Blind Date

  Gibby’s face is bruised and pale, her glasses have been knocked off. There are red marks on her white robe. Does Gibby have her period? He can’t remember. There was a time, he recalls, just after they became lovers, when she couldn’t bring herself even to talk about it. She was ashamed of her body, ashamed of going to the bathroom, too shy to show affection, too proud to ask for it. But that is all past now. She has learned to give generously of herself. Her body is free; she is not afraid to receive pleasure or to give it. Their love has survived its harsh beginnings: they are finished prompting each other with hard drugs; at last they are at ease together.

  Gibby is shaking and crying. The girl behind her swings her hand down and, pitching forward, stabs her; the red marks on Gibby’s robe grow larger and blood is streaking down her legs. Gibby is falling down the stairs. She crashes against the railing, then gets up and tries to run, but she falls again. The long knife is flashing in the girl’s hand. She brings it close to Gibby’s neck to show she is ready to slash her throat. The redness spreads all over Gibby’s robe.

  Woytek hears Gibby offering the girl money and credit cards. He hears the girl’s cackling laughter. She says she does not want Gibby’s paper and plastic.

  “Gibby, run!” he shouts, his voice tearing through his body as the pain mounts in his chest.

  Spinning violently, the girl beside him rams him with her knife again. It sinks deep into his groin. There is so little time left, he thinks, howling. He closes his eyes, pretending to faint. Gibby should try to bluff her way out. She should tell the attackers who she is — they must have seen her name in thick bold letters on cans in every supermarket they’ve ever been to. She should tell them they can gain nothing by killing her; she is rich, among the richest in this rich land, and she can give them money if they will let her go. She should tell them who she is, tell them about her money. Anything to stop them. He thinks of shouting all this at them himself, but his mind is tired, clutching at the thought: one wrong phrase and Gibby may again think he’s trying to use her money to pay off other people. He is growing confused: his thoughts drift back and forth from his native tongue to English; he cannot anchor them in one language or the other. As he writhes, he feels the rope loosening on his wrists. He has one chance only; he waits for the appropriate moment to make his move. He keeps his eyes closed, even when he hears the screams of Sharon and Jay and the sounds of a scuffle. He hears the man with the gun order one of the girls to keep watch outside. He hears Gibby scream again, then Sharon pleading for her baby. Jay yells for Sharon and Gibby to get out if they can.

  Woytek finally looks. He sees Gibby tied to a chair. Sharon and Jay are tied together, lying on the floor. Jay’s entire face is a red raw mass, yet he struggles free of his ropes and manages to get up, when the man points the gun at him. A shot explodes. Jay’s head lolls to one side, his knees bend, he slumps lower and lower, silent, shrinking into himself, his neck squeezed between his shoulders, a froth of blood on his mouth. Gibby and Sharon shriek. Jay’s body folds into the pool of blood and does not move.

  The man plays with his gun and smiles. He threatens to shoot the rest of them if they are not quiet. Then he and the girl who has been guarding Woytek ponder aloud whether to shoot him; they decide to save the bullets for later. The man points at Woytek and says to the girl, “The big pig is yours. Finish him off.” He strides over to Sharon and Gibby.

  The girl stands next to the sofa. She still holds the bloodied knife. Behind his back, Woytek’s hands are now free. He is ready to spring up. Just then he hears a car pull up to the main gate. For a moment, the killers panic; the man with the gun runs out. Levanter must have arrived, thinks Woytek. He knows there is nothing he can do to save his friend.

  The girl beside him fidgets. Rocking from side to side, she raises her knife. Woytek suddenly sits up and butts her in the chest with his head, knocking her to the floor. Grabbing her by the hair, he holds her on the floor with one hand while he unties the rope around his ankles with the other. He feels dizzy; blood pours out of his body with each move, but he keeps pulling her head by twisting her hair around his wrist. She yells to another girl to help her. Gibby and Sharon start to shout and throw themselves about, and the girl guarding them begins to stab them randomly. Woytek increases his pull, and the girl strains and jumps. The blood from the wounds on his head blinds him for a moment. Kicking herself away from the sofa, the girl pulls Woytek down onto the floor. He pounces at her throat. They roll together, knocking over chairs, gripping each other in a tight embrace. Woytek’s blood spills over the two of them, as their heads and knees and elbows bang against each other in the frenzied wrestling. He feels his fingers in the girl’s mouth, and he pushes his hand deeper, tearing at the slippery mucous surfaces. Yet, even with his hand at her throat, she keeps on stabbing him, and he cannot stop her. Woytek sees Gibby suddenly wrench herself free of the chair and run across the room toward the door to the garden. Her captor catches her, blocking the door with a knife. Panicking, the other girl pushes Gibby outside and follows Woytek to the garden door.

  As he crosses the threshold, the girl overtakes him, stabbing him time after time in the back. Fresh blood warms him like sweat. He hurls himself outside. The girl falls upon him, stabbing and stabbing. As they grapple on the mist-wrapped lawn, she yells and screams for help. Woytek scrambles up and breaks away from her, running toward the fence, across the lawn, falling, getting up, falling again, and again getting up. In the spotlights, he sees the other girl stabbing Gibby and sees Gibby collapsing onto the dewy grass. Woytek strains to call out into the darkness for help, but his breath whistles in his throat. The man with the gun steps out of the dark and hits him over the head repeatedly. The girl stumbles over and, with a downward motion of her arm, sticks her knife into him again. He feels no more pain. The man points the gun at him; Woytek falls to his knees. As he crawls over the lawn, two bullets hit him in the leg. Something snaps inside his chest. Quivering, he can feel only the clumps of earth on his lips. He looks up and sees four silent figures bent over him, but he no longer knows who they are or what they are doing so near him, so close to the sky that spreads behind them like a black fan.

  Woytek’s final image, is of himself as a boy making an anonymous call to the Secret Service. For months they have been holding his father. Woytek says he has an important tip for them. In an old abandoned factory on the outskirts of town, on the top floor near the elevator shaft, some young people have stored a cache of arms and explosives. An agent takes his message and he hangs up. Hours later, Woytek waits on the top floor, hiding near the elevator shaft. An unmarked car arrives. Through the window he sees two agents in gabardine raincoats running toward the entrance, guns in hand. He hears them on the decrepit staircase. They reach the top, they are near him. He holds his breath. As they look into the shaft, he jumps from behind and, arms spread, gathers the two men against each other, pushing them into the open shaft. They fall screaming — a long double howl, then silence. He must vanish from the factory. He runs. As he is running, he is older, and a beautiful girl is running beside him, but he is faster, leaving her behind. In a house on Cielo Drive, high above Los Angeles, he is finally safe.

  The shaft of the abandoned factory. The girl behind. All this was and was not. Who said that to him? It was and it was not.

  The death of his friends was incomprehensible to Levanter. He tried to make himself believe that they had all died in a crash in a sports car or were buried in a house in one of the landslides so common in the area.

  He was too restless to stay home alone, too restless even for company, yet he had a need to be among people. He walked the city streets, stopped for a drink at a bar, rode a bus or subway, and he kept looking into the faces of strangers, considering how impenetrable they were, asking himself whether these were the faces of victims or oppressors, whether they were people capable of murder. In every place, there were always several people he wished he knew, several he wanted to talk to, to learn about.

/>   Were people all cruel by nature, he wondered, and would they be amused by the games he had seen in some European cities? Would they enjoy the colorful ducks tapping a frenetic dance on a metal platter if they knew the platter was connected to a battery that sent electric shocks through the bird’s body each time the webbed feet stepped on it? Would they be entertained by the man who tucks his trousers into his boots, then slips two fierce-looking rats into his baggy pants, buckles up, and waits while blood begins to seep through the fabric? The bystanders move away in horror, sure that his flesh is being eaten away by the rats. He bleeds more and more, and when everyone around appears convinced that he will bleed to death, he smiles and opens his fly: two dead rats fall out, and behind them jumps a little ferret, its jaws still full of hunks of rat meat.

  Staring into the faces of strangers, Levanter regretted that in his profession individuals were perceived only in relation to the grand schemes of their business undertakings, in which profit was usually the sole incentive. He should have been in a profession which allowed him to analyze one single human being at a time. For this, he was envious of one of his friends, a famous plastic surgeon.

  The surgeon spoke about all his operations as if they were routine. For each patient, however, the surgery might be the major event of his or her life — whether it was correcting a harelip, rebuilding a nose or hand, tightening facial skin, giving new contours to breasts, hips, buttocks, or thighs, or smoothing over scars left by diseases or accidents.

  Levanter watched several operations: steel penetrating living tissue, cotton sponging up blood, chisels sculpting bone, scalpels etching in skin. He marveled at the surgeon’s skill, his ability to remold features, lifting the skin so far off the muscles of the face that his gloved hand could vanish inside it as if slipping into a pocket. Levanter observed as open veins were cauterized and droplets of hot fat spurted out; as globs of fat, shiny and yellow like buttery popcorn, were pried away; and as rows of tiny threads were knotted by fingers moving faster than those of a seamstress.

  Levanter spent hours in this operating theater, elated, curious, fascinated, watching the surgeon respond to physical reality. His friend’s investment required no explanation; the motive was implicit in the result, and the result was obvious for everyone to see: the defeat of blind nature by rational man.

  In order to close a complex deal that involved companies on both coasts, Levanter rented a house in the canyons of Beverly Hills, not far from Cielo Drive, and commuted between it and his New York apartment.

  He was reluctant to become part of the busy social life of Los Angeles, still preferring to rely on chance encounters. One day, in a UCLA bookshop, Levanter noticed a young woman. She walked between the shelves of paperbacks, scanning them as she went by, slowing down now and then to read a title. Walking behind her, Levanter felt there was something indefinably girlish about her, although she looked old enough to be a university student. She stopped to pick up a book. He was passing her when she turned and looked him straight in the eye.

  “Are you following me?” she asked.

  Levanter was taken aback. “Yes. That is” — he hesitated — “I’ve been watching you.”

  She did not look away. “Why?” she asked.

  “I want you, but I don’t know why. I am sorry you are not for sale in this shop. I’m trying to find out the source of my need.”

  She looked at him quizzically. “And have you found out?”

  “Not yet. It takes time,” said Levanter.

  She replaced the book and glanced at the clock over the cashier’s counter. “You have almost three minutes before I leave,” she said playfully.

  “May I follow you?” asked Levanter.

  She turned back to him, smiling. “You may not. I’m not free tonight.” She kept looking at him. “But one day, when I’m free, perhaps I’ll call you.”

  “I might be in New York.”

  “I might be there too,” she said.

  Levanter wrote his name and telephone numbers on both coasts on a piece of paper. “I have answering services for both numbers,” he said.

  “I don’t leave messages,” she said, putting the paper in her purse.

  “What’s your name?” Levanter asked.

  “Serena.”

  “Serena who?”

  “Serena! How many Serenas do you know?”

  A car horn honked twice. She walked out of the bookshop toward the chauffeur-driven sedan. Levanter noticed how gracefully she slid into the rear seat. She did not look back at him as the car made the turn onto Sunset Boulevard.

  Several days later, when he was in New York and had begun to doubt that he would ever hear from her, she phoned.

  “Have you found out?” she asked.

  He did not understand. “Found out what?”

  “The source of your need.”

  “I have,” said Levanter. “You are.”

  “How do you know?” she asked.

  “You resemble a girl I made a pass at in a summer camp once.”

  “Then she is your source, not I.”

  “You are,” said Levanter. “When can I see you?”

  He could hear no sound at the other end and was terrified that she had hung up. Just then she said, “What’s your address?”

  Serena called about once a week, and only when she was ready to see him.

  He might have been planning to go to the theater that evening with some friends who were soon to pick him up. But his decision was always instantaneous: for Serena he was available at any time. When she summoned him, he would telephone his friends and say that urgent business had come up and he couldn’t join them for the evening after all. His friends would be disappointed: they might have invited a date for him. He would apologize: here he was an investor, he joked, who wanted to be master of his fate yet couldn’t even master his leisure time.

  When the house intercom buzzed and the doorman announced a young lady on her way up, Levanter’s heart would quicken. By the time she entered his apartment, he had usually managed a semblance of calm.

  There was an air of confidence about her. She never wore make-up and her clothes were selected with care; she appeared to be the well-bred coed dressed for a date in the big city. When she came to embrace him, she always seemed fresh, unspoiled. Each time, like a curious child, she would flip through the business letters on his desk, take a look at the pile of books on his bed table, turn the tape recorder on and off, examine the photographs of him skiing that hung on the walls. She’d go toward the bathroom, Levanter close behind, and turn on the tub for a bubble bath. Then she would study herself in the mirror and check his medicine cabinet, picking up some of the vials and reading aloud the names of the drugs and the doctors who had prescribed them.

  As she climbed into the full tub, she would ask Levanter to plug in the whirlpool machine, which she set between her legs. Levanter remained in the bathroom, watching her until she stood up and handed him the bottle of scrub granules. He poured some into his palms and let his hands slide slowly over her back, her belly, her breasts and nipples, until all the sandy granules had worked up into suds. To keep her balance, she clutched the shower-curtain rod, facing him, her lips parted, eyes closed. Her body would be taut, her legs spread wide. He kept stroking her, first gently, then harder and rougher; the lather foamed on her skin, hiding her flesh and his fingers from view. Her body, stirring under his touch, seemed to be suspended from the rod. He would increase the friction, letting his fingers play and circle and wander over her, until the foam subsided. Levanter would help her out of the tub and, with a fluffy towel, rub her until she was dry and cooled off.

  After her bath, holding his robe tightly around herself, she sat in his rocking chair, waiting for him to put a mood into her, as she called it. She loved to be aroused by listening to a man talk, she claimed, and she knew that her arousal would then excite him. She insisted he tell her things about himself, stories that would break the routine of her life.

  Som
etimes he would be telling her about an incident that took place a few years earlier at the time of some headlined public event and Serena would draw a blank, reminding him that she was too young to know of this. She was just a little girl when some of these things happened, she would say, rocking back and forth and looking at him as if he should feel guilty that he was old enough to remember them.

  She would never tell him anything about herself. Not a passing reference to her family, her school, or her friends. Levanter had examined her belongings and found out that she carried a lot of cash but no driver’s license or any document that could identify her. She refused to answer his questions about her life away from him, dismissing them as utterly irrelevant to their sporadic meetings. For a while Levanter thought that, like Gibby, she came from a wealthy and distinguished family and did not want her origins to affect her relationship with him. Later, it crossed his mind that she might be kept by a rich, older married man who was a public figure.

  But though she would reveal nothing about her private life, Serena always wanted to know about him, his friends, his business acquaintances, his interests in things other than herself. Soon he began taking her to cocktail parties and dinners, and all his male friends were delighted with her.

  One night, after a party attended by well-known political people and celebrities, Serena asked why he was interested in her when he had so many more fascinating contacts.

  “To friends who have known me for years,” he told Serena, “I try to be what they want me to be. Only with strangers like you am I what I really feel myself to be.”

  Serena was a good listener, and as she sat spellbound she reminded Levanter of a game he had participated in as a student in Moscow.

  One autumn, Levanter and several other students were assigned by the university to give lectures at a collective farm near the capital, traveling to and from the farm by train. There were always peasants taking the train to a farmers’ market on the way, and they invariably listened in on the young people’s conversation. A student who was a good storyteller would begin a tale; as the train approached the market station, the drama would mount, with the narrator piling incident upon incident of comedy and tragedy, of betrayal and passion, of happy reunions and incurable illnesses. The peasants would stand open-mouthed, swallowing every word, laughing or crying or gasping with terror. The train would stop at the market, but they were so engrossed, so afraid to miss a word, that they never moved. As the train pulled away from the platform and began to pick up speed, the story would end abruptly. The peasants would then suddenly become aware that they had missed their stop. But they were never disappointed and never failed to thank the student for his story. The farmers’ market would always be where it was, they said, but a storyteller took their minds to places where they could not travel. Each day a different student would tell the story, luring another group of peasants, who would also miss their station. At the end of the week, the student whose storytelling had caused the largest number of peasants to miss the market stop won the game.