Nicotine (18 page)

Wincing, he sees the trace of a flash, smells fireworks, sees the curtains flutter between the open sliding glass doors, hears them rattle. “Did you train with the Peshmerga?” he asks.

“Briefly.”

“What made you quit?”

“The food.”

“I thought Kurds have great food.”

“Because the women spend twelve hours a day on it.”

He considers her answer and asks, “So where'd you get this gun?”

“Store.”

“Why'd you buy it?”

“Because the kick on the shotgun bruised my collarbone.”

“That's an answer.”

“It's a convenient size.”

“That's also an answer.”

“Because I used to be alone a lot on the night shift doing twenty-four-hour reprographics. You can print up a lot of flyers, but it gets lonely.”

“Now, that breaks my heart,” Matt says. “If I had known you
were alone and lonely in an all-night copy shop, I would have had you copy the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
while I cornholed you to Kingdom Come.”

“Too late now,” she says, turning the gun on him. He laughs, and she lowers it. “It was the PKK, anyway, and they put me on mess detail because of my limp. Not even the PKK wants a ninety-pound girl soldier with a limp.”

“They could have trained you as a suicide bomber.”

“That's a fascist tactic. The left is too underpopulated to throw anybody under the bus.”

“But that's why you need terrorist tactics—because you'll always be outnumbered. Socialism doesn't have that mass appeal. It's a shitload easier to sign people up for a system based on selfishness.”

“And easier to talk them into dying for their own benefit than anyone else's. So I guess you're right. We can't win.” She puts the gun to her head.

“Hey, hey!” Matt says. “Are you nuts?” He reaches for the gun.

She throws it on the carpet—a quick gesture that he rotates to follow, staring—and declares to no one, arms wide, “My finger's on the trigger, and he's afraid for
me
! I have never in my life felt so loved!”

Matt laughs. He turns back toward her, pushes her down, pins her with his right leg, and reaches under it to thrust two fingers into her ass. “I'll be hard again in a second,” he says. “You make me feel like I'm sixteen.” With his left hand he toys with her hair and strokes her forehead. He kisses her. She gasps and groans.

AFTER SUPPER, PENNY BRUSHES HER
teeth and mounts the stairs to Rob's room. She sees that Jazz is not home yet. She knocks on Rob's door. He says, “Yes?”

Standing in the doorway, she says, “I don't mind if you're asexual. Can I sleep with you?”

“I'd like that,” he replies.

“Do I need to keep my clothes on?”

He shakes his head, and she strips to her underwear and crawls into bed.

Her desire is there—she can't get rid of it—but after her night on the DJD, more than anything else she craves security. Rob breathes softly as a child, and he smells like machine oil and borax, except for his hair (natural papaya aroma). He is reading Barry Commoner, and when she snuggles close he rests his hand on her head. He finishes his chapter and blows out the candle. She feels very safe. Too horny to sleep soundly, but the hours pass quickly. She is awakened from a predawn doze by the screeching of jays. Rob is already up, preparing his first nicotine fix of the day.

The skylight lets in a world that looks alive. Brighter. More honest. No more lies to dull her perceptions. Rob is what he is. Wanting him gives her energy. Maybe that's what he's for. It's not a shallow crush. It's existential. She needs a job to stay alive, and a man so she's not the end of the line. What earthly man is more likely to be loyal and faithful to her?

After breakfast, late in the morning, she sits again so Anka can work on the sketch for her portrait. (Anka often works from home because her employer can afford more interns than it can afford office space.) “You look super-perky again today,” Anka remarks.

Penny leans back, her eyes half-closed, and says, “Yeah, I'm happy.”

More or less simultaneously, Matt texts Jazz from his office in Bayonne. He suggests she come downstairs and let him into Nicotine at one-thirty the next morning, after he gets out of a late dinner meeting.

JAZZ COMES DOWNSTAIRS IN HER
dressing gown and slippers and shoves the heavy front door open to a narrow gap. Matt turns and locks his car by remote. It flashes and beeps, and he steps inside. He
puts his arms around her and kisses her gently on the mouth. “Yum,” she says. Walking behind her, he keeps his right hand on her ass nearly the entire time they ascend the stairs. In her penthouse, he waits for her to drop the robe. Seeing that she is wearing nothing but a necklace of raw opals and thong underwear made of a gold chain tight enough to mark her flesh, he kisses her again. The candles make warm, living light and shadows in the drafty space, on whose many panes of glass their forms are reflected numerous times.

The affectionate act lasts for a good five minutes. Then Matt discovers Jazz's tallboy, a dresser terminating at a height of around six feet in a cornice, the edges of which he can seize for extra leverage as he pins her against it, yanking her chain in time. The drawer handles poke into the spaces between her ribs.

Penny is awakened by thumping, rhythmic yowling, and a swinish grunt so loud and close she thinks at first it might have stemmed from Rob.

“Oh no!” she says, elbowing him. She sticks her fingers in her ears and wiggles them around, standing up to look for her clothes. The yowling continues, sometimes with thumping and grunting.

Rob tugs on her arm, pulling her back down toward the futon. “Don't go out there,” he says. “He might see you. Not the outcome you want.”

“I swear, she's doing it
deliberately
to drive me
crazy
.”

“She might be doing it just to blow your mind. We both know you're not that close to crazy. Like, she wants to mess with you, but not put you over the edge.”

“If it were any other guy,” she says, sitting down. “But
shit
.”

“Take some of my earplugs,” he says. “No way I could live next to Jazz without earplugs.”

TWO DAYS LATER, WHILE FOLDING
Rob's underwear on a table at the Laundromat around six in the evening, Penny looks up and sees Anka.

She feels embarrassed to be caught in the act, and quickly piles her clothes on Rob's. He generates so little laundry in summer—just thin T-shirts and boxers, except on the special occasions when he washes his jeans—that she has decided to do it with hers. Admitting to her love for Rob stimulates her domesticity hormones, and in terms of tact it beats volunteering to clean his room.

She never considers cleaning the kitchen. The gap between the counter and the wall: Is there even caulk under that stuff, or is it merely compacted organic material? What color is the floor, in physical reality? What is reality? She doesn't want to know. The sink is spotless, as are the plates and cutlery, and that seems like enough. Just as a clean body and underclothes are enough. Life at Nicotine reminds her of camping.

“Are you doing Rob's laundry?” Anka asks.

“Just the little things,” Penny says.

“I've never seen him in here once, but every time he meets a woman, here she stands. So his clothes are always exactly as clean as they need to be.” She feeds quarters into a top-loader and watches it fill before stuffing in her one load of clothing and linens for the week.

“Does he not wash his clothes?”

“He rinses them in a bucket and uses it to water the plants. It's more ecological, and Jazz says it's very nourishing for them.”

“Maybe I'll do his sheets and towels.”

“Don't hesitate. That would be my tip.”

“Has he had a lot of girlfriends since you've known him?”

“A lot of one-night stands that thought they were girlfriends.”

Finding this flattering to herself, Penny smiles.

They stand together in front of the bulletin board, commenting on the offerings. Rottweiler pups for four hundred dollars apiece. An industrial sewing machine. Handwritten pleas for living space from childlike (to judge by the nonverbal cues—stars and hearts and smiley faces) adults in chronic financial limbo, with too little money
to rent their own places and too much to wise up and leave town. Trapped in the city by jobs that don't allow them, in their own eyes, to grow up.

One sweet, friendly person (loves pets, kids, and everything else) seeks a bedroom with kitchen and bath access near the PATH train for under two thousand dollars a month. Anka rips the flyer down and throws it in the trash. “Imagine a landlord around here seeing that,” she comments.

“But the Internet,” Penny says. “They see everything anyway.”

“I know it's pointless,” Anka says. “But I do what I can to keep JC from turning into an SRO like the five boroughs.”

Before Penny leaves the Laundromat, Anka tells her that that evening—Friday—is going to be the most interesting session at a free AIDS conference at the New School, and she should come. A famous recipient of the Right Living Award from central Africa will be speaking solo and then in an open forum with American activists. Penny can register on-site, because most attendees will arrive Saturday.

“Do it,” Rob says when she brings him his laundry. “You'll be commuting the wrong way.”

PENNY DAWDLES AND ARRIVES AT
the conference center late. According to her pocket watch/phone, the talk has already started. She jogs up the low front stairs. She sees a sign with an arrow and something about HIV in front of what she thinks must be the registration tables. “Penny!” Anka calls out. She turns.

Anka stands near a seventies-style cast concrete outdoor ashtray—an exposed aggregate hourglass, open at the top, with a bed of sand under a screen of rat wire. She waves and calls out again, “Penny!”

“What about the speech? Isn't it now?”

Anka gestures with a cigarette. “She'll talk for a while.”

She introduces Penny to some of the other smokers attending the conference. None of them want to miss the forum, which is why they're all skipping the talk. They say they have heard the African woman's ideas many times over. They criticize her with objections that sound very plausible to Penny. She accepts a Marlboro, thinking that smokers may well be smarter than other people, simply because they take time off to think.

By the time she is done registering for the conference, the speech is over. The lobby and sidewalk flood with activists from all over the world, many in vaguely ethnic costume. Just looking at them makes her feel important and involved. She feels her commitment to AIDS activism grow.

During the podium discussion, she becomes confused. Somehow it all has to do with financing AIDS medicine via some new international fund. She keeps wondering why they need to fund AIDS medicine at all. What kind of creep charges money for AIDS medicine? Or is organized crime involved in making it—all these illicit generics—or the Chinese, or what?

When a panelist says, “There is no financeable cure,” she feels spontaneous hostility, like he's raining on their parade by stating a fact. When others mention “opportunities,” she resents them for seeking positive angles.

In the end she feels very confused by AIDS, which had seemed like such a cut-and-dried case. She realizes she still has no idea what the African prizewinner thinks. She swears to herself that she will look her ideas up online when she gets home. She hopes she may understand the discussion retroactively. She has her doubts.

When the forum ends, Anka invites her to stay on in Manhattan and learn about gene therapy over beers, but she wants to get back to Nicotine and sleep with Rob—as in sleep, as in sleep poorly, because his presence is like an alarm clock that never stops ringing.

THE NEXT DAY, SATURDAY, PENNY
visits Amalia in Morristown. It's a trek involving buses, long walks, and two different train stations in Newark. She arrives hungry. They talk about inconsequential things while she slices tomatoes paper-thin the way they both like. They eat ham sandwiches with tomato.

Penny struggles to work up a confrontational mood, then a confessional mood. She achieves neither. She is too sleepy.

Eventually she says, her tone flat, “You should be patient about selling that house. They might be squatters, but they're making improvements all the time. They're maintaining that house. Enhancing its value while the market picks up. You ought to pay them a bonus.”

“No. Peñana, your friends must leave
now
. When you find
ocupas
on your property, the time to evict them is
now.
Because that's why they put up symbols and banners, to start the clock ticking. It's all a big show for the courts. And the judge will award your property to thieves, and read you the law about slumlords and urban blight.”

“But the taxes are paid up, no? It's Norm's house, no?”

“Maybe not anymore, unless we expel the squatters. Why don't you understand?”

“We didn't talk about squatting much in school, except in connection with placer mining and fossil fuel extraction. You know, without the mineral wealth, it's not an attractive business model for investors. Too labor intensive. But give me some minerals, I'll lay claim to the fucking
moon
. I'll forcibly resettle my workforce on the moon, like Canada with the Inuit.”

“You think no one has the capital to
hire
squatters?” The contempt in Amalia's voice makes Penny respect her for a moment. She proceeds to deliver hard-won South American truths: “What do you think an army is, when it invades and occupies? What is it when a factory, or a farm, or anything else replaces a wilderness? It is
theft
! Property is
theft
!”