INITIATION

He wandered more or less aimlessly up Broadway, passing 42^nd Street, looking into shop windows here and there, as much to see what was inside as to see his own reflection in the glass.  He had taken the train into Manhattan from Babylon, gone to see the agent from whom he collected the free tickets for the play Cats that he won for signing up ten new customers on his paper route, and now had an hour to kill before taking the train home.  He liked the look of Times Square, its seediness and bustle, and the interesting people he noticed, rather like a shy gawker, with his hands in his pockets and his face hanging out. 

     One shop specialized in adult stuff, and though they wouldn’t let him in, they didn’t chase him away from the window, where he stood for the longest time, seeing what he could see.  He liked the decks of playing cards best, since they were illustrated with a pair of poker hands fanned out on the shelf in the window, and he could see portions of the pictures on the cards, and the top card completely--not very graphic but graphic enough to stimulate his already hard to control hormones, which made his whole body wring and twist, his eyes narrow, and his tight jeans all the tighter at the crotch.

     But having killed more than ten minutes there, he pulled himself away to walk up the block to see what else there was to see.  It was a splendid morning, comfortably cool, sunny, especially at the corners, and people were more often than not pleasant and smiling.  He liked the smell of the air at the top of the stairs at the subway kiosks, and he liked walking over the grates in the sidewalk when a train passed.  He walked and walked, standing at the curb once in a while to feel the heat of a bus as it pulled up and stopped and to sniff the exhaust and look through the windows at the people sitting and standing.  He crossed over to Fifth Avenue and was heading north, getting further and further from Penn. Station, where he had to go to catch the train back to Babylon.  But he really wasn’t worried, for he didn’t tell his mother exactly when he’d be home, so if he missed one train he would take another.  That would give him both an excuse and more hours to kill.

     On Fifth Avenue he came upon a woman whom he began to follow, for he was struck by everything about her.  Even though it was early May, she had on a leopard skin coat with a patent leather collar and cuffs and high-top patent leather boots.  She had long blond hair, mid-back length, tied up in a pony tail with a black kerchief made into a bow whose ends stuck up.  She let the hair hang down her back where it caught upon her shoulders and bobbed with them as she walked.  But it was the walk that sent him into fits of frenzy.  “Walk” was not the right word.  This woman didn’t walk.  She ticked up the block, she swung her hips side to side in a rhythm that announced her as a fatal being--fake leopard and patent leather meaning nothing to him except perhaps a certain allure he was too young to interpret.  She ticked, side to side, in a quick advance that he timed his own pace to so he could watch her.  She was something he had never seen before and he was fascinated, enthralled. 

     For half a block he imagined himself talking with her.  He had no idea what they might talk about, but he imagined it anyway.  He’d tell her he was joining the Army and was hanging around till his appointment with the recruiter, whereupon he would head off.  Maybe he’d say it was the Marines.  That sounded better.  He’d invite her to lunch, and he imagined her reacting to all this, saying how brave he was.  He thought, seeing her from the back tick and sway like a starlet before a battery of cameras, she must be beautiful--and he imagined her beauty: large blue eyes, creamy complexion, pink cheeks, and white straight teeth, glistening as she smiled.  He noticed the expression of people walking in the other direction, passing her.  Especially the men.  It was a glance and a re-glance, and then a thoughtful look with a cocked eyebrow, which made him think that the men especially found her as interesting as he did, all of which confirmed in his own mind what he thought already--that she was a  beauty. 

     All of a sudden, as they passed Rockefellar Center, the pedestrian traffic thinned to a trickle and at the corner all but disappeared.  They were approaching the corner of Fifth Avenue and 48th Street, and the sun beamed directly overhead, lighting up the sidewalks and shining off her leopard skin, making her glow.   She reached the curb and stopped, then stepped into the street, but a taxi came rushing into the intersection, forcing her to step back onto the sidewalk. 

     “Thanks, ol’ taxi,” he said to himself, “thanks for the favor.  I’ll do the same for you someday.” 

     He made up his mind to get side by side with her, turn to her and say hello, say anything to make her look at him.  He was imagining what he’d do next--stick out his hand and say, “Hello, my name’s Rob, what’s yours?” or, “I’m heading up the same block, want to walk and talk?”  He laughed at himself as he approached, “Want to shake and bake?” “Want to prance and dance?”  “Want to....”  

     But suddenly he got serious, because he was close enough now to smell her perfume, which was reekingly heavy, and which, also, was to his mind a warning of nothing at all, for it was just another sensation of the sort that he was indulging in all morning--exotic, strange, interesting, adult, and always half-familiar in some haunting way, as though they evoked buried remembrances of a past life. 

     He was now shoulder to shoulder with her, not more than an inch away.  He did what he conceived he would do and turned to her, saying, “Hello, my name is Rob,” sticking out his hand.  She turned to him with a big smile, saying hello back.

     “My name is Jasmine,” she said in a hoarse, smoker’s voice, her face smiling, her lips hanging heavy and ruby red between powdered jowls that creased the sides of her nose so deeply as to make her nostrils seem fake.  She rasped a sly and wicked laugh as Robby stood rooted to the curb, unable to respond, her rouged face seeming more like a mask than a human face, the mask-likeness accentuated by the penciled-in eyebrows, the eyeliner and thick mascara, and the perfect little black dot just above her cheekbone.

     He was frozen holding out his hand, like a stone image, feeling like the world had stopped.  She extended her own and took the proffered hand, clasping it gently, and just ever so slightly rubbed the back of it with her thumb as she shook it and let it go.

     “Shall we walk together?” she rasped, pointing up the block in the direction they had been going.

     Robby did the only thing his fourteen years had so far prepared him to do in circumstances when his hair stung his scalp and his flesh rearranged itself on his bones: he ran.  He couldn’t have said anything, because his tongue rooted to his lower palate, and he was speechless.  What he felt was dread.  He didn’t understand the feeling and couldn’t have named it, for it was new to him.  But it was dread, aroused by the glimpse of that hidden knowledge every young person suspects is present in the behavior of adults, the unspoken, the mystery, which is proof all by itself of the initiation to come; but Robby did not want to know this mystery, was terrified at the thought of it.

     Something he could not name announced itself to him on the other side of that leopard coat, and he was frightened.  The leopard’s face burned itself into his mind, and when he stopped running and leaned against a building, closing his eyes, there it was.  It laughed that wicked laugh.  Its eyes glared.  It touched him, taking his hand.  He pulled his hands against his stomach and shoved them into his pockets.  It rasped again, “Shall we walk together?”  And again, he felt the fear shoot through him. 

     He walked back quickly in the direction from which he had come and then decided to cross the street to catch a taxi to the station.  He wanted to be home.  The city had offered him a revelation, on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 48th Street--something it does indifferently to the young--and he was shot through, as a consequence, with sensations and feelings that made him desperate for his mother.  He looked with suspicion upon everyone he passed.  Here was a woman, he noticed, who was old, maybe as old as the leopard, but she didn’t frighten him.  And there, there’s an older man--like his grandfather.  No problem.  No problem.  But something was wrong.  His vision had changed.  Underneath the normalcy people vibrated with the mystery: Who knows what madness or terror prevails in us?  What glances, voices mean?  What touches us, when we are not ready to be touched? 

     And then there came unbidden into his mind the playing cards in the adult shop, and his flesh crawled again the same way as on the corner.  Fleetingly, but all the more horribly for its fleetingness, the woman in the leopard skin coat stood naked before him holding out her hand.  The dread heaved itself into his stomach, and he felt himself reeling, so that he had to catch himself from falling.  The leopard’s spots swirled round him as independent things, and in the  hallucination he thought they were people’s heads.  But then he saw what they were, and when he understood, they attached themselves to the wrinkled, hanging skin of the haggard woman, becoming mere blotches and blemishes. Suddenly Robby got hold of himself and straightened up.  He stood still on the sidewalk as people passed him in both directions.  He didn’t know what it was he understood, but, fleeting as it was, it came to him as an explanation, and he accepted it.  All at once the sounds of the city came pouring back to  him--the honking of taxis, the grating gear changes in a bus and its roaring engine, the sounds of tires thumping on the cracks in the asphalt, voices of people as they passed.  He was no longer afraid.  Instead, as he headed once again for the station, he felt an inexplicable loss, as though someone had picked his pocket and he had only just found out, which made him shake his head and yearn all the more deeply for his mother.