Years before, Beatrice and I had spent a summer together in Europe. That was the summer of inhuman heat, prehistoric heat, when all the elderly in London and Paris were crumpling and dying in their tiny apartments, while the rest of the family went south for their August vacations. I took three ice-cold showers per day that summer. This, this wasn’t the same.
There, inside that apartment in Marseille, the air conditioner coolly dried our sweat. Outside, it was warm and windy. The sky had the glowing gray opaqueness of a moonstone shifting under a changing lightscape.
I stood up from the bed and looked out the window. People below on the street held umbrellas, and ice cream cones.
*
What is it like, to have someone say they want to see you? What is it like, to say this is not unusual for you, but this is unusual for me?
What is it like, to say you are not in danger, and not to say, that I am.
I suppose you choose one or the other. Someone for whom words stay inside. Or someone for whom words come easily—flattery, charm, mouth spilling with: you’re so cute, you’re very sexy. Someone who finds so many women beautiful and tells them so. Someone who says you have such beautiful skin, you have such beautiful hair, you have such pretty legs, I love your hands, everything is beautiful, beautiful eyelashes, beautiful thighs, beautiful hips, a beautiful laugh out of beautiful lips. You don’t question it, you know he means it, he believes it, but he believes, fervently, so many things, for so many women, that even if it’s sincere, it’s not as valuable, not as precious.
Still, you are a beggar.
Still, you think, it is nice to have someone who wants to take care of you, look after you, flatter you, touch you, talk to you, pay attention to you, spend time with you.
Still, you think.
Still.
I think about whether after spending time with him, I feel better, or worse. Better or worse?
It should be so simple. It should be such a straight line. It should be so black, and so white.
*
At the beginning, each time I assembled her, got her set up in my mind, I wasn’t sure which would upset me less: if she were just like me, or nothing like me. I ended up making her nothing like me, because I knew if I tried to recreate her as just like me, she’d still somehow end up just slightly better. Just like me but with shinier eyes. So instead, I went with the opposite—I put her at home, while I escaped. She stayed at home, while I took in the world.
There are facts I already knew, and there are scenes I saw. There are the private moments I imagined, when they first met:
All of these events, the events that would eventually transpire, respire again, again, sprouted from this one tiny folding, unfolding. A bend, a crease, one sheaf doubled over, sheets and leaves, collapse.
It is a Monday in February. You brush your fingertips over something on Heliotrope Drive, after stepping off the bus. Red, wet paint sign. It is sticky. You stare, consternation, at the faint streaks on your fingertips.
Something is happening.
You are dry. Unwell. Winter skin, winter mind. Encased, becoming a blur, edges fuzzing into the atmosphere. Undifferentiated. Becoming the sky, the air.
The sky that evening is pressing itself far from the earth. Inaccessible. Distant. Cold. Bright mackerel clouds spreading thin, like butter skidding evenly uneven across the bumpy crevices of dry toast.
It wants nothing to do with you. It wants nothing to do with this. Cold shoulder. Indifferent.
Some things had already been happening. Mercury was in retrograde. You had spilled a Diet Coke all over a baby’s face the week before. It may or may not have had something to do with the jostling for room in your left ear, which was throwing off your balance.
That Monday in February at the cafe. You stand behind the counter, facing out the front window. It is bright outside, the kind that is not tricking you, the kind that is warm, heating sunlight. You can tell by the way people hold themselves—open, loose, demonstrative surface areas exposed, swaying, slowness. Casual, in the way that all people who grew up in California sunshine grow to be. Privileged by means of weather, not aristocratic bloodlines and old money.
You had gone to the shiny white burger place before the cafe. Sometimes you throw yourself into a glossy fast food joint, for the anonymity of it. You launch yourself through the doorway before you can change your mind, and once inside, you are grateful for the standardized booths and sanitation, glad that you won’t see anyone you know there, or even want to know. Most likely, nobody will distract you, you won’t be looking up every time the front door opens, because it will always be a disgruntled mother with crust-nosed children and a monstrous stroller struggling inwards.
You shut down, for a while, the expectation of sensory experiences. Nothing here is aesthetically pleasing. Nothing is charming, there is no character. The food tastes like nothing, like a processed capsule in the shape of food, with a vaguely foodlike soft texture, and that’s it.
Later that afternoon at the cafe, you look outside, and after so many minutes, and so many people, a man walks jauntily by, facing you, and he looks happy, and your eyes catch, temporarily hook, and so you smile into the sun. He smiles back, and continues on his way, and then stops and turns back around and walks into the cafe. Hi, he says, and hi, you say back.
He tells you his name is Wade. You know him, from your friend Beatrice’s photographs.
Within an hour of talking, he is telling you all the best secrets:
Hey, Banana. Here’s How To Be More Like a Guy
• Take what is offered to you
• Ask for what is not offered to you
• Be less nostalgic
• Don’t think about/analyze love, relationships, sex
Within an hour of talking, you are telling him to get over himself a lot. This is because, you suspect, you are Chinese, and have ingrained in you, the bloody ways of humility. Modesty. Self-deprecation, in a not-joking kind of way. You are nothing, this is what you have been taught, what has been taught into you. Do not tempt the gods, the fates, destiny. Deny self-importance. Laugh at yourself. Stop taking yourself so seriously. Can you hear yourself? Can you hear yourself. If you can, you probably need to stop talking.
Hey, Banana. What is that, on your necklace, a machete?
What is that on your face, your mom?
I like that, your laugh.
Really? You laugh as you say this, even though you don’t know why.
I like it. There’s nothing like shy, unfettered laughter. It’s sweet, it’s unexpected.
Oh. Thanks I guess.
Slippery slope.
From laughter to what? you ask.
Love? At least a crush, for sure.
I like that you said sweet, you tell him, leaning in. I think that’s a slippery slope.
Oh yeah? To what.
To terms of endearment. Honey. Sweetie. Baby. Sugar. Sweetiepie. Sweetheart. Sweetpea. Sunshine. Buttercup. Doll.
Dollface?
Not unless you’re a mobster’s gun moll girlfriend, you say very seriously.
Um.
Kitten? Pussycat? Pussyface? Sweetcheeks? Chickadee? Bluebird? Sugarlips? Sodapop? Jellybean? Sugarcube? Ice cube? Saltwater taffy? Jawbreaker? Marshmallow? Funnelcake? Cupcake? Ganache? Candy cane? Crumb cake? Fruit tart? Frangipane? Gumdrop? Gummy peach ring? Swedish fish? Turbinado sugar? You feel as if you could sit there for quite a while, swapping these words with him, exchanging them like candies.
For a while, each time after spending time with him, you silently repeat to yourself, take it easy, dollface.
*
I invent jealousy, and admiration, and alienation, between old friends, between two girls. But of course, these are not really things solely of my invention. Where imagination falters, p
erhaps I borrow generously from my own memories. Sometimes, I think there’s not so much of a difference.
You’re friends with a girl named Beatrice, an old-fashioned name for especially this girl, once you really got to know her. To you she seemed so cut-out-of-a-modern-cloth, a real contemporary doll, fast and bright and creative, forward-thinking, able to be so many things.
You, you are nothing. You float, are bodiless. You are a Chinese box. In sixth grade, you and Beatrice did a report on Guatemala, the quetzal that was the currency but also the huge multi-hued long-tailed bird. You did a gigantic replica of a Hershey’s milk chocolate bar for a math proportions and ratios project. You also wrote about jellyfish—your father liked that. This turned out to be a seminal project for you, as years later, you still find yourself thinking about these lovely brainless floaty creatures.
Beatrice’s family is from someplace on the East Coast like Stamford, Connecticut. So maybe the old-fashioned name did fit after all. You didn’t know, though, you hadn’t known people like that, what places like that meant, until you went to visit one summer.
You had no idea that there was a real culture of things like Nantucket reds and seersucker and whites between Memorial Day and Labor Day and L.L.Bean and names like Tibby and Tilly and Nelson and Bunny and Ted and summer homes and lake houses and Upstate and the Catskills and the Berkshires and the Cape and pants and belts with little embroidered animals on them, and deck shoes and boat shoes and duck shoes and whatever those other shoes were called and well, belts in general, people in California did not go around wearing belts all the time, and Martha’s Vineyard and money. Where there were Juniors and III’s, and ancestry could be traced, and things like names mattered. Out west, you didn’t even have real names, your names were flip little things, pulled from the air, from the label on a refrigerator, from a movie star princess, from a transliteration or romanization of another language to English.
Summer is a verb there. As are school, and prep. People are slender and capable—that is the desired veneer: slender and capable. A murmur of correct words. Slender throats swallowing well-placed manners, words like wristwatches.
You, you have always had trouble with that. You are telling this story—you pretend to be a storyteller—but it is constant agony, each erratic word that falls out is another peck at your exposed liver by a giant eagle while you dangle from some cliff’s precipice, stuck to a rock. You have no idea what these words must sound like to everyone else, if there even is any sound.
You rely on mythology, because without it, you search inside your head for words, and see only a big dark grotto.
Beatrice always said you were more querulous than garrulous.
Beatrice is the ultimate in slender and capable. Equestrian vocabulary seems to come to mind when you think of her, like breeding and carriage and comportment and poise, but they really are fitting. She has a younger sister, surely also slender and capable, whom you imagine wearing expensive gold bracelets on her thin wrists.
Bananas are like tampons, Beatrice is saying. She says things like that. She says things, to which you respond, who says that! Well, she does. Beatrice Lee says Things Like That. Bananas are like tampons, she is saying. Necessary evils. Phallic and filling in a mercenary kind of way, a practical way to stuff it, but ultimately unpleasant and unsatisfying.
Beatrice is able to talk about bananas and tampons and still be classy about it, you don’t know how. You think it might be this: she has the prettiest eyes and mouth. Steady and ethereal and soft. She might be talking about stuffing her face with penis or banana, which one nobody even knows, but she is so damn poised about it, you don’t dare question how her elegance thrives even in vulgarity.
*
There is one scene from that summer when Beatrice and I were packing for the Europe trip, in our respective rooms, respective doors open. I was packing as if that summer I would be presented with the opportunity to impress all the boys in my life I had ever loved and lost. I looked down at the piles of clothing on my bed.
It was a joke. I ended up spending that summer sleeping with two married men. I was twenty-seven, and heartbroken, and my ripped flesh incanted to me that all was fair in love and war. That summer I felt wild and beautiful, I loved my body and the way it felt, the way it seemed to be working, how my skin was as glossy and smooth as glass, my limbs brown and flawless, my new hair choppy and free, swinging around my chin at will. I was with Beatrice, and I felt, from those men, that I was being looked at for the first time the way I had always seen men look at Beatrice. The way they would photograph her, spontaneously, as if they couldn’t help it. As if even though they were professional photographers, they had never in their lives been so inspired to capture into stillness, to give permanence.
Beatrice knew it was a joke, my behavior a flourishment of bad ideas. I knew. I knew I had spent the first part of my twenties fucking up, and the next part of my twenties repenting and paying my dues in the form of loneliness. And now what? Spend all my life longing after people who already had someone else?
*
There is the fact that Helen is married:
You listed it as one of his flaws, even before you got married: not knowing when to stop. He admitted it. Wanting to push people, wanting to take things to the very edge, see how far he can go.
Well. This is where he could go, and then here is the other side of that.
You are cool, all right. You are cool, until you are not, cool, until you can’t be cool, at which point you will remove yourself. You will extricate yourself before any kind of temper surfaces.
And now, you think, realize, that all your actions in life are attempts at connecting to other people. You are trapped in your separate bodies, you try to connect, through sex, through conversation, through seeing and listening, through telling stories, through family meals, and arguments, and traveling together, and saving each other, and resuscitating each other, and fighting each other, to merge, in some way, with other people. But how can you fight, how hard do you have to fight, to fight your way into someone else’s body?
*
When I imagine Helen, she is always at home, alone in Los Angeles:
Turn on the water. Turn it on. There is no stopping it. There are forces, like gravity, and pressure. It is neverending; it streams, is streaming look at it go. Place the three middle fingers of your right hand under the water, palm side up, just the pads of your fingers under the water. You almost don’t feel it. Wetness. What is that. It is nothing to you, you are not porous, it runs over you, you are a duck’s back. Impermeable. Run-over.
Scissor-kick into the smooth piles of sheets on your bed. Nothing touches anything else, everything is tangled, your legs do not find each other. What does it matter, your legs do not feel all the way up, they end at the hips, they do not know, they only know that the rest of you breaks because they are kept prone, in your bed, while you sleep for a purpose, while you sleep certain feelings, certain consciousness away. You sleep things away, you kick things away, you push, and your legs move and wallow of their own accord, blind under the cover of your smooth, cool sheets.
It is possible to imagine another life, one that does not require depth of water, opaque mucous green of seaweed, tender green undersides of young herb leaves in the sun.
There is a knock, sharp, an ellipsis of rap rap rap that punctures these still photos. When someone shows up at your door, you have a choice to make. You don’t sit up immediately, but the person inside of you sits up, alert. You send this inside person through the kitchen and living room to your front door. Refractory light bends its way around the corners of the front room, searching for a way in, out, hitting at fun-house mirror angles, trapped, an accidental leaf, twittery featherlight bird, juicy black fly, caught in a man-made box. You put yourself in boxes to stay organized, to keep track. You label each box, with the feelings meant for that box, with
what is appropriate, keeping in mind phrases like for someone of your station. Sometimes, but rarely, you allow yourself to coat your body in slick black mascara, a thick oily layer on each and every lash. Lashes, lashes, lashing lashing lashing. Sometimes, you will spend a significant chunk of time trying on your fanciest dresses, which are kept crumpled and crying, folding in on themselves, fetal position, in the darkest wood-chipped corners of your dresser. You put on high heels, lifting one foot up and behind you at a time so that you can reach behind and slide the shoe on. You learned how to walk in heels when you turned eighteen. You met Wade that year.
Before, you had been afraid of what it might mean, if you cared about how you looked, if you brushed your hair, if you had a spread of lotions and perfumes and creams, piles of jewelry. You were afraid of leaving lipstick prints on glasses, of getting it on your teeth, of needing to touch up in a mirror or go to the bathroom every hour, of leaving a trail of foundation on sweaters and sheets. You were afraid of the morning someone might wake up next to you and be horrified of what you looked like with nothing on your face but yourself. You told him all these things, because he wanted to know. He made you agree with him on the state of your own beauty. The fact of it.
You look at your face in the bathroom mirror, a medicine cabinet triptych. Before, during, after. During, during, during. Now now now. Enduring. Endearing. Deer in headlights. You don’t let yourself think about one thing, one word, for too long. Otherwise, you might tear your face off.
In this tripartite mirror, you try to see yourself as he might see you. You know he sees a different you, and you look for the different you in the warm moist air of the bathroom. You remind yourself that you give yourself, reasonably, you think, an at-least-okay in some pretty important departments: looks, smarts, humor, kindness. Isn’t that enough, isn’t that a lot? Isn’t that good for someone? You look for the different you, you try to imagine someone who is all those things, probably, but also distinctly acerbic, sharp, sullen, blunt, silent, condescending, judgmental, intolerant, lazy, flaky, fickle, lost, hurt. You see that these things shine through all the holes, each one pricking a blinding bright point of light into his eyes, like the punctuation of a pin shooting through a single sheet of paper.
All Roads Lead to Blood Page 13