White City
Before I met Lily, I lived at night. It was half a year since my whole big wedding had fallen through, and a few months after I'd graduated college and come to the city, and I worked at night, as a photographer's assistant.

The photographer had this idea that the models would be more relaxed if there was another girl right there in the studio, and more willing to do what he told them to if we took their pictures after midnight. But most of them were pretty desperate and would have been willing at any time of day.

The whole situation was full of low people in low circumstances, and I felt pretty low, so maybe I was in the right place. Most of the models didn't even have pretensions of being actresses; they were all hookers, or soon to be. They'd come to the studio, always late, in huge clouds of drugstore perfume, sign a fake name to the model's release, and then take off their clothes. We'd start with the more innocent shots, for covers, model holding Santa doll for December issues, model holding slightly deflated beach ball for July. Then, as I adjusted the reflectors and the radio dial, we'd move on the the shots that never stopped making me upset. I used to look at the wall or at the floor, listening to the horrible fake compliments that kept the girls smiling through it.

It was a strange, backwards life, nights of surreal busyness in a quiet city, and blank days I slept through. I never called anyone, and no one knew where I was. When I couldn't sleep I'd lie in bed and compose mental letters to everyone I hated, to my parents for planning such a stupid wedding, to my boyfriend for leaving me, to everyone who'd ever seen us together and believed we were in love. Or I'd get up and take a shower, where I'd inevitably start crying, turn off the water and hunch down in the corner sobbing, until at some point I would come to and find myself sitting naked on the tiles, my hair dried in snarls.

For so long, when I needed someone's arms to hold me, there was no one there at all.
The night I met Lily, I'd been planning to skip work. It was snowing, and I'd been having bad dreams all day about a girl we'd shot the night before, a girl who had shown up in so much eye makeup I first thought she was wearing sunglasses. Scrubbing off the gook took almost a half hour, and underneath it I found two fresh black eyes.

I wanted to walk, just walk around the empty nighttime strets, trying to forget things. But the more I walked, the more Christmas decorations I saw, reminding me of how wonderful the holidays had been last year and how this Christmas I was supposed to be a married woman. So, to forget my walk, I went to work after all.

 
I was near the front of the studio, sorting through the photo files and trying to separate body from body from body, and when I looked up she was there. She's a small girl, Lily, kind of round, but she has this golden, curly, awe-inspiring hair, hair like a cherub or the Christ child in picture Bibles. There was snow on her shoulders, and she was smiling, and a little out of breath.

"Did you walk up?" I said. "There's an elevator."

"Oh, elevators terrify me," she said. She had a tiny mole beneath her eye that looked like a tear. "It's like being locked inside a box. I'd rather walk."

I looked at our appointment book. "Are you Lily?" I said.

"I am," she said. "Who are you?"

None of the models had ever asked my name before. "Kim," I said.

I couldn't stop looking at her hair, although I was trying not to let her see me stare. She looked much too lovely and alive to be one of our models.

"Have you done this before?" I said. "This isn't the first time you've done this?"

"Oh, no," she said. "This is great money. I'll do anything for money." She smiled. "I've never been a receptionist, though," she said.

I tried to figure out if she was saying that unkindly, but I don't think she was. Feeling a little embarassed by how much I liked her, I gave her the dirty Uncle Sam outfit we were using that day and showed her where to change.

She looked cute, when she came out dressed in the outfit. But when she stepped onto the silver backdrop everything changed. Isolated, surrounded by electricity, there was a strange beauty to her, though that wasn't what she was there for. She was wearing that ridiculous Uncle Sam suit, and holding some dumb hot dog the photographer thought of as a pun, but she didn't look vulgar at all. She was astoundingly pretty. It was like seeing a purple fish or a new kind of flower. There was something about her that made for a new way of looking at the world.
But as soon as I was home and alone again, everything drifted back into darkness. I spent Christmas in my apartment; I didn't call my parents. All I could think about was having lost the man who was supposed to love me, who I was supposed to marry. I bought the newspaper sometimes, just to read his horoscope, just to find out what he was doing wherever he was.
Lily came back. She came back to our studio, which was unusual, because we didn't pay very well and the models usually found they could do better elsewhere. Or they got managers, and we didn't deal with managers.

On the night she came back it was snowing pretty heavily, and I doubted the model would show up at all. We were doing swimsuit shots and they didn't pay as much.

But I came out front and there she was. She was bent over, burrowing in her purse, and I recognized her by her hair, which was in her face.
"Lily?" I said.

"Hi. I'm looking for jelly beans," she said. "There are jelly beans all over the bottom of my purse." She looked up at me and smiled. "You can use jelly beans as lipstick, you know, if you bite them in half."

"I'm glad you're back," I said.

In a moment she came out in a little pink swimsuit, and I caught my breath. She looked different, now; I think she'd put on a little weight, and it was nice. She was softer, less dazzling, sweeter. At first, I tried to be the best assistant possible, moving the lights over and over to make them the most flattering, but after a while I lost track of time just watching her. She was such a beauty. I couldn't stop looking at Lily.

Afterwards, I kept her waiting for her pay until I was done unplugging the equipment and gathering up the rolls of film. I followed her down the stairs to the street, where the snowdrifts had gotten deeper and the sky was orange with city light reflecting off the snow.

"Can I walk with you?" I said.

"Sure," she said. "I'm not going anywhere."

She started walking north, towards my house, though I would have followed her anywhere. Beneath a layer of snow the city looked elegant and untroubled. It seemed like a city I had never been to, a white city, a peaceful, hurtless place.

We stopped at a corner by my house, and I stood there for a second. I wanted to ask her home with me, not to leave me alone, but somehow I couldn't. I couldn't ask her to do it just out of pity for me.

"Where are you going?"

"To a bar, I guess," she said. "I can usually meet someone in a bar and get a place to stay."

"You can stay with me," I told her. "I mean, I don't know if the house is really in order. I don't know if you mind."

"I don't mind," she said.

 
 
My heart pounded as she followed me up the stairs. I fumbled with the lock. She came in and looked at my makeshift barre a little quizzically, and then she threw her coat over it.

"You've gained weight since the last time I saw you," I said.

"I was staying for a while with a man who owned a pastry shop," she said.

I tried to straighten up the place while she was in the bathroom. She took a shower for what seemed like forever, and then afterwards came out in my bathrobe, which made her look a little like me. I got her the only food I had in the refrigerator, some cookies and some old asparagus, but she ate them as if she was starving.

"Do you like this kind of work?" I asked her. "The kind of stuff we do at the studio?"

"It's okay," she said, eating. "It's okay money, and I can do it whenever I want. Nobody makes me promise them anything."

"You know, one of our models ended up in Penthouse, and they paid her a lot of money," I told her. "You could make some real money if you're lucky."

"Oh, I'm never lucky," she said, and she smiled.

In the cupboard I found a carton of cereal, and I brought it over to the table.

"I used to think I was lucky," I said. "I was going to be married."

Lily was eating, barely taking time to chew one bite before taking the next.

"I thought we were going to travel. I thought we were going to live in a big house. Everyone told me everything would work out," I said. "It isn't true. Nothing ever works out at all."

"We always lived in a small house," Lily said.

I looked out the window, and I could see the sun coming up outside. I stood up and unfolded the couch and made up the bed using a couple of blankets from my bed.

"I'll be in the next room, if you need anything," I said. "I'll leave the door open."

"You mean this bed here is just for me?"

"Is it okay?" I asked.

"I haven't had a bed to myself for a long time," she said. "There's so much room."

I gave her one of my T-shirts to wear and then went to bed in my own room and let her turn out the lights. I listened for a while to the silence in the apartment; it sounded different, now that someone was there.
I lay in bed for a long time the next day, while Lily slept. I could hear her legs moving beneath the sheets in the other room.

After a while I got up and slipped out to buy breakfast, and I remember it was sunny outiside. The snow on the streets was melting away, trampled by hoards of shoppers. I was looking forward to waking Lily, but when I came back she was already up. She was sitting on the window sill, wearing one of my sweaters.

"Are you still hungry?" I said, feeling suddenly shy again.

"Sure," she said, and she was smiling. It seemed as if she had always been smiling.

I gave her the whole bag of bagels and then sat on the other window sill, looking out at the street. I hadn't really spent much time in my apartment when the sun was up. I opened the window a little, and the fresh air smelled good. Leaning back, I noticed little circles of light playing around the room, and it took me a moment to realize they were sun reflections off the face of my watch.

"Lots of traffic today," I told Lily, who was eating. I wondered if my mother would be coming into the city for the winter sales.

We sat for a long time, looking out the window at the people passing by.

"Hey, I know that guy," Lily said suddenly. She was looking out at someone on the street, and she laughed. I couldn't help laughing at her laughing, because I could guess how she knew him.

"How can you go home with all these guys?"

"It's all right," she said. "They only want one thing. It's okay if they only want one thing. It's only bad if they start talking about love or something."

"You could stay here if you wanted," I said. "It would be nice to have someone around."

"Sure," she said. "I could stay here sometimes. It would be nice to have a place where I knew I could stay."

I felt better than I had in a long time, that day, sitting with Lily and watching the busy city through my window. Cars were intersecting in perfect patterns, like plaid, and tiny airplanes flew across the sky. The daytime world, the sunshine world, was nice. I had forgotten all about it.

 
I did everything I could to make Lily feel at home in my apartment. I gave her my bedroom, and she seemed to accept it as her own, leaving comic books and loose change all over the floor. I stocked the refrigerator with bagels. I gave her money so she wouldn't have to go to the studio any more, even though I did.

We spent a lot of time together in the apartment, talking and laughing and listening to the radio. I took her walking with me, and we bought what we could. She cooked us dinner one night. I tried to tell her that if she could cook she could earn her own living, she could get a job cooking and not have to depend on men, and then go back to high school and to college. I tried to put plans for the future in her mind, plans we could live out together.
 
The trouble was, she didn't want to wait at home when I was at work, and if she went out, she wouldn't want to come home. She'd stay out all night some nights, drifting in and out of bars, hanging out with creeps like she always had. I didn't want her spending time with those people, talking to them, being friendly to them. But I could never yell at her when she was smiling. When she was home, things were wonderful. Even so, it got so the first thing I thought when I woke up was, is Lily here? Because, more often than not, she wasn't.

In fact, she woke me up sometimes, trying to get in the door. She had an aversion to locks and refused to carry the set of keys I gave her. Instead, she'd just bang on the door until I woke up, sometimes only a couple of hours after I'd left work and come home to sleep without her. Yawning, I'd get up and make her breakfast, and she'd tell me stories, awful stories about songs played on juke boxes and men she'd seen drink beer through their noses. Eventually I'd go back to bed, leaving her wearing my clothes and reading her new comic books, and wake up to find the door unlocked and her gone again. It didn't seem unreasonable that she should want to be with me, particularly when I'd been alone for so long.

I started buying gifts to get her to spend more time with me. I bought ribbons for her hair, cheap lipsticks, more comic books, cook books, an orange liqueur I had seen in a cooking shop. When she started to come home less and less, all my presents started to accumulate in her room. I used to go in and look at them and rearrange them, or sit on the bed and pull strands of her hair off the pillow.
She'd been gone for most of a week when I opened the orange liqueur and started drinking it myself.

It was a beautiful, warm night, I remember; it was springtime. I let her in and she went straight for the refrigerator. I stumbled back towards the couch. The silence between us sounded different again.

"Where were you?"

"Not far away," she said. "I met some people."

I couldn't speak.

"I met a guy who said he was a high school sex education teacher. They're not supposed to be hanging out in bars, are they? Of course, when I was at school I spent most of my time in the parking lot."

I guess I was very drunk, and I put my head in my hands. Now was the time to think of the right words, now was the time to say them, now was the time not to lose her like I'd lost everything else.

"I want you to stay here," I said. "Stay here."

"I do stay here sometimes," she said. "It's nice to know I can always stay here."

"Stay with me all of the time," I said, and I was crying now.

She sat back from me a little, and she dropped her fork into a carton of Chinese noodles she was eating, and she set the food down on the floor.

"I thought things would be different with a lady," she said.

She told me I was drunk and that she would get me some coffee; I gave her twenty dollars, and when she left I locked the door behind her. I locked the door to show her I could, to show her that I wouldn't always be the one that nobody wanted. I locked her out, then sat up waiting for her to come home.

I was drunk, though, and I fell asleep. I don't know if she came back. She may have come back, found she couldn't get in and thought I didn't love her like I said I did. I had a dream that was what happenned, but maybe it was just a dream. I don't know if she came back at all.

 
 
I wish I could start at the beginning again, before suffering and disappointment started to catch up with me. I want to go back to that white city, where everyone would start with no hurt or pain or scars. Come upon each other fresh, like new snow. A real New Year's Day.

I buy the newspaper every day, just to look for Lily's horoscope.



Library of Congress Copyright TKU527095 1994