Thin Skin

by Emma Forrest

  Weaving back from the bathroom, my cheeks flushed pink with determination, I sat beside him at the table. By now, we were the only ones at the cafeteria. Sean, sensing that keeping us apart for so long had maybe not been so smart after all, had strategically closed it off and shut the doors, so that we could get to know each other. I had no idea if he could act, but Aslan’s energy was so intense; it prickled and boiled, ruffling my hair and confidence. I waited and waited for him to acknowledge me, sitting so close to him that, if I hadn’t just lost five pounds, our thighs would be touching. But he stared stoically ahead.

  ‘Do you hate me?’

  He shook his head and smiled.

  ‘Do you like me?’

  He nodded.

  Then we both stared straight ahead. Finally, I turned to him and heard myself ask, ‘Please, will you touch my hand.’ He turned to face me for the first time, as if I had said something so shocking he had to make sure I was for real. Very slowly, as if licking a potentially dangerous berry, he traced a finger across my palm. Satisfied that it was not going to kill him, he placed his hand full on mine; no fingers intertwined, it just hovered, like a Japanese train, never touching the tracks, riding on electrical energy.

  His hand gave off such heat, my knees started to shake. His hand didn’t move and he resumed his cobweb trance. The heat traveled up my arm, down my stomach and, as the sound of Sean yelling at a prop boy wafted into the hall, I felt myself come. I didn’t know if Aslan could tell what had happened. After it was done he stood up and walked away. I waited for him. I waited and ten minutes later I went to see what had happened. Aslan had left the building and would not return to set until they dragged him out of the guitar store from whence they had first plucked him.

  ‘Ruby,’ pleaded Sean, as we waited for him to return so that we could shoot our first scene together, ‘try and be nice. You may even learn something from him. You might have spent time on the West Coast, but Aslan has spent time on a different plane.’

  By lunchtime I was kissing him. Again and again, with a gun in my hand. They had to keep cutting and starting again because Aslan couldn’t be persuaded to kiss with his mouth open. Eventually they decided to position my head so that the audience couldn’t see what a cold kisser Aslan was, our kiss implied but never seen, as though we were Hays Code lovers.

  That bad kiss sealed it for me: I was besotted with him and I hadn’t even got through the first day yet. I was consumed with the need to know how he really kissed, so certain was I that he was faking. When I put this to Sean he didn’t even bother pulling his coffee cup from his lips.

  ‘Well of course he’s faking. This isn’t real.’

  And yet with each day that passed – admittedly our romance was shot out of sequence – I got further and further away from ever getting to kiss him ‘for real’. He would arrive on set, do his scenes, and then leave without saying goodbye. If he had not said goodbye only to me, I would have taken it as a sign. But he didn’t say goodbye to anyone, so I couldn’t pretend to feel singled out.

  We didn’t have any scenes together for a couple of days and I felt disconsolate. I had gotten used to his silences – they were never sullen – and his constant smile. Finally I called him late one night. ‘Hey, you,’ he said as if it was the third time we had spoken that day. He was easy-going and giggly, unconnected to the space elf that I had starred with over the last few weeks.

  ‘Uh, do you want to come over and listen to music?’

  ‘Yes,’ he pondered briefly, ‘I do.’

  The doorbell rang a few minutes later, before I had the chance to put on mascara. I rationalized that it couldn’t be him, Aslan lived way downtown. It must be a messenger from Sean, new pages he wanted me to look at. I buzzed the door and there he was, no-color hair over no-color eyes in less defined a fashion than ever before.

  He shrugged off his coat and flopped onto the bed like a man who had just come back from the steelworks. In fact, he had spent the day laying down tracks in the studio. He boasted that he had written two of them all by himself. I asked him what the first song was called. Aslan blinked his eyes. He clearly had not thought about this yet. ‘“Pendulum”.’ And the second song? ‘“Pensioner”,’ he replied proudly, the corners of his mouth curling up.

  His mouth was always curling, whether it was up or down, like a novelty fish you put in your palm, a sliver of red fortune. Except they don’t tell your future. They tell your mood, for people who aren’t sure what they’re feeling. The red fish says ‘Passionate’, ‘Sad’, ‘Angry’, with the tiniest flick of its tail or curl on its side. Either this means that it takes very little effort to be passionate, sad or angry. Or that it’s easy to slip into the place where you wouldn’t know what you were feeling if it weren’t for a novelty fish. That’s why you get them in crackers. It’s like a safety kit: no one ever knows what they’re feeling at holidays. All they really feel is the turkey inside them, pressing hard against their gullet like a lie.

  Aslan’s mouth curled up and stayed there. He was in such a good mood, so pleased with himself, so pleased with me. I tried to think of something to say to this boy who, for all he had revealed, might as well be mentally subnormal, and I couldn’t think of anything. I could feel everything, but I couldn’t speak it. The everything lodged itself in my throat like a student sit-in, stubborn and pointless. While he went to the bathroom, I flicked through my diary to remind myself I knew how to use words. I fell upon a page in bold lettering, and when he came back, I said it out loud: ‘You are my join-the-dots boy.’

  I knew what I meant. That I had from him but the slimmest of clues with which to form a man. That he was my creation. That he was incomplete without me to fill him in. That having taken the time and effort to invent him, join-the-dots boy had me so hard, it didn’t matter that he was constructed from paper and pencil rather than flesh and blood.

  I didn’t tell him how many join-the-dots men there had been over the years. I didn’t have to tell him that he had given me even less to go on than ever before. He lay on the bed and I sat in the chair by my desk. Then he sat in the rocking chair and I lay on the bed. I stretched my arms above my head, to expose white belly, flat and unscarred, a flash of clean light in a body imperfect.

  He lay next to me, baby-blue hooded sweatshirt worn inside out. Then I got up and cracked open a beer. It should have been red wine, but I just wanted to pace and pretend, unscrew things, because he was making me so hot. I was starting to melt and by the time he kissed me, I was out of my body. I looked down on us as he put his hand in my hair (dot), stroked my back (dot), took my shirt off (dot), unhooked my bra (dot), took his sweatshirt off (dot). Join the dots, join the dots. Play by yourself like a good girl.

  I was shocked at his finely tuned body – even better than Sebastian’s. It meant something. A boy like Aslan didn’t need a body like that. It means something, broad shoulders and stomach muscles on a boy with unwashed hair. The muscles seemed like something he was looking after as a favor to a friend. They meant, I said out loud, that once he had been with a girl who needed him so much he had had to build a body so that she would have something to cling to. ‘No, I built a wall. I was trying to keep her out.’

  ‘Did it work?’

  ‘I moved to New York, didn’t I?’

  ‘And she’s still in Colorado?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  He cared, which is why he had not tried to find out. He cared about a girl and I scuttled back into my body like a child chastised. Suddenly I could feel his tongue, hot and wet, his Chiclet teeth, cold as tombstones. He put his fingers inside me. That was the end. He let me moan, once, twice, catch my breath as I rode his fingers. And then he stopped, turned away, put his shirt back on. I tried to kiss him, embarrassed bemused kiss. He patted my face, looking away. Then he smiled slash passion fish smile, picked up my bra from the floor and draped it over my arms. Eyes burning with shame, I scooped my breasts into the cups and he carefully hooked the back, grinning at his own
deftness. Then he was asleep beside me and I was awake, staring out the window, New York Street Scene No. 2.

  What did I do wrong? What did I do wrong, dog dragging pajama’d owner to mail box? What did I do wrong, trash overflowing? What did I do wrong, screenless television dumped on sidewalk? What did I do wrong, van delivering tomorrow’s newspapers? Dog turns his head to answer. Tomorrow’s newspaper bears the same news:

  ‘He knows you’re crazy. He knows you’re sick. He felt it inside you. It’s written in Braille, raised white flesh on the inside of your vagina. Everything you’ve done wrong, everyone you’ve upset, your mother, Liev, Sebastian Chase. That’s why he ran away. Because you feel disgusting. Because he couldn’t pretend you are just a beautiful girl. He doesn’t care. The prairie animals warned him about a girl like you. They said there would be signs. He liked your eyes, your mouth, so he wanted to touch you, to smell you and lick your prettiness. But as soon as he got inside he knew you were the one they had warned him about. And he will never, ever touch you again.’

  And he never did touch me again or allow me to touch him. He woke up to find me still gazing out the window. Usually I would pretend to be asleep. This time I did not, eyes Winona wide, gamine gameplan: help me, I am small with big eyes, baby small, baby cute. Babies are designed not to have their heads bashed in and people who do that go to jail forever. He knew my eyes were open, but he pretended I was asleep instead, and crept around the apartment gathering his belongings. I waited for him to slip me a morning kiss hello. But he scooped the kisses from the floor with his clothes and stuffed them in the pocket of his jeans to save for a girl who wasn’t crazy.

  I scurried to the door as I heard it open, in pink bra and knickers. I tried to kiss him but he turned his head. His earphones were already round his neck and his hand was in his pocket with the Walkman. ‘Goodbye,’ said Aslan, smiling, and hit play.

  I peered out the window, waiting, at least, to watch him disappear up Bleecker Street. But he never disappeared because he never reappeared, although I heard the front door slam. Frustrated at not even being able to admire him as he walked away, I went back to bed, crossing and uncrossing my legs, trying to get comfortable, pulling the whole duvet over my head, then pulling it back and kicking my legs around it. My eyelashes scratched me. My knees touching made me feel sicker than ever. I had a toothache. But there was something else. Something softer but more troublesome than the hair falling on my forehead. It was his fingerprints, deep inside me. I kicked and squirmed some more. But they would not fade.

  I saw him every day for the next week. But he never saw me again. He said hello, eyes on cobweb, at floor, on hands clenched tight at his sides. He wasn’t unpleasant. But he was afraid, protective. He was a good person and he struggled valiantly not to be one of those boys who screws a girl and then ignores her. He didn’t ignore the girl because he didn’t screw the girl because he didn’t try. He would be thrown out of LA forever and ever. At the end of the week he was done on the film, but I had to stay an extra three days. For some reason I expected him to ring at the end of them and ask how it had gone or, at the very least, turn up at our small and poorly catered wrap party. But he didn’t.

  ‘You’ll see him soon enough,’ soothed Sean when I confided how much I liked him. ‘After all, you’ll be doing all the film festivals together.’

  ‘Fat chance,’ I thought, convinced, with each day that had passed, post-kiss, that CAA had been right to ignore Mean People Suck.

  ‘Why don’t you just call him?’ asked Sean, and thus encouraged, I made him stand beside me when I finally did.

  ‘Hey Aslan. It’s Ruby. What’s up?’ Breezy, light, happy fun girl, kiss me, no darkness in me.

  ‘I’m watching the television.’

  ‘Oh. What’s on?’ GIGGLE. NO DARKNESS IN ME. Fucking help me out here.

  ‘Nothing. I’m just watching the television.’ Silence.

  ‘Do you want some company? Can I come over and watch the television with you?’

  ‘Um … no.’

  He didn’t answer quick enough for me to think there was a girl there. His response wasn’t the quick-draw response that precurses a lie. He answered slow because he was prepared to tell the truth.

  ‘So, Aslan,’ laugh small, darkness in me big, seeping from my cunt into the receiver, down the telephone line, ‘do you just want to be left alone?’

  ‘Yes,’ his words curled up at either end, ‘I do.’

  I left Sean standing there, and went home, where I crawled into bed, crushed. Appalled at his honesty. When I woke up at six thirty a.m., drowning in the waves of shame washing across the sheets, I determined that I would not be going back to sleep and headed out for a bagel. Still in my pajamas, I pulled a fleecy coat across my shoulders and stumbled up Bleecker to the 24-hour diner. The diner was packed with flush-faced gay boys winding down after a night’s clubbing. I took a corner booth across from two men with matching peroxide crops and black lycra T-shirts. They glanced at me, disheveled and spilling jelly on my wrist, and shot each other excited ‘minor celebrity gossip’ looks.

  When I got home an hour later, to my utter disbelief, the empty vessel had left a message on my answer-phone.

  ‘Hey, Ruby. It’s Aslan. Calling you. On the telephone. Alexander Graham Bell. Belle and Sebastian. Sebastian was your lover, right? I’m sure he loved you very much. Anyway, when you get this message … you should ring me back. OK? OK. Peace.’

  And there was peace.

  the new world order

  I shrugged off my coat, ran myself a bath. I shampooed my hair and shaved my legs, although I had shaved them the preceding evening, just before I rang him, sure he would come over and we would make love. This time I was certain. He rang me. Very early in the morning. When men don’t ring you it’s because they don’t want to. When they ring you it’s because they want you. And when they ring very late or very early it’s because they are tortured by erotic thoughts of you and simply cannot wait for a more suitable hour to call.

  I pulled on jeans and a sweater, mascara and mouth-stain morning make-up, and carried my cellphone in my purse. ‘Hi. I’ve been out jogging. I just checked my messages. Should I come by? I’m right near your house. You live on Avenue A, don’t you?’

  ‘You’ve jogged all this way?’

  ‘Yeah, I jog every morning.’

  ‘Good.’

  I pinched my cheeks flushed and shooed the cab away. Aslan answered the door with his headphones round his neck, the wire coiling across his baby-blue sweatshirt like a licorice chew in fondant. His sleeves were hanging past his hands. He yanked them up to his bony elbows, the only element of skinny indie rock boy on his finely cut body.

  ‘Can I have some water?’

  I leant to use the tap.

  ‘Don’t do that. It’s bad. It’s stolen water and then they pump it back to us all fucked up, all full of chemicals and bad vibes.’

  He reached into the small fridge and retrieved an enormous container of mineral water. I pulled the hood of his blue sweatshirt flirtatiously over his brow and he pulled away from me, flirtatiously, I felt. I felt the flirtation rising real in his jeans and he felt his way out of the kitchen and onto his bed. I followed, placing myself, literally, at his feet.

  ‘Ruby, I rang you on the phone, early this morning, because … early this morning I was thinking about something I needed to make clear. I just wanted to explain something. So now you’re here, in my house and now I can … in my house.’

  ‘OK.’ He let me kiss him.

  ‘OK, Ruby. I need to explain to you that we can’t be together and why it is, in fact, that I can have no sexual or romantic relations with you at all.’

  ‘OK,’ I nodded, leaning in to kiss him and again he let me.

  ‘Ruby, I’m not looking for a lover right now.’

  ‘OK,’ I nodded, touching my mouth to his in agreement.

  ‘Ruby. At the end of any relationship there is a check to pay. And with you it woul
d be a very big check. A check that I cannot afford.’

  I took my tongue out of his mouth and murmured, ‘I’ll pay it, silly billy. I’ve got money.’

  ‘I don’t like money …

  ‘So let me handle it.’

  ‘Oh God, don’t talk about handling money. Handling money, the physical day-to-day process of touching dollar bills with the flesh on our fingers, is what’s making us ill.’

  I put my tongue back in my own mouth and blinked my eyes in bemusement.

  ‘Why do you think Donald Trump is so ugly? Or Rupert Murdoch? Have you ever stopped to wonder why, why do millionaires, billionaires, tycoons and thieves look the way they do? Did Donald Trump always look like that? Did Mike Bloomberg always look like that? No, they were ordinary little boys and ordinary men, and then they happened to rub their bodies in bills and it infected their blood. They’re only half alive. You’re still beautiful, Ruby, but you’re only half alive.’

  ‘Jesus Christ! I’m not that rich!’ and I pulled as far away from him as the room would allow because, although he had said I was beautiful, he had also used the word ‘ugly’ in a nearby sentence.

  ‘You were in that movie last summer, right? You’ll be in another movie this summer. You’re rich enough.’

  ‘So you’re not going to get involved with me because I make too much money?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Fine,’ I spat and stormed out in a huff which is, at least, cheaper than a taxi. I huffed all the way back to my apartment, where I stopped huffing and cried instead. ‘I want Sebastian, I want Sebastian to be here,’ I wailed to myself.

  Aslan had made a moral choice and it was final. It didn’t matter what I wore or if I washed my hair and shaved my legs in voodoo anticipation of ensnaring him. He would not bite. The only route left to me was that of understanding and modesty. I practiced my expressions long and hard in my bathroom mirror.