by Ilana Masad
“Here,” Liam says, and pulls his keys out of his pocket. They’re connected to one of those belt chains like the kind Maggie has, and he unclips them, disentangles his apartment key from the set and hands it over. “I guess you have my address already.”
“Yup. Thanks,” Maggie says. She’s still pissed off, and so before she can say anything shitty, she picks a door at random and walks outside to order a Lyft.
IRIS
SEPTEMBER 6, 2015
Iris lay in bed, awake and aware and scrolling through the news on her phone. It was a recently acquired habit, though she’d had a smartphone for as long as her kids had. But the news was something she’d once preferred listening to in the car or reading in the paper. Liam, though, was attached to his phone like it was a sixth finger some days, and over their mostly silent breakfasts—they both liked long coffees and quiet upon first waking up—he would turn his screen to show her articles and say things like, “Can you believe this shit?” and “Look what the fuckers did today.” Eventually, she just downloaded a couple of news apps and became accustomed to scrolling through herself, pleased that she could now nod intelligently and mutter with disgust, “Mhm” and “I know, right?”
Liam wasn’t like anyone else Iris had ever been with, for a multitude of reasons, but the one that stuck out most to her, and that weighed on her constantly, was that he was smarter than she was. Not that any of the others had been dumb; Abe was a PhD and a leader in his field, and Peter certainly was incredibly emotionally and otherwise intelligent. But Liam was a different kind of smart. He was so well-informed about the forces of capitalism and government and various laws being passed, about the history of oppression both in this country and abroad, about the way speech and action melded together and could cause real, demonstrable good or harm, that she felt ignorant beside him. He had no formal education beyond high school, but he cared about so many things with a passion that could easily tip into rage that she was humbled. And so, humbled and ignorant and impressed, she fell for him. She thought of him, sometimes, as a corrective to Shlomo—Liam wasn’t trying to impress anyone with his brain; it seemed more like his knowledge was felt rather than intellectualized.
Quite frankly, of everyone she’d been with, he intimidated her the most. Which was partly why she’d made the decision that she made, and which she would have to carry out once he was awake. Or maybe not right when he woke up, but soon.
Last night, they’d gone out to a bar, at his urging. “I want to show you off, sexy,” he’d said, sniffing the back of her neck and running the tips of his fingers up her arms in a way that made her melt. She’d agreed, though she wasn’t partial to big crowds, and she was introduced to some of his friends, a couple of whom she suspected were his lovers as well. But she and Liam had an agreement—if she wasn’t going to talk about her home life, about her spouse and their relationship, then Liam wasn’t going to tell her about what he got up to and with whom when she wasn’t around.
She’d been around a lot recently, though. This was the other problem. It was beginning to feel like too much. But it was so easy, with Ariel working on campus most of the summer and starting his second year of college, Maggie long out of the house, and Peter working harder than ever before it seemed on designs for a solar panel company’s new marketing campaign. He’d also recently acquired a very demanding client in the form of a medical marijuana pharmacy that tended to give him ridiculously close deadlines but paid very well.
So with the kids both gone and Peter preoccupied, Iris had been spending increasing time in Las Vegas with Liam between her own jobs. Mostly, they stayed in and talked. It was like going to university all over again, being around Liam. He had radical politics, and while she challenged him occasionally on them, she never won an argument. And she loved it. God help her, she loved it. And she loved him. That, well, that was the biggest problem of all.
She was just reading a piece on the removal of prisoners from solitary confinement in Washington and wondering what Liam would think about that—probably something like, “Prisons are the way the US maintains modern slavery and it’s an antiquated system that clearly doesn’t help them or society, for fuck’s sake”—when he rolled over with a grunt. His eyes were bleary and red, and she could almost hear the way they gummed open sleepily. He’d gotten very drunk last night, and Iris had let herself get tipsier than usual too, but alcohol at night always made her wake up early in the morning.
“Here,” she said, reaching over to the bedside table. She handed Liam a tall glass of water and told him to drink it. “All of it,” she said with a finger waggle. “I swear, you’d think you were seventeen.”
“Honey, I’m youthful at heart,” he said, his voice hoarse—there was karaoke last night too, Liam singing terribly but enthusiastically. Iris had nearly peed her pants laughing. He glugged the water from the glass. She watched his throat moving, and ran a finger down it. It was so smooth. Straight up and down, no bulbous Adam’s apple in the middle. She had somehow never registered this before. He handed her the glass back and stretched. “Not in body, apparently. Fuck, am I stiff.”
“You were a sight last night,” she told him.
“A good one, I hope,” he said. “Why are you up so early? And why didn’t you wake me up? How long have you been staring at me sleeping anyway?”
Iris shrugged. “I wasn’t! I was reading the news.”
“Ah. A well-informed wife lives a well-informed life,” he quipped, chucking her chin. Then he realized what he’d said, apparently, and withdrew. “Sorry, I’m hungover. Coffee?”
Iris didn’t say a word, but he was already out of the room, his boxer shorts barely hanging on to his slim hips, his long, willowy torso left bare. His back was narrow, and Iris thought it the most beautiful one she’d ever seen. She wavered. She didn’t want to do what she was going to do. But Peter had asked her the other night whether she’d maybe be home more often, because he missed her and one of his projects was winding down soon, and she knew that she was falling in deep here and needed out before it was too late.
She got dressed, putting on her blue jeans and the white top she was wearing last night. She hadn’t brought an extra outfit, just another small detail orchestrated to make herself leave today and do what she had to do. In the kitchen, Liam was facing the coffeemaker and rubbing his eyes with the balls of his hands. He yawned widely, his crooked bottom teeth on full display. He’d had braces on the top ones as an adult, he’d told her once, early in their relationship. He was embarrassed by it, though, and said that if he could have chosen over again, he would have kept his fucked-up upper teeth as well, as a reminder to both himself and the world that he came from a small town in Wyoming where his parents worked hard and were too poor to afford luxuries like orthodontia. She loved his teeth, though. She loved that his upper teeth were pristine and straight and looked like a movie star’s and the bottom were in the same shape they’d been in for decades. She loved that he carried a flaw like that proudly, and that he was ashamed instead of what he considered succumbing to modern beauty standards. He was so unlike the people in her life.
Except Maggie, she thought often; but for so long she hadn’t let Maggie be this way with her, had objected and shut her outrage down, seeing her as childish, a little spoiled maybe, certainly self-righteous and naive. She was all those things, to an extent, but mostly, she was young, and Iris, too, had been young once, going to antiwar protests in high school despite her parents’ objections. She should have encouraged Maggie, probably, or at least not gotten so impatient with her. Parents make mistakes, Iris knew, but this was one that rippled inward from Maggie’s behavior to her essence. Iris wasn’t sure how to rectify it. And maybe, she thought now, mustering courage, that was another reason to do what she had to do. So she could try again, and try harder, with her daughter.
Iris pulled the milk out of the fridge. “Here.”
“Thanks,” he said, an
d grabbed her around the waist. He held her companionably beside him, watching the coffee drip into the pot as if hypnotized. Standing quietly like this with him was another of the things she loved. Peter liked to chatter when she was around. And she didn’t stop him, because this was one of the things they were good at: giving each other what was necessary. She needed physical space so that she could do her job well and emotional space so that she could be the companion and wife she was to him. And he gave her that. In return, when she was home, she was Peter’s sounding board, his best friend, his rock. But Liam could be silent with her in a way that felt rich and intoxicating.
Liam poured them both coffee with milk and brought the mugs to the table. Their ritual had become set: they would sit, Iris with her feet in Liam’s lap, and zone into their phones together. Sometimes Iris would read a novel instead, if she wasn’t in the mood for the real world. This morning, she didn’t put her feet up. Like a fox with a scent, Liam stilled.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“How do you know there’s something wrong?” She didn’t bother denying it, because that would make what came next worse, and one thing she refused to do was sugarcoat things. She never had, not since leaving Shlomo, and she never would again. It was part of what made her a good businesswoman too. She was realistic. In the years with Shlomo, business was the only place she could be that way; since leaving him she could spread the outlook to other parts of her life. She fiddled with her necklace, running her fingers over the amber. She’d forgotten to take it off last night. She waited.
“You look . . . different. Shuttered,” Liam said. He fluttered his hands in front of his face, like he was playing peekaboo.
Iris let go of the necklace and tried to relax her shoulders. “Well, I do have to talk to you.”
“No.” Liam got up. He started pacing. “No, you don’t. There is nothing to talk about. No.”
“Please, Liam, just sit and—”
“I will not sit, no, I won’t, I won’t. If I don’t sit, you won’t leave me. If you don’t leave me, then there’s still a chance.”
“A chance at what?” she asked quietly. She’d never seen him like this before. It was like a switch had flipped, and the grumpy man a few years her junior became a child begging his mother not to leave him all alone at the babysitter’s house.
“A chance at—at—n-n-normalcy,” he spat out. Iris had never heard him stutter, either, and now she was really scared, since he’d mentioned once that a speech pathologist in elementary school had trained him out of it. Part of her was trying to remember whether it could be a sign of stroke, and when Liam stopped dead and stared at the window behind her, his face slack, she really began to panic. Her finger was already dialing the nine on her cell phone when he spoke again and his voice sounded like it usually did. Wry, collected, sane. “Sorry ’bout that.”
Iris stayed silent, unsure what exactly he was apologizing for.
He turned his back on her and hugged himself, his hands almost touching on his spine. “I . . . have abandonment issues,” he said. “I’ve been working through them for a long time. And that’s all I’m going to say. I think you should leave. Unless . . .” And he turned his head halfway, so that she could see his profile, which looked alien to her in that moment. “Unless you weren’t about to tell me that we should end things.”
Iris was gripping her phone hard with both hands. She wondered whether she could crack it, break it in her bare palms. “No,” she finally said. “I mean, yes, that was what I was about to say, but—” She wanted to say that she thought they could talk about it, that she could explain her reasons, but Liam let out a little yelp.
“No!” He shouted it, but then he took a deep, shuddering breath, and said, more quietly, “No. No buts. I don’t want you to explain everything that’s wrong with me, but how it’s still you, not me. I don’t want to hear about what I’m lacking, and how you really just need the real thing, and how you’re uncomfortable, and how you’d be ashamed of telling your kids, and how ungodly it all is. I don’t care how you couch it, I don’t care how you excuse it to yourself.”
“That’s not—that isn’t at all—”
“Stop. Please go.”
She lingered. She wanted to hug him, to touch him, to explain. But he wasn’t a child, despite his vulnerability. And he didn’t need her concern or pity. She could understand that. She picked up her purse. At the door, she wanted to say something more, like, I love you, I never lied to you, I will always care about you, I care about you too much. But nothing she could say would be comforting or fair, and it would all be for her own benefit anyway. After all, she wouldn’t be able to change his perception of himself, or about why she had to go, and it wasn’t her job to try if he didn’t want her to. So she left.
In the car, she realized what a brutal mistake she’d made. Not in ending things. She had to do that, and she should have probably done it sooner—the flash she’d just seen of Liam confirmed it, reminded her that there was something feral in him that she never, ever had to worry about with Peter, her solid and adoring Peter. No, the mistake was deeper than that, and was made a long time ago. It was not telling him who she was, where she came from . . . It was not telling him more about her kids. More about Maggie.
It was not telling him how he’d changed her in ways Iris still couldn’t articulate, merely by being who he was and allowing her to be with him. She should have discussed things with him more, asked more questions, shown that she cared about his experience—but she’d thought this whole time that he didn’t want her to ask, that part of him was tough and closed off like his scar tissue. But maybe he’d been putting on an act for her, the same way Maggie now did, toughness that had nothing to do with how he felt and everything to do with fear of her reaction. Maybe he’d thought that she was pretending he was someone other than he was, or that she was going against her nature and inclination. All this time, had he thought she was disgusted by him? That she thought their union was somehow evil or wrong?
But no, she tried to comfort herself, that couldn’t be. She was projecting, mixing everything up. He was her lover, not her child. The sun looked wrong, too bright, and the desert was too beautiful, and she wanted to reenter the concrete of the city again, to be among squat buildings that looked as ugly as she felt.
She could have reassured him more. She should have. She shouldn’t have assumed he was always strong.
AUGUST 27, 2017
It’s almost one in the morning when Maggie hears Liam’s key in the door. She’s incredibly drunk and not a little stoned. She really shouldn’t be, second night in a row, yet here she is nonetheless. She’s in the pleasantly woozy state where she thinks she could be sober if she really wanted to, though a tiny part of her mind is aware that she’s very wrong, and long past that possibility. And, to make everything worse, she and Lucia had a fight. Or, at least, Maggie is pretty sure that’s what it was.
It started when Maggie was already three shots in. She called Lucia through Messenger to tell her about what she’d found, and without thinking about it, had ranted for a full five minutes, pacing up and down Liam’s small apartment.
“Babe,” Lucia had said when Maggie finally paused for breath, “I can see why this is throwing you a bit, but . . . well, I guess . . . isn’t there part of you that’s glad to learn this about your mom?”
“Glad?” Maggie really couldn’t fathom how Lucia could think that. What was there to be glad about?
“Yeah, I mean, I know she stepped out on your dad, and that’s not an easy pill to swallow, but—”
“No, there is no but,” Maggie said. “She cheated, and that’s shitty, and she was shitty to me, about being gay, and now . . .” Her voice broke.
“Okay,” Lucia said. “Okay, you’re right. I just—okay.”
“Just what?”
“No, nothing, babe,” Lucia said quickly. “I’m sorry I said
anything, now isn’t the time.”
But Maggie could tell Lucia had more to say, and she couldn’t handle it, didn’t want to see how or if she was being unreasonable or judgmental—like you always said, Mom—or whatever it was she was being because she had a right to be it, all of it, and she wasn’t willing to back down. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” she said after a tense pause, and before waiting to hear what Lucia said, she hung up and put her phone on airplane mode. Then she rolled a joint, and kept drinking.
Now, she’s still on the relatively good side of drunk, threatening to tip over into bad, depending on what happens next.
Liam glances at her and the bottle of whiskey open next to her on the made-up sofa bed. “Left any for me?” he asks. Even though just a few short hours ago Maggie hated him, she decides now that she doesn’t, really. She’s feeling solicitous. No one who wants to share her whiskey could be so terrible.
“There’s some for everybody!” she hoots, and passes him the bottle. He raises an eyebrow at her and takes a swig.
“Fuck, that’s nasty. Someone needs to teach you about good whiskey. And don’t look at me, I’m so broke I apparently bought this shit.”
“Then how would you know good whiskey from—of?—from, it’s from, right?” Maggie’s lost in her sentence and isn’t sure how to find her way back, and it seems like just as good a time as any to announce her new understanding of the situation. “Found your cock,” she says.
Liam is very still for a moment, a stag caught in the headlights. But like a deer will if you wait a moment, his shoulders relax. He hands her the bottle back and sits in the armchair that matches the sofa. “I guess that’s my fault for letting an angry kid into my apartment.”
“So you don’t deny it?”
His face registers irritation. “Nothing to deny. What, you think your generation fucking invented being trans? Fucking millennials, you drive me crazy.”