The Rescuer by Joyce Carol Oates

different.
    Somehow, sharing a drink with Mercedes. She’d brought her man-friend to meet me—unless this was a man-friend for me. His face looked like a clam’s face—if a clam had a face—upon which a dyed-black moustache had been pasted. And what remained of his hair was dyed-black, combed over a lumpy scalp.
    “You these girls’ teacher —somebody said? What kinda class is it, Lyd-ja, you are teaching?” Very funny, the clam-faced man laughed heartily. I saw a nubby glisten inside his mouth, a metal-laced molar.
    This man, Mercedes’s friend, was trying to escort me somewhere—to the blackjack table? to a nearby bar?—but I managed to wrest my arm loose from his fingers. He cursed me, bluntly. On an escalator I was borne upward—escaping from Clam-Face—the air currents in the Taj were such, I felt the ends of my hair lifting in the breeze—and at the top of the escalator there was an open space, and a brass railing where you could stand to gaze out over the interior of the Taj designed like a bad Indian stage set, the “Taj Mahal” as imagined by a crude American entrepreneur.
    I wanted a microphone! I wanted to be heard! I leaned over the railing waving my arms like a demented semaphore.
    “‘How scale walls of Hades’! Plato says this is a vale of illusion! A cave of illusions! Delusions! The casino is the cave! You must wake yourself—save your souls!”
    A security guard came quickly to lead me away. No one below in the milling casino had heard me—no one had so much as glanced up at me—except my concerned friends Maralena and Salaman who ascended the escalator after me.
    Maralena said to the security guard, “Hey man, she just kiddin. She not drunk, hey. Not ust to all this excitement, like—she mostly stay home in Tr’nton. We take care of our girlfriend, O.K.?”
    The security guard was tall, well beyond six feet. He wore a uniform that fitted his muscular body like a glove. His face was blunt-boned, his skin as velvety-dark as Leander’s. I wanted him to look at me kindly, or at least not with open hostility, but he ignored me entirely speaking to my companions in a low baritone bemused/exasperated tone:
    “She is drunk. You think I can’t recognize, you’ friend is drunk ? Just keep her from high places. Don’t matter what bullshit she be sayin, nobody can hear her anyway. You got me?”
    “Thanks man! We appreciate this.”
    And Salaman said, almost wistfully: “Man you one sweet cool dude.”
    * * *
    “I be drivin. Girl, you sleep in the backseat.”
    Maralena spoke firmly. Though she’d had far more to drink than I had yet she’d managed to “sober up”—she claimed—with two cups of black coffee.
    Coffee! The mere thought turned my stomach.
    Maralena and Salaman helped me crawl into the backseat of the Mazda. The vinyl seat cover was icy-cold. How many drinks had I had?—not more than two, or three.
    Still, I did not feel—well, “real.”
    Confused as I’d been falling down the stairs at—what was the name of the residence hall—not Jester College—but another place: where my Newcomb fellowship provided a room for me—my heel catching in the frayed carpeting on the stairs and I’d plunged down, down . . .
    Hello? Are you all right? Let me help you. . .
    “How she doin, you think? She ain’t ust to drinkin or maybe stayin up late.”
    “She ain’t ust to nothin much .”
    They were laughing at me. Not cruel but affectionate laughter.
    Or maybe, slightly ridiculing laughter. Now my wallet was empty of all paper money.
    “She pathetic, eh? She just don’ get it .”
    “L’nd’r, he like her O.K. He say, the white-girl sister is gon be his girl, they get things straight between them.”
    “What’s that mean—‘things straight between them’?”
    “Fuck how’d I know? L’nd’r aint even my cousin, he just some boy hangin around my uncle’s house, we all growin up.”
    And they laughed together. No idea why.
    It was mean of them to laugh at