Chapter 7
Rai had long ago reconciled herself to Z’s selfishness. She had seen the clouds in the west just as he had, so it was no surprise that she had to leave the Place alone after dinner. She had her own plans for nights like these: a different part of the Park, the tarp covered with leaves to mimic Z’s warmth. After she dashed across 59th Street in the strobe of taxi headlights, she turned right and headed to the little gazebo. Pacing up the hill along a path she knew so well she could have walked it blind, she smashed into something soft and tall, then, contrary to habit, screamed. She heard a crash into the underbrush, like something heavy and fleshy falling hard, then she smelled beer. Holding her nose and turning away, she climbed the rest of the slope more slowly, dropped down the other side, and then climbed over a chain link fence that she thought might guard her from Crips and cops and anybody else who might be happy to find a little girl alone in the Park. At least she had found the meaning of life, she assured herself. It might not keep her warm, but it would console her during a long night.
Rai looked up at the sky, furious with Z but at least relieved that clouds didn’t yet obscure the stars. Maybe it wouldn’t rain, and the night was warm, but lack of calories and body fat always left her cold in the middle of the night. She wrapped herself in the tarp, then piled leaves on top of it. The leaves were old and itchy, but mostly dry. Better than nothing. Several got under her blouse, and she thrashed around to remove them. For the next hour, she could do nothing but toss and turn, scratch at her skin, and try to imagine the sight of her name on a clean white wall. Anger at Z raged through her veins, then anger at herself that she needed him. Her heartbeat stayed fast, even when she tried to force breath into her diaphragm. She could not keep her eyes closed. Fearing a cloud would come, they constantly flashed through the blowing trees toward the sky.
Finally, well after midnight, she had exhausted herself and began to cry, first furiously, then more quietly. Finally, the tears lulled her to sleep.
On these lonely nights, Rai always dreamed of Edward Kobek. The memory assured her that life could be much worse, that if she was miserable, at least it was a noble misery. Z and everybody might sell their bodies for a warm bed, but she would not. She was better than that.
The previous spring, after Rai and Z had gotten back from their migration to Florida, an unexpected cold snap had blasted New York with heavy winds and five degree temperatures. As expected, Z found a woman and shacked up with her for a couple of nights. Rai, in despair and suffering from the cold, checked herself into Covenant House on a freezing Friday afternoon. Though morally opposed to shelters — big Christian shelters most of all — she figured her life was more important than her scruples.
That night, a Friday, she went to the Museum of Modern Art, a free treat she had longed for since they had hopped the train south three months before. As always, she walked deliberately through the circuit on the second floor until she made it to the Miró room. Sitting on the floor, she stared at the canvas on the back wall, a brown textured background with squiggles and shapes in black and red.
To Rai’s surprise, a man of about 35 sat down on the floor next to her. He wore a tight black turtleneck, his longish dark hair curling down over the collar. After staring at the painting for a half a minute, glancing at Rai from time to time, he spoke. “Miró once said he spent his entire life trying to paint like a child.”
Rai thought his voice was insuffrable, so she stuffed all the sarcasm she could into her response. “Right. A kid who could draw a five foot long sperm.” She pointed to the squiggling line with the small head. “I don’t care what Freud said about infantile sexuality. Kids don’t draw sperm.”
“Yeah…” He looked a bit overwhelmed, then stayed quiet for a moment. “You like surrealism?”
“Some. Matta. Ashile Gorky. Siquieros. Dalí sucks.” She continued to stare truculently at the painting.
“They’s showing Buñuel in the theater at eight.”
For the first time, Rai showed some interest in his words. “Which one?”
“Un chien andalou.”
“Shit, they can’t be sold out!” She stood straight up. (Rai always sat Indian style, and when she stood, she’d figured a trick that allowed her to rise to her feet without using her hands. With her legs hidden under her long black skirt, it almost looked like she was levitating. She had carefully cultivated the effect.) Without a word of thanks or farewell, she ran through the last several rooms, not even stopping to look at her beloved Siquieros, and dashed down the escalators.
She rushed up to the desk and got one of the last free tickets, then went to the third floor in a vain attempt to develop an appreciation for minimalism.
When Rai had first come to New York, she’d met a boy who sold tickets at the cinema at Lincoln Center — he was a violinist at Julliard, and the job helped pay his tuition. She took advantage of his crush on her to sneak into the theater when it wasn’t sold out. She found she loved weird films, starting with David Lynch and John Waters, then moving back through Fellini inevitably to Buñuel. They had been showing Un chien andalou on the day the violinist figured out that he was getting nowhere with Rai and refused to let her in. Remembering this misfortune, she was outside the MoMA theater door half an hour before showtime.
Fifteen minutes later, the man in the turtleneck stepped up behind her. “You must like Buñuel!”
“Yes.” She said the word in a way that did not open space for further conversation.
After a while, he gestured around the gallery, a collection of stills and movie posters from early cinema. “You like Hitchcock?”
“No.” The man was not getting her obvious hints.
A bit of a line had developed, so the ticket taker came to allow people in. Rai rushed to the third row and sat right in the middle. The man followed her and began to sit in the next seat. Rai held up her hand in a “stop” sign. “Look, thanks for telling me and all, but I really want to watch the movie alone, OK?”
“OK,” he said defensively, then stepped back, pretending the response was a kind of joke. “But hey, maybe you can give me a call and we can talk about it over coffee, huh?” He handed her a card from his wallet. “The second number’s my cell. It’s on all the time.” She took the card as a way to make him disappear, then slipped it into her coat pocket, planning on throwing it away as soon as she saw a trash can.
Rai loved the movie. She laughed constantly, especially during scenes that the rest of the audience did not find funny at all, then left the theater with a smile plastered on her face.
The bitter wind outside the front door blew the smile away. Wrapping her tattered coat around herself, she scurried along 53rd Street, then down 7th to Times Square, then across 41st to Covenant House. The gale whipped up the avenues. She could feel her feet beginning to freeze, and her hands could no longer grip the lapels of her zipperless coat, even if she held them through her pockets. The long black skirt offered no protection for her legs. Finally, after almost 20 minutes in the snowy gale, she stumbled into the lobby of Covenant House. It was blissfully warm.
The guard stopped Rai at the security desk. “You’re late. Curfew is 9 PM.”
“Curfew?” Rai said with disbelief.
“I know they told you at intake. If you don’t make it back by curfew, and you don’t have a note from a counselor, I can’t let you in.”
Rai was still shivering. “It’s fucking twenty below out there! And it’s started to snow!”
“Watch your mouth, young lady. You know we don’t tolerate foul language here.”
Rai let out a series of her favorite curses from high school French classes, which the guard failed to understand. “So you’re going to throw me out on the street just to satisfy your maudite rule.”
“Rules are rules. We don’t bend them for you or anyone.”
“This is supposed to be a Christian place, isn’t it? Where’s your love of your fellow man? Charity toward your neighbor?”
The guard was not ready for a theological debate. It was 11, and her shift was almost at an end. “These are the rules–”
“Look, lemme quote your Jesus to you. ‘The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.’ Or your Paul: ‘The law kills, but the spirit brings life.’ How about a touch of fucking spirit? What kinda hypocrite are you?” Rai felt her voice leaving her conscious control.
“Young lady, if you have a problem with the rules, you can bring it up with the director. I don’t make them, I just enforce them.”
“That didn’t work at Nurenburg and it ain’t gonna work here!” Rai exploded. “It’s on your conscience when you read in the Daily News that a little Arab girl froze to death on 14th Street!” In the small space at the top of her brain that always sat back to wonder at her own mania, Rai knew that the transgender and gay prostitutes hang out on West 14th; it was certainly not where she would end up. That part of her mind did not control her voice and her body.
It took all the guard’s patience not to pick up the phone and call the police. Instead, she made one last effort. “Look, I’m not supposed to do this, but maybe there’s someone you can call? Spend the night there, then come back tomorrow and talk to someone who can do something.” She lifted her phone to the top of the desk.
Rai pulled her frozen fists from her pockets. Though she hadn’t felt it, she was clenching a scrap of paper in her right hand. She read the crumpled card: “Edward Kobek, Documentarian.” She did not even pause to think. The number almost dialed itself.
He picked it up on the second ring. “Um hello Edward? This is Helen. We, um, met at the Miró today. Yeah, right. Um, I was wondering if we could meet for that coffee now? Yeah, uh-huh. I know it. Fifteen minutes? OK.” She hung up the phone. Then she realized what she had done. “You think just ‘cause you’re black you can’t be a Nazi? Well, so far you’re batting a thousand in Jew-killing. Even Mengele didn’t manage that!” She spun around and ran for the door, her coat and skirt flapping. The guard, used to blunter, less allusive insults, just sighed and picked up the phone to call her boyfriend.
Rai knew that survival sex was an integral part of life on the street. When it is cold and dangerous and a sixteen year old girl is all alone, sex is a price she is probably willing to pay for a warm bed and a roof. Morality is not an issue; life is. One of the few things girls can exchange for money or shelter is their anatomy, and a long-term lover can be a ticket off the street.
Rai had never been willing to pay that price. Yes, there were ethical concerns, and she preserved a romantic dream a dashing French philosophy student and a sunset on a warm beach in Tunisia, but the real reason rested much deeper in her personality.
All the girls who lived on the street — or at least all of those Rai had met — used sex as currency. They exchanged it for love, for pleasure, for money, for a place to stay, or for drugs; it was their only form of power. For Rai, that was a cop-out. She wanted her power between her ears, not between her legs. But more significant was that one word: “all” the girls. She hated being part of any “all.” She didn’t think that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had forbidden sex, nor was it contrary to some abstract metaphysical principle. No, she just thought that if everyone else was a slut, she needed no better motivation to keep her legs shut. It was another way to show that she was “better” than everyone else, that she was not made of the same stuff. “The majority is always wrong,” as that quote in her sophomore locker had insisted.
As she ran to meet Edward Kobek, she knew exactly what was in store. In the cynicism brought on by the cold, she worried little about compromising her principles; she had seen the street devour the most deeply held ethics. The problem was not moral; it was that she was about to become like everyone else.
As she rushed up Ninth Avenue, tears solid in the frozen gale, she first told herself that she was already like them, a carbon based life form who needed to eat and sleep. She quickly realized that she hated that idea, and that if she could break that tie with the rest of humanity, she would be much happier. She reminded herself that humility was a virtue, that her experience would allow her to empathize with the girls who’d had a much tougher time than she. The idea of prostitution as a morally courageous act relieved her worry for several seconds, but then she heard the inevitable voice in the back of her head. “You just don’t have the ovaries to sleep through a cold night, and here you are talking about courage!” Tears returned to her cheeks.
Somehow, she managed to drag herself into the Starbuck’s in the West 40s where Edward said he would meet her. Excuse after desperate excuse ran through her mind, but she knew them for what they were. Even in the warm café, she continued to shiver as she applied new eyeliner above her mottled cheeks.
Edward tried on a charming smile as he walked in the door five minutes later. He stood by Rai’s table. “Great film, huh? What would you like to drink?” He gestured to the cashier, who looked like she desperately wanted to close.
Rai took a deep breath. “We both know what you want, so cut the shit and let’s go back to your place.”
“And I thought that you didn’t like me that much…” he smiled with the fashionable SoHo irony Rai so despised.
“Sometimes life changes my mind for me.” She stood up straight, trying to remember the pride in her spine as she stalked out of the First Presbyterian Church of Vanillaville. That pride stayed stubbornly absent. Edward walked onto the street to hail a cab, while Rai stood inside the glass door, still shivering. With the eyes of the barista on her back, she felt so filthy that it was almost a relief when Edward waved her into a waiting cab.
“Ninety-first with Second,” he said after Rai huddled into the back seat, then he reached over for her hand. “I’m so–”
“Just ‘case I’m gonna fuck you does not mean I’m gonna hold your hand, OK?”
“Whoa, kinky. I’m not the romantic type, either,” he lied. He seemed to have fit Rai into a category that he could understand; he felt comfortable. Rai’s head was on the edge of an explosion. Her earlier furious despair had blown away, leaving her whole soul conscious of what she was about to do.
As they walked past the security guard in the lobby of his huge apartment building, Rai thought she might die of shame. In her mind, everyone knew exactly what was happening. They had to share the elevator to the 30th floor with a grandmother who seemed to be watching them in the mirrored door, her eyes the shade of Grandma Miller when she disapproved of something Rai had done. Finally, on the 32nd floor, they got out, walked down the hall, and Edward unlocked the two deadbolts.
The apartment was small, but had uncurtained windows overlooking the East River. “Would you like a drink?” Edward asked in a voice that Rai hated more with each word that emerged from his lips. “I have some very nice single malt, or maybe I could open a bottle of wine…”
“I don’t drink.”
“Well, then. I know what you’re here for.” He gestured to the bed, centered carefully under the picture window.
“I gotta pee.” She went to the door that was obviously the bathroom, then locked it behind herself. She sat on the toilet, but found no urine to pee out. Unable to find any other excuses to extend her delay, she pulled down her skirt, washed her hands in scalding hot water, threw back her shoulders, and opened the door.
Edward was lying naked on the bed, his expression clearly his idea of bedroom eyes. He fluffed the pillow next to him. “It’s warm in here. You can take off that old jacket,” he cooed.
Closing her eyes and clenching her teeth, she took off the jacket, folded it, and set it carefully on a chair. Turning her back, she pulled off her sweater, folded it, and put it on the jacket. Then the t-shirt. She could imagine him leering at her bra strap, and was almost ready to put the clothes back on when she remembered the wind whipping outside. With another deep breath, she stepped out of her long black skirt, her imagination now focused on his indulgent smile at her too-big boxer shorts. He had turned the thermostat up high, but she shivered again before imagining the cold on the streets and consciously straightening her shoulders.
She reached behind her back and undid the bra clasp, then slid it off her shoulders, folded it carefully, and set it on the rest of her clothing. Though she tried to examine the neat pile, her eyes seemed to slide off it.
Slowly, very slowly, she turned around.
“With a body like that there’s no reason to be so modest.” He tapped the bed next to him. She could not believe he could not see the demons raging inside her. Very conscious that only boxers stood between her and complete abjection, Rai walked slowly toward the bed, feeling very skinny and very small. She sat gingerly at the very edge. He slid over and slipped an arm around her waist. “When I saw you in the museum, I knew you’d look fantastic naked, but wow! Where do you work out?” A second hand touched her shoulder while the first worked its way up to cup her small breast.
Rai shivered. “I can’t do this,” she whispered. Then louder, so he could hear. “I can’t do this.”
Roughly pushing his hands off her body, she stood and walked back to her pile of clothes. For the first time that night, her shoulders held the proud posture she’d demanded of them. This time, she did not turn away as she donned each garment. “You fucker! You don’t understand anything. Not Miró, not sex. Not me. I’d rather freeze to death than sleep with you.”
Edward, feeling confusion and embarrassment for the first time, hastily covered himself with the bedspread. He could not even speak as Rai put on all of her clothes, turned her back, and marched out the door.
Rai had hopped the 6 train at 96th Street and rode it all night. Cops were patrolling, looking for sleepers, but she managed to wake each time before they came through the doors.
