“Well,” she says. “I know where he lives.”
The bartender gives her a weird look but keeps emptying the cash register, sorting the wrinkled bills into piles that won’t lie flat.
When she opens the man’s front door, Georgia knows where the light switches are in the dark. In the moment before she turns them on, it is easy to believe that the apartment will be her apartment—that her water glass will be where she left it, that the closet will be filled with four seasons of her coats. Is it like a dream, or a movie, or a trick of history, to see what appears instead? The man’s bedroom is painted dark purple and the blinds are pulled shut. The kitchen cabinets are filled with things in the wrong places: coffee mugs next to frying pans, silverware in the drawer closest to the ground.
The man collapses on the couch. For a few minutes, Georgia sits beside him, staring across the street. It’s a pretty apartment—everyone says so—but it’s even prettier from here. There is a crack of light beneath her bedroom door, as if someone is home. Her book is tented on the couch—she hasn’t read it in days—and the fridge door is crowded with shapes: pictures, postcards, invitations to weddings she won’t attend. Eventually, she takes the man’s shoes off, puts the keys on the table, and turns off the lights.
* * *
—
Tim goes back to his parents’ house every couple of weeks. They invite him for dinner, but he prefers to arrive when there is no particular occasion, when he can catch them in the middle of things. The sink running, the lawn mower sputtering. The glazed eyes of pretending to read the newspaper, the mouthed syllables while clamping the phone between cheek and shoulder: just one min. Tim knows he should resist the tempting lie: that watching people when they think no one is watching is the same as seeing the truth.
He goes upstairs while his dad finishes the front page and his mom finishes the phone call. He lies on his twin bed with his legs hanging off the edge, his feet on the ground, because it feels good to be reminded how much he’s grown. On the wall above the bed, there’s a list of all the movies he watched when he was thirteen years old—one every Saturday night, including Christmas Eve. He takes a picture of the list and sends it to a woman who’s trying to make it on Broadway. She doesn’t reply, so he sends it to a woman who’s a photojournalist in Kenya. He reads the list again and this time it seems pretentious, not cute. He wishes he could unsend the texts. He turns his phone off and looks at the black screen. Downstairs, Tim’s parents’ voices sound like anyone’s voices. He pretends he can tell their footsteps apart, but he can’t really.
Tim hasn’t finished shooting the new film yet, but he already knows which scene will be the last. The father and son sit side by side at the kitchen table. The father is worrying something in his hands—a paper napkin, maybe, or an old receipt. He looks down at his lap and his son looks straight into the camera. What do eyes look like, after so many lidded years?
The father says he will never forgive himself. There is a moment or two of quiet, and then Tim hears his own voice from offscreen:
“Forgive yourself for what?”
* * *
—
When Georgia sees Dana again, she has been completely alone for two days straight. Half the office has lice; everyone has been sent home. She is used to eating lunch for free, from huge trays of sandwiches with Post-it notes (pickle, no pickle). Her fridge is empty, but she keeps opening it anyway, as if something might have appeared inside.
Georgia expects Dana to say, I heard you spoke to Debbie. Or maybe she expects him to say, Sorry. He doesn’t say anything. When she opens the door, he’s staring down at his phone, but when he looks up, he’s smiling, his eyes bright and wrinkled at the edges. It’s a smile of forgiveness, and though she isn’t sure who needs to be absolved—what did she do wrong?—she feels the warmth of it, the childish joy of a fake egg being cracked on her head. They order takeout and watch a movie he’s already seen. They have sex with the curtains drawn, the room turned into a cave. In the moments after she tells him he can come, her body relaxes, retracts, waits. She closes her eyes and imagines herself on the other side of the wall, in the empty room, the fluorescent streetlamp bathing her in its unforgiving light, the coolness of the half of the mattress where no one else sleeps. He lets himself collapse onto her, his breath warm and damp in her ear.
In the morning, he sees the bugs in her hair. He takes a picture with his phone to show her, but Georgia doesn’t want to see.
“Why not?”
“It’s a phobia.” She shivers, by way of explanation. “Insects freak me out.”
Years ago, she tells him, there was an incident with pill bugs. She tells him before she remembers that this isn’t true. Georgia’s sister is the one who’s really afraid, who found an infestation when they were kids, who closes her eyes and swears she can feel them crawling all over her skin. Georgia doesn’t feel bad about the lie. She misses her sisters with a sudden, unusual intensity, or maybe she just misses the time when it seemed as if their lives belonged to each other—when they forgot whose fears were whose, whose stories were whose, because they were everyone’s.
“Rolly pollies?” Dana says in a strange voice. It takes her a second to realize what it is—the voice you might use with a child. She can see that he wants to make her laugh, and it feels good, and a little dangerous, to refuse, like the heady excitement of holding her breath for too long.
They google on his phone until they find the special shampoo and the special comb that all the message boards recommend, and then he’s gone. She is standing at the window in a shower cap, hands held resolutely behind her back—don’t touch!—when he leaves the building. She sees him hesitate for a moment before he knows which direction to turn, the world reordering itself in daylight. She does not expect him to ever come back.
* * *
—
At home, Dana sits on a low stool in the bathroom while Debbie runs a fine-toothed comb through his hair. The stool used to say Timothy, spelled out in rainbow blocks, but they’ve long since lost the letters.
“Are the lice a sign?” Dana asks. “A plague on both our houses?”
“You’re only saying that because it grosses you out.”
Dana doesn’t respond. He reaches up to touch his head, and Debbie bats his hand away. She has made it a rule not to imagine what Georgia looks like, and she is good at following rules. But it’s difficult, now, not to wonder about Georgia’s hair.
“It turns you off,” she says.
“I’m not a switch.”
Dana’s hair is thinner than it used to be. In a few places, Debbie can see right through it.
“You’ve always been a switch.”
Tim arrives while Debbie is covering Dana’s head in olive oil and tea-tree oil.
“We’re in the middle of something,” she says.
“You could call next time,” Dana says.
Some oil trickles down his forehead and lands in the corner of his eye. He blinks a few times. Tim leaves them like that, tells himself to remember them like that—shiny hands, shiny heads, looking for something invisible. He waits in the kitchen, leaning against the unmagnetic fridge. The Broadway actress sends him a picture of her as a baby, grinning in the bathtub, shampooed hair molded into a single spike.
Later, while he’s setting the table for dinner, Tim is the one who remembers about the old Hasidic lady—a celebrity of sorts, famous for her method of delousing. When he was nine or ten years old, he says, she cured him.
“That’s impossible,” Debbie says. “You never had lice.”
“We would remember,” Dana agrees.
It isn’t a holiday, but he’s roasting a turkey and mashing potatoes. There’s real cranberry sauce—not the kind in the can. It seems festive. Years ago, Debbie insisted he learn to cook, and now he’s the only one who does. The recipe is old and stained with the
traces of previous attempts, which is somehow comforting: they’ve been here before.
“It was fourth grade,” Tim says.
Debbie refuses to believe it. She lists every sickness he has ever had, every vaccine, every ER visit.
“I remember them all.” Her voice gets high-pitched when she’s defensive.
“It was your re-honeymoon,” Tim says patiently, and his patience makes her ashamed.
“Our what?”
“That’s what you called it.”
At the last minute, they’d bought a ticket to Mexico. She remembers now—of course.
“The ruins were important for Mom,” Dana says. “Professionally.”
“We were getting our marriage back on track,” Debbie says.
Dana bastes the turkey. It’s pink instead of brown—the skin isn’t crackling the way he wants it to.
“So, who found the lice?”
“The babysitter. She made me swear not to tell you.”
The babysitter was twenty, maybe twenty-five, and Debbie could tell from the start that Tim worshipped her. She cooked hot dogs and buttered pasta. She knew thirteen different card games, plus a few magic tricks. She wore tight T-shirts that showed her nipples, and sometimes her belly button, too.
“Siobhan,” Debbie says wearily.
One night before Mexico, Debbie and Dana had gone to an eight-hour movie that they had wanted to see for years. Siobhan said she didn’t mind staying late. When they came home, she was on the couch, the TV was on mute, and Tim was curled up in her lap. He was too big for anyone’s lap. His limbs were crowded together at ungainly angles, his head bent awkwardly so that his cheek could rest against her chest. He was screaming, Siobhan explained—screaming in his sleep.
Dana squirts the juice all over the turkey and opens the oven again. A gust of heat makes him close his eyes. He stands up and clasps his hands together to avoid touching his hair, which ends up looking a lot like prayer.
“Resist the temptation,” Debbie keeps saying.
There are a few uncomfortable moments of silence, in which Debbie and Tim stare at Dana’s interlaced fingers. Like any body part, they become ridiculous when scrutinized in isolation. Swollen and meaty. Then Tim looks up and says:
“Was Dad fucking Siobhan?”
* * *
—
Dana texts Georgia the address of Larger Than Lice, but she goes alone. Their texts are only logistical now.
From what Dana described Tim describing—my son, he writes, as if he had never told her his name—she was expecting someone’s basement: her head tilted back in the kitchen sink, the smell of someone else’s cooking in the next room. But the place has changed—now it’s halfway between a doctor’s office and a salon. The receptionist wears scrubs and the magazines in the waiting room are up-to-date.
Georgia nearly walks out. She is fragile, these days, when met with her own false expectations. Then a woman in a wig and an ankle-length skirt emerges. She wears a Disney-printed nurse’s uniform over her sweater. She could be twenty-five or forty-five, which makes her seem like a sister and a mother all at once.
The woman doesn’t explain what she’s going to do. She doesn’t warn that it will hurt like a pinch when she presses hard into Georgia’s scalp, or that it will hurt like a sting when she plucks something out of it. The sensations are all surprises.
“I’m not a masochist,” Georgia says out loud.
The woman doesn’t respond. Her glossy wig hangs like a curtain over Georgia’s forehead.
“I guess I might be.”
The comb sends tingles down pathways Georgia didn’t know existed. A tendon on the inside of her thigh is connected to the lobe of her ear. This makes her feel well designed—put together.
“The bugs remind you that your body is food,” Georgia says in the silence. “That’s the worst part, I think. They’re not just living on you, they’re living off you.”
Georgia lets herself imagine what’s underneath the woman’s wig. Hair only one man sees. The truth is Georgia can’t imagine anyone coveting her like that—asking her to hide something, longing for the moment when it will be revealed. But it might be nice to have it—whatever it is—all to herself. When she’s finished, the woman braids Georgia’s hair, the way she wore it as a child.
And now that it’s all over, where have the bugs gone? Georgia pictures the bodies. Clear exoskeletons with clusters of dark organs visible inside, punctured by tweezers, corroded by chemical shampoo. They might ooze her own blood, the way mosquitoes do. They belong to her, because she kept them alive.
At home, Georgia unfurls the braid. Her hair is kinked all over. She brushes it again and again, until it is alive with electricity, until it radiates out in all directions, quivering with static, the ridges throwing light in all directions, for no one else to see.
MAKE BELIEVE
.
One week after I told Arthur to stop contacting me, I got a job with a celebrity. The job was on a commercial, doing all the things that fell through the cracks. I’d keep the minifridges stocked with seltzer and energy bars, find the right-size envelope and the right-color earrings, silence a smoke detector and unknot a stubborn mass of wires. The commercial was for deodorant, or cologne—something to do with pleasant odors.
My own sense of smell is underdeveloped. A man once speculated that this might explain my lack of enthusiasm for sexual conquests. Like dogs, he said, a lot of people go wild in pursuit of a certain scent.
“Like dogs?” I said, and he nodded.
At that point, I had been thinking about the celebrity for several months. I’d had these kinds of obsessions—can we call them companions?—for as long as I could remember. They were generally famous or dead, and sometimes both. They were always men, which I admit was unoriginal.
I had considered what the celebrity liked to eat and how his apartment, large but not opulent, would be laid out. When I left the house, it was always with the possibility of bumping into him, or at least spotting him in an adjacent checkout line. This was implausible, but not impossible: he did live in my city. (Many people do.)
The celebrity was an actor, and it was often said that he had remarkable range. He starred in biopics about assassinated politicians and TV shows about ordinary people living in cramped houses. There was trauma in his youth, which he only ever mentioned obliquely. Something happened, I think, to his brother.
The night before the job started, I was in a crowded bar for the engagement party of a friend whom I no longer knew that well. I found myself talking to a very thin woman, a stranger whose wrists I admired. I imagined her storming off and someone grabbing her wrist. Don’t go!
We swirled our drinks around and eventually I told her that I was going home early, because of the job with the celebrity.
“You don’t have a job with him,” she said.
“I do!” I said this with delight, because it was the first time I’d mentioned the job out loud. Arthur was the only person I would have told.
“You don’t.”
I knew it was an ordinary job, but it felt good to be delighted.
“He died,” the woman said, “just this afternoon.” She pulled out her phone and showed me the home page of a semi-serious news outlet. The celebrity’s name was there, along with some version of the word death.
The job had been scheduled to start very early. I had set several alarms, three or four minutes apart, as I did when going to the airport at unnatural hours. And in fact the day before the job was not unlike the day before an important trip. I found it difficult to concentrate and tried to think of ways to fortify my body. I installed an app that reminded me to drink water at regular intervals.
The very thin woman seemed to be sympathetic to my shock, which only made me feel more misunderstood. There had been a public outpouring of grief. I want
ed to say, Do you think I’m just a sad fan? But to myself I had to admit, Aren’t I just a sad fan?
In the morning, my alarms went off, one after the other, while it was still completely dark. The streetlamp outside my window had been broken for weeks. The dark felt like a rural dark.
In one of the celebrity’s most famous movies, his character is summoned home by a death in the family—the loss of a cruel and complicated patriarch. The character boards a plane in funeral attire. It is hot and sandy where he’s going, and he will be overdressed. The plane touches down and you can see the collar digging into his neck. His polished shoes click on a polished floor. The gasp of the automatic doors is also the sound of heat hitting him in the face.
My alarm rang again. I kept my eyes open, because I didn’t want to fall back asleep. It’s different to picture things with your eyes open. I imagined handing over my belongings at the airport, watching them disappear on a conveyor belt, somehow certain I would see them again, thousands of miles away. In my head, I boarded the plane and breathed the recycled air. In the room, my eyes adjusted to the dark.
I would have liked to feel the lurch in my stomach when the wheels lifted off the ground and the wings took over, but there is only so far a body will go in the service of imagination.
* * *
—
Six months before the celebrity died, Arthur left the city we lived in together, where most of our friends lived, too. Seven months before the celebrity died, I dropped out of school. This was a long and agonizing decision, but not a very interesting one. Many people had made the same decision before me and would make it again after me. For years, I had supposedly been writing about the archive of a famous writer. In fact, I had been doing nothing but reading his letters over and over again, in a room where everyone wore white gloves and spoke in whispers. I knew the names he called his wife and his lover; I knew about the trip to Tangier, about the writer’s block, about all the wrestling with God; I knew the difference—slight—between his r’s and his v’s. Arthur said that in the end I knew very little about myself. My adviser, a man with a white beard and a vague accent, agreed.
Objects of Desire Page 10