Cherry Red Door
Passages North, No 40

32 Spring Street. That’s our address. Five of us in three bedrooms one flight up above a shop that sells expensive menswear, leather belts and felt-banded hats, the kind of stuff that lasts forever but people only buy when they’re old and can afford it. I’m on my way to Sunday’s apartment, got my short pleated skirt on and a pair of tall socks, striped black and white, my new tongue ring I push against the roof of my mouth, ball bearing rainbow titanium 14-gague. I can’t wait to push my tongue out and show Sunday. Through the shop window I glimpse a balding man, heavy set and slumped like a Christmas tree in February, his wife holding out a vest that’s at least two sizes too small for his paunch. They’re so close to caskets it’s not even funny. Well, it’s a little bit funny. I think they’re the reason why I think about Sunday the way I do. What women do to men is something else but what men do to us, well, can be altogether wrong.

 Sunday’s apartment is first floor, primo sunlight and this big bay window. Sometimes, at night, I can catch a glimpse of her through the curtains. She’s never alone at night and all I see really are shapes, light, sometimes I think I see the curve of her but it’s hard to tell and I don’t like to stop as I walk past, just let myself study her windows as long as it takes me to walk by. 

The apartment number on her door is crooked. I drop my bag on the entry hall floor to adjust my skirt, then squat and rummage around in my bag looking for loose dollars, fold a wad of bills into a bobby pin, uncap a tub of Vicious Vixen lip gloss and smear it on. Deep burgundy. Did my eyes with smoky coal this morning, leaning over the sink. Dab, dab, squint. Pinch your cheeks, that’s what my mother taught me. I stand and straighten the elastic of my underwear. Soft snap. Ding-dong the bell and hear Sunday, slow as melting candy slink to the door.

“Andi?” I hear the deadbolt turn before I can answer. “Come in.” I stiffen my back, strut my chin out, push the door. 

It’s all sunlight and Sunday. I can tell she’d been curled on the sofa, a magazine on the floor, a cold cup of coffee. “Hey, Babe,” I say to her back as she walks towards what she’s made into a bedroom. Used to be it was a dining room, her living room a parlor or something. She’s got a short kimono robe cinched around her waist; sea foam blue with peacocks blazing the back. “Did you see Angelo last night,” I ask? She’s all curve. Sunshine coming from somewhere, where? Inside her? Behind the screen she must’ve dropped her robe on the floor. I imagine her standing there shining, nude, honey hair down her shoulders.

“Naw,” her voice wafts over. “Hung out with Pepper and Mimi. I’ve got that tab for you if you want it.”

“Oh, sure,” I say, casual, bite my lip, taste Vicious Vixen. I sit on the couch that’s angled in front of the fireplace, put my pinned ones on the glass coffee table for the acid. Sunday has an actual fainting couch. That’s where she sits. A painting of two bicycles on the wall opposite me, a series of nude drawings of Sunday taped to the wall. I turn and study them as I hear her slipping on clothes. All these old Newport, Rhode Island houses are chopped up into apartments—high ceilings, chestnut floors, carved mantels, tall windows. I think Sunday comes from money but I know enough not to ask.

She walks out in a tight white tank top and cut-off jean shorts, frayed edges high on the thigh.  I imagine lifting the edge of the tank and running my fingers across her stomach. She sits, tucks her legs beneath her and leans to the coffee table for the package of Dunhills, slides back the box’s lid, offers me one. I reach, feel her finger brush against mine. Inside I pool sapphire. From the cig box wrapper she slips a square of waxed paper, unfolds two tabs of acid. She picks her hair up off her shoulders, twists it into a knot, sticks a pencil in to hold it. “I want to get fucked up,” she looks at me, suddenly seeming small on yellow couch, small in sunny apartment, small in her life. She picks up the waxed paper, puts one tab on her tongue, closes lips and comes to stand in front of me. “Here,” she says, sticks the other tab on the tip of her tongue, bends. She smells like vanilla and cigarettes. My hands are in fists, breath stopped in my throat. I pause for one beat, then another. I think of that old couple in the store, the scent of cedar and moth balls, his paunch. The white paper square on Sunday’s tongue. I open my mouth. Rainbow titanium, touch hers, lightning strike bright and soft.