The painting will remain on display until closing, at which point a stranger will possess a piece of Amanda. She likes that her image will arrive with prefabricated damage, impervious to any further imperfections. She spends a large part of the evening examining her fictional wounds, the illusory wetness of the paint making them fresher than scars.
“It’s perverse.”
She turns to find Frank beside her.
He adds, “Like it’s glorifying violence against women.” His authoritative tone rankles her.
“It’s showing a common fact,” she says.
He takes a few steps back and surveys the row of female torsos. “It feels like a gimmick. How’d you find this guy?”
“He came to the shop,” she says. “He also lives across the street. This one is of me.” She points.
Frank steps closer. He zeroes in on the garish splotches of red on the otherwise pristine skin. “Why would you let him do that?”
“I asked him to,” she says.
He leans in and whispers so forcefully that spittle hits her cheek. “Why would you want this? After what happened to you — ”
“He knows, Frank. Don’t make it such a sacred fucking thing.” Her voice carries more than she intended. A few patrons stare, entertained by the possibility of a lovers’ quarrel. Frank lowers his gaze, spots a stray thread unraveling at his sleeve and plucks at it needlessly.
“This helped me,” she says.
He laughs, a quick swallow of air, then reaches for the painting.
He manages to get his hand around the wooden frame and to pull it off the nails before she gets to him. She yanks hard on his elbow and the painting clatters to the concrete floor, then teeters there. Amanda grabs the side, propping it up against the wall.
By now, Ryan sees the commotion and confronts Frank. “Don’t touch the art,” he says.
“You don’t have the right,” Frank says.
“That painting doesn’t even belong to me. It sold already.”
Again, Frank reaches for the painting, but Ryan shoves him aside. Frank punches him, connecting with the jaw, an act of violence unrivaled by any other action he has thus far taken in his life. This much Amanda knows, and through her horror — or, more accurately, from his horror — she feels the shame of excitement.
Ryan clutches his face, and Frank steps away, his fingers splayed.
“I’m sorry.” Frank stares at his hands. “You need to leave,” Amanda says.
“I just don’t understand why you would want him to do this.” He looks to Ryan, who shakes his head.
“Just get out of here, man.”
Amanda notices how people have crept away from the art, seeking refuge in the book stacks. “Go outside,” she says.
Frank nods, then walks to the exit.
She checks on Ryan’s face; there’s a sweltering redness but nothing serious. When she follows Frank outside, he’s already out of sight.
The streets are nearly empty by the time Amanda walks home. A couple of teenage girls scurry past her, barefoot and tugging on their tight skirts, suddenly self-conscious without a crowd to lose themselves in.
She finds Frank at her place, sitting on the ledge and staring out the window.
“Which apartment is it?” he asks.
“You planning on hitting him again?”
“You sit here watching him at night,” he says.
“Yes.”
“Have you fucked him?”
She hesitates, not wanting to gratify him.
“Have you?” he asks.
“No,” she says. “Are you going to fuck me?”
Frank stands, knocking over the small table she keeps by the window.
He pushes her onto the bed and shoves his hand against her breast, then between her legs. “Is this what you want?” he says. She feels her throat burn and she realizes she’s crying. She nods and reaches for him beneath his jeans, feels what he won’t do. She tries to stroke him, to make him want her, but he shoves her hands away.
He slides off and sits with his back to her at the foot of the bed.
“You lied to me,” he says.
“I only want you,” she says. “You’re the only one I’ve trusted enough to feel this way.”
“You trust me because I’m your fucking eunuch.”
She goes to light a cigarette, a real one, and cracks the window to exhale.
After several minutes, she notices the light turn on across the street. She watches Ryan check the dryness of a canvas, then lean it against the wall, primed and blank.
Frank walks up behind her and says, “Go to him.”
“You don’t mean that,” she says.
“You can’t even go through with it,” he says. “It’s just easier for you to blame me.”
That he might be right scares her. She leaves without a word, leaves Frank sitting at her window.
She stops at the corner market and buys cheap wine. She brings it to Ryan, insisting that they celebrate his sold paintings, including her portrait. She drinks most of the bottle herself. When the last drop is gone, she kisses him, unbuttoning his shirt as soon as he kisses her back.
His touch is practiced. She can recognize his routine, but it’s what she wants, she realizes. To be acted upon as she excavates the nature of her desire. He touches her deliberately, trying to ready her, then presses in, his hips bruising her thighs. She feels her body tense, resisting him, creating pain, but she surrenders until there is nothing but numbness. Gravity weighs on his face, deepening the creases that frame his mouth as he looks through her with dark, inscrutable eyes. She wants eyes like pale water, prismatic. She can’t see beyond the harsh lights.
Amanda wishes she felt the spurring of reciprocation, but even as he moves inside her, she thinks, did someone take this from me? Or is this me? Was this always me, trying to fix an unbroken thing?
Ryan finishes and she lets him hold her.
After he turns the lights off, after her eyes adjust, she stares across the street and tries to discern the figure of a man in her window.
OVERNIGHTS WELCOME
The virus would leave you stock-still for months — years, in the flukish nightmare cases that made the Sunday news specials. One day you could run ten miles, chug a beer in the shower, and endure surprisingly long in bed, leaving your lover spent, slick with summer sweat. But in slips a mosquito, and welcome to paralysis.
It went that way for Zach in Coffeeville. He could still talk, slow and slurred, saliva trickling down his chin, but he struggled to operate his own wheelchair. George would sometimes see Mindy guiding Zach around the square on Sundays, their sulking daughter in tow. Once he saw Mindy spooning ice cream into his mouth. A glob slid out of his limp lips and settled into his lap like a pigeon shit. George felt Zach staring at him then, a tensing of the brows, anger perhaps at becoming George’s spectacle — a story he’d share with Jamie later as they perfectly swallowed their mashed potatoes.
George had nightmares that consisted solely of the keening whir of insect wings. Just blackness and that high frequency buzz against the ear, followed by the silence of its landing, its feeding, and the awareness that the virus was being deposited through the skin, buoyed by saliva injected into the bloodstream.
Jamie was pregnant, her maternity tops tenting over her belly like a fumigation tarp. They never left the house after dark. The windows were never open. The mosquitoes ruled the night, which was why the invitation for the Wrights’ party was such a shock.
“Maybe they meant A.M. instead of P.M.?” Jamie said, flipping the invitation back and forth for inspection, then fanning herself with it.
“Who starts a party at six in the morning?” George said.
It was true; many of the Coffeeville residents had taken to day drinking, moving their parties to the mornings and calling them brunches. It was the only way to blow off steam and still walk safely home in the full light of day. Even still, they had to avoid the particularly lush backyards. Even then,
a stray mosquito could find you in the shade. Zach was playing croquet in the Wrights’ backyard the week before he froze up, following the ball into the long shadows of the centuries-old oaks. Now they only played croquet in the harsh glare of the sun, sweat sprouting beneath the women’s broad-brimmed hats. The local bars closed at sundown. There was no point in staying open. The Lodge was already shuttered forever.
George struggled to see the fine print of the card, despite Jamie’s fluttering.
“Can I?” he said, reaching.
The front was a glossy square image of a bright blue door. The other side listed the times, with an asterisk corresponding to a footnote that read overnights welcome. He read that part aloud.
“My God,” Jamie said. “Is it a swingers party?”
“Surely not,” George said, but a small unbidden hope un furled and stood erect in his heart. Mrs. Colleen Dunlap Wright was the great beauty of the town, with a thick rope of hair that gathered softly at her nape, then swung with her stride like the inverted needle of a metronome. She was married to the former mayor, a farmers-market-perusing man and gallery owner who hosted any famous artist or musician who happened to be passing through Mississippi. Colleen was admittedly an exuberant flirt, making both men and women preen, eager to please her.
The last time George had seen Colleen, she was seated at the lunch counter of the Chevron, eating fried chicken with a slice of pie ready on the side. She didn’t see him, and although he’d intended to buy a soda from the fridge behind her, there was something intimate about her eating — she was fully engrossed, shoulders hunched protectively over her plate — so he chose to forego his usual Pepsi. He paid for his gas and left, unnoticed.
The last time George spoke to Colleen, he had run into her at the dry cleaner’s. She was talking to the owner, jabbing her fingers at a faded yet persistent wine stain that muddied the crotch of a cherry red dress. He was embarrassed to witness her scolding someone, a departure from her usual charm. He grasped at anything to say to fill the awkward void. He told her about a molehill he’d found in his yard that morning.
Colleen smiled then, wide and glossy, and said, “You can tell where they are if you watch closely, especially a couple days out from a good rain, when the ground is still soft, you know? And if you time it just right, you can get them with your shovel.”
George pictured a saggy-skinned critter emerging bleary-eyed on a shovel of dirt.
Colleen continued, “The other day I managed to decapitate one. Got it right through the neck.”
With that beheading, Colleen became an enigma upon which George projected his own befuddlement with life’s great mysteries.
The yard had been ravaged by moles. One morning, Colleen went to let the dog in and found her joyfully wagging her tail, a limp mole dangling from her mouth. When she picked it up, she was stunned by how smooth and velvety it was. Her dog had left the skin unbroken. She lightly pinched the mole’s foot, a wide paddle with embryonic digits, between her fingers. She could feel its tiny bones shifting, malleable and delicate in her hands, like the links of a necklace chain falling coolly into the palm. The dog meant it as a gift, but a few weeks later she came with another mole, this one long since dead, an already putrefied corpse. Colleen thought maybe she saw its organs roiling beneath the stretched, translucent skin. Nature’s water balloon, she had mused darkly, but a part of her was made serious by the irrefutable decay. She knew then it was an omen. The dog died soon after, and although the vet insisted that the dead mole had nothing to do with it, that it wasn’t that type of infection, Colleen felt like entropy was picking up steam, spinning away all comfort, and that somehow all the discontent in her life was connected, originating from a rotten core that she couldn’t name.
That was last summer, and now the moles were back. And so were the mosquitoes. No one could sip a bourbon lemonade on the porch swing at sunset, and thanks to the moles, the last lawn party was a disaster. Colleen had broken the heel of her gold pump when her entire foot plunged into a miniature sinkhole, no doubt a result of the extensive tunnels lacing her property. The croquet balls refused to go in a straight line, unexpectedly diverted by the undetected molehills. And of course, Zach had been bitten, although no one knew it at the time. It took nine days for the disease to take hold of him, and by the time she found out, it was too late to speak with him. She couldn’t call his phone. Who would pick it up besides Mindy? Everything that had passed between them had frozen with him, as if in amber.
Tonight would be the first nighttime party of the year. Colleen had screened in their expansive back patio. Before the epidemic, she’d added a gazebo near the wisteria and wrapped twinkling strands of lights around the vines and the iron scrollwork. It had been the perfect spot for a midnight chat, one of those wee-hour conversations that made you feel tethered to the other person. She liked to curate moments of moderate intimacy with others. She would seek some nugget of secret personality from someone she only knew in a distant, formal sense, and she would build worlds around that detail. The next evening, she would tell Kevin what she had learned, and they would speculate, dissect, and hypothesize on how their distant acquaintance, friend, or neighbor lived with this surprising trait, past, or secret. They would try to make sense of it, persisting in the premise that people could make sense if you thought about them enough. Usually there was a disagreement about how to interpret some aspect of the persona they had invented based upon this new detail, and this disagreement would fuel tension, and this tension would turn to a shoving, pinning, and biting form of lovemaking. This was their routine, albeit a sporadic one, before the virus, before she told him that she had been bitten, that she carried it and would carry it with her for at least a year, as best as anyone knew.
Now Colleen was patting concealer under her eyes. There was a new crinkly texture there that she couldn’t hide. Her skin was getting thinner, she’d noticed. The veins were bluer, closer to the surface. An image of that dead mole flickered in her mind as she smeared layers of thick foundation over her cheeks. After she’d perfected her makeup, she moisturized her hands, lingering over the lines that were forming on her wrists. She had searched the internet. Wrist lines, it turned out, were a neurosis that even women’s magazines hadn’t yet figured out how to exploit. She’d bought a glycolic acid solution to baste the lassoes of her wrists each evening. It was an act of faith with no evidence of improvement.
In the kitchen, through the art-laden walls, she could hear her daughter, Suzie, opening cabinets and refrigerator bins as she chatted with someone, probably Bella. Bella was gangly and scathing like Zach. After the onset of Zach’s symptoms, Colleen had brought a casserole over. Bella had answered the door, and Colleen felt sized up by the girl, who said in an accusing tone, “Why didn’t Suzie come?” Maybe she was disappointed in her friend for not showing up that particular night, but Colleen worried that Bella sensed some aspect of the truth: Colleen had ordered Suzie to stay home, to focus on a school project, so that Colleen could focus on her own feelings when she saw him. But she didn’t see him then. Mindy told her he was sleeping, that he slept nearly twenty hours a day. Colleen had said something platitudinous and wrong to Mindy, something like, “My condolences,” and she was startled when Mindy snapped back at her, saying, “He’s not dead,” as she shoved the casserole into the fridge.
Now Suzie was describing her crush on an actor in a popular zombie show.
“But he’s old!” Bella said. “Isn’t he like thirty?”
Forty, Colleen thought. She had looked that up and been dismayed that he was younger than she was by a few years.
“It’s not like I’d date him,” Suzie said. “I just like watching him.”
Oh Lord, she thought, my sweet daughter, lusting after a full-grown man. She was only twelve. Was that normal? She herself had gone out with an eighteen-year-old when she was just thirteen (and claiming to be fourteen). It had been a secret, sneaking out or pretending to meet friends at the movies. It hadn’t la
sted long, and when things ended badly, she had spent the summer crying in her room, unable to tell her parents that her heart was broken. As a teen, everything had felt magnified, too intense. It was the most extreme attachment she had ever felt, and she would be mortified if that boy, now a man, had ever known what he meant, because she knew now: it had all been intentional and ill-advised.
She found the girls sitting on the counter, legs dangling, eating huge slices of pecan pie.
“Is that my party pie? I made that for tonight.”
“Sorry,” Suzie said, mouth full.
“Give me that.” Colleen reached out for the plate, stopping an inch from snatching it by force. “You’ll ruin dinner. There’s going to be barbeque.”
“Bella’s mom said I could head over there early.” Suzie scraped one more bite down before casually relinquishing the pie.
Colleen dumped the plate so hard in the kitchen sink that she had to check it for any cracks.
“What about Calvin? Don’t you want to see him before you go?” Calvin had lived next door until a few years ago when he had moved to be closer to the university in Memphis where he taught. He was like an uncle to Suzie. He usually brought some minor surprise, like a trinket for her dresser or a charm for her bracelet. When she was little, Suzie would try on at least five outfits before deciding which one she wanted to show off for any party guests.
“Not really.” Suzie shrugged, picking at a scab on her elbow. “It’s stressful trying to remember everyone, Mom. You think I can remember all their names and how you know them, but I don’t. I hardly ever see most of those people.”
“All right, fine. Grab your bag and I’ll take you now.”
“Bella’s mom is picking us up.”
“I can take you now,” she said, “especially since you’re so eager to get going.”
“Mom.” Suzie cast an exasperated glance Bella’s way.
What Colleen didn’t want was Mindy on her doorstep, emphasizing her role as the overburdened mother who never had time for parties. She would rather drop the girls off from the curb and wave from her car, watching them run into the house without looking back. She grabbed her cell and texted Mindy.
What Makes You Think You're Awake? Page 11