And he was all over her, suddenly. His brutish hands upon her caressing. There were endearments, You are the prettiest girl I ever seen. Never kissed any blond girl before, so pretty like you. His hands like sandpaper, like a hasp. The excesses of a Manhattan skyline, at this remove, like a Big Bang inconceivably past; a blanket had been thrown over something more perfect, of which the stars were an indication, perforations of night. What was the thing that endeared Gerry to her, back when he still endeared himself, and why were endearments of people she loved so inaccessible? Objects always stood in for what was missing, a certain slutty color of nail polish that he bought for her one Passover that she had never worn, but which she kept at hand. Objects were like orange traffic cones on the right shoulder of the highway of intimate relations. That’s why she was here on the roof, with a Hispanic boy in his late teens kissing her neck in a way that was sort of unpleasant now that she was thinking about it. It was hasty, not like the long, slow tentative daubs that Gerry favored.
— Hey she said. — Slow down, okay?
He was pushing down the strap of her silk blouse, trying to get at her breasts. Maybe it was romance, and maybe romance was exactly like the dance, maybe its gestures were that familiar, that immutable, even if everyone felt that they arrived at these gestures through their own impulsive ramble. Maybe the arabesques, the fouettes, the plies of dance could be superimposed on love; maybe these gestures of dancing were just love in a deconsecrated space. The way a certain brushing of lips against a cheek then led to a collision of pairs of lips, the way the lips then moved toward a nipple, it was as reliable as the movements of Ballets Russes. She tried to distract herself with terms of her childhood education, maître de ballet, port de bras. She tried to think of other possible interpretations for brutishness, until a terror started to swell in M. J. Powell. It started small, as discomfort, swelled into revulsion, and then assumed the actual size of terror, which is always one size larger than its container. Maybe terror is implicit in all anonymous sexual encounters. Maybe that’s what’s good about these encounters, maybe that’s what made degradation, when consensual, effective. But she felt nausea, a faintness. He turned her around a few times as if this were a child’s game. Which direction did she face? It was wet, on the roof; there were puddles from the last storm. There was the stench of wet towels.
— Not here, please, come on.
His manual circulations upon her became more urgent. Here, on her exposed shoulder, he romanced a certain mole. Her nipple, at the summit of a faintest incline, was now exposed to the air. His hips were fast against hers.
— I want to show you our place. I want to show you our gallery, she said, reaching for a sequence of words that might put a stop to it. He showed no indication of understanding the we implicit in our, that locution with which couples reinforced their reign over single persons.
— Stop, she said.
She pushed against him. He resisted. She pushed harder. He pushed back. She pulled away. He held on. She pushed again. He pulled away, holding on. He pushed back. She fell away. He held on. She pushed. He resisted. He pushed. She covered herself. She pulled away. She changed directions. He held on. She pushed against him. He resisted. She pushed. He resisted. She pushed, he resisted. And suddenly, disgustedly, he put a shoulder against her, the whole of his upper body, and she was free, and her liberty was foul. She bolted for the door at the far end of the roof. But before she could get there, there was a commotion behind her. A neglected attic closet of memory opened, forth came the image of a blanket, left from a picnic up in the north during a summer visit to the Green Mountains, a blanket, at dusk, aired on a laundry line, at night, disturbed by heavy wind. She was out with a friend, and behind them they saw it, the blanket, and its animus was expressed by the gust, a malevolent spirit that sent them, as girls, howling into the pantry, inconsolable. It was behind her, this very entity, tackling her now, and she was on her back. How horrible the words in the moment that they appeared in her mind, You are on your back, while another part of her noticed the masonry on the edge of the building. It needed attention. And there were car horns, in the distance; her hand dipped in the meniscus of a puddle; her own hyperventilations, sixteenth notes, remarkably constant. This was simply an arrangement of bodies she had once experienced, during an audition, nothing more, and just when her sorrow was beginning to accompany her terror, just when she was beginning to wonder what threat would be used to ensure silence, he whispered, Iain’t gonna hurt you, and she found, instead, that he was rolling over her, hefting her up, she went over onto her right side, and then onto him, and she was on top, and the first thing she did was slap him hard across the face, You already hurt me, you fuck, she said, and he did nothing, didn’t smile, didn’t speak, and then he took her hands, coinciding, she noticed, with an infrastructure of spotlights scintillating in the heavens on the Manhattan side of town, near the Maxwell House factory, where there had formerly been a robust, good-to-the-last-drop fog, all days, all times; he took her hands; he fitted them around his own throat, tightened his grip on her hands on his throat; there was no swiveling of hips, there was no grinding at her, there was no recognition, no sexual anything; only hands on her hands, and the tightening at his throat. She struggled to pull away, What are you doing? He struggled to keep her hands around himself, and his breathing became labored, if only she could see better in the dim light of the roof, she was murdering him, he was slipping away, and yet he was tightening the grip, Let me go, she angled her legs off of him, began to pull away again, Are you out of your mind? Looking up at her, plaintive. Suffocation of the earth, putrefaction of the land, foulness of marshes, reeds and egrets and muskrats and snappers all replaced by the even fouler rattus norvegicus to make this town of Hoboken, so cars could be stolen, substandard buildings constructed, bribes paid, drunks displaced, so bond traders could purchase their condominiums. Then she was off, heading for the door, racing for the door, expecting him to finish her off in the stairwell, to impale her through the heart on the diamond stylus of his stolen turntable, to fire the exploding bullet of his class war into the base of her skull. But when she tried to ascertain his whereabouts, he was gone, except for his voice, It’s your town now, calling after her, Your town now.