Besotted
Page 20
I got fired.
It was so easy for her to reveal her secrets; her stories were all so mundane.
11.
The next day I went out for tea. When I came back, I saw her keys on the table and felt a static electricity in the air that suggested I wasn’t alone. I hurried through the apartment, looking behind doors, in the shower, under the covers, as though Liz and I were simply playing an elaborate game of hide and seek. The apartment was empty. After checking twice, I understood that I had misread the signs.
There was no electricity—just the disturbed dust motes swirling in the air, looking for a new place to settle. Liz’s money was gone, along with her suitcase and her clothes. It was a coincidence, maybe, a twist of fate that we missed each other. She waited as long as she could for me to return, but then she had to catch her plane. Or, she’d been waiting outside the building for me to leave, so she could come back and pack up as quickly as possible before I returned. She hadn’t looked for her necklace, which told me how little time she had.
I picked up the keys, feeling their weight, wanting very much for them to mean something. But they were just keys. I had packing of my own to do.
There is no picture of Bryan’s face as he follows Liz to baggage claim, as he realizes she is a completely different person, though he couldn’t have explained exactly how.
There is no picture of the mark I left on her.
There is no picture of the day she unpacked and realized she didn’t have her necklace. Did she regret its loss or was she relieved? I want to see the picture of her opening a box containing its replacement. A picture of the moment she decides against asking me to mail her the original.
This story isn’t real, I tell myself. And then: Close the computer.
But I don’t listen to myself.
Heather lives in Washington, D.C. She’s a staffer on Capitol Hill and so her profile shows me nothing beyond the fact that she exists, that she has brown eyes and auburn curls and has once stood on a mountain overlooking a lake and smiled for a picture. Elsewhere on the internet, in photos beyond her control, she wears a black cocktail dress, at a wedding perhaps or a conference. The photo should—but doesn’t—reveal which. And she is in a canoe at her college reunion. I assume from their smiles, and the fact that her companion is identified with a name but not a year of graduation that she is Heather’s date and not a classmate. She’s a pretty woman named Blair and when I find her on social media I learn she teaches preschool. I see her and Heather smiling in a kitchen.
Alice has a friend who baked her a cake when she passed the USMLE Step 1 after her second year of med school. She has a cat named Irma and makes inside jokes: about dating in LA, about anatomy and physiology, about a roommate she never names. She looks boring and happy and I miss the subtle jasmine smell of her.
I tell myself to go now to the airport and have a drink before my flight. Have two.
My father is not on social media, but my stepmother is. My 16-year-old half-brother is. There are stories and stories and stories, none of them meant for me to see. But I look through all of them anyway.
Still I don’t forget about my flight.
Love waits until sunset, when the neon lights blink on, one at a time. They are the restaurants and bars, the shopping malls like beehives, the movie theaters; they are the skyscrapers full of condos owned by lăowài, lining the river and stretching up toward space, pulsing, about to lift off; they are the hotels and the old banks, the tile-coated old apartment buildings, the guardrails along the veins of the city; they are the trees.
Love cranes her neck, looking up and up and up, searching for the dark. She wishes for stars. She says goodbye to Shanghai.
Acknowledgements
Before this book came the belief that I could be a writer. Thank you, Christopher Dollas, Mercy Carbonell, Ralph Sneeden, Karen Rile, Al Filreis, Paul Hendrickson.
Before that, the belief that a writer is a thing worth being. Thank you for that, Mom and Dad, and for the support you’ve each given me to pursue this dream.
I’m grateful to the many people who helped shape my writing and this novel: Brett Hool, Chris Khun, Dan Bevacqua, Eric Barkin, Frank Winslow, Heidi Julavits, Jamie Yourdon, Jason Pribilsky, Joanna Rakoff, Jonathan Dee, Jordan Foster, Kristin Walrod, Lidia Yuknavitch, Ramon Isao, Tye Pemberton.
Jaime Manrique: thank you for the questions you taught me to ask about my characters. Tahneer Oksman: thank you for being Besotted’s first, most patient reader, and for teaching me what critique should look like.
Annelisa Smith, April Custer, Emily Schoonmaker, Kathryn Moakley, Kendra Noyes Miller, Kimberly Kay, Kristen Boyd, Mary Milstead, Meghan Moran, Rachel Melissa, and Sarah Winter Whelan: thank you for teaching me to be a better reader. Thank you, Rachel Jagoda Brunette: the ways you keep me sane are too numerous to list.
Thank you, Leland Cheuk for believing in this novel enough to publish it, and Gigi Little for dressing it so perfectly to meet the world.
Kimberly King Parsons: thank you for being a trusted reader, a voice of reason, and the loudest cheerleader I’ve ever had. Tracy Manaster: for your masterful edits, motivational techniques, insights, honesty, culinary skills, and excellent taste in bars, I am eternally grateful.
To Jesse, for what you’ve taught me about empathy;
To Nikki, for more than 20 years of friendship, and for always believing in me even when I don’t;
To Kate, for continuing on as my longest-serving editor, and for tricking me into moving to China:
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
About the Author
Melissa Duclos received her MFA in creative writing from Columbia University, where she was awarded the Guston Fellowship. Her work has been published in The Washington Post, Salon, Bustle, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and Electric Literature among other venues. She lives with her two children in Portland, Oregon, and is the founder of Magnify: Small Presses, Bigger, a monthly newsletter celebrating small press books.
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