The Paper Wasp

by Lauren Acampora

  And the satyr dream came back. Now, on waking, I was able to draw the characters in detail, in full costume. I drew the shoes that gave the satyrs their cloven hooves, and the belts that strapped their phalluses in place. I drew the crystal beads at the hem of your ballet skirt, one nacreous bead at a time. I drew myself among the satyrs, wearing the goatskin.

  The way to improve dream recall, Tello advised, was to wake six hours into the sleep cycle, then slip back into dreams from there. They were fresher, easier to export to consciousness that way. I used my alarm clock to stir me with a piano sonata at dawn, then I returned to the Spring for the next few hours of morning before I had to awake for the day and face the barrage of your emails and appointments. The impervious guest bedroom permitted no sound but the hum of the central air system. The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was the small ebony sculpture of a plump woman on my nightstand, her bare breasts softly gleaming. I’d grown to love this sculpture. Each morning, as I woke disoriented from another world, it was a totem that brought me gently back, reminded me that I was still in Malibu—that my dreams were the false and this the fantastically real.

  X.

  AS THE filming wore on, April became May, and you came home depleted. You were having difficulties with the role. The director gave confusing cues and was frustrated by your choices. “It’s not my fault. It’s the script,” you complained. “The timing is awkward, and I’m doing my best to fix it. But Lorenzo’s some kind of purist.”

  “He should trust your instincts,” I said, pulling the words from the air.

  “I don’t know,” you huffed. “Maybe my instincts aren’t that good. Maybe I’m in over my head with this.”

  “Of course you’re not.” I thought of what else a loyal friend, a good assistant, would say. “You’re challenging yourself, and that’s when your best work will come out.”

  “I just don’t know, Abby. I don’t think I like how this is going to end up. I’m already afraid about the reception I’m going to get. And I’m nervous about Joan’s reaction, too. I’m afraid she’ll hate the movie.” You inhaled. “She came to the set today.”

  “Joan Didion?”

  “Yes.” You covered your eyes with your hands. “It was so strange meeting her. I didn’t even know what to say. Oh, God, I felt like such a jerk.” You kept your hands over your face for a long moment. “I felt like the dumbest thing who ever lived, standing there. I felt like she could take me apart with one word.” You took your hands away. “But it was also weirdly like looking in a mirror. She has these green eyes. In pictures from the sixties, I really do look like her, you know. Seeing her today, it was like seeing into my own future.”

  This, of course, was ridiculous. You were nothing like her, and never would be.

  You had an annual checkup with the gynecologist that you told me to postpone until filming was done. You needed a whitening by the dentist and an acupuncture session. I held them all off, punted the appointments to July and then August. A shipment of the Edison lightbulbs you wanted came in at Restoration Hardware, and I picked them up for you.

  I had new drawings to show you, but there never seemed to be a good time. “I really think you’ll like these,” I said. “They’re all new concepts that I’ve never mentioned before.”

  “Oh, Abby, I’m sure they’re great. I know they are. I just can’t pay attention right now. I don’t want to lose focus. I know you understand that.”

  “Of course I do,” I said, despite the bruise.

  Occasionally Rafael came and stayed. One day, he arrived in an unfamiliar car, a flagrant yellow Jaguar, which dropped him off and rumbled noisily away over the cobblestone driveway, kicking up dust at the gate. He came in with his smirking smile and went upstairs without a word. He stayed upstairs even after you came home. You poured yourself a glass of wine and gave me the report of the day, and I sat and listened stoically, waiting for Rafael to come downstairs and interpose himself, to wrest ownership of you. When he finally appeared in the kitchen doorway, your automatic expression of surprise melted into delight, and you rambled into his arms. I stared while you kissed him. He met my eyes over your shoulder and winked slowly.

  That night, I dreamed I was in bed with Rafael. The dream had the same immediacy as the loveseat dream I shared with you, Elise. The charge between us was that alive, that intense. I knew he was really there, that we were dreaming mutually. We’d just had sex, and semen was puddled on my belly. As we lay together, I watched the semen travel down my pelvis, through the hair on my pubic bone, and sink into my vulva. I felt the liquid, hot and thick, as distinctly as I’ve felt anything in waking life.

  I woke in a swirl of arousal and shame, my blood throbbing. It was barely dawn, but I abandoned my bed and went down to the kitchen, the sweat drying on my skin. Before I’d filled my coffee cup, I heard the sticking steps of bare feet and Rafael’s voice. “Good morning, sunshine.”

  There was a jab of ice in my chest. Turning halfway, I tried to relax my face.

  “How’d you sleep?” he asked, and I heard the unctuousness in his voice.

  “Great,” I mumbled.

  He pulled a bottle of kombucha from the refrigerator. “Did you have good dreams?”

  He poured the yellow liquid and looked at me as he took the first sip. His hair was a black jag, wet from the shower, and his face was shaved close. He leaned against the counter and considered me for another moment. I was wearing the expensive pajama set you’d bought for me, and I arranged an arm over my chest to cover the nipples that jutted beneath the silk.

  “I had a dream about you last night,” he said.

  My heart lurched and jammed. I had the sense of standing on a ship deck without a railing, and braced a hand on the kitchen counter. If Rafael were to take even a small step closer, the ship would dip beneath me. I stood frozen, my fingers gripping the countertop, feeling the granite edge. My eyes dropped to the middle of his black T-shirt, an interstellar void. The house was silent except for the hum of the air conditioner. I could smell the cut grass of his deodorant or aftershave. I willed him to come nearer, and I willed him to move away. The room felt airtight. He stood with a questioning grin, waiting for me to ask for the details of his dream. With just a word, I could verify that it matched mine. I could confirm that he’d been the one who initiated the tryst, that the treachery was his. But I couldn’t bring myself to say the words, and finally he took a drink and turned from me. Left alone in the kitchen, I gazed at the place where he’d stood but saw only the bright puddle on my belly, the slow creep of fluid.

  At the next break in filming, you announced that you and Rafael would be going to La Jolla for the weekend. “If you need the Tesla, take it,” you told me. “You deserve a break, too.”

  After the Mustang disappeared, a deep quiet settled into the house. I don’t know why, but I couldn’t bring myself to go to the Rhizome. I felt somehow constricted by the freedom you’d given me. Instead, I called in sick, closed the blinds, and pulled the duvet over myself in bed.

  “Dress for the beach,” Paul said, when I called on Sunday. I felt like a truant as I climbed into his Cavalier with ancient cigarette smoke in the upholstery. But as we jounced over the rocks and ruts of Topanga, a sense of ease settled in me like nothing I’d felt since coming here.

  We parked in a crowded lot at Redondo Beach. In the sky was a patchwork of kites. “It’s a festival,” Paul said.

  “How are they not getting tangled?” I asked.

  “Festivals aren’t for novices.”

  “But I’m a novice.”

  “I’ll help you.”

  Once we’d positioned ourselves at the kite-launching area, Paul presented me with a creation I’d never seen before. “It’s yours,” he said. “A bird of paradise. I thought this would be a good place to debut it.”

  I studied the delicate fringes of vinyl, each a careful feather. The tail was made from red, blue, and green ribbons. “Thank you. But I don’t think I should fly it, P
aul. I might ruin it.”

  “If you do, I’ll fix it.”

  He’d brought another kite for himself that he referred to as a sidewinder—a streamlined stunt kite in the shape of a boomerang. With a few efficient movements, the sidewinder was in the air, between an undulating dragon and a penguin.

  “Hold this.” He handed me his spool. I kept the sidewinder steady while he launched my kite.

  “I’m going to get tangled,” I said when he handed my spool back. My neck ached, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the bird’s rippling tail.

  “You’ll get in the groove, don’t worry. You start to understand the air. Trust yourself.”

  We didn’t talk for a while. Next to us, a family took turns flying a large box kite, which made unpredictable sweeps near mine. The box kite, bulky and graceless, looked like a gaping mouth, trying to seize my bird out of the sky.

  “I always think of my brothers when I do this,” Paul said, with his eyes on the sidewinder.

  I was quiet for a moment before asking, “Did anyone else ever leave home?”

  “I had a friend who did, but we all knew he’d come back. Sometimes the boys go for a little while, just to say they went. But I don’t think anyone was surprised when I broke out for real. They expected it.”

  “Why?”

  He smiled. “I was always a little different, the one reading secret books. Everything except the Bible. Jack London, Thoreau, Hawthorne. All that individualism, all that natural law.”

  The family beside us was laughing, the smallest boy falling to the sand. Paul didn’t say anything else for a while. We flew our kites amid the music and laughter and the rumble of the Pacific Ocean. “I know it’s weird, but these festivals remind me of church,” he said. “All these different shapes and colors riding the same air currents. For some reason, it reminds me of the songs we used to sing, these slow German ones from the sixteenth century. It’s that same feeling of connection, I guess.”

  A strong wind came, and I felt the pull of the animated fabric above me, fighting to be free. The tug at my hands was a solid force. As I pulled the spool, I remembered sitting with Shelby on the cold pier in the early morning, watching our father cast into Lake Michigan. A yellow perch had come out of the water, a flap of maddened muscle. I’d screamed at my father to put it back, but he held the pole steady, watching the creature thrash. “Take it off!” I shrieked. My sister had laughed at me, repeating mockingly: Take it off, take it off! Finally, with a chilling calm, my father reached to the end of the line. He’d gripped the fish’s head so that its mouth sprang open and he could unthread the hook. Then, holding the perch by the tail, he swung it against the stone pier.

  Paul and I stayed after everyone else had gone. The sun weakened until we could look right at it, a painted disc. At last, we pulled our kites in. Paul brought out sandwiches in aluminum foil, and bottles of beer, and we sat as the sun tugged out of sight.

  He told me that he’d finally gained access to a shelter for unaccompanied refugee children. He’d met several kids already, and they’d grown comfortable with him. They’d begun to tell their stories. There was a boy named Armando who’d seen his brother shot to death in Guatemala. A Honduran girl named Yolanda had been raped by gang members and then again by the coyote who’d taken her over the border. There were two little brothers, aged three and four, separated from their mother while crossing Mexico. When they’d arrived at the facility, they’d been half-starved. As I listened, a valve in my heart slammed, familiar and painful.

  “Hey, I want to ask you something,” Paul said. “Remember how I said you need to learn how films work? I wonder if you’d like to help me with mine.”

  I didn’t answer. I only looked at him.

  “I think it would be good to have a woman on the project,” he said. “The kids may open up more to you, especially the girls. I’d especially like to introduce you to Yolanda if I can arrange it.”

  I listened as he described the practical, tedious details—lighting, sound, editing—that went into making a film. Soon, the only light on the beach came from the parading headlamps on the road behind us. Paul’s features became an impressionistic blur, his face a suggestion of lunar ash. In that shadowed moment, his face struck me as startlingly handsome in the way of old poets in etched portraits. The skin on my right arm, the one nearest him, felt abraded, the hairs stiff in their follicles. I was sharply aware of the air between us and a substance that seemed to be thickening it.

  “What do you think?” he said.

  “I have to wait until Elise is finished with the Didion film. But after that, I might be able to help.”

  “Ah, right. Elise comes first.”

  “Not forever,” I said.

  Paul stopped talking and lay back on the sand. The silence stretched, and I couldn’t think of what to say. My experience with the opposite sex was grimly insubstantial. I’d had only a handful of kisses, each of which had been disheartening. The first time a boy’s tongue had darted into my mouth, like a striking snake, I’d had to run to the bathroom to wipe my face. Now, in a kind of frenzy, I asked Paul, “What was it like to be a teenager? In the Amish world?”

  He raised an eyebrow and lifted himself on an elbow. “In what way?”

  “Were you allowed to date, or were your parents supposed to pick out who they wanted you to marry?”

  “Oh, no, we dated,” he said. “There were more opportunities than you’d think.”

  He shifted on the sand, closer to me. I felt weightless, the beer bottle an inadequate anchor in my hand. As he kissed me, a fishhook lowered through my body. I felt its barb pierce an interior membrane, which I visualized as a woven tapestry with something vast and unsafe on the other side. I pulled away.

  “Are you okay?” Paul asked, his voice thickened and slow.

  “I’m fine.” My lips tingled. A damp chill had entered the air, and I shook. After a moment, Paul collected the empty bottles, and we walked over the sand to the parking lot, holding our limp kites.

  When I returned to Malibu, your Mustang was back in the driveway, but when I walked into the house, you didn’t greet me. Upstairs, the light was on in your bedroom, but I heard no voices. I paused but didn’t call or knock. Instead I went to my room and closed the door. Sitting on the bed, I felt the chill from the beach deepen. My lips still buzzed, and I felt unmoored. Paul was out in the night now, in his cave-dark cabin, in possession of a memory of me. I couldn’t stop thinking about the kiss. I berated myself for pulling away. If I’d only waited, there might have been something fluid on the other side of the tapestry. I’d felt the intimation of an approaching wave, which might have been warm and enveloping, which might have lifted me like a tide.

  As I brooded over my failure, the silence in the house was sickening. My thoughts turned to you, Elise, and I feared that you hadn’t greeted me because you were angry that I’d been out and hadn’t awaited your return. You were unsatisfied with my companionship, my employment. Or you’d somehow discovered my secret life at the Rhizome. As I lay awake in the recriminating quiet, I was sure of it.

  Finally I dipped into sleep, dreaming of kites in a night sky, like stingrays in murky water. I woke early to a pit of dread and went to the kitchen to make breakfast. When you finally came down, you were groggy and pale. Hungover, I assumed.

  “Are you okay?” I asked in a thin voice.

  “I’m just tired. Thanks for making coffee.” You didn’t meet my eyes. “Listen. That appointment I asked you to postpone with the gynecologist. Could you call and see if they can take me after all, as soon as possible?”

  You were addressing me as an assistant, not a friend. I called right away, from the kitchen where you sat with your kombucha and yogurt. “They can take you this morning,” I said.

  “Tell Lorenzo I’ll be there at eleven. Tell him something came up. You don’t have to say what.”

  You left the table and went upstairs. Twenty minutes later you were in the Mustang, hair still wet from
the shower, without having said good-bye. I paced the house and then sat with my drawings. I stared at them, tried to see them the way you would. In your eyes, they’d look like the doodles of a lunatic. You’d complimented them only out of charity. You hadn’t meant anything you’d said. It was preposterous that I’d ever believed you’d help me, that you’d ever align yourself with me as anything but an employer. I was here in the service of your success, not the other way around.

  I didn’t dare go to the Rhizome that day, but stayed in the house like a butler. You returned late in the afternoon with no color in your face. I came to greet you, and when your eyes met mine, you sank to the floor in the entrance hall and began to cry. I slid down beside you, and all the bitterness I’d felt washed away. I rubbed your back and felt your spine beneath my fingers. I was the only one who could comfort you, whatever the problem may be.

  “I’m not ready to be a mother,” you sobbed. “I don’t know if I want to be a mother.”

  My hand paused on your back.

  “I have to get married now,” you gasped. “I need to tell him that we have to get married.”

  “No, no,” I heard myself say. “You don’t have to do anything. You don’t have to do anything.”

  For a moment, you couldn’t speak. Your body shook, and I rubbed your back again, slowly and calmly, as a real mother would. Finally, you put your face in your hands. After a long moment, you took your hands away and looked at me, your eyes washed bright. “I talk a big game, Abby, but I’m still a traditional girl. I could never have a baby out of wedlock. I wouldn’t do it to my parents, and I don’t know, I just would never do it. I know it’s normal in Hollywood, but I just can’t. And I don’t know if I want to marry Rafael. I mean, I love him, I really do, but I thought we had so much more time.”