Objects of Desire

by Clare Sestanovich

  When we got back, the day after the first day of the year, Nicole had so much to tell us. She was writing poetry. A TV pilot, too. She was done with doctors. She was dating a curator. She was better. She wanted us to pretend nothing had ever happened.

  For months, every time we saw her—we kept seeing her, we kept worrying about her—the first thing she did was tell us about her latest change. She painted her bedroom walls, then her bedroom floor. She lasered the hair in her armpits, pierced her tragus, asked her dentist to remove all her fillings. There were so many people, she told us, carrying mercury in their mouths. I wasn’t sure any of this made her happy—her ear swelled and oozed—but telling us about it did.

  When her sister’s wedding invitation arrived in the mail, Nicole insisted we attend.

  “You’ll be my dates,” she said, wrapping one arm around each of our shoulders. The curator was already gone, hardly missed.

  The wedding took place at a summer camp. It was the beginning of June and the cabins were empty, but we found a raincoat and a vibrator in the bunk room where the guests slept, which was how everyone started talking about teenage romance. We all wanted to remember it—the special thrill of what we’d called summer love, the hot months in which it had seemed we were sweating away one self, becoming another.

  When it was Nicole’s turn, she told the story of kissing a girl for the first time. It had seemed like magic while it was happening.

  “Magic,” she repeated. “I know it sounds dramatic.”

  But that’s what it was. Late at night, on a dock, when the water and the sky were the same unmoving black. Their lips touched and then their chests—not breasts really, not yet—and Nicole could have sworn she heard the sound of a fish leaping in the air.

  And then in the morning the magic was gone. Just like that. The flag on the flagpole was limp, the oatmeal at breakfast was congealed. The girl sought out Nicole’s foot under the table and it wasn’t thrilling; it was clumsy, unbearable. Everywhere she turned, this ordinariness was an accusation. What have you done?

  That night there was a dance. Nothing special: acoustic guitars and chaperones. Nicole found the tallest boy and pulled him into the center of the crowd. They kissed under a cheap disco ball. His tongue was muscular and wet. She closed her eyes and her head throbbed with what might have been pain, a vague heat that was easy enough to pretend was desire.

  She ignored the girl for the rest of the summer. On the last day, everyone gathered on the hill that led down to the lake, hugging and crying and vowing to stay in touch. Nicole saw the girl looking for her, craning her neck in the crowd. She let the girl find her. She let their eyes meet for a second, just long enough to be sure that they were dull, desperate eyes, and then Nicole turned away. They never spoke again. A dozen years went by, and then the girl—a woman now, like us—opened a restaurant in Nicole’s neighborhood. Her name appeared in the newspaper, a rave review. The restaurant served food with “feminine energy.” There was a pink sign out front, the name of a goddess in neon script. Nicole told us it was impossible to avoid. Every time she passed by, she crossed the street. Through the window, she saw the waiters’ harried grace, the tables crowded with plates and elbows, the laughter that seemed all the more ecstatic because she couldn’t hear it. Once, Nicole thought she saw the woman—hair pulled back, her hands doing something deftly above a frying pan—and the old shame clenched inside her. She was sweating, or else shivering. Either way, she was trapped, her new self immobilized inside her past self. Like a bug, she said, in amber.

  Some of Nicole’s friends insisted she should face her fears. Make a reservation, introduce herself, leave a generous tip. Right the wrongs.

  “But I can’t,” she said. “She might never let me forget.”

  The other wedding guests nodded.

  “That’s how I feel about my mother,” one of them said, and the laughing resumed.

  I smiled a fake smile because I didn’t believe Nicole. She had told other, more outrageous lies, but their implausibility had never bothered me before: they were good stories. And yet this one seemed invented just for me.

  “But it doesn’t have anything to do with you,” you said when I told you.

  “Of course it does.” I pictured the amber before it was amber, when it was just sap, dripping or flowing or moving too slow to be seen.

  It was a story Nicole knew I would see through. She and I had been to that restaurant one afternoon in the spring. It was raining, the piles of pear blossoms along the sides of the street a soggy beige mass. Inside, the tables were all empty, and the owner served us herself. She was probably in her fifties, the sort of middle-aged woman who didn’t make an effort to seem younger than she was: undyed hair and a plain, leathery face. We drank tea from individual-size pots, and when we left, I said to Nicole, Do you think we’ll grow up like that?

  The wedding ceremony was about to begin. We took our seats in the last row, with the guests who had brought their babies or forgotten their ties. The music started. We stood up and sat down as instructed. A velvet bag of rings was passed down the rows, so that it could be warmed by all our hands. I held the bag too long, tracing each ring through the fabric, listening for the slight scrape of metal on metal. You had to take it out of my hands.

  Nicole found us after the toasts, her eyes glistening. Her cheeks, too.

  “Tears of joy,” she said, with a note of pride. Her dress was darkened with sweat.

  “Do those really exist?” I asked.

  You glared at me, and Nicole ignored us. She was smiling, tugging us toward the dance floor. I did what she told us to, even though my feet were heavy and my wine spilled and my clothes would need dry cleaning. You danced away from me, spun Nicole’s teenage cousin around and around in circles, her head tipped back, her face frozen with the thrill of almost letting go. When it was all over, when I was lying on the top bunk, imagining that I could feel you staring up from the bottom bunk, then worrying that I couldn’t—feeling, instead, the empty chill of your closed eyes—I said it to myself again and again: it has nothing to do with you.

  * * *

  —

  If I could choose the story of how I found out about Nicole’s book, it would appear for the first time behind the glass of a bookstore’s display window. I would stop in the middle of a bustling sidewalk, like a rock interrupting the stream. Then the book and I would be two objects.

  Instead, I found out about it online. It was the middle of the night and all the windows had turned into mirrors. On the website where I bought the book, there was a picture of the cover, a blue background with blocky, old-fashioned letters. When I hovered my cursor over the image, an invitation appeared: see inside! It seemed like a dare, or a taunt, so I didn’t click. I didn’t look for her photo, but I imagined it, her head tilted the way authors’ heads always are, the background blurred into something indistinct but elegant. I turned off all the lights and lay there not sleeping, the laptop faintly humming beside me, waiting for the sun to come up, for the construction workers to arrive.

  I read the book twice. First in bed and all at once, and then again in the world, in snatches of pages, not caring where I started or finished. (I remember being interrupted while reading as a child: just let me get to a good place.) I read it on the train and on a bench with the two Labradors breathing damply on my legs. I read it in a park surrounded by a squadron of empty strollers and at another park observed by elderly tai chi practitioners. I let strangers read over my shoulder. I left it, briefly, at the Laundromat, and when I went back and found it on top of the rumbling dryer, the dust jacket was warm with the machine’s heat.

  We’re not the only ones in Nicole’s book. The hockey player and the hockey player’s wife, or ex-wife. Half a dozen of her girlfriends: the model, the piano tuner, the disgraced politician’s daughter. Two or three Christians, so it’s a little hard to figure out who�
��s who. There’s her friend who got me my first real job, who turned out to be sleeping with my first real boss. Nicole’s brother, the one with a farm, and Nicole’s other brother, the one with a car that drives itself. She has not changed names so much as shuffled them. Mine has been reassigned to the nurse at the psychiatric unit, who confiscated Nicole’s notebook and fountain pen and box of a hundred paper clips. She is neither the good nurse nor the bad nurse, so I can’t tell whether to be offended. She disappears after a few pages. Nicole’s father is called Josiah. His own name is given to a teenage patient who slits his wrists: Bob.

  You are the only one who remains unchanged. Your name is your name.

  For a long time, I wasn’t sure what this made me feel. Your name, over and over again. Your name and your beard, your name and your sneakers, the ones you’ve always worn, your name and your thin gold bracelet, the one you started wearing right before I never saw you again. Your name and the things you said. The things you said to me. The things you said to Nicole you’d said to me.

  I considered that I might be angry, and for a while I was sad. But above all I was envious. Not envious that Nicole had known you better. I had long since accepted that the intimacy between you and me would be eclipsed, that love is only ever singular in the details—the popcorn, the bird’s nest—never in intensity, rarely even in longevity. What I am really envious of is that she captured you.

  I have never been especially interested in writing stories like Nicole’s, but I’ve tried it here and there, plucking people and things out of life and putting them down on the page. For the most part, it isn’t too hard. It’s a kind of guilty pleasure, to see how efficiently one person can take shape: the slope of a nose, the shriek of a laugh, the joke they won’t stop telling, the boyfriend they bring everywhere. But with you it’s impossible. Hundreds of times I have tried to write what you look like, to remember exactly the words you said, and because it isn’t perfect it’s all wrong. I have sat for hours thinking of what name to give you instead of your real name—your name is common, anything would do, nothing would—and never once did it occur to me to simply keep it the same.

  Was the book a success? I never checked, though not because I wasn’t curious. That kind of envy is so much smaller, so much less frightening.

  * * *

  —

  We broke up a few weeks after the wedding. Nicole had been admitted to an important writing program, and we went to the celebrations in her honor—too many of them, everyone eager to make her good fortune official, to prove that whatever had come before it was an aberration, a wheel briefly skidding off the road. We rode the subway to the last party in silence. There was a stroller in the aisle in front of you, and the baby kept trying to meet your gaze—a coy, precocious smile. You didn’t notice, so I elbowed you, but it was too late. The baby had looked away. The party was at a bar with a fireplace. The summer was in full swing, and the logs were untouched and somehow ominous. Nicole’s sister was there—married, pregnant, though we didn’t know it then—and Nicole leaned in to her, bickering pleasantly over the bill. Someone grabbed it out of their hands, insisting.

  You and I walked home, even though it was a long walk. You said you couldn’t bear to go back underground. Did we already know what was happening? We took the bridge, but we didn’t stop in the middle, halfway between the islands, above the loud cars and the dark water, because that would have been too symbolic. We said goodbye on the other side, in a park where the trash cans overflowed and the trees were heavy with leaves. We kissed and apologized and clutched futilely at each other’s clothes. I didn’t tell you that Nicole and I had found ourselves in the restaurant bathroom, looking at each other in the unclean mirror, that she said how sorry she was that you hadn’t been admitted to the program. How much you deserved it, how sure she was that one day it would all work out for you.

  I didn’t ask why you hadn’t told me. I watched you walk away and let myself imagine that you were resisting the urge to turn around.

  I never saw you again, although I bumped into Nicole a few times before she left the city. We always said we’d get coffee, and I’m surprised that I can’t remember if we ever actually did.

  In the middle of the book, Nicole and I stand side by side at bathroom sinks. I know it’s me, although my name is the name of a girl I met once or twice, at a dinner party or someone’s birthday in the park. Nicole doesn’t speak. The only sound is the automatic soap, the hand dryer that won’t stop drying. I have avoided her eyes all night, but now, in the mirror, I look.

  I can remember the smell of the hospital—like an airplane, plus dry-erase markers—and the sound of the nurses’ sneakers on the just-mopped linoleum. I can remember the worn-white spines of detective novels in what was called the library, which was just a few bookshelves. I can remember the sticky cartons of juice and packages of shortbread cookies. I can remember the afternoon I brought a five-pound bag of sunflower seeds, because the brand’s motto was: Eat. Spit. Be happy. I can remember that Nicole was helpless, and I was not enough help.

  In everything I’ve written, you are only ever there in pieces, or in flashes. (Am I putting you there or finding you there?) The softness of your voice, the softness of your hair. The time we stole a peach from the bins in front of the supermarket, just because we’d always been tempted. The only time you cried. You cried and cried; you lay on the floor and I lay on your back and our bodies heaved up and down until, little by little, they didn’t.

  I imagine one day I’ll read Nicole’s book again. By then, I won’t know where you live and won’t have a way of finding out. Even if I did: will mailboxes still exist? By then, I’ll be remembering remembering. Two characters will stand in front of a mirror in silence, and I—a person who does not yet exist, a person I have yet to invent—will wonder anew at all that is left unsaid.

  Anew. It’s a small form of alchemy. It’s worth waiting for. Like building a building, like finding God, like getting old and stacking Tupperware and wishing for your life, at last, to be contained.

  OBJECTS OF DESIRE

  .

  The two of them live in a small apartment, small enough that it is impossible to ever be truly out of sight. In the room that is both the living room and the bedroom, there is a lofted bed. They have learned, faster than they anticipated, to navigate the ladder in half-sleep, when one of them needs to pee or retrieve a glass of water or confiscate the cat’s rubber toy, which squeaks each time it’s chewed. Lately, they wonder if having the cat in such a small space is ethical. Unlike the apartment, the first important thing they have shared, the cat is Jon’s and has been for many years: since the days when he did not expect, or perhaps even want, other companionship.

  This was a private and intense time in his life—a dark time, or at least a dim time, but the kind of dimness that can be soothing in its muted constancy. Now that it’s over, it has also become, in its way, a sacred time. Leonora does not believe in this sacredness, but she understands why it’s useful to Jon and takes care not to violate it. To become truly happy, she tells one of her friends, is to betray the unhappy person you used to be. The friend disagrees. No, the friend says, it is to liberate that person.

  Leonora is cautious around the cat. He is named Buddy, which Jon thinks is unfairly considered a dog name. If, when Leonora comes home at the end of the day, Buddy is curled up in Jon’s lap, she does her best not to startle them, speaking quietly and gently—out of something like respect.

  * * *

  —

  The man Leonora once believed she would marry, Julian, has recently become something of a political sensation. A few weeks ago, he was elected to Congress. His district is across the country, on the opposite coast. Julian’s victory surprised many people, and this surprise has produced nationwide fame. He is known for his youth, his charm, and his refusal to wear a tie. His clothing is taken as a sign of sincerity. Several commentators o
bserve that the Pope, a radical man, also dresses casually—humbly. Leonora happens to know that Julian is self-conscious about the thickness of his neck, which the knot of a tie can seem to accentuate. (He is, as many have noted, exceptionally handsome. In reality, his neck is a nice neck.) It will be a month before Julian is sworn in to Congress. For now, he tweets messages of thanks and hope, and appears on late-night TV.

  On Election Day, Leonora and Jon had not spoken of Julian for many months. Early on in their relationship, he came up often, and always painfully. Leonora and Julian never lived together, but there were other things that made their love for each other seem fierce and true and somehow inviolable. They had exchanged love letters and endured a few pregnancy scares. Once, they had been accosted at knifepoint. They had gone to funerals together. Most of all, they had fought passionately.

  Leonora and Jon speak kindly and judiciously when problems arise. They have never written each other letters; when they met, they were both relieved to agree that even text messages were distracting and prone to miscommunication. Pregnancy has never been a possibility, much less a fear. In the current political climate, Leonora, like many of her friends, decided the wisest thing was to get an I.U.D.

  When the exit polls started coming in and it became clear that Julian would win—by a landslide, the headlines said—Leonora was sitting at the desk underneath the bed. Jon was above her, meditating. She waited for the gentle chimes on his phone to indicate that he was finished and then she said, without emerging from under the bed, “Julian won the race.”

  Several seconds passed, and then Jon’s face appeared over the railing.

  “Are you glad?” he asked.

  He looked concerned, which irritated Leonora more than it should have. When Jon is concerned, his expression is always the same. His forehead slackens, his eyes look deeper than normal. It is an open and profound expression, and in times of great need, many people have been moved by it. On lesser occasions—in times of small need—Leonora is exasperated by it.