She thinks it must be the statues of another religion, though they are not statues. They are graffitied images on a bathroom stall in what must be the ugliest bathroom in New York. The woman’s head is thrown back and the man seems to be worshiping her, on his knees. Etti doesn’t want to think about where his head is; still, she stares. “And you shall not take false idols,” runs through her head.
She ran into the bathroom because in a corner of the club, the man she’d been watching every time she came here had approached her and pulled her to dance and she had shaken her head. She had no idea how to dance and he had smiled at her and said, “One day you’re going to dance with me.” Then he bent down to kiss her, the way people did in the books on Mrs. Saltzman’s shelves, and pulled her gently towards him, and for a moment she let him, and with the brief press of his body against hers, she felt a jolt, like when she’d been shocked by the broken socket in her bedroom when she’d plugged in a new lamp. She had never let herself go this far. She had watched. She came here to watch, to try and understand. But this man had the fire of the Messiah. She saw it in his eyes, and also that he was sad as if something within him had broken and he was still dragging himself...
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