The Sleep-Over Artist

by Thomas Beller

  When they met, he had fallen into her soft gaze, her sensitive hands, with a sense of relief. He loved her emotional and wary eyes; he had seen them before. She had gone to the high school that had taken him in for his senior year, and they had talked in the school’s lobby. She had been a freshman. One faintly memorable conversation, interrupted for about a decade and picked up again at a party. Senior/freshman. The dynamic still percolated. When that sense of relief ended after a few months he waited for a spark of engagement to succeed it, he waited for it ripen. She was, theoretically, perfect. Why didn’t he want her more? What was he waiting for? For her to push him. For something against which he could push. For fear, really. He seemed to have a taste for women who could frighten him a little, one way or another. But the spark hadn’t come.

  Meanwhile, he sank into her house, her pillows, her; he experienced this as a narcotic, not as love. It removed him from life as opposed to bringing him closer to it. That was his worry, at least. That, and the concern that, as to a narcotic, he was becoming addicted to her. He felt the swell of anxiety that comes with dependence, as well as the resentment. He depended on her even for housing at this point. His own home was strange to him. It was a place where he changed socks. Even these had migrated to her fluffy apartment.

  “Baby,” he said, summoning the paternal attitude he often assumed when he wanted to calm her down and do what he wanted. “This is a really good movie. You have to concentrate a little, but it’s worth it.”

  “Okay, honey,” she said. She looked into his eyes in that way of hers—trusting, sweet, soft, and open, but spiced with that tiny but fierce self-preserving instinct, within which, he thought, was the ability for deceit. He admired that. He liked it when she was strong.

  Then he remembered the betrayal he was sure he had just suffered, and was seized with a blinding desire to slap her across the face. He wanted it both ways. He had no idea what he wanted. In the midst of his confusion he was determined to be calm and bide his time.

  He tried to resist the pleasures that the night had to offer—her kindness, softness, the sweetness of coupledom—but could not, and eventually, as sugar turns into energy, his anger and irritation transformed itself into lust. He began stroking her hair and kissing her neck. Their bodies melded into one another. She received his touches with a weird energy that stemmed as much from relief as from desire.

  The sounds of a Wagnerian opera underscoring a helicopter attack on a small Vietnamese village filled the room. At first he found the war sounds to be an interesting juxtaposition, but then they became distracting, and, grappling for the remote, he hit pause and threw it on the floor with abandon. They started touching and kissing again and soon were having an amazingly desperate encounter on the couch, with his pants around his ankles. For some reason he liked doing it with his pants around his ankles. Then the pause automatically ended, and the movie picked up right in the middle of Robert Duvall walking around with his bastard expression and cowboy hat saying, “I love the smell of napalm. It smells like…”

  “I don’t believe it,” he said, a little embarrassed, as though someone had in fact walked into the room.

  “Victory,” said Duvall.

  He had to grapple to find the VCR’s remote control in order to stop the video, and then a game show popped on the TV, necessitating a frantic search for the TV’s remote control to quell the horrible screams of game show pleasure. By then there was almost nothing left.

  “I’m being destroyed by technology,” he feebly joked. For a while they just lay there next to each other, breathing. Gradually, they recovered, and began again. There was some nugget of panic and desperation in his chest—triggered by the frantic search for the remote control, the brief attack of the shrieking game show, the hushed sound of her voice on the phone—but his insecurity made the sex better, as though he wanted to devour her and thereby be assured that no betrayal was forthcoming. At the end of it he noticed her cheeks were bright pink. He was never completely sure that this actually meant that something had happened, but he always took it as a personal triumph.

  Afterwards, she went to the bathroom, and he stood, pulled his pants up, and went to the kitchen counter, where a gaggle of electronic devices were pushed into the corner—phone, answering machine, and a small white gadget she had recently purchased, Caller ID. This little white box registered the number of the person calling you, and the name, on a small LED screen. He hit the last-call button and a number popped up along with a name: R. Donoghue. What a clever little device, he thought.

  She had told him it had been an impulse buy at Bed, Bath, and Beyond. “They had it right by the checkout counter and I thought what the hell, nineteen ninety-nine, it could be interesting,” she had said. Perfect that a store specializing in the pleasures of the home and hearth, a place devoted to the comforts of couples, should have such a suspicious device stuck there as an afterthought, as though the hour or two their patrons had spent contemplating the pleasures to be had using their fluffy white towels, cuddling in flannel sheets, cooking on immaculate Teflon, was the perfect setup for a pang of paranoia: what is really going on with the person with whom all this comfort is to be shared?

  He stared at the number on the little gray screen. He heard the faint sound of a toilet flush, and, like a shoplifter who stuffs something in his pocket without thought, only to feel a sense of shock at what he has just done and a simultaneous sense of its irreversibility, he picked up the phone and dialed the number. There was something perverted and betraying about this gesture just after sex, this little bit of romantic espionage. But then he had been betrayed, too. Or had he? He hovered on the edge of hateful seething feelings that, in truth, had no real basis. And if he hung up right away, they never would. Some self-preserving instinct told him to do so; the part of him addicted to the soft warmth of her, the fluffy-towel loving part of him that wanted pleasure and comfort and softness in the world told him to hang up and be done with it.

  But there was another force within him too, destructive and condemning, an Old Testament fire-and-brimstone force that said life should be hard, that wanted to punish.

  She came into the room in her nightgown, a powder puff of loveliness. She gave him a mildly quizzical look when she saw him on the phone.

  “Hello,” came a voice after the second ring. “Hello?”

  Alex nearly laughed at the obviousness of it. If one went to Central Casting and said, “We need a voice for the Other Man,” this is what they would send over. It was ridiculous. The only weird thing was that there was something familiar about it. He looked at Melissa standing there, looking at him, and felt horrible, at last. It was a kind of catharsis, to be such a shit that he no longer hated her, but hated himself, instead. In feeling guilty towards her he could cleanse himself of his anger towards her. He put the phone down in the middle of the third “Hello?”

  “Do you want to watch the movie some more?” she asked. She was being accommodating.

  “No, hon. That’s fine.” He went and hugged her.

  “Who was that?” she said softly.

  “My answering machine.”

  They got in her fluffy bed and cuddled. Then they rolled onto their backs and turned on the television. Alex stretched his left arm straight out and cracked his wrist. It was a brisk motion—the snap lent it an air of precision. Melissa had come to recognize this simple gesture as a sign that something was bothering him.

  “What’s wrong?” she said.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  But she didn’t believe him. She experienced that crack in the same way a swimmer treading water in the ocean experiences a strange bit of turbulence just beneath the toes, where the water is cold and dark.

  He brought her close and held her. His moments of disgust with her were often followed by remorse and relief, as though only at the last moment had he stopped himself from smashing a precious object to the floor.

  They held on to one another, flipped channels, browsed through cou
ntless voices and images, shared the remote control, both secretly thinking that the television was killing them, that they should get out more, out into the world against which they could define themselves, and when the remote was in his hands he happened to come across Martin Sheen, of all people, being interviewed on a talk show of the high-minded variety, by a man whose loquacious Southern accent was vaguely familiar.

  “Let’s watch this for a while,” he said.

  Seconds of Pleasure

  KATRINA ARRIVED AT THE GALLERY TO DISCOVER A DENSELY crowded room whose walls were painted in chocolate. The smell of chocolate was overwhelming. For once it was impossible to attend an opening and ignore the art. A small sign in one corner said that Cadbury had cosponsored the event. A sign in another corner announced that viewers could lick the art, but at their own risk. No one was licking the art.

  She scanned the room for Nina. Nina had a way of looking at her with twinkling admiring eyes and a permissive smirk. She made her want to divulge. They had met at St. Paul’s and been great friends; then there was a long slow death of their friendship. At university Nina had flourished. At university Katrina had met Sam. Nina had become a wit and Katrina had become a wife. But in the last year they had become friends again in a sudden burst.

  But Katrina didn’t see her, she saw no one she knew. The faces were harsh in the glare. Already she felt the sudden loss of sexual self-confidence that comes with not being married. She sat down on a bench in the middle of the room and hid.

  ALEX FADER CLOSED his eyes and smelled the chocolate; its intensity was almost sickening. He opened his eyes and stared at the deep brown wall of chocolate. He peered at it the way people at a museum come right up to a painting so they can see every microscopic nuance. Some parts were very brown, other parts were milky. It had been brushed on, like paint, and he could see the brushstrokes.

  He’d been in London for five days, but he had not yet managed to leave New York. Arriving in a new place makes you think of where you have left. You look inward, backward, or spend all your time reading a book explaining what it’s like to be where you are. Alex understood this impulse in himself and he tried to resist it.

  Once, when he was eleven, his mother had taken him to Israel, where he had been in complete and utter thrall to a book about the Beatles. On a bus, as he continued to press his nose into the book, his mother had cried out, “Oh Alex, look!” He had looked up. “That’s Mount Olive over there.” He stared at the stone wall in the distance, took in the sunbaked scenery. Then he went back to the Beatles.

  Now he stared at the chocolate wall and thought: Oh, come on! Life is out there waiting for you! Engage! He turned to face the room.

  He saw an attractive woman, stylish, wearing sleek black clothes, sitting alone on a bench in the middle of the room, and something about her cheeks, the way they were bright, and a certain nervousness about her hands, made his eyes rest upon her. He sidled up to her and saw a strange mark on the back of her hand.

  “Excuse me?” he said, gesturing to the back of her hand. “What’s that?”

  He looked more closely. He took her hand in his and examined it. “You have a dinosaur tattooed in red on the back of your hand. That’s very impressive. Do you mind if I sit next to you?”

  “It’s not my bench,” she said. “But it is my hand,” and she withdrew it.

  He asked her if it was a real tattoo.

  “It’s fake,” she said.

  He took a quick appraising glance at her. She wasn’t that pretty. His eyes roamed the crowded room and then settled back on her.

  She was, suddenly and incontestably, beautiful. Her cheeks and lips had the high color of someone who has just returned from a long walk in the cold. There was a trembling liquid quality to her lips, which were a deep, natural red. Her eyes had within them a certain judgmental distance which suggested that she felt that human beings were irreconcilably alone, that they could never be anything other than alone. There was something about her that would always be “I,” never “us,” and this made him feel lonely. The loneliness caused him pain. He found the pain delicious.

  “Are you the artist?” he said.

  “No,” she said.

  “Friend of the artist?”

  “No. Have you been in London long?”

  “What makes you think I’m newly arrived?”

  “Just a guess.”

  “Why the dinosaur?”

  “It was my son’s doing.”

  “Oh,” he said, and looked a bit shocked.

  KATRINA STARED THROUGH this interloper, grateful for the cover, nodding and smiling a little on the strength of the conversation’s rhythm, not the content, and looking out for Nina. This man’s face reminded her slightly of her dog, Abner, a long-faced whippet with soulful, questioning eyes that were always at their most perplexed after he had been barking, as though he himself didn’t know what had come over him. On the strength of this resemblance she felt some vague goodwill towards this American. Then she mentioned Patrick, and he changed a little, and this change got her attention; he became a person, curious and pensive and real. She was suddenly able to pay attention to him.

  “Have I said anything that has disturbed you?” she said. She noticed that he was wearing a candy necklace wrapped around his wrist, two strands of edible color. She hadn’t seen one of those in years.

  “No,” he said. “Want one?”

  “Is that something you wear regularly?”

  “No. And I have no excuse for it. I mean, I can’t say my daughter put it there or anything. I don’t, I’m not…Want a bite?” He held his arm up the way men do when they are about to go for a stroll with a woman and want her to take their arm; a formal, old-fashioned, polite gesture, except he was offering candy off his wrist. “They’re good,” he said. “Go ahead. Really.”

  She leaned over and carefully, using only her teeth, bit off several of the candies. A half circle of yellow pastel fell off her lips, and she caught it in her palm. It looked like a Valium. With a quick flick of her tongue she retrieved it into her mouth.

  “Thank you,” she said. They were good. Delicious. “How long are you on vacation?” she said.

  “I’m not on vacation. I’m never going back to New York.” The words surprised him; they were exhilarating. He felt wonderfully confident. He glanced at her to see if she knew this easygoing person, this casual confidence, was a sham.

  She didn’t.

  SHE DID.

  “That’s too bad,” she said. “Because everyone will like you much more if you’re on the verge of going back to wherever it is you’ve come from.”

  “I’m leaving on Saturday,” he said.

  “Very good.”

  “Really? So, in my last days here in London, would you care to recommend some activity? Perhaps over a drink?”

  “Is this an invitation?”

  “I suppose so. I’d like to have a drink with you, somewhere away from all this chocolate.”

  “Would you?” She looked at him with a smile. It was a funny idea, that she might get to know this stray, random bit of Americanness. She regarded him as one might regard an interesting piece of drift-wood washed up on a beach—might it look good on the mantel?—before deciding it was simply not worth carrying back to the house.

  “I would,” he said.

  She looked at him. His eyes were green. For a brief moment she felt something recoil within her, not in horror or displeasure, but in the way that one shivers when stroked lightly in a sensitive place. It was intimate and strange and unsettling.

  At that moment Alex experienced a hiccup in time; it was as if his own life were on film—not video, not digital, but actual movie film—and there had been a bad splice which had briefly ruined the illusion. On the other side of the splice, she looked different. He wanted to be with her. He stared at her, thinking, Is this real?

  He was vaguely aware of his friend Harry’s voice nearby. Was he willing to risk humiliation and press the point furth
er? He stared at her closely.

  “You’re staring,” she said.

  “Do you want to get a drink after this?”

  She started to look away, but didn’t. Her eyes stayed on his—they were dark green, a little hooded; she had a weird vision of him years from now, his forehead deeply lined, his eyelids heavy, the lines around his mouth making him seem a little sour, a little sexy, a mouth like overripe fruit suggesting both wisdom and sloth. The sort of man you would want to keep your daughter away from, and also the sort of man to whom your daughter, perversely, might be attracted. The sort of man to whom she might be perversely attracted. But this was twenty years down the road. Now he was just a boyish American. She didn’t like boyishness. And she didn’t like Americans.

  “Can’t,” she said. “Sorry. Have plans.”

  He stared at her, the rejection burning inside of him; a thin layer of moisture materialized on his chest and back, a cold sweat. His new self had crashed and burned.

  A woman approached from the side and called her name. “Katrina!” He had that, at least, her name. She stood up and he stood with her. The woman’s long arms wrapped around Katrina, her fingers clutching at her thick black hair, pulling it into her neck. When they stopped embracing, Katrina turned to him.

  “Nice meeting you,” she said, and walked off.

  The room swirled around him, smoky and chocolaty and foreign. He wandered outside for a breath of air. And there were Katrina and her friend, talking. He felt acutely embarrassed that it seemed as though he were following them. But there was nothing to do. He stood there and watched. She peered at him, a curious fearful glance, and then she and her friend turned and walked into the damp night.