“You’re not like other people,” he said to me after a pause.
“But I think I am like other people in most ways.”
“No,” he said. “You can fly.”
I stared at him. “All I have to do is flap my wings, right?”
Paris nodded at me very slowly. “That’s it.” He didn’t smile and there was no irony in his face.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said.
“Often words have to sink in, you know, go underground for a while.”
A crowd had gathered at the bar, and I overheard a woman say, “I couldn’t take it anymore. He just went nuts, walking around the kitchen in his underwear talking to himself like I wasn’t there . . .” Doesn’t seem that serious, I thought to myself. Paris said nothing more about flying, but we talked on, and just before I was about to say goodbye, he asked me to go to Los Angeles with him for a month. He had the money to take me, no strings attached. My obligations in New York were minimal. I had three “crummy” jobs that would be easy to leave. At first I thought he was joking, but he wasn’t. I said no to him, and he seemed to accept the rejection in good humor. When we parted, he gave me one of those European kisses that don’t land. That night I lay in bed and thought about him, imagining his hotel somewhere in Beverly Hills, and in my mind it was a cliché of luxury: powder-blue walls, heavy curtains, and in the bathroom, the fixtures were gleaming brass. I slept deeply all night but just before I opened my eyes in the morning, I had a tiny dream or half-wakeful vision. A small brown sparrow flew right into my face.
• • •
In the middle of June I was robbed. It was a phantom robbery, as it turned out, because I had nothing to steal: no television, no stereo, no money hidden under the mattress. I didn’t even own a typewriter at that point. I came home to an open door, an open window, and a mess. That was all. I picked up my clothes and books and spent the money I had been saving for a dress on a police lock. A week later, a young architecture student named Louise Hartwig was raped in the elevator by a man wearing a ski mask on a ninety-degree day. The police questioned everyone in the building, but as far as I know, they never found the man who hurt her. She left the city. Her father came to get her things. I saw him carrying boxes of books out to a station wagon parked in front of the building. It must have been her father. She looked like him. I remember that when I passed him in the lobby, I studied his face briefly, expecting to see some sign of his suffering, but he seemed only tired.
Not long after the rape, I started wearing the suit. Ruth had never reclaimed it. It was one of those all-season weights, a very thin wool, which made it a little hot but bearable. After work I would change into this disguise and take the subway home. I wore the hat, too, tucking my hair underneath it. My cohorts at Rudy’s teased me about this new habit, but I had a reasonable explanation. “No one bothers me,” I would say. “In the dark, people think I’m a man.” I remember coming out of the toilet one night in the suit and meeting Izzy, another waitress. She put her hands on her hips and looked me up and down. “You’re looney, Iris,” she said. “Crazy, I mean it.” I walked past her. Then she called after me, “One weird chick!” I turned my head. “Isabel,” I said. “Stuff it up your ass.”
This remark, of absolutely no interest in itself, was extraordinary to me. I had never said those words before. The insult had come easily, naturally, and standing outside Rudy’s, I thought: It’s the suit. The clothes were more than armor. They transformed me. Another person had leapt forward and spoken. I pulled the fedora down close to my eyes, put my hands deep in my pockets, and started off down the street, whistling. I never whistled. I’m a new man, I thought to myself, and laughed out loud. My wandering began that same night and lasted all summer. I walked and walked, from one neighborhood to another, looking at everyone and everything, indulging myself in long stares. New York City is never quiet. There are corners of stillness, streets empty for minutes at a time, but then the peace ends. People chatter, sing, cry out. A rat runs into hiding. Once, I saw a man bring his car to a screeching stop and push a woman out the door. She was hysterical and pounded on the window, her voice hoarse from yelling. He drove away, and seeing him go, she clutched her belly like a person who had been punched, and then walked away, unsteady in her high heels. On my walks I witnessed many small scenes of love, hate, and indifference. My intention was to watch only, to keep myself at a distance, but this wasn’t always possible. A young woman approached me late on a Thursday night. Bleecker Street was crowded, and she came toward me. I guessed that she wanted directions, but she took my hand and said, “Do you know what she did?” “No,” I said. The girl was short and wore thick glasses. I noticed a gray shadow of dirt on her neck. “The horses,” she grunted. “The bitch stole the horses.” I moved backward, but she grabbed my forearm and dug her nails into my skin, snarling. “Right out of the barn.” I jerked my arm away from her and headed down the street fast, relieved that she didn’t pursue me. I understood then that confrontation was inevitable. It was the risk that came with every step I took, and though I didn’t want to court trouble, I grew more daring as time went on, stopping in bars I wouldn’t have entered alone in the past, striking up conversations with strangers I would have once avoided. People were mostly friendly and eager to talk. They told me their stories—long, rambling accounts of accidents and divorce, illness, death, money come and gone. But they didn’t ask me about myself and I volunteered no information. I was Iris, the roving ear, until one night when I answered a simple question.
Below Canal Street, I had discovered a pleasant bar, Magoo’s. I began to stop there immediately after work, eavesdropping while I drank one brandy. I had been there every night for a week, when the bartender leaned toward me and said, “What’s your name anyway?”
I liked him. He had always left me alone, had always been respectful. I had every reason to tell him the truth. I lied. “Klaus,” I said. “My name’s Klaus.”
“That’s a funny name for a girl,” he said. “German, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said. “It’s short for Klausina.”
He gave me a puzzled look.
“What’s your name?” I said.
“Mort.”
“That’s nice,” I said. “I like Mort.”
• • •
Klaus was born in a bar, my Klaus anyway. The brutal boy found his second incarnation in me, and as soon as I took his name, I knew that from then on, the nights belonged to Klaus. In fact, he had been around for some time. The lie was a kind of truth, a birth announcement of sorts. My answer to Mort catapulted the sleeping homunculus into the world, and he woke up, a man. It never could have happened in Webster. My hometown is too small. People talk. But in the city it was easy to change my name, to be someone else. I was just another character, and not even an outlandish one. No one challenged my name or my appearance. Nevertheless, I did have a few close calls. Once, I nearly ran headlong into a group of graduate students from Columbia on Broome Street, and another time, I fled Magoo’s when I saw a neighbor from 109th Street coming through the door. I was a regular at Magoo’s, had befriended Mort; Fat Eddie, who was rail thin; Elise, the waitress; and Dolly, a disheveled woman with long gray hair who drank vodka only. Dolly was the one I really liked. She beat me on the back a lot and said, “You’re a mixed-up kid, Klaus, but you’re a cracker.” To them I had confided a fictional life in bits and pieces, and the idea of being exposed was unbearable. When I saw Frank’s face in the doorway, I leapt from the barstool, made an excuse, pulled my hat down to hide my face, and, passing my neighbor, heaved myself out of the door.
In early August I cut off my hair. A barber did it for five dollars, and when I came out, my hair was no more than an inch long all over my head. The barber clicked his tongue in dismay throughout the procedure, but I didn’t look back. My new small head brought me a kind of steely satisfaction. I wasn’t beautiful, but it didn’t matter. The day of the haircut, I came home very late. After
work I had gone to Magoo’s and then to a strip joint called the Babydoll Lounge, where I often went to chat with one of the girls. Ramona went to business school during the day and stripped at night. Between shifts, she would often sit with me at the bar, wearing a little blue robe and her big glasses. She told me her dream was to open a toy store, and we spent time thinking up names for it. I liked the Purple Dog, but Ramona didn’t. Anyway, after I said goodbye to Ramona, I wandered for a couple of hours, and it must have been three o’clock by the time I returned to my apartment. The phone rang. I thought my father was dead. I picked up the receiver expecting to hear my mother’s voice. It was Paris.
“You scared me,” I said. “It’s so late.”
“I just had this feeling you weren’t asleep yet.”
“You were right. How was Los Angeles? You’re back, aren’t you?”
“I am.” He paused. “You would have liked it.”
“That’s very possible.”
“How are things?”
I felt an involuntary compression in my throat. “Okay.”
“Just okay?”
“Yes, just okay.”
“You’re not very talkative tonight, are you?”
“I’m tired.”
“I called because I have something to tell you. I went out with some friends last night, and someone mentioned you.”
“Oh?”
“He swore he saw you in some bar, a dive actually. He and some friends were ‘slumming,’ as the expression goes. I told him that seemed unlikely, but then he mentioned that you were wearing a suit and a hat. I remembered Halloween . . .”
I said nothing.
“Are you still there, Iris?”
“Yes.”
“Aren’t you going to tell me about it?”
“No.” My voice was even.
Paris spoke more softly. “You don’t have to, it’s all right. I have an idea. You know, when you didn’t come with me on the trip, I was disappointed, not so much for me but because I thought I might have been wrong about you, but then when Tony was describing you last night, it all came back to me.”
“I don’t know anyone named Tony.” I pressed the receiver into my ear.
“He met you once or saw you once. That was enough.”
I didn’t answer.
“Are you there, Klaus?”
I held my breath.
“Don’t worry,” he was saying. “Your secret is safe with me. I wouldn’t tell anyone. You’re doing it now, taking off . . .”
Very slowly and carefully I put the receiver down and then took the line out of the wall. When I undressed, I said to myself, It’s all over. It has to stop. The decision gave me some relief. Before I went to work the next day, I stood in front of my open closet eyeing the suit I had determined never to wear again. Then I grabbed it off the hanger and stuffed it into my bag as I had done every afternoon for weeks. I wasn’t ready. To hell with Paris.
• • •
August was the longest month of the summer. The heat made the city stink, and I smelled garbage everywhere, even in my apartment. My Bloomingdale’s job had come to an end, as had my work at the Y. I was left only with Rudy’s. The poverty I had managed all summer threatened to become unruly. I thought about money constantly and ransacked my apartment for lost change. I remember I found three dollars and fifty-eight cents. At work we were allowed a free meal. I gorged myself so that it would last. When I roamed at night, I took to drinking Coke instead of brandy and jumped the turnstiles in the subway to save the fare. I began to stay out later and later to put off returning to my sweltering rooms. When I was home, I unplugged the phone, dreading a call from Paris, or anyone else for that matter. On several nights I walked back to 109th Street, heading north in the wee hours, letting my thoughts go here and there. It was during these walks that I filled the blanks in Klaus Krüger’s life (I had given him his author’s last name)—working out his narrative very carefully, trying to get the dates to correspond to some historical reality. For me Klaus remained a young man, despite the fact that those who knew me as Klaus never mistook me for a boy. The gap between what I was forced to acknowledge to the world—namely, that I was a woman—and what I dreamed inwardly didn’t bother me. By becoming Klaus at night I had effectively blurred my gender. The suit, my clipped head and unadorned face altered the world’s view of who I was, and I became someone else through its eyes. I even spoke differently as Klaus. I was less hesitant, used more slang, and favored colorful verbs. The midwestern accent I had worked hard to lose returned during my nocturnal wanderings, something I still find odd. The voice just came. I made no effort, and because of this, I felt my speech was neither theater nor delusion, or at least no more than any other talk is. I was that boy. Where he came from, I didn’t know. Klaus had been constructed long ago in an underground place I couldn’t reach.
Then I began to suffer from what can be described as perverse impulses, brief but strong desires to do something irrational. They came only at night, and only when I was Klaus. At first they didn’t worry me. I’ve always been prone to terrible fantasies. Seeing a steep staircase, for example, instantly prompts a vision of falling. On a roof or balcony, I feel tempted to throw myself over the edge. But the wish and the act are miles apart. In Klaus that chasm shrank, and walking the streets at night, I began to feel perilously close to acting on some insane wish. Once when a man asked me for the time on Sixth Avenue, I spoke gibberish to him, the way children do when they pretend to speak Chinese. It was absurd, and I regretted it immediately. In his face I saw surprise and then a moment of fear before he hurried away. It was a warning to me, and I promised to keep myself in check. But only a couple of nights later, I passed a bum sleeping near a stoop on West End Avenue, and for no reason, I returned to examine him. His face and arms were covered with sores, his long hair lay in thick, matted sections on a filthy towel he was using as a pillow, and he stank. The smell that came from him was nauseating, horribly sweet, putrid. For a second I panicked, thinking he was dead, but I looked closely and saw his chest move evenly. I bent over him, holding my breath to shut out the stench. I stood up and felt it—a desire to kick him. It overwhelmed me. My body grew rigid and there was a tingling sensation in my foot. I remember I closed my eyes. I swayed from the waist. I forced myself to look at him again. He was abject, gruesome. Keep yourself away, I said. You’ll hurt him. And then I noticed his hand. He was curled up in the fetal position with one hand over his crotch. The protective gesture made me wince. I covered my open mouth. Then I took a dollar of my tip money and tucked it into his shirt pocket. He didn’t stir. The poor bastard would have slept through his own murder.
The nights enervated me. I would sleep all day, waking when it was time to go to work. I served the customers in a trance, waiting for eleven o’clock when it would start all over again. The joy I had felt in the beginning was over. The bars, the streets were a necessity now, a ritual that had to be performed. My life had shrunk, and when I thought of past events, when I talked to my parents on the phone, when I saw an acquaintance or fellow student on the street, all these things seemed to be from another lifetime. And I didn’t feel well. On several occasions I suffered dizzy spells and would sink to my knees in an effort to stay conscious. Their frequency upset me, and I wondered if I hadn’t contracted some rare brain disease or invisible cancer. Sometimes I imagined lumps growing on my body. Then one evening at work, I fainted, sending a tray of two chicken curry salads and a glass of Bordeaux crashing to the floor. When I came to, I was fired. Bob, the manager, was standing over me, his long face full of concern. He was sorry, he said, but I was obviously in bad shape and he was afraid this was the last straw. I was surprised. “The last straw?” I said. He pushed out his lips so the top one nearly touched his nose. I couldn’t interpret this facial expression. Then he put his hand on my shoulder and said in a low, apologetic voice, “There have been complaints.” That was August 21, 1979. I had twenty-seven dollars and change to last me until Col
umbia started on September fourth.
My days lost their shape. Order lapsed with the job, and an hour became impossibly long, a thing to be endured. I slept a lot and read in bits and pieces, and then with darkness I continued my roaming, seeking out the same places I had gone when I was working. But now there was no money. The bartenders let me drink water out of kindness or offered me a drink on the house. My stomach was giving me trouble, though, and nothing could soothe it. Walking made me overly tired and I was unsteady on my feet. Just a little longer, I said to myself. Hang in there until you get your stipend check. Then you’ll fix everything. But the university, only blocks away, had become an abstraction, and I no longer believed in it. I thought of Philosophy Hall, of my talks with Professor Rose, remembering his office like the detailed setting in a novel, which I could imagine perfectly but never really visit. You can’t go back there now, I said. Give it up.
The afternoon before it all blew up in my face, the telephone rang. The noise stunned me because I was sure the phone was unplugged. I must have forgotten to disconnect it when I called my parents, I thought. I answered it but heard nothing. Then I heard breathing. “Paris,” I said. “Is that you? Can you hear me?” There was no answer. I started screaming into the phone. “Leave me alone! This is no time for tricks, whoever you are! Can’t you understand that? I’m barely alive, do you hear me? I’m barely alive, so go away!” I heard a click. For a long time I sat on the floor shaking, hearing my own words again with astonishment. Did I really believe that? Maybe I had howled my guts out to some stranger who had dialed the wrong number. I unplugged the phone from the wall. When night came, I put on the suit pants and a T-shirt. I took the suit jacket over my arm. It was too hot to wear outside, but in the air-conditioned bars it was a necessity. I was headed for the Babydoll Lounge, where I hoped to find Ramona. When I arrived, she was there, stripping on the little platform across from the booths. She looked adorable with a ponytail and those glasses, removing her clothes with an ease and generosity I admired. Ramona smiled and waved at the spectators and seemed to enjoy herself, unlike the other stripper, a woman named Billie, who moved in a trance of narcissistic absorption, displaying her tight, athletic body without ever seeing us. Ramona nodded at me when I walked in, and the acknowledgment made me unusually happy. The music was something old and raucous, but it had melody and my spirits rose. I sat down and ordered a brandy, squandering two dollars I might have eaten with, but I threw the bills on the bar plus a tip without even looking at them. I was casual, easy, delighted with myself. Rita, an alcoholic regular who wept in her booze, brushed past me, and I smiled back at her broadly, genuinely glad to see her. The brandy lightened my head almost immediately, and I stared at the bottles behind the bar shining in the mirror. How beautiful they are, I thought. The world is more beautiful than you remember, and it’s cool in here. The good air, I said to myself, and put on my jacket. A policeman walked in and sat down beside me. I’d never seen him before, but Ed, the bartender, seemed to know him, and the two men instantly launched into a discussion about the New York Mets. The officer was young and chubby. The flesh around his middle bulged over his pants, tightening the blue cloth of his shirt near his gun. I stared at the weapon protruding beyond the roll of fat. I wondered if it was heavy. It was so close to me. My knee was within inches of it. I could have brushed it. Then I let my knee graze it. The man didn’t move. He was deep in conversation. I took another sip of brandy and looked down at the gun again. It sat firmly in the holster, an inanimate appendage, so peculiar I wanted to laugh, but it fascinated me too. What would it be like to hold it? Quickly I let my gaze move across the room. No one was looking at me. The urge was powerful. Turning on the barstool, I let my hand dangle near the gun, my fingers touching its handle. Still the officer made no sign. Should I take it out slowly, or pull it from him in one swift motion? I had no plans for the gun, no wish to fire it, no idea what to do with it once I had it. What I burned to do was simply take it. Then I gently wrapped my fingers around the gun and began to inch it out of the holster. The policeman lurched backward, clamping down on my wrist with his hand and swinging himself around suddenly so he faced me. “Crazy broad! What the fuck are you doing?” he yelled. He yanked my hand up in the air; his grip hurt. The bar was silent except for the music that continued to blare. Everyone looked at me. I saw Ramona, now still and unsmiling. She moved her lips soundlessly. I think she mouthed “Klaus.” Ed was gesturing fast. “What happened?” “She had my gun, for Christ’s sake!” I said nothing. There was more chatter, discussion. The policeman leaned over the bar, still holding my wrist away from him, but he loosened his grip on me. I pulled away hard and ran for the door. Someone grabbed my sleeve on the way out, but I ripped it away and went through the door, feeling the hot air come down on me like a weight. There were voices behind me. I heard the door close, then shouts for me to stop. I thought I heard Ramona call for me to come back. I tore down West Broadway to White Street, to Church, and then up to Canal, crossing in traffic and running around the corner at Grand, searching for a place to hide. On Wooster Street I ducked into a doorway. All was quiet. No one had bothered to follow me that far, but I didn’t move. Sitting down on the landing, I looked out into the deserted street. Nothing moved. Dead minutes. Then, as if by magic, a breeze blew up in the stillness, scattering some newspapers that sailed onto the sidewalk. I took off my jacket, observing the motion of my fingers as I laid them on my arm. This can’t be my hand, I thought, but the long, tiny bones were unmistakable. The familiarity came as a jolt, and then I heard someone call “Iris!” I looked down the street. It was my mother’s voice. But she isn’t in New York, I said to myself. You’re hearing things. My legs were stiff, and one foot hurt. Removing my sneaker, I saw a gash below my right ankle, but I couldn’t place the injury. I sat there for a while before I put the shoe back on and headed for the subway. I paid the fare with fifty cents I always carried in my sock and limped home from the 110th Street station.