I suppose it was rape. That’s what we argued at the trial, that I was raped—because a woman’s sexual past still explains everything, is both cause and effect of everything in her life; she is necessarily good and sweet until a man corrupts her, and then you can’t blame her—it’s not her fault, it’s the man’s fault. I’ve heard people say that rape is worse than murder, which is to say that a woman’s sexual purity or dignity is more important than her life. Needless to say, I don’t buy that. Under threat of violence or death, my dignity means nothing and my sexual purity even less. Besides, I didn’t process it as a rape at the time. I know it sounds crazy, but right to the end, I nursed the delusion that I was somehow in control of it all.
After they had finished, the man put his cowboy hat on and left. Benoit stayed, stroking my hair and calling me “peach.” It was light outside, the sky a luminous white. I took a shower. You’re probably wondering why I did that, why I stayed. There’s no deep psychological reason. I just felt like a fucking shower. I turned it as hot as it would go, and then I sprayed diarrhea all over his toilet bowl. After I’d flushed, and used toilet paper to wipe away my mess—hilarious, but I was humiliated at the thought that he might discover my waste—I stepped into the shower and stood there until the water started going cold. When I got out, Benoit was fast asleep. I stood there watching him, my chest going up and down, though I had the strange sense I wasn’t really breathing. Water dripped from my hair down my back, making me shiver.
I had a sudden compulsion, as clear and reflexive as a knee jerk when the doctor brings his tiny hammer down, to rifle through Benoit’s things. The idea made my heart pound in the most sickeningly delicious way. I told myself it was not a good idea, and I shouldn’t do it, even as I quietly and carefully opened a drawer in his dresser. Don’t do it, I kept thinking, don’t do it, as I catalogued the items. In the next drawer, I found his diary. I turned to look at Benoit to make sure he was still sleeping. He was. I opened it up to the middle, and saw the words fuck and millionaire. The rest was in Bulgarian. I flipped further ahead, and looked at sketches he had made of a naked woman sleeping. Though the face was not filled in, and bore only hints of features—a Cupid’s bow for lips, simple curved lines for eyes—I thought I recognized Gemma in it. I had broken into a cold sweat all over my body. There was a strange ticklish feeling in the pit of my stomach. I wanted to wake Benoit and throttle him. I wanted to rip him from limb to limb. Instead, I forced myself to close the book quietly and slid it back among his things, telling myself I could come back for it later, that I could take it home with me—he wouldn’t notice—even as another voice inside of me implored me to stop, to not go forward, to leave. I knelt at the bedside table and very carefully opened the drawer, glancing every three seconds at Benoit’s immobile form, my entire body humming with the fear that he might wake and see what I was doing. I was looking for the Polaroid of Gemma. My muse. I wanted to look at it again, to get that sick twist of pleasure that comes when you’ve picked a scab and the blood starts dribbling. There were dozens more Polaroids in the drawer, all of them of women in various stages of undress. I flipped through them impatiently. None were of her. Almost all were young, thin, beautiful. But not her. One was even of me, though I had no recollection of it being taken. Benoit snorted in his sleep, and I hurriedly put the pile of photos back into the drawer. He rolled onto his stomach and began to snore. I sat back on my heels, trying to slow my breath. A feeling of disappointment and dissatisfaction settled in my stomach—but what was I disappointed about? That I hadn’t found anything more incriminating? That I hadn’t found a better tool to self-flagellate with?
I watched my hand open the drawer back up and, as if I were sleepwalking, as if it had nothing to do with me, I searched the rest of its contents. That was when I found the locket. It was inside a little zippered jewelry case, wrapped in a soft velvety fabric, at the back of the drawer. I recognized it instantly: the heavy gold chain, and the fine engraving, which spelled the word paix, with the little ruby set on one side of it. There was never any doubt that it was hers. I had always known it was expensive, but the weight of it clarified that assessment. It was not just expensive, it was priceless. Hands trembling, I opened it up. There was nothing there, though that did not stop a thousand images from dancing through my mind. Benoit had given her this precious thing, he’d wanted it to rest against her chest, hitting the bones of her clavicle every time he fucked her. And even now, he held on to the thing: a symbol of their love, both precious and weighty, something I could never understand. He kept it swaddled in velvet, it was so important to him; he slept beside it every fucking night. How foolish I’d been to believe he might one day grow to find me interesting. Oh, I’d never fallen for any of his cheesy peach business, I never imagined he liked me, but I thought he might come to value me in a certain way. I thought I could be his muse. Now I saw how pointless that had been. Even though Gemma’s Follower count had plateaued, and even though the industry had clearly begun to tire of her, he still loved her. He would never see me the way he saw her. I told myself it was irrational to fault him over that; he was allowed to feel how he felt. He couldn’t help it if things were still unresolved with her. But rage bubbled up inside me all the same, and I wanted to do violence to him, not just physically but emotionally. I wanted to hurt him—bad—and part of what made the desire so intense was the knowledge that I never could.
I probably knew I would take the locket as soon as I found it. All the same, I pretended to hesitate before stuffing it in my purse.
I found the rest of my things in the living room and dressed quickly. I left without saying goodbye, but not before I had found Benoit’s aviators and snapped them in half.
* * *
—
On the car ride home, I comforted myself by watching last night’s Stories. I looked beautiful and happy in those images, and that instantly calmed me. Things could not be so bad if you looked like that. I watched the bones move beneath the skin on my chest as I raised a glass of champagne; absentmindedly I touched the same bones today, trying to reconcile the image with the reality. Julia posted a photo of the three of us hugging sloppily near the bar. I didn’t remember her taking the picture. In the huddle. Hut! Hut! read the caption. I hit Like. Chocolate, my cousin’s dog, was learning how to sit. The episodes of amnesia and disassociation were found to be recurring, potentially permanent, in a small percentage of Brazilian Flu patients, though the vast majority go on to recover from the disease without any lasting side effects. It was still unknown whether the antibodies could be properly detected, and how long they would last. Joe Biden’s son Hunter was being accused of buying off public officials or some sort of other shadiness, which I was having trouble following. Kylie Jackson’s pole-dancing video was banned by some universities and other institutions in the U.K. Julia sent a video to our DM thread with Blake. How fucking rad?
The video was a close-up of Karma Black’s face, framed by navel-length dreads. In it, she has full lips, a strong nose, sparkling black eyes, and light-brown skin, with a heavy dusting of freckles across her nose and cheeks. She cocks her head to one side to accommodate a pair of clippers that has appeared in the upper right-hand corner. Her tongue flicks out and presses against her upper lip as she drags the clippers back from her temple, along her scalp, and her dreads fall away.
There were 8K Likes. I studied her name, @KarmaIsABitch, wishing briefly that I’d been given a cool name like Karma, to facilitate a clever Instagram handle. I tapped my thumb against the blue Follow button; Follow shivered and disappeared and was replaced by Following. I pressed her name and my screen opened up into a vista of small squares of Karma Black’s face.
Karma Black is dancing in the center of her living room, or a living room; there’s a bulbous vintage leather sofa to her right, the kind that looks like a beat-up baseball glove, and a mid-century coffee table laden with books and empty wineglasses. The carpet is a Moroccan thing,
the kind West Elm started copying, though Karma Black’s is obviously vintage, the real deal. Karma is wearing overalls and nothing else but a choker around her neck. Her tattoos, all black ink drawings: a butterfly just below her collarbone, a snake coiled around her wrist, indecipherable cursive along her shoulder, an arrow up one inner forearm, and a feather on the other. One hand in the air, the other out in front of her, she rides an imaginary horse. I tapped Unmute, and Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” blared in the back seat of the Uber. I scrolled down.
Karma Black is wearing a Hawaiian shirt and hugging a skinny white girl with a bowl cut, both of them falling over as if from the force of the embrace. Happy dyke day, the caption reads. The photo is geo-tagged The Rising.
Karma Black is marching in the street, a fist raised in the air; she’s wearing Vans, a wifebeater, shredded army pants. I don’t bother reading the caption to find out what she’s protesting.
Karma Black is—
A red bubble exploded on the upper right-hand corner of my screen. My mother, who was probably just waking up, had commented on my Stories from the night before with dozens of heart-eyed emojis.
So beautiful! she wrote. Have fun!
I called her, thinking she might be able to console me, even though I would never have admitted at the time that I needed consoling. But all she wanted to talk about was the appeal hearing.
“Saul’s got a really good feeling about this one.”
“Doesn’t he always, though?” I snapped.
She didn’t seem to catch the irony in my voice, and answered earnestly. “It’s true. What a godsend.”
From the beginning, Saul had wanted me to be highly visible at my dad’s trial. He said it’d look good to the jury that he had such a beautiful, sweet-faced blond daughter. “Even if you don’t say much,” he’d said, “even if you don’t say anything at all, it’ll count for something to see you, this beautiful young woman, well-bred, articulate, and kind.” I asked him how they’d know I was kind. “People aren’t that deep. They mostly look at what’s on the surface. And they’ll think, Well, how could he be that bad if this is his daughter?” He actually patted me on the head when he said that, then sent me off to be interviewed by one of his associates, who coached me on being a character witness. Of course, I couldn’t remember anything about my father that might qualify as character-building. Even my best memories of my father usually involved him performing some irreverent act, or saying something outrageous. Eventually, though, we landed on something that could work, and on the stand, I’d told a story about how my father had taught me to ride a bike. It was something I’d seen in an AT&T commercial once. Everyone ate it up. My dad’s eyes even started watering in court. He actually believed it, that’s how deluded he was. I still don’t know how to ride a bike.
“Anyway,” my mother went on, “we’re still on for Thursday, right? Don’t forget.”
“I won’t.”
“Well, last time—”
“I know, Mom. I’m sorry. I’ll be there.”
“Let’s go somewhere fun,” she said in an excited, girlish voice. “Maybe we’ll have something to celebrate!”
“Sure.”
“Oh, but you know what, I’m supposed to be eating keto.” She paused, I think waiting for me to tell her that she didn’t need to diet. “That’s when you eat only high-fat and protein so you train your body to—”
“I know what keto is, Mom.”
“Well, I’m just trying to get in good shape for when your father comes home.”
I sighed loudly.
“If I can lose five pounds, just five pounds, I’ll be happy.”
My mom always said that if she could lose just five pounds, she’d be happy, and she always said it exactly like that, with the just and everything, as if she were haggling over the price of happiness with some unseen overlord. But no matter how thin she got, she never shed those five pounds that were keeping her from happiness. I wanted to tell her to give it up finally. To forget the fantasy of my father’s return and stop dieting; to for once in her life figure out what she wanted to do, take pottery classes or learn to speak another language, do something. But I knew from experience there was no point. She wouldn’t even understand the concept. It’s not really her fault since she grew up in a generation of women that just did everything to please their husbands, because that was their best shot at any kind of financial security. Women in my generation have other options, and know that the best way to build their wealth is to build their own personal brands, not their husbands’. Building your personal brand means getting people to want or admire you so they’ll give you things, whether that means impressing someone at a job interview or making good grades to get a scholarship or fucking a photographer and a dude in a cowboy hat because it gives you a better shot at booking a lucrative campaign. It’s all the same, it’s just about knowing what to capitalize on.
Instead of saying all that, though, I told her I’d look up some keto-friendly places in the city.
“Thanks, darling,” she said. “And give your father a call, if you can. Wish him good luck.”
“Sure,” I lied.
“He misses you.”
“Uh-huh, Mom, I’m just going through a tunnel.”
“Okay, well, if you do reach him, just—”
I hung up before she could finish. I took the locket out of my bag and felt its weight in my palm. I secured it around my neck, just to see how it felt, what it was like. Every time the car drove over a bump, it bounced against my chest, hitting bone. I thought about how it would have hit Gemma like that, thwapped like a heartbeat against her rib cage. I remembered how once, in a video, she had popped the thing in her mouth absentmindedly while she flipped through magazines. In fact, she was often touching it. How many times had I watched her play with its chain or—in a habitual, instinctual way—readjust it so that its clasp hung at the nape of her neck? Every time the clasp would sneak down towards the locket, she would pinch it between her thumb and forefinger and slide it upwards and back, while she gently held the locket in place with her other hand. Come to think of it, I had never seen Gemma without it, except for when she did a fashion show or was photographed for an editorial. I felt a growing sense of unease.
I texted Julia and Blake: You guys were just fucking with me last night right?
Of course they had been. I wasn’t really worried. But I recognized that last night had had a deleterious effect on my anxiety levels, and I didn’t think there’d be any harm in having them actually say it. The sky was still white; it was overcast. I unrolled my window to see if the rain had diminished the heat. It had, only slightly. But there was little reprieve, since the humidity was far thicker than days previous. I knew it would rain again, and soon, possibly this afternoon. I looked at the people walking on the street and thought everyone looked a little gray, and depressed.
Blake responded: Lol.
We pulled up to my apartment and I got out, still wearing the locket. My legs were stiff. I felt bruises developing along my knees. The homeless man was still sleeping beside my door in an upright position, his face like a waterlogged gourd. I was waiting for Julia to say something, to make fun of me for being so gullible. As soon as I got into my apartment, I stripped naked and drank a tall glass of water, cold, from the tap. I placed a fan on the bedside table and lay down on top of the covers. I closed my eyes and let the fan dry the sweat from my body. When I checked my phone again, Julia still hadn’t written.
I wrote: I’m serious guys.
Julia responded right away. Lol.
So you ARE just fucking with me.
Lol, from Blake.
So they were trying to make me feel bad about ditching them last night. Fine. Ordinarily, I’m down for such jokes. Really, I like a good ribbing, I can take it. But, as spent as I was, I was not in the mood.
C’mon, I wrote, not wanting
to seem dramatic. I feel like I’m being gaslit.
Lol.
Lol.
Okay, seriously, I don’t think this is funny. I was growing irate. Maybe it wasn’t cool of me to leave them last night, maybe it was even a little bit rude. But it wasn’t as if either of them hadn’t ditched me before. When Julia started fucking this bartender and thought she’d fallen madly in love with him it was like we didn’t even exist for a while.
I wrote again: I’m sorry about last night, but like, you guys have done the exact same thing before. Remember Admiral? That was actually the bartender’s name. Julia had made him show her his driver’s license.
Wtf does that have to do with this?
You disappeared for a month, I wrote.
Wtf, I’m lost.
Me too.
So am I!!! I wrote.
I just thought it was funny to write lol, I had no idea what it was even about.
I started to type about Gemma, but stopped myself. It suddenly seemed juvenile to drive the point home. Clearly, they had been upset about last night and had wanted to let me know, in their passive-aggressive way. Now that I had apologized, they were dropping it. I couldn’t be too annoyed about it. After all, I’d thrown a fit before when Julia went MIA at a party or two, sneaking away to be with Admiral while I was forced to…entertain the male guests that she herself had insisted on tailing.
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