Colin Harrison - Afterburn

Christina wished her own mother had been as kind-not a chance. It appeared, in fact, that Melissa, dutiful and concerned, had heeded her mother's wishes. Slitting open one of Melissa's bank statements, Christina could see that Melissa had withdrawn three thousand dollars from her checking account six weeks prior, at the end of July, and that the checking account had registered no activity after then. The account still had eight thousand dollars in it-clearly Melissa W. was as level-headed as her mother said she was. It occurred to Christina that she could walk into a bank with the bank account number and attempt a withdrawal, even without identification as Melissa. But she didn't want to take money from another woman. Besides, men were happy to leak money on women. It was a form of urination or even ejaculation, depending on the amount involved. No, she had no desire to swindle Melissa's money from her, but she did suddenly and happily wish-as if having found a secret friend-to ingest all the stuff in the three musty boxes.

Let's see what Melissa was doing while I was in prison, she thought. Melissa W. had frequented the Angelika Theater on Houston Street; she had received an abortion with no complications in April of 1997; she had subscribed to The New York Times for five months; she had served as a juror for a civil trial; she had registered as a Democrat; she had given money to the National Coalition for the Homeless; she put little Xs on her calendar when she got her period, which was utterly regular until and after the month of the abortion; she had read through the works of Marguerite Duras; according to a sequence of photos, she'd had her hair permed; she had enjoyed a lengthy affair with a divorced filmmaker who ate lunch every day at the Union Square Cafe; she had subsequently received an AIDS test, which was negative; she had witnessed a bicycle messenger be killed by a city bus and composed a notarized summary of what she had seen for a city agency; she had donated blood three times; she had written her company's president and received a raise; in short, Melissa Williams was a hardworking, independent, and reasonably happy young woman who had left town precipitously and who planned, sooner or later, to come back. Her time in New York City, thought Christina, was probably no better or worse than the years I would have experienced if-if what? If she had not spent the night before a big high-school swim meet drinking with her girlfriends. If she had, the next day, finished second and not third in the one-hundred-meter backstroke of Pennsylvania's regional championships, thus missing a swimming scholarship to Stanford, her first choice. If she had not picked Columbia instead. If she had not slept with her religion professor in the fall of her junior year and, having suddenly been dumped by him, gone out one night and seen Rick at the bar of the Pierre Hotel (he'd been wearing a suit and a great tie, and after three drinks, she was more or less ready to climb the Empire State Building). And if she hadn't found Rick so alien and fascinating and the best lover a girl could ever dream of, then she would not have put up with his bullshit machismo or started helping him with his stolen-goods operation. If she had not realized that Tony Verducci was using Rick and her for his own ends on the last job. If she had not figured out how to outsmart Tony Verducci-if, if a lot of things.

The last item she found in the box was a tube of lipstick. She pulled off the cap and discovered to her delight that the wine-red color was absolutely perfect, and she went into the bathroom and put it on. Thank you, Melissa W., she whispered into the mirror, for you know not what you have given me. Now she had lipstick, a dress, the pumps. In the dresser lay her one decent pair of pantyhose, the black mail-order bra that fit well enough, a pair of matching black panties, a cheap little handbag with the inside lining torn, and some of Mazy's prison perfume. She would look-well, she wouldn't look great, but she also wouldn't look like someone who'd woken up in Rikers that morning. In the handbag she put her hairbrush, two of Melissa Williams's condoms, the perfume, the lipstick, forty-three of her remaining sixty-three dollars (wedging the last twenty-dollar bill under the wooden slat of her bed in case anyone came in while she was gone), and her new keys. Then she went downstairs and stepped out into the street, as free as she had ever been.

Six hours later she lay in darkness seventy blocks uptown and thirty stories above the street, and having endured all manner of comments, solicitations, come-ons, gestures, jokes, offhand remarks, earnest questions, unasked-for confessions, and, finally, a sequence of stiff drinks that became a rather nice swordfish dinner, she remembered an old trick and slipped her fingers down between her legs, felt the guy's penis, and made a tight circle around it.

"Oh, wow," he moaned, his breath full of vodka and nachos and some kind of hazelnut liqueur they had shared that was just about the best thing she had ever tasted. He was a boy, really. Twenty-five, maybe. The bars of the Upper West Side were full of boys, boys in suits. He didn't know anything about fucking, that was sure-or what she remembered of it. He had climbed and clawed and writhed around on top of her, never settling into the kind of long hypnotic driving that she remembered-remembered Rick for, unfortunately. As far as this guy was concerned, the sex was about him, not about her. But that didn't matter now-it was time to finish. She squeezed her fingers and whispered the absolutely dirtiest thing she could think of into his ear-it was a little exciting-and he grunted in fervor and came dramatically, banging at her in self-congratulatory frenzy, the stubble of his chin brushing her forehead. Then, as if gored by an ax-swinging assailant, he toppled off her and fell onto the sheets. She rubbed the guy's head. He wasn't so bad, just too young, really, didn't know anything. Too young to protect her from Tony Verducci.

"I'm going to pee," she whispered.

"Yass, 'kay."

She stood in the bathroom examining her breasts in the mirror. They might have fallen a little while she was in prison. Just a tiny bit. Her nipples were swollen from the guy's mouth, her neck blotchy where he'd snuffled Mazy's perfume. She opened his medicine cabinet, didn't see anything in there interesting, except some kind of toothpaste that made your teeth whiter. I started the day in prison and now I'm naked in some guy's bathroom, she thought. That was something. What exactly, she wasn't sure. She sat on the toilet. The next part was not good, but she had to do it. The guy had bragged to her that he had earned three hundred thousand dollars last year, including his bonus, so, from a Marxian perspective, her crime was merely going to be a redistribution of capital to one who didn't have it.

She flushed the toilet and tiptoed back into the bedroom. He was on his back, Melissa Williams's condom still on him, a droopy hat. A good thing, too-her mother always said the two of them, mother and daughter, were "built the same," which meant Christina could get pregnant if a boy "went by in his underwear." Amazing that she'd never gotten pregnant with Rick, considering. Now she watched the guy roll over. He was good-looking, like an underwear ad, but she'd felt nothing, despite grinding herself against him while straddling on top. Not even close to an orgasm. Why? She used to have jillions of them. But now she was out of practice and had been a little nervous. Also, he had been clumsy, too slow sometimes, too fast others. The whole thing was like a bad ride at the amusement park-looked fun beforehand, but you were glad when it was over. He had no clue who she was. Thought she was a graduate student in history.

"Hey, urban professional guy."

"Yeah-ahh?"

"You okay?"