I felt a hand on my shoulder and let myself fall sideways, thinking that I could kick him from the ground. I fell against a man’s hard body.
“Hey, guy, what’s wrong with you?” the man I toppled on complained.
Hovering in the sun above me was the woman I waited for.
“I knocked him over,” she said to the balding bodybuilder. “I hit his tickle spot by mistake.”
While the muscle man groused, I saw that the lovers had gone. My heart was thumping, and sweat was stinging my eyes. The black woman in the Chinese hat descended to her knees and said, “Hey, you OK?” in a tone that I’d never heard addressed to me before.
It was like she was my oldest friend or my wife or one of those social workers who put their life on the line to help someone they don’t even know. I saw that she had some kind of leotard on under the fishnet bathing suit.
“Yeah,” I said, sitting upright. “I’m OK.”
“You fell over just like a stack a’ bananas.”
“Yeah.”
“My name’s Chai,” she said.
“I’m Rufus.”
“How come you wearin’ all them hot clothes, Rufus?”
“I thought it was gonna be cold this morning.”
“I don’t know where you comin’ from. It’s been hot every day this summer. Real hot.” Chai licked her lips. My eyes were drawn to her mouth. I wanted her to say something else that sounded like before.
Chai smiled and took a water bottle from her oversize bag.
“It’s hot,” she complained.
“Yeah, it sure is.”
“I thought it would be nice to sit out here, but it’s too hot.”
“Today’s a good day to be in air-conditioning,” I said. “That’s for sure.”
“You got air-conditionin’ at home?”
“No. But they have it at the World Trade Center.”
Chai frowned. All I wanted to do was to keep her talking.
“Want to go down to the World Financial Center and get some lunch?” It took all the breath in my lungs to get those words out.
“I don’t even know you, Rufus.”
“There’s air-conditioning down there.”
“You got money?”
“Enough for lunch.”
“Enough for a taxi to take us down there?”
“Wow, this is nice,” Chai said, when we entered the glass-walled hall of palm trees in the lower court of the financial center. My friend Willy calls it the hall of palms. In the center of the vast room there are eighteen slender palm trees that reach thirty feet. Between them are benches like you’d find in a park. The benches were all occupied by people trying to escape the heat.
“I never even knew this place was here,” she said, taking my arm.
I could feel her breast against my shoulder. I wanted to swallow but couldn’t make my throat cooperate.
“I’m hungry,” Chai said.
We went under the Merrill Lynch mezzanine into the upscale food court. Past the Rizzoli bookstore and behind a yellow pillar was Pucci’s Two, an Italian restaurant I sometimes went to on my lunch break from Carter’s Home Insurance.
“No swimwear inside the dining room,” said the slender host at the podium that led into the restaurant.
Actually, there was no inside to the restaurant. There was just an area where there were about thirty tables cordoned off by a thigh-high green fence. The only inside was the kitchen.
“How’s this?” Chai said. She pulled a large piece of brown cloth from her bag and wrapped it around her waist. The skirt accented her figure, made her seem more womanly.
The host was obviously perturbed to see a woman dressing right there in front of him. He was an older white man with a full head of white hair. He stared at Chai for a moment and then a moment more. Finally he got two menus from a slot on the side of the podium and strode toward our seats.
It was just noon, and so the restaurant was nearly empty. He led us to a small table for two in the back.
“I don’t wanna sit in the back,” Chai said, when he held a chair for her.
“I thought you wanted privacy,” the maître d’ replied.
“Ain’t nobody here,” Chai said. “All you could have is privacy.”
We ended up at the thigh-high fence watching people walking by.
“Anything to drink?” Our waitress was a black woman with seven silver studs in each ear, a gold ring at the outer corner of her right eye, a tiny silver circlet at the left corner of her lower lip, and a blue stone in her nose. She laid down our menus and smiled.
“Red wine,” Chai said.
“We have a Merlot and Beaujolais,” the waitress replied. She was looking somewhere beyond the confines of the restaurant.
“Whatever.”
The waitress looked at me. I’m only twenty. I went to college early, at sixteen, but I look older.
“Beer,” I said. “Whatever you got on tap.”
The waitress moved away.
The maître d’ seated a couple at the table next to us. There was already a line of couples waiting to get in.
I noticed that Chai was still wearing her rose glasses and peasant hat. I removed my hat and glasses, hoping that she’d do the same.
Instead she reached across the table to caress my cheek.
“You have a nice face, Rufus.” Her hand slid from my jawbone and across my lips. “Nice lips too.”
“They have really good pasta,” I said, opening the menu.
Chai smiled at me and leaned forward.
The maître d’ sat another couple on the other side of us.
“How old are you?” Chai asked.
“Twenty-three.”
“You in school?”
“No. Uh-uh. I just graduated from Hunter a few months ago. Now I work at an insurance company down here.”
“I used to work down here,” she said. “At Crystal and Pomerantz. I typed and stuff. But I don’t do that anymore.”
“What do you do now?”
“I do clothes for a couple a’ black magazines. Clothes, and I help out on the photography shoots.”
The waitress came with our drinks then.
“Are you ready to order?”