by Mary McCoy
“Max!” I call out. There’s no answer, so he must be in the attic. I pull down the steps and call his name again, louder this time, as I rush up the stairs. I find him there, lying on the air mattress with his headphones on.
“Max!” He sits up and takes out the earbuds.
“Hey,” he says with a grin. “Did you get a bathmat?”
“Max, what did you do?”
It’s the only explanation, and as soon as I see the look on his face, I know I’m right. He knows exactly what I’m talking about.
“You said you wished you could find some way to tell Vincent the truth. You said he deserved to know it wasn’t his fault.”
“He didn’t deserve to find out like this!” I say. “Max, you had no right!”
Max looks genuinely surprised that I’m not grateful for what he’s done. I sit down at the computer and log into the Artists in Love hosting site, pull up the social media accounts to see if it’s gotten any worse since the last time I checked.
“I thought it was what you wanted,” Max says.
“Do you think that I wanted this?” I ask, pointing to the page of disgusted comments.
He gets up from the air mattress and reads over my shoulder, the ones I’d already seen, as well as the new posts that have shown up. Not every post tears me to shreds for being a terrible person. Some of them simply say that Objects of Destruction isn’t as good as Artists in Love. And I know they’re right.
I pull up the admin page and delete the episode of Objects of Destruction before anyone else can download it.
“Maybe it’s not so bad,” Max says.
“Vincent told me he could have forgiven me for anything except this, so don’t tell me it’s not so bad.”
“Well, whose fault is that?” Max mutters.
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me.”
“I don’t care what you do with your own life, Max, but don’t be a dilettante with mine.”
I smack the wall with the palm of my hand and cry out. I can’t believe Max would do something so thoughtless, so reckless, much less that he’d do it to me.
“Max, I trusted you.”
I can’t stand to look at him any longer. I go down the attic steps and into my bedroom, slamming the door behind me.
I try calling Vincent, but he doesn’t pick up. I text him, explaining that I’d just made the recordings for myself, that they were never supposed to go up, but someone else uploaded it.
Please forgive me, I type. I’ll do whatever it takes to make this right.
I wait for the dot-dot-dot that always follows immediately when I text Vincent, but it doesn’t come. He’s always been a prompt replier. Then again, I used to be the same way with him. I think about my three days of silence after we broke up, and wonder if it felt like this to him, like I was never going to speak to him again. What if he’d blocked my number? What if the last thing he ever said to me was, You have a funny way of showing it?
I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to begin to fix this, and the only person who knows won’t speak to me.
Then I remember there’s someone else who will know what to do.
And I owe her a phone call.
CHAPTER 30 What You Do Next
By the time I call, she’s already listened to it. My mom is an unconditionally supportive person, even when her love life is the subject of a podcast.
“You’re going to get through this,” she tells me when I call her. She doesn’t lecture me for not calling her. She doesn’t even mention it.
“But how can I fix it?”
Wherever she’s calling from, I can hear jazz playing softly in the background, sounds of traffic on the streets outside her window.
“You can’t,” she says. “You can’t take it back. You can’t do it over. You just have to live with it.”
The walls of my room feel close and claustrophobic. I hate the art posters on my wall, the clothes in my closet, the duvet on my bed. I want to crawl out of my own skin and abandon all of it.
“People make mistakes, Lee,” my mom says. “We hurt people we love. All of us do it, and there’s no getting around that. The only difference is what you do next.”
“What does that mean?”
“Give him space, Lee. And time. Maybe that will be enough, maybe it won’t be.”
“Mom, when are you coming home?”
“Soon,” she says. “After your dad’s moved out.”
“Why does it have to be like this? Why can’t you and Dad just figure it out?”
“Because we just can’t. We tried for a long time, Lee.”
“Then you didn’t try hard enough. You gave up.”
“I wouldn’t call twenty years of my life giving up. I’d call it a success. Sometimes things are over, and it’s time to let them be over.”
“Are you talking about Vincent and me?” I can’t tell whether she’s doing that poet thing of saying something that means two things at once.
“I’m saying this new project of yours isn’t Artists in Love. I’m not surprised your listeners didn’t like it.”
“Thanks a lot, Mom.”
“What I mean is, that’s not your audience anymore. Objects of Destruction will find its own audience. In any case, it inspired me.”
This gets my attention. My mom saying something inspired her is one of her highest compliments.
She continues, “I did some reading. Do you know what happened to the original Object of Destruction after Man Ray and Lee Miller broke up?”
“No.”
“A group of anarchists came into the museum where it was on display, and they smashed it. Man Ray wouldn’t let the police press charges. I mean, the piece was called Object to Be Destroyed. They were just taking him up on the suggestion.
“After that, he made six more of them, and when people asked why, he said, ‘The work has already been done.’ And then he renamed it Indestructible Object.”
“What does that mean?”
“Even things that are over aren’t over. The work has already been done,” she says. “And, Lee, I know your podcast isn’t finished, and I know you must want to walk away from it right now, but I want to tell you, I found it to be very meaningful.”
“Are you just saying that because I made it?”
“I’m saying it because it’s helpful to find out what your life looks like from the outside. You helped me, Lee. You gave me the courage to do what I need to do next.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, for starters, catch up on The Bachelorette. Apparently, Lindsey and Evan get busy in a lighthouse off the coast of Maine, but she’s still exploring her feelings for Lucas.”
“I love you, Mom.”
“I love you, too, baby. I miss you, and I’m so glad you called.”
She tells me she’ll see me in a few days, and we hang up. A few minutes later, she texts me a picture from her hotel room in New Orleans. She’s holding her notebook open to show me what she’s written in Sharpie:
YOUR HEART IS AN INDESTRUCTIBLE OBJECT.
I think about Max and me, trading inscriptions for our tombstones. Maybe I’m not like Max, floating through the world and finding all of it endlessly fascinating. I don’t know what to do about the fact that I’m a mess and a cheater and an artistic fraud. I don’t know what the next year of my life is supposed to look like, and even if someone told me I could have the beautiful life from my dream, I don’t begin to know how to get it. But as I look at the picture my mom sent, a sense of calm washes over me, and I know whatever happens, I can withstand it.
Because the work has already been done.
CHAPTER 31 Wiring Explosives
When I hang up with my mom, my situation is every bit as bad as it was before, but instead of asking Why me?, I find myself wondering, What next?
I do what an artist would do.
I sit down, and I make something.
A STATEMENT FROM LEE SWAN:
There are things about my life tha
t I want to say out loud. And then, some things are personal. Some things are private. Some parts of love stories are just for the people involved in them.
I’m sorry that I’ve caused pain to someone I love. I’m sorry, Vincent.
And to anyone else reading this, I’m sorry for taking a story that meant something to you and putting an ugly ending on it. That’s not how you tell the truth.
I hope someday I’ll get it right.
Before I post it, I want to find Max. I want him to see what I have to say, and more importantly, I want to apologize for yelling at him. Not that he’s apologized to me yet for what he did, but fuck it, I don’t even care anymore.
Apologies aren’t about who is right. They are about who is sorry.
Max had spent nearly a week humoring me, helping me, keeping my mind off my breakup, and following me down rabbit holes that involved confessional poetry and VHS cassettes. And yes, he fucked up, but when I think about how much I wish Vincent would call me up right now and say, “Lee, I understand. It’s all right. I forgive you,” I can’t go on being angry with Max.
Whatever it is that I want, I don’t have a lot of role models for it. I can’t even look to Lee Miller and Man Ray for advice. She just dumped him, moved to another country, and didn’t speak to him again for seven years.
My question is, what are you supposed to do when people who have loved you and been good to you and treated you well for a long time let you down? You can’t just go around wiring explosives and blowing up the bridge every time someone disappoints you. If you did that, eventually you’d have no one left.
I want my life to look different than that.
When I go up to the attic, though, Max is gone. I check the porch, the office, the backyard, my room, but there’s no sign of him.
He probably went for a walk to clear his head, I think.
When I sit down at the computer to post my statement to the Artists in Love social media accounts, I see that someone else has beaten me to it.
This is Max Lozada, and I want to make it clear that Lee Swan never gave me permission to upload her new project.
Lee likes doing things well. I thought what she’d made so far was good enough, but Lee is always trying to do better. Please don’t hold this against her, and accept my most sincere apology.
Oh, Max.
I post my statement beneath his, and then I go back downstairs, calling his name. I text him, Where are you? But five minutes later, there’s no response, only a text from my dad, asking if I’ll check his office for the clip-on reading lamp that he’d attached to the closet door, angled over the spot where his writing desk used to be. I tell him I’ll look and bring it over when I come.
Surprise. There is insufficient lighting in the cursed fourplex.
When I go into the office, something’s missing. It’s emptier than it was this morning. And that’s when I realize that Max’s suitcase is gone.
CHAPTER 32 Back to Chicago
I text my dad, Is Max over there?
No, he writes.
A minute later, my dad texts again.
Lee, we should talk about Objects of Destruction when you come over.
Shit, I think, he’s heard it. I imagine the scene, him and Harold and Sage sitting around a half-unpacked cardboard box, furious with me for airing their personal business to the world.
It wasn’t my fault, I want to text back to him.
But I know that’s not true. I said those things. I asked those questions. I committed the answers to digital format. It was my idea. If I’d really wanted to keep it from getting out into the world, I would have left it in my head.
That was the reality of what Max had done.
It didn’t matter whose fault it was. What mattered was, did I stand by what I’d said?
I didn’t know.
It was entirely possible that I’d taken a situation where my parents were getting divorced and I’d been fired and dumped, and found a way to make everything about it worse.
Well, you certainly found a way to make it all about yourself, I can almost hear Max saying. I wish he were here right now to say it.
I don’t text my dad back.
* * *
I don’t know whether Risa will write me back or not, but I know she’s gotten close with Max too. She’d want to know that he’s gone missing. And of course, it’s possible that he’s over at her house at this very moment. She’s good to talk to, he’d said so himself.
She texts me back almost immediately: No, he’s not with me. Everything okay?
I don’t know, I write back. He took all his stuff.
Where would he go? Risa asks.
The answer pops into my head immediately, though I have no evidence other than knowing him for ten years, knowing how much he didn’t want to come to Memphis in the first place.
Back to Chicago, I text Risa.
Max has finally had it with me, with Sage, with being under the same roof as our bullshit. Not that he’d tried to make things right with either of us to our faces. He’d posted an apology to a bunch of strangers on the internet, then disappeared without even saying goodbye. I thought we were friends. I thought we meant more to each other than that.
He must feel awful, Risa writes.
I almost text back, He has a funny way of showing it, but then I remember Vincent using those words on me. I remember how misunderstood they made me feel.
I check the clock. There are still a couple of hours before the next train.
Do you have a car? I ask Risa.
Yeah, why?
Do you want to go on a mission to stop Max from getting on a train to Chicago?
I’ll be there in ten minutes, she writes.
CHAPTER 33 The Life You Sing About
It’s the last scrap of daylight when I get into Risa’s car. Streetlights are beginning to come on, and the sky is a fierce golden pink. She tries to kiss me on the cheek, but it’s an awkward angle and the kiss lands near my ear, and when I try to kiss her cheek back, I miss altogether and end up kissing the air.
Neither of us speaks as I buckle up. I’m wondering if I should have kissed her on the lips, or hugged her, or if, given the seriousness of the situation, we shouldn’t have touched at all. I wonder whether she’d even be here if she knew what had happened between Vincent and me the night before.
“I’m so sorry,” she says as she pulls out of the driveway. “If I’d known what would happen, I wouldn’t have told Max posting it was a good idea.”
“You knew?”
“He had a crisis of conscience right before he posted it and asked me what I thought he should do. I told him to go for it.”
“Oh.”
I don’t have any energy left for feeling angry about this, or blaming other people. Instead I change the subject.
“Max told me you had a good conversation last night.”
“You would have been invited if you hadn’t been over at Vincent’s,” she says in this very cool, tossed-off way, adding, “How’d that go?”
“It was a disaster.”
“Anyway, you were invited,” she says.
I can’t tell if she’s being sincere or sarcastic, or whether she’s angry with me but trying to be low-key about it, because it’s not even clear whether we have the kind of relationship where you get to be mad at someone for hanging out with their ex.
I decide to do things like Risa would, the honest way.
“When I didn’t hear back from you, I guess I thought maybe you had second thoughts, or maybe you weren’t that into me.”
She looks surprised. “I’m a utilitarian texter.”
“What does that mean?”
“I’m not a recreational, conversational, chatty, ‘you up?’ kind of texter. I’d been meaning to talk to you about that.”
I thought about the giant paragraphs of text that Vincent and I used to send each other on an average Wednesday and wonder what Risa must have thought of my correspondence.
“I’
m sorry. I hope I didn’t stress you out with my… long-windedness.”
“You weren’t long-winded. Just enthusiastic.” I must look mortified because she quickly adds, “Enthusiastic is good. It felt good, knowing you wanted to spend that many words on me. It’s just not my style.”
“Understood,” I say, and I know that whatever kind of relationship this is, it doesn’t have any lies or secrets in it yet, and I want to keep it that way. “I have to tell you something too.”
“Did something happen with Vincent last night?” she asks.
“He asked me to move to Washington, DC, with him. He said that he wanted to be with me, and…”
“You hooked up.” She says it like she’s not even surprised.
“Not exactly. We started to, but then, like I told you, disaster.”
“Cool,” she says, and I can already feel her putting me back in the box of bi girls to watch out for.
“Are you sure?” I ask, because I’m not.
“We never said we were exclusive. Anyhow, I kind of knew better than to expect that from you.”
Just a couple of days ago, Risa was writing me songs and taking me to underground video stores. Everything she’s saying now sounds so casual and indifferent, like I’m more trouble than I’m worth.
“I like you,” I say, “and I like being with you. I want to be around to see what happens next.”
“Like an experiment?” she asks warily.
“Like a dream,” I say. And then before I think better of it and stop myself, I ask, “Have you ever watched The Bachelorette?”
Cool Risa, guitar-playing Risa, bedroom studio–having, very-gay Risa looks at me like I’ve just asked if she’s ever watched a snuff film.
“It’s my favorite show,” I say. “I’ve never told anyone that except my mom.”
“Okay…,” she says, trailing off. I can tell that she thinks I’m just trying to change the subject. If I have a point, I need to make it fast or I’m going to lose her.
“Hear me out. At the beginning, you have this model or beauty queen or whatever, and she’s dating all these different people at the same time. They go out, they get to know each other, they kiss. And the feelings she develops for all of them are real. She cares about all of them for different reasons. And every week, people watch her do this, and they’re cheering her on.”