Woman No. 17

by Edan Lepucki

  “I guess I could see that,” I said now.

  I like it 2. I like her Females.

  “Pervert.” It sounded flirtatious but Seth just kept looking at me. I kicked off the edge of the pool, my ears hot in the cold water. I wished I could unsay it.

  By the time Lady returned, Seth was holed up in his room and I was wiping down the kitchen counters, my hair wet and knotted like seaweed against my neck.

  “I wrote!” she said, slamming her laptop bag onto the kitchen island.

  “That’s great!” I remembered Karl’s face, his pride.

  “My editor will probably say it’s totally off-topic, but I don’t care! I wrote five whole pages!”

  “Congratulations!” And then, “Devin’s napping.”

  She didn’t seem to hear. “You want some sparkling rosé? Just a glass won’t hurt.”

  “Really?”

  She already had her head in the fridge. “He’ll be asleep for a while.” And then, “Who the fuck opened my—”

  “Kit Daniels was here,” I said quickly.

  She slung her head out of the fridge, her forehead furrowed into dozens of deep lines. At least she’d withstood the peer pressure to get Botox.

  “She was with Karl,” I said. “They were dropping off Seth.”

  “I see. And she took the liberty of opening my bubbly. Classic.” She shut the fridge, without the wine, as if her sister-in-law had infected the bottle.

  “You know what I call her?” she said.

  “Who?”

  “Cunt Daniels.”

  “Cunt Daniels!” I repeated, applauding. My interaction with Seth had put a little Katherine Mary in me, and it was easy to tap into my mother’s forwardness, no alcohol needed.

  “Cunt with a C or a K?” I asked.

  Lady laughed. “I love you, S for Snake.”

  “Oh my God,” I said. “You. Are. Drunk.”

  She smiled. “I wrote at a bar. Not some dive, don’t worry. It was a bar-café—call it a bistro. I had two Kir Royales. Okay, three. I ordered a Caesar salad too, but it came with tomatoes and not a single anchovy so I sent it back in a huff. Which is what Cunt Daniels would do, by the way. I learned how to be a pill from her. Karl is the good twin, for sure.”

  “They’re twins?”

  “Yep. There’s always an evil one.”

  “In fairy tales, maybe.”

  “And their mother, Nance, was either a vicious witch or an elegant queen, depending on who’s telling the story. She was probably both—she died before I could meet her. Apparently, Nance doted on Karl but was hard on Kit. He always felt like he had to protect his sister, so he’s the one who had more issues with her.” She stopped. “Someday I’ll tell you about how I met Kit. Right now I’m calling Pink Dot and getting them to send me some more rosé and a loaf of bread, the healthy kind with the seeds. God, I’m starving.”

  She ran off to find her phone and I took the baby monitor into the Cottage. Didn’t matter what time of day it was, the light was milky inside that space. There was something off about it: creepy, lonelier than a dorm during spring break. From the door two steps led down into the room, and each time I entered I felt like I was descending into something unknown, something muddy. I could age cheese in there.

  I considered getting drunk and asking a Ouija board what the deal was with this Cottage—that was pure Katherine Mary, for sure—but I was still a little too creeped out to try it.

  I texted my dad about meeting Kit. I really wanted to tell Everett, but I wouldn’t. Anyway, the good twin inside me had erased his number weeks ago.

  11.

  Everett Forever James. I swear that’s his middle name. His mom added it to the birth certificate the day after he was born; his dad was in the hospital cafeteria, slurping down some orange Jell-O. Or so goes the myth. Everett didn’t tell me the story; his mom, Hannah, did when she drove up from Los Gatos to visit. Everett blushed as she talked. His blush was one of my favorite things about him.

  How could I not fall in love with a guy whose middle name is Forever?

  “And even if he isn’t immortal,” Hannah had said, “his art will definitely live on.”

  “Mama,” Everett said. Mama! How could I not?

  But Hannah was right. I swear Everett is one gallery show away from wowing everyone at the Whitney Biennial and being profiled in The New Yorker. I’ll probably impress my grandkids someday by telling them I used to be his lover. “Everett Forever James?” one will say, and another, the fuck-up (there’s always a fuck-up), will ask, “Who’s that?” (But even the fuck-up will know Everett’s work once someone describes it.)

  Everett and I used to live in the same decrepit two-story clapboard on Ashby. It was an intentional community; I still don’t fully understand what that means. I was only in it for the cheap rent and the view of the magnolia tree from my bedroom window. I was right down the hall from Everett, who liked to sleep with his door open a sliver. On windy nights, it tapped against the jamb, open, closed, open, closed, waking me. There was a SHIT HAPPENS bumper sticker on his door. The nights I crept to his room, I’d press on the letter I with an index finger. Everett would do the same with my clit five minutes later.

  I’d met him in Art Studio. At the time I was living alone in Clark Kerr, on a quiet floor, and I was complaining about it to the girl next to me. I thought the quiet policy would make me feel peaceful but instead I felt anxious all the time, imagining the computer science nerds behind their closed doors, writing code in all that silence. I spent half my nights at my dad’s. “Which is fine,” I was telling the girl. “But not great.”

  Then Everett leaned over and offered me a room. A girl named Hippo (don’t worry, she was lithe and beautiful) was going to move out of the house he shared at the end of the semester; her anemia had resurfaced and her doctor told her she needed to eat beef and other animal products. To become a roommate, all I had to do was abstain from eating or cooking meat at home, and pay $350 a month. The rent was so much cheaper than what the dorm was costing, I would’ve agreed to eat, or not eat, anything demanded of me.

  And I had to attend their monthly happenings.

  “Happenings?” I asked.

  Everett nodded. By this point we were standing at the large sink in the corner of the studio, and he was washing his paint-covered hands and arms like a surgeon. “We play music and cook food,” he said. “Over dinner we discuss books, politics, art, sex.” Here, he blushed. “We get drunk. All of us are artists.”

  I handed him a paper towel. “That’s the intentional part?”

  “Hardy har-har,” he said, I swear to God. “You’re funny, Esther.”

  I hadn’t been making a joke, I’d truly wanted to understand what an intentional community was, but I didn’t push it. This was my fourth year at Cal and I still didn’t have many—or any—close friends. I often hung out with my dad and Maria on the weekends. I studied a lot too, sometimes I painted, and if I was lonely I’d ask someone from one of my psych classes if they wanted to meet at the library to prep for the exam. I’d always been a loner; chalk it up to having a cool dad and a fuck-up for a mom: I was either hanging out with him or taking care of her. Anyway, I didn’t want to mess up my chances with Everett and his intentional roommates.

  “When I first saw you,” Everett said, “I wondered why you were so dressed up. Who wears nice clothes to paint?” I knew he was judging me like all the other arty kids did. I painted, but to them I didn’t look like I did—their practice required a certain level of grubbiness that I just couldn’t go for.

  He continued: “But you’re cool. The other roommates have to vote but it’s just a formality; they’ll want you.”

  That line: they’ll want you.

  I came to the next happening, read some Spanish poetry Maria had foisted upon me, and bam, I was intentional. I would move out of the dorm after finals and start my final semester in the house.

  “But I’m only an art minor. I’m not really an artist,” I sa
id to Everett. “Not like you.”

  By then, he had already begun work on his senior show and he’d already applied to Yale with work that everyone in the department drooled over. This studio painting course was the last class I needed to fulfill my minor. I was painting the views from my father’s house—Maria’s house, really, earned with her attorney’s salary. The money my dad made from insurance sales would have purchased him a decent place in Reno or Kansas, but not in California, no way. The view from their living room, perched above Berkeley and overlooking the Bay, was almost sickening it was so picturesque, no smog or sprawl to besmirch it. My mom had no idea her ex-husband’s new life was so great. She’d never see this view. I’d never show her the paintings either.

  Everyone in class thought they were ironic. Apparently no one but old biddies did straight landscapes. I didn’t correct them.

  “You’re an artist,” Everett told me. “You make art, don’t you?”

  I did, but only for class. I wasn’t like Everett. He woke every morning and drew his reflection in the mirror. These were painstaking pencil drawings, almost as small as matchbooks, and he wouldn’t even let himself pee until he finished one. I mean, honestly, he usually had morning wood during the entire process, which maybe was the point. He went to galleries and museums every weekend, and he not only subscribed to, but read, art magazines. One of his professors was letting him use her back garage as a studio. I asked him what was wrong with the studio they gave him at school and he told me he needed more space. Then he solicited my opinion about encaustic paints, as if I would have one.

  “Art is my life,” he told me after the first time we made out. Our lips were stained purple from the house happening, my second. “I seriously don’t care about anything else,” he said.

  That should have been the end, my dad said later.

  At the time, Everett was building a bunch of small cameras. He had embedded one in the eye of a lion Beanie Baby, which he attached to the strap of a tiny purple backpack a girl in kindergarten might carry.

  The cameras were part of his senior project. On two different occasions, Everett Forever James wore an old T-shirt of his father’s that pictured Barack Obama in a turban, the words “Allahu Akbar” in a cartoon talk bubble above him. Everett hated when his father wore this shirt and so he’d stolen it over Christmas break. “Out of rage, but also, even then, I knew I’d do something with it,” he said. The shirt was an XXL, and it hung off Everett like a nightgown; it made me think of the narrator in “The Night Before Christmas.”

  While I was setting up an easel in my dad’s house and painting at my leisure, Everett was wearing this incendiary shirt around Berkeley, Oakland, and San Francisco, secretly recording the responses of people who passed him. The sneers! The wrinkled noses! Even slurs. A drunk woman laughed. Only one person, a heavyset white guy in a golf shirt, a liberal’s dream of a Republican, nodded and smiled. Everett’s tiny camera recorded it all.

  He printed out and enlarged stills from this footage, and mounted them in ornate gold frames. The faces of these people were awful: there was so much cruelty in them, so much unrestrained judgment.

  For the show, Everett also displayed the T-shirt, backpack, and camera in a rectangular Lucite box. He screened a video in which he puts on and takes off the T-shirt; in the footage you can see a blush spreading across his neck. He’s aware of the camera in a way that his subjects weren’t. He has betrayed them in order to display their intolerance. On one wall, a single silkscreen poster read BUT WHAT WILL MY DAD THINK?

  My own dad thought my descriptions of the show made it sound mean. But the moment Steve Shapiro walked into the gallery, he loved it.

  12.

  It’s like an old map, the kind my dad continues to use, even in the digital age: you turn it to match the direction you’re facing in order to see more clearly where you’re going. By the time I moved back to L.A., Everett was behind me. I saw everything differently.

  The first time he and I had sex he’d closed his bedroom door. He actually got up from his bed and walked butt naked to close it, his dick pointing so straight and hard from his body he could have hung a small-town sign from it that read EVERETT JAMES, DDS. No one ever talks about the diversity of erections in the male species: some stick straight out, others diagonally, some flip so flat against a man’s stomach you have to pull it like a lever to make anything happen. I remember thinking it was information my mom would get out of me about Everett if I wasn’t careful.

  His door had made an impressive click when he shut it, bank vault–style. It made me feel special. In the moment it didn’t occur to me that Everett might want everyone else in the house to hear the sound of his door shutting. Maybe he got off on the assumed audience. Just because someone blushes doesn’t mean they don’t enjoy the heat of that shame.

  Our first time, Everett didn’t have a condom and I went to get one from the stash I kept in my old Sanrio pencil case. I didn’t bother with clothes for the journey from Everett’s room to my own, and with every step my thighs swished together and my bare feet picked up all kinds of gnarly dirt from the crooked wooden floor. If someone caught me, I planned to say “It’s intentional,” and keep walking.

  When I returned to his room, Everett said, “If I could have, I would’ve recorded you running naked back to my bed.”

  “You couldn’t do that.” I peeled open the Trojan wrapper. “Ever.”

  At the time, and for months afterward, I thought that was the right answer. But it wasn’t, not for Everett. If I had agreed to let him film me, would he have decided I was interesting enough to keep dating? Would he have texted me from Yale?

  For a long time, I thought Everett’s lack of condoms meant he was innocent and pure. What kind of attractive male at a top-tier university doesn’t have a prophylactic hanging around? One who hesitates before going all the way, that’s who. One with discerning taste, a gourmand who won’t eat at just any restaurant. I had only slept with four other guys my whole time at Cal, and even with that small sample size I knew enough to know that Everett was the exception. Exceptional.

  But since I’d started working for Lady, I understood something new. In that haunted-seeming Cottage, with only my own fingers to keep my body company, I realized that Everett inviting me into his room for sex even though he didn’t have a condom meant either that he was afraid to have sex with me, despite overtures to the contrary, or that he presumed I’d handle it, that I would go ahead and solve our problem, plan the picnic, book the flights, do whatever women have been doing for men since the dawn of time. Or it meant that he was hoping I’d shrug and fuck him anyway, too turned on to worry about pregnancy and STIs. Nope.

  Not long after I slept with Everett for the first time, I overheard a girl on Telegraph tell her friend, “I’m not a condoms girl.” I should have leaned over and told her about a guy she had to meet. There’s a chance Everett wouldn’t have gotten tired of her.

  When I started the Tevas project I hoped Everett would catch wind of it. I wondered if he’d see echoes of his own stuff in mine, the way we both investigated modes of judgment and censure within a distinctly delineated community, or whatever bullshit we used to volley back and forth during crit, and call me up to discuss it. I’d come a long way from painting. Everett didn’t even have to call—I’d settle for a Facebook message. But there was nothing.

  Later I was happy to imagine that he’d never heard of the project, which, let’s tell it like it is, I’d conceived out of heartbreak, or at least partly. It was a way to stop thinking about Everett, but also a way to think like him, a way to see if he was right. Could one live and breathe art? Could I?

  Everett would say no. The semester was ending, and everyone was moving out of the intentional community. Standing in his packed-up room, he told me he couldn’t see me anymore. “We’re just too different.” He went on to say that he needed to focus on his art.

  “Seriously?” I said. “You’re only here for a few more weeks.”
r />   “You don’t get it, Es.” S, I thought.

  “What is there to get?” I asked.

  “You were right, you’re not really an artist. And hey! That’s okay!”

  He tried to step forward to squeeze my arm, or hug me, and I stepped backward. In that moment, I wanted nothing more than to get away from him.

  Later, though, I missed him. Okay, he was insufferable, okay, he was a jerk, but he was also talented, he was interesting. I loved him.

  13.

  A couple of hours after I met Karl and Kit, Lady got ready for a housewarming party in Brentwood. By seven she was gone, and by eight, Devin was fed and bathed and lullabied to sleep in his tiny bed, and I felt the evening growing plump ahead of me; there was so much time left. Before returning to the Cottage, baby monitor in hand, I waved good night to Seth. He was headed to his room to play Grand Theft Auto. (Till dawn, he typed on his phone.)

  On the video monitor, Devin slept with both arms over his head, his stuffed bunny straddling his chest. The screen was green, it made me think of drone-strike footage on the TV dramas my dad watched with Maria. It was Thursday—what shows would be whirring their DVR tonight? I texted my dad something about how I was post-TV, and a second later my phone chirruped. I’m disowning you. And then: JK LOLZ!

  I smiled and headed for the tiny fridge. The small bottle of vodka lay flat on the freezer shelf, covered in what looked like shaved ice.

  I thought about calling my mom, but she’d yack on for over an hour.

  I checked the small window that faced the pool. The coast was clear. I pulled a juice glass from the cupboard, then unscrewed the bottle. The liquor smelled antiseptic. I wished I had olives, but my mother liked her vodka pure and unadulterated. When she was in a mood, even ice cubes bothered her.

  I knew it was wrong to be drinking, but the baby monitor didn’t lie, Devin was deep in dreamland, and, anyway, if anything happened, Seth was home.

  Here’s a question I’d had since middle school: What did it feel like to black out? Katherine Mary fell down the well enough to know its mossy insides like a best friend, but it had never happened to me. I hadn’t let it.