The Sleep-Over Artist

by Thomas Beller

  “Go to sleep,” she said. She seemed truly irritated that he had refused to leave her house. But sort of amused, too.

  He fell asleep in the strange room, smelling his fingers and smiling.

  HE WOKE TO the sound of footsteps somewhere in the house. It was cold, and he had pulled the blanket and sheet up nearly over his head. The small dormer windows admitted just a little light into the low-ceilinged room, which, other than the bed, was empty; the dim light made the day, and all the life it contained, seem like a distant, far-off thing. No one in the whole world knows where I am, he thought. He fell asleep again feeling thrillingly alive.

  He awoke again to the sound of footsteps. They were light but very nearby. His eyes cracked open but he didn’t move. There, in the doorway, standing stock-still, was a young boy. His hair was brown and curly. He stood motionless, staring at the lump under the blanket.

  “Nanny?” he said, half a question, half a statement. He said it in a slight whisper, as though he were trying not to wake the person even as he was. “Nanny?” This time a little louder, more commanding.

  He approached, one step after the other, a little jerky, like a marionette. His small figure loomed up next to the bed. A little Goldilocks, thought Alex, wondering what this napping non-nanny was doing in his house. But it was the baby bear who did the wondering…so Alex would have to be Goldilocks…his mind jangled in its half-awake state trying to straighten out what it meant that he had cast himself as Goldilocks. Meanwhile he remained utterly still until he couldn’t bear the suspense any longer and opened his eyes, though he didn’t move.

  “Hello,” he said.

  The boy took in this new bit of information for a moment, swaying back on his heels as though a gust of wind had passed across him, and then he stood straight again and said, “Where’s my nanny?” He was a bit demanding, even accusing, as though he suspected that she had been stolen.

  “Downstairs, I think,” Alex replied. The boy rocked back and forth, looking at him for another second, and then spun around and stomped out of the room.

  KATRINA CAME UP a little later.

  “My son has informed me that there is a strange man lying in bed upstairs,” she said.

  “Are you coming to evict him?” he said.

  “I’m investigating,” she said.

  “He asked what I did with his nanny.”

  She lay down next to him. It felt very safe up here. Almost immediately he became excited. They pulled each other close. Then, with so little bashfulness it was almost perfunctory, as though she were doing some housework, she pulled off her pants and got on top of him, facing away. He had never been in this position before, and at first he looked down at what was happening with interest and also a sort of detached pride, because it felt as though his erection was something apart from him entirely. He felt the pride of a racehorse owner watching his horse come down the home stretch leading the pack. And he was intrigued by the shape of her back and the way her hips moved; they had an engorging motion, as if she were devouring his cock. He put his hands behind his head and let her do everything.

  But gradually a strange and somewhat rejected feeling came over him; it was insulting to be reduced completely to a thing upon which this woman could gyrate. She seemed to be getting a considerable amount of satisfaction and pleasure from it, but the fact that he was almost entirely out of view—only his shins, ankles, feet stretched out before her—began to seem like an insult. I’m being used, he thought. For a moment he thought this was funny. Then it became less funny. His erection, sensing the slight, began to go away. He sat up sharply, pushed her forward onto her elbows, and suddenly who was using who had been rearranged into a more palatable arrangement. But the voracity of her hips stayed in his mind.

  SHE MADE HIM a breakfast of fried eggs and tomatoes. Sitting there in the kitchen, Alex felt a familiar, sleep-overish sense of delight in this immersion in someone else’s life. He munched his thickly buttered toast in the sun-strewn kitchen, and glimpsed the peculiar dance between Katrina and her household staff. It was that strangely revealing noninteraction between employer and employee, intimate and yet utterly distant. While Lisa, the nanny, was afforded a kind of respect, Emily, who was the housekeeper, was merely tolerated. Emily had light coffee skin, and her high, prominent cheekbones were sprayed with freckles. Her movements were rushed and unruly. She had a raw and wild beauty; there was a fearfulness and apprehension in her eyes, and he wondered if it was Katrina’s sharpness that had instilled it. No, he thought, probably something much deeper. Amidst the cacophony of information Alex was absorbing, there was something conspicuous about the way Emily moved around the house; worry, anxiety, and sex emanated from her in equal quantities. Lisa ignored her subtly, speaking to her occasionally in Spanish, not unfriendly, but distant.

  Katrina ignored her completely on the surface, but Alex could sense an impatient disdain that passed from Katrina to Emily like a fine mist that glistened on Emily’s skin.

  Compared to the help, Alex was being treated like a king by Katrina, the subject of enormous attention, even a tiny bit of deference. Yet he couldn’t help note that he was nevertheless comparing himself to the help.

  The day was bright when he left. There was an acknowledged sadness at parting that marked a new level of intimacy for them. She said goodbye from the kitchen. Their kiss was perfunctory yet somehow charged; he wondered why she didn’t come to the door to see him off and then it occurred to him that it would be scandalous for her to kiss him out in the world’s eye; she was still married to someone else, after all. He walked towards the Warwick Street Tube trying to suppress the raging sense of glee and joy, holding it down not out of any sense of humility or sense of proportion, but for purely pragmatic reasons. The feeling reminded him of the wildly ecstatic posture he had had when he got his job at the network. The way he walked around his apartment with his arms aloft, like a victorious Muhammad Ali. Of course this is happening to me, he had thought. Of course! It was pure hubris, and he had been punished for it.

  Now he tried to keep the feeling inside him down to a buzz, a hum, not a raging torrent but a manageable current of electricity.

  TWO LOVEBIRDS WERE added to Katrina’s household, and an African gray whose shrieks were terrifying. The lovebirds were a big hit with Patrick, and the cat, Marvin, who sat for hours staring up at the cage.

  AN AMERICAN WAS added to the household.

  AT THE NETWORK’S offices, he and the other younger staff had mere cubicles, but the more senior executives and producers had their own offices with doors that locked. During the day he sat dumbfounded at his desk, unable to motivate on any project, a Bartleby the Scrivener of television news. At night he roamed the halls and touched, gently, the office doorknobs, testing to see which were unlocked.

  Many were unlocked. He would step inside, close the door behind him, and, in the humming fluorescent light, stand amidst the productive debris of someone else’s life.

  Other people’s lives were so full! So much chaos, so many strands of different enterprise.

  He discovered a small room devoted exclusively to copy machines, one of which was a sophisticated color copier, and he spent several hours pressing his face and hands and feet and elbows and chest and bare ass against the smooth warm glass of the copy machine, watching the machine spit out color renditions of these body parts.

  Months went by. Eventually he began staying the night.

  He slept on a long couch in the lunchroom and was woken by the cleaning ladies. There were few windows at the office, and none near his cubicle, so time for Alex became a weightless, fluorescent-lit, undefinable thing. In the morning he washed in the men’s room. He began having fantasies of moving in completely.

  All things considered, it took them a surprisingly long time to fire him. He was given two weeks to leave. He developed a fantasy of smuggling bricks and mortar into the office and building a wall around his cubicle. He calculated that he could build it over a weekend. Peopl
e would arrive at the office and instead of being gone, he would be living in an impregnable brick structure. He started perusing the aisles of supermarkets with on eye on survival food. He would stand in front of the canned corn and think:

  A hundred cans of giblets. But maybe some creamed corn as well.

  But I hate creamed corn.

  But won’t you get sick of regular corn?

  I’ve never gotten sick of regular corn before.

  But you haven’t had to live on it exclusively for weeks on end while living in a brick cubicle!

  He did not, in the end, buy any creamed corn. Or regular corn. He purchased no corn whatsoever. He left quietly, though not before one last nocturnal wander during which he slipped color copies of his body parts into other people’s files. His foot, his elbow, his ass. He seeded these images in places where they might not be found for days or weeks or years. Each person got only one, and he imagined a long unconnected litany of private puzzlement as they were gradually discovered.

  THE HUSBAND, SAM, was one of those enterprising English men who had turned his family’s old money into new. He had a chain of specialty shops all across Europe that specialized in spy equipment: “Sleuths.”

  Alex paid a visit to the main store, which was just off Baker Street, right in the heart of Sherlock Holmes territory. Amid stores that sold every conceivable object onto which Sherlock Holmes’s name and likeness could be stamped was something that appeared to be an electronics store. The logo was a silhouette of a Holmesian man with a top hat smoking a pipe. The name suggested something playful, innocent, a place of fun and fantasy. “Sleuths.”

  What dark fantasies!

  Alex had wandered into the place, and there found a paranoid’s dream (or nightmare). Pencils that could take a picture, video cameras shaped like a pack of gum that could zoom into a nostril. Katrina’s lifestyle was riding high on a global surge in voyeurism. Alex chatted with a salesman, who informed him the chain was expanding into America, where the demand for surveillance equipment was even stronger than in Europe. Everyone was an amateur spy, an amateur documentarian. He should really be stocking up, he thought. Here before him was the next great leap in his creative life: the whole world was one big stage set for an ongoing Candid Camera.

  All this surveillance equipment cast Katrina’s home in a new light. He loved the hushed isolated feeling of being at Katrina’s house, roaming the master bedroom, the guest rooms, the bathrooms, all covered with a thick, sound-absorbing carpet, but he could never fully escape the feeling, having visited this store, that the deposed master of the house had, as a parting gesture, wired the place with video cameras and recording devices, heat monitors, who knew what else, and was now parked in a van down the street, jerking off in a masochistic frenzy in front of a video monitor, watching his wife fucking another man.

  SHE TOOK HIM to a party. It was their first social event together. She briefed him about the hostess while she drove, and he got the general idea they were headed towards something fancy, so when they arrived he was surprised to discover that the hostess, an elegant older woman, had started a company that made mulch, and the guests, upon entering, were handed plastic bags with a small amount of mulch in them. The mulch was fragrant in a nice, fertile way. If another product had been involved, then the event might have seemed crass or commercial, but there was something wholesome about this little bit of fecund earth in a plastic bag. The mulch gave the gathering a pleasant, amiable, almost giddy atmosphere. People held glasses of champagne in one hand and their plastic bag of mulch in the other, and talked feverishly to one another.

  He drifted away from her, wanting to let her roam a little, to talk to people unencumbered by introductions, and also to see how she looked at a distance, across a crowded room. From certain angles she was not beautiful. And from certain angles she was. Her taste in clothes, Alex felt, was impeccable. She had, as a rule, a wild, combative look in her eyes, as though she dared anyone to make trouble for her, which only heightened her moments of softness and tenderness. She was lovely when she laughed. Her hands flitted nervously up to her hair. She had mentioned that after giving birth her hair had all fallen out. He felt a kind of pride in knowing why her fingers kept reaching up and rearranging her hair, where the habit began.

  He moved through the rooms. There was a fake invitation on the face of everyone in the room, he thought. So many of these people knew each other, had fucked each other’s wives and husbands, had been once cruel or once kind to each other in long-ago incarnations. They had seen each other’s fortunes of wealth and happiness fall and rise and fall and rise. He felt the closeness of this world and its strange element of cruelty, which excited him. He made small talk with an attractive blond woman about mulch. He joked with her, he tried hard to make her laugh and eventually succeeded. He thought he saw in her eye a look that said, “Why are you doing this? I know you’re not sincere.”

  She was Argentinean, she said.

  “But you have an English accent,” he said.

  “I was born in England,” she explained.

  “So you’re English, really,” he said.

  “No. I’m Argentinean.”

  “Both my parents were from somewhere else, but I grew up in America so I’m American,” he said.

  “That’s not the way it works here,” she said.

  “IS IT POSSIBLE,” she inquired on the drive home, “for you to talk to a woman without shamelessly flirting with her? It’s kind of pathetic, you know.”

  He laughed at this.

  “Three things,” he began. It was, she thought, one of his more irritating qualities, announcing how many points he was about to make before he made them.

  “One, I was just talking to that woman. And I’m charmed that you care, two. And three, there is, I admit, a tiny part of me that really liked being insulted,” he said. “But it is a tiny part! And the rest of me is at any moment going to rise up and smite you, or smote you, or whatever happens in the Old Testament…”

  “You’re the Jew. You’re supposed to know what happens in the Old Testament.”

  “There you go again!” he said, laughing with exasperation. “You can’t help but be insulting. It’s some genetic thing programmed into English people!”

  “I just said you were a Jew. It’s your choice to take it as an insult.”

  “I was just having a good time, for God sakes. Why is that so unseemly?”

  “It’s just that you’re so boyish!”

  THEY WENT TO the movies. Five weeks had gone by since their initial meeting. Alex had twice changed his ticket and couldn’t change it again. He was leaving in three days.

  Katrina navigated her car through Bayswater. It had begun to snow. The flakes turned to wet when they hit the street, but in the air they seemed fat and substantial. She drove up a winding ramp that led to the parking lot of the Whitehall movie theaters. Big improbable flakes descended rapidly. He leaned over to look at her watch. She could smell him. All afternoon, after Patrick had been picked up, they had marinated in her bed. Just when they should have gotten up to get dressed they embarked on a particularly ambitious encounter. It involved lotion, and unnatural acts, and then he went too far and she screamed and curled up in a ball saying “That hurt!” again and again and laughing, and he laughed too, both of them rolling around laughing hysterically. And then they jumped up to race to the movies.

  “Hurry up,” he said. “We’re late.”

  She squeezed the car into a parking space, feeling irritated with his demanding tone. “We’re late,” he said again. “Hurry.”

  When they got out of the car he took her hand and started running through the snow. She wore a hat, and held it with her free hand. When they got inside they discovered the movie had sold out. They wandered back out towards the car, through the snow-dusted parking lot, with wide amazed eyes, as though they had never seen snow before. Her cheeks were flushed. In the middle of the parking lot he hugged her tightly.

  “I never r
un,” she said. “I never run like that.”

  “But that was fun,” he said. “Wasn’t it?”

  She nodded, yes, it was.

  He made her stop walking and looked at her face. Snow fell around them.

  “I love you,” he said.

  Something passed behind her eyes.

  “I love you, too,” she said.

  HE STAYED IN London for six weeks, until his plane ticket could be extended no further, and then there was a tearful farewell, and vows to reunite as soon as possible.

  She gave him an envelope with a note in it when he left.

  “Open it on the plane,” she said.

  He was giddy with anticipation, but also dread. Part of him looked forward to some effusion from her about how much she loved him, or wanted-needed-thought-about him. Another part of him wanted her to keep her distance, wanted her to stay cool, was rooting for some terse witty phrase. He waited until the seat belt sign was off before he opened it. There was no note. There was just a rather stylized photo of the red leather couch, its brass tacks gleaming in the sun. His heart leapt.

  HE HADN’T REALLY believed that she would agree to visit him in New York, and so he threw himself into the task of convincing her with easy abandon, as though it were a joke, and he was teasing her. So he was shocked, elated, and, he had to admit, almost disturbed when she responded to one of his invitations by saying yes. Patrick would be spending spring break with their father. She would visit him.

  Confronted with the awesome task of being her host, he set about planning activities: walks in the park, restaurants, museums.

  But when she finally arrived at his front door she fled past him and flopped facedown on the bed and refused to look at him for a long time. “This is too weird,” she said.