The Portrait of a Mirror

by A. Natasha Joukovsky

  —Alas, the litany of advanced bitch accomplishments is hard-fought, Dale admitted. Quixotic elephant sculptures are the subject of terrific anxiety in my household, I assure you.

  Diana narrowed her eyes, trying to calm her craving for Maximum Strength Visine.

  —It doesn’t always seem hard-fought, though, not from the outside. When I first met Wes, this was the intoxicating thing about him, much more so than the presence of quixotic elephants.

  —Accomplishing difficult feats with ease and all that?

  —Sort of, though you don’t make it to the Olympics without at least some willingness to expose your efforts. It was more as if, to go back to our original argument, his foreground self was enhanced by an ultra-deluxe background, yet also somehow unencumbered by it. I wanted him because of this, but I also wanted to be him. Sorry, that probably sounds super-creepy.

  She thought about telling the story of Wes’s father here, the irony of how well it had all played out for him, but decided against it. At face value it was the ultimate pathos-generating narrative, and she wanted Dale to save up all of his sympathy. Besides, she already had his undivided attention. Dale wasn’t looking at her so much as staring, studying her almost, as if trying to relearn the rules to a game he loved but hadn’t played in a while. Diana tilted her head at what she imagined would be a particularly obliging angle, rolling her shoulders so that her collarbones popped. They sat in silence for a few deliciously awkward seconds before he invited her to continue.

  —What I’m trying to say is, Wes just had this thing about him—the not-actually-a-thing thing that people always seem to think they’re going to achieve by buying certain shit and doing certain things, but never seem to be able to. You know—you know the special effect some people give off that seems materially imitable, but just isn’t? He had that. Do you know what I mean?

  The manner in which Diana said this rather emphasized the unsaid: the tacit implication that Dale was also one of those instantly intoxicating people—and, perhaps more importantly, so was she.

  —I think the term you’re looking for is self-actualization, he offered.

  —Sure, fine, whatever you want to call it—self-actualization, self-assurance, ease, nonchalance, thing—the point is, I wanted it too. Violently. For a while, even though I was working very hard and miserable and exhausted from all the SoulCycling, I could sense that people were under the impression that I’d actually achieved it, like they thought I lived in a magazine or something. Our wedding, certainly, would have yielded this impression—although by now you must realize what a ruse that particular illusion to be.

  —But illusion or not, you have to know you still give off that impression—of quirky feminine perfection and whatnot. Stop fishing for compliments, Diana, it’s unseemly.

  —I swear I’m not fishing—

  She was, though, and Diana paused, feeling preemptive embarrassment for what she was about to say in proof of her innocence to this accusation. At this moment more than at any other point leading up to it, she wanted to seem raw and uncut and real, to lay bare her feelings with such forthrightness that the stunning bravery of unmitigated personal exposure would overshadow any question in his mind. She needed to paint marriage a more dismal landscape than she actually felt it to be, and was fully prepared to self-humiliate in order to achieve her desired effect.

  —Something fundamental changed for me. I’m not sure whether it happened before or after the wedding, it was such a sneaky slip—at some point, I realized that our self-actualized selves, that special thing everyone else now saw in both of us—not only had I never had it, not really—I no longer saw it in Wes, either. He was encumbered with something now. He was encumbered, I think, with me. I feel like you must know what I mean.

  —Yes, of course I do, because you’re describing any long-term relationship. There’s always an inflection point, a point where you slip into that intimacy-killing sort of intimacy. Achieving the insatiable closeness you initially crave inevitably satiates the craving. You said it yourself tonight—postmerger integration is the hardest part. If you want to stay with one person, you have to find a way to live on the memory of it; to be able to occasionally rechannel and bring it back. Because honestly, think about it: there’s an appeal to stability, too. It’s nice knowing you have someone to go to weddings with, someone who already knows all your foibles and friends. Can you imagine what your life would actually be like—how shaky and chaotic—if you were always passionately in love?

  —What is so wrong with wanting that? Diana exclaimed, almost yelling. Call me naive, but that’s what I want. Why wouldn’t you want every moment to be movie-caliber? Or better yet, like the preview? I want my life to be packed with that kind of incessant intensity—which, by the way, I am aware is fully incompatible with the patient dedication it takes to achieve advanced bitchdom. But just because I know these things are illusory and impossible doesn’t stop me from wanting them. This realization—this is what has been my recent undoing. I had an experience that extinguished the sliver of hope embedded in my illusions, the great illusion of illusion itself: that somewhere in there, some small part of it has to be real.

  At this moment Diana’s phone, which was sitting on the bar faceup, started to ring. The name Wes was clearly visible for Dale to see. Diana looked down at the phone, then up at Dale, deliberately. Yes, her speech had had the intended effect. She held his gaze as, with the tiniest flick of her eyebrow—so small as to be almost imperceptible—she silenced her phone. It was a haughty sort of showmanship, but she made sure not to overdo it, turning her attention swiftly thereafter to the inside of her bag. She had not yet forgiven Dale for his pragmatic approach to passion. It felt like the defense of something she didn’t want him to want to defend. And yet, the way he had defied her wishes somehow made her respect him in a way that harkened to an even deeper kinship. The first bottle of Maximum Strength Visine she tried was empty, and she fished around for a second. He ordered another round as the tetrahydrozoline hydrochloride flooded her eyes.

  —What? I have allergies, she said.

  —Nothing—nothing at all. Go on; tell me about your recent experience, please.

  —On my last project, someone googled me and found our wedding announcement from the New York Times.

  Dale had been mid-sip as she said this, and promptly aspirated on his Stella Artois.

  —Are you okay?

  He nodded and waved her off.

  —The team couldn’t get enough of it; there was even a dramatic reading at dinner one evening. Are you sure you’re okay?

  —Yes, yes—okay, he managed to say.

  —It had been ages since I’d thought about the article, and it’d reclaimed the ability to surprise me—you know, like a movie you haven’t seen since you were a little kid. There it was, the most public, permanent record of my life, saying everything I could ever want it to say—and I didn’t recognize myself in it. All the facts about us, the story of how we met—it was all technically true, of course, but it wasn’t the truth, if you know what I mean. The part at the end, especially. They make it sound like we missed this big social function because Wes was super-interested in an algorithm I built. What actually happened is he was so late coming to pick me up it didn’t seem worth the effort to go, and we decided to stay in. He played with the algorithm for most of the night, yes, but on and off, and not with some blazing enchantment. It wasn’t until months later that he connected it to a few other ideas he’d been working on with Julian in the ideation phase of Ecco. You see? The unvarnished reality was messy and inelegant. But the way the Times tells it, spinning the story into a eureka moment—it makes our whole relationship, our whole lives, even, like glow in the dark or something. Like we’re these lovable geniuses. All of the plodding, interim work that built Ecco—hell, that built our relationship—that gets totally lost. The facts are presented in such a way as to render their collective narrative fictitious.

  —But that’s precisely why
everyone loves those things, Diana! The New York Times Style section is just analog Instagram. It’s a vehicle built explicitly for the exposition of your best self.

  —I know you’re right, but I’m telling you, this went beyond a filter. It didn’t even seem like me in there. Like, I was actively jealous of the girl in the article—jealous of myself! The girl in the article seemed like the luckiest fucking human being in the entire fucking world. Now she had that thing. I’m telling you, aspiring to my fictional self and empirically knowing that she wasn’t and could never be real—it was mind bending and ego shattering and dehumanizing and bleak. You don’t realize how important that sliver of hope is until you’ve lost it, I think.

  —Perhaps not, he said, blushing . . . but it does explain why you’ve colored your hair.

  Diana burst into a rich guffaw. It was the only possible thing for him to say. She would have been disappointed if he’d overindulged her melodrama, but she would have been likewise so if he’d lacked interest in it. Dale had read the damn article. He was interested, all right. She grinned at him with her entire body.

  —Yes. Guilty.

  —Pretty cliché response to such a profound revelation, I’d say, he gently teased.

  —Oh, don’t worry, that’s just one part of my recent experiment. I’ve also fired our housekeeper and removed the Instagram app from my phone. I’ve been letting go of little things I love but are bad for me. I’ve been seeing how it feels, how I handle it. It’s my natural approach to decision-making, I guess.

  Diana trailed off, biting her lip and blinking, the background fading behind him.

  —What are you trying to decide?

  —Isn’t it obvious? Whether or not to leave Wes.

  Her words hung in the air as if suspended in front of her face between them, waiting to see whether Dale would breathe them in or blow them away.

  CHAPTER XIV.

  It was the Friday before memorial day. Wes was supposed to have met Diana at noon, and it was nearly half-past. He could see her waiting for him in front of their building, head back, laying into the Visine. She uses way too much of that shit, he thought with a shiver, bracing himself to face the whites of her eyes as he crossed the street.

  She’d returned from Philadelphia the previous evening in such an icy mood that the little mechanisms Wes had built to solve for the problem of Vivien Floris froze on the spot.

  He’d started erecting them even in the wee hours of Tuesday morning, when Wes had had the good subconscious sense to make his way home. Waking up alone in his own bed did nothing for his hangover, but it significantly expanded the options for self-deception. There was no disputing the who, the what, the where—these images were too vivid, and hardly outside Wes’s moral boundaries in and of themselves. It all boiled down to a problem of when. Change the date and the whole affair was not only aboveboard, it was a memory to revel in. A distant memory. He’d had too much to drink at dinner, come home, and dreamed of another night—a real night, yes, but one years in the past. This version of the events had much to recommend it. He’d had sex with Vivien, but it wasn’t adultery. How could it have been? When it had happened, Wes hadn’t even been an adult.

  He’d repeated this story to himself over and over in the days that followed, but it couldn’t hold up to the reality of Diana’s presence. As is so often the case with truth, it wasn’t dead but merely hibernating. The shames of his crime hung upside down in his mind, like sleeping bats, and every word and action that passed between Wes and his wife shot through him the terror they’d awaken.

  —Hi, he said, gingerly, navigating the curb with a cautious step, rubbing the back of his neck with his hand.

  —You’re late, Diana snapped.

  Almost all of Wes and Diana’s arguments followed a similar arc, with every new row like the outermost shell for a growing matryoshka doll of past disagreements. Even on the Friday before a holiday weekend, when the Uber surge was unreasonable, the traffic flow to JFK ossifying, and both Wes and Diana in frantic need of lunch, her objections to him running behind, he knew, would have little to do with whether they made their flight. The specific transgression would become an exemplar of some systemic issue like “spending too much time at work,” which they’d argue about in escalating cycles until one of them objected to the other’s “tone.” The natural response here was that there was no “tone,” or, if there really obviously was a “tone,” that this “tone” was merely in proportionate reaction to the tone accuser’s “tone.” It was generally during the “tone” debate—usually five, maybe six argumentative layers deep—that the instability of their dispute began to manifest, and either Wes or Diana would didactically instruct the other to “calm down,” a request that was received, invariably, as the single most inflammatory and uncalming thing it was possible to say. Any remaining pretense to debate would devolve into irresolvable bickering over whether the accused party was or was not in fact calm, who was calmer, &c., and ultimately deteriorate into the ever-infuriating were-they-or-were-they-not-presently-capable-of-having-an-argument argument about—what was the original argument about?

  Wes was keen to avoid this series of events, and managed not to respond. He disliked squabbling with Diana in front of third parties in the best of circumstances, and their Uber driver, Raoul M., was pulling up now.

  Raoul M. had an adolescently sparse mustache and the nonleather interior of his Toyota Highlander harbored the lingering plasticized-gluten smell of a Subway sandwich. Wes was abashed, thinking this way about poor Raoul M., but consoled himself that developing an unflattering mental portrait of him at least recognized his humanity. Many of his friends treated their Uber drivers like the central processing units of autonomous vehicles, he told himself. And to be fair to his friends, eventually they probably would be—autonomous vehicles, that is. But not yet, not Raoul M. Wes wondered whether Raoul M. ever used Uber on his days off. Something told him probably not. Ultimately that’s the problem with the sharing economy: not everyone gets to share in it. Wes imagined himself delivering this line in a TED Talk, and tried out a few subtle variations. It was a gratifying image. There is nothing like abstract righteousness to distract from one’s concrete personal failings.

  Traffic was indeed bad, but Diana became engrossed in texting someone, and Wes was able to maintain a wary near-silence all the way to JFK. They breezed through PreCheck, and once it became clear there would be enough time to buy snacks, Diana defrosted a bit. By boarding time and down half a bag of Chex Mix, he would have classified her temper somewhere between impassive and resting-grouchy. Not his favorite Diana, but well within her normal emotive range. She was still young and pretty enough to be broadly forgiven by the world for both sour attitude and questionable diet.

  As usual, the plane to Nantucket was one of those dated puddle jumpers with no real first class and two seats on either side of the aircraft. Wes and Diana generally had an unspoken understanding that on all forms of commercial and public transportation she took the interior seat and he the aisle. It was an arrangement that tended to work well for both of them, and made total physical sense, but to which Diana occasionally objected vehemently on spurious grounds of sexism, only to dramatically concede, deliberately reverse-engineering an example of her magnanimity for leverage in subsequent disputes. Wes was duly relieved when she shuffled toward the window unceremoniously and fell asleep before takeoff. As they soared away from the big city, he polished off the Chex Mix, glanced at the nutrition facts and immediately hated himself for it, queued up a podcast, and tried to ignore Diana. The way her mouth half-opened in sleep made this difficult. It was unattractive, and yet there was something endearingly defenseless about it, childlike almost. This impression didn’t wholly dissipate when she woke a few minutes before landing. He watched her peer serenely out the window, transfixed on the island below, almost like she was empathizing with it.

  Nantucket! Go on Google Maps and look at it. See what an incredible corner of the world it occupies;
how it stands there, away off shore, basking in the benefit of a little distance. Look at it—a storied hillock, and keenly conserved elbow of sand; a manicured wild, the ultimate background. Now double click, switch to satellite, then Street View—yes, zoom in. See the cedar shingles, cobblestones, and brick. Mosey down the Straight Wharf and examine its boats, the houses on stilts. Visit the Whaling Museum and learn of its history, how Nantucketers conquered the watery world like so many Alexanders. Is it any wonder, then, that now so many Alexanders of our watery world seek to conquer Nantucket?

  Wes’s uncle Cort, his mother’s younger brother, picked them up from the airport in his obligatory doorless Jeep, clapping Wes on the back and bear-hugging Diana—who suddenly radiated warmth and sunshine, as if she’d been saving up all her good humor specifically for him. Exaggerated kindness to others was one of Wes’s least-favorite tactics in their marital war arsenal, mainly because Diana was better at it. Witnessing her charm someone else was far more punishing than universal gloom or petulance. There was something chastely perfidious about it—the relative demeanor differential, its wide expanse—like she was systematically excluding Wes from the essence of her winning Diana-ness he most wanted to singly trounce and possess. He watched Cort bask in her expressive, sly joviality, the things she did to please, that high-decibel laugh ripping into the wind. Little wisps of hair escaped her ponytail as she turned toward him or threw her head back in peals, like Cort was the most interesting man in the world.