by Lila Savage
· 3 ·
Ella had met Alix at a party she went to with Cissy four years earlier. Cissy was older than Ella, and everyone at the parties she went to seemed like legitimate grown-ups, bearded men with eyes that crinkled at the corners when they smiled at Ella, and stylish, lipsticked women looking voluptuously dishier and fifteen pounds heavier than Ella imagined they had in their twenties. At that time in her life, the parties Ella more usually went to were either full of people she had graduated from college with or throngs of young, largely homogenous gay men, their eyebrows as unnaturally groomed as Jean Harlow’s.
The party was in a warehouse converted into artists’ studios, and Cissy had informed Ella on the way there that the rent was crazy cheap, because it was so close to a Superfund site that people couldn’t safely live there full-time. This had struck Ella as attractively dangerous and bohemian, but she had noted, as usual, that Cissy took an annoying amount of satisfaction in impressing her, in making her feel privileged to be included. Cissy’s friend Isaac drove them there. He needed to get out of the house because he had become a bit reclusive in the few months since his wife had left him, and the prospect of this divorce only served to make Ella feel even younger.
They wandered around the warehouse, looking at strange, messy, occasionally gorgeous installation pieces and striking, slightly drunk artists. The space was so enormous that there might have been a hundred people present without it feeling like a crowd; they milled about a pile of mannequin parts twenty feet high and a claw-footed bathtub filled with moss and ferns and sat on old beauty salon chairs and battered plaid couches. Cissy knew lots of people there and fell into conversation easily, but Ella hung back a little. Isaac, perhaps chivalrously, stayed with Ella, and she was grateful.
Partially through their second drinks they found themselves sprawled on a fifteen-foot sectional, still roomily half empty, with a handful of people dispersed around it. Ella lazily noted that her bare knee and Isaac’s were touching and assumed it was deliberate on his part. Isaac was appealing enough but not exactly her type; still, she enjoyed the attention, so long as it didn’t carry the weight of further expectations. They hadn’t been talking much before, although the music wasn’t so loud that they couldn’t, but they now seemed at ease with one another, exchanging carelessly knowing glances and the occasional witty, forgettable observation. Cissy had disappeared. A group of three meandered over and settled near them on the couch, and Ella observed them as though she were actually at a discreet distance. There was a girl with long dreadlocks and a tall man with scruffy facial hair, and the two of them were arguing with an irritable familiarity.
Closest to Ella was a very pretty girl, approximately her age, with enormous brown eyes and a dancer’s legs. She was wearing a frilly vintage dress covered in lace that must have looked fussy on its hanger at Goodwill but on her looked frothily chic. Her expression was both anxious and bored, and she seemed content to be excluded from her friends’ disagreement.
“Hello,” she said, shifting slightly to look at Ella, who was normally shy under such circumstances yet felt somehow liberated by the languid persona she had adopted with Isaac.
“I like your dress,” Ella replied. The girl cringed a little and looked down at the scalloped hem as though she had been hoping Ella wouldn’t notice. “Oh. No…,” the girl said, and then: “As soon as I saw you in that dress, with that necklace, I wanted to meet you.”
“Thank you,” Ella said, with a look that hovered between humility and self-satisfaction. Ella seldom had trouble receiving a compliment, mostly due to the alchemy of her good looks combining with the defiant bravado of being more plump than was fashionable.
Ella managed to tease out of the girl that she was a barista and also a printmaker and painter, that she was dating the tall, scruffy man, and that her name was Alix. Unlike virtually everyone else at the party, Alix made Ella feel older. She was wide-eyed in her self-deprecation, and her eagerness to become friends seemed exaggerated for effect, like performing a child’s playground overture. Gradually, Ella forgot to keep her knee against Isaac’s, and then forgot to include him at all. The impression of a playground overture proved astute; it felt like one of those chance encounters from childhood that soon turned into a cheerful, furious argument about who is the captain and who is the skipper of their imaginary ship. But Ella knew that this kind of immediate intimacy could often be just as easily forgotten, and so she wrote her phone number on Alix’s hand before she left.
Once Alix was gone, Ella leaned apologetically into the shoulder of poor, neglected Isaac, a posture that left her still feeling rather like a girl, now worn out from play, except Ella wasn’t tired. She liked the feel of Isaac’s worn T-shirt against her cheek, and the warm, masculine smell of him. He agreeably slipped his arm around her shoulders. If this gesture had struck Ella as sexually assertive, she would likely have eased apart, but it seemed companionable, and it occurred to her that maybe he was sad about his divorce in a way that tamed his appetites. Soon enough, though, they were back into their earlier groove of intermittent banter with a low hum of attraction. The space had become more crowded, and noisier, and so as not to feel removed from the reckless undercurrent that emerges as a party builds momentum, Ella dangled her legs across one of Isaac’s knees as the sectional filled in around them. She still felt pleasantly languid and enjoyed the largely unfamiliar power of being uninvested in his interest. She admired the look of her own supple legs and her feet in the pretty high heels against Isaac’s cut-off work pants. He rested a masculine hand just below her knee, and she saw that it wasn’t a boy’s hand, pink-palmed, sweatily self-conscious, but a man’s hand, callused, one that worked at a trade—Isaac was an electrician—and that had, until recently, worn a wedding band. He stroked her leg lightly, almost absentmindedly, as he chatted just loud enough to be heard. Ella’s indifference dissolved into the first stirrings of desire. She still wasn’t really attracted to Isaac—she thought, not quite accurately—just to his attraction to her. Somehow, Ella realized, he had played his cards in the only order that could have found him any degree of success: a little more deliberate and she would have shied away, a little bit less attentive and she would have begun to look around for someone else to give her attention.
After they dropped Cissy off, Ella permitted Isaac to kiss her in his truck outside her apartment. She kissed him matter-of-factly, as though it were fair for him to expect this much but no more. His tongue moved around her mouth with a pleasant confidence that didn’t make demands, but Ella thought only about how soon she could politely disentangle herself and go inside. Her panties retained the memory of his coarse fingers on her leg at the party, but it was as if a boat lock had come down in her middle, and nothing that happened above the waist had any effect below it. She was closed, she had made herself unreachable, and she bid him a polite good night as she shut the truck’s door and turned away, already checking to see if Alix had sent her a text.
* * *
—
Ella had a terrific apartment; the first time Alix came over, she was blown away by the space and by what Ella had done with it. It could have been the set of a certain type of movie, it was so carefully put together with thrifted and cast-off items. If Ella had doubts about her other creative outlets, she had none about this, about her capacities with the domestic arts; it was the one realm in which she felt no conflict between her lower-middle-class background and her potential departure from it. She hated the ugliness of the house she grew up in and found an almost mystical satisfaction in the hunting down of lovely objects at yard sales. Her income was far less than she might have wanted but it wasn’t evident in looking around her home. A colorful, intricate wooden doll house sat on a battered coffee table that Ella had painted cerulean blue, and there were books and plants everywhere, and a swing suspended from the ceiling, and mismatched vintage pots hung all over the kitchen walls. One living room wall was entirel
y covered by a blown-up photograph of the countryside in the northwest of Russia. The trees were small and golden, and the sky had an eerie sublimated brightness. The photo had been printed out, glossy page by glossy page, and affixed in rows that formed a mural-sized whole. On the opposite wall were a series of prints Ella’s aunt had made in the sixties, understated, abstract, in shades of black and navy. Nothing in the apartment looked new; everything had a patina of use. A wooden chair slung with caramel-colored leather looked design-significant but not necessarily weight-bearing; Ella had bought it at a yard sale. The sofa was long and low, its upholstery both faded and torn, but undeniably marvelous, with a pattern of aerial-view fields spreading like a green-and-gold patchwork quilt over its length.
This was where they had sat, that first visit, sipping cheap wine, becoming acquainted. The sun slipped below the horizon, leaving them illuminated only by the streetlight outside, with the noisy air conditioner turned off at this cooler hour of summer darkness. The windows that could be were open, and a humid nighttime breeze stirred the drapes and pulled strands of hair across their necks and cheeks. It was late, later than either of them had planned for, but the Thai food and then the art opening they had attended (good people-watching, disappointing art) had given them only a taste of all they might say to each other if they had the chance. Ella felt as if she had found a friendship that seemed so fated, so easy, so urgent that it was like falling in love, only more rare, and it was as if they had to tell each other everything, and as quickly as possible, interrupting an opinion with an anecdote, and interrupting that with the analysis of a movie, only to interrupt that with Important Plans.
Ella was describing her parents’ divorce when Alix picked up her hand and examined the antique charm bracelet fastened around her wrist. This did not surprise Ella; it seemed in keeping with their casual intimacy, the way they had linked arms as they walked around the overchilled gallery space. But then Alix leaned in and kissed her, which surprised Ella. She had not anticipated this turn of events, but if she somehow had, she would have expected something quite different, something sweet, and girlish, and almost chaste, or implausibly posed and bloodless, like a photo shoot in Vogue. Instead, before she could think, Alix was straddling her, a knee clenched against each of Ella’s hips, and they were kissing so deeply they were melting into each other, and then Alix was biting her, biting her lip, and then her cheek, leaving teeth marks against the flushed skin, and then her neck, and then Ella was doing the biting, it was Alix’s breast, small and round in her mouth, and then they were stumbling to the bed.
They had both dated women before, interspersed with an assortment of men, but nothing had been quite like this. From the beginning, there were no predictable roles, no demure glances, no lingering touches, no laughing at jokes with an outsize hilarity. There was none of that, somehow it would have felt dishonest, it would have been at the expense of something else, some clarity or frankness, some unembarrassed sincerity they had pooled between them.
It happened fairly quickly, after that first night. Two weeks of spending every possible moment together, and then Alix moved in. It had been convenient, meeting Alix just as Ella’s previous roommate was leaving Minneapolis for law school in Chicago. They hadn’t talked about whether it was a forever kind of relationship, they had just accepted that, for now, they wanted to ride whatever welcome crest this was. It was unbelievably heady to feel so profoundly understood, not like they were beyond words, but as though the words had a breathless inevitability about them, as if the depth of the other’s interest was a psychic magnet, pulling their truest selves into articulation. It became Ella’s favorite of nearly all activities, seeing herself as fascinating through the eyes of Alix. Is this how men feel? she wondered, suddenly, with a jolt of discomfort. Was this why they would ask women out to dinner and then never stop talking about themselves? A pretty girl as funhouse mirror, offering up ego-affirming distortions? The beauty of it was that she could talk about it with Alix, and, like nearly every subject, it became more interesting as they pulled it apart together.
Before they met, Ella and Alix had both preferred androgynous women, like painfully beautiful boys, with cowlicks and soft skin and square jaws and tattoos on the lean muscles of their biceps. They’d kissed feminine women, but who hadn’t? In college? It came with the territory, but it had carried limited erotic weight. Now their similarities felt at once overwhelmingly sexy and gloriously deviant, like Lauren Bacall in her prime, throatily muttering “Fuck you” to all that was masculine in the world: the bearded radical Ella had dated at twenty-two who scoffed at her counterrevolutionary addiction to fashion magazines while insisting she continue to shave her legs. The musician Alix had been in love with who never once let her hang out with his male friends, as though her realm was the bedroom and his was the laddish larger world. The jock Ella had dated in college, who had made her stand, shivering, naked, while he jerked off, whimpering unsexily. The endless, unsought male attention Alix received in every bar, at every party, and, in contrast, for Ella, what she perceived as the nakedness of her need for sexual attention, on display for all to see in her lipsticked face and the pivot of her walk. Her unsubtlety felt inseparable from her femaleness, the abhorrent softness of her body, the lavishly pantomimed Eros that was the soldered flip side to her placating hesitancy, the infuriatingly routine feeling of supplication, of being coolly assessed and found wanting. It wasn’t just the remarkable absence of all that, the sting of marginalization, of surging resentment inspired by the latest display of cheerful, boyish entitlement; it was the soaring relief of not having to explain it to one’s beloved.
That evening, when Ella returned from her interview with Jill, Alix was there, stirring something difficult to identify on the stove and talking to her mother on the phone. It was lovely, in a way, having somebody cooking something warm to share when Ella was so tired, but Alix was a troublingly experimental cook, often combining ingredients because the colors looked good together (like curry powder in guacamole) or following the flawed logic that if something is good—butter, cream, sugar, cheese—more will be better. Ella liked being the better cook, and it came out in gleeful bursts of exasperation or, if an audience were gathered, dramatic retellings of Alix’s more spectacular failures.
Eventually she and Alix sat across the kitchen table from each other, pushing the soft, pale broccoli around in the extraordinarily salty pesto and interrupting each other so consistently that not a single thought was completed by either of them:
“You want a gun? No you don’t. You want to try on the idea—”
“Why not? Maybe I do want a gun. Maybe I want to protect our property if—”
“What property? My computer? Because people are lining up to—”
“Okay, so nobody wants that, but once they’ve broken in—”
“You would what? Shoot them? You wouldn’t even wake—”
“But what if I did wake up? And didn’t have a—”
“It’s so tiring when you try to be provocative,” Ella said, a little irritated. It was tiring, how Alix liked to try on ideas that clearly weren’t good, the way another woman might flirt, in a dressing room, with a dress that didn’t fit. Ella thought it was silly when the world was full of untested ideas, and dresses, that might fit. At the same time, this was part of what she liked about Alix, how she pulled Ella outside of her own compulsive efficiency. It wasn’t that there was anything really useful in contemplating gun ownership, or even interesting, as far as Ella was concerned, but once one stopped questioning such positions, other interesting ideas were bound to slip by unexamined. There was a degree of unwelcome rigidity to Ella’s thinking, born of efficiency, certainly, although also, one level deeper, of fear. It was like repurposing objects: Ella preferred to use things in the manner they were intended for—no weathered antique rakes used as tie racks or earrings sorted into egg cups for her. This was because she’d grown up buyi
ng everything secondhand, and it had been a constant concern, misusing something out of ignorance—like the time she had worn a vintage smock to high school, unaware that it was a maternity dress, or when she had tried carrying her schoolbooks in an unbleached canvas bag and a more affluent girl had commented, not unkindly, “Oh, that’s the kind of bag we use when we shop at the co-op,” and Ella had realized how incongruous this simple, wholesome object was in her life, picturing her father at Cub Foods, filling it with Cup O’ Noodles and frozen potpies. Ella didn’t want to be wrong, but she also didn’t want to be unimaginative. It was difficult, trying to scramble for footing in the middle class while yearning to disdain bourgeois conventionality. Alix’s willful absurdity was almost like a mild hallucinogen, swirling and refracting the map Ella was always squinting at discreetly, worriedly, like a self-conscious tourist who doesn’t like where she’s found herself but doesn’t want to be identified as an outsider.
· 4 ·
At the interview, Ella had decided to err on the side of caution when she was introduced to Jill and to greet her as she might any person. It was Ella’s default position, and it had never served her wrong, for what harm could there be in showing respect, even if the recipient remained unaware? And Jill had appeared cognizant that Ella was a new person, she’d seemed more or less aware that it was an introduction. Jill had seemed polite but wary in a way that was somehow different from a child; a child might have been bashful, mumbling with husky displeasure what adults expected to hear, whereas Jill’s reluctance seemed authoritative.