by Lyndsay Faye
“That’s when I realized that this guy, and the opiates I was getting from him, you know, they were the same. The pills, and the booze, and the relationship.” Her eyes well with tears. “I’d be feeling amazing and then it was hurting me. They both were gonna kill me, you know?”
Ariel shifts in his seat. “That’s powerful, Frankie. Anybody here relate to that feeling? Like what’s around you and inside you gonna get you killed?”
“It killed my aunt,” a man says. “It killed my best friend, too.”
“It killed who I used to be, anyway,” Lia states. “My life was over.”
Ariel nods. His eyes where they feather contain a past too, darknesses, acts that can’t be taken back or forgotten. “All lives end, but we sure can want to change the how and the when of it, can’t we?”
She’d had a plane ticket, was meeting Ben at JFK for a romantic Christmas jaunt to London that she figured was probably mostly about avoiding his parents. But it would involve Christmas trees, and whiskey-spiked apple cider, and her fiancé, and so she was happy. It was snowing hard, and she left the apartment with bag in hand to get to the airport. Decided to stop by her East Village studio space first, have a nip of something and check her email.
She never arrived at the airport. The sisters found her the next morning.
“I died on the hospital table but they got my heart going again,” a reedy guy notes with pride.
“Oh, I’d have died.” Frankie nods. “But . . . it’s hard not to still think about it. That familiarity. That feeling.”
Lia studies an ancient ceiling leak. She once created an illegal installation in an abandoned New Jersey shopping mall that was just ivy growing violently, voraciously, over a defunct escalator. It got her featured in Time Out and reminds her of what’s-her-name: entangled, very pretty, and not going anywhere. Frankie is sad tonight, which saddens Lia in turn—the Tale of the Clicker generally perks her up.
“It was this roller-coaster, right? There’s the wind in your face and you’ve got this shit-eating grin. Then come the bruises and that’s even kind of OK, you know? Romantic from the right angle.”
“You can still see the stars from the gutter,” Lia agrees.
“It’s pretty somehow, or else you make it pretty so you can stand it. Anyway, they both were this thrill ride. Afterward, without either . . .”
One man has his cap pulled low over his eyes as he nods off.
“Afterward, you might as well have flatlined,” Lia supplies. “Since it feels exactly the same.”
CATNIP: Useful in drawing a particular man to you. Either sprinkle it in a man’s food or in the four corners of your bath.
After an hour, everyone scatters like so many nestless ants. At least tonight the meeting calmed her. Occasionally Lia wanted to take the entire box of cheap black-and-white cookies plus the stale coffee and dump it all over her own head. Just to shake up the narrative. But the interlude spent during the meeting helped, if not the meeting itself.
It was stupid to come to this meeting. One with Ariel.
One from the old days.
Lia thinks about the word trigger, and how trite she used to find it, and how much it now feels like a gun to the head.
She reaches 104th Street and a plain glass door in a plain complex from the 1920s. They’ve been capable of moving for twenty years or more. They never have. Maybe because her mother, Laura, lived and breathed and very slowly died here. To the right of their door hangs their mezuzah scroll, now covered in a dozen layers of landlord-approved industrial white paint.
Lia touches it, because she always does.
ANGELICA: To sanctify your home, keep stray men from your home, bless a baby in your home, protect your home, create a border for enemies and crossings into your home.
Inside the Brahmses’ two-bedroom, the TV shouts merry partisan vitriol. One politician wants a nature preserve, and the other feels indifferent to rare water bugs. Lia used to paint picket signs about this kind of thing. Now she leaves the sound on because Paul likes it that way and goes to join her sleeping dad on the couch, nudging him affectionately.
“I wanted to catch up. Jesus, it’s only ten at night,” Lia teases.
His open mouth twitches into a fatherly half-smile. Paul Brahms was always small, Lia thinks as her own lips curve down. A small man with big burdens. She sometimes wonders whether he sheltered inside them. He’s a curious figure, her father. Dithering and efficient, clearly innocuous but ferociously determined. Paul isn’t hiding anything definite that she can pin down, but he always did seem like more of a person to her than the person he showed to the world at large. What an odd thing—for a man to loom larger in a two-bedroom rental than he did running a massive production company. But it might have been easier for her dad to be a melancholy man in public, a worried man, an almost ridiculous man, and not be anything more noticeable. Maybe the cloud of woe took solid form, hardened into a crab’s shell. After all, it requires a special kind of ego to take on the world.
“No, don’t hang the lights from those cords,” Paul mutters. “Two to a ladder. Always.”
“What’s that, Dad?”
“I said two to a ladder.”
“I love you, and you’re absurd.”
She covers him with the crocheted quilt he insists does not smell like a stale microwave. Lia glances down at the coffee table and her lips part again. This time in shock.
Paul was working. He never stops worrying about other people’s jobs—so maybe that’s why he seems to encompass more than himself alone. That’s where Lia learned to pick up strangers’ burdens, she supposes. Then again, maybe it was her dad’s personal grief that trained her to thrum along with pain like a tuning fork. As if suffering had to be shared, like a concert or an art exhibit. Paul used to thumb through family albums prominently featuring Laura Caruso Brahms, leaving them on the countertop for his young daughter to put away. Again.
And again. And again.
But this isn’t a documentary of family loss. They aren’t even the benefit gala spreadsheets. These are grainy, sordid, CSI-looking pictures. Of Ben’s mother and his new stepfather.
But taken two decades ago. At least.
“What the hell, Dad,” Lia breathes.
Her hand hovers before them in a grotesquely long depth of field. Something Hitchcockian, featuring bell towers and lethal falls.
With a creeping sensation, she carries the prints to the kitchen where the overhead light still coolly hums. Out of love and habit, she investigates the fridge. He’s living off cottage cheese again. Sniffing a container of lunch meat, she gags.
It’s as bad as just after Mom died.
You need to take better care of him, since you can’t take care of Ben anymore.
Lia refuses to slide to the floor in a lake of tears. This feels like supernatural bravery.
Are you really so brave though if you’re supernatural—isn’t the point of bravery that you’re, like, shitting your pants but you do it anyway?
Shut up, Ben, she pleads.
Sitting at the counter, Lia flips through the photos.
“What the fuck,” she whispers.
Her dad didn’t take them, first off. These were paid for. Photographer Paul Brahms directs everyone closer together, we all like each other here, aw, sure we do, until Benjamin would stick his elbow straight into Lia’s ear, and her dad would take several blurred shots of his own finger. No, a detective or a cop must have been involved. Second, there’s nothing but pictures here—no notes, no reports.
Lia’s stomach roils. She needs to know what this means. Because she’s read the articles about Jackson Dane’s dubious death, she saw the painting shrivel into ashes with her mind’s eye, or maybe with Ben’s mind’s eye. And afterward, when the death turned all too real, they ruled it a suicide.
Would discovering a decades-long af
fair drive a grown Texan over the edge?
The first is a shot of Trudy Dane framed in the sort of outdoor hotel corridor you find in LA. Looking like a circa 1960s bombshell who just fucked someone’s brains out on a beach. Trudy’s always been stunning, stunning and calculated. Lia has lost track of how many times Trudy’s been featured on the BroadwayWorld website or photographed for Page Six.
Lia glances at where Paul Brahms is now fully snuggled into the old-soup-can-smelling caftan. Her dad knows everything about New World’s Stage, from whether the restrooms are being properly serviced to what brand of coffee the concessions stand sells. His fingerprints are on every inch of the building. And he doesn’t share that information, not even with Lia—he hoards it like a dragon crouched over its gold.
But why this, Dad?
Why the hell should you know this?
Next come the money shots. Claude Dane exiting the same hotel room, kissing Trudy on the cheek. She smiles with her eyes closed. Ben got all that manic drive from his late dad, but Trudy has always been languid. This identical expression is the closest her son ever gets to looking like he just lapped up the cream, and it was always from lapping at other things entirely.
Lia shifts on the chair, her eyes watering even as she flushes.
In the next shot, a breeze whips Trudy’s hair into a wide blond smudge as Claude rests lips against her ear. It’s the second floor, because Lia can see the parking lot filled with sleek, powerful machines, dancing palm trees. The Danes aren’t hiding in some roach motel. Even though they’re the wrong Danes.
Lia returns the pictures to the coffee table. Lots of people have affairs, even within families. But these photos frighten her.
In light of the death.
In light of the dreams.
She desperately wants to pepper Paul with questions. But Paul protects all the Danes like some medieval knight. Worse, this inevitably has to do with Benjamin. And her dad would rather sew his own mouth shut than broach that subject with Lia. She watches the shallow, almost concave movement of Paul’s chest.
In-out. In-out.
They were desperate when the Danes changed their lives. Only a little girl, still hugging her late mother’s pillow to her chest, she doesn’t remember it well. But the story has become the stuff of legend. And like all legends, it leaves room for its various narrators to be unreliable.
Paul and Lia were living off tinned tuna when Lia wasn’t gratefully eating her school lunches, and they’d missed the rent twice. Drowning in her mother’s brain cancer debt, her father with a leaky rowboat, a pair of hip waders, and a thimble. Trying like hell to save them, choking on the salt spray. Then one night, young Lia alone with the flickering television glare as Paul begged the bank for another loan in midtown, he came to an alleyway. An extraordinarily well-dressed and imposing man was being held at gunpoint.
What was I gonna do, just keep walking? was how Paul Brahms put it.
What everyone agreed on was that Paul—weak, nebbishy Paul—walked straight into the corridor yelling and waving his arms, lying that the cops were on their way. The thug (sentenced to fifteen years at Rikers Island thanks to multiple violent priors) howled with laughter.
Which was the only opening Jackson Dane needed. He’d smashed the attacker’s gun hand against the brick, and seconds afterward that little shit’s skull.
Guy wanted my blood. Saw it in his eyes. I owe Paul my life, my family’s happiness, everything—and we Danes repay our debts was the way Jackson Dane told the tall tale.
The Danes employed her father, refinanced their crippling hospice bills. Paul and Jackson worked like partners. Lia and Benjamin fell in love. Their lives were a nest of forgotten jewelry chains, and people either sit picking eighteen separate necklace strands apart with a needle, or else accept the entire lump.
And Lia is discovering that their lives were even more entwined than she’d imagined.
“Why do you have these, Dad?” Lia touches the streetlight reflecting off her dad’s head and he snuffles gently.
She’s taking one last queasy glance at them when Paul’s phone flashes briefly. But it’s enough. A millisecond would be enough. It’s from Ben.
hey thanks for earlier today I know I was asking a lot of you but it is pretty urgent so can we this time not underestimate said urgency and do ten thousand other things instead please?
What could possibly be going on?
And Trudy and Claude, they’re . . . Christ, they’re married now.
Lia traps her hands against her sides to keep from flinging herself at her father, begging for information. It won’t do any good.
As a last recourse, if only to assure herself this isn’t another nightmare, Lia selects a picture of Claude looking at a wind-warmed Trudy from inches away. His eyes are so full of her. As if that doorway led to the wide world entire.
Lia trudges down the hall with the glossy print, taking refuge in her old room. Childhood idols study her. Freddie Mercury scowls at her distress, but David Bowie offers asylum in a wonderland of astronauts with eyeliner. Reflexively, Lia slides a hand into the depths of her pillowcase. But there aren’t any bottles there.
Lia is so far gone, she doesn’t know if she’s relieved or furious.
Her late mother smiles at her from a portrait on her dresser. Bigger briar patch of curls, sharper hook to the nose, fuller lips, cat’s-eye glasses. Laura Caruso Brahms was more beautiful than Lia can ever imagine becoming. She gently touches the scarf.
Crawling onto the mattress, Lia surveys her memorabilia. Certificate from the Congressional Art Competition, when her work was first displayed freshman year of high school—at the United States Capitol.
You peaked too soon, Ben teased.
Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, when she was petrified of what to wear to Carnegie Hall.
Do body paint—I’ll help, and it’s totally legal in New York, Ben suggested, all sly smiles, and they hadn’t even slept together yet. The first time for that was in a locked dressing room at the theatre when she was seventeen, sizzling makeup lights illuminating fevered skin.
The crystal paperweight of the Milky Way galaxy. It reminds me of you, Ben said about what ought to have been a knickknack and instead felt like his heart, heavy and pulsing in her hand.
“Fuck this noise,” Lia whispers, casting around for her phone.
No matter what I did, I love him, I just fucking love him, and you help people you love no matter how many times you may have stabbed them in the heart.
Lia’s teeth grind as her screen lights up and she begins to type.
When the phone falls from limp fingertips, she’s too exhausted to even know whether or not she pressed send. Lia snuggles under sheets that still smell like her. She has to be up at four in the morning again, anyhow.
As Lia lets the mental cacophony smother her, a strange image plucked from earlier today keeps reoccurring. One of the man named Robin, the little guy the sisters might adore or despise. And how, catching sight of a fraying seam on Moma’s cropped tee, he pulled out a miniature sewing kit. Leaning over, licking his lips like a gourmand, he threaded a needle. Lia’s muscles twitch and start until she falls into a fitful near-slumber, dreaming of monsters captured in photographs.
HORATIO
Books and drafts mean something quite different for different thinkers. One collects in a book the lights that he has been able to steal and carry home swiftly out of the rays of some insight that suddenly dawned on him, while another thinker offers us nothing but shadows—images in black and grey of what had built up in his soul the day before.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science
Sparrows are faffing about outside, and they sound absolutely appalling. The walls, extraordinarily thin for a pre-war building, thump with salsa music. Horatio’s teeth feel sandy and he’s facedown with legs tethered in knotted sheets and he im
agines that a witch turned him to stone.
“Bollocks.” Horatio rolls onto his back. “Bollocks, bollocks, bollocks.”
He scratches his hairline, disentangling. Marveling that he is here of all places—he nearly thinks home, but no, here in his old bedroom across from his old . . .
“Benjamin?” Horatio croaks.
The door is wide. No answer. Surely if there is a God in heaven, the nutter is still passed out with his hair standing up like a punk porcupine.
Well, there you are, then. Jains don’t believe in a God in heaven.
You’re buggered, sir.
Horatio cracks a stupid smile, blinks at his brass statue of a Tirthankara. Still here after all this time. He must’ve been too distracted to pack the poor soul. Horatio doesn’t pray as often as he should do, and certainly not when he was at Columbia. The figure appeared here after a foray with Benjamin into St. Mark’s Place and a very great deal of weed and ramen. Rishabhanatha’s eyes are closed. Lucky, considering what Horatio—new to American appetites and American boldness too—got up to in this bedroom.
He presses his palm against the heartache that never dissipates. In a sense, it’s unsurprising Benjamin acted glibly after their unspeakable (apparently) error. Horatio’d had a different red-blooded, red-pricked Yankee in here every week. Teaching assistants, pre-med students, coffee baristas. Alcohol, marijuana, meat, sex—they’re contaminants, like sun leading to skin cancer. Bodily pleasures. Horatio enjoyed being shagged senseless by that ginger-headed lab tech about as much as he relished a good whiskey.
Purify yourself afterward. Gift deli flowers to your idols, return that full-price shirt to Brooks Brothers. Spare the life of a mosquito. He’s a modern man and he was in grad school abroad, for heaven’s sake. Sex was worth about ten Hail Marys in Catholic terms and giving up his seat on the 1 train in Horatio’s.
Sex with Benjamin, though.
“God, what a cock-up,” he whispers. “Benjamin! You awake, mate?”
Sex with Benjamin derailed Horatio’s entire belief system—he’d give up dharma, abstain from non-attachment if it meant he could hear Benjamin’s breath catch that way every night. It has tainted every casual encounter since. As generous and as ecstatic as losing himself in flesh proves, by the finish line, he’s just a mindless pulse of pleasure. A car engine, a mallet, a thing of cock and pistons and no soul. Every song suggesting that he could imagine his way out of this, picture Benjamin while with another man, was laughable.