Objects of Desire

by Clare Sestanovich

  “It sounds exciting,” I admitted.

  He looked at me gratefully. When he leaned back on the bed, his shirt rose up, revealing the gentle incline of his stomach. I might have touched it, if it weren’t so difficult to convey the difference between tenderness and desire.

  “Did you ever have imaginary friends?”

  “A lot,” he said. “An old man named Leo. And an orphan whose name was all vowels.”

  “I had an orphan, too!”

  “And sometimes the ghost of Leo’s wife.”

  I had photos of Max as a little kid. Bowl cuts and big cheeks. The same eyes. It was easy to love the little kid. Max looked at the ceiling, where the remnants of a glow-in-the-dark solar system clustered around the overhead light.

  “I yearn for my childhood,” I said. “But everyone says I seem old.”

  “That’s because children don’t yearn,” Max said. “They just want.” The adhesive on the stars was slowly coming off. A comet’s tail wilted, Saturn’s rings peeled at the edges. “They want stuff. Popsicles. Yogurt in tubes.”

  “Is the fantasy with Hannah—”

  “For Hannah.”

  I squinted, which I hoped conveyed skepticism. “Is that yearning?”

  Max shrugged. He stood up carefully, the mattress sinking and shifting under his feet. Wobbling, he reached up toward the stickers, but the ceiling was still far away. His T-shirt rose even higher when he lifted his arm. The comet tail dangled out of reach. Like everyone, he looked strange from below.

  “Yearning is so religious,” Max said, bouncing gently on his heels.

  “It is not.”

  When I thought of all the ways faces rearranged themselves from different angles and distances—a nose in profile, a nose up close, a nose illuminated by a camera’s flash—it seemed miraculous that we recognized each other at all.

  “Fine,” he said. “It’s so spiritual.”

  “Don’t say it like that.”

  When Max sat back down, the bedsprings whined.

  “If I say I’m looking for a way to make Hannah an object of my desire again—” He stopped swinging his feet.

  “Does that mean you’re objectifying her?”

  “I want to be a good guy.”

  We sat there silently for a while, not looking at each other, which could have meant that Max wasn’t a good person, or that no one was, or that we wanted to sound smart and goodness was the kind of thing that always came out sounding dumb.

  Sometimes in the morning there was a star or an orb or a planet’s ring on the pillow beside me. I had to remind myself not to make everything into a metaphor.

  * * *

  —

  I wrote the English teacher again on a Monday. I told him that the fraternity had me thinking about things that travel in packs. Big cats and protesters and cans of soda. The visual element interested me. Seeing these things on their own became sad, sometimes even alarming. Lone-wolf shooters. A table for one. A single can of beer in a paper bag.

  High school is the ideal time for packs, I wrote. Everyone is weak, everyone wants strength in numbers. Once a critical mass has assembled, the vying begins. Jostling your way to the front.

  What counts, I asked him, as being alone? In the mornings, I could hear the whir of someone’s electric toothbrush through the wall. On the subway, I misjudged the space between two passengers, pressing myself against the shape and warmth of unfamiliar thighs. And who was that man I saw every week—sometimes every day—on the same platform, waiting for the same train? I noticed when he wore a new red coat, but I didn’t know his name.

  Every few weeks, I saw Hannah jogging in loops around the park. I went to the park to read or call my mom on the phone, but if I saw Hannah I felt aimless and guilty. I made myself do a dozen push-ups, or the kind of sit-up where you pedal your feet in the air.

  One weekend, I stopped and sat under a tree beside the running path, and then I saw Hannah twice. On the first loop, she didn’t say anything—just waved and went on running. On the second loop, she slowed down as she approached, jogging in place for a little while. Her face was blotchy with exertion, but she wasn’t sweating very much. This made her seem pretty—full of restraint. She had taken her headphones off when she got close, and a pop song leaked out of them.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey.”

  She didn’t turn the music off, and I could hear the song building toward its last ecstatic chorus. They were lyrics I knew without knowing how. She spoke over the tinny, faraway sound. We didn’t say anything interesting. How many loops she’d done, what I was reading, whether the cool weather was here to stay. She put the headphones back on before saying, “Are you sleeping with Max?”

  Her face had almost returned to its normal color.

  “Of course not.”

  She stood there a few moments longer, bobbing her head to the music, or just to her thoughts, and then she was running again. I sat under the tree, waiting for her third loop, but she didn’t reappear. I saw a dog walker, a cycling team, a group of toddlers all holding the same rope. The song got stuck in my head.

  * * *

  —

  The last time I saw the English teacher, we were sitting in his office, in between the chemistry lab and the girls’ bathroom. As is true of life, but not movies: I didn’t know it was the last time.

  That year, my handwriting had transformed abruptly. Until then, I wrote in vigilant cursive: m’s with three humps, g’s that didn’t look anything like g’s. These inefficiencies seemed elegant, until suddenly they seemed absurd. In my cautious world, this counted as a revelation. Afterward, I didn’t write so much as scrawl. I was known, by then, as an overly conscientious student, and most of the teachers ignored the illegibility of my new handwriting. One of them, leafing through the pages of an assignment, said, “I can assume you’re saying something correct in here, right?”

  The English teacher, of course, was different. He called me into his office that day and said he couldn’t read a single word of my final exam. He held out the small stack of blue books. The class was about tragedies. We were always saying things like, “But is it tragic, or just sad?”

  “Here,” he said, flapping the books in the air. “Read them to me.”

  I read the essays haltingly at first, since the words seemed to accost me: they had never been intended to be said aloud. I paused after a few paragraphs. I would have chosen differently, I said, if I’d known I was going to perform. The English teacher didn’t respond, and so eventually I continued. He watched me carefully. Didn’t smile a fake smile or nod encouragingly. Already I was imagining how I would describe this—in writing, maybe, or to a friend who didn’t actually exist. Our eyes locked. I pictured solid, clinking metal.

  I began to read with more confidence, changing words here and there when I saw a sentence headed toward a clumsy conclusion. These adjustments made me feel artful—adult. When I finished, I was out of breath, my face prickly with adrenaline. I waited a few seconds before I looked up, allowing myself the thrill of being watched. The words on the page were a faded graphite streak; they were or weren’t the same words I had spoken.

  When I did look up, he was unbending a paper clip in his lap. I couldn’t see his face.

  “Ow.”

  He dropped the paper clip on the ground. His finger, reflexively, went between his lips. He met my gaze then, but he seemed distracted.

  “So,” he said. “What grade should I give you?”

  There was no longer anything pleasurable about his inscrutable expression. His mouth twitched or his eyes flickered, or maybe I just imagined that he was moving farther and farther out of reach.

  “I don’t know,” I said, looking at the floor, the mangled paper clip on the carpet, grey on grey.

  “What do you deserve?”

&nb
sp; He twirled a pencil around his thumb and his pointer finger. It was a habit the boys in class all copied. Boys who slouched and argued, boys who took their sneakers off under their desks.

  “Nothing much.”

  “Nothing much,” he repeated, turning over the phrase, as if it were extremely interesting, or unbelievably stupid. “B plus? B minus?”

  I said nothing.

  “C plus?”

  I was an A student.

  “Okay,” I said. I held out the books, which weighed almost nothing. “Do you need these back?”

  He shrugged. On my way out, I threw them in the trash.

  A few weeks later, I graduated, wearing a robe in primary blue. The teachers wore blouses or ties and uncharacteristically nice shoes. I never found the English teacher in the crowd, though I remember waiting for him—and telling myself I wasn’t waiting—until nearly everyone had left. I watched the football field gradually emerge from under so many feet. Clumps of kicked-up dirt, the puncture wounds of high heels.

  * * *

  —

  There was a garden behind my house, but it was mostly plants that flourished of their own accord: wisteria and honeysuckle, clover and scorpion grass. For a few weeks each year, a blanket of crocuses. “Technically,” I told Max, “they’re weeds.”

  I wanted to plant something new—something intentional—so we bought paper envelopes full of seeds. The man who sold them to us said they’d never grow. Already, the weather was changing. Max nibbled the bottom of a honeysuckle and sucked.

  “The problem with horticulture,” I said, “is the more you know, the more things you’re obliged to dislike.”

  We pressed the seeds into the soil and covered them up. They were small and easy to misplace. Some blew away in the wind. I planted tomatoes, because I wanted to see something ripen on the vine.

  We sat on the ground and Max plucked onion grass absentmindedly.

  “Do you know about peppers?” he said.

  “What about them?”

  He took off his shirt and wiped his hands on his stomach. He was wet and shiny, and the grass from his palms clung to his skin.

  “Green peppers and yellow peppers and red peppers.”

  I took off my shirt, too, and then my bra.

  “Yeah, I know,” I said. “They’re all the same thing.”

  Max looked at me carefully. There were a few hairs around my nipples, long and dark, like eyelashes in the wrong place. We were sitting cross-legged, and he reached out and held one of my breasts in his hand. I imagined him putting his mouth around it, the image so vivid that it seemed to me I could taste my own sweat. Then Max let go. He wiped his hands again, and I couldn’t help thinking that it was me he was wiping off.

  * * *

  —

  The English teacher wrote me one more email, at the very end of the summer. It arrived in the middle of the day, but I was still in bed. I liked the idea of going all day without speaking, clearing my throat sometime in the evening, preparing to address someone for the first time. I had folded a blanket into a person-size rectangle—just enough weight to feel like I was being pinned down. I drifted in and out of sleep and dreamed about boring things. Brushing my teeth, trying to wash the cheese grater and shredding the sponge. When I woke up, I was impatient, and a little embarrassed. I wanted to scold someone: this isn’t what dreaming is for!

  While I lay there, one of the boys who lived in the attic was moving out. I could guess what he was carrying by the sound of his footsteps. He ran up the stairs three or four at a time (trash bags, mop), and came down slowly, step by step (bed frames, picture frames). The new roommate was arriving soon. I’d never met him, but I’d scrolled through enough of his social media to decide I didn’t object and wasn’t curious.

  I looked at the email for a long time without opening it. The blanket didn’t cover my feet, which made me very aware of my toes. Lying under the blanket, sweating in all the creases of my body, I told myself that the English teacher had been cruel all along. In the hallway, plastic hangers clattered. A pillow thrown from two floors up sounded like getting the wind knocked out of you.

  Cruel! I repeated the word in my head, trying to approximate indignation. What does outrage look like, when it first begins to unfurl? The doorbell rang. The old roommate greeted the new roommate. A few minutes later, they knocked on my door.

  “It’s us.”

  I pushed the blanket away and underneath my clothes were damp. I pictured Max rolling off Hannah when they were finished having sex. Both of them on their backs, staring into space. In a second, she would pull up the sheet and one of them would turn toward the other, murmuring the usual things, touching with hands that were just hands again.

  “Come in,” I said, forgetting to clear my throat.

  The door opened and I deleted the English teacher’s email. I felt loss and then relief, or relief and then loss. I sat up. A star did not fall from the ceiling.

  SECURITY QUESTIONS

  .

  On days when she’s unproductive, Georgia likes to imagine she’s pregnant. That way, she’d be accomplishing something. Dana, the man Georgia is sleeping with, has a wife without a uterus. Years ago, when she still had one, she gave birth to a son. He’s the same age as Georgia—twenty-six—and Dana only ever speaks of him with pride.

  When Georgia found out about the son, she googled him right away. Tim. The screen on her phone had been broken for months, so she looked at pictures of him through a spiderweb of cracks: a portrait in black and white, a group photo, an action shot from a long-ago soccer game. Dana says they look alike, but this isn’t really true. The most you could say is that they both have brownish hair, biggish noses.

  For years, Georgia swore that she would never have a day job; all she wanted was to be an actress. She was in movies her friends made and a few plays in theaters the size of living rooms. But now she works at a company where no one is over forty. The company sells fancy meal kits—individually wrapped ingredients, laminated recipes—that get delivered straight to your door. There’s a Ping-Pong table in the office and a petition circulating to replace it with a Foosball table. It’s okay to wear shorts, and sandals, too, if you’re paid enough: Georgia’s boss has stubby toes and hair sprouting like antennae from the tops of his feet.

  Tim is a filmmaker. He made a documentary about cowboys and another one about Mennonites—small projects, but well received. In an interview, he says he’s interested in dying ways of life. It has been decided that Tim has potential: he’s someone who will become a bigger someone. Maybe, Georgia thinks, predicting who will be successful is what men do instead of getting pregnant, what they do when they want to watch and wait—to see what will hatch. Late one night, she streams Tim’s first documentary on her laptop. She isn’t sure whether she’s hoping it will be good or bad, but in the end she’s impressed. When she finally falls asleep, her dreams are filled with bearded men and wild, snorting horses.

  * * *

  —

  Debbie never wished she had a daughter until the hysterectomy. One of her coworkers accumulated four sons in the quest for a girl, which Debbie thought was pathetic.

  Once, when Tim was young, she said it wistfully, not quite seriously: “One of each would have been nice.”

  That made Tim upset. Above all, he wanted to please.

  “I can be a girl, too,” he said, hopping back and forth on one foot.

  “No, you can’t,” Dana said sternly, and Tim stopped hopping, frozen on one leg like an ungainly bird, his face scrunched up with the effort not to cry.

  Debbie had the surgery when Tim was twenty-three. He’d been living in the attic for a while, out of inertia not necessity, but recently he’d found an apartment nearby, in a neighborhood where new parents lived. The lobby of the building was crowded with strollers and miniature plastic scooters—bri
ght pink and blue and yellow, with helmets to match. Tim’s apartment had high ceilings and no walls, and he had no idea how to furnish it. Room to grow, he kept saying.

  Debbie’s neighbor had gone under the knife that same year, and she came over to tell her what to expect.

  “Hysterectomies make you extremely constipated,” the neighbor said, “and extremely happy.”

  The pamphlets from the doctors said Debbie might experience a feeling of loss. The doctors themselves said little.

  In the neighbor’s case, there was no cancer. There were fibroids and continuous, debilitating pain. Her uterus expanded all the way up to her rib cage. Without it, Debbie’s neighbor said, her body became a room.

  “Like cleaning out the garage.”

  Later, Debbie repeated this to Dana, who nodded sympathetically, as if it sounded sensible. This wasn’t the reaction she was looking for.

  “The garage?” she said. “My uterus housed human life. Not a Honda.”

  “A Ford.”

  “What?”

  “Her husband drives a Ford,” Dana said.

  Debbie hadn’t stayed overnight at the hospital since giving birth. After the surgery, she was tired and sweaty, or else she was tired and parched. Pregnancy had a sound logic: you lost a fetus, but you got a baby. This time, the thing they took out of her was her.

  Tim texted: get well soon. A few minutes later: or whenever you’re ready!

  A fruit basket arrived at the hospital, even though nothing was in season. Unripe strawberries and melon carved into flowers.

  “Imagine a daughter,” Debbie told Dana. “I would have been excellent at dealing with girl puberty.”

  His mouth was full of honeydew. The painkillers made the insides of her elbows and the backs of her knees itch unbearably.

  “Breasts feel like tumors at first,” she said. “Some girls freak out.”

  “You mean”—Dana finished chewing—“you freaked out.” The flower’s stem was a sharp wooden skewer.