Look at me: by Jennifer Egan Page B

right there, peering out from behind it. “Nothing bad has ever happened to me,” he said. “My life has been one enormous bottle of Karo syrup.”
    “Poor you,” I said, and laughed, my head back, so that suddenly I was looking above the buildings, up at the winter sky. And then I saw the sign. It snagged my gaze and held it, an old advertisement painted on the side of a brick building. Griffin’s Shears, it read. The paint was faded but still legible, a faint chalky blue, and beside the words I made out the silhouette of a pair of scissors. Without realizing it, I had stopped walking. We were on Seventh Avenue at Twenty-second Street.
    “What?” Oscar said.
    I didn’t answer. I didn’t know. “Look at that,” I said.
    Oscar looked up and down, then swiveled his head. “What?”
    “That old ad! Griffin’s Shears.”
    Oscar looked at me.
    “It’s like a ghost,” I said.
    We stood there, looking at the ad. I felt moved by it in some way I couldn’t explain. It reminded me of Rockford, of its factories and smokestacks and industry. A glimpse of New York’s shadow face.
    “I have eighty titanium screws inside my head,” I said, still watching the sign.
    “Don’t say such things,” Oscar murmured.
    “The bones were all crushed.”
    Now he turned to me, with surprise, admiration, maybe, and something else: love, I guess. We’d been close for so many years, that confluence of work and social life that makes for a certain kind of friendship. But I knew, as Oscar did, I think, that we wouldn’t go on as we had.
    “If you give up,” he said, “I’ll lose my faith in everything.”
    “I never give up,” I told him.
    I hadn’t brought a man home with me since before the accident, but no sooner had I hugged Oscar good-bye that afternoon than I sensed my months of abstention coming to an end. A knot of desire had formed in my belly, tightening as day went on so that by evening I’d forgotten everything but the need to cut it. I was not like most women. For me, the sexual act had nothing to do with love, or rarely. On the contrary, the less I cared for or even knew a man, the more easily I lost myself in his physical company. I didn’t mind awkwardness—I was good at asking for what I wanted and making sure I got it. I liked not knowing what he would do or want, and I didn’t worry much about my own performance; as I saw it, any man who succeeded at picking me up with so little effort, with no strings attached and without having to pay for it, should consider himself to be having an extremely good day. I’d been a safe-sex practitioner since before the phrase existed, not for health reasons so much as a basic squeamishness at the idea of mingling cells. Embracing, kissing—even the grittier exchanges I had no problem with, but the things I couldn’t see, the molecules and atoms—those should stay apart, I felt. The onslaught of AIDS had made this qualm easier to justify; men had finally stopped bitching about the condoms.
    There are lots of ways to find casual sex, but I had a favorite routine. It began with dining alone at one of several East Side restaurants near my apartment, places frequented by businessmen and diplomats with some connection to the United Nations. I would order a salad and wait for a glass of wine to arrive at my table. Then I’d either wave my thanks, or, if I found the man attractive, make my greeting slightly warmer, so that he knew he was welcome at my table. I kept conversation to a minimum; if I let it go on long, I’d found, the man ceased to be attractive no matter what he looked like.
    Tonight I was relieved to discover that even with my new, indeterminate face, the ritual took no longer than usual to complete. His name was Paul Shepherd. He had a pale blond beard and hair just a shade or two darker, like sand. He worked for the World Bank in Hong Kong but was originally from Minnesota. Despite his courtly, diffident manner, it was obvious he was a regular cheater.