Katz, zipped up in her usual place, sat with her feet on the coffee table and the Gameboy on her lap. Her long fingers tapped the buttons.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Level Ten, Dana.”
“We don’t have to talk about it.”
She looked up at me as I hesitated by the door. I was late, really late now, and I felt it in the sweat that was starting to pool under my arms. I should have called in to let them know, but now I was truly behind schedule and I could lose my job for this, I could lose my place to live, and worst of all I could lose Katz, who was so beautiful to me that my eyes stung when I looked at her, whose mouth was moving and saying words I didn’t understand, as though she was another species entirely, a creature more graceful and poignant than I would ever be and not at all human. I felt small and sweaty and jealous.
“The rent’s going up this month,” she said. “We got a letter.”
“I think it’s worth it,” I said.
She shrugged. The situation wasn’t that simple now, and we both knew it. The Gameboy chirped, and she switched it off without saving the level. She’d have to start over from the beginning now.
“You’re easier to live with when you’re not here,” she said. “That was part of our deal, right? That you would have your life and I would have mine. Separate.”
“You want me to be invisible.”
My voice cracked, but she nodded and kept nodding. My throat closed.
“I don’t really want to talk about it anymore,” she said.
I had no words.
“You can go now. Please don’t come home until after six. You’re paying for my space, right? Not my time. This is just until I can finish transitioning.”
I had fifty-five dollars in my bank account. I had maybe no job. I lived on tea and discount canned food, eggs, fun-sized candy bars from the reception desk at work. This was temporary only because I couldn’t sustain it. I licked my lips.
“I can do that,” I said.
Katz smiled at me, for probably the second time ever. “It means a lot,” she said. “Your support. I don’t know what I would do without you.”
By the time I got to work, I had my excuse all figured out, but it didn’t matter, because the apartment building on the corner caught on fire. Someone had left a candle burning. After they left for work in the morning, the candle set their bedroom on fire. The whole apartment burned and spit huge, rainbow-tinted flames out of the breaking windows. Everyone got out safely, but the whole block was evacuated.
My coworkers were standing across the street in a huddle, gossiping, watching Emergency Services hose down the smoking wreck.
“Dana! I’m so glad you’re here,” Jeff said, taking my arm. “Where were you?”
“In the back. I forgot to clock in,” I lied.
“That’s fine, I can check you off my safety list. I was so worried. I thought you were still inside.” He turned to the rest of the group. “Dana’s here,” he announced.
Nobody noticed I was wearing the wrong kind of shirt.
“It’s so good to see you,” said one of the other techs. “You ready to work late today?”
“Every day,” I said. “If I lived here, I’d be home by now.”
That made them laugh, and I knew I was safe. I stepped into their circle and stood there like everyone else with my hands in my pockets, listening to their jokes and half-remembered headlines and opinions: This fire was just a sign of more trouble for the housing market; no, it meant people needed updated buildings to live in, not these gorgeous old husks; no, it was just an accident, plain and simple, there’s no such thing as an act of God, that’s the first thing you learn in this business. They turned, contemplated the burnt building’s blackened architecture and smoldering roof. The problem was deeper than this, they agreed; this was a sign of something, some deeper flaw in the city’s infrastructure, housing allowance, cost of living, population density. Although what did we expect, moving to Portland, in the flood zone of a major tributary? The city was all timber when people came here. Stumptown. This fire stuff, this is the Wild West. We just had to be careful, watch out for each other. There weren’t many places to go. We’d lost how many units, up in smoke in a matter of hours. Anyone’s home, anyone’s safe haven could be next. Look, the ashes are falling. It’s like static, black snow, and it’s landing on people.
If I kept quiet and let their words filter past me, it wasn’t that different from the radio, or Edith’s half of her weekly podcast interview, a voice in another room, speaking a language I couldn’t seem to learn or understand no matter how hard or how hopefully I pressed my ear to the vent’s metal grille. On the other side was everything I wished I knew. I heard and waited for the meaning to follow.
How to Be a Better Metamour
The magazine said, if you want to know him better, get to know his other lovers. As Josie, age twenty-six, read the block of text, her brow crumpled. Third Wheel was her favorite advice column. Her boyfriend, Mark, had suggested it to her after he came out and she was having trouble accepting him. I just want you to know me better, he’d said and texted her the link to Third Wheel.
Mark was polyamorous. Where Josie grew up, in Ohio, that was called cheating, but Portland and everything about it was different from Findlay. She felt awkward and vanilla here. The people were different. The rules she was used to didn’t apply. Dating, which she did with the help of a few apps, felt like a series of interviews in which she was either hiring and nobody was qualified or she was answering questions that made her feel profoundly old-fashioned. Everyone was poly here, except for Josie. At least, that’s what Mark told her. She believed him.
His other lovers, Third Wheel said. The column called these outside people “metamours.” The lover of your lover. Even dating was a way to network, to polyamorous people. You slept with someone, and they slept with someone, and you built a community on your willingness to fuck each other. A metamour was also called a co-husband or co-wife or a familiar. Josie wondered what it would be like to be married to someone who had another wife. She decided she would probably kill both of them.
“What are you reading? Your cheeks are pink,” Mark said.
“I got hot all of a sudden.”
He smiled. He was thirty-three. He looked older to her—laugh lines around his eyes—and even though she knew that theoretically they were both young, and that when she was thirty-three she’d see her present self as a child and other thirty-three-year-olds as normal people, she wondered what he really knew that she didn’t, aside from how to love more than one person at a time.
“You’re pretty when you blush.”
She smiled, but he went back to his crossword puzzle. “I wasn’t blushing,” she muttered. Nothing in Third Wheel talked about how to tell if you were too grown up, or not grown up enough.
After breakfast, Mark wanted to go back to his place and fuck, but Josie made up a story about how she needed to help her roommate with a really important project. She had a hard time saying no to Mark’s bed, but it was summer and she didn’t want to get all sweaty; besides, once they started fucking, it was so hard for her to stop she’d spend all day in his bed in the loft of the carriage house, with the skylight open to let the fresh air in and her happy sounds out. Mark kissed her for a long time after she unlocked her bike from his house’s front fence.
“I wish you’d stay.”
“What will you do instead?”
“I’ll get up to something,” he told her. “Liz and I have plans tonight.”
“Plans?”
“There’s room for one more, if you want to join us. We’re taking a picnic to Overlook Park to watch the sunset.”
“That sounds romantic.” She tried to keep the sarcastic tone out of her voice but knew from Mark’s expression that she’d failed.
“We’re dating. I wish you’d jus
t accept her. She’s important to me too.”
“I hope you have fun.” She swung her leg over the bike’s crossbar.
He sighed and rubbed the back of his neck. He wasn’t from Portland, either, but he wasn’t from a place like Findlay. “Look, Jo. I’ll text you her number. If you were willing to meet—maybe it would put some of this to bed.”
Put it to bed. She knew he fucked Liz in the same bed as her, on the same sheets. In this warm weather, she sometimes smelled the other woman’s oils and her shampoo and soap on the pillows. Liz smelled like geraniums and roses and lemons softening with mold. When Josie thought this special combination of scents was Mark’s, she couldn’t get enough of it. Now, it turned her stomach. She wished he would at least do the laundry between Liz’s visits. She wished it was winter. She wished that Liz wasn’t even in the picture.
Her phone buzzed against her hip as she pedaled away. That would be the phone number. Mark did all the things Third Wheel said to do: He told her about Liz, including her last name and where they’d met, and he told Josie when he had a date with her and where they went. He seemed too eager to share the details and frequency of the sex he had with Liz, which made Josie feel even sicker, so sick that she actually almost fainted when he said that Liz gave amazing head and, even though Mark didn’t get the point, he could at least shut up about how open-minded Liz was so that he could bring Josie a glass of water. She was, he said, a little green around the gills.
* * *
Josie’s future self, who was thirty-three and way more open-minded than Liz and Mark put together, would probably look back on this period of her life and sigh wistfully. Wistfully, or whimsically? She always mixed those words up. Mark didn’t ask for her help with the crossword because of that. She turned down Albina and then took a left. The bike lane went all the way into Sellwood, the other end of Portland’s universe, where she rented a room on the first floor of a house near the college. The long ride took at least thirty minutes, which gave her time to think about nothing as North Portland’s industrial, glass-fronted shops and gentrified store facades gave way to green spaces. She rode along the Springwater Corridor, inhaling the sweet scent of grass and growing weeds and the vague, brackish scent of the Willamette River just down the low bank. Some of the trees here were the same and some of the birds, but on days like this Josie felt her new city’s foreignness, as though she was on another planet entirely, hearing sounds and smelling smells that were reminiscent of the place she grew up but on closer examination were only similar enough to Findlay to compel her senses and lull her into a feeling of familiarity. No matter which way she looked, she couldn’t quite convince herself that she was home.
* * *
She lived with Ashley, twenty-six, Caitlin, twenty-five, and Jenna, twenty-nine. Jenna seemed at times impossibly old and mysterious and spent most of her time off in her room reading about crystals and testing various plant emulsions. She was an aesthetician who spent her days ripping hair out of women’s bodies with hot wax and tweezers. Her boyfriend was a bartender who rode a motorcycle. Ashley and Caitlin, who worked at the same nonprofit, were uncoupled but sometimes brought strange men back to the house and had loud, enthusiastic sex with them. Josie, at home, felt her white-bread-ness. Even at home, she felt out of place.
She parked her bike on the house’s front porch and went in as though entering a temple. It smelled like basil and popcorn—cooking. She dodged into her room before anyone could see her and closed the door. She sat on her bed, took out her phone and set it, screen up, on the bed. She folded her legs and stared down into its flickering face as though consulting an oracle.
Liz Bechtolt. And a phone number. She typed the name into Facebook and thumbed down the scroll of faces, wondering which one was Mark’s other girlfriend. He explained one time that polyamory wasn’t infidelity, because what he did with Liz didn’t change how he felt or what he did with Josie. And he said that it couldn’t be a betrayal, because he’d been honest with both of them the whole time—he hadn’t gotten bored, changed the rules in the middle of the game, decided to switch ponies. Josie’s stomach clenched. He had not gotten bored with her, true, but having another girlfriend in the picture, or even saving a space for someone else, seemed to mean that he had no intention of really letting her in, either. He had room on his plate for a dab of each partner, mayonnaise and mustard, and that was enough for him. He said all the time that Josie was free to see other people, but she didn’t want that. She was afraid to move any farther from Mark, to give up more of him than she already had. She was as close as he would let her be, and it wasn’t enough.
Of course all the Facebook Lizzes were very pretty. She hated that she was this kind of girl, who got jealous. She hated that she was the kind of girl who did the things she did and felt how she felt. She wished to be older, wiser, grander, but seemed unable to change or be anything other than what she was: too young, too self-aware, too naïve. She felt as though she was surrounded by girls, but still without friends. Nobody loved her brand of vulnerability here.
Her first text was designed to be innocuous, a wrong number kind of text that could be read and deleted without comment.
Hi, how’s it going?
She sent it and then put the phone down. She could tell Mark she’d gotten in touch the way he wanted. Then maybe he’d stop bringing it up. In the kitchen on the other side of her bedroom wall, one of her housemates turned the water on. She heard Caitlin singing, indistinct. Outside was a lawn mower, someone doing yard work before the heat of the day came on too hard.
The text window flickered. Liz had read receipts. Josie watched the speech bubble, three percolating dots, appear on the left side. Then: Hi, Josie! I’m getting ready for work, then my date with Mark.
Next line: Nice to hear from you.
It had a weird finality to it. Liz already knew her name—that meant Mark gave her Josie’s number first. Why hadn’t she been the one to reach out? Josie turned her phone’s screen to the quilt and lay back, arms crossed. She felt that she was playing a game whose rules she didn’t know. Was Liz his favorite? The primary? How exactly did you talk to your metamour when you didn’t want to?
As the sun set, Josie knew, Mark and Liz were sitting down next to each other on a picnic blanket at Overlook Park. She imagined Liz in a pretty sundress, the kind she saw in the window at Urban Outfitters or Anthropologie, totally out of her price range. They’d have a picnic basket with separate compartments inside, a chilled bottle of champagne, and no mosquitoes.
Josie lay on her bed, watching the sun move in pinkening stripes down the wall. The stars would come out, and they would hold hands, counting them, making wishes. The love Mark had with someone else was always a little better than whatever he had with Josie. The lighting was better, the makeup, and even the script—as though her little slice of relationship was merely a dress rehearsal for what he was doing with her metamour. She wondered, not for the first time, what he said to Liz, and if they were the same words he used with Josie. Did he hold the other girl’s face the same way? Did he put his lips against her ear when he fucked her, whispering, urging her to cum? By the time she’d thought it all through, she was too sad to masturbate and fell asleep with her clothes on.
When she woke up, it was maybe four in the morning. Her phone vibrated next to her ear.
Come over.
It was Mark. She picked up the phone, stared at it. She didn’t have read receipts.
He must be alone, then. Or he wanted a threesome. Fuck him. She turned the phone off and rolled over. When she woke up again, the birds were singing, and Jenna was running the coffee grinder.
“Wow, you’re up early.”
“I can’t sleep. It’s too hot.”
Jenna nodded sagely. Her bedroom was pretty much the whole basement, the coolest room in the house in the summer. The unfinished ceiling was hung with dreamcatchers, hides, horns, and dried flow
ers—a witch’s bower.
“My boyfriend is dating someone else,” Josie blurted.
Jenna frowned.
“I mean, obviously I know about it. But I’ve never done this on purpose before. You know?”
“So he’s poly.”
“Everyone is here.”
Jenna poured two mugs and passed Josie the carton of cream. “I’m not. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. Is he really that great?”
The coffee tasted slightly of cardamom and was the perfect temperature. The kitchen window was open, to let in the few hours of cooler, fresh air. The pale-yellow curtains, which belonged to Jenna and were embroidered with small golden stars, waved in the barely-there breeze. Josie sighed.
“He’s your first real one, huh,” Jenna said. “Have you met this other bitch?”
“I don’t even know her.” She didn’t know why Jenna, whose whole witch thing was built on a neo-feminist ideal of radical sisterhood—the label witch itself, Jenna once explained, stood for Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell—would call Liz a bitch. The word floated in the air, green as swamp gas, and its presence made Josie feel just a tiny bit better. Even Jenna saw it. Liz was a bitch. They didn’t have to know her to decide they didn’t like her.
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