It was a dull, punishing red. Felt cutout Christmas trees grew on it underneath a sky of tiny star-shaped buttons. It screamed READER'S DIGEST NORMAN ROCKWELL HUMMEL FIGURINES WILLFUL LACK OF CURIOSITY at the top of its metaphorical little lungs.
Its owner, seated near me in the station, did nothing to dispel the impression it created. Her face was smooth with triumph over thought and feeling. She nattered on to her husband about the certain precise lunch she wanted to have.
And I thought, no, this is just too easy. She cannot actually BE what she looks like. She cannot BE the person that I could kill on the spot by firing up my (nonexistent) notebook computer and going to capturedguys.com. No. If I did that, I knew that she'd point at the picture on the left and say "I did the rigging on that one. You have to be so careful with that kind of tape. But such nice boys they were." I knew it.
I knew that her name was Svetlana and she was a spy in deep cover who'd been cut adrift in '91 and had gone on living her lie in a swirl of terror and habit.
I knew that that husband of hers was actually Number 5, and she looked so blank because she'd worn herself out from blood and thunder on the sand.
Or it was those years in the rain with the blacklist and the FBI tail, and the long despair of seeing her red-diaper babies grow up to be yuppies.
Anything. Anything but the book turning out to be like its cover.
"I want *meat,*" she was instructing her husband. "I want *meat.*"
A veteran. She'd been a nurse at the front in Italy; she'd grabbed a machine gun off a corpse once and started firing. After the woman she loved was shot down beside her. (Nurses were front-line casualties in that war; Iraq's not the first.) She'd married a man because she'd only seen Rebecca in every other woman's eyes.
"So if we see a Burger King," she went on, "we'd better stop there."
I turned the page of my book. I was rereading Simon Napier-Bell's I'm Coming To Take You To Lunch. I hadn't noticed it the first time, but the two narratives--arranging Wham!'s concert in China and going on ever-stranger adventures with the mysterious Professor Rolf Neuber--commented on each other directly. I hadn't thought they were meant to; I'd thought they were meant to provide contrast. But Rolf Neuber affects Napier-Bell the way Wham! affects its fans--Rolf is enigmatic, fascinating, and 'beyond,' and only gets more so. But he has another life, another side, which is not at all what Napier-Bell expects. In the end, Napier-Bell withdraws rather than jeopardize his image of "his" Rolf. It's an obvious comment on stardom. And stars.
The stars on the sweatshirt rose and fell. "I just don't want to miss my chance at Burger King," said my lesbian nurse spy activist bondage rigger. "I want *meat.*"
I closed my book and closed my eyes.
The button stars danced inside them. Where had she found them, I wondered. Perhaps the future sky, too hot for real ones, coming closer.
