Private Citizens: A Novel

by Tony Tulathimutte

  “I’m sure there are men out there who do treat women fairly, but I assume some enabling x factor of privilege, like it only works because they’re rich or good-looking, or worse, because they don’t think about this stuff. Men can be feminists, but I don’t know if straight guys can avoid being creeps, not here and now. The structural power advantage is always there, even if it’s not leveraged. So usually I avoid women, confirming the guilty suspicions that feminist men are silly effete intellectuals who would be sexist if they were man enough, so that sexism becomes almost this sexually selected trait. It’s also just defensive pessimism: ‘I’m not shy, I respect women!’ A vicious circle that keeps me insulated from and sensitized to emotional engagement, amounting to nothing except a feeling that I’m right. Which I’m not.”

  She shifts her sunglasses up. “Jesus.”

  “Sorry.”

  “If you think it’s so hopeless, why are we talking?”

  Another pause long enough to fix a martini in. “I don’t know. So far all I’ve done is embarrass myself. Either you think that’s funny, or you enjoy not having to impress me. But I’m lonely and invested enough to accept it now that it’s begun.”

  “Enough, stop it.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Listen, I agree and I disagree. You’re like me. If you didn’t hate yourself a lot you wouldn’t like yourself at all.” She snuffs her cigarette. “I’m E,” she says, not offering her hand.

  “E, like the letter?”

  “No. Like the drug.”

  It is a nickname she’s just invented, an algebraic symbol designating her new variable self. “C’mon, let’s go do something. Let’s go shoplift.”

  With startling composure he says, “Do you have tinfoil?”

  It circumvents theft alarms, he says, and begins explaining how Faraday cages work. He takes visible solace in academic talk, as it can be nuanced and factual without having anything to do with him. Returning to the coffee cart, she spends the rest of her shift fortifying her bag, and afterward they walk to the Stanford Shopping Center. Playing the bored purse-holding spouse at Bloomingdale’s, he lifts a sweater and exits nonchalantly, handing her the purse.

  “It’s like you just handed me free money for life,” she says, petting the chenille.

  “Just like my pops taught me,” he says, knowing she’ll think he’s kidding. “I can take off the antitheft tags too. With a rubber band.”

  “Yes. Next time. You will show me.”

  Cool, she thinks. She pens her number on his wrist and takes her leave with a noncommittal nod. Petty larceny is weaponizing her intellect. Forming the vision of her desires: the auratic, anesthetic, deterrent power of prestige—though the young and green will content themselves with its basest form, cool. To dictate the terms of male attention and take whatever she wants.

  For the next three weeks she is a crime wave, mopping basics at H&M, swiping skinny jeans and houndstooth circle scarves from Urban Outfitters, wearing tube dresses under her tube dresses out of Forever 21, thrift-lifting a D&G jacket and a Prada bag. Corset tops, rib crop tees, bobble lace halters, stretchy shiny bandeaux, strappy chunky wedge heels, the visible spectrum of Lycra leggings, skinny ties, and a fucking beret. Never again the athletic sock or the solitaire stud. Not one more banana clip. She will awestrike. Get ambitious about her hair. Read smoky eye tutorials. Wax.

  Soon she’s gazing upon a full wardrobe. All hers. She reconsiders Henrik. His gameness in the face of repeat humiliation. Someone she can bombard with new identities. Zero risk of catching feelings. It is her first time on the pedestal. She will see what sort of bust she makes.

  CHAPTER 9

  Everyone Else’s Problem

  Now I hate to tell such a plain truth, but I must—the bulk of San Francisco’s liberality seems sometimes actuated by a love of applause.

  —Mark Twain

  2/2/08

  It’s so me of me to start a journal, especially knowing nobody will read it. In theory I hate navel-gazing, so not writing felt justified: the supreme negative poetics. So much for that. I’ve hit a bottom, & not even rock bottom—just plain dirt bottom.

  Let the exposition be brief. In Jan I checked out of SF General w/ an impossible bill. Instead of taking Will’s offer to stay at his place, I went back to Eve’s—up until the accident I’d been turning in solid diaper changes, & they’d never pass up free babysitting. So I cabbed to their place unannounced, figuring my damaged steez would arouse her maternal pity. It did. “We know you’d been going thru a rough time,” Eve said, courteously rationalizing my shittiness. Which is not the same as saying she likes me.

  I’ve been here about a week looking after Mercy, who’s tripled in size. The baby teeth she has coming in are the same ones I’m missing. She looks constantly amazed at being able to stand & grip the rail of her crib in her hooded lime-green onesie. I give her la-las in the morning, poochie-poos at night. Again I hold a green binky in her yap & wait for the latch. Again I accept diaper payloads, handle refrigerated bags of milk pumped out of my friend, & slather rash-paste across a thankless butt. The only time I hear my voice is when I’m talking to Mercy’s life—oops, are we hungry? Did we drop our binky? Did we shit our diapies again? Fitting that I should narrate the subjectivity of someone who hasn’t even constructed one.

  If I’m going to let my ambition die shouldn’t I at least be paid for it?

  2007 Report Card—Silence: B / Cunning: D / Exile: A+

  2/17/08

  Jared is that guy who’s talented but only paints shit like yetis on skateboards or pterodactyls eating astronauts. He’s got the bloated face of the ex-junkie who doesn’t sublimate his addiction into exercise. Back in Brooklyn he tried to be a party photographer & would lure girls to his apartment w/ drugs to sit for photos, twenty-somethings who cultivated a grueling look of underage skank: I was that girl.

  Street art is his thing now. You can smell the rubber glue from the alley whenever the bathroom window’s open & all he talks about are his “ideas” for where to get up—supermarket produce, mail, the plastic shield over photobooth cameras, so people’s faces come out tagged. Tonight over dinner he tried showing me how to bite the nib of a glitter pen to make the letters drip but it exploded in his mouth & sprayed all over the tablecloth. Eve yelled, the baby cried, I yawned. Not that I’m one to disdain anybody’s way of making his stupid mark.

  I could go out to get away from the noise, but not with this grill. For purposes of laying low it helps that I’m approaching absolute ratchet. Scabs, bruises, & did I mention the acne rosacea is back? It is. Now that my hair toner’s washed out it’s this rank candy-corn yellow w/ shitty brown roots. Even some saddlebag softness where I hate to be soft. Day & night my gumholes make protest chants of pain. I can’t bend my arm all the way—blots of stiff pain in my elbow, like the pins are stripping the bone. Last week the casts came off & my leg’s got this puckered greenish tint, impervious to scrubbing & sunlight. I’m getting mouth lines. And I think a yeast situation is a-brewing. So begins life as a hag.

  2/23/08

  I thought living w/ Eve and Jared would be ho-hum—two parents who change from work clothes directly into sweatclothes to stare at a TV over the sounds of a screaming baby. But the shelter has gone skelter. Jared’s trial period w/ sober partying has gone about as successfully as you might expect from someone who once shit in my couch (yes, in it: he lifted the cushion). Yesterday Eve comes home & finds Jared passed out in an armchair w/ Mercy fallen on the floor. Me, I was applying to copyediting jobs in the next room—fuck me for entrusting Jared w/ his own daughter. So Eve investigates the premises—both those they live in & those they live under—quickly finding a grip of OxyContin in Jared’s windbreaker.

  2/28/08

  Around midnight, when I’m putting Mercy down, Jared comes in w/ the stern look of someone who’s been pacing for hours before a decision. His earring clashes conceptually w/ his pajamas. “So you couldn’t sleep either,” he says, leaning on
the doorframe, either for balance or for dramatic effect.

  I said yup, li’l jerk wouldn’t go down w/out a fight. In that shushing voice.

  “Can I hang?”

  It’s your house, I say, just don’t wake her.

  “I can tell you care about Mercy.”

  Yeah it’s my job, I say, while a light goes red in the dash of my brain: I, you, care.

  When he stumbles to the recliner I can tell he’s throwed on pills—floaty, noddy, & I don’t smell booze & he has to get drunk to shoot up. “It’s really cool having you here, Linda,” he says in a voice weighing about half a gram.

  Thanks? I say.

  “You take care of Mercy & it’s not a big deal. Eve’s been cutty like a motherfucker. The milk’s got to be this warm, Mercy’s got to sleep on this side and it’s like, can I live? Just raise the fucking kid, hey?”

  I say yup.

  “To be totally honest,” (I do not want total honesty) “I kinda think we should’ve dated instead.”

  I say the only thing I can: ew.

  “In New York I thought it’d be lame to date someone w/ a fake ID. But now it’s like, we click. You totally get it. Come on, you know it’s true.”

  Here I’m trying to contain the fury—you know, that seething star-core of indignation that goes supergiant whenever some dickhead makes his sexual entitlements known. I saw this coming; he’s been texting me while we’re both in the apartment, always shit like “haha hey” and “whats up.” I tell him he’s a bit premature for a midlife crisis. He tries to say more but I cold shut him down. You should probably go to bed, I say. (Before I fucking put a knife in you.)

  “We’ll move to Omaha. Buy some land, make art, raise our own—”

  Nope, nope, nope. Your side-chick-homestead ambitions are about to meet their death.

  “No but you hear what I’m saying? I’m in love w/ you. Linda, I love you.”

  Actually, I considered it? I calculated logistics—how to bone w/out waking the baby, whether this Omaha farmhouse would have Wi-Fi—but virtue triumphs, I guess. I leap forward & pull his blissing ass off the recliner (I am the strongest bitch alive when I have to be) & I kick him out. Mercy makes those pre-sob hiccups, then starts howling, needle in the red. I’m up for another two hours. Boys are vile.

  I feel it’s best to keep the whole scummy affair mum from Mom. What’s one little horny bucolic fantasy, tendered in an opium-addled night rapture? Jared’s idiocy is status quo. Babies need status quo.

  3/2/08

  God hell fucking dammit. Status quo? Never you fucking mind.

  Today Mercy teeters flat-footed over to me, gripping couch cushions for balance. “Ummumma,” she says.

  Eve, who’s eating dinner at the kitchen table, drops her silverware. “That was—”

  I say, no, I don’t think—

  “She called you Mama.”

  Now I’m on the high wire. No way, I say, babies don’t make that kind of mistake, they just don’t.

  “Linda. She was looking right at you.”

  I tell her Mama’s an easy word—that’s why it means what it means. Open your mouth twice while humming & that’s it.

  Eve takes Mercy from me (kind of unsafely!) & starts dandling her in perfect anguish. “This is so not what I need right now. Linda, it’s OK, I’m not mad. You’ve helped a lot. But we need to talk about your plans.”

  “Umma, um. MUM-ma,” Mercy enunciates from the dale of Eve’s bosom, grabbing out to me w/ her face bunched. Eve joggles her double-time like she’s trying to make up for lost parenting, & glares at me like, usurper.

  At first I protest: doesn’t it mean I’m doing a good job? But I’m also thinking: bitch, you may not have the life you asked for, but you have a life, & now you’re booting the girl w/ no work, money, friends, close family, or front teeth, who’s been raising your fucking baby.

  So I tell Eve she’s been so checked out that she hasn’t even noticed I’ve been fucking Jared, all this time he’s been turning me out like a dirty rubber glove, et cetera.

  I don’t blame her for slapping me: that’s sort of what I was going for.

  She gave me the ol’ ho-heave, and with cab fare as my severance, I brought my duffel bag to Noe Valley to cash in on Will’s offer of sanctuary. Will was too tired to object, so he pushed a key to the downstairs studio into my hands & slammed the door in my face. He’s a good guy.

  3/29/08

  This hag has not left Will’s apartment in 3 weeks. It’s your basic hardwood-&-whitewash affair, screaming realtor from every sconce & track-light. Big round glass table, daybed, lounge chair so overstuffed it leans you forward. Huge flat-screen on the wall where portraits of ancestors might have once hung. On the breakfast bar is a dusty candleholder w/ linen-scented candles, still shrinkwrapped. Dishwasher & laundry. Backyard terrace with potted plants & patio furniture. A purgatory beyond my price range. Will’s girlfriend’s wheelchair creaks the floorboards upstairs. The sky outside a featureless white, like the fluorescent panels they hung my X-rays on.

  TV isn’t numbing me: that means trouble. Last week I binge-watched The Wire & thought shit, about time TV killed the social novel, that sad oxymoron. A social novel needs a society, & society wants to be shown, not told. I hate to hork up the old gravamina about the death of literature, but I cannot take being outdone by entertainments I thought I was aiming higher than. Channel by premium channel, there goes period drama, self-help, chick-lit, fantasy, horror, cookbook, travelogue. The news beggars satire, and the verse line will never outrun the headline crawl—QUESTION DOCTOR’S SLEEP, NIPPLE MIX-UP ADVICE / GAYS WORSE THAN TERRORISTS LAWMAKER SAYS. Then you go online & read the public affirmations of the First World. At last the mass can sing of the mass. What writing can survive? The inverse in verse, the antisocial novel?

  Fucking why even trip when all I’m doing is writing journal entries to myself about myself by myself for myself against myself in spite of myself? I can admit certain things now: That I can’t be alone. That ambition, transgression, and righteous vengeance weren’t enough after all. And finally that my writing urge has nothing to do with talent or expression. It’s not that I have a way with words; it’s that I have no way without them.

  My birthday’s next week. Retired dominatrix, tired bellatrix, failed belletrist, bailed fellatrist by 22. No existential justification no problem.

  “BABY,” VANYA CALLED out into Will’s living room, where Will was reading eight blogs. “Come eat breakfast.”

  Since Vanya’s apartment was being gut-renovated to accommodate filming, she and Will were living together for the first time. It was temporary, and she worked East Coast hours, but cohab was cohab.

  She’d made garden omelets that sat on two round white dishes redly squiggled over with Sriracha sauce, and was photographing them. She and Will sat at the kitchen table in their usual tandem-work catercorner.

  “I know you hate when I ask you, but I’d like you to take some tests,” Vanya said. “To develop your onscreen persona.”

  Will sneered at his photogenic omelet, which somehow symbolized Vanya’s firm, broad, unambiguous selfhood. Through years of personal optimization testing and strength-finding, she reckoned herself a Type A Left-Brain ESTP Post-Wave Feminist True-Cost Social Capitalist Progressive Independent Compatibilist Challenger Mahayana Buddhist Straight Mono Switch Femme; a Carrie, an Aries, and a Ravenclaw. Last year she’d had her DNA sequenced and found she was part Polish. In this galaxy of metrics Vanya had rigorously defined herself. You’re more than that, Will wanted to say; but could he insist she was more complex than she said she was?

  From her laptop Vanya administered the omnibus quiz—Myers-Briggs, enneagram, NEO PI-R, and Holland Code. “I’ve filled out the boilerplate. Okay. Religious beliefs?”

  “None.”

  “Aren’t your parents Buddhist?”

  “Yeah, and I’m an atheist. The universe is a random-number generator.”

  “You’re just saying that because it
’s trendy. Atheism is actually really extreme,” Vanya said. “You literally believe there’s no possible undiscovered thing that explains consciousness? You’re positive?”

  “Nobody’s positive.”

  “That’s agnostic then. Doubt means agnostic.”

  “At least put igtheist.”

  “There’s no menu option for that. Agnostic it is. Okay—political affiliation?”

  “None.”

  “Baby, you vote straight-ticket Democrat.”

  “I hate conservatives and I’m lazy.”

  “Basically a Democrat. Okay, now rate your agreement with these statements, scale of one to five. I am worthy of love?”

  “I meaning you?”

  “No, I meaning you.”

  “This test blows. Loved by who? Worthy meaning what?”

  Vanya searched Will’s face as if for Spartacus. “Baby.”

  “Three.”

  “I rely on others for my emotional well-being?”

  Will glared. Vanya clicked.

  For the next half hour Will sliced smiles into his omelet as he self-reported his workspace tidiness, feelings about lions killing antelopes, drinking habits, relationship with his parents, attitudes on justifiable violence.

  “Okay, it’s loading,” Vanya said. She popped her knuckles with an ice-crunching sound while a server in some Latvian barracks digested him. “I knew it. INTJ, obvi.”

  Will used his mobile VNC client to spy on Vanya’s screen. Two columns were labeled WILL and VANYA. Amid the other data was a light blue box that said COMPATIBILITY SCORE: 56. His own column read DEATH AGE: 52, while Vanya’s was 84. Will pocketed his phone. “These are just horoscopes for people who went to college.”

  “You’re actually right,” Vanya said. “Horoscopes get you thinking.”