Chapter 9
Rai didn’t know why she couldn’t stay mad at Z. Though she liked his perverse charm, it certainly didn’t compensate for the cold, lonely nights, the constant arguments, his inability to express any kind of affection… Her past certainly didn’t suggest a forgiving temperament — the Easter ham still stuck in her craw after 18 months — but she preferred that explanation to the alternative. She didn’t want to accept that she needed Z so much that she’d let him get away with anything.
Regardless of her motives, Rai had completely forgotten her anger just two seconds after Z pulled the sheet of construction paper from a shopping bag he’d kept hidden behind his back. She stopped him before they could even leave the building, then opened it on the front desk. Tanya’s papers scattered everywhere, but she had become used to that — she just knelt down to gather them up.
“Holy shit, Z! It’s perfect! How the fuck’d you do that?”
“Stole it.”
“From the train?”
“Exactly.”
Tanya had recovered enough to look at the object of Rai’s admiration. It looked just like the subway ads for the Marble Collegiate Church, with pictures of the sanctuary and a happy, multicultural flock. Except for one thing: where the text should have been — some sort of welcoming Bible verse, though Rai didn’t remember which — Z had inked in an entirely different quote. Tanya read it and laughed.
“Whatever the God of Earth and Heaven is, he can surely be no gentleman.”
-William James
Rai couldn’t contain her enthusiasm. “You rock! You fucking rock! So where’s it gonna go? Who receives the benefit of our wisdom?” She tried to add a touch of irony to her voice, but it was almost unnoticeable.
“I got it on the F train…”
“Then we put it back there. Fuck yeah!” She rolled the poster up, gave a quick wave to Tanya, and dashed out the door. Z followed her, only a bit more slowly.
Z had wondered how they were going to replace the text. Later, he would admit to Rai that he had only been able to steal it in the middle of the night, when no one else was around. Rai had no such qualms: after they jumped the turnstile at Rockefeller Center, she paced up and down the train until she found an ad with a loose pane in front of it. She pushed the commuter in front of it to the side, unrolled the tube, and artfully slid the poster over the old ad. Then, pointedly ignoring the angry gaze of the woman she’d offended, Rai stood back to admire her work.
“Fucking brilliant, Z. Whaddaya say? You wanna hang out and see what people have to say?”
For the next three hours they sat in the same car, like two Madison Avenue advertising executives doing reception research. Though some Manhattanites laughed at the quote, most denizens of that most secular of boroughs had no interest in anything that talked of God. However, out near Coney Island, Rai and Z heard two matrons planning to call Marble Collegiate Church to tell the preacher that God was indeed a gentleman, and a polite one at that. They knew it from their own experience, they huffed. In Queens, a group of older hispanic men looked at the sign, conferred with each other in Spanish, then became angry. Rai wished she could understand what they were saying, because it seemed very interesting. In Manhattan, the best response they got was from a group of white punks who got on at Delancy Street. One took out a permanent marker and scribbled a couple of exclamation marks on the plastic cover.
That night, Rai desperately tried to read Z’s book of quotes under a streetlight, but his crabbed hand really demanded the light of midday — and a magnifying glass. Sleep didn’t come easily, but the next morning, as Z prowled the subways for other ads he could steal and modify, she say by Mike’s softball fields, paging through the book in search of quotes that would really teach the Muggles about life.
By the time that Mike showed up at noon, she thought that she had found a couple of possibilities. She was thrilled to see him — and even more thrilled to see that he had brought an extra sandwich. That morning other things had seemed more important than breakfast, and she was hungry.
“Life must be going well,” Mike observed as she devoured the chicken salad. “you glow, my dear.”
“It’s right on. We kick ass. I mean, we completely kick fucking ass. You wouldn’t’a believed those old farts when the saw the way me and Z changed the ad for that fucking church.”
“I am very excited for you,” Mike replied, still rather overwhelmed.
They had been paying little attention to the softball game, but the fans’ tension drew their eyes to the field. One team had the bases loaded, and a young, well-built man stood at bat. He wore his baseball cap backward, which struck Rai as even worse fashion on the field than off. He swung as hard as he could at the pitch, but the ball merely popped gently into the air and then into the glove of the third basewoman. The teams changed sides.
“Don’t be sarcastic. I’m serious.” Rai had a remarkable ability to maintain the chain of conversation in the face of interruptions. “It’s like I finally found some novelist to write my story, y’know? Make it go someplace. Maybe Lermontov’s come back to life and I got him to narrate my life, huh? Now that’d fucking rock.”
“I fear you have gained too much enthusiasm for this book.”
“It’s an awesome book! Pechorin knows you gotta tell a good story. It makes shit interesting. Maybe it even makes you laugh, huh? That’s why I like the bastard. Dude’s a raconteur.” She felt proud of the last word, and pronounced it with relish. “No, it’s like even more. The dude knows how to live a good story.”
“I do not think this is true.”
“Huh?”
“It is one thing to take a life, with its pains and joys, and turn it into a story. It is something else to take a story and try to turn it into your life. This is the tragedy of Emma Bovary.”
“Who?”
Mike often expressed disbelief at the gaps in Rai’s knowledge. On the one hand, she could quote Cherneshevsky from memory, but then she’d have to ask who Flaubert was. “You must read more of the French, my dear. Madame Bovary read too many novels, and she wanted her own life to be as exciting and romantic as the characters she read about. She wished ‘to live a good story,’ as you say. It destroyed her, her marriage, her children. A great indictment of fiction. Except that the government did not understand the point, and they took Flaubert to court for trying to corrupt female readers.”
“ ‘Our public is still so young and naive,’” Rai quoted in a proud tone, “ ‘that it does not understand a fable unless there is a moral at the end.’”
“That’s exactly my point,” Mike sighed under his breath.
“What point?”
“That you know Lermontov by heart, but you have never heard of the greatest French novelist.”
“But this Emma Bovary babe just sounds like a female Pechorin.” Mike’s expression showed that he was not convinced by her hypothesis, but she did not clarify it. “This way, I get the same idea without a million pages of women fainting and complaining.”
“I find it strange that you do not like most female characters…”
“The interesting ones are evil, and the good girls just whine and pretend to be deep. What I hate… It’s like Sofya Petrovna in St. Petersburg. She doesn’t know shit, but because she tries and then screws up, men like her. It’s like her ignorance makes them feel good about their pathetic little knowledge. That’s why they like her. Freud’s the same.”
“I’m sorry?”
“The stupid penis envy thing. Freud wants to think his dick’s important, so he pretends all women want a dick. If we want it and don’t have it, there must be some value in it. Well, I don’t want a dick. Not on me, not in me.”
“Very smart.” Rai beamed at the compliment. “But there are other books, yes? Anna Karenina…”
Suddenly, Z, with his usual stealth, whacked Rai over the head with a paper tube.
“Whoa, dude! Basta, huh?”
“I’m working all day while you shoot the shit with some old Stalinist, and you got the balls to say ‘basta’ to me?” As always when he was around Mike, Z roughened his accent into something almost incomprehensible.
“So you got one? C’mon. Show it to me.”
Z looked at Mike in a way he thought was subtle, but which was anything but.
“He knows all about it,” Rai laughed. “C’mon, I wanna see it.”
Rai recognized the ad campaign far before she read the word. It was an MTV poster, the sort with text so surreal that no one could understand it. At first, the quote that Z had pasted on top made no more sense, but then the meaning came to her.
“I dunno, Z…” she said with as much tact as she could muster.
