by Lucy Ives
And when Whit saw me, he did this thing he does where he shows the bottoms of his top teeth and, like, instinctively reaches up to loosen his tie. I staved off unreserved rage by imagining insipid notions that might occur to him, like “the milky hemispheres of her bosom,” as I approached. He wasn’t, I should explain, supposed to be here. According to the separation agreement, my soon-to-be former husband wasn’t supposed to be anywhere near me, but legally we were still hitched and so I couldn’t pretend that I did not know who he was, particularly since he had lately fucked with me more violently and absurdly than I had previously believed humanly possible.
“Hey, babe,” he actually said. In this moment, I realized that he was not here by accident nor was he on some unfathomable networking mission. His suit was navy and Italian, his tie red. He is not ugly, exactly, but has this slightly gerbily face. Our ten-year wedding anniversary was just five weeks off and I was praying that Whit would be merciful enough to sign divorce papers before that day.
“What,” I said, by way of preemption, “are you doing here?” I may have included “the fuck” in this phrase. It was very difficult for me to determine what exactly I was saying at all, so loudly was the blood clanging in my ears.
“You look fantastic,” Whit told me, psychotically unfazed. He added, ambiguous creep that he was, “And so young.”
The lobby was filling with swells, and a string quartet struck up some Mozart. I had not explained a great deal about my separation from Whitaker A. Ghiscolmb, to whom I had basically been wed since childhood, around the museum. My reticence was due less to anger or shame than to a sense that these events were beyond trivial. His unbidden appearance tonight was, on this count as well as many others, incredibly inconvenient. I had lied to Bonnie, I now recalled in horror, because I did not in fact have a date, and if she were to see me tonight in the crowd with my present interlocutor there would be hell to pay. As, additionally and even more depressingly, just because I hadn’t talked about the breakup at length didn’t mean that everyone in the museum did not know, in documentary detail, what had happened.
I squirmed. Fur coats were being flung down on a folding table to my right. I was beginning to hope that one of them might possibly be enchanted and, if I were to crawl inside it, would helpfully transport me to an alternate dimension.
“What are you doing here?” I repeated.
Whit shrugged. “You think no one invites me to parties? You should have seen the invite for this one. Pretty snazzy!”
“I’m serious,” I told him. “I think you should leave.”
“Well, I want to talk. It hasn’t exactly been easy to reach you.”
I had blocked Whit’s electronically communicated self on every device, platform, and service I made use of. I said, “True!”
“Ouch.”
I pondered the possibility that some aspect of “Whitaker A. Ghiscolmb, Esq.”’s personality had come unstuck from his legal name and/or professional identity and considered itself freshly at liberty and available to evil this evening, what I believe the experts like to call a “psychic break.” I squinted at him, trying to remember when last it was this legal eagle and I had been pals. He seemed cold to me and somehow drowsy at the same time. He kept pursing his lips and then smiling. He was contemplative, that was the word for it, and really it was odd.
Whit said, “What, you’re going to turn down an evening with one of 2014’s most versatile tort litigators under forty-five, according to fidigest dot com?”
Because I had no idea what to reply, and because it felt like part of my brain had just caught fire, I turned and started walking briskly away from him into the Egyptian wing. I knew he was coming after me, but at least I was putting multiple meters of marble tiling between us and other humans.
“Look”—Whit suddenly had my elbow from behind and was directing me into an alcove behind a fragmentary Hatshepsut—“if this is about her, then I’m sorry. OK? I really can’t help it if I have a type! I’m still attracted to you, Stella. You know?” He had placed his body, screen-wise, between me and the as yet light parade of perfumed and well-combed invitees, and now he yanked my dress expertly up and placed his hand on my inner thigh.
The novel sensation of his erection against my hip bone distracted me, it’s true.
[ 5 ]
When Whit makes reference to “her,” he is referring to a woman named Estelle Dooskin. And when I say he and I were married as children, I mean that I got married to him the summer when we were twenty-five, two months before I started my doctorate. As is traditional in my family, this took place under the aegis if not auspices of Columbia University, where Whit and I had met as freshmen. And I was in love with Whit Ghiscolmb in a way that made me feel I was doing a logical thing, because when you are in love with someone in this way you are going to spend the rest of your life loving them, which proposition still holds some unfortunate veracity for me.
Whit once prank-called a professor I felt had slighted me during my orals and pretended to be a concerned museum-going dermatologist, detaining the scholar on the phone for two hours one night discussing the finer details of rosacea in Titian and the more general biology of blushing on and around the human ass. He picked me daisies from store window boxes and stole carnations from diners. He drew me cards in crayon and ballpoint on my birthdays and holidays, inscribed with promises to love me all my life. (These cards usually sported likenesses of hilariously deformed walruses and kittens.) Our couch had multiple, unnoticeable pee stains on it, he made me laugh so hard.
But somewhere in the midst of what seemed to me a literally incredible store of good fortune, Whit was secretly pondering my disinterest in bearing children and finding that it disagreed with him. He wanted, as he began informing me just before he passed out from yet another survival-agnostic drinking bout, something he called “a wife,” someone who would “be supportive.”
Because it was then my custom to work as many as sixty hours a week outside the domestic sphere, and because we were already married, I ignored him. And I ignored him because I in fact knew, when he said such things, exactly what he meant: that he was privately envisioning his parents’ hallowed suburban partnership, their teenage wedding in the early seventies, his father’s extrovert career first in litigation then in local politics, his mother’s charmed trajectory from high school coed to homemaker to part-time librarian, the manor outside Stamford and their Maine escape, his four identically gerbiloid siblings. I ignored him because I could not believe that he wanted any of these so-called comforts—what I as a child of outsider Yuppies perceived as the wages of white privilege and cronyism—for himself, even as he was obsessively wanting them, pining after them, numbing his pain at the lack of them with tallboys and processed meat. I ignored him because Whit had read his Zinn and listened to his de la Rocha and for a while wrote accomplished opinion pieces denouncing American historical amnesia for an undergrad review. I ignored Whit because Whit loved complexity and tolerated identity politics; because he loved me for my mind, which was complex, and I believed he wanted this complex mind to flourish in the cutthroat milieu into which I, Stella Krakus, had been, for better or worse, launched.
But Whit no longer gave a damn about complexity, and the only way he was capable of caring for me or my identity was by leaving me in as slow and humiliating a fashion as his pickled brain could devise. It’s also possible that I ignored him because I simply did not care enough, at this point, what he thought or wanted, living with him sucked so hard.
And there was something else. It was year 7.5 of our marriage, and I had been at CeMArt for about six months. A group of previously unseen early Fraktur bookplates had come up at auction, and though German folk drawings are not my specialty, I felt that these represented a body of work the department’s collection might usefully absorb. Anyhow, if I were eventually going to be recognized as an authority in Early American works on paper, this was kind of the acquisition it was going to make sense for me to make as juni
or staff. Frederick Lu agreed with me, at least as far as the drawings were concerned (who knows how he felt about me personally at this stage) and negotiated the necessary funds. We had lunch a couple of times, met with a few patrons together, and I got to know his face, how the corners of his eyes tensed during mental processing, how he sometimes liked to laugh in a natural, almost human manner once he was done with business. It was clear to me, too, that even if it might be going too far to say that he “saw something” in me, as the expression goes, he was relieved or refreshed or mildly enlivened to know that I was the hire made. I did not bore him as a possible future head of the Department of American Objects, and that deficit of boredom was the kind of deficit into which it did not entirely displease him to gaze.
And gaze he did. At length. And our discussions began to encompass more general departmental operations, not just the Fraktur acquisition. Fred sometimes sought my advice. One afternoon we found ourselves feeding ducks together. It was odd. I began thinking about him on the weekends. I wrote him a note whenever he shared a point of view in a larger meeting to let him know what I thought of what he’d said. He expressed gratitude. He started coming to see me very briefly each day. He’d hover just beyond my open door. He smiled.
I had simultaneously started seeing less and less of Whit although I lived and slept and ate with him. Around Whit I sometimes felt as if I were wrapped in invisible cotton batting, a body condom of some psychic sort. And though I believed that Whit was the partner of my life and though I was gainfully employed and though I had every material comfort, I was having difficulty seeing my future. One night, at the close of a particularly bitter tussle over the lack of groceries in the house, Whit had exclaimed, “We’re not even having kids!” and went on to smash a container of cottage cheese with his fist. I do not remember what this was apropos of, but the phrase stuck with me. It was very odd, not the sort of observation Whit had previously leveled, since, as I noted, it was not so much a criticism of me, in particular, as of the both of us, together. And this—if not the dried cheese flecks, lingering in local crevices over the months—made it seem like it had come out of someone else’s mouth. Not that it wasn’t Whit who was saying this line, but that he had heard it somewhere else first and was relaying the sentiment to me, who was here a mere secondary interlocutor as far as my husband was concerned, another item of furniture in a residence he’d ceased to cherish.
I was lonely. I was also a little ashamed, if I am honest, of Whit, who as far as I knew had not read a book that was not a work of sports history in more than thirty-six months. He was taciturn at receptions and parties, frowning, flushed, impatient. He seemed at times exceedingly reluctant to spend time with me.
I watched Frederick Lu. A server at a restaurant one afternoon leaned over, after Fred had excused himself, and told me, unasked, “You know, that man really likes you.” Others elsewhere also seemed to indicate that this was indeed the case. And it felt plentiful, this liking, but also totally useless, because I was partnered for life and that was what I wanted, to be partnered for life. Not to mention that Fred had presumably had experiences of this nature before and was now having one of these experiences again and that was the long and the short of it, that it was cyclical, it happened to him. Fred had trends, and this was the extent of his meaning.
At least, this was what I fervently believed until one Friday Fred asked me out for a drink. And I went, knowing in my gut what I was doing, and had this drink with him. And I went and had additional drinks with him on subsequent occasions, all the while knowing what I was doing, and we fed more ducks, now explicitly feeding ducks together, and then one early September when American Objects had decamped en masse to a rural Delaware location for a workshop in furniture appraisal and was residing in a series of brick huts at a former-foundry-turned-B&B, I replied to a late-night email of Fred’s bemoaning his lack of phone charger by appearing in person at the door of his hut, phone charger in hand, and he in turn responded by inviting me into his hut, and so I entered, and we were in his hut together. And had extremely sweet and pleasurable sex. Which we repeated on the subsequent evening. After this, all fucking hell broke loose.
It was mostly in my mind, the hell. I dealt with it by precipitously taking a week’s vacation. I read five or six books on meditation and spent a lot of time sitting on the floor, breathing. Whit was made vaguely curious about this behavior on my part and showed the first spontaneous interest in me he had managed to muster in more than a year, telling me that this new practice might really be a good way for me to at last confront some of the intractable personality issues that had for so long plagued me. I even agreed with him. Meanwhile, it fell to me that not fifteen minutes could pass without some memory of Frederick’s body in hot proximity to mine overtaking all other mental activity. Not only was I betrayed by my vagina, but the rest of my body seemed helpless to prevent me from becoming an adulteress. This was, I told myself, a somewhat challenging period in the lifetime I was spending with my true love, Whit.
Months went by. Fred and I felt each other up in a couple of taxis. We did not have sex again. I begged Fred to help me understand what was going on. He asked me to be gentle with him. He told me that there was someone else in his life, too, a woman with whom he maintained a tacitly nonmonogamous partnership, who worked as much as he did. Fred did not tell me her name, but thanks to my burgeoning online stalking habit, he did not need to. I cursed myself in front of him. I told him that I wanted to walk into traffic. He told me to be gentle. I said that I was hoping a bus would run me down. I said that I wanted to move to Nevada and find work as an accountant and forget my own name. I told him that we could not do this anymore. I pleaded with him to see me. I told him that I was going to leave the museum. He told me that he loved me. I told him that I could not tell him that I loved him. He told me that he could not see me anymore. I told him that the only thing in the world I wanted was to be with him. He told me that I could not see him anymore. I told him that I was planning to leave the museum. I told him that I could not be with him. He said that he did not know what to tell me. He said that it was possible that he loved a lot of people, that he was happiest this way.
I was nursing very immediate memories of what were to me bizarre and painful events, when this past summer, postliaison with Fred and just after my ninth wedding anniversary with Whit, I went away with my husband to his parents’ island enclave in Maine. I was keeping to myself during a time of chaotic family encounters, which was how I found out that Whit’s phone was full of pictures of Estelle Dooskin’s crotch.
Quickly: Estelle’s name was actually already tattooed on Whit’s arm. He had met her in high school. She was the child of professional Doberman breeders, a petite pretty woman who, hitchhiking one June with an older boyfriend, had, through no fault, other than bad luck, of her own, been involved in an interstate police chase that ended when the pursued Jeep, the backseat of which she was asleep in, rolled three times. Her boyfriend died. She suffered severe head trauma, brain injury. So she was an eighteen-year-old sophomore when she met Whit. It had taken her a little while to get back to school.
From what I knew, most things were on Whit’s side. One of the effects of the injury had been to lower Estelle’s sexual inhibitions, a fact Whit had more than once described to me in graphic detail. But she was mercurial, and broke things off with Whit senior year for the much older owner of a local bowling alley. Then she absconded to New Zealand, where for many years she apparently made a living from online sales of humorously altered sock-monkey dolls. You will be unsurprised to learn that in spite of the tattoo, I did not find this person even nominally threatening, as far as Whit’s affections were concerned. However, when Estelle returned to the States and took up residence in Queens and waitressing in Park Slope, I might, had I known of her presence, have given Whit’s absence more thought. Estelle had, unbeknownst to me, been back in Whit’s life for more than two and a half years by the time her pussy, adroitly accommodating a h
efty rubber dildo, appeared to me among Whit’s text messages. And though her face was nowhere in sight in this lurid image, nor in numerous other photos, some of which divertingly demonstrated novel and unforeseen uses for socks, not to mention clothespins, spatulas, and oven mitts, I was able to determine that this impressively taxed anatomy was Estelle’s own on account of Whit’s blithe association of her full, real name with her contact info.
Naïvely, I assumed it was a brief flirtation. I had spent most of a year suffering through my attachment to Fred, which I was coming to see mainly as a kind of character test I had failed—and then failed to get over failing. I expected Whit, when confronted, to tell me the relationship had gone on a matter of days, at most a few weeks, and beg my forgiveness. He did not.
I countered by moving out of the house and requesting a divorce. Whit informed me that I would never be happy until I gave up the false consciousness I’d acquired in the professional world. I needed to have children or get a simpler, more honest and authentic job as a waitress or elementary school librarian, preferably some combination of the above. As things stood, my way of living was ruining other people’s lives, by which Whit meant his. I thanked him for the advice. He called me a cold unnatural bitch and said that I had never loved him. I hung up on him and blocked his number for all time. A month later, with the grudging assistance of my dad, the other attorney in my life, I had him served with papers.
—
THUS, WHEN IT CAME TO removing Whit’s hand from my inner thigh, this was done fast. It took a nontrifling quantity of self-control not to scratch out his beady gray eyes, but I opted instead for a firm “Stop.”