Floating City (30 page)

Margot kept trying to impress these lessons on Carla. “They never look back and neither should you!” Margot liked to say.

But Carla would never leave her friends and family. She would probably never even leave the Lower East Side, despite that picture of the condo in the Bronx. In fact, she had already used some of her savings to give loans to a few friends who wanted to try what she was doing. They needed clothes, didn't they? She even had dreams of becoming the Margot of Avenue A and was already, for a small commission, helping some young streetwalkers with dates and advice. “Sudhir,” she said, “these women
need
me.”

The words were eerily familiar. Like Margot and Shine and Angela and Manjun and all the rest, success meant nothing to Carla unless it was reflected in the people she cared about. Her social capital was also her social cost. I couldn't shake the thought that philanthropists never won in the black market, or that Carla's charitable instincts were a reflection of her anxiety about her own future.

When she went off to make a phone call, I asked Angela what she thought about all this. Wasn't Carla risking her investment? Wasting time and energy she needed to create her new life?

Angela shook her head. “If Carla was meant to make it out there,
mi amor
, she would have done it by now. I'm just happy she's not on the pills.”

“But I thought the whole point was to get out of here, get off the streets?”

“We're not like you, Sudhir. She's nobody without us. She couldn't put on her
panties
without us.”

She laughed at that, then became serious. Margot wanted Carla to be white, she said. And that just wasn't going to happen.

I remembered the words of the contractor back in Chicago who'd told me he hated taking jobs in white neighborhoods. “The ghetto's like a fish tank,” he said. “You struggle all the time trying to make enough to get out of the tank, but as soon as you get out there and feel the heat, you try to jump back in.” This was more complicated than fear of a white planet. If you spend your life on the edge of a cliff, you know you need people to help you in times of trouble. Carla had had the experience of that rich white client who'd beat her and got his money back. She had no recourse, no established social system to support her. Why would she want to put herself through that? But in the ghetto, everyone knows everyone and everyone owes everyone and there's always someone who would do you a favor—who
has
to do you a favor.

This was the diametric opposite of Analise and J.B. and their
dreams of heroic individual achievement, which explained a lot. There was no doubt where my sympathies lay. But the problem was, Carla's choice exposed her to new dangers. If she was trying to manage teenage streetwalkers, you didn't need a psychic to see another slow-motion car wreck coming her way.

•   •   •

A
few months later, I found myself in another kind of fish tank. This one was an elegant Park Avenue apartment with a Lichtenstein print hanging on the wall and a small ivory Buddha sitting in a wall sconce lit by a small spotlight. Analise's friend's place. They were in Bermuda for the week.

I drifted into the kitchen, where Analise's guests looked like they were straight out of the J. Crew catalog—young men dressed in mock turtlenecks and blue blazers, a few skinny bored girlfriends. A full spread of sushi, caviar, champagne, and holiday cookies on the counter. Copper pans hung from a rack on the ceiling; a giant stove looked big enough to feed an army.

And the black marble countertop made a splendid surface to cut cocaine on, judging from the lines spread out in a boastful array.

And there was Brittany, swaying through the room in a gold Carolina Herrera dress with one naked shoulder. She had landed in trouble and come running back to Analise, of course, and she was worse than ever. She'd gossip about Analise's escort service to anyone who would listen, talk openly about trips to Paris with clients, brag about sleeping with UN diplomats because they “had immunity and so no one goes to jail!” Her sense of privilege seemed to undermine the modesty and self-awareness a person needed to think tactically, which made the threat of some kind of explosion constant.

As Brittany sloshed around the room, a single thin strap worked overtime to keep the dress on her shoulder. To me it seemed to
evoke their whole hanging-from-a-thread operation. On her right ankle, she wore a sparkly diamond chain that added another touch of decadence to her black-heeled shoes. With one arm around an unsuspecting man, she put a hand gently on the small of his back and used the other to raise up her skirt just enough to show her panties. Then she laughed like it was all a big joke.

Shine stood idly at the living room window, an unlit Kool dangling from his hand. He looked sharp in a black beret, clutching a rocks glass filled with whiskey and Coke. His sleeveless shirt made a display of the tattoo on his biceps, a crucifix with a legend written in calligraphy beneath:
He Knows.

J.B. was talking to him. “I'm probably going to the Rose Bowl,” he said. “It's incredible, man. Maybe someday I'll take you with me.”

Shine looked at him with thinly concealed disdain. “I guess I prefer the Sugar Bowl myself,” he said.

J.B. said one of his films had run into “creative” problems, so he was back to making porn to raise some fresh capital. His grand plan was to use some of the girls who worked for Analise. He fiddled with a new pack of Dunhills and sighed. “Analise and I want to leave,” he said.

“The party?”

“The city,” he said. On a sailing ship, one of his father's smaller vessels. It would be a good break from all this, once the porn flick was finished.

Shine scowled, doubtless thinking the same thing I was—nice fantasy if you could get it, and J.B. probably could. But lesser mortals could not.

Shine smiled and gave me a curious look. “Well, you finally got out of my neighborhood.” He turned away and looked out the window toward Harlem, as though he wanted to be saved from what New York had become.

A few minutes later, Analise started banging on a bathroom door. “Brittany! C'mon.”

From inside the bathroom, Brittany groaned. “That fucker told me this shit was clean.”

Analise shook her head in disgust. “I bet you don't even know the guy's name, do you?” She hit the bathroom door one more time and told Brittany to get her shit together, goddamn it. A moment later Brittany came out, looking dazed. “Did Michael go home? Where did that fucker go?”

“I gave him to Jo Jo,” Analise said.

Brittany shot her a furious glare. “Fuck, Ana!”

“You're too wasted,” Analise said, her voice icy.

“You're like my fucking mother sometimes,” Brittany said.

During their breakup, Analise had told me that she and Brittany would always be in each other's lives. Now I saw what she meant. They were locked in the same battle forever, Brittany insisting she was indispensable and demanding constant emotional stroking, Analise forever trying to turn Brittany into a slightly less controlled version of herself. I wandered away in a state of melancholy tenderness and spent the rest of the evening standing in the kitchen talking to Evalina and one of J.B.'s depraved preppy filmmakers. At different times, I glanced across the room and saw Analise and Shine together, or J.B. and Analise together, or Analise and Brittany together. I had a feeling that they were all in a space capsule together, floating in a weightless world.

Finally Analise walked over to me and asked how I was doing.

“This is weird,” I said.

She led me out onto the balcony so she could smoke a cigarette. Shine was already out there smoking.

“You okay?” Analise asked.

“I'm okay,” I said.

“You don't look okay, my brother,” Shine said.

I tried to laugh. “Truthfully? Don't you think it's strange that
you two are working together? Don't you think it's strange that you and Brittany are back together? And what about J.B.?”

But Analise shook her head. “The problem isn't us,” she said. “The problem is you.”

Shine nodded. “She's got a point, Sudhir.”

I was completely floored. My Harlem broker had met my Upper East Side broker and together they were running a citywide brothel, and
I
had the problem?

“I'm going to be honest with you,” Shine said. “Since I've known you, you been meeting up with all these people—Manjun and Angela and Carla and Martin and Margot and all these people—and you don't
do
nothing with it.”

Why were they attacking me? I was an academic trying to penetrate a variety of subcultures in hopes of writing that great book or documentary. I had done studies. I was gaining access, entrée, insights. This was Margot all over again.

Shine continued. “You think I'm uptown and she's downtown and how the fuck can we hang out?
Fuck
you, man. Why the fuck not? You doing the same thing. You teach them rich kids uptown, you make films downtown with downtown people. What makes you so different?”

A good question, I had to admit.

“I'm done with this shit in a year,” Analise said. “Shine will move on to another level. None of us are fixed in place, Sudhir. But
you
are. You go from story to story and group to group but you're always in the same place, looking in from outside. And now you're freaked out because you don't know what's inside and outside anymore.”

She was right. That was it exactly. How odd that the ultimate insider, America's daughter, understood me better than anyone. I was trying to make a box big enough to fit everyone into and she and Margot just climbed right out and pointed at the box
I
was in. They finally broke through my Chicago framework and put me in
that New York state of mind I'd heard so much about. It was probably the same reason Martin freaked me out so much, because his world came too close at that vulnerable moment in my life. I couldn't maintain my borders.

“But that's what's so great about this city—everyone who
wants
to be different
gets
to be different. It
doesn't matter.
”

With that, she threw her cigarette off the balcony and followed Shine back into the party.

Shine shot me a look as he walked away. He didn't need to say anything because his expression said it all.
You can't stand there watching or the wave will hit you. At some point, you gotta choose.

•   •   •

A
few months after that, Angela called. Carla had been beaten up once again. She had gone to a hotel room where one of her teenage protégées was working. The date was going bad, the woman called Carla from the bathroom, and Carla arrived to find the man tweaked out on coke and the girl locked in the bathroom. The man beat Carla so bad she couldn't answer questions in her hospital bed for three days. When she came out of her daze, she kept telling Angela how proud Margot would have been.

Angela wanted me to put her in touch with Margot. “Carla won't listen to me. Says, 'Only Margot understands what I'm trying to do.'”

Margot had been in the Southwest, looking for a new place to live. But I got in touch with her and we made plans for the three of us to visit Carla at her apartment.

When we got there, we found Carla propped up on some pillows that looked as if they'd been borrowed from a child's bedroom. She was all bandaged and bruised and crazed from painkillers and humiliation. She wanted revenge, she said. She was going to get Ricky to go kick that motherfucker's ass into the next world.

Margot took a small chair and pulled it next to the bed. She stared at Carla, ignoring her talk of revenge. Finally Carla pulled herself up on the pillows and spoke through clenched teeth. “Why is it that you can do this, but I can't? I'm no idiot. It's not fair.”

“Stop feeling sorry for yourself,” Margot said. “That's the worst thing you can do.”

“It's not
fair
,
Margot,” Carla cried.

“Fair? No, it's not. But why am I here?”

Angela and I were standing at the back of the room, by the door. I saw Angela look at Margot curiously, wondering what kind of strategy she was using. I was wondering the same thing.

“Carla, why am I here?” Margot repeated.

“I don't know,” Carla said meekly.

“Well, if you don't know, I don't know either.” Margot looked around the room, taking me and Angela in too. “I'm done with this. I'm getting out. You want to whine and bitch, you do it to Sudhir—
he's
not going anywhere.”

“I'm not whining,” Carla said.

“Yes, you are! You're whining! I'm so sick of listening to whores whine about their pathetic fucking lives, Carla. If you want to play in this game, you have two choices: either you let the girls get beat up or
you
get beat up. Someone's going to get beat up. Which one do you want?”

Carla didn't know what to say. “I don't know. I—”

“Well?” said Margot. “Which is it? Them or
us
?

“These are my friends,” Carla said. “I'm not letting no asshole beat up my friends.”

“See, that's your fucking problem, Carla,” Margot said, standing up to leave. “Those hookers are
not
your friends. They
work
for you. They're the thing standing between you and a better life. Get your head together and stop being a whiny little bitch.”

With that, Margot walked out of the room. Angela and I followed her through the dank hallway, into the dimly lit elevator,
and outside the housing project building, a twenty-floor monument to government paternalism that seemed particularly futile on this sad night. In fact, I thought, Carla and the building had a lot in common. She wanted to be there for her friends and offer a helping hand as they tried to make it as prostitutes in a world that was the definition of nasty, brutish, and short. She wanted to be their Angela and make them feel good about themselves, she wanted to be their Margot and make them learn to better themselves, but all she had learned from her journeys across all those borders was how to get her ass kicked. Now Margot was telling her the same thing all the critics of government support said. Low-cost housing and welfare and health care and that sweet Angela love just made you weak. To win at this game, you had to be tough. You couldn't be their friend. You had to be like Shine. You had to know when to cut your losses and move on. It was, in the end, a business.