Objects of Desire

by Clare Sestanovich

  Kelly doesn’t cry or rage, doesn’t say much at all. Leonora is startled to remember that it has been months since they spoke in person. Kelly is quiet in the office, sputtering apologies at the copy machine, avoiding eye contact at the bathroom sinks. There is an awkward pause while Leonora wonders what else there is to say.

  “You’re a whole different person online,” she says at last.

  Kelly shrugs. “Not really.”

  “Don’t you want them to know this person?” Leonora points at Kelly, then realizes she’s pointing, and drops her hand, embarrassed.

  Kelly opens her mouth to speak, then starts coughing. Leonora looks away—is this the polite thing to do?—but the coughing doesn’t stop. Kelly’s face turns blotchy pink. When she reaches for a water, she looks at Leonora, as if for permission. The look fills Leonora with shame.

  “Oh God. Of course.” She does a wavy thing with her hand that means something like, Help yourself.

  The bottles are made of dark blue glass and arranged in a triangle, like billiard balls. Kelly takes the one at the very top and gulps deeply. Eventually, the coughing stops, but Leonora can’t help glancing at the ruined triangle.

  “Have you noticed,” she says, “that whenever one of the bottles disappears, it’s always been mysteriously replaced by the morning?”

  Kelly’s face has returned to its normal color. She looks confused.

  “Why is that a mystery?” Her voice, for the first time, has an edge. The bottle looks elegant in her hand. “It’s just somebody’s job.”

  * * *

  —

  The day before Leonora’s boss leaves on vacation, he keeps asking her to check the weather on the island. The answer never changes. Six days of cheerful yellow suns; a seventh with a cloud but no rain. Outside the nearest window—Leonora reminds herself it is a privilege to be so close to her boss’s window—it has been snowing on and off all morning.

  Through the glass door, she sees her boss pick up the phone on his desk at the same time that the phone in her pocket starts vibrating. This is disorienting, and for a few seconds she is immobilized by her confusion. When she picks up, a stranger with a frantic, high-pitched voice explains that Jon has been arrested. The woman says Jon’s name with affection and desperation. There’s a loud noise, followed by many muffled noises. The phone being fumbled, then dropped. For several seconds, there is silence, which makes it feel to Leonora that she is literally inside the phone. She is the thing that has been overturned on the sidewalk or lost inside a purse—knocked back and forth among a wallet, a paperback, a pencil that stabs the blind hand trying to find her. The lostness is unexpectedly peaceful. Leonora wonders, calmly, if the woman is in love with Jon. Or maybe Jon is in love with the woman. Then the voice returns, apologizing. The phone slipped out of her hand. She’s wearing mittens. The voice is too loud and too clear now. Leonora holds the phone away from her face and says something sympathetic. Yes, it’s so cold out.

  She agrees to come to the precinct where Jon is being held. Her boss is off the phone now. He gnaws on a stick of beef jerky and stares intently at the screen in his palm. Leonora sends him a text and watches him swipe it away impatiently without reading it.

  She calls a cab to take her downtown, because this seems like the proper response to an emergency. Instantly, the car is locked in traffic. The money accumulates on the meter in neon red numbers. Leaning her forehead against the car window—cold, greasy with other foreheads—Leonora tries to persuade herself that she’s a tourist. A visitor, at least. That the people on the sidewalks are not the same crowds she observes every day from the office window, when bodies and bikes and cars are just shapes moving at different speeds.

  The desire to speak to Julian appears. Leonora knows it will eventually subside, but with her face pressed against the window, pressed toward so many strangers, it seems to her that there will be a kind of ecstasy—at least, a kind of honesty—in seizing the desire as it swells.

  Leonora has not spoken to Julian in three or four months. She wrote a polite email of congratulations after the election. The politeness, so incommensurate with the old intensity of their emotions, was in its way a kind of rudeness. He wrote her back right away to say he’d call her—soon—and he never did.

  The phone rings for long enough that Leonora becomes aware of just how near her desire is to despair. Then he picks up, and his voice is full of surprise, which is easy to mistake for happiness. She says where are you instead of how are you, because it’s a more manageable question.

  “I’m at IKEA,” he says.

  “I’m in traffic,” she says.

  He is sitting in a simulacrum of a child’s bedroom. The rug, he says, looks overvacuumed. The pillow is dented with the shape of a stranger’s face.

  “How many people buy this exact room?” he wonders. “How many people come in and say, I’ll take the whole thing?”

  Leonora pictures him looming over the miniature furniture. He sits down in a small chair and it vanishes underneath him. Leonora clenches her jaw, as if she, too, must bear the unfamiliar weight.

  “Who would say that?” she asks.

  The cab inches into a large intersection, its front half blocking the crosswalk. A man in an elegant overcoat pounds on the hood and mouths something profane.

  “I’ll tell you the secret of a good campaign,” Julian says, in a voice that is probably supposed to sound conspiratorial. He has always been good at saying things as if he has never said them before.

  “Okay.”

  He is quiet for longer than she expects, and in the background she can hear the sound of small children—the sound of a playground or a swimming pool, a sound that is so generic it is neither ugly nor pure, but always not quite real. When he speaks again, Julian’s voice has lost the shiny sound of performance. It’s sad.

  “The secret isn’t getting people to want you. It’s telling people they want you and then getting them to forget you told them.”

  The stream of pedestrians separates when it encounters the cab, as if the car is a heavy rock in a river, and merges again on the other side. The light turns green, but still the car is stuck. Two women walk around the cab in opposite directions. When they reunite, they exaggerate their delight, laughing.

  “I’m happy for you,” Leonora says. It seems possible this is what she has been calling to say, but once she has said it there is no release. What she had hoped for was the feeling of something coming into view—the feeling when you find the constellation someone has been pointing at, or when you understand the optical illusion someone has been trying to explain. The feeling when it becomes impossible to unsee what before you could only imagine.

  “Thanks.”

  At last the car begins to move. There is not much more for either of them to say. When they hang up, Leonora imagines the effort it will take him to stand up from the chair made for a child. Her phone buzzes with a message from Jon.

  They let me go.

  Maybe Julian sways a little as he gets up, his balance not quite lost or found, his head momentarily weightless. Or maybe he stays where he is, knees pressed close against his chest. The car inches forward out of the crosswalk.

  OLD HOPE

  .

  When I was about halfway between twenty and thirty, I lived in a large, run-down house that other people thought was romantic. There was a claw-foot tub with squeaky knobs, and philodendrons that draped over the banisters. The door to my bedroom was at least twelve feet tall. I installed a coatrack over the top, and whenever I needed to retrieve a jacket or a towel, I stood on my desk chair, swiveling uncertainly.

  There were six of us in the house. We were all about the same age, and at some point during the summer—I had moved in at the beginning of March, when the mornings were still cold, veins of ice glittering over the front steps—this became claustrophobic, unbearable. The
house smelled of sweat and bike tires and something at the back of the oven being charred over and over again. Two boys lived on the top floor and another lived in the basement. (They weren’t men, not really.) I was aware of being surrounded. Shirtless, they cooked big vats of tomato sauce, the steam beading on their faces and clinging to the fur in their armpits. They smoked bongs they didn’t clean and returned my books warped by bathwater.

  One afternoon, while a desk fan whirred near my cheek, I composed a long email to my high school English teacher, because I remembered him as handsome in a remote way. The school had been large and impersonal, full of unkind sounds: the clang of lockers and the terrible screaming bell. But the English teacher wore expensive clothes and took an understated pleasure in saying inspiring things. In my head, he belonged at a prep school. My idea of prep schools came from outdated novels. A Separate Peace, that sort of thing. Later, at college, I learned that going to these schools entailed a lot of lacrosse and furtive blow jobs, and that, too, became a kind of romance in my head.

  I calculated that the English teacher was about forty, and then I pressed send. The email covered a lot of ground. I summarized what I called my “college experience” and devoted a long paragraph to The Artist’s Way, the self-help book that I was using to structure my days. I described the cat outside my window, which I took the liberty of calling a feral cat. Toward the end of the email, I found myself saying that I couldn’t understand the fear of death. Maybe it was a boy thing. The male ego. If death turned out to be anything other than pure oblivion—if the afterlife was even a little bit lucid—I would be disappointed. Wasn’t everyone looking forward to the chance to actually, finally rest?

  * * *

  —

  One evening, at a Chinese restaurant with my friend Max, I debated whether to tell him about the email. All the tables were occupied, so we sat on the sidewalk out front, eating from plastic containers. One of the tables inside was pushed right up against the window, and occasionally I made eye contact with the woman sitting there, only inches away. Her boyfriend leaned his head against the glass, his curly hair flattening like something compressed in a microscope slide.

  I put an entire dumpling in my mouth and wondered if Max would think the email was in character. I had been asking myself this sort of thing more often. I knew I should permit myself uncharacteristic actions, but when I did act—and in general, I thought about acting more than I acted—I wanted to know if I was acting like me.

  “Or the person recognizable as me,” I said out loud.

  “What?”

  “Never mind.”

  Max bit a small hole in one end of a dumpling and dribbled soy sauce into the opening.

  “Hannah says she’s at the point where she would consider getting pregnant to be a sign.”

  Hannah and Max had been dating for a year or so. She was an avid reader, with relatively few opinions about the things she read.

  “A sign of what?” I said. “That it’s meant to be?”

  “Or just that it’s time.”

  I imagined Hannah in maternity clothes. She was small enough that the billowy tunics would make her look even smaller.

  “She isn’t actively pursuing motherhood, but it’s a future she knows she wants,” Max said. “So why not now?”

  “Motherhood is a pursuit?”

  The dumpling slipped between his chopsticks. Ambition alarmed Max. For years, he had been saying he was going to find a new job.

  “I only like thinking about the future because it hasn’t happened,” he said.

  I nodded while I finished chewing. “Happening spoils the fun.”

  * * *

  —

  It’s difficult to say whether I expected the English teacher to respond. For as long as I can remember, I have been told Don’t get your hopes up. My mother said it habitually, about even the smallest form of desire. The faintest glimmer of wishful thinking. She said it when I wondered if the roadside diner offered free refills, or if my father would send me a Christmas present. She said it when I applied to every college I had seen mentioned in books—the ones with demure colors, Latin mottoes, things called quads.

  There were graver threats she might have worried about. Student debt and callous boys. Rising sea levels. But it was disappointment, most of all, that she feared for me. For a long time, her fear seemed like a form of doubt, maybe even an insult. Proof that she didn’t think I could weather the minor calamities that life had in store. I would have preferred, I thought, that she imagine me as a tragic victim—someone susceptible to plane crashes and sexual harassment. But she didn’t worry that I would die or be destroyed. She worried that I would crumple in the face of everyday failures, that I would gradually deflate—a quiet, unremarkable hissing—into a case of unfulfilled potential.

  And so while I waited for a response to my email, the worst-case scenario I imagined was a standard reply. Hope this finds you well. No reply at all would be better than that.

  When the English teacher wrote back, I was distracted. The college I had attended was in the news. A nineteen-year-old boy had died at one of the fraternities. The stories about the tragedy had a unifying effect among those of us who were not directly involved. I began emailing with friends I had lost touch with, whose lives were hard for me to imagine. They had good salaries and reliable boyfriends, with whom they bought reasonably sized pets. They circulated Facebook petitions for uncontroversial causes—cancer walks and hurricane relief. I disdained them, and was aware that my disdain was born of dislike for what these friends proved about me: that whatever I was doing—cultivating a taste for chipped mirrors and monochrome palettes, reading self-help books that scorned other self-help books—was a life of ugly indecision, pooling like day-old rainwater.

  In our emails, we asked the same questions too many times: What did we know back then? What should we have known?

  The English teacher’s reply wasn’t any of the things I’d feared it might be. He wrote without preamble. He taught at a new school in a new city. It was a Quaker school, which was apparent in only small ways. There was no dress code and no student government. Lofty words, called tenets, were painted on the walls in big block letters. Equality. Simplicity. Environmental Stewardship.

  Once a week, the school convened for Meeting. Like chapel, except everyone sat in silence. The chairs were arranged in concentric circles, with an empty space in the center. There was no preacher, no text, no assigned seating. Most of the students were Jewish. Anyone was allowed to speak, but sometimes the Meeting passed in uninterrupted silence. If you’re moved to share was what the real Quakers said. The implication, presumably, was that God did the moving. But the students interpreted these instructions loosely. The results were beautiful, often breathtaking.

  They spoke about all kinds of things. One told a story about his grandfather, who was dying in a different country, and another wanted to talk about his baseball team—its first time in the playoffs. A third explained that he was making a list of all the ways to categorize people. Crest or Colgate, Apple or Android. People who joke about farts and people who don’t. People who say I love you at the end of every phone call and people who can barely bring themselves to say it at all.

  If there were only adults in the room, the English teacher said, all this vulnerability would be a performance—the art of carefully calibrated disclosure.

  Then the email ended, as abruptly as it had begun. He did not include a sign-off, which was the sort of thing I thought about a lot. Best or All best or All my best. He just wrote the first initial of his first name, a name I had never called him.

  * * *

  —

  I resolved to seek advice about the English teacher’s email, but as time passed and it remained in my inbox, crowded with other, more straightforward messages, the strangeness of it came to feel like a kind of intimacy. I was afraid of what d
iscussing the intimacy might do to it.

  Max texted that he was coming over: he needed help.

  Instantly, I relaxed. I would have to make the email small and insignificant to accommodate his problems. This task made me energetic, like a sudden burst of resolve to clean utensils that have sat in the sink, their dirtiness turning into rebuke.

  Max perched on my bed and untied his shoes slowly. He arranged the shoes under the bed. His fastidiousness seemed ominous, so I asked him if Hannah was pregnant.

  “Of course not. She’s on the pill.”

  I nodded. “She’s conscientious.”

  “She doesn’t even set an alarm to remember,” he said admiringly. “She just does.”

  Max was very handsome. To those who doubted that my feelings for Max were uncomplicated and platonic, I often added: objectively handsome. But when he spoke in tones of awe, he seemed ugly.

  “Well, she said if she did get pregnant.”

  “That conversation stood for a larger conversation.” He sounded impatient. “It wasn’t, like, practical.”

  We sat there quietly for a little while. In general, I prided myself on understanding the true meaning of things. I looked at Max’s sneakers, their laces coiled neatly out of view.

  “What’s the real problem, then?” I said, when I had recovered.

  The problem was that Max couldn’t stop imagining Hannah having sex with strangers. Or not-strangers. Men or women. Anyone, really, who wasn’t him. It had gotten to the point, he said, that he had to conduct these fantasies during sex in order to stay turned on.

  “Do you close your eyes?” I said.

  Max shook his head.

  “I don’t imagine she’s someone else.” He swung his feet back and forth, the way a child might. “I just imagine I’m someone else.”