42nd & Lexington
I felt she was a symbol of the city less so because I met her in midtown and more so because her breasts were skyscrapers. Both of them, shapely and rounded when under her silk blouse, expanded into exact replicas of the Chrysler Building when she took off her bra. She was the first woman I had ever loved with art deco nipples. Her name was Toby. We went back to her loft after drinks. I undressed under a girder. She called me closer to her bed by a giant window with chicken wire glass. There she revealed them to me. Normally I was a gentleman, but I had had a lonely childhood marked by bullies and model planes. I didn't even look her in the eye. Not even a kiss. My hands cupped under the long brick tier of the building, rubbing back and forth between the silver statue of wings and up toward the iron eagle heads that guarded the corners below the stainless crown.
"Don't squeeze so hard," she said, straddling me. "You'll break the lights on the viewing gallery."
"Sorry," I said. I rolled the antennae between my thumb and forefinger. "Is this steel?"
"Yes," she said, rolling her eyes.
"How did they–"
She planted her hand on my chest and dug in with her nails.
"They don't even smell like glue," I said.
"Are we going to do this or what?" she asked, yanking my chest hair.
"Yes," I said. "Yes!"
A few of the workers in the offices around the 39th floor had opened their windows to watch. I could hear them making catcalls.
"You can do better, Toby."
"His ass is dented like his face!"
"Touch her where she pees!"
I was having a hard time performing in front of the crowd, but Toby pulled me toward her chest and moaned and the hard brick edges of the towers scraped my face raw. The pain sharpened me until I was throbbing. Still I had so many questions.
"I didn't think those windows could open," I said as she ground her hips into mine. "The hinges must be incredibly nimble. And the workers? What do you charge for rent?"
"I'm trying to come," Toby said. "Get with it or get out."
She rocked her hips harder and I sat silently transfixed by the lines of small lights, those tiny chevrons stacked one atop the other, and for a moment, with my ha
nd alongside hers on the side of the building, I thought I could feel the rumble of the elevators."Van Alen!" Toby shouted.
"My name isn't–" But she put a finger on my mouth and arched her back.
"Don't you even move," she said.
Toby slept with her back to me. The soft glow of the tiny office lights cast pale squares onto the chicken wire. It looked like a glass checkerboard, and I played a game in my head, kinging myself, until Toby rolled over and the board blackened. As if on cue, a stream of men and women, each no taller than a pen's nib, piled through the banks of revolving doors by her cleavage. They slid down the notches of her ribcage, carrying leather valises, umbrellas and messenger satchels, and then walked into the darkness, toward some unknown corner of the loft, toward some mean life in an undisturbed borough behind the glass checkerboard. One of them, a man with bronze skin, came up to my pillow and spoke in my ear. He carried a bucket and looked like a smaller rusted cousin of the Monopoly man. I could barely understand him. English was not his first language.
"I work in the basement," he said, pausing to search for words. "Her heart is not to scale."
Toby opened her eyes once and, seeing the man, flicked him off the sheets like a fly.
"In the morning," she said, "the bra goes back on."
But I was gone before she woke up a second time.
Ekleksographia:
Wave 4.1.c
August, 2010
Fiction
Patrick Crerand
Patrick Crerand has had fiction appear recently in Conjunctions, Barrelhouse, Harpur Palate, and other magazines. Currently he lives in Tampa, Florida where he teaches English at Saint Leo University.