Objects of Desire

by Clare Sestanovich

  You were sitting at your laptop, drinking straight from a gallon jug of water and tugging nervously at your beard. The story was for a class you were taking in the evenings, taught by a well-known writer. A writer with enviable success, a kind of fame that seemed to befit a different profession: people knew his name and his face, they got sentences from his books tattooed in visible places. There were a few political issues the writer had decided to care about, and when he spoke out about them he was treated, strangely, as an authority. Your girlfriend liked his novels more than you did, and she agreed with his political opinions.

  That afternoon, you told me the story wasn’t really fiction.

  “Oh,” I said, “one of those,” and in my memory you smiled. You’d changed names, switched a few things around—the usual partial disguise. In the middle of the story, you’d copied and pasted an email from your girlfriend. At first, you’d intended to alter it in little ways, maybe even in meaningful ways. But then you kept writing, and it became impossible to dismantle.

  “You can’t improve the truth,” I said, which I meant as another joke. You frowned.

  The way I remember it there was silence, the three of us looking off into different vacant spaces. Eventually, Nicole took over. She told us a story about her friend the professional hockey player. All her stories were about her friend the. The hockey player, the speechwriter, the glass blower. (I wondered sometimes how I appeared in these stories, or whether I did, since I wasn’t the anything. I had a nonspecific job, a vague creative ambition, a family that sounded interesting only if I told the right anecdotes.) The hockey player had been married for years, even though he was only twenty-five. He and his wife had known each other since they were kids. They were more in love, Nicole said, than anyone she’d ever met. And yet the wife had never attended a single one of his hockey games. It was a matter of principle. She’d seen a brawl on the ice once and had never gone back. The punching, the yelling, the hands made grotesque in their huge foam gloves. It was even worse when the fight was over. She could feel the satisfaction in the stadium, in the men on the ice and the men in the stands. It was the pleasure of spent energy, like a room after sex. Then the game went on as usual, except she couldn’t stop thinking that on the bottom of every skate was a knife.

  The two of you kept talking, eating from a large bowl of popcorn until it was the kernels you were eating. I could hear them crack between your teeth. Nicole went into the kitchen to refill the empty bowl and for a while you looked at your computer screen. There were a few stray pops from the stove. Without looking up, you said, “The story doesn’t really matter.”

  It would be read by no more than twelve people, and only because they were required to. Your girlfriend would ask to read it, too, and there was no question that she would recognize her own words. You said she looked for herself in everything you wrote.

  “Does she find herself?”

  You nodded. “Even when she isn’t there.”

  There was a crescendo of popping, faster and louder, and it seemed to me as though we were defying something by sitting still, by thinking and speaking slowly. And then the popping stopped.

  “Maybe,” you said, “the thing I’m most afraid of is that she won’t be angry at all.” Nicole appeared with the bowl. You grabbed a handful, then let it go, surprised by the heat. “That she might even be pleased.”

  I wanted to say something—the right thing. Instead, I left in my zipped-up coat, my tongue worrying the shard of a popcorn kernel in between my teeth. And it felt good—like the mortifying pain of a period cramp or a sudden spasm in the arch of my foot—that you looked up only briefly, that my departure was unremarkable, that I could be certain there was nothing I had left behind.

  I’ve been looking for mailboxes lately, wondering if this is a letter I’ll ever send. In my neighborhood, half of them have been painted green and padlocked. I guess they’re empty, though sometimes I picture a stack of envelopes trapped inside, each one licked shut and Forever-stamped.

  I was never a writer the way you and Nicole were. I never took classes or entered contests or learned to like the readings where everyone squinted while they listened, where every plastic cup was filled with half an inch of wine. I never sent out my work, which meant I never had it returned: the package addressed in my own handwriting, a form letter with no signature.

  When I imagine all the things I’ve written, I imagine them piled up in the kitchen, the mess of an old woman who can’t bear to part with her Tupperware—flimsy plastic in every imaginable size, because someday it might be just the thing she’s looking for. The beginning of a story, the title of an essay. The journals, the text messages with lowercase i’s, the emails signed yours or yrs, the ones I’ve started signing xx because someone British started doing it first, someone who is at once forbidding and kind, one x blown into the ether and the other erected like a shield.

  To find the nearest mailbox, I pass the construction workers on a break, sitting in whatever shade they can find, their legs stretched out across the sidewalk. In the morning, when I feel cool and light and younger than I really am, they are already sweating and eating lunch. Their helmets are empty bowls on the sidewalk; the hats underneath are white with their bodies’ salt. They have earned their rest, their sandwiches in Saran Wrap, their huge containers of rice. And then there is nothing interesting in the words I have written and refused to throw out. I want muscles and a big appetite. I want to make a building and leave it outside someone else’s window.

  * * *

  —

  Three days a week, I’m a dog walker. The dog-walking company is owned by my neighbor, Konstantin. His best friends are successful entrepreneurs. Until recently, they all lived together, hatching ideas in the kitchen, vaping and tapping notes on their phones. The friends live in Manhattan now. They have it made, Konstantin says. I suspect this is an exaggeration, but I like the expression. Is there a difference: making it and having it made?

  The dog-walking company is Konstantin’s attempt at madeness, and I am in no position not to help. Most of my jobs—odd jobs, they used to be called—involve being alone in front of a computer, sending emails to people I will never meet. I proofread their résumés, correct typos in their letters To Whom It May Concern. A woman who signs every text sincerely pays me to Skype with her daughter—in college, a major she made up—whenever deadlines approach.

  There were six or seven dogs at the beginning, but now there are only two. A pair of elderly Labradors in a studio apartment. Roommates, their owner says. They have grizzled white snouts and bad hips. They can hardly squat to take their shits. At least, Konstantin says, they have each other.

  More than a year passes between my first memory of you and my second. Your girlfriend was gone by then. The famous writer had incurred the wrath of certain people online, which didn’t stop him from writing books and didn’t stop the tattoo-getters from reading them. The new books were less popular than the old ones, but he’d started dating a celebrity—a real one—and in this way his fame did not diminish.

  We were at a party at the end of the summer, in the mosquito-infested backyard of someone Nicole had recently decided she loved. I arrived late, you arrived even later. Paper plates were being swept into a big trash bag, the embers in the grill had turned grey and dusty, and this belatedness seemed like a kind of intimacy. We stood next to a plastic bucket of beers that had once been filled with ice and now was filled with water, which was where we met Nicole’s friend the evangelical. His name was Josiah.

  He was the kind of evangelical who likes beer—also mushrooms and salvia; the celestial-feeling stuff, he said—and he plunged his hand into the bucket alongside ours. We stood there, our forearms dripping, while he explained that the reason God’s love is better than everyone else’s is that it’s unconditional. There were, he admitted, human replicas that strove for the same steadfastness. Maternal
love, say, and the kind of marital love that actually lasts. But it was only divine love that could really be said to have zero strings attached.

  I slapped a mosquito and got blood on my hand. I told Josiah that sounded awful. I told him I wanted conditions—as many, preferably, as I could get.

  “Why is being let off the hook a form of love?”

  I told him—I didn’t look at you—that I didn’t want to be loved in spite of: my mood swings and my neck pain, my secret arrogance and my secret laziness, my bad dental hygiene and my leftovers molding at the back of the fridge.

  Josiah was a little drunk already, and his evangelism made him seem drunker. He scraped the label off his beer bottle a little too vigorously. He rocked back and forth on his heels. He was in the middle of a sentence when a woman came up beside him, tugging on his arm the way a little kid might, saying something excitedly. His whole body came alive with her urgency, as if all this time he had been waiting for someone, maybe anyone, to arrive with that childlike command: come look. The commotion spread through the yard, and gradually all the remaining guests followed them inside.

  We stayed where we were, the warm beer in the warm water in between us. In the silence, I cataloged the things I had revealed to you. My dark moods, my dirty teeth. With Josiah, they had been effortless to divulge, as if they were merely evidence in an argument, as if they didn’t really have anything to do with me.

  “Quite a character,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  You shook your head, as if trying to shake your hair away from your face, but it was slicked to your forehead with sweat.

  “I’m afraid one day I’ll use him,” you said, finishing your beer.

  “Use him?”

  “You know, it’ll come up in conversation. Love, or faith. Or maybe it won’t, and I’ll just see a way to fill the silence.”

  “For the sake of a story,” I said, and you nodded.

  “Would it be so bad?” I asked. “Is he really so sacred?”

  You put the empty bottle back in the water, where it bobbed on the surface.

  “Maybe not.” If we had been sitting down, our knees might have touched, or our shoulders. Standing up, the distance between us couldn’t be bridged by accident. “Or maybe everyone is?”

  And so we vowed that evening not to use Josiah. I haven’t told anyone about him, but I think about him often. I wonder what will happen to him, or what already has. Eventually, he’ll tell someone he loves them no matter what. In sickness and in health. Till death—or, I guess, beyond it. I wonder if together they will have agreed to total devotion, or if they will acknowledge the taut but not unbreakable strings that bind them, the promise they will always be making: to sway with the force of something unseen, to love and also to believe.

  When the party was over, we met Nicole on the front steps.

  “Oh good,” she said, “you found each other.”

  This spoiled something for me, as if she had predicted whatever had transpired between us. Her hair was unbrushed and I remember the strap of her dress slipping down her shoulder. She made a point of always seeming a little undone. She told us that the commotion had been about a bird’s nest wedged in the corner of the kitchen windowsill, twigs poking through the screen and into the rack of drying dishes. Inside the nest were three tiny birds, pink and unfeathered. A consensus had emerged that they were in danger of falling. The sill was narrow, the nest was lopsided. Everyone crowded around the sink, arguing among themselves about what to do, when suddenly a man in the group opened the window and pulled the nest inside. Nicole paused in her telling of the story. Her face fell, she sighed heavily.

  “So that’s the end of that,” she said. You and I looked at each other uncertainly, and our puzzlement seemed to exasperate her.

  “Everyone knows,” she said, “that a bird won’t come near her babies if they’ve received a human touch.”

  * * *

  —

  There is nothing stopping me from hand-delivering this letter. There were many mornings, years ago, when I walked from your house to mine. It was a long walk—there was a bus I might have taken—but I was trying to postpone my arrival, to let the feeling of being with you languish. Back then, this seemed to me like a necessary condition for being in love: to be immune to, or ignorant of, the waste of time. In fact, that was the last time I experienced it, though I have been in love since, as I hope you have, too. On one of those mornings, the sun burned the part in my hair, and for the rest of the day I was consumed by the image of my scalp, white and unknown, streaked with one perfectly straight pink line.

  We fell in love and Nicole fell apart. Is that an unfair way to tell it? It had happened before, we knew that much, even though neither you nor I had been there. She had long since turned it into a story: coming undone. The story was unoriginal, and I was ashamed to realize that I held the generic details against her. Sleeping too much, eating too much, drinking too much. A grey cloud descending.

  We were in a movie theater when Nicole called and wouldn’t stop calling. It was October, but already turning cold, and I wore a new coat. Not warm, but elegant. The saddest film of the year, we’d been assured, which was the only kind I ever wanted to watch. I explained the catharsis of this to you—being hollowed out by something that had nothing to do with me. Sounds like a fun date, you said, smiling.

  And so I was crying when I ignored Nicole’s first call, and then the second. The third time, we went out into the lobby and I called her back. Everywhere we looked, the faces of famous actors stared out from posters. There were crumbs flattened into the carpet.

  At Nicole’s apartment, I went inside and you waited on the sidewalk, as she had instructed. I apologized too many times for this. You had known her so much longer. You’d met her dad, her sister, even one of her second cousins. You were the first one to read her first story. Together, you took mushrooms at the botanical garden, wondering at the alien armor of cacti, the secret language of tree bark. I couldn’t even remember which floor she lived on.

  Nicole was lying on a shaggy white rug. Her crying proved that I had never really cried. In her chest was what sounded like a broken motor, revving and wheezing. When she looked up at me, her face was liquid, snot shining on her chin. We lay there on the rug for a while. I said stupid things like breathe, and she nodded, still sputtering. Eventually, when there was quiet, she closed her eyes and gestured toward the next room. She had peed in her bed.

  Nicole watched me strip sheets. The urine was a fierce and unexpected yellow.

  “I’m always thirsty,” she said. “But I can’t get up.”

  The fitted sheet snapped into a heap.

  “I just can’t get up.”

  The naked mattress was mortifying. Sweat stains and bloodstains and long strands of hair. Grey specks of lint everywhere. I tried to think of something trivial to say, something distracting.

  “Is what they say about dust true?” Nicole looked at me blankly. “You know, it’s all just dead skin?”

  As soon as the sheets were gone, she lay down again, her face pressed into the pillow without its case. She looked up when my phone rang, and when she saw your name, her body curled in on itself, like a cat, or the kind of bug that can turn into a ball. No, she said. Or maybe she didn’t have to. From the kitchen window, I could see you on the sidewalk, your phone between your ear and your shoulder, blowing into your hands for warmth. When the buzzing in my hand stopped, you looked up, but the lights were off and you couldn’t see me. You stood like that, your face tilted up, as if basking in the streetlamp’s glow, and then you turned and walked away.

  Nicole kept detergent in a quart milk container. The man who owned the Laundromat lent me a cap for measuring. I watched the other customers absorbed in their tasks, peeling socks away from shirts, shaking polyester until it let its static go. I tried to follow the same navy blue
something as it whirled inside one of the machines, but I lost track of it right away, my blue blurring into all the others.

  * * *

  —

  The day after Thanksgiving, Nicole checked herself into the hospital. She stayed for more than three weeks, until Christmas Eve. In those weeks of waiting, the city turned ugly to me—all its seasonal rituals cold and meaningless. Snow fell overnight and was grey by noon. The subways were crowded with shopping bags, dripping boots and dripping noses. In the morning, Christmas lights were just green plastic wires, strangling every arm of a tree.

  We visited twice a week, with clean clothes and snacks. The nurse reminded us of the rules each time: laceless shoes, zipperless coats, no visitors after six, no calls after nine. Half of the time, Nicole declined to see us.

  When she checked herself out, Nicole didn’t call you until she was at the airport. That night there were carolers in the park across from my apartment. I could hear you on the phone in the hallway; I could see the candles cupped in their hands. She was flying across the country. She said this as if it were the most normal thing in the world. Home for the holidays.

  You refused to be angry.

  “You’re allowed—” I said, and you cut me off with one look.

  In the morning, we drove north to your parents’ house, at the end of a potholed road, with a view of nothing but trees. Everything went right that trip: four feet of snow and something always in the oven. But you were quiet and distracted—the smoke detector reminded you there were cookies baking—and I surprised myself by filling the space that you had withdrawn from. I was a new audience for traditions that were getting old. I’d never decorated a Christmas tree, couldn’t believe eggnog was really made out of eggs. Everyone was grateful for me, without quite knowing why. Someone’s dog lunged at someone’s niece and I swept her up in my arms, just in time.