Vacuum in the Dark

by Jen Beagin

  “Love you,” Lena said now, as they clinked glasses.

  “More,” Mona said.

  “More what?” Lena said.

  “Love,” Mona said. “And war stories, please.”

  In Budapest, Lena said, she once poisoned a man to death after finding out he was a pedophile. In Los Angeles, a very famous basketball player paid her to poop on him. Also in Los Angeles, a very famous filmmaker tried to sodomize her with a broomstick. In Tanzania, she collected ancient bones, learned to fly a plane, and had a brief affair with a Maasai warrior.

  “Wait, was Tanzania before or after you were a hooker?” Mona asked.

  “After,” Lena said.

  “Before or after you were married?”

  “Long after,” she said. “Open your mouth.”

  “Again?” Mona said.

  “It’s only Percocet,” she said.

  Usually Lena placed the pill on Mona’s tongue and then handed Mona a glass of something to wash it down. This time she fed Mona the pill from her own mouth. Their tongues touched briefly and Mona thought she tasted blood. Underneath the blood, a hint of sweet corn, or perhaps cereal. Lena pulled away and smiled.

  “Jesus,” Mona said. “I wasn’t expecting that.”

  “I just kiss-fed you,” Lena said. “I used to do that with my daughter. With food, obviously, not pills.”

  Mona nodded. “I did that with my dog a few times.”

  “It’s a pretty powerful bonding ritual,” Lena said. “It’s also where French kissing evolved from.”

  “I’ve seen apes do it,” Mona said. “On TV. By the way, not to change the subject, but I haven’t pooped in like three days.”

  “That’s easy,” Lena said, scratching her nose. “Next time you’re on the toilet, reach down and slide your thumb into your vagina.” To demonstrate, Lena wiggled her thumb into an imaginary vagina. “Press on the back wall,” Lena instructed. “You’ll feel the shit in there. Massage it like this.” As Lena massaged the imaginary back wall, Mona was overcome with tenderness.

  “You fascinate me,” Mona said.

  “I bet you have some war stories of your own,” Lena said.

  “More than you’d want to know.”

  “That’s not possible,” Lena said, and lit a cigarette. “I want to know everything.”

  Did she? Mona drank the rest of her prosecco and then drained Lena’s glass, as well. Lena was looking at her expectantly.

  “Tell me something you don’t tell other people,” Lena said.

  “Well, I once knew a guy who murdered his girlfriend,” Mona said.

  She checked Lena’s face to make sure she was listening. Lena seemed to be smoothing Mona’s hair with her eyes.

  “I met him a couple of summers before he killed that girl, when I was nineteen and he was twenty-two. Earlier that year, he’d chopped off his own finger with a hatchet just to see what it felt like, and tried to burn the tattoo off his forehead with acid. He often threw himself down flights of stairs on purpose and would walk into moving traffic. For whatever reason, I found this guy entertaining. He looked like a psychopath, but I never thought he was an actual crazy person, or even dangerous, because I’d spent a month in a psychiatric hospital with legitimately unstable people, and this guy wasn’t like them. He was charming and affectionate. A decent storyteller. A happy drunk.

  “One Saturday afternoon in July, he was drinking in my living room while I was getting ready for work. I’d just gotten my own apartment, and he’d stopped by to check it out. I was washing my hair in the kitchen sink, for some reason, and he came up behind me and tried to get under my bathrobe. I turned around and slapped him, which had always stopped him in the past, but this time he dragged me to the bedroom and threw me on the bed. When I tried to get up, he pushed my head down.”

  She checked Lena’s face again. Lena’s eyes were now caressing Mona’s neck.

  “He raped me with a large, round hairbrush. Not with the bristle end, but with the weird rubber handle and only some of the bristles. He was behind me. I was not on all fours, but rather lying flat against the mattress, which felt somehow more revealing, and he had my legs spread. I was in a complete panic, but only internally. From the outside, I looked as though I was playing dead.

  “The worst part wasn’t the hairbrush, strangely. It was the sunlight. It was streaming in through the room’s many windows, and I was fully exposed. He could see everything. My instinct wasn’t to scream or fight him off, but rather to find a way to turn around, and I realized that I was ashamed of my cellulite. I was worried about how my butt looked. Part of me wanted to look good for him, which added an extra layer of shame to the whole thing.

  “Eventually I managed to convince him that we should be facing each other. He seemed confused by that because we’d talked about sex and I’d mentioned that I liked it from behind. So, he knew that about me. Anyway, he let me turn around to face him and he fucked me for about two minutes, and then—this was another surprise—he pinned me down with his knees and started jerking off. I remember thinking, Is there something wrong with my pussy? Why doesn’t he want that?

  “Although I despised my body back then, I was on pretty good terms with my face. My face and I were friends. My eyes could have been bigger, perhaps, and more symmetrical, but I liked my cheekbones. My face was the only part of my body that I didn’t actively loathe. So, of course that’s where he chose to ejaculate. I was like, Fuck—really? No one had ever done that to me. I didn’t watch porn back then, and so I had no idea that this was something people did, and that it had been given its own category.

  “Afterward, he asked me why I was crying and tried to console me. He had his arm around me like we were old friends. He seemed baffled that I was upset, because I hadn’t put up a fight. I had been too distracted, too weakened by my stupid thoughts. I could not speak. My throat was completely closed, and I could barely swallow.

  “He said, ‘You know, you should work out a little. You don’t need much, but you’d feel a lot better about yourself.’ He spoke kindly, out of what seemed like genuine concern. My whole body was burning at that point, and the tears kept rolling. They would not stop.

  “ ‘Wait, hold on,’ he said. ‘Here, stand up.’

  “I had to be at work in thirty minutes. So why was he kneeling in front of me? For a second I thought he was going to try to give me head, or something stupid like that, but it turned out he was holding an electric razor. Before I understood what was happening, he’d buzzed off most of my pubic hair. I was stunned again and unable to move. ‘There,’ he said. ‘Much better.’ He led me over to the only antique I own, a full-length dowel mirror.

  “It looked grotesque to me. I felt like a stranger to myself. As I got dressed, I kept telling myself that everything was fine. I even let the guy hug me goodbye. Okay, yeah, see you later. Uh-huh, yeah, cool, take care—like that. There was no way I was going to let him know he’d gotten to me. I knew I would tell no one. So, I went to work like it was any other day. I wondered how I was going to explain my missing bush, but my boyfriend was touched and delighted. He said, ‘Did you shave your pussy for me?’ As if I was a total sweetheart. And I thought, No, the guy who raped me this afternoon shaved my pussy for you. He’s the sweetheart.

  “Anyway, this is all a long—and perhaps not very interesting—way of saying that if I’d been a normal white nineteen-year-old with healthy self-esteem, I would have called the cops that day, and maybe that girl would still be alive.”

  Lena let out a puff of air.

  “The End,” Mona said.

  “Does your mother know about that?” Lena asked.

  “My mother? No.”

  Lena’s eyes were watering. “Why not?”

  “I buried it,” Mona said.

  Lena stubbed out her cigarette. “Well, at least he’s in prison,” she said. “Getting raped.”

  Mona shrugged. Lena went back to staring at the boat. Mona watched her eyes go out of focus and fill up
with water again. It was something she did roughly every seven minutes, whenever there was a lull in the conversation, or sometimes even while she was telling a story. Only when her eyes watered did she look away, and then it was usually at Mona’s face. The boat seemed to both anchor and unsettle her.

  “I do that with your coffee table,” Mona said.

  “What?” Lena said.

  “Stare at it,” Mona said. “When I feel lost.”

  “I’m not lost,” Lena said slowly. “I’m praying.”

  “For what?”

  “You,” Lena said. “And for rain.”

  Mona looked up at the sky: uniformly blue, as usual. Not a cloud in sight.

  * * *

  THE FOLLOWING WEEK, MONA WATCHED Lena eat an avocado. She cut it in half, removed the pit, and filled the holes with olive oil. She fed herself slowly with a beautiful gold spoon.

  “You really know how to live,” Mona said.

  Lena wiped her mouth with a linen napkin. “Let’s look at your photographs.”

  “Again?” Mona said.

  “Yes,” Lena said. “We need to figure out your story.”

  Mona retrieved her camera and handed it over. Lena made appreciative noises as she scrolled through, and then she removed her glasses and looked Mona in the eye.

  “Let me send these to some people I know,” she said, and crossed her legs.

  “People?”

  “Curators, gallery owners,” she said. “Other artists like yourself.”

  “I’m not an artist,” Mona said. “I’m just a documenter, a record keeper.”

  Lena rolled her eyes. “You have an exciting career ahead of you, Mona, if you want it,” she said, “but you have to want it.”

  “I’d rather just be you for a few years,” Mona said.

  “Once we print these out,” Lena said, ignoring her, “which we can do very easily on Paul’s inkjet, perhaps you’ll see what I see.”

  She did. The sixty or so prints they made were stunning, particularly the photo sequences from Paul and Lena’s house. The story many of the sequences told, in Lena’s view, was a ghost story in reverse: in the first shots Mona was a pale, nebulous apparition wearing an apron and cleaning; in the final shots, dressed in their clothes, handling their most precious objects, she transformed into a living, breathing, fully fledged badass.

  “You start out looking exhausted and—I don’t know—anemic? Your power seems very neutered,” Lena said. “And then, bit by bit, you come back to life. It’s really beautiful to witness, actually.”

  It was a story Mona hadn’t been conscious of telling, and she wasn’t sure if it was accurate or even true, but she enjoyed listening to Lena discuss her sensibility as a photographer, how her work was reminiscent of Duane Michals, an American known for his use of the photo sequence, which he coupled with his own handwritten prose, and Sophie Calle, a French artist known for her detective-like ability to document the private lives of strangers. Calle once followed a man she met at a party in Paris all the way to Venice, and then she followed him around Venice, photographing him without his knowledge.

  “That’s sort of what you’re doing with these houses,” Lena said. “Don’t you think? It’s another angle to the story. The detective angle.”

  “Except these houses aren’t strangers to me,” Mona said. “I have intimate relationships with them. Especially this house. I feel like I’m fucking this house.”

  “It’s me you’re fucking,” Lena said. “I mean, in the sense that this house is all me.”

  “Are you responsible for that coffee table?”

  “In more ways than you’ll ever know,” Lena said sadly.

  Mona waited for her to say more, but Lena lit a cigarette instead.

  “What about the black violet toilet?”

  “Custom-made for me by an old lover,” Lena said, exhaling. After a pause she added, in a soft voice, “Do you know that I love you?”

  Mona swallowed. She felt lightheaded and weightless, as if she’d fainted and hit her head and was now being carried in someone’s arms. Lena was the “I,” Mona was the “you,” but the arms? The arms were the phrase “do you know.” That’s what she felt buoyed by: “do you know?” It made Lena’s question seem utterly selfless and without need, a question that didn’t require an answer. Wasn’t that what true love was, according to Stevie Wonder? It asked for nothing. Acceptance was the way you paid.

  * * *

  ON HER NEXT VISIT, LENA wasn’t there. One of their curators quit, Paul explained, so Lena needed to spend Saturdays at the gallery in Santa Fe. They would be moving forward without her. Paul gave her a small smile.

  “She left this for you,” he said.

  Allergy Rescue, the label read. The bottle was heavy and contained many days’ worth of rescue—weeks, perhaps months. She suspected she wouldn’t be seeing Lena for a while, possibly ever again. She’d been ghosted. Was it something she’d said? She should have nixed the rape story, for starters. No one wanted to hear about that. Or perhaps it was what she hadn’t said. I know you love me, she should’ve answered. I love you, too.

  She’d spent all week painstakingly rewriting and editing her housekeeping notes, and then handwriting the best ones and pairing them with the beautiful prints they’d made. She’d placed everything in a fancy leather portfolio she never would have bought otherwise. Pomegranate lambskin, hand-finished and ink stained, with an old-fashioned cord binding. A hundred and fifty bucks. The process of putting it all together had been deeply satisfying and occasionally thrilling, and when she was finished she’d felt immediately attached to it. She’d spent an evening or two snuggled up on the couch with it, petting the cover. That morning, however, she’d felt an overwhelming urge to destroy it, to drown it in the bathtub or set fire to it, and then throw herself off the Gorge Bridge.

  “Well, I brought her something, too,” Mona said. “Will you give it to her?”

  “Of course,” Paul said.

  She handed him the portfolio and watched him place it on his cluttered desk. Seeing it there made her feel lonely suddenly, and diminished somehow, as if she’d given Paul her pinkie finger.

  * * *

  NEEDLESS TO SAY, THE ATMOSPHERE changed in Lena’s absence. Props began to appear, a different one each week. A dentist’s chair, a pink salon chair with a hair dryer, a metal examination table, all dragged out of the huge storage closet at the back of the studio. He always made a few sketches first and then photographed her with a large-format camera.

  He asked her to close her eyes in the dentist’s chair, to cross her legs and read a magazine under the hair dryer, and to put her feet in the stirrups of the examination table, “but don’t worry,” he said quickly, “I’m only photographing you from above. I can’t see your punci.”

  “My what?” she asked.

  “ ‘Punci’ is Hungarian for ‘vagina,’ ” he said.

  Once she had her feet in the stirrups, he told her she reminded him of Valerie Neuzil, Egon Schiele’s model and mistress.

  “He’s one of my favorites,” she said.

  “I’m happy you know who he is,” Paul said. “He’s been a major influence on me.”

  I can see that, she wanted to say, but stopped herself. Best not to point out that his work was derivative.

  “Childbirth is going to be difficult for you,” he said.

  She blinked at him, thinking he was commenting on her punci.

  “I don’t mean to frighten you, but you have hips like Lena’s,” he said. “She had a terrible time giving birth. Like pushing a piano through a transom.”

  “I’m twenty-six,” Mona said.

  “Can you touch your toes?” he asked. “I think you can’t.”

  “I most certainly can.”

  “You bend over like an old woman,” he said.

  “How do you say ‘fuck off’ in Hungarian?” she asked.

  He laughed. “Baszd meg,” he said. “Baszd meg.”

  * * *

/>   ONE DAY SHE WALKED IN to find a claw-foot tub sitting in the middle of the studio. The outside of the tub was painted a rich gunmetal gray, and the inside was filled with mysterious green liquid. She didn’t like the looks of it.

  “It’s just water,” he said.

  “Why is it green?”

  “I wanted it to look like absinthe.”

  She wondered if that was what he’d been drinking. He looked both tired and manic. His hair was unwashed and standing on end, and there were bread crumbs in his beard. His skin was oddly purple, especially around his eyes.

  She undressed and he asked her to climb into the tub. She hesitated.

  “I’m not really a fan of water,” she said. “That’s why I moved to the desert.”

  She eased herself in while he adjusted the studio lights. The water was warm, but not warm enough. He plucked a red apple from a bowl on one of the worktables. “Would you mind holding this?” He polished it on his T-shirt before handing it to her.

  “Hold it how?”

  “Bring your knees together, then maybe balance it between them? Rest your arms and hands on the lip of the tub.”

  She did as he said and watched him climb the ladder.

  “Where should I look?” she asked.

  “At the apple,” he said. “Keep your chin down. Good. Now look up at me with your eyes.”

  What else would she look at him with—her feet? He took a few pictures and then spent the next thirty minutes moving the ladder around, photographing her from different angles.

  * * *

  AT AGE SEVEN, SHE’D DOGGY-PADDLED across the pool with an apple in her mouth to entertain her grandparents, who’d been bickering. She’d even swum four circles around Ginger, who was treading water in the deep end. Woody was standing at the pool’s edge, laughing. She still had the apple in her mouth when she got out of the pool and Woody wrapped a towel around her shoulders. He took it from her mouth and bit into it.

  “You look like Esther Williams,” he said, chewing.