendous in the sight of her slender white form emerging from all of that darkness. Once she finished undressing, Rory often wished she would put part of the outfit back on, or better yet, dress completely again and start over.

Vesuvi was eyeing Stacey. "You look familiar," he said. "Did I use you for something?"

"Once," she said. "Four and a half months ago."

"Right, I remember now. It was that ..." He waved a languid hand, which meant he had no idea.

"For Elle," Stacey said. "Bow ties." It had been her best job, and she was crushed when the pictures the magazine printed had failed to include her head. To use them in her book would look desperate, her agent said, so she kept them pasted to her bathroom mirror. Rory looked at them while he was shaving.

Vesuvi sat back, satisfied. The question of whether or not he had worked with a girl always troubled him, Rory had noticed, as if the world were divided between girls he had shot and girls he hadn't, and not knowing which side a girl was on caused a cosmic instability.

"You worked for Elle?" Anouschka asked Stacey.

"Once," Stacey said.

"So far," Rory quickly added.

Anouschka glanced at him, and then at Stacey, with the same startled look she'd worn when Rory left her on the curb. He felt guilty all over again.

"You must've worked for them, too," Stacey said to Anouschka, who nodded absently.

"I heard you got a cover," someone said.

"Yes," Anouschka said dully. Then she seemed to take heart, as if hearing this news for the first time. "Yes!" she said, grinning suddenly. "I am the cover for December."

Rory felt Stacey move in her chair. Anouschka lit a cigarette and smoked; exotic, dragonlike, her black hair tumbling past her shoulders. For a moment all of them watched her, and against his will even Rory was moved by a face so familiar from pictures. Never mind what you thought of Anouschka; she was that woman-you recognized her. There was an odd pleasure in this, like finding something you'd been looking for.

"When do you leave for Tokyo?" Anouschka asked Inge.

"Next week," Inge said. "Have you been?"