“Yes,” I say. “I see.” This is what I get for walking. In a car you’re more insulated. And how do I know she is what she purports to be? She could be a dope addict. In the soft touch market, scams abound.
“I have with me a family of four. Two children. They are with me, it is my, it is my own responsibility.”
She stumbles a little on
“Yes?”
“I am doing it.” We look at each other. She is doing it. “Twenty-five dollars can feed a family of four for a month.”
What can they be eating? Stale bread, cast-off doughnuts? Does she mean a week? If she can believe this, she deserves my money. I take off my glove, raid my purse, rustle bills, pink ones, blue ones, purple. It’s obscene to have such power; also to feel so powerless. Probably she hates me.
“Here,” I say.
She nods. She’s not grateful, merely confirmed, in her opinion of me, or of herself. She takes off her bulky-knit mitten to receive the cash. I look at our hands, her smooth one, the nails pale moons, mine with its tattered cuticles, its skin of incipient toad. She tucks the bills in between the buttons of her jacket. She must have a purse in there, out of the reach of snatching. Then she slips on the mitt, dark red with a pink wool embroidered leaf.
“God will bless you,” she says. She doesn’t say Allah. Allah I might believe. I walk away from her, pulling on my glove. Every day there’s more of it, more of that silent wailing, those starving outstretched hands,
Chapter 57
house, because I can’t afford not to. Both of these locations are hazardous: my life is now multiple, and I am in fragments. But I’m no longer lethargic. On the contrary I am alert, I crackle with adrenaline, despite the late-summer heat. It’s treachery that does this for me, keeping on top of my own deceptions: I need to hide Josef from my parents, and Jon from all of them. I sneak around, heart in my mouth, dreading revelations; I avoid late nights, I evade and tiptoe. Strangely enough, this does not make me feel more insecure, but safer.
Two men are better than one, or at least they make me feel better. I am in love with both, I tell myself, and having two means that I don’t have to make up my mind about either of them. Josef offers me what he has always offered, plus fear. He tells me, casually, in the same way he told me about shooting a man in the head, that in most countries except this one a woman belongs to a man: if a man finds his woman with another man, he kills both of them and everyone excuses him. He says nothing about what a woman does, in the case of another woman. He tells me this while running his hand up my arm, over my shoulder, lightly across the neck, and I wonder what he suspects. He has taken to demanding speech from me; or else he puts his hand over my mouth. I close my eyes and feel him as a source of power, nebulous and shifting. I suspect there would be something silly about him, if I could see him objectively. But I can’t.
As for Jon, I know what he offers. He offers escape, running away from the grown-ups. He offers fun, and mess. He offers mischief.
I consider telling him about Josef, to see what would happen. But the danger in this would be of a different order. He would laugh at me for sleeping with Josef, whom he considers ridiculous as well as old. He would not understand how I could take such a man seriously, he would not understand the compulsion. He would think less of me.
Jon’s apartment over the luggage store is long and narrow and smells of acrylic and used socks, and has only two rooms plus the bathroom. The bathroom is purple, with red footprints painted up the wall, across the ceiling and down the opposite wall. The front room is painted stark white, the other one—the bedroom—is glossy black. Jon says this is to get back at the landlord, who is a prick. “When I move out, it’ll take him fifteen coats to cover that up,” he says.