Looker

by Laura Sims

  Does she dream at night of their gaping, hungry mouths? Of falling, disappearing, into the void of motherhood? Not that she could ever disappear—but she might fear it anyway. Tonight in class we discussed a haiku by Buson—one of the ways I like to diverge from the strictures of the Western Verse curriculum. “The camellia – / it fell into the darkness / of the old well.” I tried to make my students see the beauty and horror of the poem—the bright white swallowed by limitless darkness, the white lighting the dark as it sinks down, down—but Simon and Bernardo in particular refused to take it at anything more than surface value. I thought of the actress falling, mouth agape, hands waving in air, white linen sundress billowing in the updraft, into nothingness. Consumed. It gave me a moment’s pleasure—and a thrill of fear. Don’t! I would scream, reaching my arms down the well. But then I would linger, waiting for the distant splash. “It’s pretty,” Bernardo said, shrugging. “Don’t try to make it so complicated, Professor.” He sat there, grinning impishly. “It’s horrific,” I snapped. I saw him pull back into himself a tiny bit, and felt satisfied. “Think of her—the camellia—sinking down in full flower, lost forever to darkness. It’s a horror story.” Joanne, Mary, and Chloe nodded in response: they could see it. Simon had lost interest, was consulting his phone. Bernardo still looked puzzled. Not the brightest spark, Bernardo, but definitely the hottest.

  “You made up with your husband,” Bernardo had said almost as soon as I walked in the door. I had the newly polished wedding ring back in place. He grinned slyly. Flustered, I folded my arms over my chest and started class as breezily as I could. I’d dug the ring out of my dresser drawer and taken it to a jewelry store for buffing. I promised myself I’d throw it into the river as soon as the semester ended. Bernardo’s grin stayed fixed, like he wouldn’t let go of the “joke”—or of me. Bright white teeth. The bastard.

  I stared into the hall bathroom mirror after class and said “I am unloved” out loud. I hated watching my dry lips move. Do my students hate watching them move as much as I do? By the end of class, even though I’d just been standing there talking, I’d become a wan and sickly old woman. But I knew how to fix that—I scrounged in my purse for Divine Wine and applied it liberally. Blotted it, applied again. Topped it with Burt’s Bees for a touch of shine. Great improvement. It even lifted my spirits somewhat. Because it made me think of the actress? Perhaps. At least, a little bit.

  *

  I’m in a second-run theater with cramped seats watching a recent film of the actress’s—not the one from the bus poster, but the one that came out just before it, a subpar thriller. I’ve already seen it. She plays a detective wholeheartedly committed to her job—because the rest of her life is a mess. Or else I have it mixed up: as a result of her commitment to her job, the rest of her life is a mess. It’s hard to say which. I note the details of what I suppose could be called the detective’s “home life”: the empty fridge, the amply filled liquor cabinet, the permanently unmade bed, the nightly insomnia, and, of course, the latest broken romance. You’re playing me and you don’t even know it. I pick up my bag of popcorn and tilt the remains into my mouth.

  In the end, she catches the serial killer and finds a promising new love interest. Lucky her. Now she gets to go home to her immaculate, well-appointed brownstone and be a beloved mother, a gifted wife, and a rich, famous person. And me? I get to go home to one floor of an empty, neglected brownstone. And to Cat.

  I sit there for a long time in the half-light of the theater, watching the credits roll. I want to delay that moment when I walk through the lobby doors, smack into the wall of oppressive heat and sunlight. Crowded sidewalks and blaring horns. Can’t I just stay here? And merge with the dark? Nathan used to sit with me as the credits rolled—he would never rush me out as people stood, gathered their coats and bags, and hustled down the aisle. He understood. Why should we rush back out there, to the complexities and letdowns of real life? It was one of the things I loved about him—his ability to savor the post-movie darkness with me. To sit as though the two of us were safe in a cave where no one and nothing could reach us.

  I think life must have been easier for early humans, crouching and sheltering in caves. When the only form of entertainment was watching shadows move on the rock walls, in the firelight. When what mattered was shielding our tribe from saber-toothed tigers. Giant bears. There were actual dangers then—not beautiful, loose-limbed women gliding across the screen and past our doors in costly dresses and costly versions of our own drugstore lipstick, showing us who we aren’t, what we haven’t done, can’t do, and will never have.

  Of course, in ancient times I would have been exiled for my barrenness. Out of the cave, woman, away from the fire. Into the snow with a spear (perhaps) and a bearskin coat, to wander the rocky terrain. Until I was eaten or fatally injured or froze to death. I admire the cleanness and honesty of such an expulsion; I would have been able to taste and touch an emptiness like that.

  Coming home, I turn onto my block and nearly collide with the actress’s husband. He’s jogging, but he holds his hands out and stops, says, “Sorry,” at the same time I do. We lock eyes for a moment. I can tell he’s evaluating me. I can tell he likes what he sees. He smiles, gives a nod, and takes off running up the street. On his way to the park, no doubt. At nearly 10 p.m.? I suppose he can do what he likes. The kids are in bed and the actress is having her wine. But why doesn’t he join her? Isn’t that what married couples with kids do at the end of the day? Relax and reconnect? Watch a show? Perhaps they’ve had a fight and he’s sweating it out. When he comes back, the air will have cleared. She’ll pour him a glass of icy water, bottled and brought direct to them by special shipment from the streams of the Swiss Alps. He’ll wrap his hand around hers when he takes the glass, and the tension will evaporate. Whatever. All that matters is that the husband and I had a moment. I rarely give him a thought, but . . . he has gorgeous dark eyes. And strong, shapely legs. I like his hair how it is now, nearly down to his shoulders, though it was tied back for the jog. I’ve never been with a man with such long hair. Or with such a full beard. The feeling of our moment tingles at the ends of my fingers and toes.

  *

  The next day at lunch, Shana says, “You seem better.” When I roll my eyes she says, “Really! You do! I’m not just saying that!” Shana has the social savvy of a wild boar. I lift my wineglass and feel color rush to my cheeks. The aftereffects of my moment with the husband still linger, even into this new day. “Are you seeing someone?” she asks, tilting her head. I stare down into my wine and smile. Shake my head so my hair falls charmingly into my face. She taps my hand triumphantly. “You are!” she says, raising her voice. I shush her and she whisper-shouts, “You’re seeing someone!” I almost correct her and say, No, it’s nothing, but then I don’t. What do I care what Shana thinks? If I tell her I’m seeing someone, she’ll leave me alone, stop checking in via phone and text with her caring condescension. “I might be,” I say coyly. Shana looks straight at me then and says, “What a relief. Honestly, that’s a big relief.” That stops me cold. Why have I maintained this friendship, built on the bonding that took place over a shitty admin job more than a decade ago? Shana and I are strangers, really—she knows nothing about me and has nothing I want. Nothing I need. I smile coldly and take a gulp of wine as she patters on. She doesn’t even ask who it is, my new love interest, because she doesn’t really care; she just wants to slough me off of her to-do list, so she can move on to discuss more interesting and rewarding topics pertaining to herself and her tidy little married life. The purchase of a new flat-screen TV for their living room. Her son’s second-grade accomplishments, and her relief at having her daughter in preschool full-time, at last. I manage to feign interest, concern, delight, even, at all the appropriate moments, but as we hug goodbye I’m saying, Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, in my head, meaning it forever.

  Cat greets me at the door with the same enthusiasm she used to show Nathan when he came home—pathe
tic creature. Don’t you know, I want to say, he’s dumped you right along with me? It’s shocking that he has, actually, given their long history together. When we were trying to get pregnant he’d drive me crazy by cuddling Cat to his chest and saying things like, “You’ll always be my first baby,” in a ridiculous little voice.

  I have no use for the cat, though I go on keeping it alive. I whisper things into her delicate pink ear I would never say to a human, cruel things about loss and the death of love. The cat twitches her tail, flicks her ear like she’s shooing a fly. Stalks away. But for the last few days, I’ve been good. Kind and attentive. Forgiving of Nathan’s late ownership. Able to see how absurd it is to make an animal pay for its former master’s sins. When I sit at my desk and the cat comes trotting to rub a figure eight around my legs, I pick her up and put her on my lap. I scratch under her chin like Nathan used to do, where the fur is soft and white. She purrs. So hard and loud it’s disturbing. She’s too desperate for love. I push her from my lap and flick the hair she’s left behind off my jeans.

  The next time I see the actress’s husband, he’ll veer toward me on the street. Brush the right side of my body, stoking a quick wave of heat. Then he’ll stop, gesturing in the direction of his house. In the direction of her house. No one’s home, he’ll say. Want to come over? He’ll grab my hand and guide me through their front garden, down to the basement entrance, the family’s most intimate door. I’ll duck my head when I enter and step over the entryway, as I’ve seen visitors to temples and shrines do. He’ll turn to face me, pull me toward that glorious kitchen island of theirs. His warm hands will be on my hips, but I’ll be staring all around—at the floor where she walks, at the ceiling that hangs over her, at the paintings and family photos on the walls and the pots and pans I’ve seen gleaming through the window. The husband won’t seem to notice, or mind. Before I know it, my bare ass will be up on the island and he’ll be pushing his dick deep inside me. Now cue the grunting and groaning as we really start to move, cue the pots and pans shaking above us on their hooks. My hands are in his hair but I keep my eyes glued to a black-and-white photo of the five of them, tumbled up together on a green lawn, all sunglasses and grins. When the husband comes, when he collapses against me and breathes hot air onto my neck, the picture drops from the wall. The glass shatters.

  *

  I feel like a star tonight, standing before my class of overworked adult students. Their collective gaze warms me—it fills my belly with something like pleasure, mirth, belonging. I raise my voice and gesture emphatically as I explain Emily Dickinson’s biography—her historically exaggerated reclusiveness, her correspondence with the great thinkers of the day, her outsized, seemingly erotic passion for God. They’re all hooked, every one. I love you, my dears. Chloe shifts in her seat and smiles as though she has heard me.

  But Bernardo seems to be sulking tonight. He frowns during lecture, averts his eyes when I look at him. He is not at all his usual perky, impertinent self. I find myself directing questions and comments to him, prodding him to speak. He gives only the most perfunctory responses. It doesn’t stop me from being my most effusive and alive, though. Bernardo’s resistance is nothing more than a minor itch. I’m on an Emily Dickinson high, and I feel like cramming her sharp little words and lines down their throats. I mean, lovingly. Adoringly, even. It would be so good for them, so nourishing. I recite the first stanza of poem number 249: “Wild Nights – Wild Nights! / Were I with thee / Wild Nights should be / Our luxury!” while remembering how the actress’s husband’s face contorted when he came. Does he make the same face with her? I wonder. Joanne, a fortysomething singleton like me, looks down at the page with a dour face. “What was she doing, alone in her room, writing this weird stuff?” she asks. “Oh, Joanne,” I say. The class laughs. Joanne reddens, but smiles. I think of my legs veed up in the air on the actress’s island, of the actress’s husband pounding away, right on the spot where she has her nightly glass of wine! What glory! Wild Nights!

  After class, Bernardo stays stuck to his seat. Finally, when the last student has left and we’re alone, he clears his throat but says nothing. “What’s up?” I ask lightly. I’m floating on air. It’s hard for me to focus on his face with filthy images of the actress’s husband crowding my mind. Finally, Bernardo speaks: “Professor, I don’t get why you gave me a C.” It’s his paper, of course. He waves it around, and then slaps it down on his desk. “Oh,” I say warmly. “Come up here and I’ll walk you through it.” I see something flicker in his eyes, some tension releasing. I’ll have him grinning again soon.

  Next time, the husband and I will meet in the park, late at night, when he goes for one of his runs. We’ll clasp hands and walk the main loop until we reach the head of a narrow, winding trail leading into the woods. We’ll follow it over one small hill and down to a gazebo in a secluded clearing. The scene will be almost unbearably picturesque in the moonlight. Pausing to take it in, we’ll look at each other’s strange faces, and after some time he’ll lead me into the gazebo, lay me down on the narrow bench where homeless people sleep and shoot up and rats crawl and babies’ dirty diapers are changed by harried mothers, and he’ll fuck me long and hard and his smooth dark beard will brush against my face while his heart beats in time with mine.

  Imagine the actress discovering us! On our crusty gazebo bench. On the kitchen island, my legs raised in a V. Her lip would curl at the sight of me. Her? she’d ask, incredulous. She’s just one of the neighbors, for Christ’s sake. But wouldn’t it make us sisters of a kind, the actress and me? Wouldn’t it be an act of communion with her, in the end? Could I ever make her see it that way?

  Bernardo’s eyes have cleared, but he looks puzzled. What was I saying? Right. “So if you want to revise, I’ll give you a whole new grade.” He smiles. “Clean slate?” he asks. “Clean slate,” I agree.

  *

  The next morning, I stare into the small green plot shielding, but not obscuring, the garden-level windows to the actress’s house: ferns, a small, leafy tree, window boxes hanging from the gate. All dense and artfully overgrown. But not wild. Not wild. Calm down. I close my eyes for a moment. I can see the gazebo, pale and glittering under the moon, but that’s all. The gazebo is empty. The kitchen is empty, the kitchen island bare. I’ve been locked out of the scene.

  When I go back inside, my phone’s ring is screaming through the apartment. Cat sits by the window, cleaning her paws. On the screen it says: Nathan. Those letters, arranged in that order, raise a wall of black before my eyes. I back away from the phone. Eventually the screeching ends.

  Time passes. I don’t know how much time. I’m sitting on the couch, where I’ve been since . . . the call. In the early days, after the breakup, I longed to see his name on my phone screen, to hear his voice in my ear, to hear him saying, I fucked up, I’ll come back, please, please forgive me. The call that never came. Cat winds herself around my legs, mewing plaintively for dinner. When I look up at the window, I see the light has shifted. The angle and quality of the light. Without warning, we’re lodged inside the sad husk of late afternoon and I’m spooning food into Cat’s dirty bowl.

  I pour myself a large glass of wine. I will not give in to fear. I put the message on speaker—somehow I can handle it better that way. Or I think I can. His smooth, deep, deeply familiar voice fills the room. My skin literally crawls. I scratch my neck and then the backs of my hands as he speaks.

  “Hey. Hi. Uh—this is, this is awkward. But I—I really want to pick up Cat sometime, and her stuff. Is there a good day I could do that? I still have keys, so I could—you know, you don’t have to be there. Let me know. Hope you’re well.”

  You’d expect me to pick up the phone and throw it. Or scream. I don’t. I feel perfectly fine. That damn cat. He doesn’t care about her—he never did! That’s why she has no name but Cat! For fuck’s sake. He loves her as much as I do, which is: a negligible amount. Infinitesimal. Ludicrous—he wants to take Cat back, the final vestige of
our life together. Ha!

  I guzzle half the glass of wine. Time for a walk.

  Dickinson’s poems are full of sex and rage, I told my students the other night. I quoted the lines “Come slowly – Eden! / Lips unused to Thee – / Bashful – sip thy Jessamines – / As the fainting bee.” I said, “She wanted God to come to her, she feared he would come to her—and he did. She got what she wanted, in the end.” I got nothing, I think as I wander, skating my eyes over worn faces hungry faces scared faces glowing happy faces, all evening long. It’s the wine or it’s the fast slippage of time that pulls me along for hours before I realize my fatigue. My aching feet. I return to my block at last and stand outside the actress’s house. It is 9 p.m. I see her husband in there, phone to his ear, showing his white teeth, insatiable wolf.

  If he were to come out tonight he would see me sweaty and disheveled, with wine breath and wild hair. He would like me like that: flawed and mussed, so unlike his wife. But the wolf won’t come out. There will be no island, no gazebo, no dark beard in the moonlight. The wolf is really a dog, a good dog lying at its mistress’s feet, obedient and true.

  Still, I can’t seem to move from my post in front of their house. Inside my apartment is the phone and inside the phone is Nathan. His voice. His demands. As always, his demands—even after he’s gone he makes demands, but this one I refuse to meet. He will not take Cat! I won’t give her up. Something like love wells up inside me, surprising me with its force—love for poor Cat, rejected and broken like me. I feel shaken and have to bend over, hands on my knees, breathing deeply by the actress’s gate.

  I’m still trembling there when I hear a door open. Someone’s coming out of the house. It’s too late for me to move so I stay put, hoping I’m invisible in the night. Footsteps. I can’t see anything but I know it’s him. He stops at the gate, clears his throat. “You all right?” He sounds wary. I straighten up and look into his handsome, frowning face. I want to see welcome there—or recognition, or lust—but his face is blank. The mask someone wears when he’s looking at a weird stranger standing too close to his family home. “I’m fine,” I say, mumbling, and speed-walk up the street, away from the actress’s husband.