“Thank you,” Angela smiled. Untouched.
“Thank me all you want.” The dark woman wouldn’t let up. “Crap is still crap.”
Despite the evidence of his eyes and ears, he’d still thought she might need some comforting after that, so he spoke to her for the first time after class.
“Don’t worry about her,” he’d said. “She’s just mad because she can’t write like you.”
“Oh, her.” Angela smiled sweetly. “She’s just mad because I wouldn’t fuck her.”
Her laugh, a throaty giggle, made him feel like something was coming untied inside him. Her skin was soft white, her features, small and delicate like a Victorian doll, did not go with the black leather biker jacket with its unfriendly arsenal of zippers and the single earring that dangled over her soft cheek like a little scimitar. He knew that if the point pressed too hard there would be a single drop of blood that would look almost black against that white cheek.
They began going out for drinks after every workshop, to the dark little bars she knew on the scrambled downtown streets he still had trouble figuring out. Walking past all the lighted windows with people eating and drinking and talking inside, he used to imagine he was being shown a series of beautifully lighted tableaux he could make his own if he wanted to. Now he was part of one of those couples in one of those lighted windows, and he thought of the young man or woman outside, newly arrived in the city, walking by and looking in – what would they see? A man, still young, leaning across a booth toward an ageless-looking woman in flowered silks and black leather, hanging onto her every word, struggling to make his own equal to hers.
When she talked about fucking it confused him. Women fucking women. He did not understand how that was supposed to work. Did they use something? Angela laughed. “I thought that’s what all men liked to see – two women together.”
He had seen it, of course, in magazines and videos, but most of it did not move him and he’d fast-forward through those scenes to get to something he could recognize.
“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s kind of like watching a woman make love to a mirror.”
“So,” she said. “One woman is just like any other woman?”
“No,” he said, quickly, “I mean – I’m talking about that stuff in magazines and films. You know.”
“So,” she said. “You need to see a man.”
“Sure.” Then, quickly, “With a woman.”
“Not by himself?”
He realized he’d never seen that, and he said so. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen that.”
“Of course you haven’t,” she said, “You see plenty of women by themselves, but never men, because the men who make those films think straight men don’t want to see that. They don’t even care if a woman might want to see it.”
“What about you?” he said. “Would you like to see it?” He was drunk now, by God.
“Honey, please.” She smiled, reaching into her purse. “I’ve seen it.”
While she talked he was aware of her digging around in her purse. Cigarettes, he thought, until he saw smoke from the one she already had burning in the ashtray. He glanced back down in time to see her withdraw the hypodermic needle from her soft white forearm and slip it discreetly inside the slim, cream-coloured plastic case and close it with a pop.
“So,” she said, quietly. “Does this bother you?”
“No. I mean – why should it?” He didn’t think his face showed any alarm but when he looked into her eyes he knew he was caught.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Why should it?” He couldn’t tell if she was angry with him, then she smiled her sweet smile again and he wondered if what she’d just put in her arm was already working on her. “It does bother you.”
“No.” He couldn’t get rid of the lie – he’d been raised to lie where other people’s feelings were concerned. “It’s just – I guess I’m just not used to seeing that.”
“You will be,” she said, taking a sip of her martini. He felt a conspiratorial energy surge across the space between them.
“I don’t think I could ever do that. Not with a needle, anyway.” More than anything, he didn’t want her to think that he was afraid of it – or of her. He leaned across the table and half-whispered, “Can you toot it?”
She stared at him over the rim of her glass, eyes wide and unbelieving. “Toot it?”
“Yeah, you know.” He put a finger over one nostril and sniffed. She stared for a moment longer, then laughed a wild, undignified laugh he’d never heard from her before and covered her mouth with the back of her hand.
“Sure, John, we’re all junkies here in New York.” Then she told him. “It’s insulin.”
The shame hit him so hard that he went blind for a moment – wasn’t that what happened to diabetics? “I’m sorry…” he said.
“Don’t be,” she said, still laughing a little. “Maybe I should try it that way.”
If he could have made himself disappear into the ground he would have done it. Instead, he sat with his eyes shut tight, unable to look at her.
“John,” he heard her say, “Open your eyes.”
He heard something low and musical like a challenge in her voice, and thought, Kiss me. Then he felt cold liquid running in all directions down his scalp, through his hair and into his collar. He opened his eyes and saw her smiling at him, his empty gimlet glass still in her hand, then the big manager who was suddenly standing over them, frowning.
“It’s all right.” Angela smiled graciously up at the big man. “We were just going.”
For the rest of the evening, whenever he heard her rattling around in her purse he kept his eyes trained on her face and would not look down until he heard the pop of the syringe going back into its plastic case.
“I’m sorry, you can’t do that here.”
John looked up and saw their waitress looking down at the space on the floor between their table and her feet.
“What do you mean?” Angela said – quietly, but with an unmistakable edge.
“That,” the woman said, thrusting her chin toward the hypodermic needle in Angela’s hand.
“This is insulin. I’m a diabetic.”
“I know what it is,” the young woman said, “But you can’t do that here. You’ll have to go somewhere else.”
“Like where? Where do you think I should go?” Angela’s smile, her voice stayed calm. “Would you like me to go into the restroom? In the toilet stall? Maybe out back in the alley?”
John saw the waitress stiffen. She was getting more than she’d probably bargained for – John almost felt sorry for her. She made one last attempt. “My boss says you can’t do that here.”
“Listen,” Angela said, “you tell your boss to show me the law that says I can’t do this here.”
John watched the young woman walk away and huddle by the bar with a big man in a stretch green sport shirt. “You were pretty tough,” John said, admiringly.
“She’s just doing what that asshole is telling her to do.” John saw the man point his finger at them, talking faster, the young woman looking down and shaking her head.
“Is there a law?” John asked.
“They don’t want me to stop because it’s illegal. They want me to stop because they don’t like seeing needles.” Angela lit a cigarette and frowned against the smoke that curled around her eyes. “If I have to see it every day, they can see it once in a while.”
They had many things in common, he was finding. They had both suffered at the hands of men. She in a different way than him, but also not different, he thought, not so different at all. Neither of them had been raped, exactly, but both had got caught in something that had gone too far. He thought of the common phrase he’d heard in discussions of rape, that when sex becomes violent it’s no longer sex, and he wondered if the inverse was true, that when violence becomes sexual, is it no longer violence?