Diego pulled the blanket tighter around himself as he craned to get a better look at the yard. A group of first-years were down there, tossing a Frisbee. They yipped like puppies.
“They look like they’re having fun,” he said.
I took a bite of banana and said, as I chewed, “First-years are never having as much fun as they seem.”
“You don’t think they’re really happy?”
“I wasn’t happy,” I said. “When I was them.”
Diego picked at his cuticle. “I was happy,” he said. “I loved being a first-year. I had this whole idea … I felt I could arrive at Catherine and be someone completely new. You know, like a new car, all shiny and modern and beautiful. That whole first year, I was so young. Young and drunk.”
“Diego, we’re still young.”
Diego raised a shoulder in a half shrug. “I don’t know. I don’t feel that way anymore. And now we’re going to graduate.”
“Not soon.”
“Soon enough. And I don’t feel new like that. Not anymore.”
A cool breeze stirred the pages of our textbooks. The breeze smelled like the woods. Like animals and dying leaves.
“Of course you don’t get it,” he said. “You and Yaya, you’ve always felt trapped here. But I don’t want to graduate.” He rolled a banana against the table with his palm. “I’ve spent my whole life reading beautiful books and watching beautiful movies, dreaming that there was some real place out there where I would fit in and be beautiful, too. And now I’m here. And I don’t want to leave. I don’t want to get an ugly job in an ugly office full of shit like staplers and fax machines. I don’t want to write memos. I don’t want us all to move far away from each other and grow up and forget to call. I don’t want to get fat. I don’t want to be tired. I don’t know. I just … sometimes I can’t imagine anything good happening to me. After Catherine.”
He sipped his cider.
“But you can get a fun job, can’t you?” I said. “There are a lot of jobs that aren’t in offices. Maybe you’ll teach art to kids in a pretty classroom. That would be nice. And you’ll make new friends and sleep with new men. And you’ll get to listen to the radio. Don’t you want to hear what new songs have come out?”
“It’ll be too late,” he said. “I won’t dance anymore.”
“Grown-ups dance.”
“Do they?”
“If they want to.”
He picked up the banana with his slender fingers, eyeing it as if he’d never seen one before.
“Did you know,” he said as he unpeeled it, “that I’m sleeping with M. Luther?”
I hadn’t known, but it made sense. M. Luther was Diego’s advisor, a slender, pale-eyed art history professor with tiny hands and a gentle voice. He’d taught my landscape course, and with that low voice I’d barely been able to hear a word he said and didn’t really try. But Diego was always gushing about what a brilliant thinker he was, how his contributions to the field were so underappreciated. He went to all of M. Luther’s office hours, and whenever he met us for dinner afterward, he would have the smuggest smile on his face. Yaya would nudge his shoulder and the two of them would giggle in that intimate way of theirs as they shared a bowl of clementine pudding.
“It’s not just some dirty little affair,” Diego said. “He loves me, and I love him. But I love him because he’s brilliant, and he loves me because—because I’m young and raw. I’m not even that smart, I know. Just new. I make him newer. But I won’t be new forever.”
Diego was folding up his banana peel.
“It’s not going to last,” he said. “I’m not stupid. I know he has a wife. Soon he’ll go teach at some college far away, and I’ll graduate and dim and disappear into those staplers and fax machines. Here at Catherine—we’re lovely, you know? Everyone and everything is lovely.” He raised one shoulder in an elegant shrug. “I don’t know. I’m scared that out there, someday I’ll look around and realize forty years have passed and no one can see me. That I’m gone.”
The first-years had moved farther across the yard. The neon Frisbee didn’t make a sound as it arced through the air.
“You’ll see,” Diego said. “With Theo. You and him, everything is so good now. But when everything is good, everything’s going so well, that’s when you’ll really start to freak. Because then you’ve got something to lose.”
“Theo and I are just having fun,” I said. “It’s not serious.”
“Sure,” he said. “All right.”
A chorus of cries rang out from the first-years. The Frisbee had gotten caught in a tree.
*
Everything really was good. Everything was going so well. I attended my classes. I studied. I finished my homework, and had long, ambling meetings with M. Owens where we drank peppermint tea and chatted about everything from astrology to orchids to children’s schoolyard games. I slept easy. I put on clean clothes in the morning and made my bed. Even my appetite was good. I dreamed, like a queen, of rich foods, custards and tarts and bloody steaks. And I was with Theo.
Theo. Theo in the afternoon, in his bedroom, a slithery breeze running through the window and over my bare skin as he pulled up my T-shirt and bit my stomach. Or Theo at night, laughing as I flung open my door to pull him inside. Theo’s hot breath. His fingers seizing my hair, his slick sweat. Morning, legs against legs and arms entwined, his hand stroking my throat. Because I was the thing he liked to touch. I was the thing he wanted to reach inside.
Mornings, we untangled ourselves to go eat big breakfasts of ham and puddings and gleaming eggs with runny yolks. We sat with our friends and laughed uncontrollably at the stupidest things. He rubbed me under the table. I went to class and paid attention, took notes, and answered questions, but I could still feel him inside me.
I was full. The days were big.
Evenings, I studied with Yaya in the music room, in the dark. She was memorizing passages from Homer. I listened to her with my head in my arms and looked out the window at the whirling starry sky. The Greeks had used those same stars to conquer the world. We were like them—gods and heroes.
*
“You’re shaking,” Theo whispered.
It was late afternoon. I was watching his face. His summer freckles were fading.
“No, I’m not,” I said.
He squeezed my thigh. “You are.”
“I’m cold.” I shifted in the bed, pulling the sheet tighter.
His hand ran farther up my thigh. “I’m happy you’re here.”
“Where else would I be?”
“I don’t know.”
The features of his room—the jeans slung over the back of his chair and the papers bunched under his desk, his kicked-off sneakers, and on the dresser, a withering bunch of grapes—it all appeared to me with hyper-clarity. Before, his room had been so neat that it felt like a hotel room. Now it was his home. I liked it like this. I could feel him in everything: his jeans, his papers, his sneakers, his grapes.
“Let’s stay here,” he whispered against my ear. “Forever.”
He didn’t realize I knew about the keycard, and that he had been accepted to M. Neptune’s lab. If I hadn’t seen the card with my own eyes, I probably would never have guessed it. He was the same Theo as ever, the same relaxed, laughing kid. He didn’t sit with M. Neptune’s students in the great hall. And when he disappeared for hours at a time, he never told me where he went. “Just the lab,” he would say if I asked.
I knew where he was really going. Because when he went to M. Neptune’s lab, he came back smelling like warm milk.
In all those heady days and close, muggy nights, he never said anything to me about his studies. But I never felt he was keeping a secret. He would tell me when he was ready. I knew he would, because I knew Theo. Not just the obvious things, like his high-pitched laugh or his favorite card games, or how cranky he got when he was hungry. I knew his insides, too. I knew his private things. I knew the way he mumbled to himself when he was waking
up in the morning. I knew the face he made when he lost control of his body. I knew his ugly secret parts. He was mine. He belonged to me.
So the keycard belonged to me, too. Sometimes when I touched him, I could feel it in his pocket. And when he was asleep, I would go to the drawer and feel it there, hidden beneath his clothes. I would run my fingers over its surface before moving his clothes back in place and slipping into bed.
Theo propped his head in his hand to peer closer at me. “What are you thinking about?”
“Nothing,” I said. “You.”
He kissed my nose.
*
The projector clicked to a photograph of a doll. Not a pretty doll, but a grotesque little monster, two girl bottom halves fused together at one taut, bloated belly. The leg stumps fit into the body with deep articulated grooves, as if they could be repositioned and recombined. The two vulvas were swollen and hairless.
The Surrealism movement, our professor explained, was inspired by Freud’s concept of the uncanny, the dreadful double. According to Freud, doubling creates meaning. Doubling turns sounds into words; a baby first speaks by turning ma into mama, pa into papa. But when a double appears uninvited—the buried object returns—it brings us into the realm of the uncanny. We watch dead things wake up. And we are afraid.
The class had ended. I poked Nick awake as the other students filed out of the room. He’d arrived late, wrapped in a long woolen coat and carrying a mug of wine, and slept through the second half of the lecture with his head on the table.
“Up.” I poked him. “Dinnertime.”
“Mmm.” He rubbed his face. “Not yet. I’m still asleep.”
I rubbed his back. He blinked at me like a lazy cat.
“I feel like I haven’t seen you in a while,” he murmured. “How’ve you been?”
“If you had been awake, you would have seen me.” I pulled at one of his curls. “I’m good. Philosophy of Law might kill me. But I’m good.”
“Yeah. And you’ve got the sickness.”
“What sickness?”
“You know.”
I put my chin in my hand. “God.”
He patted my arm. “Don’t worry. Enjoy it while you can.”
His textbook was open to an Yves Tanguy landscape. Abstract alien figures cast long, silent shadows on the empty horizon.
“Ugly, isn’t it?” Nick mumbled, staring at the image. “My grandma collected that kind of shit. Weird little paintings … and she was always smoking these nasty cigars that smelled like spearmint. God. I hated that apartment.”
I didn’t like the Surrealists, either. I hated that class. I didn’t want to waste my time dissecting insipid German psychology and analyzing childish paintings. I just wanted to work on my tutorial.
Not that my tutorial was any easier. The critical theories of minimalism and abstract expressionism were impenetrable; I spent many hours bent over texts trying to understand stupid new meanings for words like absorption and object-beholder. But I didn’t mind doing it for Agnes Martin. Agnes Martin’s paintings were perfect. Her simple, large, plain canvases, each gridded into even shades of pale, were better than language, better than history. They were good. Holy, even.
One untitled Agnes Martin painting had been hanging in the gallery since October. I would go there in the morning and stare at it. Every day at around nine o’clock, pale sunlight radiated on the painting just so, and its surface would glow, weightless and pale and supernatural as sea-foam.
When I looked at the painting then, I thought: This is it. It wasn’t gold that was the sublime material, the magic matter; it was the surface itself. The stuff in between. The birth of the world. I’d found it. It was here.
*
Through the hall, down damp stone stairs, past a pavilion of windows. Down another hall, the one with green vine wallpaper, into the Harrington lounge, then the courtyard, where an October wind kicked up a whirl of wine-red leaves and a smell of black, humid soil. Into a Harrington parlor, then through a gray door.
The walls of the Harrington music room were lined with blue silk, as were its dark wood Edwardian chairs and tea tables. A low-backed crushed velvet settee sat beneath a window draped with gauze curtains, and in the middle of the room stood a grand piano, its lid lifted. The piano’s mechanics—the endless recurrence of dampers and strings, the biomorphic twist of metal and wood—gleamed like the insides of a space machine.
I’d spent many afternoons in this room, cross-legged on carpet, listening to musical practices or poetry readings. Now the room was empty, and the piano stood silent.
I sat down on its bench. I ran a finger along its keys.
I wandered farther into Harrington, toward a billiards room filled with noise and bustle. I found Theo there with some of his Ashley chemistry friends, playing bid whist and eating cherry pie.
I glanced at Theo’s cards as I sat beside him. He had a good hand. Mostly clubs.
He kissed the side of my mouth. “Play with us?” he whispered.
“No. I want to watch.” I swiped a fingerful of his pie.
The night lengthened as they played. The others disappeared into libraries and bedrooms. Eventually we were alone.
I watched our hazy reflections in the window as Theo shuffled the cards.
“Let’s make a pie together,” I said.
“Okay. What kind?”
“Peach. Blueberry. Every kind.”
“Rhubarb.” He tapped the cards together. “My grandma used to make rhubarb pie.”
“Let’s do it. Now.”
“Now?”
“I bet the kitchen has rhubarb. Apples, anyway. Maybe they’ll let us use the oven.”
“Mmm,” he said. “Maybe. I should go study.”
“Don’t study.”
He ran a hand through my hair.
“Everything about you is so beautiful,” he whispered. He was staring at his fingers entwined in the ends of my hair. “Every part of you.”
He lowered his hand. I took it in mine.
“I used to think that no one could be so beautiful,” he said. “No one and nothing. But in here—I’m so happy.” He looked up, smiling. “And you’ll be beautiful forever.”
I laughed a little. “I’ll get old and ugly someday. Old, ugly, and ornery.”
“No,” he said. “You’ll always be beautiful.”
I squeezed his thigh.
“I should go study,” he said again.
“Not yet.”
“No,” he said. “Not yet.”
I didn’t want him to study. I didn’t want him to go anywhere. I wanted to be closer. I wanted us to hit each other. I wanted it to hurt.
He laid out the cards in a game of solitaire.
There were moments when I felt like Theo knew me exactly. Like he could read my brain, with all its dark ideas and affections, and still liked me. As if we were two faces of the same villain. It felt stunning.
Other times I wondered if he knew me at all. Sometimes, when he stared at me, I felt he was watching me from far away. Like I was a moon he dreamed of conquering.
I didn’t care. I wanted to be that moon, that beautiful thing, as long as he kept looking at me.
Outside, as we walked through the courtyard, he drew me close and kissed me. I rubbed his cheek. His skin was rough, chilled by the autumn night. The stars blurred.
“Let’s go,” I said.
“Home?” he said. He glanced at the Molina door. “We are.”
“No,” I said. “I mean somewhere like the Great Barrier Reef. Or the Grand Canyon. Somewhere real.”
“Man, the Grand Canyon’s so hot. When you go, you’re just in the car forever.”
“You’ve been to the Grand Canyon?”
Theo shrugged.
He started walking again. I skipped to follow him. His profile shone in the moonlight.
I don’t think I realized it until that moment: Theo didn’t want to leave Catherine. And he didn’t want me to leave, either.
&nbs
p; Of course he didn’t want to leave. Why would he? He had nothing out there, and at Catherine he had everything. He had friends. He had food. He had work. And he had me.
He squeezed my arm as we entered the house. “You know, I should probably stop by the lab and get some shit done,” he said. “I’ll come by after?”
“Yes,” I said.
He gave me a little kiss before skipping down the stairs. He turned to the left, toward the Ashley basement.
*
One morning in late November, I dragged myself back to my bedroom after many long hours in the library to see that the tea trays had already been delivered. I found a white card tucked behind my teacup.
“You are cordially invited,” the card read in florid script, “to the wedding of Diego Jimenez and Yaya Osmond.”
“What on earth is this?” Anna said, waving an identical card as she padded toward me. She was wrapped in a towel and her skin was damp.
“Guess those crazy kids are finally making it official,” I said.
She flipped over the invitation, but there was nothing on the other side. “Honestly,” she said, squeezing her wet hair, “I don’t know what you guys are going on about half the time.”
I glanced back down at the invitation. The ceremony was scheduled for five o’clock in the Molina parlor. According to the program, I would be giving a poetry reading before the exchange of vows.
When I arrived at the parlor that afternoon, the room had been transformed from its usual dusty elegance. All the chairs and couches had been turned to face the fireplace, and dried roses clustered in vases at the end of the makeshift aisle. Scarves and fairy lights were draped over the windowsills. Curious first-years and second-years lounged toward the back. Theo, Anna, and Nick had gathered in the front seats.
“I still don’t really get what’s going on,” Anna was saying as I sat down next to Theo.
“What don’t you get?” Theo said. “The invitation was so clear.”
Catherine House Page 21