The Blondes (23 page)

Then I felt Moira’s fingers wrapping my wrist.

Across the circle was a baby in a posh-kid mini-adult outfit. She was climbing on the rim of Washington Square fountain. A few feet away, near an overturned stroller, the mother stood with arms stretched out, not as if she were reaching for her child, but as if she were keeping the blonde toddler away. Two tourists loaded with backpacks had stopped nearby. Stupid and happy, the woman fed the man blue liquid from a water bottle. At the edge of the fountain, the pale toddler began to screech.

Moira was pulling me away, hard.

“She
has it
,” Moira snapped. She jumped up and then over a concrete bench in spite of her high heels. I felt my stiff, injured knee jerk as she pulled me over it.

At a safe distance, we looked back. There was another high-pitched screech. The small blonde child had turned and run at the man with the backpack. We watched as little fingers clutched at his knees and teeth dug into the muscled white thigh below the hem of his shorts. The toddler’s dress exposed a pull-up diaper. The man stumbled about, exclaiming in another language, attempting to grasp and dislodge her. His girlfriend dropped her sports drink; as the man bent and thrashed, the camera that had been around his neck smashed to the concrete.

We both turned and ran out of the park, me galloping on my bad knee and Moira sprinting in her heels, her glockenspiel case clutched firmly across her chest.

When we slowed a block or so later, I begged for a rest, my chest heaving. But Moira said, “Let’s just get to the club.” She let the music case fall to her side, one fist wrapped around its handle. She brought her other hand up and used her delicate scarf to mop her brow.

“Your leg,” she said then, pointing.

There was blood on my jeans. I must have torn a stitch.

I asked Moira if she’d seen attacks before, but she didn’t answer. A cop car zoomed down the narrow side street past us, siren warbling, toward the park. It paused at the light, then surged on.

Moira acquiesced to my demand for rest, and then we continued on, but slowly.

“This is it,” Moira said finally. We were standing at the base of a flight of stone steps outside what looked like a house. It had the sign we were looking for. “It’s too early,” Moira said. “I always arrive for shows too early. It’s part of my process.” She sank down on one of the steps. There were other people sitting on the stairs as well, two guys, one a few steps up from her and one a few steps down. One was smoking, the other reading a book. Moira asked the reader if he knew what time the bar opened. He shook his head. I thought it was funny, that she had asked the one who was engrossed in something rather than the one who was just sitting there. Then I realized the guy she’d asked was probably better-looking.

We waited for half an hour. Moira pulled a compact from her purse and retouched her cover-up with a sponge. She closed the compact and said, “Damn.” She was staring at the building
across the street, but when I looked over at it, I couldn’t see anything remarkable. It was a red-brick tenement. I looked back at her.

“Now I don’t want to play,” she said.

I asked her again if the attack in the park was the first she’d seen.

She shook her head.

I thought about the backpack man, his gnawed knee, and whether men could be asymptomatic carriers. One of the reports I’d read had seemed ambiguous on that point. I asked Moira what she thought.

She pushed her hair back. “The women. I saw a whole ward of them down south. They have them all in one room and they strap them down.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I’m not. The sounds they make. They can tranquilize them, but—” She shuddered visibly, and the cords in her neck popped out. “My dad’s an administrator at a private hospital. It’s been pretty harrowing for him. That’s why I was down there.”

A group of politicians had walked through the hospital, legislators who wanted to see “the real face” of the disease, she said, an acid note in her usually calm voice.

She described a big room, with beds on either side, a post in the middle, and wicker chairs grouped around it, aiming toward the beds. “Like you’re going to sit down and have a heart-to-heart with someone in that situation,” she said. “Seriously, there was this grouping of chairs like you might find in a hotel lobby, and then there were these women tied
down. These raging animal noises on the one hand,” she said, “and then these chairs … I went only once, but I thought of those chairs when my dad told me about the politicians. I could just see them in their suits, sitting down and quietly observing, someone taking notes, some photographer snapping pictures.”

The smoker on the stair below us gave us a look. He had long ago butted out, and now he got up and loped off.

The victims were mostly women of privilege, old-money wives and trust-fund students, Moira said. Their husbands or fathers cried in the hallways and signed forms for any test the doctors asked for.

“Didn’t you worry about catching it?”

Moira tilted her curly head and threw her arms out as if daring me to look at her. “It isn’t airborne,” she said, staring unseeing at the building across the street again. “It’s spread through saliva and blood. That’s why they turn psychotic, like animals with rabies. If they go into a frenzy they’re more likely to bite or scratch someone and the infection can jump to a new host. A lot of them self-destruct before they can spread it because they’re just raging out, don’t know what they’re doing. A part of me thinks that’s a good thing … and that makes me feel sick.”

She said there was a code of secrecy among the rich. They called it “gone to the spa,” rather than telling people their wives or daughters were in danger. I said I couldn’t believe that. Moira just raised an eyebrow.

I said I didn’t know a lot of wealthy people—that academics
are just good at faking it. I asked her what happened to the women. Was it true that they eventually died?

“I don’t know,” she said, and she crossed her arms and put her head down on them in a way that told me not to ask any more about it.

We’d waited an hour when dusk settled on the sidewalks. The reader on the steps above us stood up; his friend had arrived. The two debated other bars before leaving.

Down the street a man whose back was to us shouted into a pay phone, “Nigga, if I say I got nothin’, it means I got
nothin’
, nigga. You ask around. There ain’t nothin’ to get. It don’t help that half the world’s closed down.”

“Oh god.” Annoyed, Moira said, “Let’s just go in.”

She got up, gathered up her things, and pulled on the bar’s door. It opened into an art centre. There was an office and ticket booth on the first floor, but they were empty. We went upstairs and looked around. A steel garage-style door was rolled down over the bar where Moira was performing. She had played there before, she said. She set the glockenspiel down outside the space, then turned and continued up to the third floor. I followed. Inside was a dance-and-theatre space with hardwood floors. Two women were fussing with costumes and hangers in the far corner. They looked up when we walked in.

“I’m playing at the bar downstairs. Do you know when it opens up?”

“Only about fifteen minutes before our events,” a woman holding a pink crinoline said. “Our event doesn’t start for another hour. Do they know you’re coming?”

“Maybe not. I’m an import,” Moira said.

The women gazed blankly at her.

“From out of town, but my show’s on the website,” Moira elaborated.

“Good for you,” the woman said, but it wasn’t meant to be congratulatory. She and her friend turned back to their costumes.

We exited and camped in front of the roll-down steel door on the second floor, inhaling wafts of urine cakes from the men’s toilet down the hall. I excused myself to use the women’s, and when I came back, Moira was peering into a closet off the hallway. It was full of beer cases.

“Empty?” I asked.

She pulled one from a carton and held it up. It was full. She let it slide back into the box with a papery thud. “Watch them walk in this minute,” she said with a laugh. She closed the closet door. “If they don’t show up though …”

There was one chair beside the corpse of a pay phone that had wires springing from its mouthpiece. Moira let me have the chair, my back to a large antique mirror. I didn’t argue. I rolled up my jeans and examined my knee. A stitch had popped, and the wound looked like a Cheshire cat grin. I had three stitches where I was supposed to have six. There’s a scar there now.

I remember Moira sat on the floor, cross-legged. The walls of the place were painted red and black. The hall was narrow and dark. If anyone had come in, we’d have startled them. Moira slipped one shoe off and rested her foot on top of her opposite jeaned thigh. Her toenails were painted blue-black.
I remember thinking how beautiful they were, how amazing it was she didn’t have any marks on her feet even though she wore impractical shoes, how nicely done the pedicure was, and how I’d never had one. Take this as a sign of the times, baby: a man had been mauled in front of us by a child who behaved like a rabid dog, and I was thinking about pedicures.

The start time for Moira’s show came and went, but neither the bar owners nor curious audience members showed. The steel door remained in its rolled-down state.

“That’s it for me,” Moira said at last, and slipped her shoe back on.

“You don’t think they’re opening?”

“I don’t think they’re opening for my show or the one upstairs. These days I don’t count on anything or anyone.”

She stood up, stuck her hand into the closet, and pulled out the same bottle she’d shown me earlier. Just the one. Then she looked at me and smiled, and grabbed another.

When Moira and I left New York the next morning in the rental car, it was like leaving the known world. She directed me as I drove through Manhattan, which, with her shouting out instructions, was not as difficult as you might imagine. It didn’t hurt that we were driving in the opposite direction to most people: out of Manhattan while everyone else was trying to get in. We got to New Jersey and were feeling triumphant, buzzing on caffeine, when we realized we’d taken a wrong turn and were off route.

We curved around and pulled in at a two-pump gas station. I put gas in the car and Moira went in to the station to use the bathroom and get directions.

When she came out she handed me a map and said, “Let’s go.” She got in the car and slammed the door.

I asked her if she’d paid.

“Absolutely. Let’s go.”

There was an urgency to her voice so I did what she said. This time, she didn’t bother to give me directions. I just drove back the way we’d come, hoping she’d pipe up if I was doing it wrong. We weren’t far down the road when she leaned her head back against the seat rest and gave a growl of frustration.

“What the hell happened back there?” I asked, slowing down.

“ ’Kay, pull over here,” she said, and gestured to the side of the road, where I parked us and put on my flashers. A car passed us but otherwise there wasn’t too much traffic. We were clearly still off-route.

“This woman in there is working the cash.” Moira turned toward me in the seat, her hands up, palms toward me as if she were waiting for a volleyball. “I ask her for directions and she says, ‘Who’s your friend out there? Is she naturally blonde? She looks like a blonde.’ And she’s peering out the window at you. I mean, she was a nasty woman.” Moira shuddered, her hands falling into her lap.

“Oh,” I said. “Well, that’s okay, Moira. I don’t mind.” I was about to put the car back into drive but she still seemed upset.

“It was just so rude. I said, ‘I just want directions to get
back on the highway.’ I get out my wallet to remind her that we’re buying gas, and she rings it up, but she just keeps watching you out that curtained window. She takes the money and I ask for the directions again, and she says, ‘I see you got New York plates. Why don’t you tell your friend to just turn around and go back there.’ ”

I tried to calm her down, but Moira was really upset. “You don’t understand,” she said. Her eyes were glassy. I told her the woman hadn’t said anything mean about her, she’d said it about
me
, and not to worry about it, not to let it spoil the day. So the woman was afraid of possible blondes. Everyone was afraid of blondes these days. I joked that my skin tone
was
the colour of veal.

“That’s not the point,” Moira insisted, but she unfolded the map and after a few minutes we found our route. We’d shot off-course by ten miles.

I gave Moira control of the stereo and she plugged in her iPod. I asked her questions about every song, partly because they were by bands I’d never heard of, and partly because when she talked, it seemed to help her forget the experience at the gas station.

We’d been back on the freeway for half an hour when Moira kicked off her pumps, slid her seat back, and put her toes up against the glovebox. That was when a car ahead of us veered into the divider. It scraped the concrete, left behind a stripe of paint, then bounced back across two lanes.

“Jesus!” I shrieked, and hit the brakes and pulled hard on the wheel, steering us into the lane the other vehicle had just vacated.

Moira flew forward, then back. Thank god her seat belt was on. The other car plunged off the right shoulder and through the grass down a low grade. I pulled into the right lane and slowed down. I felt like I’d done fifty sit-ups—my heart was racing that fast. But I’d done everything right and we were safe. I was still watching my speedometer and checking my rear-view. I couldn’t see the car that had gone off the road, but the vehicles behind us had slowed right down.

Even though we’d made it through, Moira was gasping and I could feel thin rivers running down the sides of my cheeks. I put on my turn signal, checked my rear-view, and pulled over.

With shaking hands, Moira dug through her purse and pulled out a package of cigarettes. She got out of the car, leaving the door wide open. She walked around the back and leaned against the trunk, shielding the cigarette from the breeze with one hand as she lit it. I scooched over, across the gearshift, to get out her side of the car because it was safer, and when I joined her against the trunk, her head was thrown back and she was peering off in the direction of the accident, holding the smoke in her lungs.