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Brooklyn at night is alive enough that you only have to be a little afraid of going out alone. If it's summer vacation and your parents are visiting Europe and all your friends are away, and you don't have a fan and you're tired of lying naked in a darkened room, sweat-slick and mosquito-bitten and wishing you had a boyfriend, you may as well get up and get dressed and go out to see what you can find. If it is so muggy the weight of your favorite jacket dizzies you and the heat of the air pressing down denim makes you feel ill, you will still drag the jacket on --just a tanktop and cut-off jeans might make someone think you're inviting something. You drift through neon-lit streets, avoiding the drunks and the men in packs, watching ghosts of yourself in the store windows. You imagine that at the next store someone will put his hands flat against the other side of the glass and stare at you gravely, and finally tap a knuckle against the window and mouth, "Hello." You don't know that you will meet someone tonight, someone so lost he's misplaced his reflection and can't find it in mirrors. You don't know that you will look so hard for your image imprinted on his pupils that you won't be able to see anything but black.
He had cut his hand on some broken glass, a Coke bottle maybe: a pale green curve glimmered moonlike between his fingers, cratered by dark splashes of blood. His eyes, at least in the street light, were the same green as the glass; the rest was a charcoal sketch, all black, grey, and white. He was in the foreground; I was in the background, watching him. All you could see of me was one eye and a bit of hair, and maybe my left hand coming from a patch of sleeve embroidered with ankhs and roses.
He dragged the white blotch of his other hand across his eyes in exaggerated confusion, swaying: drunk. Not too drunk to see me half-hidden by a lamppost; drunk enough to call out, "Hey--" and forget if he had anything else to say. "Hey."
His eyes were the same green as the glass. I couldn't believe I hadn't recognized him before--I'd spent enough time staring at him in hallways, in classes, knowing I would never dare talk to him; he was older, he was one of the beautiful people, he was one of the people who drank and smoked and slept around. He'd disappeared about a year ago. Rumor said he'd run away, or been arrested, or died.
He jiggled his bleeding hand. "You staring at something?"
He was annoyed. I backed up a step and dug my handkerchief out of my pocket. "Here--"
"Jesus," he said in disbelief; he threw down the glass and it splintered on the pavement. He crunched over the shards, coming to meet me in the light. "A handkerchief, in this day and age." He tried to tie it on by himself, one-handed.
"Am I supposed to say I'm sorry or you're welcome?" I shoved my hands in my pockets, trying not to shake, thinking, My God, that was witty, how did I manage it? I shifted and the seams of my jacket chafed hot red lines from my wrists to my armpits. The creases of my elbows felt as raw as rashes.
"Shit. I know you." He squinted at me, his mouth slightly open, and I smelled the beer on his breath, sour as day-old sweat. "Shit--I'm sorry. I mean, thank you. Really. I--where do I know you from?"
He was biting his lip and I could see the pale marks his teeth made, and the delicate pink rims of his eyes. His skin looked so tender I had to curl my hands into fists so I wouldn't touch his face.
"Calliope," I told him. "Cal. From school."
"Yeah. Oh, yeah. Uh. Could you help with this?"
"Oh, no--" I blurted. My face went hot, not with the humid city heat.
Astonished, eyes and mouth widening in an expression that might become hurt in a second, he looked even more like the shell-shocked bad boys I dreamed about: rough, velvety, dazed. I said quickly, "Sorry. Sure."
The slash was as neat as a paper cut except for the red smudges on either side. Once he flinched and his cuff brushed the inside of my wrist so lightly I shivered. I muttered sorry a second too late for reflex. "It's okay," he said, looking elsewhere, looking uninvolved. Despite the leather and the heat, he wasn't sweating; when my fingers touched his skin, I felt like I was smudging glass.
I straightened. He was short, my height or maybe an inch or two taller, and in the instant before I stepped away, his breath cooled my cheek. I had to scrape my teeth over my tongue to stop myself from wanting to kiss him.
"It looks okay ..." I wiped my hands on my shorts. Like eyes blinded with an afterimage, my fingers retained only the feel of his skin. "You should probably put peroxide on it, though."
He shook his head, touched my elbow. I wished he could touch bare skin. He probably could hardly see me, now that I was almost out of the circle of lamplight; the pupils of his eyes were so wide that the thin shell of green looked silver by contrast.
"Thanks." He didn't sound friendly, exactly, but his voice had lost the particular wariness you have to have for strangers, before you know what they want or whether they're crazy. "So. Calliope. So you're still in school?"
I nodded. "I'm a senior. I mean, I will be, this fall."
He nodded back, his earring catching the light for an instant. It was a diamond-pierced crucifix with one arm twisted up.
"Are you, uh, thinking about college?"
"Or art school," I said. "Or work. . . . What're you doing?"
He nodded again, absently, sucking on a string of hair that fell past his eyes. "I'm Matt," he volunteered. He tried a cautious smile on me, as if offering a strange dog his hand to sniff. "Anyway. I gotta go. Nice seeing you, though. Thanks."
I watched the neon bloom on his hair, the red and then the green and then the blue, relieved he was gone, jealous of whoever he was going to. I imagined a girl filling the emptiness of her palms with the feel of his skin and my gut cramped, tight and fierce.
Glass smashed three feet away. I jumped, my heart thumping so hard it hurt, naked legs and belly and neck vulnerable to anyone's glance or touch. Memory filled in the gunning engine, the tossed bottle, the girl sitting in the window and laughing with her arm still flung out; the car now half-way down the block, now past the yellow light. I tugged my jacket closer and tried to calm myself by staring at the safety-lit windows across the street. Naked mannequins with angular bodies posed behind chain-links and going-out-of-business signs; only their faces looked close to human. I tried to imagine someone coming out from behind them, but someone had green eyes and black hair. And the wind kept walking through abandoned newspapers and the lids of metal garbage cans like someone else, someone who had a gun or a knife or just more muscle than I did. I waved good-bye to the mannequins for form's sake, and went home.
I saw him again the next day at twilight, feeding pigeons in Union Square. He was slumped low on a bench, wearing the same Les Mis T-shirt, the same jeans ripped at the knee, the same leather jacket so loose the sleeves fell half over his hands; but he looked even more punk because he'd gotten an iridescent blue streak in his hair and magenta lipstick smeared half off his mouth. I wasn't sure he was feeding the birds intentionally; his head was tilted back and his eyes were closed, and he was clutching an open bag of popcorn that had spilled onto the stones and the bench around him. Some kernels were nestled in the folds of his jacket and the cuffs of his jeans.
I'd been wandering around sketching in the Village. New York is a good city to be alone in. Some places you can't stand it: everyone seems to have a pack, a flock, a herd of people around them; couples hold hands or friends dash giggling across the street whenever you look up. But New York is a city for loners. It has a rhythm and a beat and a hustle you can't help picking up as you walk, so you're moving half-way between a run and a dance, with the traffic and the wind and nine million voices for background music and nine million people for partners. At night it's different. You don't know the steps and you move fast mostly because you're afraid. You remember things you forgot during the day: that you went out to try to forget that no one's written you all summer and you don't feel close enough to anyone any more to write them first; that you haven't called your parents for two weeks and they haven't called you to see what's wrong. You look at the buildings around you and you wish that you were behind one of those high windows bright with yellow light.
It was almost full dark when I saw him. The sun was down but the sky was still light enough that colors were distinct. I was sick to my stomach because a bunch of kids had crowded me as I was crossing the street and one of them had poked my breasts and laughed, "Nice tits--" He looked about twelve years old. The pressure of his fingers still burned; in public I couldn't even touch it myself to try to rub the feel away. I was so glad just to see someone I knew, it gave me the nerve to go up to him.
Trying to feel casual, I hitched up my backpack and ran across Fourteenth Street against the light. Cars honked at me and a man shouted, "Motherfucking suicidal bitch--" I stopped when I hit sidewalk, dizzy with heat and the rush, sticky with sweat. I wished I had a can of soda so I could press the water-beaded metal against my forehead. There weren't even any trees on this edge of the Square to cast shade. Only a Manhattanite could consider this a park: a few basketball courts and some lawn islanded on either side by Park and Broadway, dotted with round roof-capped subway entrances that looked like wishing wells. His bench looked over the street and the broad sweeping circular steps leading down to it, where singers usually set up shop with cheap amps and open guitar cases.
He had showered: close up, he smelled of baby shampoo and Old Spice and something clean and sharp that embarrassed me, because it could only be himself. His lowered eyelashes looked so soft and shadowy I wanted to brush them with a fingertip to see if they were really there.
"Hi," I said. A mosquito bite near my elbow itched and I scratched healthy skin so I wouldn't scratch it. "Um. Quelle coincidence, huh?"
I tried to tell myself it probably didn't sound as stupid to him as it did to me. It was bad enough that my skin was tight with sunburn and my shirt soaked with sweat, and that my legs weren't shaved half so smooth as his face. It was bad enough that he would be rude, and laugh, and maybe ask if I'd been following him. I tried to memorize his face, the slumped shoulders, the loose wrists and limp hands, before I had to memorize an expression of contempt to go along with them. When I'd tried to draw him before going to bed, his face had blurred toward the generic in my head; the curves had not caught the hollow of his cheek, the lower edge of his eye.
"Cal-li-o-pe." He sounded out my name as if it were a new word he was learning. "I read a comic book with a character named Calliope in it once. She was a muse."
"Epic poetry," I said, stupid with relief. "Calliope was the muse of epic poetry."
He straightened up, spraying popcorn on me and on the pigeons, who flapped off, startled and complaining. "This guy bought her. He didn't know what she was. I mean, he knew she was a muse, but he refused to admit that she was a person, and he kept her for a long time and he raped her every day, for inspiration." He kicked at the closest pigeon. "He didn't have a fucking clue."
"I don't know why my parents named me after her," I said. "They don't write poetry or anything." I thought about toeing off my sneakers, but the pavement would burn the soles of my feet. "Uh. You think I could sit down?"
"Why not?" he said, and swept some popcorn off the bench in a magnanimous gesture. I sat, sliding my backpack off my shoulder and shoving myself so close to him our arms touched--or at least my arm touched his leather.
"I'm sorry I was such a bitch to deal with last night," he said. "I was ... visiting my parents."
"'Sokay." I tried to sound as sophisticated as he did, not bitter; not scared. "Sometimes I wish I never had to see mine again." I'd told them not to call. I'd told them I was old enough to be on my own.
"Yeah, well, now I never have to." He sighed and arched his back, wriggling out of his jacket without using his hands. "It's so fucking hot ..." He'd cut the neck and sleeves off his T-shirt. "I'm not used to this ..."
I stared at him, without premeditation for once. "Not used to it? Where have you been all day?"
"I was wandering around ..." He shrugged, flapped a hand at the air. "The subways, they're pretty neat shit, you know? Air-conditioned. Would you believe? They don't air-condition the fucking schools."
"Tell me about it." If I had moved my head just a little, I could have rested my cheek against his heart, heard its thump in my ear. I didn't dare look at his face. I crossed my arms, then uncrossed them because the sweat made them adhere like band-aids. I tried to distract myself by thinking of my sketches, grimy buildings and battered cars in charcoal smears that looked like dirt, but I could feel the pressure of his thigh against mine, the sharp poke of his elbow in my ribs as he tried to slouch more comfortably; I could almost feel the weight of his arm on my thigh, it was so close to me. He'd scraped it against something somewhere; there was a scratch running along the vein from his wrist to the crook of his elbow. I gave in and touched the scratch, as lightly as I could, just to be touching him.
"Hey," I said, "what'd you do?"
"Oh," he said. "Oh, well. I was ... kinda depressed. So."
"Oh." I felt sick. I felt stupid. I thought I could feel the surge of blood beneath the thin line of the scar.
"Yeah. Well." His voice sounded almost drugged. "I decided to wear my favorite T-shirt that day. I don't know why. I mean, I knew I'd have to take it off first. It was cold when I did, I was shivering.... It's not that there was anything special about it, to make it my favorite. It was just this plain black T-shirt. It was really comfortable, that's all."
I could see him doing it. Bending over the steaming water to turn off the rust-speckled faucets; pulling off the black T-shirt and dropping it on the blue-tiled floor; straightening up, his skin goose-pimple'd with cold. The bathroom was the one in my apartment; I had no idea what his would have looked like. No sound but disturbed water lapping at the sides of the tub.
"... for hours. I just didn't get off at my stop. There just didn't seem to be any point. I didn't want to go home. I didn't want anything at all."
"I'm sorry. Matt?" I'd never used his name before. "I'm really, really sorry."
He hunched inward, not touching me, not looking away from his shoes. He looked the way he had last night when I was bandaging his hand; the way you'd look when you lowered yourself into water so hot it was almost like happiness, or the way you'd look when you pick up broken glass to see if cutting yourself will hurt; or the way you'd look in the suspended moment when you step past glass doors (your hand is so sweaty it leaves a print when you push the door open) into the lit-up dark of the streets.
"Do you ever feel--" I said it softly, because I was ashamed of it, and because I didn't know if it was good enough; if it would make him feel less alone. "Do you ever feel like it's your fault, when you don't get something? Like if you wanted it enough, it'd happen? Like if you wanted it enough, you could draw--" Or you could fall in love with someone, and someone would love you back. I averted my eyes from his face, his neck, his collarbones ending in knobs as delicate as birds' skulls. Beneath the scar, the vein looked like a smear of blue watercolor. It was so faint. It'd be so diluted you'd never be able to tell what color it was on a brush. "It's so hot," I said finally. "It's just so hot. No one's here and it feels like everyone I know doesn't really exist. Like even I'm not real."
After a moment, he touched the inside of my wrist with the tips of his fingers. "You're here," he said. Beneath the smeared lipstick the set of his mouth was gentle. "I can feel you."
An ambulance went dopplering up Fourteenth Street in front of us and the car behind it screeched through a red light. It was full night now. The windows outshone the stars and the sky was deepest navy-blue; city skies are never dark enough to be black. The air was so moist it clogged my lungs, and every breeze brought a whiff of human stink. Somebody across Fourteenth Street cursed me out in Spanish, or maybe he was cursing out someone else; but I thought he was looking at me. I leaned my head against Matt's shoulder, which put a cramp in my arm but felt good anyway. I remembered that I'd dreamed overnight that he wanted me. In the dream I'd been so scared I'd stopped wanting him back. I imagined slipping a hand along his inner thigh, feeling the heavy denim, the tense muscle.
"I thought about it," he said. "What I'd do if some old guy offered me a muse. She was really skinny, he was starving her. Naked too--the old guy who sold her had to lend her a trench coat. I guess he must've lent her a pair of shoes too, so she'd be wearing these thick ugly leather things, you know, the kind of shoes old men wear. They'd be the wrong fucking size, probably give her blisters or something. Anyway. I'd take her outside and I'd look at her a while. She was real pretty, except she was so skinny. And after a while I'd say, I'd have to say, Okay, you can go now. You're free. I set you free. And she'd look at me real blank. She'd say, Why? And I'd say, Because it would be--" He lowered his voice, embarrassed, as if it were a dirty word. "--evil. It would be evil."
"Uh-huh." I turned my face into his chest and my lips brushed his neck. I could feel his ribs rise and press hard against me, and subside.
"Hey," he said. His Adam's apple bobbed against my mouth, so vulnerable, so tense. "Hey."
I raised my head. He was looking straight at me, uncomfortably straight, as intent as he had been last night, cradling a piece of broken glass. His face was the color of a flag of surrender; his mouth was a shock of red. He reached out and I could not move and he touched my cheek lightly, so lightly; as lightly as he'd touched my wrist; as lightly as I'd touched his.
"Do you still have my handkerchief?" I blurted. "I've been thinking about it, we could get it cleaned, we could do that now..." I rubbed the heel of my palm against the place the kid had touched, trying to make it look like I was rearranging my shirt. I wished I knew how I had managed not to think of that for so long. I wished I could manage it now.
"Yeah, sure," he said, blinking. "We could get it cleaned, if that's what you want." He stood up, scrounging for the handkerchief in his front pocket, pulling the tight jeans even tighter across his hips. His shirt was tucked into his jeans so neatly, so crisply, his waist and hips were one narrow sheath. "Why the hell do you carry one, anyway?"
My palms felt empty. I filled them with my backpack straps but the straps were cool, nylon, nothing. I said, "I thought it was a cool kind of thing to do."
We had to look for a while before we found a dry cleaner's that would take the handkerchief and charge us less than they would for a shirt. By the time we realized that making that big a deal over $10 was ridiculous we'd been to three different places and we would have felt stupid giving in. The woman at the counter said they would probably get to it in an hour or two, so we decided to see a movie. We were the only people there: it was a weeknight, and a movie we'd never heard of, and a theater so ill-kept popcorn, spilled soda, and the residue of chewing gum made it hard to lift our feet from the floor. The air was so cold after the street that I started sneezing convulsively. He draped his jacket around my shoulders. It smelled like him, and like cigarettes and beer, but his body hadn't warmed it much.
The movie had Sting in it, and took place in a city, or at least I thought it was supposed to be a city; it was very pale and very clean. Somewhere in the middle Sting raped a comatose girl. The camera lingered on a shot of his hand on her naked breast as if it were beautiful.
We weren't touching, unless the jacket counted as a proxy. I listened to the sound of his breathing underneath the soundtrack. Absently, he began toying with a strand of my hair. I went utterly still, so he wouldn't notice what he was doing and stop.
He said softly, as though there were someone else to hear: "Calliope?"
"H'mm?"
He cupped my cheek and moved my face close to his. The pressure of his tongue and teeth revolted me, but I opened my mouth anyway. His mouth didn't taste the way I'd imagined a mouth would, just wet and kind of sour. I sat rigid, terrified, needing to pee.
"What's wrong?" he whispered. His breath was cool on my lips and I shivered once, and again, and couldn't stop.
"Listen," I said, starting to get up, "I'll be back, I'll be right back, okay?"
"No--" He jerked me back into my seat, hurting my wrist. "It's not okay. Calliope--what's wrong?"
"I just haven't." I had to sniff so my nose wouldn't run, and I was still shivering. "I just haven't ever even kissed anyone before."
"Christ." I couldn't make out his expression; the only illumination was in the shape of other faces, gigantic and pale on the screen. "I thought you wanted ..."
It was hard, speaking past the knot in my throat. "I do." I made it come out louder. "I do. I just want to have done it. I just want to have it done."
He pressed the heels of his palms against his eyes. I could make out his mouth, tight and unhappy. Is this what desire looks like? I wondered.
"Look," he said. "Look. You know what I want, right?"
"Sure," I said scratchily. "No strings. Whatever."
"No strings. Jesus Christ, Calliope--" He grabbed me and the chair arm separating us banged into my belly hard; and he was standing and dragging me upright. He had his arm around me, I thought for support, until he pushed my head to one side so hard I thought, He's going to break my neck, so hard the muscles pulled into pain, and he put his mouth against the jointure of my neck and shoulder and for a moment all I felt was the muscle strain and the soft dry touch of his lips and his breath slightly moist on my skin. Then he bit down.
I yelped and tried to shove him away, but he was too strong, too heavy. It was like a shot, it hurt and kept hurting and kept hurting and in a second in just a second you knew you were going to scream; and my entire body was twisted with trying to get away and I could smell his hair. He used Johnson's baby shampoo. How could you be hurt by someone who used Johnson's baby shampoo?
He let go, and I took a step backward fast, watching him, and my hip hit the back of the seat in the row in front of us. I held on to it. My neck felt sore. My neck felt bruised. Something wet trickled down it, but I couldn't tell whether it was my blood or his spit. He just stood there, his eyes big and dark, his hands open. I could see the scars down his arms, faint and blue in this light, and I could see his palms, lined only by heredity, with no cut from yesterday, no new scar. I saw how pale he was, how really pale, as pale as the skin of a white woman in a black-and-white movie; I saw his mouth smeared with something besides lipstick. The lipstick was probably on my neck now. All I could hear was my breathing. There was something wrong with it.
"No," I said. I was crying. That was what was wrong. "No."
He rubbed his mouth off with the back of his hand, like a kid wiping off a milk mustache. He hesitated, then reached for my elbow. I twitched back--overreaction: he wouldn't have touched my skin. He would have touched leather, his jacket which still smelled of him, of cigarettes, of beer.
"Oh, shit," he said helplessly. "You can't cry. We don't have any tissues. For Christ's sake, just stop it, okay?"
"Are you crazy?" I screamed at him. "Don't fucking cry? Are you fucking crazy?" I shut up and wiped my eyes off on his jacket sleeve.
"Shit." He dug at the end of one of the scars with his fingernails, the place at his wrist where it was knotty, slightly upraised. He must have had to press especially hard with the razor, to break the skin. He swallowed and I remembered the softness of his throat against my mouth, the bump of the Adam's apple. Blowing draperies on the screen blew waves of light across his face. He said, "I was empty already, you know? It didn't make much difference." Then he said furiously, "You're a fucking artist for Chrissakes, you know what you want to do, you told me you knew what you wanted to do!"
I could say nothing. I could go home and crawl into bed and never cross the threshold of my door again, not for school or groceries or anything. I wanted to go home more than I wanted him, even, because the sharp lines of his face and the angle of his collarbones and the softness of his hair made me feel like throwing up. But if I went home and played the answering machine, there would be no messages on it. If I went home and opened the mailbox there would be only junk mail and the Times inside.
"I want to take you home," I said. "Let's go, okay? Let's just go."
The elevator was broken so we had to climb the stairs. I walked through the door and noticed he wasn't following me. "What's wrong?"
"Calliope." He leaned against the door frame, closed his eyes a moment; the lids were shadowed faintly blue. "You have to invite me in."
"You know you're the only person who ever calls me that?" I said shakily. "Cal. Everyone says Cal."
He watched me, as grave as a fairy-tale prince. I wanted to ask him if he made a habit of standing in the best light, because he could be a painting again: the dusty beams of light from inside falling only on his face and on his arm, picking out the green of his eyes, the pink of his mouth, the blue streak in his hair; picking out the tension in the muscles supporting his weight, and the scar that overlay the blue vein, and the skin so vulnerable and tender, and slightly pinker in the crease of the elbow. I wished I knew why he wanted me.
I swallowed. "Do you promise you won't hurt me?"
He said, after a minute, "Do you really want me to?"
The key's edges were hurting my hand; I thought, If it bleeds, I can't use my handkerchief, we forgot to pick it up.
He said, "Look, it always hurts the first time. That is what we're here for, isn't it?"
"Yeah," I said. "Yeah." I stepped back. Because I had been so numb I'd wanted to feel anything, even fear, even pain. Because the things you might do and think and feel and be can't enter you unless you invite them in. Because you have to invite them in.
