Читать книгу The Wicked City - Beatriz Williams, Beatriz Williams - Страница 11

THE POWDER room at the back of Christopher’s isn’t much to speak of, and I’ve seen a crapper or two in my time. I mean, it’s a basement of a basement. What are you going to do? There’s about enough room to swing a cat, if you’re the kind of damned brute who swings cats, and your cat belongs to a pygmy tribe. The tiles are black and white, the mirror’s chipped, the sink bears the stains of a thousand furtive cigarettes. The toilet’s liable to flush you down whole, if you’re not careful. In the corner, there’s a narrow ventilation shaft—I use the term loosely—leading to the stinking back garden of the next-door grocery, and I am presently contemplating said shaft as a means of possible escape. Not from poor Billy—whose bravery in the face of Tarzan has just about melted down the sides of that place in my chest where the heart’s supposed to lie—but from the nearby army of New York’s finest, who, I feel certain, await only a flicker of Tarzan’s eyelashes to storm the building in thunderbolts of moral righteousness.

Now, if I stand on the toilet, the pig might just fly. I’ve got the figure for it, thanks to poverty and cigarettes. On the other hand, who wants to die in a ventilation shaft?

You may be surprised to hear this, but when I first arrived on Manhattan Island two years ago, wearing my heart on my sleeve and ten additional pounds around my hips, I had never once sipped the nectar of juniper nor breathed the leaf of tobacco. It’s true! My dear mother had scraped and saved to send me to a nice Catholic school fifty miles away, and I’ll be damned if those nuns didn’t have their wicked way with me. A year of college didn’t improve matters, what with the Wagnerian dorm mother and the scarcity of men. So there I stood in the middle of Pennsylvania Station, in a hat and a sweet pink coat, clutching the tiny valise that contained my all, just like every starlet who’s ever set foot in her land of dreams, and I thought I had made a terrible mistake, that I would never belong in this sea of stink and vice, this hive of determined bees lining their cells with honey. And then I tasted the honey, honey, and I started to understand what New York City was all about. Hallelujah. I started to glimpse my place in the hive, how each tiny insect contributed her mite of pollen, how grand it was to live in a hive like this at all, even if your cell measured one inch square and lacked proper ventilation, even if you had to pawn your favorite shoes each month to pay the milkman for a quart of milk, even if—well, you get the idea. The point of Manhattan is that you occupy a cell in the hive at all. That you belong. That you have your seat at the Christopher Club bar, and that seat, if you’re clever, can propel you from a typing pool downtown to a swank party uptown to the front of a camera in a tatty Village studio, so any man with a nickel in his pocket can admire the tilt of your tits.

And I’ll be damned if I’m ready to give up my seat just yet.

I set one foot on the lid of the toilet. Brace my hand on the wall. Hoist my bones upward and upward to the hole in the ceiling, fill my lungs with the reek of sewage, and then, of course, comes the exact second the boots clamor down the hallway and the door flies open, and the powder room fills with gentlemen of blue suits and billy clubs, unamused by my predicament.