From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant: A Novel Read Free Page A

burning?”
    “Then we’ll have to share the bed. That’s what Dasha and I do. Only don’t get the wrong idea about it. We’re not lezzies.”
    “Oh, I didn’t think that. It’s just that Dasha never mentioned she had a roommate. You can imagine my surprise, meeting you here under these circumstances.”
    “Typical Dasha. We have an arrangement, you know. I sublet from her whenever I’m in town.”
    I found out later that Olya paid Dasha rent for half the queen-size mattress. During fashion week there was a room shortage in modeling agency apartments, so many girls had to double up. The price of glamour comes at an encroaching cost, as Dior once said. 7
    “I swear I smell something burning.”
    “Oh fuck,” said Olya. She ran into the bedroom, taking the bottle of San Pellegrino with her. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” From thedoorway I watched her sprinkle the soda water onto the bed, extinguishing whatever small flame she had ignited with her cigarette.
    “Is everything okay?” I asked.
    She reemerged from the room and closed the door behind her. “I burned another hole in Dasha’s sheets. She’ll kill me.”
    “Is the fire out?”
    “
Of course
. I can’t believe this. I’m so stupid.”
    “Don’t say that. They’re just sheets. We’ll replace them.”
    “Fuck her.”
    Olya was a Pole by origin, just fifteen when she was first scouted in her small town of Kozalin by a German who took her to Milan, Tokyo, Paris. He showed her the world, and she fell in love with him. But once they got to New York, with Olya set up at Ford Models, he left her and eventually made his way back to Berlin to pursue a career as a drum-and-bass DJ. “I see him at parties,” she said. “He’s a dick now. But he got me out of Kozalin, so I suppose I owe him something.”
    She knew all the major cities and was a tremendous help to me as I navigated my way. She marked in my guidebook how to get to Ground Zero, how to get to Saks from Barneys, then to Bryant Park from Times Square. She enlightened me about the monthly metropass, scams by persuasive men at the turnstiles—“Don’t ever pay them for swipe”—and where the closest subway station was. “Far,” said Olya. “If you have casting, you have to leave like forty-five minutes early to get anywhere.”
    And so I spent the rest of my first day getting lost, making transfers, missing connections, falling in love. New York’s subway system is a rubber band of sexual tension, stretched and twined around the boroughs, ready to snap. I frolicked in this salaciousunderground, where every motion had meaning—every leg crossed, every glance up from a paperback, every brush of a shoulder or rump was a kiss blown in my direction. The porcelain Chinese beauties on and off at Canal; the thoroughbred Eastern European models of Prince, castings a‑go‑go; the NYU coeds of Eighth Street, plump and studious. Oh, and the sexpot hipsters at Fourteenth, right off the L, like cattle, their eyes drowned in eye shadow, looking as if they had never missed a party, nor would they.
    My first meal I ate at an establishment called Steak Chicken Pizza Grill, Forty-second Street. Its sign was lit up like a carnival and called out to me, American food eaten here. I was aware of the tackiness of the eatery upon entering. Its sign, menu, and patrons were a testament to a class of people I wanted nothing to do with. But let me tell you, it was the best meal I had ever tasted. The blackened burger, thick tomato, crisp iceberg, and lone fry, which somehow snuck its way under the bun, each lent a delight to the other. And the slice of authentic New York pizza, reheated by a Mexican, handled from oven to tray by a Pole, and rung up by an Italian—“Here you go, boss”—complemented the burger beyond my wildest dreams. I consumed more than my small body could digest. And what a feeling! Like I’d just fueled up on unleaded and had gasoline pumping through my small intestine.
    The city could be