And Now You Can Go (3 page)

"What's the right way?"

"I have no idea," I tell him.

He asks what I recited. I don't even know the verses now. He says that's okay.

"It might be good for you to get out of the neighborhood," he says. "Plus, we should get you some food."

This is something I like about Tom: he always makes sure I eat. I have ten extra pounds—I don't know, fifteen—that I carry around my waist, a downward wave of flesh that crests over my belt. Some men think this means I shouldn't need food. "Are you
sure
you're hungry?" they'll say when I suggest grabbing dinner or ordering dessert.

Before we leave the apartment Tom turns me in to face him and zips my coat up to the top.

On the subway platform I see a man who has red hair and I jump back, but I know that I'll know him when I see him. I will scream or vomit or maybe even faint. I've never fainted, but I think that now, if I see him, I will. Tom takes me to see the Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center and then to a bar downtown.

"Name the only president who wasn't married," he says.

"I don't know," I say. "I don't care." I tell him it's just beginning to hit me how lonely everyone is. My hand is flat on the bar table and Tom places his hand on top of mine. I put my free, left hand on top of his, and then he puts his other hand on top of that one. I pull out my bottom hand, and soon we are playing that hand game, quickly—hand upon hand upon hand.

When we stand up to go, my feet hurt. Electricity runs through them. A bearded friend of my fathers once told me a slang word for feet was "dogs." "My dogs are barking," he'd say.

"My dogs are barking," I say now to Tom, once we're outside the bar.

"Do you want me to carry you?" he offers. He understands every stupid expression I use. "That's okay."

"Come here," he says, and turns around. I jump onto his back and he catches my legs under my knees, then carries me with his hands under my thighs.

Up here I can see the tops of peoples heads, the spaces between crowds.

"It was Buchanan," he says. "James Buchanan was the only president who was a bachelor."

On the subway on the way home to my apartment he strokes my hair with his gloved fingers, untangling the knots. I close my eyes, tilt my head against his ear, among people who are going places we are not.

At 116th Street, he wants to stop at a deli.
Condoms
, I think, and my face burns with anger and with cold. I stand outside the canopied entrance, refusing to accompany him. I stare at everyone who passes by; my eyes strain from not blinking.

"Don't wait there by yourself," he says, and leads me by my elbow into the store. I plant myself by the cashier, where I'm sure there must be a red emergency button he can push if need be.

Tom comes to the register with two packages of Birds Eye frozen peas. "For your feet," he says.

Back in my apartment, on the couch, he holds my feet between the packages of peas for half an hour. When the packages get too cold and wet, he wraps them in pillowcases. '

"Better?" he asks. I nod. "Thanks."

In bed he holds me. His hair smells of chlorine and I bury my face in it, weave a brittle strand through my lips and try to whistle.

He slips his hand into my underwear. "Stop," I say.

He moves his hand out of my underwear, rests it on my hip, and then I feel it cupping my breast. He has a wart on his thumb.

I put my palm on his knuckles, wrap my fingers around his, and pull his hand off. "Please," I say.

I have shutters on the window that open like the doors of an advent calendar. Now they're closed and latched, with a hook the shape of a question mark.
Could someone scale the building
? No. Never. I try to see the sunrise slide through the slats of the shutters and crawl into the idea that yesterday is over. But it's only 1 a.m.

I adjust my arm. When there are four arms in a bed, there is always one too many. Tom yawns and props his head on his hand.

"I wonder how long it will take you to get over this," he says.

I sit up. The sheet is tucked under my armpits, the way actresses cover their breasts in movies. "That was not the right thing to say," I tell him.

I wake up in a rage. Today is still yesterday.

Balls of dust are curled up in the corners of my room. The walls are water-damaged and the paint bubbles out like boils.

I open the window and shut it again, hard. Still Tom sleeps. I go to the bed and stand over him. His head is on the pillow, his face looking up at me with closed eyes.

With my finger, I stroke the reddish spot on his nose. I've never asked him about it because I hate it when people ask me about the freckle on my lower lip. But this morning the spot on his nose looks much too red and cancerous.

"What?" he says, waking up.

"That's really ugly, the spot on your nose," I say. I scrunch my own nose instead of touching his again.

"Thank you," he says, calmly. "Have you gotten it checked out?"

"No," he says. "I know I should. My mom always tells me that."

I haven't met her. She lives in New Jersey with Tom's stepfather and his three half-sisters, all under fourteen. Tom's told me several times now that his mom is dying to meet me. I try to imagine the mother of the man from the park.
He has a mother
. I try to picture both these mothers, Tom's and the man from the park's. But all I can see is the mother in our seventh-grade textbook, the one saving her child. In the picture, an infant is under a car, and the mother can lift the front of the car herself. The caption: "Adrenaline Rush."

I feel sorry for someone, but I'm not sure who. Tom's mother, Tom, me? I feel sorry for all of us. I feel sorry for a mother who has a son who won't get his cancerous spot checked out, and I feel sorry for him because when I told him the spot on his nose was ugly, he looked at me with sympathy, and I feel sorry for me because I know that I will have to end this.

I ask Tom to leave and he does so without protesting. "Call if you need anything," he says.

I stay sitting on the bed until I hear the front door to the apartment creak, shut, and clink behind him. I get up and open my closet, hopeful for laundry to wash, but there's hardly enough for even half a load. It's too early for the mail to have come. I go into the bathroom and, for the first time, I pluck my eyebrows. In the kitchen, I flip through my roommates recipes. It's time I learned how to cook.

The phone rings. I stare at it—how can it rest so still when it's ringing?—and consider not answering, but I'm too lonely and curious not to. It could be Sarah. But it's the campus security chief, who wants me to come meet with him in half an hour. He has a voice like a bassoon.

When I meet him in his office he has a pad of paper and a pen; he asks me how to spell "Giorgio Armani." As we walk across campus toward his car, several women nod to him or say hi, shyly.
What happened to them
? I try not to stare.

He takes me down to the police station, where I give two more reports. ("Caucasian male, age twenty-eight to thirty-five, five foot ten, one eighty-five, reddish hair, leather jacket."). The police ask if I know the man with the gun. Everyone asks if I know him. What did you do to him? they ask. Did you break up with him?
I'd never seen him before
. Had he seen you before?
How do I know if he'd ever seen me if I'd never seen him
? He doesn't fit into any category I've been warned about and no one seems to know what to do.

The police officers bring out binder after binder of photographs of Hispanic men, of black men. I have to remind them he was Caucasian.

"Oh," they say, "we thought you said Hispanic" and "Oh, we thought you said black."

A new network of people has entered my life in the past twenty-four hours: the police officers, the head of school security, the therapist, him. When I close my eyes I can see him with the gun and I can hear myself reciting poetry, but now all of it is wrong.

I see posters around campus and I have to read them twice to realize they are describing what happened to me. They are warnings, pleas for clues, and sketches of the man. I approved the sketch when they first made it but now it looks nothing like him. Maybe, though, my inability to recognize the event is a good thing—a sign I've moved on. So fast, so good, I am strong. It took a day, but I am unvictimable, I am unstoppable.

A friend sees me eating by myself at a Chinese restaurant near campus. She works for an ad agency, on the Lifestyle condoms account. She's getting off her cell phone to talk to me. "I'll call you right back," she says, and stashes her phone in her purse. She tucks her copper-colored hair behind her ears and reprimands me for not returning her last phone call. With noodles slipping through my chopsticks I tell her what happened. She has tears in her eyes.

"Well, you should never walk in the park," she says.

"What?" I say. I feel strong.

"You should never walk in that park. When I run, I run on the side, never in it." "Fuck you," I say.

She looks around to see who's heard. And for a moment, I feel terrible: she's not that bad a person.

"Shhh," she says. "Come here."

She sits down next to me and brings my head into her so my forehead is against her clavicle. My eyes water and drop one tear down the gape in her suede blouse. She takes a thin napkin from the dispenser, dips it in a glass of water, and runs the cool, coarse paper across my forehead.

I tell the therapist what my Lifestyle condoms friend said about how I should never walk in the park.

"People like to think it can't happen to them," she says. "They like to think there's a reason it happened to you and not to them. They put it in a category that makes them think it's far away. Next time just stop them and tell them that that response isn't helpful to you."

This is the first intelligent thing the therapist has said.

I take off my sweater, settle into the brown leather chair, and tell her about the coyote lover. "Sometimes men are attracted to violence," she says.

She looks at my shirt—a long-sleeved crewneck that's old and snug—with something like disapproval.

I cross my arms over my chest. "It shrunk in the wash."

. . .

A sharp smell is starting to pervade our apartment. I stick my nose close to the garbage disposal, to the ficus tree, but can't locate the source.

"Can't you smell it?" I ask Susan. "It's suffocating." "No," she says. With a pink-stemmed Q-tip, she's digging the wax out of her ear. She keeps a jar of Q-tips on top of the TV. She uses them every day.

For a moment, I wonder if the smell in the apartment could be from her French boyfriend, a law student who doesn't use deodorant. But he hasn't been to the apartment lately. When I first moved in, Susan informed me that she and this man would take many trips—to Paris, Ibiza, Reykjavik, Cleveland—and I would often be alone. She has yet to go.

The head of campus security calls to tell me I have an appointment at the CATCH unit to look through pictures.

"I already looked through pictures," I say.

"I know," he says, "but this precinct has all the photos, the other one had just a few."

Above the doorway is a big sign that reads "CATCH." I ask the officers what the acronym stands for. Nobody knows.

I go into the office, where a female officer pulls out all the pictures they have on file of past offenders. She selects pictures from the Hispanic file.

"He was Caucasian," I say.

"Well, sometimes the Hispanics are very fair-skinned," says the woman, who's black. She puts the Polaroids in front of me.

"No, no, no," I say, and, occasionally, "Wait" or "Stop." One picture looks like the man I met in the park. He doesn't have red hair, but his face is familiar.

"On a scale of one to ten," the woman says, "with ten being the highest, how much does the criminal in this photo look like the person you're accusing?"

"Seven," I say, but I know this isn't right. "Six," I say. "Are you sure?"

"I'm sure," I say, and she writes something down in her books. Then she resumes placing the Polaroids on the table, each with a snap. The sound reminds me of boys sorting through baseball cards.

"Stop," I say again. "I was wrong about the last guy. If it's anyone it's this one."

"On a scale of one to ten how much does this criminal resemble the man you're accusing?"

I want to say: "More than he resembles the man everyone else seems to be accusing—more than he resembles a Hispanic man, a black man, my boyfriend, someone I know." But I say eight because I'm caught up in some desire to put a face to things.

As we leave the CATCH office, I tell the officer I'd know if it were him. She says they'll check it out anyway.

I ask what I can do in the meantime.

"Change your hair, your address," she says. "Try not be alone." "What do you mean, my address?"

"Move."

"All because of
him
?" I say. I tell her I can barely afford what I'm paying now, that it was the cheapest room I could find.

She sighs; she's heard this before.

"Let me know if you see him again," she says, and hands me her card. She adds her cell phone number in pen.

"Thanks," I say, and stick the card on top of my drivers license in my wallet, her name over my picture.

I get an e-mail from Freddie. She's in England. She's gotten a scholarship to Oxford for the year, to study and row crew. She's a few inches taller than I am, and all muscle, no stomach. Our parents have told her something's happened.

In my reply, I downplay things for her. "It only lasted a minute and I knew he was bluffing," I type. I turn to other matters: "I can't wait to see you at Christmas. Do you want to go in on a gift for Mom and Dad together? If so, what?"

When my father left home, I played along with my mother by lying to Freddie, saying that he was just away on business. Sometimes I'd pretend he'd called while she was out. "You just missed him!" I'd say. "Now he's in a big meeting."

When my father was gone, I'd sleep in my mothers bed. It seems strange now—a teenager sleeping in her mothers bed every night, hoping it would make her feel less alone. I'd watch my mother go through her nightly rituals: applying her hand cream, putting aside her book, checking the alarm clock twice. When I was certain she was asleep, I'd turn off the light.