Sex for America: Politically Inspired Erotica (22 page)

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DIRTY HE AVEN
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VANESSA NORTON

When I was twenty-four I got an entry-level job with a left-
of-center political party canvassing neighborhoods I’d only pon- dered while riding the subway. Sheepshead Bay, Ozone Park, Mas- peth, Middle Village, Utopia, tiny, round pills paused along the B, Q, M, and C lines. These places could have been in another country, they seemed that remote, that exotic.

Our crew varied from five to fifteen, each of us part of a cam- paign to raise the minimum wage. Mondays through Thursdays the canvassing manager, a retired cop named Bernie, propelled us down thoroughfares of car dealerships lit by blurry brake lights, marooned us on residential corners far from rush-hour traffic, fast food chains, the random independent grocer. We emerged from

the van carrying clipboards, stacks of party literature, envelopes for funds collected. Our nightly goal was thirty signatures and a hundred bucks. The first night I amassed eighty-six dollars, minus the beer I nursed at a local bar.

The following nights proved even less lucrative for the orga- nization; I pilfered all small bills and quarters. Even when the lit faces of attached houses seemed to be the only ones looking, I slid the money under my palm, along the yoke of my jeans, and into my back pocket. Later, I rewarded myself with drink or a trip down Duane Reade’s candy aisle.

A few weeks into the campaign, an elderly lady answered her door in a quilted pink robe buttoned to the neck. She was a fragile woman with yellow-brown skin powdered a sallow golden hue. I lamented my cause with an orphan’s dignity.
How can anyone survive on five dollars and twenty-five cents an hour? Look at me,
I nearly said, holding out my cold hands.

Just when I thought she might retreat, another old lady ap- proached the door. This time a fat one in a blue robe. Morning glo- ries twisted up her front, around her collar. Immediately, I wanted in. I wanted to sit in their living room, between them and listen to them giggle. I stopped talking—and before I knew it, they had held the door open and were ushering me to a beige velveteen sofa pat- terned in feathery paisleys, cockatiels flying between them. The small woman stepped into the kitchen, reappeared with a Styrofoam cup of coffee, clumps of sweetened, congealed oil floating on its surface.

“She doesn’t like to do dishes,” the fat one said. Her cheeks reminded me of the flat, baggy rump of a pachyderm.

“Neither do you!” the smaller one giggled.

Their English was heavily accented. Between talking to me,

they mumbled indecipherable colloquialisms. I nearly nodded off just looking at them, their loveliness had that effect. I asked to use their bathroom, ferried through their murmuring.

The bathroom was pink as the inside of a conch. Above the toilet was a brass shelf with three mirrored shelves, the top of which displayed a smudged silver compact. I took it off the shelf and examined its exterior. Tiny blossoms rose from its silver, gathered into wreaths below its clasps. Inside, it was empty— no mirrors, no powder. But for a moment, the compact rested in my palm like someone’s heart. I closed my eyes, dragged my fingertip over petals and pistils and leaves tiny as a newborn’s fingernail. I wanted it to be mine forever. And easily it could have. At home, my dresser was a gallery of stolen ornaments, from an antique sapphire ring to a Mont Blanc fountain pen to a knife engraved with the initials
FOG
—and nothing, really, but my own conscience, which my life up until now had confirmed to be a parched gully, kept me from stealing it. Nothing. But in that moment, I discovered something I’d always doubted: I couldn’t. I didn’t have it in me.

I waited for Bernie at the intersection of Queens Blvd and Forty-ninth. Across the meridian, SUVs roared past a pizza joint announcing itself in blinking green neon. Inside, my restraint was blossoming into pride. I had to jog in place just to keep up with its momentum.
You’re good,
it told me.
Good
. When the minivan ap- proached, Bernie lowered his window and a feather of sleet landed on his wide, white mustache.

He asked:“Too much coffee?”

“No. I’m just keeping warm.” The fact was, I’d removed my woolen hat and gloves, I was burning up.

“How’d we do?” His lips stretched into the kind of smile you give when you know someone has gotten lucky.

“I only got thirty—” I said, “Thirty-two,” remembering the two dollars in my back pocket.

I sat in front with Bernie. There were four others in back, but during the ride to downtown Brooklyn, they didn’t exist. Not that I’d ever talked much to anyone, but now they seemed to have vaporized, re-frozen as feathery patterns on the back windshield. I told Bernie about the two ladies. I told him about the coffee in the Styrofoam cup, and the cockatiels flying through the upholstery of their couch. I wanted to tell him everything—about the compact and my moment of divine intervention, but to do so would have meant incriminating myself for all my wrongdoings of the past. So I ended right there. Bernie nodded and grunted in agreement—he appreciated little old ladies, too—without asking how long I’d stayed or if they had donated any money. (They hadn’t.)

“You know we’re moving to Manhattan,” he said. The tips of his mustache bristled against his blue nylon coat.

“No.”

“We just endorsed a Democrat for state senate and we’ve been hired to vote-canvass her district. I think you should help run the office up there.”

“Me?”

“Why not? You’ve been around longer than most, and I think you’re smart. Besides, you know how easy this shit is.”

I shrugged my shoulders, realizing this wasn’t as flattering as I’d hoped.

Bernie hadn’t left Brooklyn his entire life and he wasn’t going to start now. So, four days a week, I rode my bike up the path along

the West Side Highway to Seventy-ninth Street, risking my life through traffic to arrive early at our office, a hovel on the ground floor of a featureless, rent-subsidized high-rise. The voting district consisted of a hefty chunk of Manhattan stretching from Fourteenth Street into the nineties. My job was piling the voters’ addresses into stacks, assigning each stack to a clipboard, then pairing up staff. As someone accustomed to reducing most of my shift to a break, I thought the right kind of pairing might discourage this. My staff was a convenient miscellany of do-gooders and derelicts, including a dull-eyed environmentalist with the complacency of a Mormon and a magenta-haired foster kid with whom I’d once spent an entire shift in Maspeth, passing a liter of Heineken.

But those days were over. I stuck the foster kid with the envi- ronmentalist, entrusting one to foil the other. I felt like a hypocrite but imagined most people felt this way.

Every evening, I picked someone to accompany me through my list of apartment buildings, ride the elevator to the top floor, knock our way to the basement, zigzagging down stairwells, slid- ing campaign fliers under security doors, cutting off the squinting eyes and thinning hair and sloping forehead of our candidate’s face. Once my staff understood the routine was for real, no one wanted to accompany me. Most days we were an oddly numbered crew; I canvassed alone.

Then, in late June—just in time for the hot, humid weather to set in, just in time to trade in my jeans and long-sleeved T-shirt for an Indian cotton skirt and a tank top, and just in time to ditch my bra—a new guy showed up.

“He’s all yours,” Bernie told me over the phone. “Show him the ropes.”

The guy appeared to be about my age; skinny, with a plump adolescent mouth and tortoiseshell glasses. His boyish form car- ried an airy, weightless quality; he seemed to be floating under the open doorway, shifting in and out of the frame, blurred by the outside light.

“I’m Russell,” he said, stepping inside. He was dressed in an ugly red-and blue-striped shirt with a white V-neck collar out of which a cluster of reddish hairs sprouted. He moved with calcu- lated indifference, but tagging it as such gave me a fragile impres- sion of knowing him.

I surrendered my stack of lit to him, tucked the clipboard and canvassing sheets under my arm. As we ambled up Lexington, I asked for his impressions of our candidate.

“Didn’t she put in like ten years at a homeless shelter?”

He turned to face me as he spoke, while I remained with my nose to the sidewalk.

“That happens to be the first thing I remember about her,” I

said.

As we continued up the street, I undressed every bar and

deli we passed, stripping them of fiberglass and paint and con- crete, until they were nothing but a neat row of bottles, a saucer of smoked fish, a bowl of ice cream. I had to remind myself that I cared about my job now because I was the boss, that I was trying to pay attention these days. I hadn’t stolen anything from work. I’d minimized my breaks. I wanted people to trust me. I wanted to be good.

Our first apartment building was yellow bricked with a dark green awning. Barrels of geraniums fortified either side of the front walk. Russell and I stood at the switchboard of buzzers as if

we knew someone in the building, until a man in a starchy white shirt exited and Russell grabbed the door. In the elevator, we di- vided the sheets according to floor—he took the ones on top, and I took the rest. When I handed him a pen, we brushed thumbs and locked eyes, and briefly I felt something surreptitious pass between us.

“I’ll meet you outside in thirty minutes,” I said. He nodded, then the doors closed.

I went from apartment to apartment, hoping the person wouldn’t be home so I could ponder my attraction to Russell, strat- egize the rest of our evening.

It was only 6:35 when we met outside. Russell was sitting on the edge of a barrel of geraniums smoking.

“Hey,” he said. His voice was soft and hauntingly familiar; it seemed as though we’d been friends early in life, as preschoolers, the ones who’d slunk away from the group to hide in tall grasses, emerging with one hand down the front of their pants.

“It’s early,” I said, glimpsing a kissing couple across the street.

He pulled a throatful of smoke.

“We could get a drink,” I said, then added, “It helps to be relaxed when you talk to strangers.”

We found a surprisingly dank place—or maybe it seemed that way because it was so bright outside. The only light bled from a row of golden bulbs reflected off the varnished wood of the bar top. We set our campaign materials down and ordered pints of Guinness.

“I feel like we’ve fallen into our own dirty heaven,” I said, swallowing one, then two gulps.

“Me, too,” he said.

“I was really—so—in the mood for this.” “Exactly in the mood,” he said.

I wanted to kiss him, but it was better to stew in flirtation for as long as possible. He brushed my bare shin with his. I sipped the remaining foam from my glass and ordered another round. As we drank, Russell disclosed the obvious facts about his life: he was twenty-three—a year younger than me—and from Rhode Island. He hadn’t finished college because he’d gone on the road with a band his junior year and never went back. Now his life was dedicated to music.

“I used to live with a musician. I wouldn’t repeat the experi- ence.”