“No, sorry,” I say to the woman huddling by a planter box filled with purple and white icicle pansies. I step past her, but I look at her. I don’t avert my eyes because I read somewhere that the worst thing for homeless people (aside from being homeless) is that they begin to feel invisible. So I look and try to smile.
“Have a nice day, cunt,” she says.
“Thanks, you too,” I say out of reflex, and keep walking.
Holy shit.
It’s not funny, but I want to laugh.
I could laugh and cry too.
Jeez, I need to go home and stay there.
I need to do something.
I duck into a store and buy every newspaper they have—one of each. I add four candy bars, an art magazine and put it all on debit. I take out some cash and plan to give it to the hostile woman outside, but when I get back out on the street she’s gone.
I look at my watch.
I’ve been out for twenty minutes.
***
Three weeks.
You’ve memorized his face and body, learned his gestures, looked at his work. You’ve brought your own paints and canvas and work as he works, but he makes no comment, shares no wisdom. You silently will him to give you more.
He doesn’t.
It might take something different.
One morning you stare at his back as he makes coffee. His shoulders are wide, almost like he’s wearing football pads, and he holds the right one higher than the left. He has nice proportions, a good body, if a little skinny in places and a little soft in others.
“Caleb?”
“Yo,” he says without turning around.
“You have a girlfriend?”
Now he turns. His eyes meet yours for a moment before he looks away.
“No,” he says.
“Boyfriend?”
At this he gives a short, sharp laugh. “No.”
You lean forward with your elbow on the counter and your chin in your hand. His back is to you again. You watch his body for clues. He takes an apple from a bowl and begins to slice it.
“You know, I’m legal,” you say as the knife slides toward the core of the apple and then straight through without pausing.
He turns the apple so it rests on its flat, cut side and gets ready to slice again.
“Legal for what?”
“You know.”
He puts the knife down and you see the muscles of his shoulders tensing.
“No, I don’t know.”
“Figure it out,” you say.
You slide off your stool and walk up beside him. You pour yourself a mug of the fresh coffee, then reach out and take some of the apple from the cutting board.
“Thanks,” you say, and turn and walk down the hall to the studio. Your can barely breathe and you feel like you’re going to pee your pants, but you take a careful bite of your apple, chew, swallow, put your coffee down and then begin to work.
All morning, you can’t look at him. You feel him trying not to look at you. You paint nothing but lines—squiggly, curly, tangling lines.
As you’re leaving for the day he says, “I won’t be here tomorrow.”
“Why not?”
“Uh, I have a...I have something...I won’t be here,” he says.
You feel your cheeks burning and you look down at your hands so you don’t have to meet his eyes.
“Okay,” you say.
You fucked up, you really fucked up. He got your message and he doesn’t want you and now it’s awkward.
And what about the day after tomorrow? Next week? Better not to ask.
You give him what you hope is a normal smile. You wave, turn, and walk toward the stairs. His door should be shutting behind you, but you haven’t heard it. You look over your shoulder. He’s still there, watching you.
“What?” you say.
He shakes his head. “You’d better go.”
***
Bernadette’s at camp and you have no one to tell, no one to help you interpret Caleb’s words or the look in his eyes when he told you to go. All the way back to your dad’s you play the scene over in your mind. What next?
Next turns out to be Dad on the sidewalk in front of his building with all of your collective belongings.
“Dad?” you call out, and run towards him. “What happened?”
He looks up at you from his perch on the edge of an old, hardcover black suitcase.
“Moving,” he says.
“Hunh?”
“S’all right, we’re moving.”
“What happened?”
He looks away and hangs his head.
“S’not my fault. Th’fucker.”
“What fucker?” you ask.
“THE FUCKER WHO EVICTED US!” he jerks up onto his feet and shouts, suddenly crystal clear in his diction. “THAT FUCKING FUCKER, CHUCK!”
***
Dad’s latest girlfriend invites you to crash at her place with Dad.
She believes the story about Chuck cashing his rent checks and then denying he paid.
The women Dad dates are all idiots, but you thank her nonetheless. She is, after all, saving your father from homelessness and offering to do the same for you.
But you can’t quite see yourself crashing on a futon for the rest of the summer.
“I think I’ll stay with Bernadette for a few days,” you say.
Dad doesn’t know she’s at camp. He looks relieved and watches you pack a small knapsack.
The rest of Bernadette’s family is in Prague and house is locked and the alarm system is armed. You stash your stuff under the wicker furniture on the back porch, get on the bus, and head back downtown.
On the dark street below Caleb’s front window, you stand for a long time before getting the courage to go up and knock on his door.
He might find you intriguing and perhaps even attractive, but he’s not your lover and not your friend and may not even like you. Most likely he thinks you’re a precocious teenager with a bit of talent and nothing to do all summer. At best, you’re a charity case.
But pain drives you and need drives you and you have no place to stay tonight.
So you knock.
He takes a long time to get to the door.
While you wait, you drag your thoughts away from your father, sitting pathetic and drunk on the sidewalk in the middle of the afternoon. You try not to think of Mom’s house, cold and unwelcoming, and Mom, apparently unconcerned since she shoved you onto the front doorstep weeks ago. Certain memories, certain thoughts, are holes...holes ripped in you, through which precious things escape and leave you wanting, needing, gaping open. Laughter and belonging and comfort gush out, leaving their tracks but not their substance. And you are left empty, a skeleton, a shell with wind rushing through you and a sensation of sinking, barely existing...a few bones, no blood.
And then he opens the door.
“Help,” you want to say. “Help, I can’t feel my body.” But you just look at him.
He looks back at you, shoves his hands into his pockets.
“I don’t work at night,” he says.
“I know.”
“No lessons either,” he says.
“You sure?”
He turns and walks inside, leaving the doorway clear for you to enter. You come in and shut the door, then follow him to the kitchen.
He gets himself a drink but doesn’t offer you one. It doesn’t stop you from getting a glass from the cupboard and pouring one for yourself. He leans against the counter on one hip and watches you as you take a sip.
When he looks at you, your body is there again. It’s good. It would be even better if he touched you.
“Have sex with me?” you ask.
“I’m thirty-four.”
“Oh, so you can’t do it?”
He puts his glass down on the counter and you hear the clink of glass against ceramic. You put your glass down too. In two steps he’s in front of you with his hands on your hips and pulling your pelvis toward his.
“I’m not your boyfriend.” His breath is hot on your face.
“I know.”
“And I don’t love you,” he adds. His dick, through his jeans, is hard up against your stomach.
“You don’t have to.”
You put your hand on him and squeeze.
He shuts his eyes and says, “Damn.”
He pushes you up against the kitchen counter and peels off your shirt and then your bra. He rakes his hands up and down your body, brings his teeth to your shoulder, and rubs the sharp stubble of his chin on your breasts.
You unzip his jeans and he pushes you to your knees in front of him. You like the pain in your kneecaps, the ache in your jaw—they mean you are alive.
Soon the cold of the kitchen floor is on your back. Caleb pulls your shorts off, looks at your naked body, then steps back and walks to the bathroom. Something of you slides away.
But he comes back, and with a condom. He puts it on and you pull him in, pull him deep, and wrap your arms and legs around him, so he won’t be able to leave you again.
You move together, and you keep your eyes locked on his and your attention on the feel of his hands on your hips and the friction between your legs.
With every in and out, the cold, the sadness, and the ripping, aching, screaming fears that live with you, ride on your shoulders. But you drive them back. You drive them back and Caleb drives them back.
You rage together and defy yourself to feel anything, to think of anything, besides this.
***
“Where are your parents?” Caleb asks later. “I mean, will anyone be looking for you?”
“No one’s looking for me.”
“Why not?”
You run your hand up the inside of his leg. “Are you almost finished with that drink?” you ask. “I’d like to see your bed.”
***
You lay sleepless and listen to the sounds of the city. You have been on Caleb’s bed, watching him, wanting to wake him and make him fuck you again, but he already complained after the second time that he was an old man, not a sixteen-year-old.
It’s hard not to think about how alone you are.
You slip out of bed, grab a T-shirt and tiptoe to the kitchen.
By the light coming from the window, you look into cupboards until you find a glass and something to drink. You pour an ounce of something, sip, and enjoy the burn as it slips down your esophagus.
You see the phone and find yourself staring at it. After another shot of the burning liquid, you pick up the receiver and dial. Mom picks up after six rings.
“All right, asshole, now you’re starting to piss me off,” she says.
You were going to hang up after you heard her voice, but now you don’t.
“It’s four o’clock in the goddamned morning, what the hell do you want?” she says.
You grip the phone, lick your lips.
“What, are you going to start breathing heavy now?” she says.
She’s scared and now you are too.
“Mom? It’s okay,” you whisper. “It’s okay, it’s just me.”
“Mara?”
“I dialed your number by accident. Sorry I scared you. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, some asshole’s been crank calling, that’s all. Who were you calling in the middle of the night?”
“No one. Bernadette.”
“Everything okay?”
“Fine. Perfect.”
“You’re at your father’s?”
You look down at your naked legs. “Sure, of course.”
And then there is The Long Pause. The long, awkward pause in which the unsaid everything rears up and then is shoved aside, ignored.
“Your room is a mess,” Mom says after the pause.
“Really?”
“Next time you’re here we should do a big cleaning.”
“Sure.”
“And you’re probably due for some new clothes. We’ll go shopping.”
So it’s safe. Safe for now, at least. Mended, supposedly mended, by omission, by a careful gliding over.
You shiver with need yet hold onto fury and the desire to punish her by staying away, now that she wants you back. You’ll go, but not tonight. Because now you have something of your own to keep you alive and wanting.
Two somethings, actually—art and Caleb.
***
It’s odd to wake up in bed with a man, and the morning light makes the lines on Caleb’s face seem jagged and deep. He suddenly looks pale, skinny, and old.
And the sheets aren’t clean.
A feeling of nausea, a pit of self-disgust, forms deep in your belly and it gets hard to breathe. You ache to be in your bedroom at Mom’s, under your own clean sheets, blankets and duvet—safe from the things you are discovering about yourself and the world.
And you can go back. After your conversation with Mom, you know you can go back.
You sit up, trying not to move the covers.
You will go. Right now.
You will go to her and she’ll smile her soft smile and hug you, tell you how she’s missed you and how she wishes you’d never fought. She will protect you because she is your mother and she loves you and surely she will see that you need her and she will fix everything.
You will wear your flannel jammies and sleep in your own bed and you will not invite strange, tortured artists into that bed even if you are tempted to, because Mom would kill you if you did. And therefore you will never wake up feeling this way again.
You just have to get out of this bed.
And find your clothes.
You edge toward the side of the bed, keeping your eyes away from Caleb.
As your foot touches the floor, a warm fingertip touches your back, then slides down your spine. You freeze.
“Where’re you going?” Caleb asks, his voice thick and low with sleep.
The mattress shifts and his arms come around you. He draws your body back to his.
“I...”
He moves you back down, so your head is on the pillow again, and pulls his body onto yours. He is hard. Pushing. Grabbing at you.
“Oh,” you say.
You want to push him away, roll out from under him, but you don’t—you asked for this, you brought it on. You lie still at first then you begin to move your hips with his. You let his legs slide between yours.
And then he stops. He rolls to the side and braces himself on one elbow and looks at you.
“Ah,” he says finally.
“What?”
“Not such a big girl today.”
You look away.
“Let’s try something else,” he says.
You don’t want to try anything. You want to go home, you want your mother, you hate this man, you hate yourself for being with him.
You say, “Okay.”
He puts his hand on your stomach. You shiver. He moves it to your hipbone and rests it there. He watches you and you look back at him. Your skin, under his palm, begins to heat up.
You close your eyes.
He moves his hand over your torso, palm down, staying in place until your skin warms and then moving again.
You might not hate this. In fact you might...
He straddles you, placing the weight of his hips on yours. His fingertips stroke your neck, the hollow of your throat, the path between your breasts. He watches, listens to your breath, sees you flinch and shiver and then relax.
You find yourself moaning. No one has touched you like this, looked at you like this. Heat moves deeper, from your skin down into your belly and thighs.
He turns you onto your stomach.
Lips to the back of your neck, the crook of your elbow, the inside of your wrist. He touches your palms, your fingers, nibbles on the pad of your thumb. He lies on your back, slides his hands under you and rubs your breasts.
Oh. O
h wow, you can hardly breathe.
And now you know what it is to really want...
You move against him, you have to have him.
He holds you still and says, “Not yet.”
It gets worse when he squeezes your nipples and growls in your ear.
“You didn’t want me last night,” he whispers.
“Yes, I did.”
“Not really,” he says, then trails his tongue down your spine and sucks on the skin at the small of your back. “Admit it.”
“I didn’t know,” you gasp, looking down at the pillow. “I...thought I did.”
“You didn’t want me a few minutes ago either, but you were willing to do it.”
“Yes, but now I...”
“I want you to want me,” he says, and slides his fingers between your legs.
Holy-mother-of-everything, you’re going to fucking die if he doesn’t...
You want to roll over to your back, make him finally do it, but he holds you in place with his body while his fingers torture you.
Nothing will ever fill you up, nothing will ever, ever feel this good and this bad at the same time.
“Do you want me now?” he asks.
He pushes into you with, it feels like, his whole hand.
“Yes!” You shove back against him.
“Good,” he says, and then all the warmth of him is gone.
And you are lying, face down, panting, squirming and waiting.
You hear him behind you, his breathing coming in short, sharp gasps, and then the floor creaks under his feet.
“Time to paint,” he says.
You roll over and stare at him.
He can’t intend to leave you like this.
He can’t expect you to work like this.
He grins and walks out of the bedroom.
The bathroom door closes and locks.
The bastard.
Chapter 22
I continue with my project—every day after painting I venture outside and try to act and feel like a normal person.
I progress to buying newspapers and reading them in coffee shops.
Falling Under Page 14