The Family Unit and Other Fantasies (18 page)

“Come on,” he said. “This way.”

Holding her hand again, he weaved expertly through an onslaught of other people as if he was a white water rafter and they the waves, or some other image from “a little upstate” she clutched to keep calm. In truth, there was nothing from the natural world about what he did: he was more like a video game player entering and acing an invented environment, evading all enemies, and since she had never played before, what had been trust became total and utter dependence—she could not make a move without him.

They passed a table where police were opening and examining the bags of commuters, supposedly at random but really targeting young and attractive women. Allie heard her companion scoff, seeing this—saying “right” with a special spitting take on the “t”—before tugging her hand harder.

“Down here,” he said, and they went—it was possible!—even lower.

Descending to the next level, Allie again held onto his belt, but this time she intentionally dipped her fingers over it and onto him, curling them so she’d rub against and feel his hair, scratching him a little when she did in a way that could have been deliberate or not, he’d never know. How could she not want to become closer to him when he was all she had and without him she was literally lost?

Soon they had no choice but be inseparable, for there was no room at the base of the stairs to edge apart. So many people waited for a train to come down the track that they milled in a giant mass, stuck together with sweat and the stink of themselves. Her front pressed against the boy’s back, and since he wore a white T-shirt, too, it was as if she had partly disappeared into him, like the invisible man does into things in other, older movies.

If something exploded now, there would be no saving anyone; each person would be propelled into and annihilate his neighbour. But Sari knew it was nonsense and there was nothing to worry about. He remained almost dry on the damp platform; she noticed it when, with absolute ease, he brought her arm around him onto his stomach and held her hand there, and her heart beat so powerfully she was sure he must have felt it: they were so connected now her heart was pumping into his.

Then, from a distance, the track was illuminated. They all stirred, like refugees hit by a spotlight, their emotions ranging from anticipation to relief to fear. The ground started rumbling and Allie suddenly held the boy’s hand tighter, her fingers wrapping around his palm.

“Here we go,” he said.

The sound grew louder, the light became brighter; it seemed as if the station itself was about to erupt, no bombs were even needed. Then the rumble was joined by a shriek of gears that hurt her ears and what seemed a hysterical, high-pitched, mechanical scream from a new gizmo that could feel and express pain. Allie saw the “R” of the train cab come at and pass her, blowing up her hair, the letter seeming to stand for someplace mysterious, a final destination far in the future where there were only letters and no names. The train lasted forever before it finally stopped, the doors opened, and there was no turning back.

Allie saw that inside there was already no room. Each seat was filled and riders jammed the aisles, pressed together in brightly coloured summer clothes like the roasted peppers in that unopened jar in her mother’s kitchen. Allie imagined it was impossible each had enough air, but what was there was cool and that was something, a seductive reason to get
on and stay.

And they did get on, all of them—even if someone had wanted to walk away, he couldn’t, there was no way out. Allie felt the new people must make the train bulge out from its sides, as in a cartoon—but, amazingly, it maintained its shape as they added to what could not be increased.

She and the boy managed to make it to—or merely were rammed toward—a middle pole, which Allie grabbed onto as if it were a floating relic of a shipwreck that kept her from being swept away. She wrapped herself around it and, from behind, the boy wrapped around her, and Allie felt this was the last place they would ever be—they could never leave and would have to live there.

They waited for what seemed an unbearably long time, the cool air slowly being diluted and polluted by the hot air from the platform, which seeped in like poison and threatened their survival. Then, after the almost comical ding-dong of a make-believe bell, the doors coughed and stuttered and finally closed.

Their savage peeling into the dark of the tunnel made her cry out, once, weakly, not sure she made a sound. But since Sari had promised, she was certain it was no longer death they were racing to find, and her freedom from fear was like discovering a second, braver self, and it was thrilling in a new and startling way.

As they left any recognizable place and were imprisoned at high speed in a tube, Allie’s cries grew louder, became a kind of moan, and she scanned the signs overhead that told her of the system’s origins, to centre herself somewhere, anywhere, in space.

It was then that she became aware of the hands at her side and felt one hand, his hand, moving slowly and determinedly beneath her short denim skirt with the sparkly studs she thought so cute until it reached the rose (was that what it was?) that bridged her thighs.

“I want to hold all your flowers,” he whispered, and then his other hand moved to encircle and squeeze her right breast, the cup of the bra covered by its own bud. (He
had
seen her! How had it happened without his even sneaking a peek? Was it a bizarre gift all boys had or had he merely looked so cleverly he hadn’t been caught?) Then he kissed gently at her neck and said, almost with sorrow, “I wish I had a hundred hands to hold all your flowers,” and his fingers moved under her panties as if burrowing to the place from which the rose had grown.

He put one, then two, then three fingers inside her, and Allie was ashamed and grateful that she was growing wet. She moaned more and—never having done this before, darkness all around her, her death no longer imminent—moved her hand down amid all the other hands to press him in deeper. Then she got so wet his fingers fell in to their knuckles and he caught her nipple between the first and second fingers of his other hand, as if he were using a soft pair of scissors to snip it or something. She couldn’t think straight; it was all connected—the flower—like she and the boy were connected, and she leaned her head back so her cheek was on his, and she came, which only ever happened to her when she was alone, using that old embroidered pillow her parents had given her as a tenth birthday gift.

“This stop is Times Square,” someone who wasn’t real announced.

It was every man for himself now—no more of one mind, some in the car struck out on their own, showing little concern for those who stayed behind, indeed using their arms and legs as springboards or stepladders to get out the door. Disentangling from each other, Allie and Sari were soon among this exiting and unsentimental group, though Allie whispered “Excuse me” to a woman she practically jabbed unconscious with her elbow, a courtesy attributable to a country upbringing not yet as far behind her as Union Square.

“Let’s go uptown,” the boy said.

Soon there was a new platform and more new people—would she ever see the same face twice in New York, Allie wondered? (In her own town, even the guy at the gas station remembered she’d been a colicky child.) Well, of course you would: she had seen the boy again, as clear as if she’d conjured him; if she’d hadn’t so desired, he would have disappeared. This was another truth about the city: you could work your will on it just as it did a job on you. If it called an alert, you could become awake in your own way; it was a contest of wills that anyone could enter, even Allie.

Now it was as if the boy and she were starting something over—was it their lives? As big as that?—because the new train they fought to board was numbered 1, the first of its kind. It was just as jammed, and they quickly laid claim to the same centre pole, the way an old couple always had the same seats in the movie theatre back home and resented you irrationally if you had the temerity to sit there.

This time, from behind, he hung his hands off the belt of her skirt, the sides of his thin arms brushing her breasts and even flexing a little, so she’d feel it. This time, as they took off, she felt the erection in his jeans up against her behind, half-exposed in her tilted and distorted panties, still not fully fixed from the last time. He used it to push open her cheeks the way he’d barrelled by people in the crowd; it felt fatter than the only other one she’d felt, the one of her ex-boyfriend—what was his name—and she tensed her ass around it, something she’d never done before and yet knew immediately how to do. He moved slowly up and down against her opening, and then suddenly he stopped moving and his arm wrapped tightly around her waist and he kissed into her hair and whispered, “Oh, no, not here.” Allie felt sorry she had forced something from him, a promise or a story from his past, except she suspected he really was going to share it with her anyway, and only wanted her to think she’d convinced him to—she was that sophisticated now.

After standing there utterly unconscious, Allie looked up. For the first time, she was aware of someone watching her, from only inches away. It was a middle-aged man in a business suit with a ferrety face and five o’clock shadow. Allie was immediately prepared for his disapproval—and she couldn’t look away, as if not allowed to not wait for it—but instead he stared back with a mixture of desire and disgust so strong that it startled her. She had never been aware of provoking such intense feelings in someone (though she had, in the very guy from the gas station who’d seen her grow up, though he never stood so close—that was another difference in the city). Allie stared back to confirm and then truly understand what she had inspired. But her comprehension was cut short by their arrival in a station she had not even known they were approaching.

“72
nd
Street,” an unseen robot woman said.

They raced across the platform to the 2 train—child of the first, look what they had created!—and, as far as they were concerned now, the more crowded the better. For a change, they sat down, covered by a curtain of people, and he had one hand under her and the other around her. His feeling and fingering of her was so intense she felt it caused the train to blast by stations, as if the subway itself was staring at them and lost its place, as Allie herself had, so far from home. Then she noticed the word “Express” where the train’s number was and knew that meant they had been matching its momentum and not it their own. To muffle her moans, she pushed her tongue into the boy’s ear—another new experience—and it tasted nasty like everything adult did, she figured, before you learned to like it.

They got off at 125
th
Street, a stop actually and improbably outside. The crowds were sparser and the boy seemed in no more hurry to catch another ride. Instead, holding her hand as gently as a child, he guided her slowly to an escalator so long it looked like something out of that song “Stairway to Heaven” Dan had droned along with, except this one led oddly up
to Earth, which turned out to be a street hiding shyly beneath an elevated track.

The boy brought her to a brownstone, the bottom floor of which held a Spanish restaurant. The tasty smell of cooked bananas followed them up the stairs until they climbed so high they lost it and stopped at the top.

His apartment had two or three rooms and, though they were alone in it, Allie could tell there were other inhabitants, that maybe he still lived with his family, too. She hoped so, for this would link them more.

In the kitchen, which had a bathtub, he gave her a glass of water but he was kissing her before she could finish it. His own room had just a bed and a TV and a few self-help books on shelves. He mumbled something about his mother having gone to work; it was around five and, if she had just gone and was not now coming home . . . but before she could ask or he offer anything else, he was on his knees, raising her skirt, kissing lightly between her legs then licking at the rose itself before, nearly begging her, he took off her underwear altogether.

It was different from how it had been on the trains—they were alone, obviously, and less hot because a breeze blew in from the window—yet she still had a sense of their subverting other people’s desires, maybe just his mother’s now and not the whole city’s. And it was different from the other time for her—there were no TV ads in the background, no sounds at all except an occasional car horn passing or a car radio playing salsa—and it was not as fast as the first time: as he completely undressed and touched and kissed her all over, she felt everything he intended her to feel; when she reciprocated it was not out of resentful obligation as before but with a sense that getting and giving were now the same thing, a new idea she could not completely explain, even to herself.

She whispered “Wow” when she finally found him in her hand, almost unnerved by how much there was and how complicated it seemed. There were so many lines and streams and little dots like stars upon him, as if he had his own transportation system and was so big the map of it was magnified, she could find her way around it easily: she was surprised by how much more excited she was about this penis than the last one.

He fought a condom onto himself and she helped him do it, gingerly, not wanting to hurt him, but she did anyway, when the rubber got caught in the hairs at the base and he had to pull each one out individually, wincing the whole way.

Then, it was funny; both were wearing nothing but gold chains. Allie’s said “Allie” and his said “Tony”—it was his real name at last; she read it the instant he entered her, as if she really only knew him then, and she said his name and kept saying it each time he pushed inside, expanding her knowledge of the world. He came a second
after
she did, he actually had that ability—it was incredible—and Allie thought (typically for her, for she was still the same girl) he was one of the very few and maybe the only person on Earth who did.

Then he turned her over on her belly and straddled her and whispered, as an apology, “I have to do this,” as if it was a secret no one else could ever know. He didn’t enter but only adorned her, and his sweat and other bodily liquids lacquered her, and she felt enjoyed to the last drop like that turkey on Thanksgiving everybody liked so much—so little had been left of it, and that’s what she wanted, too: to disappear for his pleasure, leaving only bits of skin behind; he’d need a new one of her next year.