Exes

by Max Winter

  “I know,” I said, looking at my sneakers.

  When she asked me why it took so long for me to talk to her, I said, “I didn’t think someone like you would like someone like me.”

  “We can like who we want, you know. Wherever,” she said, walking back to that pole to gouge an X into it with her keys. “Whenever.”

  _____________

  The wig shop was still boarded up, so the front door to Polyesther was the back door to what hadn’t been SyBell Underwear since the early ’40s. What it had been between then and now was anyone’s guess. A typing school? Methadone clinic? Boudoir studio? The door was propped open with a paint bucket. There was a black Sharpied note taped to it, decorated with stars and webs and butts. COME IN, it read.

  The foyer was wallpapered with the repeated image of what turned out to be not an octopus devouring conjoined twins, but young lovers kissing beneath a wisteria-tangled gazebo. I said hello a couple times. From upstairs came sawing and something being dragged from one end of the room to the other, then back again. The banister was worn and burnished by years and years of hands, except for where splintery two-by chunks filled in gaps.

  Upstairs was broken up into many tiny lofts. The windows that weren’t boarded up were hung with curtains that used to be either black or red and looked like they’d been used in a school play to suggest a throne room or bordello. I followed the noises to what turned out to be the kitchen, identifiable only by the drawing on the wall of the stove they didn’t have. Glued above it was an already grease-spattered mosaic of subscription recipe cards. A girl in flip-flops power-chiseled linoleum. Another, in boots, sawed through a piece of drywall. I didn’t recognize either of them; they were young, cool. RISD? The women wiped sweat and nodded at me. I nodded back.

  I was going to ask if they’d seen Viv, when I saw her by an un-boarded-up window in the far corner of what the tape indicated would soon be another room. I walked over, dragging my feet so as not to startle her. She looked up from the print she was screening of an old white guy suckling at the marble dome of the State Capitol. Crab claws and eyestalks poked from his breast pocket. “Sanderson & Sons” was written across his bald spot in curlicues that all but dared you to call them girly, and below him, in block print:

  SAVE OLNEYVILLE!

  FIGHT GENTRIFICATION!

  “All right,” Viv said, brushing dust off her Lizzy Borden T-shirt. She hugged me and then did that thing uncles do, where they hold the just-hugged person in place and lean back to look at them. But her eyes were overpoured drinks.

  “Viv,” I said, and gave her a smile.

  “I’m glad! Why are you here?”

  “Well . . . you know . . .” I suddenly realized this was a question I hadn’t rehearsed an answer to on the walk over. “I just—I wanted to see how it was going?”

  She gestured all around herself to show exactly how it was going. “Slowly, dirtily,” she said.

  “It looks great.”

  “It looks like someone locked Eagle Square in the attic.” She smiled, either at the place or her simile.

  She asked what I was up to these days, and I told her about my jobs. She told me about her new work, about how it was theatrical, about how it lived in the moment. “We have enough stuff to last us lifetimes,” she said. “Do you still have those pictures we took? In the old house? Of you and me?”

  “No.”

  “Whatever happened to them?” The difficult-thought wrinkle at the bridge of her nose didn’t fade right away.

  I couldn’t tell her. “Oh, you know. Moving . . . Moves.”

  “All that back and forth?” The wrinkle was gone now. “They’ll have to carry me out of here on a stretcher.”

  “You don’t have the negatives?”

  She gestured around the place again, as if to say, who could find them if she did.

  I told her about Kit, and how she was painting now, and how she needed somewhere to live, leaving out the Vagina Project and everything else.

  “There’s no plumbing upstairs, but we still have a couple spots left. I have to say that I like the idea of layered generations. Can she do taxes?”

  “No.”

  “Can she bake bread?”

  “She’s good to talk to, sometimes.”

  “Some of us need help with that.”

  I gave her Kit’s business card, which I was surprised I even had, let alone on my person and in the first place I looked. Kit couldn’t afford anything but the plain white kind, so had soaked them all in Lady Grey. I crossed out her old number, replaced it with my new one, and handed the card to Viv. She turned it over in her hands.

  “You and Jacob Deinhardt are friends, right?” asked Viv.

  She meant Jake, who only kind of took her place after she had transferred and before Eli. I hadn’t thought of him in years. It made me feel bad all of a sudden. “Now? No, not really . . . Not anymore.”

  “I mean, you were—right? In high school.”

  “Yeah, well—I guess. I needed someone to hang out with.” Once I realized I was rubbing my hand—because it hurt—I stopped.

  “Well, he works for Sanderson and Sons.” She gestured at her poster. “He’s their lead on the Eagle Square project.”

  “We haven’t spoken in years,” I said, truthfully. “Not since college.”

  “College,” Viv said, looking at her now-dry print as if she still had choices to make. I looked at her looking at it for as long as felt normal. I started to make well-I-better-get-going noises. “I’ll be in touch,” she said. “With your mom.”

  “Great,” I said. But it was great. I mean, it was something. It felt good?

  _____________

  Once Viv had left Fox for the Jane S. Dorr School for Young Ladies, she would cut class and meet me on my frees to smoke pot and shoot the shit and take pictures. Viv was just getting into photography. And that’s when we found our favorite hangout: a steep, block-long street lined with abandoned tenements that dead-ended near the foot of the Prospect Park wall. We didn’t know the story behind the tenements, but it looked like they hadn’t been lived in since the sixties. There were four: identical triple-deckers set close together on one side of the street, opposite a sloping vacant lot filled with wind-strewn trash and, in the summertime, broom corn and sumacs. The chain-link fence surrounding it was low and kicked-in, and you could tell from all the empty coolers and cracked whippets that kids partied there at night.

  We walked up and down the street a bunch of times, peeking through cracked and boarded windows before we worked up the nerve to break into one of the houses. Viv brought her camera, like always, and I had swiped a crowbar from Buildings and Grounds, but it turned out we didn’t need it, because the back door to the house at the very top of the hill was unlocked. There was only a hole where the knob had once been, and the door swung open easy. The stairwell was pitch-black. Viv led the way by feeling along the wall while I held on to her waist, which came and went beneath the thin fabric of her dress. I didn’t know I could still get scared like that, like a little girl. The fallen chunks of gouged-out plaster made gritty noises beneath our feet.

  The third-floor apartment was dark despite long shafts of dust-spangled daylight that spilled in through the many missing windows. The splintering floorboards were streaked with bat or pigeon shit and buckled beneath our feet as we walked. “This is perfect,” Viv kept saying, clicking pictures. “Just perfect.” Wallpaper hung off the walls in great crumbling sheets, like bark peeling from a birch’s trunk.

  Viv stepped back from the dust-coated mantel. “Here,” she said, taking off her dress, “put this on. I’ll get a shot of you in the fireplace, crouching, reaching up.”

  I took off my jeans and everything else. My skin felt hot and cold at the same time. Viv handed me her dress. I was about to slip it on when she said, “Wait. Lie down on the floor first, in front of the fireplace. For a second.” I found a splinterless and only just dusty spot an
d did as she said, my eyes closed the whole time. One camera click, two clicks. “Okay. Get up now.” Viv and I looked at the cleaner spot my left thigh and ass and shoulder had left behind. “Perfect,” she said, and on a super-slow exposure clicked the picture that still hangs above my mantel. “Now put on the dress and reach up the chimney.”

  Once again I did as Viv said, crouching down on the balls of my feet, steadying myself with one arm, reaching up with other. I felt soot-caked brick with my outstretched fingertips. I swallowed the lump rising in my throat, clamped shut my eyes and mouth, and lifted up my head. The inside of the chimney was black, airless, and webbed with dust. Something brushed against my cheek and clung to my hair. I imagined the wings of clustered bats against my skin. I waited for one to wake up, to flap its wings. I held my breath for as long as I could.

  _____________

  Now I was late for class and had nothing to hand back. Eli told me he always used to keep a spare lesson in a drawer—so to speak; he had no desk, just his lap and wherever he sat—so he could always whip something out at the last minute. His stashed lesson was on kleptomaniacal breakfast cereal mascots—Lucky! Trix! Sonny! Cookie Crook! And what exactly are these Cinnamon Crunch Toast Bakers doing in our kitchen so early in the morning? What are we so goddamned afraid of? But I figured I’d teach my class about Proust’s madeleine and about how their senses can take them back to their childhoods. Pretty half-assed, but it was just meant to be something to get them thinking, by which I mean talking and maybe writing, because Expository is just a class. But right away they got hung up.

  “I can’t picture the cookie—is it shaped like a girl?” My hand-raisingest student asked.

  “You get them at Starbucks,” another guy said. “They’re like Twinkies without the cream filling. And look like a clam or something.”

  “Like a door knocker you mean,” another kid added. “A fancy door knocker.”

  “Do Twinkies make any one else’s fingers burn?”

  Everybody laughed.

  “Okay,” I said. But it was too late. Everybody was talking about Twinkies now, and how they wouldn’t rot. I looked around the room for a way out.

  One woman, who sat in my blind spot—or immediate left, if you’re not a teacher—raised her hand. I was so excited, I called on her before her arm was fully extended.

  “In middle school, after school, I’d always come home and eat a salad with Catalina Dressing in front of General Hospital, and now just the sight of it makes me want to throw up.”

  “That’s so crazy,” shouted a girl from the back row who never talked. “In middle school I ate a salad on Catalina with an actor from General Hospital! And I could’ve thrown up!”

  “We’re like twins,” went the first girl.

  We all laughed, except for them. Because it wasn’t funny. But I didn’t realize why not until after class let out. Shit, I thought. If I’m not careful, I’ll get caught up in the moment, too. That’s the hardest part about being a teacher: always keeping one eye out.

  _____________

  Eli thought of me as a woman before anyone else did, though everyone thought he liked me because I wasn’t one yet. When I was growing up, kids and adults—my family, really—called me a tomboy because I liked to climb and dig and was long and ropy like a boy. I much prefer the French expression garçon manqué, missed boy, or maybe failed boy, a phrase that better describes my exes than me. The French can feel the presence of an absence like no one else.

  Right before Christmas break, Eli invited all of us over to his place to watch a film he had scolded us for not even hearing of, let alone seeing, likely knowing that only Jake and I would show up. “In France, even nine-year-olds drink wine,” Eli said, pouring all three of us a glass of Bordeaux in his slant-ceilinged attic apartment. “Just like the Fonz!” Jake had said when we first walked in. “In a Very Special Episode,” he now added, staring into the wine he wouldn’t finish.

  We followed Eli’s lead and raised our glasses. “But no brushing till you’re twelve!” he said. And we watched Claire’s Knee or Le Rayon Vert, I can’t remember which.

  During free periods and on weekends we all started taking walks together and pretty soon smoking weed. By the time Eli began ditching Jake or else sending him on lost-cause scavenger hunts—Say, can a guy still find wax lips round here? Or, We need Canned Heat to clean the hookah. Jake!—I knew.

  Eli was the first man to tell me I was beautiful. I was going to say the first man other than my father—who I called Ned—but that isn’t true. Ned’s preferred word was gorgeous, but he used it as a proper noun, as in, Hey there, Gorgeous. How was your day? After Eli said it, I didn’t say anything. Jake was off looking for sorghum or a box of cocktail swords, and my cheeks were hot from wine and my tongue suddenly felt like leather in my mouth.

  Maybe I could see it now—what Eli saw in me—in those photographs Viv took. But Eli has them. All I have is the one of my body shape on the floor. It hangs in my bedroom just above the sealed-up fireplace. Still, I waited till Rob was gone to take it out. He would’ve recognized me, and he was that jealous. I never even told him about Eli, because of how he grew up. He would’ve gotten it all backwards. The French use the same word for backwards, inside out, and upside down; they communicate with metaphors and syntax. With their bodies and their voices.

  But even back then, I dragged the photos out only when people asked. People meaning Eli. This was before we had fucked. Like everyone else allowed in my room, he saw the photo on the wall and asked the same questions everyone asks, more or less. Jake was there. He’d already seen the pictures, but had since come to resent that I had shown them to him, I think—like I thought he was a eunuch or something for trusting him with my nude image. And it’s true: I never once considered so much as his most general physical desires. But when Eli asked to see the other pictures, Jake said, in a small voice that I hated, “No. Don’t do it, Alix.” I wanted to punch him when his voice got small like that.

  “Don’t worry,” Eli said. “I won’t tell.”

  So I did, while Jacob worried his cuticles in the corner and, later, the hallway. Then, at some point, he just left. Kit likely didn’t see him out, as she never quite knew who he was or what I saw in him.

  “These . . . are . . . beautiful,” Eli said, looking at the pictures. Now, in my mind’s eye and ear, I can see and hear the fear in his eyes and voice as he lingered over those black-and-whites of Viv and me. We thought we were really onto something. Well, weren’t we? She was. But now I’m writing about it, and she’s onto something else, and they don’t call it the last word for nothing. “Viv’s got some eye,” he said.

  Later, Eli got up to pee—or take a leak or piss, he would’ve corrected: “Only girls and babies pee,” he liked to say, “grown men relieve themselves transitively”—and I followed him into the hall bathroom, because in old houses that’s all there is. So he took it out and I looked at it, and nothing happened. “It’s hard with you watching. I mean, difficult.”

  I turned my back for a bit. Long enough for a stream to start, at which point I turned around. “When you’re done, can I tap it off?” I asked. “I’ve heard about tapping off.”

  “Okay,” he said. “That’s fair. The exchange rate oughta be lousy.”

  When he finished, I tapped it off. Then I led him over to the sink and mixed the water in my other palm and rinsed him. He nodded at the soap, and I used it and let the water run, and afterward, while he dried himself off, I pulled the waste pull. It gurgled rudely.

  Later, in my room, we kissed. Some things had to wait until I felt comfortable, which took longer than I had expected, but he stayed patient and kind. In the meantime, I just saw to his wants. Eagerly, like the star pupil it turned out I had always wanted to be, deep down.

  Kit figured it out pretty much right away. But she didn’t get mad. One afternoon, when Eli and I lay in bed, we heard a knock at the front door. Kit let Jake in, and he sat with
her in the kitchen, which was just below my room. It sounded like he was there to see her. I listened through the radiator. His voice had gotten so low all of a sudden that I couldn’t quite hear him. But Kit’s voice was a bell. “Alix seems happy for a change. So let’s keep this under our hats, Sam.”

  There was a pause, during which he corrected her, presumably. But politely.

  “Up until now, I’ve never been able to describe my daughter as happy. Can you understand that, Jacob?”

  Another muffled pause. I leaned in to where the pipe met the floor.

  “It really is,” she said, and looked at something I couldn’t see. “Let’s talk, Jacob. Sit. Can I fix you a drink?”

  I heard heavy footsteps and then the front-door glass shudder.

  And it didn’t take long before other people started asking questions. Ask, I say, like they ever just asked. They only went, Ew, or Ohmygod, are you okay? Yeah, I said. I’m fine.

  Ned and Kit had only been talking logistics since my idiot brother’s expulsion. But for my folks things had soured long before that, back when Kit started dressing like a wizard—in loose tunics and robes with sleeves floppy enough to hide rabbits, baggy pants, little slippers, everything but the hat and beard. Women of a certain age will dress like wizards if their husbands haven’t been paying close enough attention for long enough, regardless of how rich and pretty they were or are or still could be. “Mother warned me not to marry new money,” Kit once told me over early-evening cups of vervain tea, just after my announcing that I had changed my last name to Mays—hers, meaning her father’s, who was also an asshole, but what are you going to do? “Us Mayses are Jamestown through and through, and if anything, I should’ve married up. A Vanderbilt or a Haffenreffer. A Pell, even. Christ, Jordan Falleman was drunker than a shithouse rat, but at least he understood appearances. Leave it to a third-generation Mick like your father to out-country-club a WASP.”