by Julie Hilden
Beneath my tongue and my fingers, I feel her hips rise and fall. I move my hands onto her hipbones, framing the cup of her white belly. She rises and falls with increased urgency. Despite herself she begins to spread her legs wider and wider, until she reaches a degree of spread that is highly indelicate – a physical posture that connotes to me every time in life that I have wanted too much, and what the consequences of that have been.
She spreads for me; the extent of her wanting overcomes me; I am wet, myself. Whatever she wants, I’ll give to her. I bend my neck, I press harder, I am farther down inside her with my tongue – imagining it rough as a kitten’s, imagining that I create friction as I lick her soft labia, tease her clitoris out from beneath its small, cowl-like hood. I am insistent, I concentrate, I can wait.
I wonder to myself – as she rises to me, as her pleasure takes her, as I put the flats of my hands on the flats of her thighs and press on them hard, as I show her she can spread even farther than she believes she can – as I do this, I wonder if I will love her. And I wonder if she can make everything I once was, and all I once wanted, seem to me only surpassingly sad and strange.
* * *
The next evening, Olivia invites me to go dancing at a club she likes on the Lower East Side, and I say I will. I calculate that the club is probably too obscure for any journalist to be likely to see me there with her, and even if there is a report of my being there with another woman, I know I can always deny it, and Mr Resnick will never believe it. When he last saw me, I was hardly in any condition even to leave the house.
Again Olivia meets me at the loft – wearing a bright red dress that provides a shocking contrast with her red hair. Since we met we have barely been apart.
As we walk to the club, I feel a soaring, there are the lights of faraway hotels, and I know it is wrong, in the wake of Ilan’s death, that I am so happy – that in this time, of all times, I have caught sight of such a clear pleasure in myself, like pure water.
I try to allay my guilt by thinking: He sent her to me. She is the one he wanted me to be with. In a way, she is the note he left for me – I believe she is, at least. In everything she says and does, I believe he somehow speaks to me.
The club is hard to find on its shadowy block. Once inside, in the darkness, with the music a roar in my ears, I am incautious – letting Olivia touch me as much as she wants, dancing with her in a way that would convey to any careful watcher that we sleep together.
I watch another woman flirt with her, try to dance with her. For once, I do not enjoy my jealousy in any respect. Instead I instantly dislike the woman – who is short-haired, small-boned, bubbly, birdlike – and I want her to go away. It makes me wonder whether Olivia is actually changing me after all; whether this is the kind of love most people know, whether I could have it too.
Olivia turns away from the woman and begins to dance with me again. She whispers to me, ‘Ecstasy,’ and then she leans over to kiss me.
I take the pill from Olivia’s tongue without a second thought – maybe because the petite, flirty woman is watching us jealously. I’ve never tried drugs before; for all our sexual experimentation, Ilan and I never experimented that way. I think it excited him that I – and the other women – would do what he asked with the aid of nothing more than a little champagne; he loved that drugging us was unnecessary.
The Ecstasy takes a while to fade in, but when it does I feel the love it inspires, and I try to forget that the feeling is fake. I accept it just as I accepted the kiss.
When Olivia sees I am starting to be affected, she slips a pill into her own mouth and smiles at me. Soon I see the shine in her eyes from the drug’s euphoria, and I wonder if there is a shine in mine to match it. Wherever she takes me, I want to go.
* * *
We stay out all night at the club and watch the dawn from its roof. Then I take the subway home with Olivia, both of us in dark sunglasses. The sunglasses are mostly for privacy; I fear running into a journalist on his morning commute.
We are not quite hungover yet; instead we are still slightly drunk. We giggle together, sitting in our low-cut dresses with the suited morning travelers in the tarnished subway car, its floor tracked with footprints. It is not a life I am used to, this life, but I find that it suits me in a way.
At the next stop, some of the people near us in the car filter out, and when they do, they reveal a single, dirty footprint, with a Nike swoosh in its center, outlined on the floor.
Suddenly I envision the prints on our white floor, in Ilan’s blood; I see him walking, weaving, falling, see his eyes closing. I hear him slump into the couch, watch him put his bleeding wrists up to his face.
I prop myself up on the metal arm of the row of seats so that I don’t faint. I try to think of other things, to collect myself before Olivia notices my distress, but it’s too late.
‘Are you okay?’ she asks me. ‘Let’s get some breakfast. The night is still young.’
‘The night is over,’ I point out, still reeling, trying to recover. ‘But it was great. I had a great time.’
I try to sound happy, but I am shaken by the vision, and I’m sure she can hear it in my voice.
‘You liked the X?’ she presses.
‘I loved it,’ I tell her.
‘I can introduce you to more,’ she whispers, leaning closer. ‘Whatever you want – you just tell me.’
‘You don’t have to do that.’ Since Ilan and I never used drugs together, they still make me nervous, just as they did when I was a teenager. She looks dejected; I think she saw drugs as a new gift she could give me, a new surprise.
‘The Ecstasy was great, though,’ I add, to console her.
The rest of our ride back home is quiet. Another wave of nausea hits me, but I do not give in to it, I only lean more heavily against the cool metal and sink down farther in the plastic recess of my seat. I realize I have become one of the people I used to stare at on the subway, when I used to go to work.
By the time we go to sleep, an hour or so later, I have a headache from drinking, and from the drug – which has a terrible ‘down,’ I learn – and Olivia says she feels ill too.
We each drink water and take aspirin, put on icepacks. Then we lie next to each other in bed, with only our fingertips touching as we drift to sleep. In the dissipation of the pain from the headache, there is a kind of pleasure. And I find there is a calmness in my going to sleep beside Olivia that I never felt with Ilan. I am not afraid of what the next day will bring; instead, I am expectant, curious, almost happy to meet it.
These small pleasures, are they what constitutes a life? It might be as simple as this, I fantasize – the trick to happiness that I could never find, that I thought I did not believe in.
Soon Olivia is staying over every night. In the daytime, she spends part of her time in Brooklyn, at her apartment or studio – she’s a photographer, it turns out – but I never visit her there. She was the one who came to me, and it stays that way.
Eventually I give her a set of keys – Ilan’s keys – and finally, after she beseeches me to do so, I invite her to move in. She accepts instantly, and packs up and moves the next day, giving up her own apartment even though it means breaking her lease. I am disturbed at how much she throws away, how thoroughly she purges herself of her own furniture and belongings so they will not crowd mine, but I say nothing.
I take her into our house, mine and Ilan’s, so quickly, so easily. And slowly I begin to give her access to all the places I used to let him in.
With Ilan, I became a certain type of woman, and I continue to be such a woman, I find, even after he dies. I am still easily overtaken, perhaps easily taken advantage of. Olivia’s insinuation into my life is like another soft penetration, with a mixture of pleasure and a question of what I have permitted, what I have invited; like fingers offered to me to lick, the very gesture an assurance that I want what is offered.
It is so easy to say that I do want it, to take the fingers into my mout
h when they are held out to me, to feel their whorls against the slight texture of my soft tongue. I do not question Olivia’s entry into my life; I give myself up to it.
Occasionally I still think of the actor, but as time passes, I gradually forget him more and more; after all, I met him only once. And I feel very grateful to Olivia now, even though I know I do not yet quite love her. Without her, I know I would be wondering why to live. Instead, I am confident enough that my latest prescription bottle of Prozac sits in the medicine cabinet unused.
It turns out Olivia is a joy to live with. She is never in a bad mood, and she is always bringing home beautiful fabrics that she’ll make into translucent curtains, or fabulous spices she has found in Chinatown. I tell her not to cook so often – I never do, and it makes me feel guilty – but she says she enjoys it.
Sometimes it is a little eerie, the attention she pays to me; at times her precision, her perfectionism remind me of Ilan arranging our wedding, making sure every detail was right. But then I remember that in a sense he was offering me the wedding as a bribe or a compensation, while what she does seems to be done purely out of love: she asks nothing from me except that occasionally I sit for a series of photographs.
She often uses a timer, photographs us both together, and doctors the photographs to mix our images, in ways that are fascinating to me; my face will merge into hers, or her hair into mine, which is slightly curlier.
She tells me she got the idea in the Prada store – that as much as she had wanted to be there with me, she had also, at the same time, wanted to be behind the camera watching the twinning, the strange echo of one body in another.
As I get to know Olivia better, I begin to learn the details of her life, everything from the mundane – her red hair is dyed, she’s naturally a blonde – to the significant: she grew up in North Carolina, was a runaway, never finished high school. For years she drifted in and out of foster homes, halfway houses.
‘It must have been terrible,’ I console her.
‘People survive worse. The important thing is that I’m here with you now. You suffer to get somewhere, that’s what I learned. You do it for something – that’s why it’s worth it,’ she assures me. I feel that beneath her confidence, she is reassuring herself as well.
It was photography that helped her attain a normal life, Olivia tells me. That, and her grandparents, who began to take an interest in her after she left home, and who still call often, paranoid, to warn her about the dangers of New York City.
‘Without them,’ she says, ‘I don’t know what I would have done. Do you have anyone in your life like that?’
‘Ilan was like that.’
‘No he wasn’t,’ she snaps. ‘What did he ever do for you?’ It’s the first time she’s ever spoken to me sharply.
‘He helped me leave my parents.’
‘You ask so little, Maya. You deserve so much more.’
As I learn more about Olivia’s life, she begins to learn more about mine – the tired stories of my unpleasant parents and their happy remarriages; of my half sister’s teenage pregnancy, and the strange way it made me begin to long for a child of my own.
I tell her little of the years with you, Ilan; she does not want to know. She knows about the women, of course, and she knows you cut me – I’ve shown her the scars – but she does not know about the gun, or about the last games we played just before you died, those games that were so serious to me. These last things, I don’t have the heart to tell her, and I don’t think she can bear to hear.
Most of our discussions about you are very simple. We fall into a little pattern, Olivia and I. She tries to convince me I did not really invite or deserve or want all that you did to me. I try, in return, to believe her. But within myself, I am torn.
For her, of course, everything that happened was your fault. The pathology was yours, never mine. Now that you have died, our lives will disentangle, and everything bad will stay in your grave with you; I will be free of it.
It was not my fault. Olivia has said it to me many times, and now I repeat it to myself: It was you, not me. It was you, not me: I chant it silently. It’s you, don’t you see, Ilan? It’s you and it was never me at all.
Soon another interview leads to another cover story and another secret unveiled: the actress has long been addicted to painkillers despite public denials. She confides in me that knowing I would learn her secret anyway, she has decided to tell her own story, her own way.
It is odd how actors – even stars who have long been in the public eye, and are expert at handling the media – now attribute to me an almost magical power to ferret out their secrets, know them intimately. I didn’t even know my own husband, I want to protest – not well enough to save his life, anyway. He had his own secrets, and I did not learn them. He still remains in part a mystery to me.
I visit the actress in rehab to conduct the interview. She is there for the first time, finally able to stop worrying that a visit will disclose her addiction, since she is now ready to talk about it herself.
Her face is peaceful but her hands shake – they shake with the need that she has not yet satisfied, that perhaps she will never satisfy. I know the story well, and so I write it well – as if it were my own.
For several months, my life with Olivia is quiet, romantic, untroubled. But beneath the quiet surface, a small conflict grows: even as she begins to use me repeatedly as the subject of her photography, I am obstinate in refusing to return the favor.
When I am not working on my interviews, I write more and more about Ilan – and never about Olivia. His is the body I never tire of imagining; his, the face whose angles echo for me now in strangers’ faces on the street, as if it lived behind them.
While I take her body into my hands, I will not take it into my mind, I do not become obsessed with it. And she can tell.
One day I notice my journals are slightly askew – piled differently from the way I left them.
‘You went through my things, didn’t you?’ I demand.
‘No, I didn’t.’
‘It’s obvious you did – look at them. You had no right,’
‘Fine, I skimmed a page or two – that was more than enough.’ She pauses. ‘I want you to get rid of the journals. Will you do that for me? It’s sick for you to obsess over Ilan like this.’
‘But it’s my writing, it’s the way I’m working through it.’
She doesn’t believe me, and she persists. Finally, to quiet her, I agree to get rid of the journals – to burn them, as she wants me to.
The next day, I pretend to rummage through the desk for my journals, annoyed that Olivia, who is in the next room, isn’t watching. I find them easily – I always knew exactly where they were, in fact – but there is a distraction: I again come across the envelope of childhood photographs Ilan left for me, and cannot resist looking at them.
I slip the photos out of the envelope, and onto the desktop. They seem eerie to me now – especially the one that freezes the moment when I am caught falling off my bicycle. I used to think it showed vulnerability, openness; I believed that was why he chose it. Now it seems to show only how I can’t stop time, can’t stop the oncoming blood and hurt. I can’t stop it, but my eyes nevertheless are bright; there is excitement in me, falling.
‘What a strange photo,’ Olivia comments. Absorbed in scrutinizing the photos, I am startled. Peering over my shoulder, she reaches over me to fan them out so she can see them.
‘I’m impressed you recognized me,’ I say quietly, my heart beating fast, as if I have been caught being unfaithful. ‘I didn’t look much like myself yet at that age.’
‘I’d seen the photo before – Ilan showed it to me.’
‘What? What are you talking about? I thought you only met him once. He showed you my photos?’
‘I told you that when we first met.’
‘I thought you meant photos of me the way I am now.’
‘No, childhood photos. These.’
�
��All of them?’
‘Yeah, all of them.’
‘Why?’
‘How should I know?’
‘There must be a reason. He left them behind for me when he died.’
‘Of course he did. It’s just another way for him to control you. I’m sure he meant for you to wonder forever. He set these puzzles for you to solve, Maya. He left his death as some kind of macabre puzzle for you on purpose. This is the man who didn’t leave a suicide note, remember?’
‘Yes, I remember.’ But, I think, you may be the note he left.
‘Just forget about him, that’s what he deserves.’
‘You’re right,’ I tell her. ‘Of course you’re right.’
That evening, I offer Olivia a bag of ashes. Inside it, buried in the gray dust, are the charred, twisted spiral rings of seven notebooks, each spiral like the mangled spine of some metal creature.
Olivia is delighted, but she does not know the truth: I burned seven notebooks, but they were new, and blank. I bought them to burn them. The real ones – the ones in which I wrote of Ilan – I only locked away in his desk, as if I were saving my own heart in a drawer for the day when I would need it.
Taking the bag from me, Olivia smiles, and I feel a pang of guilt. Though I expect her to throw the ashes away, instead she disappears into our bedroom to stash them somewhere, as if they were a memento, remains to be kept in an urn. As if, Ilan, they were the last of you.
I believed that would be the end of her jealousy, but it is not. One night, soon afterward, I am sitting next to Olivia and she reaches out for the chain.
It unnerves me. I saw so many women reach for that tiny silver hand when it was around Ilan’s neck, not mine.
‘I really like your chain,’ she says. ‘What’s it supposed to be?’
‘It’s Ilan’s, from his grandmother. It’s supposed to be the hand of God. To protect him.’
‘Can I wear it for a while? I’d like the protection.’ She lifts it over my head; it is off in a moment; and she places it around her own neck.