Cake Time

by Siel Ju

  I let myself feel again that small, posed moment of tenderness. Maybe that’s what closeness really was. We could all keep waiting to come across something more visceral, more real, but reality was always strung up in the performative wires of living itself. Better to take it all at face value, without digging around in constant agitation to find something more beneath it. Better not to idealize love, or desire, or affection. Perhaps the cookbook author and I really were as intimate as her collusive attitude had implied when she’d stood by me. Perhaps she had the right idea, eating whatever she thought best in private, but maintaining a veggie, leggy exterior. At least it got people to eat more vegetables, and gave them hope. And perhaps Lana too really was sincere, her nakedly self-promoting efforts simply an honest reflection of this sincerity.

  Lana had stopped talking. We stood watching the dancing crowd, and above them, the projector flashed through the photos from the competition events. The photo of me with the cookbook author came up, and seeing it, I felt exposed yet also gratified in a small way. “Hey, that’s you,” Lana said, then looked at me and smiled.

  It was time for the winner to be revealed. The dance music faded out, the finalists were lined up center stage, and the emcee who’d introduced the videos earlier started officiating. He was a good-looking guy, a host on some small cable show, but he was clearly drunk now, his eyelids at half-mast. “We’ve really run these women through the gauntlet,” he said, “though I personally would have liked a mud-wrestling contest.” A few people tittered. After another minute or so of this the older emcee from the morning took over the mic, somewhat forcibly, and walked us through the judging process. The crowd that until a few minutes ago had been dancing sweatily against each other now stood in lonely, self-conscious postures, waiting unhappily.

  Unhappy, bored: This was how people really felt about environmentalism and its killjoy mentality, I thought, feeling smug. At the same time my appreciation for Lana grew. So she was showoff-y, but so what? There was a vague emptiness at the center of Lana’s message that still bothered me, but she was smart in her own way, strategic, and deserved the mic more than the boob slurring about mud-wrestling, or the tight-lipped guy droning on about carbon emissions now, unaware of the mood of the crowd.

  In the end I was glad Lana won the competition. It wasn’t so much that she’d managed to win as that she’d decided to win from the start, to make that firm grab, and the tenacity and certainty of that was refreshing, so unlike the wishy-washy, I’ll try and hope for the best-ness of the rest of us. Watching Lana hold that little trophy above her head, both arms raised and chest thrust out like in a gymnast finish, I did feel a little proud of her. I liked her even more when, after her husband came up and gave her a congratulations hug, she stepped away from him with a hint of irritation and held the trophy aloft again to dying applause. This was a big moment for her, winning this tiny environmental competition, and seeing that made me feel protective of her happiness.

  After that the crowd dispersed. There was a long queue out front for the valet, and waiting in it holding my ticket, I saw the raw cookbook author on the good-looking emcee’s arm, giggling as she got into his car, a silver convertible. She turned and saw me watching her. “Oh hey!” she said brightly. She pointed vaguely in the direction of the emcee, who was walking around to the driver’s side. “He’s giving me a ride home,” she said. “Uh-huh,” I said, and she blushed a little, and shrugged. Then they were off into the night, the red taillights blinking on and off cheerily.

  The next morning I had several emails from Lana. Each one was long and a little strange. One asked that I not mention the word “model” in my article, never mind that the tagline for the competition had been “Be a model for the environment.” She said that as the winner, she was trying to do something different, that she was really positioning herself as an intelligent voice for the cause. The word “model,” she felt, would undermine her efforts, so she’d appreciate my help with this. I sent back a rather caustic email, to the effect that she could do her job, and I would do mine. At this she wrote back that she understood, she certainly hadn’t meant to step on my toes. “You determine how the world sees this,” she wrote. “I trust you’ll do the right thing.”

  The world. I scoffed, at her, and also at myself. Lana didn’t seem to realize how little my article mattered, even in the small scheme of things. Then on reflection, I thought maybe she was right to be concerned, to try to do what she could to shape how she’d be portrayed. Sure, only a few thousand people would bother to read my write-up, but anyone, at any time, would be able to google it. Perhaps she was wise, more cognizant than I of the web’s panopticon. I googled her name with the word “model,” and saw that the phrase immediately brought up all the softcore porn photos on the first page, and at that I felt a little sorry for her, her feeble, belated attempt to separate her past and present personae. I emailed back saying I thought she’d be happy with the piece, and apologized that it would be an online-only article. I said that the magazine was trying to expand its web presence and hinted that its web traffic was not high, and I imagined Lana reading this and feeling both disappointed and relieved.

  I realized this was how I felt about my own work. It wasn’t much, but I had my small little place in the world, and there was a certain freedom in being out of the limelight. I recalled again the night Alek and I found his car using the camera kiosk. Driving to my place afterwards, I told him I had mixed feelings about the cameras. I was thinking back to high school, when cars were about the most private spaces we had. Where did teenagers have sex these days, I wondered. I wondered if they had less sex, or if the sex was even more furtive and closeted, frightening in the YouTube era. This made me a little sad, though almost immediately I began to deliberate over whether or not a little inhibition may be a good thing, may have been a good thing for me.

  “Why mixed feelings?” Alek asked.

  I deliberated for a moment. “It prevents a certain freedom of imagination,” I said. I’d meant it as an innuendo though I wasn’t sure he’d get it. A lot of jokes in English still sailed right past him.

  He smiled though. “Tell me what you’re imagining,” he said, and squeezed my thigh. I laughed, and he slid his hand up, bunching my skirt. For a second I thought about stopping him, then decided not to. Whoever was watching the cameras would never see us in real life anyway. And in any case, the cameras weren’t watching us. They were watching the cars.

  Glow

  The night after the night we broke up, Alek showed up at my doorstep unannounced. He pounded on the door, yelling my name. For some reason my first reaction was to look at the clock. It was eight, time for his Saturday AA meeting. My next reaction was to get up and quickly open the door to stop the banging. Alek and I stared at each other in the sudden quiet. He looked strange and familiar across the doorjamb. It was the first time I’d seen him drunk.

  “I want to go to the beach,” he said slurrily, his Russian accent thicker. “Like first time. For closure.”

  It was September and a chilly breeze was coming in from the ocean. Above us I could hear the helicopter that had been circling the neighborhood since noon. During the day it had sounded lazy and droning, but now it imbued the dark with a foreboding turbulence. Behind Alek I could see my neighbor’s cat across the shared mini patio, staring at us from behind the mesh of the screen door. When she saw me, she pawed at the mesh like she was saying hello.

  Alek made a motion like he was going to come in and I stepped to the center of the doorframe, stopping him. We had broken up, and I didn’t want the boundaries to get fuzzy again.

  “Okay,” he said. “Come out. Let’s go to the beach.” He used that gruff, take it or leave it tone he’d used each time he’d told me he didn’t want a serious relationship, not yet. But this time his unfocused eyes were liquid and pleading. His jaw was slack.

  “You’ve been drinking,” I said disapprovingly. Still, the muted fascination in my voice was obvious. I couldn’
t help it. It crept in whenever I learned something new about him, even if it was something I didn’t want to hear.

  Alek held up his hands as if I was pointing a gun at him. “I’ve stopped already,” he said. His fingers were splayed, like jazz hands. “Stopped,” he repeated rather loudly, and at that my neighbor came to his screen door and picked up his cat.

  My neighbor was a kindly older man who shared the tomatoes from his container garden with me in the summers. He raised his hand in a wave, like his cat had done.

  “You kids going to beach?” my neighbor asked. He called us kids though Alek and I were both in our mid-thirties. “It’s Glow tonight, you know.”

  Alek and I had met at Barnes & Noble, the one on Third Street Promenade. He’d helped me lift down a Vivian Maier tome I couldn’t reach. He said he was there looking for a book about self-publishing on Amazon. “But I was distracted by you,” he said, smiling, though I’d been the one to talk to him first. He looked very European to me, in his teal jeans and V-neck shirt. His posture was jaunty but intense, his presence visceral, physical. “You’re in the wrong section,” I said. “You’re lost.”

  He kept smiling. “Yes,” he said. “You win.”

  He suggested taking a walk, first to the pier, then down the beach. The sand was empty but still warm from the summer heat. We’d found an abandoned volleyball and kicked it around, then kissed leaning against lifeguard tower twenty-five.

  Since then, a year had passed. Now I said I’d only go to the beach if I drove, and Alek handed me his keys like this was our usual habit, like we’d been sharing a car for some time. The intimacy of this gesture unnerved me and I complied, walking past my car to get into his, opening the passenger door for him from the inside because his automatic locks didn’t work, hadn’t worked since before we’d met.

  Glow was a big, interactive art exhibit on the beach that the city put on one night a year, an event I’d never bothered to go to in the past. Because of the traffic we parked pretty far south and walked up the beach. Giddy young people biked by us in energetic clusters, laughing and yelling over their shoulders, imbuing the air around them with an alert electricity. There were many walkers too; we passed some and were passed by some, all of us moving expectantly toward the Ferris wheel on the pier, its LED lights scrolling through sharp, geometric swirls. Alek took my hand and I didn’t resist him. His energy felt angry and unpredictable and incoherently masochistic, and I thought my literal hold on him would give me some control over his actions.

  My hand did seem to have a pacifying effect. Alek moved closer to me as the crowds thickened, walking politely, careful not to step on anyone’s heels. I’d never seen the beach this packed before; we missed the first exhibit entirely because it was completely hidden behind a long wall of waiting people. Gentle hordes clustered like bees around the big lit globes that marked each exhibit, and milled about reading the sign before splintering off into small groups and wading industriously through the loose sand, toward the actual artworks.

  Alek and I tromped to the first exhibit we spotted. It looked like a gigantic net hanging down from the sky in messy parabolas, lit up in changing, luminous colors. Below it, the sand had been sculpted into hills and valleys. Little boys busied themselves running up and down these moldings. Clusters of teenagers sat in the low points, possessively hoarding the shadowy areas, trying to mask their youthful enthusiasm with cultivated postures of apathy. The more adult stood shoulder to shoulder on the high ridges, watching the colors morph on the nets and occasionally looking around at each other. I looked around too; there was the sense that something else was supposed to happen, though nothing did.

  Alek asked if I was cold, then put his arms around me. He smelled like vodka but he felt the way he always did, which comforted me. He said we should go by the water so we did, and he held me there as we watched the little waves come in. He said he was glad to be out, then added, “with you.”

  Twenty-four hours before we’d been lying naked in my bed, not touching. We’d just had sex, then the half-dozenth argument about whether or not we were “committed.” He’d said he wasn’t seeing anyone else and wasn’t going to. I’d said I couldn’t take him referring to me as his “friend” anymore, that this behavior was juvenile. We’d argued for a while and then we’d fallen silent. After some time he’d said, “Do you want me to go?” In the past I’d sometimes hedged this question, sometimes said okay, then when he called my bluff, reduced myself to begging him to stay. But I was angry this night, a year to the day since we’d met. I got up and got dressed. Then I held the door open until he got dressed too. When he finally stepped outside I said, “Wait,” and he stopped expectantly. I ran to the bathroom and got his toothbrush. I handed it to him and turned on the porch light. “Watch your step,” I said, pointing my chin at the stairs. I saw his face shift, harden. Then I closed the door.

  Now here we were, on the sand again. I was wearing old jeans and a shapeless hoodie, what I’d had on when Alek had started banging on the door. I was embarrassed by my shabby outfit but Alek didn’t seem to notice. I’d taken off my shoes and my feet were cold in the sand. I shivered a little. Alek zipped up my hoodie, then hugged me tightly. His lips pressed against my ear, slack and wet. “This is not me,” he said, whispering. “You know this is not me. I call my sponsor tomorrow.” He paused. “Tonight.”

  I put my arms around him too. There was a new tenderness to him I wanted to wallow in. He seemed to be sobering up. Before this Alek had been sober four years and counting. Or maybe three years, since there was that slip up that had landed him back in detox that he’d mentioned once, in passing. I wasn’t sure. I could never figure out the timeline of his biography because his math was always fuzzy. He mentioned often the rigorous honesty part of the twelve-step program but he also told a lot of lies of omission. I’d fallen for him because he was affectionate and spontaneous and generous. He’d brought flowers and encouraged my writing and cooked for me when I was sick. It was only once I got comfortable that he revealed he wasn’t divorced, that in fact he was so newly separated that he hadn’t even found a place yet, he was living out of his office. The separation had wrecked his credit, he confessed. Then one day he showed me a video of his five-year-old daughter twirling in a tutu. He showed me this in such a vulnerable way that I felt closer to him and forgave his secrecy. The daughter lived in Palos Verdes with her mother, who’d gotten Alek his US citizenship and who was still legally his wife, though he never referred to her as such. I’d realized soon after that he also never referred to me as his girlfriend.

  Once we got back to my place, our feet were gritty and we were both tired but we still moved toward each other with a tender resolve. Our motions as we undressed felt obligatory, but affectionate too, in its doggedness. Still, once we were naked, I kept getting distracted. I remembered Alek’s big smile at the bookstore, like he couldn’t believe his incredible luck, as he entrusted the weight of the Maier tome into my hands. I held that image close as Alek kissed me now, my mouth, my breasts. He went down on me, then after I came, stayed with his face burrowed between my legs. I swiveled my body around and took him in my mouth. I pictured him young, imagined how he’d looked eleven years ago when he’d just moved to California, working as an off-the-books hotel security guard with the San Francisco fog damp in his hair, his attitude impulsive and cocky despite the muted fears about his future. I got that tense, fraught feeling again, like I needed to act quickly, I needed to figure it out before I lost my chance for good. It was then that Alek reached down and softly touched my head. “I can sense your teeth a little bit,” he said. His tone as he said this was very gentle, apologetic, and for some reason that suddenly brought into focus the hilarious absurdity of our night, my life. For a second I had the urge to burst out laughing, though the feeling faded, and I didn’t.

 

 

  you for reading books on Archive.