When Watched

by Leopoldine Core

  Praise for Leopoldine Core’s

  When Watched

  “A striking debut collection of nineteen short stories revolving around sexuality and city life . . . Core is a master raconteur and organizes all of her tales around objects and places (most take place in a bedroom or in transit); she captures a quintessential New York cynicism—one punctuated with hopeless romanticism, stress, and hyperstimulation. But the cynicism also produces pure moments of bliss. . . . Entrancing, subtle, and tragically poetic, this collection is an important contribution to queer literature.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  “Leopoldine Core is the author that’s turning everybody’s heads. These stories set in NYC form an unforgettable work about sexuality, identity, and gender.”

  —Bustle

  “Full of dazzling insight and empathy, each of the stories in this debut will force you to consider how personal identity is impossible to pin down: We are all chameleons, shifting parts of ourselves to make the best of new circumstances. While there is an undeniable headiness to Core’s collection, her writing is never heavy-handed: It’s refreshing—even bright—and full of heart. This new voice fills a void that, until finishing the final pages, we didn’t know was sorely missing. But now that When Watched has surfaced, we can’t wait for more from Core.”

  —Refinery29

  “Leopoldine Core is one of the most original new writers I’ve come across. Reading her carefully laid-out sentences is like following a trail of white pebbles through a dark forest of strange insights and passion. Her ardent wanderers exist in the ever-churning flux of their moods and minds, in a haunted, desperate, and bejeweled New York. I get so much from being in her worlds.”

  —Sheila Heti, author of How Should a Person Be?

  “Powerful and lucid, these stories are full of pain and sex and the cutting things people say to one another.”

  —Marie Calloway, author of what purpose did i serve in your life

  “Leopoldine Core writes deceptively poetic prose—there’s a delicacy to it, without being precious at all, and it leaves you with a feeling that resonates long after. She captures an essence of her generation, a sort of alienated and self-destructive ennui. I felt so protective toward these characters, like I wanted to reach into the pages and pull them out and save them from themselves.”

  —Molly Ringwald, author of When It Happens to You

  “Intent on both wasting and appreciating their youth, Leopoldine Core’s distinct and fascinating characters know they’re being watched but seldom fully seen. But every now and then, they see each other. And they don’t just meticulously observe the sweetly gritty East Village of the recent past; they bring it absolutely to life.”

  —Sarah Manguso, author of Ongoingness

  “I love the way Leopoldine Core lets her characters fight toward a turbulent happiness. Like a lesson in how to talk to each other—and also how to be alone. Fast, lucid, and beautifully blunt, these stories cut and swoop to the conversations and meditations that, of an afternoon, can define an epoch in your life.”

  —Benjamin Lytal, author of A Map of Tulsa

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  WHEN WATCHED

  Leopoldine Core was born and raised in New York’s East Village and graduated from Hunter College. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Joyland, Open City, PEN America, and Apology magazine, among others. She is the recipient of a 2015 Whiting Award for fiction, as well as fellowships from the Center for Fiction and the Fine Arts Work Center. Author of the poetry collection Veronica Bench, Core lives in New York.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  penguin.com

  Copyright © 2016 by Leopoldine Core

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  The following stories were published previously in different form:

  “A Coffin” in Conduit; “Historic Tree Nurseries” in The Literarian; “Smiling” in Sadie Magazine; “The Underside of Charm” in Joyland Magazine; and “When Watched” in Open City.

  eBook ISBN 9780698411265

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Core, Leopoldine, 1985– author.

  Title: When watched : stories / Leopoldine Core.

  Description: New York : Penguin Books, [2016]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016012621 | ISBN 9780143128694 (softcover)

  Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Short Stories (single author). | FICTION /

  Contemporary Women. | FICTION / Literary.

  Classification: LCC PS3603.O734278 A6 2016 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016012621

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design by Lynn Buckley

  Version_1

  CONTENTS

  Praise for When Watched

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Hog for Sorrow

  The Underside of Charm

  Smiling

  Another Breed

  Historic Tree Nurseries

  Chubby Minutes

  The Trip

  Memory

  Teenage Hate

  Orphans

  A Coffin

  The Hitch

  When Watched

  Polaroids in the Snow

  Like Baby

  A Career

  Pleasure Kid

  Paradise

  George Harrison and the End of the World

  Hog for Sorrow

  Lucy and Kit sat waiting side by side on a black leather couch, before a long glass window that looked out over Tribeca, the winter sun in their laps. Kit stole sideward glances at Lucy, who hummed, twisting her hair around her fingers in a compulsive fashion. Her hair was long and lion-like with a slight wave to it, gold with yellowy shades around her face. Kit couldn’t look at her for very long. She cringed and recoiled, as if faced with a bright light. Lucy was too radiant.

  A low glass table stood before them. Fake potted plants flanked the sofa, their waxy leaves coated with dust. Lucy crossed and uncrossed her legs. Her eyes were quick and green, flitting about the room like birds. She wore a blue mini-dress with a white collar and peep-toe black heels. On her lap sat a chestnut leather purse with a brassy curved handle. Lucy was both plump and long limbed. “A tall cherub,” she had once said of herself with a laugh of self-hate. She mocked herself constantly, but with a certain joy. Her joy had a tough edge to it and seemed wonderfully defiant considering the pleasureless nature of their business. Kit was captivated by her. It seemed magical and impossible that one could laugh so heartily while waiting to be handled by a perfect stranger.

  At the far end of the room, Sheila sat at a steel desk, staring at the bright page of a catalog, poised with her red pen. She booked all of their appointments sulkily, sighing whenever the phone rang. Kit and Lucy considered her a bitch, though she rarely said a thing. “She does it all
with her eyes,” Kit had quietly remarked. They spent much of their time on the black couch talking shit about Sheila, leaning near one another and giggling conspiratorially.

  Lucy removed a gold-tone compact from her purse and clicked it open. She patted powder onto her chin and gave her mouth a glance. It was pale pink and without lipstick, open slightly, her teeth and tongue peeking through. When her client arrived, she ate a green Tic Tac, biting down on it. He was a short, swarthy guy with a newspaper under his arm.

  Lucy rose and clacked across the room with the steady grin of an assassin. It was her third appointment that day but she was an enduring faker, tossing her hair and sucking in her stomach. The man twinkled as he handed Sheila a white envelope full of money, which she counted and placed in a small drawer, then led them to their room with a crabby smile, one hand extended.

  Once she was alone, Kit raised her butt off the sofa and pulled her stockings up. Sheila returned to her desk and groaned. She circled something in her catalog and Kit’s client called to say he would be fifteen minutes late.

  “But he’s already fifteen minutes late,” Kit said.

  “Well,” Sheila said, without looking at her, “there was some sort of emergency. I told him you would wait.”

  “Yeah, I remember that.”

  Kit walked to the bathroom. The walls were gray with one frosted window and a big beige air freshener that hissed vanilla perfume every ten minutes. She yanked the window open and a great wind came into the room. Snow rushed onto the black tile floor. Kit lit a half-smoked joint from her purse. She kept several on hand at all times in a battered Altoid tin.

  She took a squinty suck and held the smoke in, liking the long burn, then leaned her head into the wind and exhaled, snow pricking her face. She peered down at the neon white streets below, car tops mounting quietly with snow. Kit shivered. She took another long toke and thought of the miserable year she’d spent at Bennington, where she had barely attended class, watching snow fall from her dorm window. She had been bored there. All anyone wanted to do was get plastered and sleep around. It was a lot like being a prostitute, she thought, only she had never gotten paid.

  Kit took another tug of smoke. She stubbed the joint lightly in the tin and licked her index finger, daubing the orange ember. With one hand, she pushed on the window until it clapped shut, then walked to the oval mirror. Kit stared at herself like a doctor who—right away—sees something very wrong. She wore a sleeveless black dress that she had bought in high school for her aunt’s funeral. Her body hadn’t changed much since then. She still had narrow legs and a lean, gloomy face, half-moon shadows under her eyes. There was a pubescent look about her, a Peter Pan shapelessness. She flickered between boy and girl.

  Kit returned to the black couch, reeking of pot, and began eating a flattened corn muffin from her purse. Sheila shot her a look of amazement and Kit glared back at her. She took another bite of the greasy yellow muffin and a man walked in. He removed his collared black coat and looked pensively about the room, tugging off his leather gloves. “Hi,” he said. “I’m Ned.”

  Kit smiled, her mouth packed.

  He stared at her and she tensed with embarrassment, knowing that he was comparing her face to the one he had seen on the Internet, a photo in which she sat posed on the arm of a beige sofa with the stricken look of a woodland creature in captivity. Kit hated to have her photo taken. The fact of one moment being yanked from all the other moments scared her. It was the same fear when people stared at her, much as Ned was doing. Her fear looked fresh and clearly he found this attractive. She seemed unaccustomed to it—unable to hide it—which suggested that she had not been a prostitute for very long.

  To Kit, Ned looked a little desperate. Like someone on Judge Judy, fighting for old furniture. She watched as he counted out ten twenties on Sheila’s desktop, then wiped his nose with the back of his hand. Sheila led them to a square bedroom with scuffed white walls and brown carpeting. Once she’d shut the door, Ned removed his suit jacket and the two sat on the edge of the bed.

  “What was your name? Tammy?”

  “It’s Tonya,” she said, crossing her legs. “So what are you into?”

  “I’m not going to touch you.” Ned pressed his temples. “But I’d like you to get undressed.”

  Kit nodded absently. Her eyes were bloodshot and her thoughts floated somewhere near the ceiling. Ned leaned his face toward her neck, as if about to plant a kiss there, but instead took a sniff.

  “Your hair smells like pot,” he said. “And like that big piece of cake you were eating.”

  Kit turned in alarm. “It was a corn muffin.”

  He smiled oddly. “You should be careful, eating all the muffins you want. You’ll get fat.”

  “No I won’t,” she frowned. “Not if I tried. No one in my family is fat.” It was absolutely true. They were a bunch of beanpoles with long feet and sunken faces. Ugly, Kit thought. But uglier was his smile and his warning. His wish for her not to eat. For her to remain locked in a single state of attractiveness, like a woman in a painting, with no body fat or smells, nothing to say.

  Kit could smell Ned too. Strong cologne with the scent of his underarms screaming behind it, a bright, beer-like tang. She tried to imagine the women who loved his smell. A wife. Daughters. Possibly girlfriends. These women were lurking in the private lives of even the ugliest men she saw. Ned was neither ugly nor handsome. He had the sort of face that there had to be hundreds of. A pale white oval with a slight shine. Small eyes and a largish nose.

  “I bet you drink a lot too,” he said, still smiling foolishly.

  “Not really.”

  “Youth is an incredibly buoyant medium,” he mused. “What you can do at twenty you can’t do at forty.”

  “So you’re forty?”

  “About that.”

  Kit undressed. She lay on the bed with shining eyes, like some dog awaiting the strange and particular abuse of its owner. Ned stripped down to his boxers and stood alongside the bed, staring down at her.

  “You are so stoned,” he said.

  “Not so much,” she said.

  “Yes you are. You’re barely here at all. It’s like you’re dead.”

  Kit felt a flash of panic pass through her eyes and knew he’d caught it. Ned was right. She was completely stoned. And because of this, certain things in the room appeared huge. The pink-flowered Kleenex box. The pump bottle of generic lube. Ned’s oily, egg-like head.

  Kit was arranged facedown on the bed. She shut her eyes and Ned rocked into the quiet space between his hands. “I think you like this,” he said, which was what they all said.

  She fell into a partial sleep. Dreamless brown darkness closed around her. She heard her heart beat. It was like a fist pounding at the bottom of a swimming pool. Ned groaned. He came onto her buttocks and she woke, a dull hate glowing inside her. She stood and wiped off her butt cheeks with a tissue. “Are you married?”

  He nodded.

  Kit returned to the bed. “Does she know you come here?”

  “I think she does.”

  “And it doesn’t bother her?”

  “She has a very good life,” he said. “She’s not gonna go and fuck that up.” He lay down on the bed next to her.

  Kit refrained from pointing out that he had not answered the question. He went on to say that his wife didn’t work. She took care of his daughter. He talked about her in a frank and vulgar manner, like she was an animal who had eaten out of the same can for years. He said she was really interested in astrology. He said all women were. He said his wife kept a dream journal and he laughed gently, slightly like a madman. “Who cares about dreams?” he said. “They don’t mean anything.”

  Ned said he was a dentist and Kit wondered how he handled all that revulsion. He complained about his practice and boringly recounted the events of a cocktail party in which he had hum
iliated a fellow dentist in front of several beautiful women. “That took a bite out of his swagger!” he said. And Kit laughed obediently, which felt like the worst kind of sex.

  • • •

  Kit and Lucy walked to the train at dusk, snow swirling past their faces. The sky was a pearly gray, the moon dimly visible. The two walked along a narrow path of brown slush, bookended by white humps of snow. In their boots and coats, they looked like the children that they were. Each bundled and waddling, their tight dresses and biscuit-colored stockings buried underneath. Lucy wore a long tweed coat with big glossy black buttons, Kit a brown leather bomber jacket and sagging wool-knit hat. They hooked arms, steadying each other.

  “He like, reprimanded me for eating a corn muffin.”

  “What an asshole.”

  “It was like he wanted me to be dead. Like I was interfering with my potential hotness by living.” Businesspeople passed swiftly in black coats. “I hate this neighborhood,” Kit sneered. “I hate every single person.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “No. I’m freezing. And I hate these tights.” She wiggled with discomfort. “I hate this dress.”

  “Well,” Lucy grinned, “they need you to remind them that they want to fuck you.”

  Kit laughed. They stopped in front of the train station and looked at each other. “Do you wanna come over?” Lucy asked. There was snow in her eyebrows.

  Kit couldn’t help but smile sheepishly at the offer because, until that moment, they had only ever spent time together in diners or on the black couch. “Yeah,” she said. “I do.”

  • • •

  Lucy’s apartment was small and lit like a bar, one long room with yellow light in every corner. There was an old claw-foot tub next to the stove and a mattress on the floor by the wall. Kit stooped to pet a brown rat terrier with a silvery snout. He rolled under her hand with a guttural moan, groveling with delight. “That’s Curtis,” Lucy said.

  “It’s like a dirty-sock sex club in here,” Kit laughed.