The Sleep-Over Artist

by Thomas Beller

  The one person who had agreed to go on camera was Ms. Sanchez, the biology teacher, who had testified on his behalf at the trial, making an incredibly serious and even passionate argument that he was, basically, a good kid and deserved a second chance, even if he had already had quite a few second chances. Ms. Sanchez was a Spanish woman with large, heaving, and rather firm breasts and deep, melancholy eyes, the former of which caused Alex to frequently excuse himself in the middle of class to alleviate the monstrous sex fantasy that proceeded unabated from the moment he laid eyes on her at the start of every class, and the latter causing him a weird sensation of shame and pleasure when he returned to his seat, human again, and she cast him a peculiar glance over the rim of her glasses, which always slid down to the end of her nose when she taught, that suggested she knew exactly what he had just done, and didn’t mind.

  Ms. Sanchez had given him a very undeserved good grade in vertebrate anatomy the previous year, mostly because he had done so well on the year-end cat-brain dissection project. He had done so well because one day he arrived in class early, went up to one of the stinking buckets of formaldehyde in which the cats were stored, removed a random cat, and traded it for the botched Frankenstein experiment of a cat that was in his bucket. He got lucky; he got a perfectly dissected cat brain.

  Ms. Sanchez’s emotion on his behalf at the trial was replicated in an unexpected way when he interviewed her for the documentary. She had been its one heartwarming feature. On camera she explained that a few years prior to when he knew her she had lost a son. He had died when he crashed a motorcycle he had borrowed from a friend. Her melancholy eyes filled up as she told the story. It made him feel ashamed to be devoting all this attention to such a small gripe, such a petty complaint about what, in the big scheme of things, was a very small bump in life’s road, and yet she gave the film some real authority. She was still upset about “what they did to you,” as she had put it.

  “They” became his prey. Particularly Mr. McPherson, dean of the upper school, who had been angling for principal and seemed to think that in squashing the Student Herald insurrection he was making a name for himself as a law-and-order sort of dean. Alex became a dogged reporter; at one point McPherson was seen pathetically jogging down a leafy suburban block only to have Alex jump out of the bushes in jacket and tie, microphone in hand, and start jogging along with him, asking pointed questions about the specifics of the trial. Mr. McPherson’s response, amazingly, was to break into a sprint. He outran Alex and his camera crew. It proved to be the weirdest and funniest footage of the documentary, McPherson’s white-soled sneakers flashing smaller and smaller as he receded in the distance.

  The whole experience of making the movie had been extremely painful and unfunny on some level, and the project was driven by a sort of zealous and, some of his friends and professors pointed out, unhealthy desire for revenge. Alex’s response was that he was not vengeful. But he felt there was a lot to be avenged.

  There had been, back in eleventh grade, a trial. He and his cohorts—Phil Singer, Arnold Gerstein, and Jack Eisner—had to sit alongside their parents on several occasions after school and face the inquisition. It was mass humiliation. In the end, Gerstein, Singer, and Eisner were subtly abused by not getting into the college of their choice the following year. But Alex, because of his long track record as a disruptive force and an academic underachiever, was booted outright. For years afterwards he found himself imagining clever ripostes and new philosophical defenses he could have delivered to the committee. In real life he had begun with a spirited defense and ended with a mumbled contrition and an appeal for amnesty. Then he slunk out of the school for the last time with his furious, white-lipped mother, who, to his delight and grief, reserved her anger about the whole situation almost entirely for the bastards who ran Wave Hill, with only a little left over for him.

  Petty Cash, humbly screened along with the other graduate projects, had been seen by a journalist who was writing an article on the state of New York’s private schools. It was one of those part-news, part-lifestyle articles that manage to make a certain schadenfreude-sensitive segment of the population react as though the dentist had accidentally drilled through a nonanesthetized tooth. The journalist featured the documentary prominently as an example of the malaise that existed beneath the glossy surface of private school life. There was a photo of Alex. The whole article had a seismic importance for the exact amount of time it was on the newsstands, after which it completely vanished. But an afterglow had lingered around Alex for a few more weeks, at the tail end of which he met Sally.

  “You’re a public figure,” she had remarked to him when they first met, a twinkle in her eye, as though she might be kidding, or she might not.

  It occurred to him that Sally was probably McPherson and Laverman’s idea of a dream student. She was everything they wanted their lives to be like. She was the fantasy to which he was ghastly reality, the counterpoint.

  So his presence on her couch had an almost political or anthropological aspect to it; he wanted to get inside this strange creature and understand the mechanics of her thought, of her existence, to see how much irony and facetiousness she attached to the act of appearing in majestically expensive jewels at benefits for the needy (not much, he thought). Less philosophically, he just wanted to get inside her. He wanted to perturb that placid elegant surface and watch her turn into an animal. He wasn’t a hunter, literally or in that figurative way that people sometimes use for men chasing women, but there was an element of blood sport to this visit.

  As he sat on her couch and saw the ease with which she threw her bare feet up on his lap, however, it occurred to him that if there was a hunter in the room, it was probably the person not wearing shoes.

  NOW HE RECALLED that line about his being a public figure—its inscrutable mirth—as he sat on her couch. At the moment, however, there was no public. There was a room with green wallpaper and small framed lithographs of horses and other vestiges of a certain preppy kind of wealth; there was a white couch with a rather stunning woman with shiny brown hair and green eyes on it; and there were Sally Brown’s two bare feet. She was speaking, and his right hand rested calmly on her left ankle as though it were the most natural thing in the world.

  He had never before touched her ankle, or even seen it, as this was only their second meeting. The first one had been two nights earlier at a party that was filled with people whose presence reminded him of freshly minted coins. He had always felt disdain for these shiny people, and was amazed and appalled at how eager he was, once in their presence, to be mistaken for one. He had met Sally just moments after entering into a conversation with a tall blond model he had just been introduced to and in whose presence he had developed, for the first time in his entire life, an utterly debilitating stutter. His conversation with the model—or rather his brief session of stammering at her before she smiled and walked away—had gained Sally’s attention and, he thought, respect. In the same way that a sleazy real estate developer secures a loan from one bank on the strength of a loan he has secured from another, he had somehow secured the interest of Sally Brown.

  He had heard of her. She possessed a certain amount of gossip-column notoriety and a cold, slightly cruel beauty which looked good in pictures, and better in person. She was rich. She wrote about clothes. Her eyes had the piercing judgmental quality of someone who makes important decisions—like what dress to buy—frequently. They had chatted in a coy insubstantial way that Alex enjoyed a great deal. A man ran up to them, a drink in one hand and a small Instamatic in the other. “Sally!” he called out familiarly, and snapped a picture. She turned ever so slightly towards the man and smiled just as the flash went off. Alex blinked.

  Eventually they had held hands, and she had almost let him kiss her on the lips as he put her into a taxi, turning her head at the last second.

  “Why don’t you call me and we can have tea,” she said instead.

  Which was how he had ended up on h
er couch, without the aid of alcohol, and only his rational faculties to fall back on. He weighed the situation.

  On the one hand, Sally’s position at the far end of the couch, her beauty, the florid swags of cloth that hung down from the ceiling, the address (Park Avenue), the tray of tea she had brought out for them to sip (a drink would have held more promise), and the small amount of time she had allotted this meeting (six to seven) all suggested to Alex that this was a mistake in the cosmic order of things, that he didn’t belong here, and that Sally would soon end the meeting as quickly and circumspectly as possible.

  On the other hand, there were her feet—two innocent and unassuming repudiations of all the above objections. They were pretty feet, but not perfect. The arch was nice, the bones delicate, but the toes were slightly bulbous at the ends and were spaced a little strangely. They were, to their credit, devoid of all the abused, exhausted, footsy qualities that feet often have. Both of them, like the rest of Sally, seemed to have recently emerged from a fragrant hot bath and been swaddled in something spectacularly smooth and luxurious.

  “Alex, are you listening to me?” she said. “You’ve gone all glassy-eyed on me.” She took her feet down from his lap.

  “I was listening to you,” he said. “I was also trying to remember something. I can do several things at once.”

  “What were you trying to remember?”

  He couldn’t remember. “This room is like one big four-poster bed,” he said.

  “Do you want a drink instead of tea?” she said. “I have whiskey.”

  “No. This tea is very nice.” He reached forward and picked up the cup and saucer. It had little flowers printed on it. He felt like a gorilla who has had an object of sophistication tossed into his cage, and whose reaction was being carefully monitored by scientists in white coats with clipboards. He took a sip, and his hand shook slightly as he brought the teacup back to the saucer; the pieces of porcelain quivered against each other before settling, producing a faint ringing sound.

  “Where do you live again?” she said.

  “On the West Side. Uptown a bit from here,” he added vaguely.

  “I was just on the West Side today! They finally opened up the Seventy-ninth Street transverse they’ve been working on for so long and so I thought I would take a look. I went all the way to Zabar’s!” She made it sound as if she had been on a safari.

  “Go on with what you were saying before,” he said.

  “You don’t even know what I was saying before,” she said.

  “You were talking about how much you hate that woman,” he guessed.

  “Right. Well, anyway, I just think it’s absurd that she’s been made a contributing editor at My Cell,” said Sally, mentioning the name of a hip new fashion magazine. “I mean, she doesn’t even write anything. You know, I’m a contributing editor at My Cell. Did I mention that?”

  “Several times.”

  “Don’t be snide.” She put her feet back on his knee, though this time she didn’t cross them at the ankles and they lay there like two slats, waiting to be touched.

  He was amazed at his ability to be slightly rude to her, and knew he must somehow keep it up at all costs.

  She started in on how unpleasant this other woman, the socialite, was, how she only threw parties and meanwhile here was Sally slaving away in front of the word processor. Alex now had a hand on each ankle. He squeezed gently and methodically, left right left right, and watched the effect of each squeeze manifest itself in the slight movement of her toes. If he squeezed hard they splayed a little. Eventually he squeezed too hard and Sally said, “Stop it,” and took her feet down.

  “And so then my mother calls and says, ‘Honey, you looked just wonderful in that spread in the magazine. I never knew you wore top hats out at night.’ And you know what that means, don’t you? Don’t you?”

  “No, I don’t. What does it mean?”

  “It means she actually mistook her for me! It means my own goddam mother actually thought she was me! And meanwhile I was on the other page in this nice white dress and, and…oh, I hate my mother!”

  At this moment Sally sat forward abruptly and her loose white shirt parted. The inside half of both her breasts—which were quite full and, apparently, bare—briefly came into view. Alex apprehended them at the same time that he saw a remarkable thing happen at the corners of Sally’s mouth. A veritable avalanche of saliva came forward, bubbling out at the corners. Only at the last second did she catch it and suck it back in. It was quite disgusting, the very first unattractive thing he had seen of her, and the combination of this slightly gross physical mistake (maybe she drooled while she slept) and the incredible sight of her breasts and the beauty of her face and the greenness of her eyes and the buoyant bounce of her shiny brown hair, and also the thought of what it might mean that she had invited him over for tea and was padding around barefoot and braless and in a loose white button-down shirt with the top three buttons undone confessing to feelings of dissatisfaction and pain—all this conspired to give him an erection.

  It rose up beneath his black jeans without any regard to decorum or tea rules, and Alex sat back and closed his eyes and prayed for it to go away.

  “Oh God, look, I’ve freaked you out. I guess you see all this has nothing to do with Emily Peters, it’s all about my mother. I have a difficult relationship with my mother.”

  With the word “mother,” Alex’s erection went away. He sat back up, struggling a little with the pillows. When he was upright he looked at Sally, whose feet were back on the ground and whose face was near his.

  “You have very beautiful eyes,” he ventured.

  “Thank you,” she said. They stared at each other, with lust, with love, with curiosity, Alex wasn’t sure. Then Sally jumped off the couch and went over to a little rolltop desk in the corner of the room on which she had a computer turned on and began to furiously pound something out on the keyboard. This went on for about thirty seconds and then she sat back down on her side of the couch.

  “Did I inspire you to write something?” he asked.

  “No. I just wrote a few sentences about Miranda Frasier’s jewelry the other night. I’m doing a piece for My Cell. It’s due in a week.”

  “What’s it about.”

  “Personal style. The way people look. The way they act. They way they combine all these different elements into a personal style.”

  “I think you have a really nice personal style.”

  “Thank you, Alex,” she said, and she sat up and smiled what seemed like the most radiant and suggestive smile he had ever seen. She sat straight up and brought her face very close to his, as though there were a very small message spelled out on the tip of her nose and she wanted him to read it. He leaned in a little, narrowing the distance between them so that he could almost feel her breath.

  “I think having a personal style is almost something you can’t even pay attention to,” he murmured, as though in a trance. “It sort of just happens. One day you’re walking down the street and you glimpse yourself reflected in the window of some store…” His hand found hers on the couch and he began squeezing it in the same palpitating way he had squeezed her ankle. He was almost whispering now. His hand and hers meshed perfectly. Their hands fit so well it felt matrimonial. “…and you have this spontaneous reaction, when you see this thing reflected in the window, you think, ‘I’d like to have that, I’d like to own that,’ except you already have it. It’s you.”

  Her eyes looked into his, moving a little as they focused on the left one and then the right one, and she was smiling a little, as though enjoying herself tremendously, and then a most important decision was upon him: Should he try to kiss her? And risk spoiling this perfect moment with Sally Brown? The famous socialite who was in People magazine as one of the fifty most beautiful women of the year and who had taken an inexplicable liking to him at a party and was now gazing lovingly into his eyes and holding his hand in her apartment where she had invited him
and made him tea?

  Or should he play it safe and preserve this moment forever in the realm of the possible, the present tense that hovers just before another more exciting present tense that hasn’t yet arrived? But then he would risk missing an opportunity to kiss her, to touch her breasts, to discover the exact shape and color of her nipples, to listen to her breath, to feel her hands on the back of his neck.

  Maybe, he thought, his whole appeal to her was as someone a little rougher than what she was used to, a little less bound by social convention, someone who would make the pass, who would kiss her deeply, who would enter several different parts of her body at once and generally molest her and fuck her and use her, and after all hadn’t all that saliva come frothing forward in her mouth? Didn’t she have these desires like everyone else? Wasn’t she a grown woman, an adult grown-up lady in the world who had a grown man on the couch with her with whom she was entangling her sensitive, warm, and well-washed extremities? Would she ever forgive him for this moment lost?