The Portrait of a Mirror

by A. Natasha Joukovsky

  In the self-serving competition of who was better at recognizing and apologizing for his or her own privilege, the insinuation of sexism was an outright declaration of war. Diana could see the onslaught of Wes’s objections hanging on his lips with a rising personal exigency:

  —Calm down, Diana, he susurrated. None of this is about guilt. I’m just trying to keep the focus on what’s important in Serial: the faulty legal proceedings, the conviction of a man without the evidence necessary—a shit ton of reasonable doubt. You need to relax. Liberal guilt doesn’t land you in jail.

  —I’m not uncalm! All of your self-righteous posturing, Wes, and you don’t even care whether or not Adnan actually did it. He should be free only if he’s truly innocent. If he’s guilty, he belongs right where he is. Stop leaning on some abstract accusation of privilege to obfuscate the real moral dilemma here.

  —Can someone please explain to me what exactly is so horrible about privilege? Julian asked. I, for one, enjoy it immensely.

  —You don’t mean that, Julian, Wes said.

  —Sure he does, countered Diana. We all enjoy it.

  —How can you say that? The very problem with privilege is that not everyone has it, Wes intoned didactically.

  —I meant the three of us. Jesus, Wes. It’s like you’re intentionally misunderstanding me. And I’m not saying that privilege isn’t a moral dilemma, by the way, I’m just saying it’s not the primary moral dilemma at issue in Serial.

  —Oh thank god, the food is here, Julian said. Moral dilemmas make me hungry.

  The Breakfast Club Sandwiches temporarily put a halt to the conversation, if not the tension around the table, as they all fell into worship at the altars of their plates. A few minutes later Diana broke the silence, picking up where she left off with her mouth still half full of food:

  —Do you think it’s better to be guilty, and thought to be innocent—or innocent, and thought to be guilty?

  Wes studied his water glass.

  —That is a false dichotomy, Julian stated obliviously. You left out the other two options. You could also be innocent and thought to be innocent, or guilty and thought to be guilty—like Adnan Syed. It’s a two-by-two matrix.

  —Yes, but both of those other outcomes are rational and just. The whole point of the hypothetical is which injustice you’d choose if you had to, rejoined Diana. Whether you ultimately care more about reality or appearance, truth or facade. Whether you would rather have peace of mind, or peace of matter.

  —You’re either guilty or innocent of something, Wes said, so your “truth” axis is fixed. The question comes down to appearance. And what rational actor would choose anything but the appearance of innocence either way?

  —Clearly you have never read Crime and Punishm—

  Julian cut her off with vigor:

  —Are we seriously still arguing about Serial at brunch in the West Village? Sorry, I need to step away from this parody of my life. I’m going to Patagonia. They’re having a sale.

  He deposited a wad of crumpled cash on the table theatrically.

  —Wow, Diana said, why do you have so many ones?

  —What are you implying? Julian rejoined. That I made a lot of money stripping this weekend? Small bills are useful at food trucks and coat checks and Taco Bell when their payment interface crashes on Friday night, not that I owe you any explanation.

  Wes and Diana unanimously laughed at this, and the tone of the table neutralized.

  —No need to be ashamed of stripping, Wes grinned. I’m sure you’ll get used to it in your new line of work.

  —Excuse me, but I do not think you understand the nature of shame. And I quote, “Shame does not ebb away slowly over time; it sometimes hides its face for a while, seeming to slink out of sight, only to stride purposefully back out of the shadows and onto the center-stage of your life, as real and alive as it was the first day you saw it.”

  He paused dramatically, clearly enjoying Wes and Diana’s astonishment. Julian shook his head and smiled, breaking the character of himself for a brief second before standing up and retrieving his tote bag.

  —I’ll let you sit back and marvel at that, he said, deftly playing himself once again.

  —What’s it from? asked Wes.

  —Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution, Julian said. Why do you look so surprised? I told you, it’s an excellent book.

  CHAPTER XVIII.

  She stood in line at la maison Paul in a contrapposto slouch, an elbow draped crudely over the handle of her luggage, her attention vacillating between the boulangerie’s vaulted menu and a glossy disposable gift bag, mint-green in color, hanging over her other elbow, from which she extracted macaron after macaron.

  She was Diana Whalen in Charles de Gaulle Airport Terminal 2F. Dale McBride had the long-standing tendency to record his memories in novel form like this, like a pending mental draft of his life that one of these days he would finally find the time to type out and dramatize. Back when he was putting together applications to MFA programs as a college senior, Dale had mustered enough self-awareness and insight into the modus operandi of graduate school admissions not to submit some story about himself, to write instead about the abduction of an underprivileged woman in South Boston that demonstrated all of the appropriate intersectional sensibilities. He’d genuinely believed in the outraged moralism of his own story, of course, but he also had to admit he’d only written it to satisfy the canon-balancing bloodlust of a few purple-pen-wielding deans. Dale was unusually capable of genuine empathy for a handsome young man, and especially when genuine empathy was much to his own benefit, but the true subject of his writerly interest fundamentally boiled down to himself.

  Turning down those modest-yet-prestigious MFA stipends for commonplace big money at Portmanteau was a decision that Dale had, over the years, spent a great deal of time reminding himself how much he did not regret. His initial plan had been to defer acceptance for one year—just long enough to cement his relationship with Vivien and earn the Portmanteau signing bonus—but then he got promoted early and was slated to make even more money and didn’t it perhaps make most sense to defer again? He deferred again. A few weeks later, the economy collapsed. Pandemic uncertainty swept across the upwardly mobile young-professional landscape, and it started to look like he had dodged a real professional bullet. The next summer his friends with newly minted MFAs—even top ones—were by and large forced to accept teaching positions at third-rate institutions or even low-paying noncreative jobs to support their writing on the side. When Dale met up with them, the most innocuous conversations often exposed the sharp divergence of their material circumstances. His friends were envious and embarrassed by their envy, which embarrassed Dale, too—even as it pleased him, and made his friends ashamed of embarrassing him, and Dale ashamed of his perverse pleasure. It was all so obvious, and yet sedulously unsaid. American liberal politeness required the forceful denunciation of inequalities in the abstract while pretending not to notice them between friends. You assured yourself they didn’t exist, even as you jostled for position. How could Dale say no when Portmanteau offered to pay for his MBA? He couldn’t. He had already gone through the thwarted do-gooder cycle of failing to change and becoming, as a result, increasingly focused on his own comfort. In truth, the salary that had sounded enormous coming out of undergrad had failed to keep pace with his—or Vivien’s—expectations. After all, his banker friends in New York made far more.

  Everything had worked out so well for him. He’d gone to Wharton. And yet, the mind is its own place, and Dale had never quite been able to quash his road-not-traveled regret. It was at small-talk-heavy parties with Vivien, where it was difficult to briefly convey his singularity and prestige, but everyone oohed and ahhed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art—let alone now the Met. It was after the economy recovered a bit, and Dale found out on Facebook that one of his once-envious writer friends had sold his debut novel for six figures. A flattering professional portrait of this friend,
delicately composed to suggest a down-to-earth intellectual coolness, front-lined an article in the Times. It was exactly the sort of authorial portrait that Dale, much to his own annoyance, could not prevent himself from thinking he would rather like himself.

  It took three weeks for Dale to fully grasp the real reason why Diana Whalen had seemed so immediately familiar to him, so inherently trustworthy. How could he have failed to see it sooner? At the nondescript bar, she’d practically said so. They were both tormented by a compounding series of voluntary decisions, a controlled spiral of ceded control. They were connected, if at first only subconsciously, by the memory of a freedom surrendered for well-appointed captivity. There was an underground Kerouac in both of them, dying to hit the road.

  He hesitated for a moment, watching her with prickling anticipation. The skin under her eyes was puffy and bluish from inadequate sleep. But the polar whites of them glowed. Like heartless voids and immensities of the universe, blank and full of meaning, operating without medium upon matter in the morning light.

  Nowhere did Dale’s misgivings envelop him more painfully than when he saw Diana like this, proximate and far away, dissatisfied, placid, and tumultuous, a too-human array of contradictions and appetites that perfectly mirrored his own. It was when Diana was at her most artless, when the unattractive realities of her humanness seeped to the surface, that Dale was most inclined to deify her in symbolic worship. In harboring her own parallel spiral of regret, Diana had become the embodiment of his. She was every MFA acceptance he’d turned down and deferred and watched lapse, every risk he’d successfully avoided but wished he hadn’t. She was all the nights he’d gone to bed early, and all the girls he hadn’t fucked. Diana Whalen was the protean face of his own fictional pasts, all the butterfly versions of his life that he yearned to grasp.

  He approached her slyly, poking just below her elbow, the mint-green, glossy-bag-laden one.

  —Let me in on those macarons, he smiled—and second breakfast is on me.

  —Oh, hi! Yes, please have some—and yes please!

  Her excitement to see him was so palpable, it was almost possible to forget why they were here. He wanted to say: Let’s hop a train to Nice. Yes, I’m serious. Yes, right now. My parents have a place there. Fuck Mercury. Fuck Portmanteau. Fuck Wes, and fuck Vivien. I’ll take you all around the Riviera—or—let’s just move there, permanently. Economize, but like kings, on baguettes and fresh pasta. Don’t you see what I’m trying to say? It doesn’t even matter, so long as I’m with you. Let’s go, now-now. I don’t want to analyze it or rationalize it or develop a list of pros and cons or build a fucking issue tree. For once in our lives can we please please please not think and just do? It was what the fearless character of himself in his unwritten novel would say.

  But Dale didn’t say it. He didn’t say it for the same reason he didn’t do any of the other totally unacceptable things it occurred to him at various points that he would like to do—the same reason that he didn’t take his pants off in hot weather or ask Vivien’s friend Grace Cho if she’d gotten a boob job. Because invariably, exerting your freedom to do this kind of thing precluded your ability to exert it. You could beg your married coworker to run away with you—but only until you actually did. And Dale wanted the inchoate possibility of indulging his whims more than he wanted to actually indulge them.

  He made an exception and did indulge in a macaron, however, extracting one with unflinching eye contact. He made another for postmortem analysis—and rationalization, pro-con list development, and issue-tree building—second-guessing and reaffirming and second-guessing every aspect of his inaction in an agonizing loop of regret and relief.

  For the taxonomy of Dale’s feelings for Diana Whalen was not mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive. It both was and was not that old, remote worship of a woman, characterized precisely by her proximity out of reach. Dale had, by this time, become acutely acquainted with Diana’s flaws, and it was impossible to reduce his admiration to glamoured abstraction. Indeed, in their strange friendship Dale and Diana had developed that deep, variegated intellectual-emotional intimacy rarely found outside of marriage, the kind that generates expectations and obligations and too-human familiarities. The kind that tends to shatter the illusions of courtship. Diana was manipulative and balky and loud and erratic. She drank too much and overused profanity. There was a scar on her forehead that, once he noticed it, Dale had been surprised he hadn’t seen sooner. Her second toes protruded slightly past her big ones in that way he otherwise found rampantly unappealing. The bewitching nature of her eyes was manufactured by fucking Johnson & Johnson. Her youth, even, was not entirely without its drawbacks. While in general Diana’s shrewd practicality yielded the impression of maturity, there were moments when this effect fell away and it felt more like he was chatting to a precocious adolescent than a woman—like she was a teenager catfishing him from her parents’ basement. The clear white light shone unforgivingly on the things Dale didn’t like about Diana, the things he found unattractive, the things, even, that did not compare very favorably to Vivien. But it didn’t matter. It was not the velvet paw he loved so much as the remorseless fang.

  And yet Diana’s remaining remoteness—her tantalizing unavailability—was an undeniable aspect of his fascination, her resistance augmenting her irresistibility. Naturally his body yearned madly for that one great intimacy, the one that supposedly compensates for all the rest. But he also wasn’t sure if anything could be hotter than not having sex with Diana. Dale was hardly insensible to the pull of the world’s greatest compliment and his desire to overpower her in the game they were playing. But there were timeworn contradictions in his imaginative demands, and his sensations of inferiority and superiority traced their origins back to the same source. Dale would have been hard pressed to articulate it as such, but the unseen presence of Charles Wesley Range IV was a curious part of Diana’s appeal. It made him feel important to have such a competitor for her affections, even in his jealousy, and especially in his resistance. As if what was good enough for Wes Range, “entrepreneur and Olympic rower,” was not quite good enough for Dale McBride: amateur athlete, sure, but real intellectual. Dale ordered their coffee and croissants, and the airport barista, doubtlessly fluent in English, responded to his French in French, as if in direct support of this position.

  There was then, too, something honorable in Diana’s loyalty to her failing marriage, and she would have lost some of her halo in willing infidelity to her husband. The moments, in fact, when Dale felt Diana’s conjugal resolve cracking were those in which she became least attractive to him—needy, desperate—and Dale found himself, often to his own surprise, the half-hypocritical guardian of fidelity, putting forth passionate arguments on his rival’s behalf. When Diana spoke of Wes fondly, however, or regaled the team with jaunty tales of her weekend life, Dale privately burned with the shame of a cuckold, quite as if she’d been Vivien. If only he could have resurrected all of Diana’s spousal dissatisfactions then! He wanted to hurl her own secrets back at her, to watch the very arguments that erstwhile brought Dale to Wes’s defense explode gloriously in her face. That Dale knew this shame to be misplaced only exacerbated his pain. If anything, the shame of his misplaced shame, this meta-shame, was even worse. He blamed Diana for precipitating his feelings and felt guilty for blaming her. He hated himself for wanting her, and more for wanting to hurt her. The dominos of his thoughts and feelings were set up in a circle, and he resented her most at the apex of his lust.

  Dale McBride was teetering on the edge of this annularity just now, as Eric Hashimoto had arrived with a rollicking “Sup,” interrupting their pointed lack of conversation with the sort of personal chitchat inevitable to elicit some soft mention of Wes. Dale already knew Wes and Diana had gone to a wedding in Brooklyn over the weekend; having to share her attention with Eric in the process of hearing about it only served to rile Dale doubly. Her latte arrived and they turned toward the exit.

&nb
sp; —Oh, it was just like every other wedding these days, Diana was saying. Elaborately orchestrated into elegant simplicity. I’m sure Dale’s will be just like it.

  She said that last sentence as a jocose slight, toeing the line between backhanded compliment and fronthanded complaint. Diana was abusing Vivien’s specialness in a tacit declaration of jealousy, needling at Dale’s marital reticence precisely by gratifying his ego with her own displeasure. Her air of nonchalance had been partially pulled back to expose the edge of something darker. As they joined the taxi line, she pointedly turned to Eric.

  —Macaron?

  —Yeah. Thanks, Mom, Eric said casually, taking two at once, but carefully, visibly mindful of his shirt cuff.

  Over the past six weeks, Eric Hashimoto had undergone that particular metamorphosis of self-assurance often discernible in smart new analysts granted blanket psychological safety. Social inclusion combined with praise for his (undeniably) high-quality work and personal preciousness had systematically invigorated Eric’s fragile confidence a bit too far in the other direction. This was partially Dale’s own fault, he knew—though it was mostly Diana’s. Her tutelage was like a NICU for the gifted novice, and she had gotten Eric milk-drunk on his own future promise. It wasn’t that he was “different” now so much as just extra-emphatically himself. Eric’s genuine eccentricities had been exaggerated with positive reinforcement in the same way that laughing even once when a four-year-old says “fuck” will incline him to say it again—except louder the second time, and to a larger audience. That was the problem with incentives, though—not that they didn’t work, but that they worked only too well. Diana and Dale had made all of the well-meaning mistakes of parents anxious to ensure their child’s success, and having helped Eric shed his cocoon with too great an ease, it occasionally became necessary to thrust him back into it.

  —Eric, you have to stop calling us “Mom” and “Dad” before you accidentally do it in front of the client, said Dale.