by Rufi Thorpe
“Are you ever going to kiss me?” she asked.
My mouth was full of plum. I had failed again. I had waited too long. She laughed and reached over and kissed me.
—
My usual pedestrian concerns during sex—wondering if she was liking what I was doing, wondering if I would make her come, trying to keep from coming myself—were absent. Susan didn’t try to say dirty things to me, and I didn’t try to say dirty things to her. Kat and I had had sex something like this, wordless, animal sex, but there was none of that teenage fumbling or frantic lunging between me and Susan. Our sex was slow, almost decorous, and yet verging on delirious. I felt like I had a fever. Naked, her body was small and firm, but she was not skinny. She reminded me of a cat, that kind of contained, graceful plumpness. After she got me undressed, she wanted to look at me for a long time and I felt silly. “Golden fur everywhere,” she said and touched my chest hair.
“Sorry,” I said.
“No, I like it.”
When we were done, I pulled the amber necklace out of the canvas grocery bag and gave it to her. I’d brought it with me only because I didn’t want to leave it in the apartment, afraid Vera would find it.
“Are you serious?” she said, holding the beads which almost seemed to glow in the low light.
“Yeah,” I said. I thought that I could always go back to that store and buy something else for Vera. In that moment, I just wanted to give Susan something and the necklace was what I had.
“But this is so beautiful,” she said.
I helped her put it on. She sat on the bed, naked except for the amber at her throat, and ate another plum. I thought that I would remember how she looked for the rest of my life. Her hair was the same brassy red-gold as the middle beads of the amber necklace. Her skin was dewy with sweat. Her room had no air-conditioning and there was sweat at her temples too, making her hair curl. It was clear from the easy way she sat cross-legged that she was comfortable being naked. She was not nude, not like some European painting of coy, pale butt cheeks. She was graphically, powerfully naked, like a fertility idol.
“What are you doing?” she said, and snatched away the bed pillow I had used to cover my crotch.
I laughed. “It’s just a reflex. When it’s erect, it seems obvious to be naked, but when I’m soft I feel like I should cover up.”
“I think he’s very handsome, sleeping like that,” she said, gesturing to the way my penis slumped over my thigh. I had never had a lover refer to my penis as “he,” like it was a separate person. I thought it was cute of her.
“I like you so much,” I said.
“Oh, don’t start with that,” she said. “You’ll get me all confused.”
“But I really do like you,” I said.
“I know. I like you too.” She fished another plum out of the bag and threw it to me, then got one for herself. “These little plums are amazing. I could eat all of them. They’re so sweet, they’re like candy.”
I ate the plum. We were going to talk only about the plums. Normally I was all for avoiding such conversations because women were so often hurt by whatever I was really thinking or feeling, and so talking after sex involved a lot of white lies. But to not talk about it with Susan now seemed perfectly absurd, like we were both ignoring bombs going off just outside our window.
“I’m not going to get you confused,” I finally decided to say. “This isn’t just a lark for me. I haven’t felt like this about someone in a long time.”
“Oh, just shut up!” she cried. “You’ll ruin it!” She threw her plum pit at me and burst out laughing.
“No, I won’t,” I said, brushing the wet plum pit off my chest and onto the floor and then lunging for her, tackling her on the bed. “It can’t be ruined! That’s what I want to show you. That’s why I’m talking about it.”
“You’re young,” she said, but she was smiling, a little out of breath, her eyes darting back and forth like she was trying to look in both of my eyes at once.
“I’m young,” I agreed, and I kissed her.
Chapter 10
Date: 7/17/2014 4:30 PM
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Another sunset
Dear Fang,
I was very interested in your letter about Virginia Woolf, and I assume it is an olive branch. You always know best how to please me. I accept your gesture of intellectual rapprochement. I think it is very civilized of you. I also know you prefer brevity in writing and so for you to write me pages and pages like that was really impressive. It meant a lot to me. Even though I suspect you just got weed from your cousins and were stoned with no one to talk to. Still, you could have done anything with that time. You could have jerked off to porn of dragons fucking cars, for instance. The Internet makes anything possible.
But for now, lay your suspicions to rest: I am fine. I give you my solemn word.
There have been a few interesting developments here, however.
For one thing, my father says that he might be able to help me pay for college. And I got the sense, Fang, that he wasn’t saying it to get me to like him. It wasn’t a bribe. He was saying it because he genuinely wanted me to be able to go to college.
It just brings up all these possibilities that I had assumed were off the table, and it makes me feel very differently about starting school because if I could get good grades in the fall, then maybe colleges would see that last year was just a blip. I know you probably don’t like the idea of me going out of state. But you could too! I mean, couldn’t you? Why not? Why does everything have to be California California California?
I get so torn, Fang. About humans. About what we are. About whether God exists. Sometimes I am so hopeless about it, and then other times I feel blinded by this realization of exactly what we are. The truth of what we are. The beauty of it.
One part of me thinks I am just a collection of cells and hormones and hair. The idea that I am entirely a Jew because it was my mother and not my father who was Jewish—as though there is a metaphysical baton that she has passed me—well, isn’t it insane? I am equally my father’s daughter, and so half Lithuanian. Or Polish. It is always unclear to me whether we are Lithuanian or Polish. But isn’t Grandma Sylvia’s blood in my veins, too? It seems so obvious now that I am here, my connection to her. I was not aware of it, but I think my whole life I have been pretending he is not my father on some level. I have been pretending that he has nothing to do with me. But he does.
It turns out that Grandma Sylvia was raped by an SS officer and that is how she really escaped from Stutthof. This guy saw her naked when she was in line for the gas chamber, decided he wanted some of that, yanked her out, fucked her, then sent her off into the woods with his coat and some money. Which just goes to show you: Human beings, in the end, are nothing but a bunch of chimps.
And yet. Sometimes something will happen, like my father will offer to pay for college and I’ll think: But what beautiful, noble chimps we are. And it seems like we are more than animals, after all. I still don’t understand what beauty is. What it indicates, exactly. But it must mean something.
Do you think that we are made in God’s image, Fang? What does that idea even mean?
When I was eight, I told my mother I was an atheist. It was ridiculous, really. We were having a fight about the sunset. She said, “Just look at that. So beautiful. It looks enchanted, don’t you think?”
And I said, “It’s just what happens when the sun hits the atmosphere at that angle. There’s nothing magic about it. I read about it in science at school.”
“I’m just saying, there doesn’t have to be beauty,” Mama said.
“Are you saying beauty means something?” I asked. Because I didn’t know what a pretty sunset could possibly mean, but I did recognize that it was an appealing idea. Actually, I was very into the idea of EVERYTHING meaning something. Like, I would look at three candles burning, and I would think: Those three candles repr
esent Dedushka Pavel and Babushka Inna and Mama, and that is why two of them are very short and one of them is long, because Mama still has many years to live and Dedushka and Babushka will die soon.
“I suppose that beautiful things always make me think of the divine,” she said. She was driving me home from piano.
“I don’t believe in God,” I told her. Which, I had never actually thought that before, but it seemed like such a daring and interesting thing to say, I just couldn’t resist.
“You don’t?” she asked.
“No.”
And she asked me why not, and I think I said something lame about how there was so much suffering in the world, how could there be a God who would allow it, if there was a God he was a sadist, basically. I don’t think I used the word sadist. I think what I actually said was that if there was a God, he was the kind of boy who liked to pull wings off flies. Anyway, she said that God gave us minds to question with and that she was proud of me, but that she took my atheism as yet another sign of the existence of God. Which, maybe she just said that to irritate me. That would be very like her. Or maybe she really did see it as a sign of God’s existence. Maybe it was this whole stupid conversation that made her want to send me to Hebrew school in the first place.
My dad wants to believe that Grandma Sylvia being raped is some big meaningful event, some kind of mystery that sums up all of human existence, but I am very afraid that it is just another sunset. It seemed like what you were proposing in your letter is that God is a kind of larger collective mind that is using our individual minds as neurons. And that strikes me as the most exciting and beautiful idea of all. I will try my hardest to believe in it.
I’m going to try to go to sleep.
With love,
From Vilnius,
Your fellow neuron in the mind of God,
V
I WANDERED HOME after dark had fallen, worried. I had used Judith’s note as an excuse to shirk my fatherly duties, though on the other hand, Vera was nearly an adult and all she was doing was hanging out with Judith. I guess it made me anxious not being able to use my cell phone. What if she had needed me while I was at Susan’s? What if something had happened? When I got to the apartment, I was relieved to see that Vera was already back and painting her toenails at the kitchen table. Judith had not been lying about coming home early.
“How was your night?” I asked.
“Where should I start if I wanted to read some Virginia Woolf?” she asked, not looking up from her toes. She was painting them black, or some version of brown-red that was nearly black.
“Mrs. Dalloway or To the Lighthouse,” I said. “Why?” I assumed she and Judith had been talking about Woolf for whatever reason.
“Fang said I should read The Waves,” she said, looking up finally, and screwing the little cap on the nail polish.
“Why on earth would Fang tell you to read The Waves?” I said. I had always staunchly defended The Waves in graduate school, but it was a weird book, and I did not particularly enjoy reading it, if I was being honest. It wasn’t even really a novel. Woolf had called it a “play poem” and it was a series of soliloquies from six different narrators who were not, Woolf maintained, separate characters per se but merely six facets of consciousness that were really continuous. It was slow and very poetic and opaque. The fact that Fang was recommending it was bizarre.
“He said it’s the best thing he’s ever read,” she said. “He said Virginia Woolf was the first European he had ever read who had spit out the lie of, you know, thinking we are all separate people.”
I hesitated. “But we are all separate people.”
“Well, but that could be an illusion,” she said. “Ants might think they are separate people, unaware that they act as a colony. Maybe humans only think they are separate, but really we might be like cells or bacteria, and collectively there might be a thing that is thinking, using us as, like, neurons.”
I sat down at the table. I wanted to get out the vodka, but I did not. The drinking had to stop, it just had to. I wanted my body back. Something in the sex with Susan had made me want that, to be a physical specimen again. To be frank and naked and unashamed of myself. Or maybe it had been meeting Herkus and seeing in him such an uncanny facsimile of a self I had already given up for lost. “Does Fang think there is no such thing as separate people?” I asked.
Vera squinted, looking up at the light, thinking. “Maybe not ‘no such thing’—like, that makes it sound like there are no individual ants, and of course there are—just more that what is actually interesting might be something we are unaware of about the way we are all connected. And he thinks that the idea of individuality is like a disease that has infected our culture. Basically.”
“Is this a Tongan thing?” I asked. “Or a Mormon thing?”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “I think it’s a Fang thing.”
“Why is Fang named Fang?” I asked suddenly. “I mean, is that his real name?”
“No. It’s because he can open a beer can with his teeth.”
I considered this for a moment. “Well, then, you should read The Waves.” I held up my hands, shrugged. “It’s kinda boring, though. And she talks about the connectedness of people’s minds in the other books too. That’s what I was writing my dissertation on.”
“No shit? So you don’t think Fang is insane?” she asked, narrowing her eyes at me in a dramatic way that made it hard to take her seriously.
“No, why would I think that?”
“I just thought maybe you might,” she said.
“No,” I said.
“But you still think I’m insane,” she said.
“No,” I said, shaking my head. It was almost as though the past few days hadn’t happened for her. I was confused. She looked at me, searching for something. “I really don’t,” I said.
“All right,” she said, but I didn’t get the feeling it was settled in her mind.
“You told me you were on acid,” I said, trying to give her a replay of my understanding of our mutual reality. “And I believed you.”
“Oh, how great of you to ‘believe’ me,” she sneered.
“Well, Vera, what else am I supposed to do but believe you?”
That seemed to stop her. She shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. A glass that had been on the counter suddenly fell to the floor and shattered. We both jumped as though someone had fired a gun.
“What the fuck!” she cried.
“I don’t know,” I said, “it must have been on the edge and then fallen.”
“Or there’s a ghost,” she said. I stood to sweep up the glass, telling her to stay sitting since her feet were bare. She propped them up on the table, her newly painted toes splayed, as I swept under her chair.
“There’s no ghost,” I said.
“Maybe it was Grandma Sylvia,” she said.
“Why would Grandma Sylvia be here? Wouldn’t her ghost be in California?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I have no idea how ghosts work.”
“Well, I don’t believe in ghosts,” I said. But I had no explanation for why the glass might have fallen.
“I’m sorry I was so weird,” Vera said. “About believing me. That wasn’t fair of me.”
“That’s okay,” I said, down on my hands and knees with wet paper towels, trying to get the smaller shards.
“So you think I should read Mrs. Dalloway first?” Vera said, and it took me a minute to remember we had been talking about Woolf in the first place.
“Sure,” I said, crouched at her feet, holding the dirty wad of paper towels, still scanning the linoleum for shards. I had lost the thread. Nothing was making sense. Other people’s moods were changing too quickly for me to track. It was late and I needed to go to sleep.
“Justine called,” she said. “I told her we would skip out on our afternoon event tomorrow to go meet your family.”
“My family?”
“Yeah, I guess it’s Herku
s’s cousin’s birthday or something. And everyone will be there, his mom, his aunt and uncle, like everybody. Big family gathering in the country.”
“And you didn’t lead with this news?” I said, as I struggled to stand and throw away the wad of paper towels. My body was stiff. I felt old. “This wasn’t the first thing you thought to say when I entered the room?”
“Ugh, Papa, not everything is about you,” she said. “The address is by the phone. I figure we can take a taxi.”
I nodded, feeling overwhelmed. I didn’t have a number for a taxi service. We would figure it out. Tomorrow was still an entire day away.
A bit later, she went to bed and I retreated to my room. I could hear her playing music in there on the tinny speakers of her laptop. Lady Gaga, it sounded like. I wanna take a ride on your disco stick. I thought about writing my mother, but didn’t. I should tell her about Herkus, but it felt like too much to explain, and I was exhausted even thinking about getting out my computer and typing it all.
I wondered about my mother. I wondered what it had been like to grow up as Grandma Sylvia’s daughter, what glasses might have shattered on that floor. The transition from forest fighter to housewife was perhaps only a smooth one in retrospect. I wondered what my mother hadn’t told me about growing up in that house, what things she had left out of her stories.
One of the things I had never told my mother was that I decided to find my father when I was living in New York. I had never told anyone, except Katya in one desperate letter sent after the fact. But since then, I had tried to contain it and keep it from spreading by not even thinking about it myself, as though it were a disease under quarantine. All these years, I had just sort of grown around it, the way skin will swallow up a splinter of glass.