Objects of Desire

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by Clare Sestanovich


  Spencer rented an apartment in a nearby city and called more often. In his newly independent life, he had a lot of questions. Do you refrigerate soy sauce? Can you lie to your boss’s wife?

  A month or two after he met Allegra, he brought her home for the weekend. This was new. A proper introduction.

  “He’s growing up,” Jeb said.

  “He texts with punctuation,” Suzanne agreed.

  They served dinner without gluten, then ice cream in elegant flavors. Jeb stirred his nervously until it began to melt, the colors running together into an ugly soup. He took out a spliff and offered it to Allegra. Her spoon was in her mouth. For a moment, Suzanne let herself imagine Allegra was going to say yes. Or else she would say no, but her refusal would be full of conviction. Maybe there was something secret about her—a hidden talent for making scenes.

  Allegra swallowed, then declined politely. The spoon was clean when she set it down on the table. She went back to being thin-thighed and small-eared, the kind of girl Suzanne might once have hated or might once have been, she couldn’t remember which. Allegra’s bowl was still half full. Spencer gave her a reassuring look.

  After dinner, he said he wanted to show Allegra around the high school.

  “Spencer loved high school,” Suzanne said disapprovingly, drizzling blue soap over a pile of plates in the sink.

  “Spence was salutatorian.” Jeb gave him a thump on the back.

  “He had zero angst.” Suzanne’s hands disappeared beneath foam. “And zero acne.”

  “I want Allegra to smell the track,” Spencer said. “What would be really great is if she could see the stadium lights turn on.” He smiled, picturing it.

  Allegra smiled back. “But it’s okay. I’ve seen it in football movies.”

  When they left, Suzanne got the step stool from the basement so she could reach the liquor cabinet. She tugged at the hem of her shirt when it revealed her stomach. The right glasses weren’t where they should have been, so she poured the whiskey into champagne flutes. Jeb ducked his head sheepishly.

  “No thanks.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “I’ll get a headache,” he said while she drank the first glass in one efficient gulp.

  She raised the second one in the air.

  “To our son.”

  “Susie.”

  Later, bending down in the bathroom to charge her electric toothbrush, Suzanne heard Spencer and Allegra having sex on the other side of the wall. The bed frame creaked. The noise embarrassed her, as if the whole thing were a parody. There was no whispering or groaning, but she could hear the sucking and unsucking of skin, like feet in mud.

  * * *

  —

  Suzanne decided to hire a new designer, even though there wasn’t really room in the budget. Laird was thirty-seven and barrel-chested. He drank coffee in the evening and lost his cool on the phone with the cable company. He was astonishingly good at his job.

  In the first months after she hired him, Suzanne walked purposefully around the block two or three times a day to talk herself out of her attraction. She told herself that it was predictable—mortifying. She looked at her reflection in the new chrome buildings while she walked: there was always something to dislike. This, too, was predictable. She saw another woman adjust her hair in a Starbucks window—hair made brittle by heat and dye and time—and hurried away in the opposite direction before her own image appeared in the glass.

  There was a food court where people from nearby offices waited in long lines for custom-made salads. Suzanne liked to sit nearby and watch them. They were mostly young people, with wrinkled clothes and theatrical voices.

  “I have a date with the girl from coat check,” one woman told another.

  Suzanne’s table was covered in someone else’s crumbs. She chewed a piece of gum until it lost its flavor, then sucked it.

  “Would you like a crunch?” the man behind the salad bar asked the women.

  They both ordered sunflower seeds and moved farther down the line.

  “I’m keeping a Post-it with my phone number in my purse,” the second woman said.

  “Next time you’ll be ready.”

  “Is that old-fashioned?”

  “Protein?” the man said.

  “Old-fashioned could be cute.”

  The man chopped their salads into pieces with a huge knife and Suzanne walked back to the office. Big gusts of wind blew her hair over her face, blinding her. While she walked, she recited all the phone numbers she knew by heart. The oldest ones were the easiest. Her sister, her sister-in-law. The neighbor in Berkeley with the extra key and the sourdough starter. Spencer’s pediatrician. The numbers were useless now. Her phone knew them all.

  Back at the office, Suzanne couldn’t sit still. Her feet ached, so she took off her shoes. Plain leather boots, which would have disappointed a younger version of herself. The plainness was supposed to prove their expensiveness.

  “My husband and I used to trim the calluses off each other’s feet,” she told the assistants, and she could see they were afraid to show their disgust. When Laird brought her a mug of hot water, she held it against her cheek, hoping that the wind had made her skin look pink and full of life.

  * * *

  —

  There was a party at an old Italian restaurant to celebrate the firm’s latest project. An alumni magazine for a college in Maine—redesigned, the editors said, to appeal to young donors. Kids who got rich from robotic vacuums, recyclable sneakers, cookies made out of meat. For weeks, Suzanne had been looking at pictures of wholesome undergraduates. Reading on lawns or clambering over rocks, smiling in front of the Atlantic. The ocean, she thought, looked grey and unfriendly.

  The restaurant had leather booths and decanters made of thick glass. Recently, it had been decided that this old-school décor made the restaurant authentic—cool. For the first time, reservations were hard to come by. After appetizers were served, Suzanne went to the bathroom with outstretched hands, fingertips glistening with calamari grease. When she opened the door—it was unlocked, she would remind herself later—Laird was leaning against the sink, a house key underneath his left nostril.

  “Fuck,” he said.

  “Fuck,” she repeated, because her mind was blank.

  He put the key away and looked at her steadily, waiting for her to decide what to do. On the other side of the door, the party sounded like every other party: utensils clinking, people laughing, conversations trying to stay alive. The faucet was dripping, and when he turned the knob to make it stop, everything on their side of the door was quiet. She didn’t think he looked afraid.

  She kissed him, they were kissing. She ran her greasy fingers through his hair and he ran his powdered fingers across her gums. The cocaine tasted metallic, like traces of vomit. When she unbuckled his pants and held him—warm and not quite hard—in her mouth, she wanted to push him to the very back of her throat, where there was spit and acid.

  She didn’t do that. She stood up after a few seconds, a few unimpressive thrusts. He pulled up his pants, she washed her hands, they went back to the party. She watched him get his coat, pulling a red scarf out of its sleeve. The scarf covered his mouth and half his nose, and then he was gone. At the table, Suzanne submerged a piece of bread in her glass of wine. She ate a whole basket that way, the bread purple and soggy and sticking between her teeth.

  * * *

  —

  That was all that ever happened with Laird. He took a week of vacation unannounced and posted only one picture—a sunset with all the usual reds and golds. He could have been anywhere. Later, someone saw him throw his phone against the wall, but Suzanne let it go. She kept taking walks around the block, bought new shoes that were the same as the old shoes. He moved to Berlin without a job, and she assured him he could count on a positive recommendation w
henever the time came.

  Suzanne hired a woman in his place. Someone with a good degree, a quiet voice, a daughter in kindergarten. Suzanne would have disliked her if she’d had the energy.

  Spencer and Allegra moved in together. An apartment with wall-to-wall carpeting and rubber plants in the corners that didn’t get enough light. By then, Suzanne had stopped searching for Laird. Most people were easy to keep track of: texts and tweets and things called stories, which weren’t really stories at all. Laird didn’t leave the same traces. Maybe he’d grown quiet, or tired. Maybe he was just private. She could have looked harder, but Suzanne didn’t want to seem—even to herself—like she was trying too hard. Jeb friended all their nieces and nephews. He wanted to learn about hashtags.

  Suzanne took an S.S.R.I. She researched rare illnesses with vague symptoms.

  “Brain fog,” she said one morning in the kitchen, scrolling through alarming search results.

  “Mist,” Jeb said. “Maybe it’s just mist.”

  When people asked, Jeb said he was retired. From what, Suzanne wanted to say, but didn’t. He was more energetic than ever. He went running barefoot and called recipes projects. He made curry powder with a mortar and pestle.

  It was the end of February—a leap year—when the lawsuit was filed. There had been no snow that winter. Suzanne kept a thick coat and a thin coat in her office closet to accommodate the erratic temperatures.

  Sexual harassment.

  Spencer had just emailed her an edited version of his résumé.

  Hostile work environment. Lewd comments.

  What’s the difference, Spencer wrote, between passive and active voice?

  She took a walk in the wrong jacket. Sweat beaded behind her knees and underneath her breasts.

  She went home early and googled Laird the way she used to. There were dozens of photos now. She scrolled until she found the sunset, then worked her way back up to the present. Mountaintops and cupcakes and a girl with a long orange ponytail. He posted a selfie when he’d been sober for six months and another when he’d been sober for twelve. He wore glasses, smiled widely. Eventually, he got a dog with two different-colored eyes.

  Suzanne edited the résumé. Spencer got the job. Sometimes the weather matched her feelings, and on those days Suzanne was calm. When spring arrived, the sun wouldn’t stop shining, so she left the firm before anything worse could happen. She hired a lawyer, who wrote a lot of expensive emails. She threw out all her old clothes—silk and linen and wool—and bought outfits with made-up materials.

  “How much is the vortex?” Suzanne asked a salesperson.

  She had become the kind of person who went to the mall.

  “The Gore-Tex?”

  Suzanne bought waterproof jackets and pants, but the rain never arrived. The jacket could be compressed into a tiny ball. Summer came, the hottest one on record. She sat on the front porch while Jeb read. These days, he read only massive books. It was a matter of principle: stories that required commitment. She sat with an unopened newspaper in her lap, glaring each time he turned a page.

  “We can endure this,” Jeb said when he reached the end of a chapter.

  Suzanne didn’t respond. She went inside to get more ice.

  “We’ve endured so much more than this,” he called after her.

  * * *

  —

  No one understood why Laird had waited so long. They kept asking, Why now.

  Suzanne couldn’t know for sure. She wasn’t allowed to see him or make any contact with him. He hadn’t posted a picture of himself in weeks.

  “Because it was time,” she said, as if on his behalf.

  Her lawyer was younger than she was. An untidy beard and a baggy grey suit. They tried to resolve everything over email, but in the end the mediators met in a building with dozens of identical conference rooms. Suzanne had to wait by herself in an empty room, where someone had left a pitcher of lukewarm water and no cups. When they took a break for lunch, her lawyer repeated it like a mantra: why now, why now, why now. Suzanne opened a clamshell container and lettuce went everywhere.

  “It takes a while for things to sink in,” she said.

  The lawyer frowned. “Do you want me to win this or what?”

  It felt like the most natural thing in the world to give Laird what he wanted. Suzanne pictured him somewhere else in the building, drinking straight from the plastic pitcher, water dribbling down his neck. She wore spandex and sneakers and wandered the hallways even though she’d been told not to. Jeb texted and she typed a reply, then erased it. All the other rooms on the floor were locked. After a few more hours, the lawyer came back and said everything was settled. He packed up his bag.

  Up until the very end, Suzanne held out hope that Laird would appear. She waited while the elevator clanged up from the lobby, and when the doors opened, she was sure he would be inside. Long after the lawyer went home, she sat on a bench in front of the building, looking at everyone who walked by. She left her purse on the opposite end of the bench and wondered, vaguely, if it would be stolen. A bus pulled up to the curb but no one got off.

  Suzanne imagined him running toward her, as if he’d been looking for her everywhere. He’d be shouting. He’d grab her wrist, or maybe her shoulders. He’d keep shouting, even when their faces were right in front of each other. Horrible, honest things, things he’d been meaning to say for years.

  A security guard came out of the building and locked the door in two places.

  “Everything all right?” he said when he saw her.

  The man was younger than her, but he wasn’t young.

  “Everything’s settled,” she said.

  He nodded sympathetically. She took the cigarette he offered her, like a kind of apology. When he’d walked away and she’d gathered up her purse, she said it again, just to herself: “Settled.”

  That night, she and Jeb sat on the porch again—sweating even once the sun went down. When she asked him for a divorce, he put his finger in the middle of a page so he wouldn’t lose his place. He looked at her sadly and said okay.

  * * *

  —

  Suzanne rented an apartment in a high-rise. The other tenants were people Spencer’s age, with jobs in marketing or coding or search engine optimizing. There was a grill and a hammock in the shared courtyard. All the keys were cards.

  “Stainless steel,” Jeb said when he visited. “This isn’t what a midlife crisis is supposed to look like.”

  “What were you expecting?” Suzanne bought plain white dishware and a TV with a complicated remote. “A compost bin? Too many pets?”

  When Spencer was little, Jeb and Suzanne had owned a car that ran on vegetable oil. It couldn’t drive very far or very fast and the fuel smelled like burning wax. Whenever they lit candles around the house Spencer said, Vroom, vroom.

  As a housewarming gift, Jeb gave her a tiny succulent in a pot the size of a shot glass.

  “The real danger is overwatering, not underwatering,” he told her.

  “No helicopter parenting.”

  Suzanne hesitated, looking for a place to put the plant, even though there was no shortage of available surfaces. End tables without lamps, bare bookshelves, too-clean countertops. She cupped the small pot in both hands, as if it were something to keep her warm.

  Suzanne kept the plant alive and bought it company. Two cacti and a pot of ferns. Spencer and Allegra announced their engagement around the time her Rebutia was supposed to bloom but didn’t. Suzanne worked on the wedding invitation while live-chatting with a horticulturalist. He recommended giving the plant a winter dormancy period. Store it someplace cool and dark.

  Spencer called and asked her to come to the suit fitting. The wedding was still eight months away.

  “Why?”

  “Like, for moral support,” he said. “To g
ive compliments.”

  “Your dad is the one who can sew.”

  “Mom.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  The night before the fitting, Suzanne stayed up late making imperceptible changes to the invitations. She had forgotten this was the hardest part: deciding when to be done. She printed out three versions and looked at them for too long.

  In the morning—she’d thought the decision might arrive in her dreams, or else in the shower—they were spread out on the table where she’d left them. From a distance, they were just blank squares. She knew what came next: she would stare at them again, from one angle, then another, in one order, then another. She would tell herself to concentrate. She would tell herself to choose. For now, she stood where she was, admiring the empty shapes.

  TERMS OF AGREEMENT

  .

  There’s a building under construction outside my window, close enough that when it’s finished, there will be nothing but building in my line of sight. Progress has been slow and therefore mesmerizing. One morning, I watched two men assemble half a dozen floors of scaffolding. They were acrobats in metal-lined boots and many types of vests. The scaffolding came down recently, after so many months, and revealed a huge grey wall without a single window. The wall is what I’m looking at now—what I look at nearly all day long.

  My first memory of you is sitting at the table in Nicole’s kitchen, writing a story that was going to get you in trouble with your girlfriend. Later, you remembered this—the kitchen, the story, the girlfriend—but you didn’t remember me being there.

  I was just stopping by, because spontaneous visits were a kind of proof of loyalty to Nicole, especially when she was lonely—when she was in between girlfriends or in between shows. I don’t think I ever took my coat off. One of the black puffy coats that everyone was wearing at the time, its puffiness and its ubiquity a precious insulation. I was skinnier than I should have been, and I was always cold.

 

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