And Pearl knew, as she stood there, that there was a dark mote within herself, expanding with each of her thoughts: Her anger at Elliot. At Val. At Rhett. At herself. Her own stupid helplessness. The chasm of her loneliness. How good it had felt to do something, to do harm, when so much harm had been done to her.
The HMS sounded again as the front door opened, and Pearl looked up to see Rhett in the doorway. There was an oddness in his expression, which she thought, at first, was embarrassment. Then she blinked and saw that beneath the embarrassment was a giddy pride, was happiness.
“Mom,” he said.
The girl stepped into the doorway next to him, leaning to the side ever so slightly so that their shoulders brushed. She had short hair fastened into little twists and a sleeve of thin bracelets from wrist to elbow. She was in love. Pearl could see it on the strange girl only because she could see it on Rhett, whom she knew so well, and it was the same look. They were, both of them, in love.
“Mom,” Rhett’s voice broke through, “Mom, this is Saff.”
“Hey.” The girl waved, then thought again and extended a hand, each of her movements accompanied by a metallic scale, ascending or descending as the bracelets slid up or down her arm.
And with that, the dark expanse that had opened up in Pearl shrunk back down to a mote, to a speck on her heart, to a size she could endure.
“Hello, Saff,” Pearl said.
She moved forward to take the girl’s hand but stopped short, realizing that her own hand still contained the little mouse. Pearl could feel it on her palm, small and struggling.
5
Midas
Elliot was on his sixth bowl of honey when he began to vomit. The honey had gone down in perfect orbs, golden bubbles, gleaming and quivering on the end of his spoon. It came back up in gouts, splashing into the bucket at his feet, sticky, brown, and reeking. When his retching finally ceased, Elliot wiped his mouth and straightened to find the entire room of gallery-goers staring at him. Their eyes skated away from his in embarrassment, as if it had been they, not he, who had just vomited on a platform in the middle of an art gallery. Elliot told himself that he felt no shame at being watched while puking. After all, this was the point. Of the piece. Of art in general. That one should stop and look at it. He smiled brightly at the onlookers and thumbed a bit of sick from the corner of his mouth.
Two kids about Rhett’s age stepped up to Elliot’s platform. Each had a hardback sketch pad clamped under an arm like a single wing. Art students. Elliot had carried an identical hardback when he was in art school and, over that time, convinced a few different girls he’d dated to have sex upon it. Each one had mounted a tiny protest at the suggestion—a skeptical eyebrow, a scoffed breath, a like hell—but in the end he’d always managed to coax their round bottoms down onto the cool marbled board. Juvenile as it now seemed, the act still stirred Elliot. There was a word attached to it, one too silly to admit out loud: transmutation.
The boy who stepped up to Elliot’s platform wore wire-rimmed glasses, the kind a little old man would pick from the case. The girl had her hair wrapped in a bright scarf, a few braids spouting from the top, the tinsel on a party hat. The kids surveyed the objects on Elliot’s platform, the glass jug of honey, the spoon, the bowl from which Elliot ate. Their eyes lingered on the reeking bucket.
“You think that jar was full when he started?” the girl asked of the honey jug.
“Well, that’s fake,” the boy said, gesturing at the bucket. He blinked at Elliot through the smudges on his lenses. “He has a tube rigged up or something.”
“The barf? Naw, it’s real. I can tell.”
Elliot took up the bowl of honey and spooned another dose into his mouth, praying his stomach was settled enough to manage it. He had the sudden urge to impress and appall them, these kids.
But the girl only clucked her tongue and said, “Mister. After today, you’re never going to be able to eat honey again. Did you even think about that?”
There was something to the set of her expression that reminded him of Val. It was her eyes; they were Val’s eyes. All their eyes, he realized, all the eyes of all the people in the gallery were Val’s eyes—flashing, opaque, unknowable. Elliot let the spoon fall back into the bowl. He thought again of Val’s confession, or rather her confession that there was something she would not confess.
Tell me. Why won’t you tell me?
“Midas,” the boy read off the placard affixed to the platform, then appraised Elliot and the jug anew. “It’s about greed. Midas is the story of a greedy king.”
“No, it’s not,” the girl said. “Midas is the story of a guy who killed his family.”
At the end of the day, a man who could have been Elliot’s double—pleasant parakeet features, carefully tousled hair, tallness made agreeable by a stoop—stepped forward and squinted at the placard. When he’d finished reading it, he gave Elliot a jaunty little salute and said, “Everything I touch turns to puke, too.”
Elliot smiled; his stomach roiled.
* * *
—
APRICITY CONTENTMENT PLAN: Eat honey.
“Eat honey.”
That’s what my Apricity said. If it was even a real Apricity. Gwen and I had been sitting in the park on the first not-cold day of spring, the dampness from the ground coming up through our blanket, when the man approached us with his slick silver case. Gwen recognized the machine before the guy’d even told us what it was. Some of Gwen’s rich clients got their Apricities done, not that any of them seemed happier for it, she said, not even a little bit. The man explained that he was an artist and that he was taking people’s Apricities for an art project he was doing. Except he didn’t call it an art project. He called it a piece.
And I thought, A piece of what?
Could he do ours? the guy asked. I was shaking my head no even as Gwen was gesturing for him to take a seat.
The man kneeled and grimaced as the wetness of the grass soaked up from our blanket to the knees of his pants. He told us how it would be just a cheek swab and that he’d keep us anonymous and that we’d get our results out of it, too. Still, it was no small thing to say yes. We knew Apricity results could be embarrassing, life wrecking even. It was always in the tabloids, some story about the humiliating thing this celebrity or that politician had gotten on their Apricity.
But Gwen looked at me and I looked at Gwen, and it was the same look we’d shared before we stole that car someone had left running on the curb and drove it all over the city; the same look as on the day we both agreed to tell our respective asshole bosses at our respective boring office jobs to screw off; the same look as on the night we got drunk on Gwen’s roommate’s cheap vodka and had sex, which we didn’t talk about and hadn’t happened since.
So we did it. We let a stranger in the park take our Apricities. And one of the things the machine told me was “Eat honey.” So now I have a single spoonful every night before I go to sleep.
Gwen wouldn’t show me her results, so I don’t know for sure what the machine told her, but a few days after that day in the park, she kicked out her roommate and asked me to move in instead. Now, every so often she reaches over from her side of the bed and runs her hand up under my shirt, saying, “Come on, sweetness. Pass that spoon over here.”
* * *
—
VAL HAD SKIPPED THE FIRST DAY of the installation on account of the fact that she was a sympathetic vomiter. Val gagged when Elliot spit a bit of gristle into his napkin. She gagged when the cat hacked up a wad of fur. She gagged when she brushed her own teeth. She’d come by the gallery once Elliot was done, Val had promised, and they could take the train home together. But those plans had been made yesterday afternoon, before Val’s confession, which was not a confession, and their fight, which was not a fight. And now a portion of Elliot, a portion that had increased in certainty over the past three hours spen
t retching upon a stage, had started to think that Val would not show up after all. An unfamiliar worry. Elliot had always taken it for granted that whomever he was meeting would already be there when he arrived, scanning the crowd for his face. So when he heard Val’s braying laugh from the front room of the gallery—a wonderfully vulgar laugh for an otherwise delicate woman—the power of his relief surprised him. The feeling came from down deep within him, from the gut, same as the puking.
Elliot located Val at the front desk gossiping with Nita. Before she could turn and see him, he grabbed her around the shoulders and smacked a kiss on the top of her pinkish pageboy. This, too, was a bit of performance, and Val must have known it, though she allowed herself to be tousled. Nita watched them expressionlessly.
“What are you telling my wife this time?” Elliot asked over the top of Val’s head.
Nita flashed a smile. “None of your concern.”
The women’s friendship was founded upon embarrassing stories about Elliot from Elliot and Nita’s college days. Nita pretended full disclosure with these stories, but was in truth discreet, scrubbing any mention of Pearl from their plots. Not that Val had ever shown even a twinge of jealousy toward Pearl or any other woman, something Elliot had been proud of, his confident young wife. Today, though, it felt as if insecurity had bypassed Val only to buzz around him.
“This is why gossiping women are compared to hens,” Elliot said. “Geese. Partridge. The eating birds.”
“The eating birds?” Nita repeated.
“You sound like a serial killer, honey,” Val told him.
“If you could not mention honey.” Elliot grimaced and clutched his stomach.
Val’s face creased in concern, and she touched his arm. Elliot noted her fingertips, their tiny pressures. “Was it awful?”
He wondered if she would tell him her secret now. He looked down for the answer on her face but saw only the top of her head, the crooked pink part, the pale path of her skull.
“Don’t feel sorry for him,” Nita told Val. “He does it to himself.”
“And you show it in your gallery,” Elliot retorted, leaving out the fact that Nita had only booked his installation in her tiny Civic Center gallery (and then only after it had been rejected at every other gallery in town) because of their long-standing friendship.
Elliot had been going through a creative fallow period—Val’s phrase for it—ever since he’d finished the Valeria series. In the two-plus years since, he’d filled up notebooks with scribbles and sketches that became stuck on their pages; he’d blathered on in front of attentive classes of young art students; he’d wasted entire fellowships, months of them.
Unlike most of his peers, Elliot had never treated being an artist with any reverence. As a kid he’d had busy hands and would fidget with whatever you put in front of him. When he was a college freshman he’d taken an art class to fill a requirement, and then unceremoniously chosen it as his major. His parents hadn’t even minded. His older sister, Mallory, had already done the reasonable thing and become a lawyer. Besides, his parents were wealthy enough that having a child in the arts was a status symbol, like a vacation home in a foreign country. Lo, Elliot was an artist. No crucible of hardship, no spiritual calling. Art was just something he was good at, therefore something he was praised for, therefore something he kept doing. He was good at the business of art, too, the machine of it. He filled himself up with the commissions and group showings, the parties after, the gossip of the scene, filled himself up like he was a glass canister full of dried beans, the kind where you can win a prize if you guess how many. But in the time after Valeria, Elliot had begun to believe that he was done, the canister empty, the smart guess zero. And the thing was, it didn’t feel as bad as he might have feared. In fact, it didn’t feel so different from being full.
Until one day: an idea. He’d gone to Pearl’s to pick up Rhett and had seen her Apricity on the front table alongside her gloves. The tagline came into his head, spoken in the voice of the actor from the ads: “Happiness is Apricity.” Midas was Elliot’s first piece in three years.
“You bet your ass I’ll show it,” Nita said. “You think I’d miss seeing you puke your guts onto the floor?”
* * *
—
BACK AT HOME, Val sat atop the kitchen counter and delivered noodles directly from the takeout carton into her mouth. Elliot was forgoing dinner, his stomach still in a tumult of syrup and acid. He kneeled on the rug below Val, laying out strips of cashmere and vicuna to practice wrapping himself for tomorrow’s performance.
Elliot had been working on Midas for months. He’d borrowed a decommissioned Apricity machine from Pearl—which had required his signature on dozens of forms, practically promising to sever his left arm if he lost or broke the damned thing—and had collected contentment reports from a few hundred people. It didn’t feel like making art so much as canvassing. Elliot had liked talking to the strangers, though, approaching them at the market or on the street, making his pitch, mining their desires. For the actual piece, Elliot had chosen, from hundreds of Apricity reports, seven recommendations to act out over the course of a week, one per day. Today had been honey, tomorrow would be vicuna.
Elliot held one end of a vicuna strip and wound it up the length of his arm, tucking the other end into the wrapping once it reached his bicep. The next strip he wound around his shoulder and neck. He decided that it made the most sense to work from the bottom up, feet and legs first, then torso, then arms, head last.
“Hey, look. This is the perfect food for what you’re doing.” Val presented a cluster of noodles trapped between her chopsticks. “See? Like tiny bandages.”
“These aren’t bandages,” he said.
“Well,” Val replied in the tone of Yes they are.
Val was always noticing patterns. She had an artist’s eye; Elliot had told her so, but she seemed indifferent to the compliment. Val worked as a freelance namer. Her job was precisely what it sounded like: companies hired her to choose a name for the department they were forming, the conference they were planning, or the product they were launching. A lot more went into it than one might think—research, linguistics, focus groups. And of course there were also Val’s own unerring instincts when faced with such questions as whether a car should be called the Tornado or the Tempest, the new branch of a company referred to as a collective or a department, an antidepressant named with soft syllables or fricatives. So if it seemed preposterous to be paid thousands of dollars for coming up with a word or two, well, it was and it wasn’t. In fact, Val had been the one to name Elliot’s current piece. Midas.
Midas is the story of a guy who killed his family.
“A little help?” Elliot asked. He’d wrapped the strip all the way to his fingers and was having trouble tucking in the end.
“I won’t be able to help you tomorrow,” Val warned.
“I just need to figure it out.”
“You’re wrapping your face, too?”
“Of course.”
“Hm.”
“It wouldn’t make sense otherwise.”
“Do you think maybe you should do your hands last?”
“I’m figuring it out,” he repeated, this time with a tone.
Val sighed and hopped down from the counter. She took the end of the strip, then paused and rubbed her face against the fabric, looking much like their cat.
“This feels like divinity. What is it again?”
“Vicuna.”
“That’s a rabbit?”
“A sort of camel.”
“A soft sort of camel.”
Her eyes were closed in pleasure, her eyelashes a fringe against her cheeks. For the Valeria series, Elliot had cast Val’s face in plaster, pressed it into clay, chipped away flecks until it had floated to the surface of a block of marble. He’d used plants to make a landscape of her face, plat
es of metal and tiny bolts to hammer it out, a synthetic skin replacement to grow it in a saline bath. But as he looked now, he found that his wife’s features had become unfamiliar to him, shapes that had been arranged within the same frame but did not otherwise belong to one another. Elliot looked away. The idea that he might not know her after all was painful to him.
And surely this was the wrong time to say, “Are you just not going to tell me?”
Val kept her eyes closed for a moment. Tiny veins branched from the centers of her eyelids, a luminous pink, as if they were lit up by a source of light from within her head. Then her eyes opened, and she watched him silently.
She tucked the end of the fabric into the wrapping on his arm, her fingers a soft scratch against his palm, then scooted back onto the counter and picked out some more noodles.
“What if I said I won’t?” she replied, chewing.
“Not ever?”
“Yeah. Never ever.”
“Then I’d be left to wonder—” He gestured vaguely with his mummy’s hand. “Then I don’t know.”
“What if I said that last night I was lying? What if I told you I only said it to see how you’d react?”
“Did you?”
She shrugged and peered down into her carton. But he did know her after all, or at least he knew her well enough to recognize that the tautness in her neck and mouth meant that she had not been lying. Elliot’s heart began to pound beneath the strips of fabric that felt not like bandages anymore but like the filaments of a web.
Here is what happened the night before:
Elliot and Val had been up late drinking. Val was young enough that alcohol was still recreation, not yet anesthesia, and their nights too often ended in tumblers of diminishing ice. It was all right to perform the honey eating with a hangover, Elliot had reasoned; in fact, it might help with the regurgitation.
Tell the Machine Goodnight Page 10