Read Online Fresh Girls & Other Stories by Evelyn Lau - Free Book Online Page B

and humiliation and the rage that accompanies their passion. “Please,” she wants to whisper, digging her fingernails into this man’s arm, “make them go away, make them not real.” But the man in the bedroom closes his eyes, he is making love to her between her legs, unaware that she is sweating from the pain of the men around her. Sweat runs from her temples into her open eyes. She tries to count backwards from one hundred: ninety-nine, ninety-eight, make it stop. The man thinks she is finally feeling pleasure, he is happy, he is smiling so hard she can see his teeth, he too tries to count so he can make it last longer for her: ninety-nine, ninety-eight … it goes on for too long, for too long she hears the men scream.
    But then it does end. He rolls off her body and stares at her for a moment, his eyes large-pupilled in the candlelight. He lies back with his arms folded behind his head on the bank of white pillows. “Jane,” he says, “I think you should leave now.”
    She drowses all the way home in the taxi, which takes her over the bridge and into the city with its halogen and neon lights alive. The night air is thick as a hangover in her mouth. She sprawls across the back seat, no longer caring about her exposing miniskirt or the driver’scontemptuous stare in the rearview mirror. Across the water the man in his apartment goes to sleep in his white bed.
    Jane huddles inside her jacket, her fingers brushing the fifty-dollar bills wedged in a rectangle in her pocket. The downtown streets run together outside, blue and glimmering — storefronts, restaurants, clubs. She leans her forehead against the window, watching beneath her drooping lids the occasional couple sauntering down the street, bits of conversation and a few shrieks of laughter carried to her on the chill wind. Between the waves of nausea it occurs to her that certain things, things that once seemed so possible, are becoming less and less likely with each passing night.

THE OLD MAN
              A n old man lives across from a restaurant in a neighborhood of art galleries, picture-frame stores, and bookshops. I visit him every other night of the week, at the hour when most families are sitting down to dinner. He watches me pull up the street in a cab whose headlights aim low down the center of the road. Because the interior is dark, he can seldom make out my profile in the back seat, but he knows who it is. He is already waiting with his door open.
    Across the street the sign of the restaurant flashes above a panel of stained-glass windows. Usually there are customers entering or leaving, so that the door seems perpetually half-open, and I hear the clink ofglasses on trays and glimpse the white jackets the waiters wear. I have never been inside this place, so I do not know if the bursts of laughter come from intimate tables lined against the wall, or from men sitting on barstools with women in short aprons weaving around them, or from round tables of couples and friends. As I leave the cab and turn my back on the restaurant, I hear the tap of women’s heels on the cement steps, names being called, and car doors slamming in the dusk.
    But I never linger because the old man is waiting. Quickly I step onto the curb and walk across the grass that borders the sidewalk. The stiletto heels of my shoes sharply echo the sounds the restaurant-going women make as I approach the stairs of the building.
    As always, the old man is half in shadow and half in light, leaning against the heavy steel door with one shoulder. A triangle of yellow light leaks out from above him and onto the top step. His face is white and retired; he wears a halo of snowy hair that smells of a shampoo with alcohol high on its list of chemicals.
    “Barbie,” he says. Some nights he calls me Lolita. Or even Cuddles, because he thinks I like to hug him. He is still in the process of naming me; he hasn’t found the name that suits me best, he says.
    We kiss, and he stops