Virgin and Other Stories

by April Ayers Lawson

  “It’s too bad you didn’t get to see the twin towers,” he says, though we aren’t near where they’d have been, his remembering them seeming to be provoked by an actual set of attractive twin girls strolling past in polka-dot sundresses. “That was what I always looked forward to seeing the most when we visited as a kid. I like repetition,” he says pointedly, as if this has something to do with me. “Damien Hirst called the attack ‘visually stunning.’ He said they achieved what no one would’ve ever thought possible. That it changed our visual language. An airplane became a weapon. People started panicking when they saw one close to a building.” As we walk, he alternates between staring ahead and turning down toward me to observe my reactions. “He said, ‘On one level they kind of need congratulating.’”

  And what to make of this? The cold detached gaze of the art world strikes me as terrifying. But I know he means to shock me.

  What is it about a man carrying your luggage, the way it appears lighter in his grip? The way you feel both grateful and entitled, in that if he hadn’t offered to carry it he wouldn’t be a gentleman, would be disrespecting you as a woman? Because he desires me I enjoy the display of his strength, and the memory of his rolled-up sleeves in the gallery, of the physical labor of him and the assistant having moved the large canvases before I came in. I like thinking of him holding a hammer—something about him equal parts dandy and brute. I like thinking of his gallery. Of his ability to have established it. Of his expertise. I like to think about what he does all day, from the moment he climbs out of his bed; sees his bearded face in the mirror; slips on his socks. I like the way he walks and speaks and his boyish bravado, the air of performance about him, or rather, the chinks in which I glimpse that I’m being given a performance by a very shy younger man who himself wouldn’t even speak to me without the assistance of this other man who now runs the show.

  But when after our first comfortable spell of silence he says, “Why did you like the bats so much? Those paintings?” I recall for whom I came and to whom I belong—him third on the list in terms of the men in my life—and the hint of conquest in his voice lets me know that all this time he’s kept in mind what I’d forgotten.

  * * *

  “I have a sentimental attachment to this apartment,” he says before leading me into the main building, adding that he prefers small spaces. Then, “This was where I moved after my sister died.” While he speaks, he holds open the door for a young woman in running clothes, exiting from the other side to pass through, and says, “Hello, there. Having a jog?” and though the girl looks at him like she thinks he’s a weirdo, the hint of a question at the end of her Yeah, the way her eyes slide over to appraise me, continues to bother me even after we’re up the stairs, inside the apartment.

  The faint scent of cat and incense presents itself to me as we stand inside the apartment. (We’ve stopped by on our way back to the gallery, from which he needs to email a file saved on his computer.) Its perimeters only a little larger than a walk-in closet, the place is about the size of my husband’s former college dorm room, and now I understand why on our way here he seemed to have been trying to explain it (or even apologize for it) to me.

  He has let me in to take a shower. “The bathroom,” he says, gesturing toward it with his hand. Then he steps inside it, comes back out with a towel he extends to me.

  “The puss is shy. She may or may not make an appearance.”

  His eyes spark. It takes me a second to understand he’s talking about his cat. I can imagine him bursting into laughter or even dance, such is his giddiness at having me inside this space; after he shuts the door to go wait at a bar next door, I can’t decide if he likes me more than my husband ever did or if what he feels rides more on the surface of him than it does with most; if he likes me in an exceptional way or (again worrying over his reaction to the jogger) if he just likes women. She’ll sleep with him after I’m gone, I think, remembering how her eyes went over me and then back to him. It doesn’t matter; you’re married.

  The door to the bathroom doesn’t shut all the way, and in the shower I find nothing to wash with but an amber bar of honey-scented soap.

  Outside the shower, drying myself, standing outside the bathroom so as to escape the steam, I observe a big discount jug of scotch (my husband’s brand, I discover with an ache of guilt so briefly debilitating I feel almost as if it’s coming from some outside force) on the narrow counter of the sink that seems to double as the “kitchen.”

  As I sit on the edge of his single bed, I text my husband to tell him both that my flight has been changed to the next day, and that I seem to be having problems with my cell phone; but as I type I’m alarmed by a loss of sensation in my hand—like I’m staring at something that isn’t a part of my body anymore—and again there’s that rushing of air, as if in a tunnel, the sense of something tearing and darkening, so that I have to pull my legs onto the bed and lie down until it stops. The orange cat that has apparently been hiding beneath the bed leaps on top of it to observe me. Meowing, rubbing up against me, she seems to be begging for my affection, but after only a moment of petting (during which her soft body purrs) she rears her head back and bites my hand—hard, so hard that I cry out as she leaps down and back underneath the frame.

  III

  Back in the office he couldn’t stay on the couch with me for more than a couple minutes; he was restless; he stood. He walked over to the window through which the now-golden last part of the afternoon lit the glass, and he told me how he hadn’t had a girlfriend until after college, at the age of twenty-two. “I couldn’t even talk to women,” he said, lighting a cigarette. He smiled. It was as if he were talking about someone else, and again I had the sense of two men, each of them wanting to impress me with his contrast to the other.

  “I worked in the library in college,” he said. “I was obsessed with this woman who came in almost every day. A graduate student. She looked like a young Isabelle Huppert. Some of her blouses looked like negligees. What do you call them?”

  “Camisoles,” I said, pleased to know something he didn’t.

  “Camisoles. She’d wear these camisoles under blazers. “White. Pink. Champagne. No bra. Remarkably poised. Some inborn nobility about her. Small-breasted but large-nippled. I could see them occasionally when she was leaned over her books, these rose half-dollar-size areolas. Forgive me if I’m going into too much detail, I—”

  He would plan things to say to her. He’d write them down and then practice saying them in a way that sounded casual, but whenever he saw her he froze up, couldn’t say anything at all, and if she came toward the desk when he was behind it, he acted busy with something else so the other clerk would have to help her.

  “Finally, one day at a bar near campus, she approached the booth I sat in. She looked at me like she recognized me; she smiled; it was like being in a dream. I could tell she was about to ask me something. She appeared hopeful. She was wearing one of the champagne-colored camisoles I’d dreamed about her in. This was the closest I’d ever been to her. She was wearing perfume—very light and clean, not what I’d have imagined she’d wear but strong enough to momentarily override the smell of my food, the bar. She leaned in toward me.”

  At this he brought the cigarette to his lips, inhaled. Held my eyes. “She said to me, ‘Are you using that ketchup?’”

  “A decade later I ran into her at a party. She looked pretty much the same except that her face was leaner. She had remarkable bone structure, I saw. I could see she was going to age well. She wore a man’s gambler hat. It looked perfectly ridiculous. Upsettingly sexy. She felt she knew me but didn’t know from where. I didn’t tell her. I pretended not to know. She was … receptive.” This said pointedly, him staring into my eyes. “But she turned out to be boring and not very intelligent.”

  This twist in the story caught me off guard. The air changed. I felt a little like I was being warned.

  “So you went out with her?” I asked.

  “Out w
ith her? No. I could tell from that short conversation at the party she was terribly dull. I had to make an excuse to get away from her. It was such a disappointment for me—here I was with the woman of my dreams on a summer night, but just not into it, just wanting to get away; what she was saying didn’t even make much sense to me; I couldn’t decide whether or not I even liked her voice, really—and at the same time, as the girlfriend that I almost married pointed out once, what I was in love with was her image, and I’d had it that year in the library. All that time I’d thought I was missing out on something, on more, but what interested me was there all along. I still remember her outfits. I remember how her hair looked when she came in from the rain. One day she wore this awful yellow shirt and I felt less attracted, like I’d made a mistake. The next day when she looked right to me again I felt like we’d made up. Now that I’ve been in some relationships, I understand that they’re not much more than that, essentially, but involve talking and sex.”

  He exhaled. The smoke from his cigarette was a blue haze. The window overlooked the gray wall of the building across the street, speckled russet in places with discoloration. In retrospect I would think a relationship is nothing like staring at a woman in a library who doesn’t know you’re watching her for a year—and what I think now is that when he finally did have the chance to be with her, he just chickened out, wanting it to end with his feeling superior—but there in his office what he’d said sounded profound to me and more than likely this had to do with the way his pants fit his ass, and his way of bringing the cigarette to his lips, his knobby carpal bones giving way to long tapered forearms; the almost prissy quality of his perpetually critical air riding over some raw and puritanical desperation about this world that would never be good enough for him; and I don’t know how to explain it, but there was something thuggish about him around the edges; something a little seedy not concealed by fine brands of clothes; I could imagine him in jail. Was I being typical?

  “But you could say my first love was my sister,” he said, going on about other women. “At the age of five I believed we’d marry, like our parents, and when I told her about it she called me an idiot and explained brothers and sisters couldn’t do that. I was devastated. She was the center of my existence. She regularly broke my heart, and had we not been related she’d have had nothing to do with me. I asked her this before she died, and she confirmed it, happily. She said, ‘Of course not. You’re such a creep.’” His face was pleased as he said this—he loved his sister’s sense of humor, I could tell, and I liked it too, and maybe this was when I began to like him. “She was so … she was…”

  Then he stopped. As if shaking himself from nodding off into a dream. He was staring at me again.

  “You look hungry. It’s time to eat.”

  * * *

  But at the restaurant I grew detached as I sat at the table alone while he lingered up at the front, flirting with a waitress he knew. The waiter taking my drink order noticed, too, seemed to pity me, and as I sat there in the air-conditioned dining area wearing his jacket over my tank top, I regarded him with the safe humor of a married woman on an outing with a cad: a cad whom once, now to her own amusement, she’d actually imagined herself to be in love with despite that he was so obviously—

  Did I tell you, as we ate, I decided you were the saddest man I’d ever known? Loneliness clung to you. “Her fiancé is Albanian,” you said of the waitress after you’d finally sat down to join me. “She’s Italian but he’s Albanian, and he speaks her language but she doesn’t speak his. They see an English tutor together.” You seemed to like thinking this at the same time you gave off a hint of jealousy. “I come here on Tuesdays, usually.” In the brief lulls in conversation, when your face fell, I could see: you were one of those miserable bachelors who went to the same restaurant on the same day each week and had fantasy relationships with your waitresses. You spoke of the details of her life as one inside something, as one having entered a much larger construction, so that I pictured you with your head against a pillow, dreaming of sitting beside her as she saw the tutor, your Tuesday waitress with the olive complexion and cascade of dark curls and full chest, dreaming of stealing her from her fiancé like—

  But now you were with me. Recalling your face in front of the cab, I saw now and then the glow of triumph, of the fantasy of me having become reality, the sense of increased possibility with which you viewed the waitress just before your attention turned to me. If it could happen with me, then why not with her?

  And frankly by then I’d decided to sleep with you as an act of compassion. Poor thing—that night, I’d never seen anyone who so needed to be fucked. You were the kind of sad person who’d become so numb he didn’t even know what sadness was anymore, who thought he was fine because he couldn’t even remember being happy, and I wanted to help you.

  Happy. I saw I was making you happy. I had forgotten what it was like to make someone happy.

  * * *

  “They were fucking,” I told you. “First it looked like they were about to get into a fight—they were snapping their beaks at each other, the female snapped up at him and the male snapped down. They kept snapping like that, like they were threatening each other. But then it seemed to be more like a dance. Like an imitation of a fight.

  “Then he was on her,” I said. I was describing the flamingos from my trip to the zoo with H. “He climbed on top of her.” I loved your widened eyes, the air of victory that came over you at just the mention of him because I was here with you now.

  “He was flapping away while he stood on top of her—it looked kind of like he was trying to kill her. What’s happening? some little kid was shrieking at his mother.

  Hey, the flamingos are doing it, said someone else.

  “Then H. turned and looked down at him. He said, ‘The flamingos are mating. That is the male mounting the female.’ ‘What’s mating?’ the kid said back. The mother gave H. the most irritated look, and then she dragged the kid away. Oh, you should have seen it,” I said. “The kid kept turning back to look at H. He looked like he wanted to get back to H. so he could find out what was going on. H. sounded so grim and serious but the kid wasn’t at all afraid of him. He was like this huge man, grimly towering over the kid, but the kid looked crazy about him.”

  “If only he had got that reaction from you,” you said dryly, both ruffled by the mention of him and pleased with yourself, before launching into your disappointment with a piece in his last series, a piece which, had he applied your advice, would have been so much better.

  “I was a little embarrassed by it,” you admitted. “That I got the price for it I did had more to do with my having dared to ask that price than the quality of the piece.”

  And with a rush of ardor and loyalty and guilt—with an inner flinch, as if you’d with your words struck me—I praised H.’s brilliance, his superiority as an artist, the superiority of his way with form, his vision, his originality, his depth. To you who represented him. To you who spoke of him with a faint trace of possession and condescension, as if it were the other way around.

  “I am crazy about him,” I said. “Just not in the way I expected to be.”

  “Oh,” you said, smiling. “And in what way is that?”

  IV

  But what most affected the painter in the late-night conversation with the gallerist on the couch in the lobby that preceded their lovemaking that she even then tried to convince herself might not (and probably wouldn’t) happen—this accompanied by candlelight, the backdrop of the city framed by the perimeters of the glass wall, a record player at low volume emitting Blonde on Blonde—was his speaking of his sister, who’d gotten cancer after he’d convinced her to move here to the city to work and who because she didn’t like their stepmother didn’t want to go back home to Tacoma—their real mother was gone, she’d long ago left their father for another man, and as an adult the gallerist had completely cut her off, refusing even to answer her letters, speaking to her only through
his sister—and she moved in with him to die.

  Then he was twenty-two, a bartender and adjunct instructor in art history at a community college in Queens.

  Small. Petite. Her eyes as dark as his fair (the painter would later learn from pictures). A former librarian.

  “Not the mousy kind,” he clarified. “The kind everyone gets a crush on.”

  And on the couch in the office of his gallery he’d told the painter about how once his sister (the only one he trusted through the divorce, maybe the only one he ever trusted) after she’d given up on the chemotherapy had gotten mad at him for some innocuous comment that she’d taken in her fever as a direct attack at the heart of her being—“You use too many paper towels,” he’d said, tired and only half even paying attention, but she’d heard something entirely different.

  “Well you were the one who insisted,” she said to him. “You insisted,” she rasped at him, trying but failing to yell. (Her skin appeared scaly in places. Almost as if picked at. The odd white flecks of skin caught in the light like the pills on a thinning, overwashed sweater.) And then fifteen minutes later on the couch—which smelled of death and cat urine and Lysol—he’d rubbed her feet to calm her down; gotten up to go to the bathroom; and then come out to find her gone. Terrified, he’d hurried out of the apartment afterward but really there had been nothing to worry about because she was just down there in the lobby at the foot of the stairs, sitting and already out of breath.

  “Sometimes when the health-care worker didn’t come, I had to bathe her,” he said, at this point the painter’s persistent sense of her art dealer’s desire to kiss her having dissipated. No, he is not going to make a move, she thought. Nothing was going to happen. (Was she relieved or disappointed?)

  “But it wasn’t like you’d think it would be,” he went on, oblivious that he’d withdrawn himself from her as he entered the past. “It wasn’t such a big deal. Once I got started, it all became rather abstract.”