Every Kind of Wanting

by Gina Frangello

  FOR ALICIA, GIVER OF IMPROBABLE GIFTS, PORT IN EVERY STORM, BFA.

  Copyright © 2016 by Gina Frangello

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Frangello, Gina, author.

  Title: Every kind of wanting: a novel / Gina Frangello.

  Description: Berkeley: Counterpoint Press, [2016]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016020227

  Subjects: LCSH: Interpersonal relations—Fiction. | Married people—Fiction. | Conception—Fiction. | Domestic fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Literary.

  Classification: LCC PS3606.R3757 E94 2016 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016020227

  Cover design by Jarrod Taylor

  Interior design by Domini Dragoone

  ISBN 978-1-61902-862-3

  COUNTERPOINT

  2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.counterpointpress.com

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  CONTENTS

  ACT III

  PRIVATE BEASTS

  ACT I

  THE COMMUNITY BABY

  ACT II

  COMMUNISTS IN THE FUNHOUSE

  ACT IV

  STRONG’S LANDING

  ACT III

  PRIVATE BEASTS

  VERY EARLY IN MY LIFE, IT WAS TOO LATE.

  —MARGUERITE DURAS

  LINA

  You think you know our story, Nick, but that would imply that I was capable of honesty. You think our stories are some joint thing, a common narrative on which we, the coconspirators, would agree, but you don’t know anything yet.

  One thing you taught me is that all empathy involves a kind of method acting. You used to say I was a natural actress, but with bipolar as rapid-cycling and tidal as mine, maybe inhabiting alternate states isn’t particularly foreign. Plenty of days, I can wake up in a hypomanic groove, cylinders firing with crystalline clarity all morning, then crash into a blackhearted, apathetic depression by evening where my brain feels wrapped in gauze, and come 1:00 a.m., facing another manic, sleepless night, I’m ready to peel the paint from the walls, mentally ricocheting around like a fruit fly that can’t land, head blaring, trying to benzo myself into sleep or stupor and hoping the ride will be less wild tomorrow, unsure of who I’ll be.

  I love all the versions of you, you used to tell me, my pluralities for the first time not an embarrassing liability. But if characters are supposed to be consistent, I’m damned from the outset. Maybe I’ll have an easier time with the rest of you than I do with myself.

  I don’t know my brother’s husband’s sister well, but I’ve been around her, I don’t have to conjure her from scratch. You’ve met her plenty of times, so that’s something, too. For our purposes here, let’s call her Gretchen. Did you ever visit her old house? I didn’t, but I bet we can both imagine it, in the shiny North Shore suburbs of Chicago. We both know what that kitchen looked like, right? Viking stove nobody ever cooked in: check. Gretchen’s marriage was unraveling just as all of this was beginning, so of everyone, perhaps she should have known better. But she loved her brother, Chad, who loved my brother, Miguel, who once upon a time knew Emily, before she was your wife. The story of how they all came together again is random, as chaotic as everything that happens in our lives, and yet not: we were their intersection, Nick. We are to blame, for life, for death, for everything.

  Besides, if even one person had known better, where would I be now?

  Still, there you have them: our ensemble cast. The movers and shakers of the Community Baby Plan. All the pieces on the board now. Who will be the queen; who will be the knight; who will be the pawn?

  Isabel is still in the shadows, I know. I’m aiming for that Virginia Woolf thing, that “absent presence,” but all I really know for sure is blank space. An Isabel in dirty cotton underpants, left behind. A tragic thirteen-year-old pawn, protecting Mami, the queen, when that’s not half the picture, has nothing to do with the Isabel I grew up longing for and reacting against. Isabel, who had nothing to do with these one-big-happy-commune surrogacy plans, who would have been appalled if anyone had possessed the nerve to breathe a word of it to her. And yet her body in many ways is ground zero—for what came before us and what came after. The damage and the beauty that, in turn, was waiting for us all.

  We live every day on top of fault lines, Nick—well, I don’t need to tell you that. What I mean is that maybe everybody does, at every moment, and it’s just that some people don’t hide it well—we wear visible rifts and fissures on our skin and in our eyes, in our disreputable professions and fringe lifestyles and mile-long medical charts. For others, the shifting plates are way below ground, biding time where no one can see them, everything on the surface Stepfordpretty while underneath, forces are brewing that can swallow entire cities whole.

  I’m trying to wrap my head around what lies beneath. Around what people who are not like me might call the Truth. But for me, truth only ever slides around like the mercury from a broken thermometer, ricocheting inside a white sink—truth offers two choices: touch it and be poisoned, or watch it wash down the drain.

  You may think that because of my “episodes” I can’t be trusted with our story—that I’m too damaged. But all stories are altered by perspective—and you would never say that anyway. That’s just my own voice, or maybe Isabel’s, still talking to me inside my head. Besides, with our cast, it’s easy to see how things could go awry. And so they did.

  All the texts I sent you the night I left Bebe are still on my phone. I don’t have a wife or two sons; I don’t even have a girlfriend anymore: I have no reason to delete anything. I allowed my phone to run out of batteries and stashed it in a drawer with my Self-Destruction Survival Kit. The needle, the lighter, the spoon. They’ve been in the same bag for six years; most nights, I don’t give them a second thought. My dead phone, though, has become an increasingly noisy siren; it glows like something radioactive, I can’t keep it quiet in my head. I’ve thrown the power cord away, but I swear I feel like I could plug my fingers in a socket and light up the History of Us. How many “load earlier messages” would I have to scroll through to get to our beginning? How many new texts would I find from you, after I let my phone go dark and abandoned you to the nightmare ensuing? Would yours be as frantic as the ones I sent you that last night?

  I need you.

  They spiraled out from there, longer, messier, but always between us, things came back to the same starting point:

  Nick? I need you.

  The first time I told you I wanted you to hit me, I asked, “Do you have a problem with that?” You laughed and said, “I’m guessing you haven’t met many people who had a problem with that.” But you’d be surprised. You said, “The thing is, I don’t know how to hurt someone without hurting them,” then caught me off guard by offering, “You could show me first, on me, what you like.” Bebe always maintained that the recommendation of “tops” trying things out on themselves first to “know how it feels” was idiotic—if she doesn’t experience pain as pleasure, how would burning herself, or testing a cane on her skin, give her a clue about my experience? It would only s
uck. But when I parroted her words to tell you I wasn’t interested in topping, that it would ruin the dynamic so that when you did it to me it wouldn’t feel real, you said, “Those are just labels, that’s a load of shit—we’re both here. We’re real.”

  You’d say I’m hiding behind sex again, bringing all that up at a time like this. But what I’m trying to say is: we were real, Nick. I’m afraid by the time you’re done reading this, you’ll think we were nothing but a game to me, a challenge or a role-play or a means to an end. This is the part where usually I cut my losses and run. There are only so many options, only so many potential outcomes to any story. Heartbeats can be rectified. Your heart is still beating out in the world, and I am here, without you, without Bebe, and I can cling to this new thing with both hands or I can just let go.

  There are so many things I need to tell you here, before I can tell you the one thing you really need to know. But try showing me a story that isn’t about secrets, the sins of the fathers. That isn’t about desire, lies, family, loss, and what it takes to survive. You show me any tangled knot of people that doesn’t simultaneously exemplify both loyalty and betrayal. Is a baby any different than a lover when it comes to the endless, unwinnable war over who owns love? You show me anything worth losing, Nick, that doesn’t at some point give way to jealousy, entitlement, possession, even if that’s exactly what we were all trying to avoid.

  ACT I

  THE COMMUNITY BABY

  YOU CAN DRIVE THE DEVIL OUT OF YOUR GARDEN BUT YOU WILL FIND HIM AGAIN IN THE GARDEN OF YOUR SON.

  –JOHANN HEINRICH PESTALOZZI

  GRETCHEN

  Something is wrong with Gretchen’s son Gray when he sits down in the breakfast nook. He looks different, alien, but Gretchen can’t place it. She keeps staring at him and it’s like she’s taken someone else’s black coat accidentally in the pile of coats at a party, when she’s a little bit drunk and the coat looks like hers and maybe is even the same designer but something is implacably wrong. She watches Gray as though feeling inside the pockets of this wrong coat, hoping for some evidence of its wrongness or, better yet, clues to whom it actually belongs.

  Troy saunters into the room for coffee, looking sexy and angular and hateful like someone who would be cast to play a Nazi in a miniseries, and takes one look at Gray and says, “Where the hell are his eyebrows?”

  “Huh?” Gretchen says.

  “Why doesn’t our kid have eyebrows?” Troy snaps, and they both turn back to Gray, who is shoveling cereal into his mouth. For an instant, their eyes meet above his head in a rare moment of collusion: Is it possible that Gray has never had eyebrows? Has he been eyebrowless from the get-go, and somehow Gretchen and Troy forgot to . . . notice until now?

  Gretchen glances at a photograph on the hutch of the three of them in better-if-still-not-good times, when Gray was maybe three, and no—thank God!—there are his eyebrows in the photograph. Kind of pale, but definitely present. She says, “Uh, Gray, honey. Did something happen to your face?”

  “Did something happen to my face,” Gray states in that inflectionless way of his.

  “Yes. Your face.”

  “Your eyebrows!” Troy says. “For Christ’s sake, Gretch, be specific at least, what are you trying to say? Are you asking him if he’s had a facelift? Are you asking if he has a black eye? Say what you mean!”

  “Your eyebrows.” Gretchen feels herself turning red. “Where did they . . . go?”

  Gray laughs.

  “Did you shave your eyebrows, honey?”

  Gray spits milk and cereal chunks into his bowl, giggling. “No!”

  She and Troy are both on him now, standing above him, handling his face, searching for clues. There are still some strays protruding from his fair skin, which is reddish around where the missing hair should be. Troy pokes her too hard in the arm and mouths, What the fuck?, but Gretchen says quietly, “Gray, did you pull your eyebrows out?”

  “Why are you yelling?” shouts Gray.

  “I’m not yelling, honey.”

  “Stop yelling at me!” Gray bolts from the table, knocking some of the milk from his bowl.

  “Oh my God,” Gretchen says to Troy. “What are we going to do?”

  “Do you have an eyebrow pencil?” Troy asks.

  “No, I don’t. Do you?”

  “Why would I—what’s wrong with my eyebrows?”

  “I don’t understand how he did it,” Gretchen says. “Did he spend all night pinching his little eyebrow hairs one by one and yanking them out at the root? Why would he do that? I didn’t even know that was possible.”

  “I love how in Gray’s moment of crisis,” Troy says, “you manage to twist this around so that you’re implying that something is wrong with my eyebrows.”

  Gretchen huffs out of the room. Troy doesn’t follow her; she can hear him pouring coffee into his portable mug and then, seconds later, exiting into the garage—its door rising—presumably on his way to the gym, where he goes every morning (or pretends to go every morning). Gretchen heads upstairs to Gray’s bedroom, some of the wind stupidly taken out of her sails by the fact that Troy didn’t chase her. The last two years of her life have been marked by more Bette Davis exits than the whole forty years prior, but now that she is thinking of it, not one such departure has ever been met with anyone pursuing her. She leaves rooms in a thunder but no one ever seems to care that she is gone.

  Inside Gray’s bedroom, he is playing with a model of the Titanic. These models—he has seven or eight of them—are not really toys; they’re expensive and kind of fragile and clunky—but since discovering the Titanic, Gray has taken little interest in anything else. After having spent the bulk of preschool and pre-K being the subject of parent-teacher meetings because he seemed wholly disinterested in learning the alphabet, suddenly, still months shy of his sixth birthday, Gray knows how to read at a fourth-grade level and spends his every free moment on the family room computer researching ship disasters and writing by hand elaborate lists of the names of every ship whose sinking has ever been documented. Gretchen is alternately thrilled by his precocious reading skills and . . . well, utterly creeped out.

  “You need to get ready for school,” Gretchen tells him. He fails to look up. “You still have to go to school today. If the other kids make fun of you about your eyebrows . . .” She wants to say, Then maybe you shouldn’t have fucking yanked them out of your head, but instead makes herself say, “I’m sure Daddy will have an eyebrow pencil for you by the time he gets home tonight.”

  “I’m ready,” Gray says. “You’re the one in your pajamas.”

  Gretchen looks down at her body. She’s wearing a nightgown, but she drives Gray to school and was just planning to put her raincoat on over it, which she thinks he should know by now, so he must just be acting rude intentionally, copying the way Troy talks to her. Still, shamed, she stalks into her own bedroom to put on sweats (Troy would say these are pajamas, too, although he just left the house in track pants for the gym. You aren’t going to the gym, he would counter if she said that). They’re already late—they are late to school pretty much every day—but Gretchen can’t stop herself from sinking onto her bed and plugging into her iPhone: kid pulls out his eyebrows.

  WebMD says: Trichotillomania is a type of impulse-control disorder. Impulse-control disorders are mental illnesses that involve the repeated failure to resist impulses, or urges, to act in ways that are dangerous or harmful. People with these disorders know that they can hurt themselves or others by acting on the impulses, but they cannot stop themselves.

  Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck.

  She catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror: her Middle American embarrassing sweatpants, her disheveled hair, her own pale eyebrows that could be absent when glimpsed through a mirror all the way across the room—evidence that, clearly, an eyebrow pencil should be in her repertoire.

  The thing about getting your child to school so ungodly early in the morning is that, if you have a Normal Child
, you are probably desperate to get their loud, messy, sticky little personage out of your house to get some peace and quiet. Whereas Gretchen could go about her business and not hear from Gray for the rest of the day while he played with his overpriced models, chronicled marine disasters, and engaged in “failure to resist impulses.” As a baby, he never cried, even when he was hungry. It was like owning a fish; Gretchen sometimes feared: if you forgot to feed it, it sent no signals, it just . . . died. She was often nervous that something would happen to Gray on her watch—that he didn’t seem to have the proper instincts of self-preservation and that she was, in the business of keeping him alive, more alone than she was supposed to be.

  On that note, she stands with renewed purpose. At least at school, presumably, someone will notice if he attempts to scalp himself.

  Gretchen’s parents have taken, in their advancing age, to throwing parties in the daytime. It’s her mother’s sixty-fifth birthday, and her parents are hosting an adults-only luncheon at the country club, which is an excruciatingly specific insult to Gretchen, given that Gray is the only child in the family, the only one they had to go out of their way to make sure was not in attendance. Gretchen is galled, though not enough so to lose awareness that she is also relieved to be there alone—Troy wouldn’t dream of coming these days—unencumbered of either. Her mother will be irritated that Gretchen is wearing a pantsuit to her party, but cocktail dresses make Gretchen feel like a transvestite. She is nearly six feet tall, thick-calved, hearty, suggestive of appetites. Her mother has often cautioned her never to wear her hair pulled back, lest she resemble a Polish cleaning woman. When she was young she was a tennis jock, skilled enough to excuse her lack of daintiness, and even to play professionally—briefly, but long enough to become acquainted with legions of other low-tier pros like herself and to marry one. Now she works with numbers, though to describe exactly how would be sadistically dull.