Afterburn (21 page)

"The man is an expert," Bobby exclaimed. "'Course, I have to pay him."

"Bobby is rich," exclaimed Mona.

"How rich?" Christina asked.

"Oh, I am very,
very
rich."

"How rich is that?"

"He gives all his girls pearls."

"Real ones?" Christina asked.

"Of course!" Bobby answered. "I get them from a guy who sells only the best. Very special deal, just for me."

"Look at these." Mona pulled a strand out of her tiny pocketbook.

Christina held them. They looked pretty good. But her mother, nobody's fool, had taught her about pearls. "You know," she said, "there's a way to tell if they're real."

"Yeah, by how much you
paid
." Mona giggled.

"No."

"You mean like did they find it in a oyster?"

"Real pearls come from oysters," Christina answered, "but they don't find them in oysters accidentally anymore, they stick in a piece of sand and make the pearl on purpose. That's called a cultured pearl."

"That's
not
a fake pearl, you mean," said Mona, eyeing her strand suspiciously.

The car sailed north toward Canal Street. "Right, I'm talking about the difference between cultured pearls and synthetic pearls."

"Synthetic means fake," said Bobby. "Like my teeth."

"It looks real."

"But it's not," Christina said. "Not even close."

"You can tell by the color?" asked Mona.

"No," Christina said, "but it's an easy way."

"I fucking don't need to hear all this shit," Bobby said suddenly. "I give all my girls real pearls, and that's it."

"Then you don't mind if I show her mine," said Mona. "For the test."

"How 'bout
mine
?" one of the other women squealed, reaching up to her earrings. "Bobby, you gave me these."

"Now, hold on here."

"Here you go, honey," said Mona, handing Christina her necklace.

"Don't touch that!" Bobby slapped the driver on the shoulder. "Gerry, stop the car. I don't want this chick in my car anymore. She's fucking me up here."

The car pulled over next to a Chinese man cutting off the heads of fish.

"Get the fuck out," Bobby said to Christina.

"Wait!" yelled Mona, "I want to know—"

"Out, get your fucking ass outta my car!"

Christina opened the door and jumped out with her plastic bag but held on to the door.

"Let go of the door!" Bobby roared.

She bent down and stared him in the eye. He blinked. Rick had taught her how to recognize a punk. Generally they yelled more than anything else. "I think," Christina said in a low voice, "that you should come out here and speak with me just for a moment. It's actually in your own interests."

"What the fuck you want?"

"I'm going to help you out of a jam that you know you are in, Bobby."

He sighed his great irritation and pushed his way out of the car. He was shorter than he had first appeared. "What is it, woman?"

He didn't scare her. He was just some pimp. A punk pimp. The world was full of guys like him. "You want to know the difference between a real and a fake pearl? I think you
need
to know."

"Why's that?"

"Because"—she glanced at the car, then back at him, as if she knew his conspiratorial tendencies—"I
think
you've been giving
real
pearls to some of the girls and
not
-so-real pearls to others. I just got a feeling about that."

Bobby grimaced in the sunlight. Stared a moment at the Chinese man chopping up fish. "Why the fuck is that your business?"

"It's not. But I thought you might just want to know how to tell the difference yourself, so that"—she leaned closer to him—"you can keep your stories straight."

He nodded in contemplation. "Avoid unnecessary problems and whatnot."

"Right."

He pulled out his wallet. "Five?"

"No."

"Ten, tops."

She shook her head. "Fifty."

"You're crazy."

Christina shrugged. "This is valuable information for a man like you, Bobby. You're a businessman, you have these people working for you, you need their loyalty, you need to control their perceptions of you. You can't have them figuring out which pearls are real and which are not, right? Makes you look bad, makes you look cheap, too. Right? Makes you look
unfair
, and we all know how women don't like
that
. Also, you need to know if your man is selling you the good stuff or putting it over on you."

Bobby glanced down the street, the mannerism of a man who wants to know who is nearby. He looked back at Christina. "You're right."

"So fifty is a bargain."

He pulled a wallet on a chain out of his jacket pocket and handed her the bills.

"You put the pearl in your mouth and you scrape it with the edge of your front tooth. If it feels rough, it's real. Smooth, then it's synthetic. "

Bobby glared at her. "That's it?"

"Yes."

He looked at her. "You scrape it against your teeth."

"Smooth, it's fake. Rough, it's real."

He nodded. "Like people."

"Like
some
people," she warned him. "Some of the rough people are fake and some of the smooth people are real."

He lifted his jaw aggressively. "What are you?"

She could tease him now. "Oh, Bobby, I'm just like you."

"What's that?"

"Both."

He shook his head. "You tear me up. Why don't you come spend a night with Bobby? Bobby will show you some
times
." His hand brushed his crotch. "I mean, we're talking very high quality, you know?" He looked at her, his street intelligence concentrated now, as if he had suddenly sensed something about her. "You want my card? Case you ever want to call, whatever?"

"That's okay."

But already he had it in his hand. Red, with white lettering. bobby b good—business opportunities sought. She took the card, if only to get rid of him. Bobby smiled at her, slyness in his eyes. "Yo, Bettina, I think you're going be all right out here. I ain't going be worrying about you, you know?" He slammed his door and the car lurched away.

WAS SHE FREE
? Certainly felt like it. She looked behind her. No one. Maybe. She threw the cheap business card to the street and walked straight into the sunlit flow of people, straight into a city of eight million or ten million or whatever the number, so big you can't find me, whoever it was she should be worrying about. She felt slow and a little lost, but with each minute the city came back to her, like language. She saw everything—the ever-sleeker cars, the new ad campaigns on the sides of buses, the sidewalks thick with faces. People looked tired and sweaty and fed up. Overworked and barely paid. Underworked and stuffed with money. Chinese cops. Russian housewives from Brooklyn. White kids trying to look like black kids and black kids parodying themselves. Men who wanted to be women, and girls who liked girls. Everyone had attitude but no one looked political. The city had the same beat, the same insistency. She hadn't walked one hundred yards in a straight line for four years, and now block after block lay in front of her. Space, she was understanding space again.

And the
women
. Here they were in their lipstick and cute little skirts and fat-heeled shoes, shopping and walking and going to work or eating with one another in the restaurants or walking along with guys in suits, the men paying special attention or not, depending, and she looked into the women's faces and saw none who would ever be going to prison. You could tell. They were never going to be in a position in which they might have to do something really stupid. They were safe. They didn't know how safe! She wanted to have the same big bags with the lip gloss and brush and Filofax and credit cards, all the things. But as she walked, switching her garbage bag from one hand to the other, she saw younger women, too, strolling with their boyfriends, floating through the shoe emporiums, past the sidewalk merchants, sauntering along, going nowhere, girls who were getting into a bad way; their skin looked dull, and they had all kinds of shit tied up into their greasy hair or had cut it too short or dyed it green. Or too many tattoos or nose rings. Something that said, too loudly, This
definitely
is who I am. Maybe I'm looking for my old self, Christina thought. But she was never going to find that girl, because
that
girl was dead and gone and forgotten, that girl was the girl who had
trusted
and believed in love. Yes, I
used
to wish for those things, she thought, but not now. She didn't expect she was going to love anybody for quite some time, and that was fine. She was going to get back into the world. But she didn't want to get to know anybody right now, not yet. She needed to get to know herself again. And she didn't want to call anybody up. Well, maybe her mother. Try from a pay phone. Maybe that was okay. The rest of the family was mostly dead. She'd lost so many people, and some of them she could take up with again, but they would want to know all about prison. Their eagerness would tire her. And if she started to call up some of the old people, then eventually they'd ask about Rick—at least in passing—and she didn't want to think about him, not at all. The news might reach him that she was out and he would try to find her. He'd come looking for her with his heart on a plate, begging for forgiveness, and she'd hate herself either way—for forgiving him or for not forgiving him. He was out on Long Island working on a fishing boat; let him stay there. She never wanted to see him again. He could rot in hell, as a matter of fact.

She walked into an electronics shop and asked for the biggest bag they could give her. She switched her belongings into it and discarded the garbage bag. In SoHo, walking north on Broadway, she saw the Guggenheim's downtown museum, went inside, and procured a big paper bag with the museum's logo on it. That was better. Just north of Houston she stopped in a little pizza joint. She ordered two slices with everything on them and a Coke—a cold, beautiful Coca-Cola—and carried the greasy paper plate to a table in the back and looked around at the other patrons—delivery boys and secretaries and construction workers. She put her mouth against the warm crust, her nose filling with the oregano and basil, and suddenly began to weep. It was all so stupid. Stupid and sad! Four years gone. Everything had been torn away—her apartment, her books, her cat, the people she used to know. And she'd spent four years learning the routine of the prison, which, though hateful for its regularity, was at least
something
, a pattern, a dailiness she understood, and she had gotten to know the women and love some of them, Mazy especially. Now that was gone. She knew how hard it was going to be to get started again. She would do what was necessary, and find a job, find a place to live, try not to let Tony Verducci find her, but in this moment, with the warm pizza so sadly delicious, its intense desirability indicating the utter desolation of her life, she felt grief cut through her. She was, she knew, entirely alone.

A HALF HOUR LATER
, she found what she was looking for, a secondhand clothing shop in the East Village, the late-morning sun bright against its front window. The bell tinkled as she stepped inside, and an old man in a purple T-shirt looked up from his magazine and stubbed out his cigarette.

"Hi, dear." He eyed her Guggenheim bag.

"I used to come into this place, long time ago." She looked around. "I once bought the most beautiful kimono here."

The man lifted a pair of half-frames to his nose. "I remember you! It's been a
long
time. Been away, darling?"

"I have."

His eyes brightened. "Was it a man on a train? Some fellow with a nice hat?"

She smiled. "Not exactly."

He came out from around the counter and sized her up. "Oh well, then, let me guess
again
."

"Please."

He took the challenge seriously. "Well, I'll say it was a—a calamity, a
storm
, that just took you, dear, and you had no power over it!"

"That's about right."

"And you came here, you came
back
, because you were happy here, right here, in my little old shop."

"That's true." She smiled. "And now I need a dress, sort of nice, not cheap-looking."

He nodded. "I
have
it."

He flipped through a rack of dresses, pulled out a red cotton one.

"No."

"No?"

"That'll make me look too flat."

"But, honey, you are definitely
not
."

"I know, that's the point." She tipped up her chin. "Don't you know how boys think?"

"Yes, I do. They're
all
nasty." He smiled wickedly. "One way or the other."

"I need something sort of
nice
, but not—something that is, you know, a little—"

"Something that says, Here I
am
."

"Right."

He went to another rack. While he flipped through dresses, she picked up a copy of
The Village Voice
from the stack on the glass counter.

"This is free now?" she said.

"Yes." The man nodded. "Free as love."

"Why?"

"They were losing against the free weeklies. They're all the same, anyway. Sex this, sex that. It's the only reason people read them."

"Only reason people do a lot of things."

He pulled out a black sleeveless dress buttoned up the front with cunning little buttons. Everything about it said, Cigarettes, table for two, and please bring me a martini. "I mean, honey, this is practically illegal!"

She had her black mail-order bra and underwear in her bag. "How about shoes?" she asked.

"How about them? I've got those, too."

"Does that lady across the street still rent out rooms by the week?" she called after the shopkeeper.

"If I say you're okay," he answered over his back, "she will."

"Will you say I'm okay?"

His face hardened. "I always ask a few questions for her. She's a nice old lady who can't hear too well anymore."