by Edan Lepucki
But I could make him want me, for what I would let him do.
I offered him some tequila. He nodded and I poured us both drinks, imagining him watching me from behind as I dropped two ice cubes into each glass, a squeeze of lime that I let spill into the paper cut on my index finger. When we clinked glasses it was the only sound and I liked that. I thought of Kit Daniels. The politics of the body. But Seth probably hadn’t read any academic articles about his aunt.
I started talking. First about how much I liked drawing and painting, and how I was really only starting to own up to that. And then, facing him on my bed, both of us with crossed legs, I told him about Everett. How if you took away his camera and pencils, the stupid Lucite boxes, the tiny spy cameras, the modes of blankity-blank discourse, the wound-up buzz he claimed to feel after a long day at the studio, he’d be a zero. A cipher.
“Art’s replaced everything in his life,” I said. “Even pain.”
I was drunk enough that I didn’t really need Seth to be listening. But he was. He laughed when I described Everett’s senior show.
“Wait until I tell you what I’ve been working on,” I said.
I described the project to Seth, how I was acting like my mom, drinking like her, and how that was influencing my art. I hadn’t told anyone but Everett about Katherine Mary and her problems, and here was Seth, looking startled. He signed something quickly.
“You know I didn’t follow that,” I said.
On his phone he typed: Who R U?
“What do you mean? You mean, who am I, right now, with you?”
He waited.
“I’m not sure,” I said.
It was so honest, I knew it was Katherine Mary talking.
“I’m a liar,” I said. “My mom isn’t. I guess it’s the one thing I admire about her. She doesn’t try to be anyone else. Even when she drinks, it isn’t to numb herself or escape from reality, it’s to find a better one that’s been there all along.” I blushed. “Or that’s what I’ve figured out since starting this project.”
I kept talking because he let me, he couldn’t stop me with his own words. It felt wrong and also I didn’t care.
“Kiss me,” I finally said.
This time, he did it without teeth, not even tongue. Just his lips, which were enough. I kissed him back. I closed my eyes and let myself fall into whatever this was. I felt him pulling off my shirt, the collar tickling my mouth, then my nose. When Seth laid his hands on either side of my bare shoulders his fingertips were warm and rough and I startled before going still. It was like he was trying to steady me. Or heal me. He kissed me again, on the neck, and then lower. With a single, gentle push, he shoved me so I was lying on my back.
When I opened my eyes we were both naked, and his body was nicer than I expected, as long as a felled tree trunk I could climb onto. How was he only eighteen? He was paying close attention to my body, touching it, looking for signs that what he was doing was working. I told him it was. Surely he’d never heard this from that other girl, and I could tell he wanted to please me. Or not me, but whoever I was now, this hybrid creature.
Afterward, we lay next to each other on our backs, the light bright and ugly. The panic was only starting to rise in me.
“I better pee or I’ll get a UTI,” I said.
He didn’t even pat my thigh like, Okay, baby.
He had already left by the time I returned from the bathroom. He’d left evidence, though: At the foot of the bed lay the dirty condom, tied up like a deflated water balloon.
You could leave a used condom with a drunk—was that the argument? The drunk wouldn’t mind. Made sense. That was the thing about drinking that I was beginning to understand: the list of things I didn’t mind was getting longer and longer.
37.
Now, every time Seth visited, he took stock of my drinking as soon as he arrived. He was checking to see how far S had slipped into Katherine Mary before we kissed, before he let me undress him. The drunker I was, the more delighted he seemed.
Afterward, he’d ask to see the photo. I would have offered to forward it to him, but I was afraid he wouldn’t come back.
One night, a week into our fucked-up affair, Seth didn’t seem interested in making out. Instead he picked up my pencil and sketchpad and began writing on a blank page.
“Hey! What are you doing?”
I want to be in yr photo. I can be my dad.
“Thank you,” I said, “but…I’ve decided to paint both of them, and photograph only myself.” He nodded quickly, but I could tell he was disappointed. “It’s to emphasize the lack, the loss, like I was telling you about.” He didn’t seem to be listening. “It’s just my instinct,” I said. “Besides, I just got another photo, of a mother and her teenage friends. I can’t find models every time, you know?”
Seth was biting the edge of my sketchpad and I told him to knock it off.
“Why would you want to be in the photo? Is this another way to piss off your mom?”
He stared at me. Again, I marveled at how much he could express without words. When he came over I liked to keep the lights on and my eyes open, because he told me so much with his eyes. It embarrassed me how much I liked it, how I missed it as soon as he was gone.
“I know about Kit’s photos,” I said. “I heard the fight.”
He was flipping through the sketchpad and wouldn’t look up.
“Seth,” I said, louder.
He looked up like, What?
Katherine Mary was revving up within me—she was always there now, especially around Seth. I would say whatever I wanted.
“Are you sleeping with me to get back at your mom?” I asked.
He looked disgusted.
“It must be exhausting,” I said, my voice growing fangs, “to express all your feelings with your body.”
He wasn’t sure how to react, and I watched him decide not to react at all.
“Is this how it was for your mom when she was yelling at you the other night?” Here it was, the mean truth. “Do you just decide to give nothing?”
At that last word—nothing—he let out a little strangled squeak and I gasped. I couldn’t help it. “You can make noise!” I knew it was the wrong response. “Sorry. I just didn’t know you could.”
He held out a fist and wrapped his other hand around it.
“Stop drop dead!” I said, louder than I intended.
He was writing something else in my sketchpad.
I make sounds but not wrds I cant
“Got it,” I said. “I totally understand.”
It doesnt mean Im a freak dont treat me like im retarded
“I would never,” I said, but if he saw my phone’s search history (“Why would someone not speak?”; “Mutism”; “Mutes + Sex”) he wouldn’t want to have anything to do with me.
I cant talk. The end.
“I said I got it.”
Im not a metaphor
“I wish someone would mistake me for a metaphor.”
He looked like what I’d said had hurt him, that I would never understand.
Im not your little toy either
So he’d caught on to me—to Katherine Mary. What we liked.
“What do you want from me?” I asked.
He dropped the sketchpad and I hoped he would kiss me so I could make a bad joke about body language and we’d never have another problem again. Instead he got his phone and typed. It was taking longer than usual. He tapped something and a robotic voice spoke:
“What do you want from ME?”
“Ugh, don’t use that, it’s creepy. You’re not a robot.”
I waited for him to type more. But he didn’t because he knew what he was doing.
38.
Seth: Can I come by to see the pic again?
Me: Sorry I deleted it.
Seth: You could of forwarded it to me
Me: That’s not how the project works.
Me: You there?
Me: You can come look at the portrait
if you want.
39.
Seth stared at the painting in the same way he’d stared at the photo, devoted and searching, like it might reveal the secret to life if he would only pay it the proper attention. At least to this one person, my painting was magnetic.
We hadn’t discussed what had happened the last time he’d come over, but he’d already touched my waist, held my wrist for a beat too long. He didn’t want to end things either.
I was proud of the portrait. I liked how I’d captured the wall behind them, its rough texture. And the whiteness of the sky, matte and blunt. Lady’s hair and the thin cliff of her collarbone. The fabric of the shirt and the lettering of the words across her chest. That bored look in Seth’s dad’s eyes—MARCO was the name on his shirt name tag. I’d gotten the red thread of the cursive words just right.
“Was your dad’s name really Marco?” I asked. “Or is that name tag meant ironically?”
Seth looked up suddenly like there was someone yanking his neck with a string.
“Don’t tell me you don’t know your dad’s name,” I said.
Seth tossed the painting onto the bed.
“Hey, be careful with that!”
He was already picking up a pencil and my sketchpad.
His name = Mark Green
“So you do know it,” I said.
Seth wrote something else. He was practically vibrating.
Marco or Mark?????
“I’m not sure what his real name is, but that’s definitely what his shirt said.”
But he wasn’t listening, he was already slipping on his flip-flops.
“So his name is Marco,” I said.
He put his phone in his back pocket.
“Now that you’ve solved the mystery, that’s it? You’re going? I get it. You were just sleeping with me to get to the photo. I told you everything about me, about my mom, and now you’re over it.”
He stopped at the door, preoccupied by whatever he’d figured out about his father. But there was something else showing on his face. I’d hurt his feelings.
“I mean,” I said. “I like when you come visit me.”
Another guy would have smiled and crossed the room to kiss me before leaving, even though I’d be out of his mind right away. At least I’d feel wanted. But Seth wasn’t another guy.
40.
Seth: Youre the only reason I havent moved to Kits
Me: If that’s true kiss me goodbye next time.
41.
The situation—the affair?—with Seth should have had me freaking out, queasy with the fear of getting caught, of at the very least him letting the cat out of the bag about my art project. His age still had the word “teen” in it, and he was still my employer’s son. If Lady found out, she would kill me, and if I survived that, she would probably take me to court, claiming I’d defiled her disabled son. My dad’s disappointment and shame would be matched only by my mom’s pride and fucked-up satisfaction that I was as fucked up as she was. Seth knew more about me than anyone else. Everett had been the last person to hear so much about Katherine Mary, and look how that had turned out.
But I wasn’t losing my shit, and that was because of the art. I couldn’t remember the last time I felt this way.
Where to begin? There was the Katherine Mary project part of it, dressing like her, wearing my hair like she did when she was my age, not bothering to cover up the bags under my eyes or the pimples on my chin. There was the liquor, that longing to loosen all the screws in my body with just one drink. I was reaching across time to give her a high five. In those moments, I lost myself, forever and hallelujah, and it was like I was stepping back into the womb, tunneling farther away from that even, to before my mom had anyone but herself to fail. When I painted, she was painting too—she had never done it before, and I was showing her the way, and we were painting together. And when I let Seth pull off my clothes and get on top of me, it wasn’t me, it wasn’t my body he was touching. It wasn’t Katherine Mary’s either. It was some new person. Seth was touching someone new, someone I’d made.
And in the mornings, hungover, when I put toothpaste on my finger to brush my teeth, Katherine Mary–style, I felt the despair. She used to call it the Shadow, and now it followed me too. It was why I hugged Devin so tightly. And I guess why my mom had always held me to her chest whenever I’d been at my dad’s place for the week. Unlike me, Katherine Mary didn’t have art to save her from the Shadow.
Well, she did now.
I was staging the photograph of Bless This Mess (Mother No. 2) on the far wall of the Cottage, where Karl had installed a cheap butcher-block counter and sink. I decided I would shoot it digitally, and add an external flash to play up the glare in my painting; I was bound to mimic that light and I was into it.
I wasn’t sure where I’d shoot Lady’s photo, Lovers (Mother No. 3), but I knew I wanted to use film. My dad’s prehistoric Canon, which he’d given me in high school, would finally get some use again. I’d already ordered the shirt online, and was considering dyeing my hair red too. A wig would look silly, and unlike the first photo, this one felt sad and wistful and I had to honor that. As long as I got the right sky, I’d get away with everything else. The thought of not getting the overcast sky made me want to cry. Everett only ever cried over his work.
As soon as I was done with these two photos, I’d begin painting the new mother. It showed a teenage girl in a 1970s subdivision with her three friends. The mother looked fourteen or fifteen, and she had on an Oxford shirt that almost but not quite covered her womanly body. She was the only one looking at the camera. She had braces, and bobby pins holding back her shoulder-length hair. She looked like she was going to kick my ass. It was in black and white.
All of this took time: the painting, the staging, the shopping, the drinking, the recording. I’d hardly been sleeping. I guess that was also keeping me from thinking about what would happen if Seth and I got caught. I was too tired to worry about consequences.
The morning I overslept for work, I’d spent the night photographing Bless This Mess (Mother No. 2).
Seth hadn’t shown up at my door since he’d found out his dad’s real name; who knows what he was doing with that precious information. I’d had three nights without him barging into the Cottage and I was starting to miss him. His Snapchat had helped, but it wasn’t a replacement for actual contact. At the same time, my project was becoming something, I was inside of it, and I needed the time to work. That made me feel not like Katherine Mary but like Everett. Like a man.
Lady was knocking on my door when I came to. I sat up in bed like a vampire rising from the crypt. “Coming!” I croaked.
The curly-hair wig hung on the doorknob, its synthetic strands slippery and greasy, and it took me a second to get a good enough grip to open the door.
“Sorry, sorry,” I said, opening the door just a crack. Even though the props from the photo weren’t suspicious, I didn’t want Lady to come inside and smell the musk of her son.
I expected her to have Devin, but she was alone.
“You okay?” she asked.
“I forgot to set my alarm,” I said. “Give me fifteen minutes?”
“Come up to my room when you’re ready. I have something to show you.”
As I washed my face and dressed, my stomach quaked with nerves and last night’s drinks. Lady hadn’t brought Devin with her to check up on me, and now she wanted me to come up to her bedroom. What was she going to show me? I imagined footage of my trysts with Seth—our most recent. I was nasty, that was what Lady wanted to talk to me about.
That or Seth had told her everything about my project.
She’s pretending to be someone else.
“Just face her already,” Katherine Mary would say.
The Manse was quiet, which could only mean that Devin was either asleep or he wasn’t home. I walked upstairs and knocked softly on Lady’s bedroom door.
“Come in.” Her voice sounded far away and I imagined her on
the other end of her master suite, as big and cold as an ice-skating rink.
She was sitting on the bed, smiling, but she looked, as she always did lately, a little disheveled. It seemed like the news of Kit’s photos, and Seth’s betrayal, had broken her. A couple of times she had apologized to me—and for nothing at all.
“I’m sorry again,” I said. “I haven’t overslept since, like, high school.”
“It’s really fine.”
“Where’s Dev?”
“I got Seth to take him out to breakfast.”
“So you guys are talking again?”
“Barely.” She patted the bed next to her and I noticed she had an iPad on her lap.
“Sit,” she said.
“I didn’t know you had an iPad.” I kicked off my shoes and climbed on the other side of the bed. The mattress groaned a little.
“It’s Seth’s,” she said.
“Seth’s?” I tried to keep my voice even.
“I got it for him when @sethconscious passed a hundred followers. Now he’s got thousands. Can you believe that?” She sighed. “Of course, he asked me not to read his Twitter anymore.” She laughed and tugged at a hole in her sock.
“What’s funny?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she replied.
I was too scared to say anything. I had no idea what was on the iPad, but all I could imagine was evidence. Exhibit A: our very first texts, before we got smart and stopped sending those. Exhibit B—holy shit, what?
“I stole this from him,” she said.
“Why?”
“It’s got his video on it.”
“His video?” I thought of Everett wanting to film me running back to his bed stark naked.
“Sorry, I mean his…film,” Lady said. “The one he made for school? Turns out, Karl and Kit have seen it. But I haven’t. Have you?”
“No.” I was relieved to be able to answer truthfully even though another part of me felt bad. All this time I’d been yakking away to Seth about my work without a clue about his.
“I found it on here. It’s only, like, a minute and a half long.”