Green Girl (4 page)

Ruth walks up Oxford Street, tunneling past tourists pushing in and out of high street clothing stores, past the horns on top of Selfridges, the whiff of peanuts from the nearby vendor, moaning softly to herself. Suddenly she lets out a sharp gasp, imagining a hot knife pushing through her ribcage, as a man in a blue jacket presses against her walking by. She feels curious stares warming her.

She stumbles around, outside of herself, looking at them looking at her.

Sometime she narrates her actions inside her head in third-person. Does that make her a writer or a woman?

The blonde girl walks all nonchalant down the street, hidden by her sunglasses and wan swing of hair, presumably innocent of swivelling eyes. Zoom in, one might see a faraway look.

In the push of the crowd struck by that feeling that she is entirely outside of herself, only faintly aware that she is alive, moving through this world. Sometimes she is struck by how much she goes through life almost unconsciously. She is being swept along. She is a pale ghost.

Such a haunting, vacant quality.

On Baudelaire’s “religious intoxification of great cities”: the department stores are temples consecrated to this intoxification.

— Walter Benjamin,
The Arcades Project

Repent! Repent! drones the street lunatic into his bullhorn at Oxford Circus. He is at his usual perch at the top of the stairs descending to the tube, signaled by the red, white, and blue circular target. As she walks by him she averts her eyes so as not to be trapped within his prophecies. For the wisdom of paltry things, he is saying. Ruth turns on the cobblestones towards Liberty.

Her eyes linger on the roses outside the doorway, lovely lavenders, perfect whites, almost a velvet cream, heartbreaking reds, as red as Chanel’s lipstick. Drenched in this lavishness, Ruth feels almost intoxicated with Technicolor, like Dorothy in the poppy field. She sees herself as a beautiful girl smelling the beautiful flowers. She savors in this image. The girl in front of the perfect roses dotted with raindrops. Shiny eyes. Shiny lips. A perfected surface. A cosmetics ad.

Ruth shakes herself out of her reverie and makes a right into the scarves department. Like a museum flooded with light where you can touch and wear anything inside. She finds refuge in these sacred spaces. The rows and rows of perfection, an experience approaching transcendence. Her temple of intoxication. Immersed in the glow of thingness. Everything so beautiful, a beauty so acute it brings tears to her eyes. A little girl in a candy shop (no calories!). She loves the geometry of the rows of wallets in leather goods, separated by every color of the rainbow. The purses lined up like surrealist houses.

She fingers the silk scarves, ethereal butterflies, and picks up a pink felt scarf whimsically looping it around her neck. Pink so pink it isn’t pink almost purple. Ruth loved color so much she rarely wore any. Except on her face.

A saleswoman swoops down on her. Very nice, very pretty, she croons. She has a foreign accent. Perhaps from Eastern Europe. She wears a blue silk scarf knotted around her neck like a cowboy. Ruth admires the woman admiring her in the mirror. She is overjoyed that she is kind to her, so overjoyed she is tempted to buy anything she asks of her, just so she continues to talk to her. The saleswoman shows Ruth how to tie it correctly around her neck. Perfect for you, because you’re so young, she says. Ruth smiles, savoring the compliment, and gingerly removes the scarf.

How much?

50 pounds. The saleswoman senses, smells Ruth’s hesitancy.

Oh, you should buy it. She says encouragingly. She plays maternal.

Ruth folds it regretfully back on the table, her hand still petting it like a cat. I love this store, she blurts out to the salewoman.

The woman smiles, tightlipped. She is not as nice anymore. Americans usually do, she replies.

Ruth teeters hesitantly up to women’s fashion. Shoppers clomp down the other direction on the wooden stairs, clutching their purple bags. She is aware of the watchful eyes of the pretty clerks, all outfitted in various black frocks and standing in languid poses. They are beautiful racehorses. It is a race they are clearly winning. Despite this evident superiority, they are not cruel to her. They smile. They see her. She smiles back, grateful.

These assaults of casual perfection in the form of the shopgirl. The leggy peroxide blonde with a soft doe face. Everything she wears is perfect—it makes Ruth itch. The blonde seems to have fashioned herself entirely out of a film from the French New Wave. How studied is it? How many hours does she take preparing herself for the outside world? Today she wears a black cape, out of which peek lovely wrists. She could be a model. (What is a model a model of?)

Ruth strolls around the racks, reaching out here and there to finger a pleat or stroke a soft cashmere. She lovingly touches these garments she cannot possibly afford, separated by color like a fresh box of crayons. A shiver of delight with each touch.

The leggy blonde is conversing with an Anna Karina type, hair long and shiny like a shampoo ad. The two shopgirls squeal and look admiringly at each other. They are each other’s mirrors. They trade in compliments about each other’s daily costume, the false currency for the green girl. I love that. One of them says. That is just
darling
on you the other says.

They are conversing about a film based on a novel one of them had seen. I don’t like to read books. They’re too depressing one of them says. I know what you mean the other one says.

They are waiting for a woman to come out of the changing room. She is modeling a blouse for them. Not a blouse but a jumper. It is bright blue. The two salesgirls gather around. Arms crossed as if studying a painting at a museum. There is strength in numbers. I love the color on you. One of them pipes up. It is
so
you. The other in melody.

Ruth’s eyes lock onto a dress, hanging up on the rack almost insouciantly, so aware it must have been of its hold over her. A little black dress. Everyone needs a little black dress. In every closet there must be that little black dress (do you have your LBD?). It’s on everyone’s must-have list.

The dress speaks to her. IT says: Those who wear me live another kind of life.

Is that me? (Who am I?)

Is that me? (Who do I want to become?)

The dress is giving Ruth an identity crisis.

She approaches one of the salesgirls, clutching IT. IT sways in response, chuckling maliciously. May I? she asks timidly. Voice soft as a breath. She is nodded into a changing room. Soon comes a swift knock. Come out let us see. Ruth opens the door hesitantly. She is naked and exposed. She allows the eyes of the shopgirls to feast on her. She offers herself up to the world.

The two clerks swarm around. Oh, you look like a little Parisian girl! they purr. Ruth beams, swimming in the attention. It’s…. One of them pronounces the designer’s name knowingly like a secret password. It tells a beautiful story the blonde says knowingly. Ruth lovingly cradles the dress in her hand. For a dress like this she is willing to offer up anything. First-born. Soul. Self.

Although it costs two months of her earnings, she puts the dress on hold, vowing to herself to return to at least visit it again although she knows and they know and she knows they know that she cannot afford it. She hardly has enough money to eat. But who needs to eat when you can wear a dress like that? Ruth thinks. Anyway, food gets digested, food goes away. Useless practice. But a dress like that will be forever. A sort of spiritual nourishment, just as fundamental as eat and roof and breathe.

Her perpetual list of wants and can’t-haves. To want. To lack. To have a hole.

She is enflamed with Desire. Oh, the pain of true love. She deceives herself that this is what she needs to be complete.

She hears a voice from deep within. The arsenal of voices telling her to buy the dress. Buy it don’t think. Buy it. Buy it. It is so you. It enhances your personality. It makes you more you than you were before.

But it is an impossibility. Oh she aches she aches her soul aches. She walks out feeling like a shadow of self, shabby, ugly. Oh, the hunger, the hunger. My hunger artist. Always starving herself.

My hunger artist her art is herself she is fast fasting away she would like to disappear.

Why shouldn’t the
flâneur
be stoned?

— Gail Scott,
My Paris

Stumbling outside, Ruth is hit with the cold and the swirl of the crowds. She hears the preacher again.

For the witchery of paltry things obscures what is right, and the whirl of desire transforms the innocent mind.

He is quoting from the Book of Wisdom. Wisdom is not something the green girl possesses in abundance. Her sacred scriptures are new wave films and fashion magazines.

Walking past Carnaby and down Oxford again, it begins to rain. She doesn’t really notice, except for tourists jerking about into the Boots to purchase umbrellas. The clang clang of the Hare Krishnas approach, playing their instruments, chanting their Hare! Hare! Krishna! toward their temple near Soho Square. The rain, which spots their melon-colored robes with translucent patches, doesn’t slow them down.

They always look like they’re having a lot of fun, Ruth thinks, and stops and claps her hands as they pass by. She makes eye contact with a boy about her age. He grins back at her as he dances around in a circle, his short rough ponytail swaying. She admires the intricacy of the bright white markings like an eagle’s beak. She temporarily forgets herself. So ecstatic. So lost inside themselves. So taken up by the crowd.

She jerks and pushes and pummels her way through the throng. Freezing rain. The umbrellas hunched over, protective. Thump of dance music outside the high-street shops. Mannequins. People. You can tell a tourist because they always look up, she thinks. Londoners stare ahead, or to the ground. Not that Ruth is a Londoner but she isn’t a tourist either.

Faces here like faces there. Faces and faces. She thinks she sees HIM in the crowd. She is always posed for seeing HIM, even across the world. Perhaps a narrative plays out in her head as the rain stains her. HE has stained her. She will spy HIM in the crowd, no, HE will spy her first, and HE will see her anew. That is why she left, why she went to London. For HIM to follow her here. For HIM to realize HIS love for her and HE is searching, searching, searching for her. She walks as if HE is watching her. She is always being watched. She is not free. The vision of HIM follows her everywhere.

Phrases flit through her head. My mad girl’s love song, a hymn of HIM: