by Mona Awad
“Can I take your coat?” Cupcake offers. I turn to her. She’s looking at me so hopefully. So willing to take a coat I’m not wearing, I almost want to give her my skin. I feel my chest going red in fiery patches.
“Um.”
“She’s not wearing a coat, Bunny,” Vignette observes from her invisible opium cloud, still looking at me with her conspiratorial half smile.
They all break out into laughter. Cupcake claps a hand over her mouth and looks at me aghast. Like I’m something worse than naked and she only realized it now. I feel terribly hot. Sweat drips down my back.
“I’m sorry,” are the words that come out of my mouth before I can stop them.
“Why are you apologizing, Samantha?” Creepy Doll says, her breathy voice full of demonic emoticons flanked by winking smileys.
“Why?” I repeat.
They’re all looking at me. Yes, why?
I become light-headed, painfully aware of the fact that I’m still standing and they’re all sitting in a snug circle. There is nowhere to sit except a heart-shaped ottoman between Creepy Doll and Vignette, which I presume is for their feet. Should I wait until they ask me to sit down? Should I—
“Samantha,” the Duchess says, opening her arms. “Come. Sit.” She pats the space beside her on the loveseat. The others look at Cupcake, who is looking at that space like it was hers until I got there. She turns to look at me as though she’s just been smacked across the face. Then she smiles. “Yes, Samantha,” she says, “sit, please.”
“I can sit here,” I offer, gesturing to the ottoman.
“No, Samantha, sit on the couch,” Cupcake says. “You absolutely should. You’re so tall.”
“Like Alice on mushrooms,” Creepy Doll says.
“Or Gilgamesh,” Vignette observes from her reclined position on the chaise. “Or the Tower of Babel.”
“But in the best way.”
I make my way over to the Duchess. I’ve never sat near her before. She opens her arms and hugs me, her airy embrace all fragrant hair and frail bones and elegant fabric. A smell like flowers and burning. When she pulls away, she is smiling intimately, as though we’ve just been through something words cannot express. Her long-fingered hands are gripping my arms. She’s looking at me like I’m her favorite special-needs child.
“Samantha,” she says, taking my hands, “we’re so glad you could make it after all. How about a drink? We came up with a cocktail just for you.”
“For me?” Something breaks in me. That strange heart swell I felt when I first saw my name on the swan’s wing. Not believing it could be for me. Could it be for me?
They all nod. Yes, Samantha. For you.
“Here, taste,” Creepy Doll says, offering me her drink. I stare at the bile-green concoction in which what looks like a small black turd floats. I want to ask what’s in it, but this seems rude, somehow. When they’re all still smiling at me like this.
They watch me take the proffered glass. Why are you being nice to me? I want to shout. Why, why, why, why? Instead, I smile back. Bring the drink to my lips. As it hits my tongue, I wince.
“Well?”
“Isn’t it so you?” Creepy Doll says.
It is a mouthful of dark acid, with something deeply, unrelentingly bitter in the finish that causes my eyes to tear and my lips to pucker. I cough despite myself, while they watch.
“It’s a little intense, huh?”
“Kind of hard to take it straight like that, right?”
“I could sweeten it a little, maybe? Maybe that’s all it really needs.”
They look so genuinely concerned.
“No, this is fine, really.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. It’s great.” I take another sip of the terrible drink, try not to grimace.
They all smile except for the Duchess.
“Samantha,” she says, resting her hand on my knee, squeezing. “Lies aren’t allowed in Smut Salon. This is a night of Absolute Truth.” I look down at her lacy white lap where a pane of glass sits, poking out of a rabbit-fur case. There appear to be words etched on the glass. I feel a lick of fear in my gut.
“I love it,” I say. “I do. I—”
They laugh. What’s so fucking funny? I want to say. But I don’t. I laugh with them. Ha. Haha. Hahaha.
“Oh, Samantha, we’re so glad you’re here,” the Duchess says.
“Me too,” I say. The mystery liquor is in my toes. Making little prissy flowers open all through me. Like the ones blooming in her fake fireplace. Like the freesia on the coffee table. Like the tulips that I now observe are stenciled all over her impossibly high pastel-colored walls. There’s a ceiling up there somewhere, from which a mysterious rosy-golden light shines down on all of us.
I open my mouth and apologies tumble out. I’m so sorry I kept them waiting. I hope I didn’t keep them waiting? Did I? I—
“Don’t even worry about it, Samantha. We were honestly just getting started.”
I notice a self-conscious arrangement of books on her hexagon-shaped coffee table, which is lit here and there with tea lights: The collected Byron and Keats. Some Sade. Barthes’s Erotisme. Wuthering Heights. Ovid’s Metamorphosis. And, surprise, surprise, a book by the Lion. His infamously horrific and debauched novel, a fever dream about a sociopathic Scotsman who engages in deeply philosophical acts of homicide against women has been reverently placed atop an anthology of Russian fairy tales. I flush at the sight of his name on the cover, at the cover itself. When the Duchess sees me eyeing it, she tucks the book discreetly under the pile.
How much they think they know about what transpired between the Lion and me last year is anyone’s guess. Probably they think I fucked him. Maybe it’s even the reason they kept their distance from me. Or maybe he and I got close because they kept me at a distance, I don’t know. All last fall in Workshop, they’d side-eye each other if he praised my stories. Because surely they’d seen me leave class with him, walked past us chatting together in the hall, observed us exchanging books and vinyl. Caught us sitting together in cafés or in the basement of the Irish pub, having a drink, another drink, one more for the road, why not? They’d noticed him walk over and talk to me at department functions, sit beside me at readings. Then, in the winter semester, they might have observed how quite suddenly all of this stopped—that he no longer sat next to me at readings or talked to me at parties or met me off campus. And then, of course, in spring, on the night of the end-of-year party, they definitely observed me drunk in the passenger seat of his Subaru.
I imagined they imagined wild things. Probably he ties her up like in his sick stories and she loves it because of her sick stories. I want to defend myself against these unspoken accusations, against the microaggressive manner in which the Duchess now smilingly straightens the stack of books though it doesn’t need straightening.
You think you know, I want to say to them. You think you know but you don’t.
But know what, exactly? What is there to really know? Sometimes when I tell myself or Ava the story, it grows teeth and it’s something. Definitely something. Other times, it comes apart in my hands like air. But if I remember all the right details. If I tell them in the right order. If I pause in the right places, trail off in the right places . . .
The Duchess smiles at me as she rearranges the other items on the table—a Ziploc bag full of short brown sticks, some dried flower petals. No dildos in sight.
“Samantha,” she says gently. “Have you never been to a Smut Salon before?”
You never invited me, is what I want to say. Instead I look at the smiling pink plastic pony standing in the middle of the coffee table like a sacrificial lamb. “Um. I don’t think so. Was I supposed to bring something or. . . ? Are there rules?”
“You’ll be fine,” Cupcake says, swatting my question away like a fly. “Just follow
our lead. Really this is just meant to be a night of inspiration for us. As artists, you know?”
“To awaken our creativity,” Creepy Doll says. “To open our hearts.”
“To be perverse,” Vignette adds.
“Bunny. Anyway, Samantha, you’ll see,” the Duchess says. “Caroline was actually just about to start us off, weren’t you, Bunny?”
Cupcake nods gravely and sets down her cocktail.
“Lower the lights, please, Kira,” she says to Creepy Doll, who jumps from her seat.
Suddenly we’re in semidarkness. The only light in the room comes from a few tea lights and the shine in their hair. Cupcake rises up off the floor. Clears her throat. Reaches for the Ziploc bag full of what I now realize are cinnamon sticks. She pulls one out and holds it in front of her like a candle. She sniffs it fervently. Her eyes closed tight.
Then she begins.
“If I were a cinnamon peeler,” she begins in a quavering voice, “I would ride your bed . . .”
As she recites the Ondaatje poem, she begins to shave the stick with long, tender strokes. Earth-colored dust falls onto the table. I look around. They’re all listening intently, nodding solemnly. The Duchess has her eyes closed. Creepy Doll is absently petting the fluffy pink tail of the pony. Vignette is staring straight ahead with her mouth open. Not sure what to do, I just sit there, clutching my drink, watching Cupcake shave and recite with increasingly fast, fevered strokes. Her head is thrown back and she looks ecstatic. A little breathless. The whole time she recites, the Duchess holds my hand firmly, as if she’s seeing me through a birth. An unholy laugh rises in my throat but I hold it in.
When she’s finished, they’re all silent for a minute. Solemn. As if they’ve just heard a prayer.
At last Creepy Doll whispers, “Oh my god. So erotic.”
“Hot,” Vignette says.
The Duchess nods. “I absolutely love the way the erotic is rendered as a tactile, olfactory experience. Every time you read that poem, Bunny, it seems to possess you.”
They’re all looking at me, I realize now, with expectation. I’m supposed to say something.
“So great,” I murmur, but it rings false, so I add, “I love the cinnamon peels.”
“I was going to do just the powder or serve cinnamon cookies, but then I was like no, bark. It has to be bark.”
“You also didn’t want to disrupt the purity of cinnamon,” the Duchess observes.
“Exactly,” Cupcake says, as though the Duchess has articulated a truth she’s been trying to pin down for years.
The Duchess breathes in deeply, then exhales slowly with eyes closed, the way my old therapist did. The one my father sent me to when I was a teenager, after my mother died. The one with the intricately knotted scarves. I’d lie to her. Do you hear voices? Yes. See demonic entities? All the time. Now Samantha, tell me, why do you think the dream means you’re going to die a fiery death imminently?
The Duchess says, “Kira, your turn, Bunny.”
They go, one after the other. Creepy Doll reads an erotic version of “Little Red Riding Hood” while donning a red cloak, Vignette reads a chapter from Marguerite Duras’s The Lover while Cupcake passes out Vietnamese spring rolls, and at last the Duchess removes her pane of glass from its rabbit-fur case, and begins to read aloud a very oblique and circuitous passage of theory she has etched from Julia Kristeva about the nature of the erotic.
After each of them is done, they all sigh collectively, as if post-orgasm. I sigh with them. At this point in the evening, I’ve downed a few Samantha cocktails as well as several Light and Sunnies, a sky-colored drink they invented that is the inverse of a Dark and Stormy. I’m swaying in my seat. The Duchess keeps patting my hand. The pink pony winks at me with its sparkly eyes fringed with enviable lashes. Great, so great, I’m murmuring. This is fun, this is fun, this is fun. It is fun, I tell myself. It really is. It’s not stupid or lame. I clap along with them, and they all smile at me as if I’m a many-headed beast who is at last letting them put bows in its tentacles, braid its mange.
We’re so glad you’re here, Samantha, they say, again and again.
“I’m glad too,” I say. And I mean it more each time. I’m saying it fiercely into each of their four pairs of eyes. To the freesia on the mantle. To the pastel cushions. To the winking pony on the table to whom I now raise my glass that never seems to empty. I’m glad too.
Every now and then I think of Ava, her burst of laughter erupting in my head like a dangerous firework. She would not even be able to sit in this room, for what Smurf chair would accommodate her height? Wearing her stolen clothes, her ripped tights, biting on her lip behind her fishnet veil, dropping ash onto the shaggy carpet shaped like a heart, filling the room with her rain and smoke. Her blue eye and brown eye boring holes into their faces. Lame, her face would say. Lame, lame, lame.
“What did you say, Samantha?”
“Nothing.” Shut up, I tell Ava, swaying. These are the women in my department. These are my peers.
Women? Try children, Smackie. Try grown women who act like little girls.
They’re graduate students, I argue back.
Exactly. Hiding from life in the most coddling, insular, and self-aggrandizing way.
But I see the Duchess has slipped her diamond proem back into its rabbit-fur case. She’s looking at me. They all are. “Well, Samantha, it’s your turn now.”
I look at them, surrounding me in a semicircle, their hair the same shiny nonshade in this light.
“My turn? But. I didn’t bring anything.”
“So tell us something, then—”
“Something smutty, obviously.”
“Like we just did,” Creepy Doll says, her red cloak still on her shoulders.
The Duchess rests her hand lightly on my shoulder. “I bet you have a ton of smutty stories, Samantha.”
“A whole other dirty, mysterious life.”
“What? I don’t—”
“Of course you do.”
They’ve become a many-legged blob in the darkness. Eight eyes staring at me with such expectation. Spill. Spill.
“No, really I—”
“Come on, Samantha.” Their eyes become slits. Their smiles tighten. They look at me like they know I have a burning slutty secret I am willfully withholding. Like I’m denying them entry into my whorish vagina and it’s a real problem. This is why you’re not part of things, Samantha. It’s not us, it’s you. Don’t you see that? You’re the one who isn’t willing to put yourself out there and share.
I look at the green, bitter drink on the table that they made in my honor. Then at the stack of books on the table, his name imprinted on one of the spines.
“We never fucked, if that’s what you’re thinking,” I whisper.
“What was that, Samantha?”
“Nothing.” I stare down at my lap, my mind a great, blazing blank. “I really don’t know what to tell you. I’m sorry.”
“Well you have to tell us something, Samantha. It’s the rules.”
Rules? But you didn’t tell me anything smutty!
I look at the Duchess, who nods sadly like she is so sorry but yes, these are the rules. We can’t break them even though we invented them.
“What if I read a poem or a passage from one of your books?” I offer, reaching toward the stack. Like you guys did, I don’t add.
They don’t answer. Vignette yawns luxuriously. Cupcake coughs behind her fist. I watch as they all pick at invisible lint on their clothes, pointedly sip the sky-blue dregs of their Light and Sunnies while avoiding my eyes.
I want to explain. Tell them that whatever gave them the impression that I have this “dirty mysterious life”—seeing me with Ava? the Lion? my “sick” stories?—was surely misleading. I have no dirty mysterious life. I have no life. If only you knew how empty and boring my
hours were last year. Maybe I should just go.
Instead I say, “I guess I could tell you about the time I died with Rob Valencia.”
They look up at me now. Well?
I take a breath, then a swallow of Samantha. I wince again at the bitter taste, but it goes down easily. Velvety. Almost sweet.
“Rob Valencia was a guy from my high school,” I begin. “A couple of years older than I was. I thought he was the hottest man I ever saw.” So far this is all true.
“Who did he look like?” Cupcake prompts.
I think about Rob Valencia. Taller and broader than the school hallway, or so it seemed to me then. Small dark eyes like liquid smoke. His prematurely balding head of brown curls. His pale, thin-lipped smile that made me pant-y with fathomless lust.
“Zeus,” I say at last.
“The Greek god?”
I nod. “But seventeen. And he liked to wear vintage suits. He oozed charisma like . . . ooze.”
They all lean in. “What made him sexy, Samantha?”
“Sexy?” I repeat. They’re looking at me, waiting.
“Not one particular thing, really. It was more . . . complex, you know? Sort of like an . . . animal magnetism.”
I see they’re all staring at me now like wide-eyed little girls. Tell us, Samantha.
I tell them how he was old-school Spanish Catholic and his family slaughtered goats in the backyard. So he always smelled sort of biblical. Like incense and roasted flesh.
“That’s hot,” Vignette says.
“And then there was his voice,” I say. “He had one of those deep, serene, all-knowing voices like a documentary narrator. Like any moment he could tell you a fact about a penguin or the war and you’d believe him. It was soothing. But sexy too. Like a tongue was being dragged up your inner thigh every time he said hi.”
They’re hanging on my every word. There is no more lint to pick. Ever.
“But the best, the hottest thing about Rob Valencia . . . ,” I say, pausing to drink, “was dying with him.”
“Tell us, Samantha.”
I tell them how long I’d loved him from afar. Then I played his wife in the school play. How, because it was a murder mystery, we both got murdered two thirds of the way through by electrocution. In the scene, we were holding hands, and then he was supposed to plug a lamp into a wall, at which point we were to convulse and die.