Objects of Desire

by Clare Sestanovich

  Arthur moved to a dense foreign city that was friendly to expats, but not too friendly. Living there would be difficult enough to count as an adventure. He followed a job. I didn’t follow him, because he didn’t ask me to and he didn’t ask me not to, and his indifference frightened me. I was only in the habit of chasing things in my head.

  Arthur’s job involved selling other people’s art, which didn’t mean liking other people’s art. When we had lived in the same city, I went to galleries with him, where everyone pretended to walk around aimlessly. In fact, everyone had a mission. Arthur was often impatient with the artists for not completing theirs. The collectors, he explained, were looking for a performance. They wore tucked-in shirts and sweaters in presidential colors. They wanted artists who wore fishnet shirts, ripped denim, shoes that looked like robots. They wanted to buy more than just art; they wanted to buy personality.

  When Arthur moved, it was unclear if we were still dating, though he texted me a lot. Mostly photos, mostly of dogs. The large public parks in his new city were overrun with them. He had never heard so much barking. Sweating through his office clothes, he became fascinated with the anatomy of canine tongues.

  Panting, he texted me. Incredible technology.

  I read the text and decided to respond in twenty minutes. He texted again.

  Why do we keep our tongues in our mouths?

  I took a shower to pass the time. Eighteen minutes later, I said: So we can talk!

  What was most striking about the parks, Arthur said, was that they were frequented by purebreds and strays in equal numbers. Some of them had elegant noses and humanlike hair that touched the ground. Others had more skin than fur, taut pink patches where they scratched until they bled. He sent me a picture of a greyhound getting his teeth brushed. Later, a pit bull with sagging nipples and a shredded-up ear, like paper ripped out of a notebook. There were ornate fountains in the park. Cherubs spitting, pissing, glinting in the sun.

  The photos were probably supposed to mean something. It was tempting to think they meant missing you, but it would have breached the terms of our intimacy to ask. We knew better than to take pride in wordless comprehension, but we did it anyway.

  * * *

  —

  When the celebrity died, I went back to looking for odd jobs. I learned this approach to employment from my friend, an aspiring artist. He told me that everyone he knew—other aspiring artists—worked this way. Cobbling things together, he said. I told him I wasn’t sure if I was entitled to be a cobbler. I had never made any art. He smiled pityingly and referred me to my first job, walking a pair of miniature Australian shepherds. Before the walk, I fed them each a Prozac, crushed into a dish of their favorite meaty stew.

  Most often, I found work as a personal assistant. I learned this could mean many different things. A woman with a laryngectomy wanted me to sort her extensive jewelry collection. Her neck hole wheezed while she watched me untangle delicate silver chains. She made me empty my pockets before I left. Later, a young couple with a tiny apartment hired me to do their grocery shopping. Sheepishly, they asked if I would wait on them during dinner.

  “It’s like”—the husband looked at his wife instead of looking at me—“make-believe.”

  “Growing up, Travis always wanted a butler,” she said.

  They unfolded a card table for dinner, which blocked the route to the bathroom, but they tipped generously. For dessert, I unwrapped Klondike bars and served them on plates.

  The jobs were usually short-lived, and most weeks I found myself in new parts of town. Arthur once explained to me that some cities expand up and some expand out. Vertical sprawl and horizontal sprawl. If you can, he said, pick a vertical city. They encourage optimism.

  Our city, which was now just my city, had skyscrapers and many-story walk-ups. There were pharmacies and grocery stores in old bank buildings, where the vaulted ceilings were fifty feet above the shelves. I had been in elevators with uniformed operators and elevators with no buttons at all. Somehow they already knew where you were going.

  Three months had passed when I answered an ad for a night nanny; the celebrity had long since stopped appearing in the news. My sleeping schedule was already out of whack. I liked scrolling through my feeds in the dark, when I could be sure that only strangers were awake. Nearly everyone I knew—the number seemed to be dwindling—lived in the same time zone. Increasingly, they believed in regular bedtimes. They adjusted their screens to glow soothing orange at night and wore expensive mouth guards that made them lisp.

  While my known world slept, I read old tabloid articles about the celebrity. The smallest developments of his life were resurrected on my phone: he starred in a new movie, he found a new girlfriend, he bought a coffee. Just like us. Sometimes the headlines said that the celebrity was exhausted. In the world of famous people, I learned, this was a clinical term.

  When the celebrity was alive, I had avoided this kind of behavior. I wanted to know him, not to know things about him. This had felt like a principled distinction. Now that he was impossible to know, I investigated him, collected him. At strange hours, when late-at-night became early-in-the-morning, my greed managed to look like something else. My phone a bright square in a dark room, pretending to be a portal or a treasure or at the very least a time machine.

  * * *

  —

  To become a night nanny, I took the train uptown, to a luxury apartment building with a view of all the best museums and the reservoir in the middle of the park. The doorman had to swipe a special card to take me to the twenty-sixth story, where the elevator opened directly into the front hall. There were no shoes or coats in sight. There was an end table with a fan of reputable magazines and a framed handwritten letter, presumably from someone famous, though I didn’t recognize the name.

  I was interviewed by the mother and three other women. The day nannies. They asked me questions while we observed the plate of cookies between us.

  “Did you have a formative caregiver?” the mother said.

  She seemed disappointed when I told them what little I could remember of the years I had spent in daycare.

  The girl was five years old and her name was Susan, which seemed to me like a name for adults. The first nanny explained that Susan didn’t respond to Sue or Susie. Terms of endearment were off-limits.

  The mother left in the middle of the conversation, reappeared in flattering gym wear, then left again. The father was mentioned only once. He alone, the third nanny explained, was allowed to say sweetie.

  It was Susan herself who showed me the twin beds where we would sleep. She told me I could keep my pajamas under my pillow.

  “Or bring them in a tote bag,” she said solemnly.

  Each day, I relieved the day nannies around the time Susan brushed her teeth. She wore nightgowns, or a onesie with the feet scissored off. Otherwise, she said, wearing it made it hard to breathe.

  “I want to wiggle my toes,” she said, and I told her I understood.

  While Susan slept, I searched the Internet on my phone. Every several hours, I calculated the time difference between Arthur’s city and mine. The silence of these nights reminded me of the silence of libraries. It wasn’t as peaceful as it sounded; I had long since stopped trusting this kind of quiet. In my second year of working in the archives, there had been a major announcement: a celebrated painter’s love letters were about to be unveiled. The letters were mostly to her husband, an even more celebrated photographer, and she had insisted that they be sealed until fifty years after her death. I respected both the painter and the photographer, and I thought this suspense seemed romantic, proof that some love really did endure. But on the day of the unveiling, I had forgotten all about it. I arrived at my usual time with my usual supplies—sanitizer and snacks, a thermos wrapped in plastic, to prevent spills—and there was a line around the block. I watched from acr
oss the street while the line inched forward. People chatted, laughed, craned their necks to see the front of the line. Their giddiness might have been inspiring—it isn’t every day that a library attracts a crowd—but instead it seemed to me like an indictment. I took notes and met deadlines, but when was the last time I had been so excited?

  At Susan’s, I hardly slept. In the morning, when it was time to leave, a car was waiting for me. It was sleek and black, with miniature water bottles in the backseat. The first time it picked me up, I finished all four bottles in quick, desperate gulps, and the next day there were eight, wedged into the cup holders. Mortified, I never touched them again.

  Often, I went weeks without seeing Susan’s parents. I heard the elevator open late at night. They made the sounds of rich people. Heels on hardwood, keys to luxury vehicles on custom-cut marble. Where did they learn to murmur like that?

  Once or twice, the noise woke Susan up. She peered at me from across the room. In the dark, she seemed even less like a child.

  “It’s them,” she said.

  I nodded. My phone lit up on my chest. I pictured my chin glowing bluish, and just then it was intolerably sad that Susan had never seen me in the sun.

  “Her green boots,” Susan said.

  “What?”

  “I can tell from the sound.”

  We listened to the feet click.

  “No you can’t,” I said.

  Susan looked at me silently for a few seconds, and I could tell I had betrayed her. She turned away, her face to the wall. On my phone, I had found the celebrity’s sister’s Instagram, where she posted pictures of her children—twins. In one, taken when the twins were still infants, the celebrity lifted the babies in the air as if they were barbells, grinning sheepishly at his biceps. I scrolled back one year, then another. Before the sister had become a mother, her account had mostly featured photos of unpaired gloves, found on the street. Abandoned, muddy, flattened by tires. The hashtag #seekingsoulmate had attracted an enthusiastic following.

  In the kitchen, the fridge opened and closed. Susan didn’t toss or turn or snore. Was she awake? I wondered if it was my job to keep her asleep. I could hear things that didn’t belong to me rattling, clinking. When they spoke—people I could barely picture, voices I couldn’t quite make out—I longed to be closer to them. My face felt bare and prickly, like someone had recently touched it, like someone had whispered so close the words were whorls on my skin.

  * * *

  —

  A few months after Arthur moved away, he called and woke me up. It was late morning, nearly noon. I had missed my first alarm and then my second, along with a text from my roommate asking if we had any baby powder. There were ants in the kitchen. None of this really mattered, since I had nowhere to be, but my head swarmed with regret.

  Arthur was calling to tell me he was dating someone new. The straightforwardness of this embarrassed us both. We disliked discussing predictable events. The truth, of course, was that I was desperate for the small details of his life, and now of hers. When I pulled open the shades, there were hundreds of bugs marching down the side of the window. In the fierce light that streamed in, it was easy to imagine someone who possessed everything I lacked. In my head, she was a doctor or a teacher—something passionate, but important, too. A lavish cook who never dieted, the kind of person who wasn’t afraid to arrive at a party alone. She posted earnest things online, without wondering who would see them. Naked and tangled in a bed I’d never see, she knew how to answer when Arthur said, Tell me what you want.

  “Does she speak English?” I asked him.

  They spoke in her language, which I had hardly ever heard him use. A few years earlier, on our way back from a long trip, we had stopped for a day and a night in their city, back when it was not yet their city. I was surprised by how loudly Arthur spoke in Spanish, like he was selling something—shoving words into other people’s hands. I listened to him barter for a bag of spiced nuts. I was a little bit disgusted.

  Later, sitting on a bench near the hotel while Arthur went jogging, I was turned on by the thought of his voice in a different language. An ugly dog investigated my foot and I ignored him. I pictured my face pressed into the mattress and Arthur’s hand pressed into my back. When it was over, he would murmur words I couldn’t understand. There would be parts of him inside me I couldn’t see. This was what I liked best about sex—possessing something we couldn’t even be sure existed. I hated the sight of semen. Smeared on my thighs, dribbled on my stomach. Milkiness inside a condom, like a bag of something forgotten at the back of the fridge.

  The dog nudged my sneaker again. His breath on my ankle mocked my fantasy. I frightened myself by wanting to kick him. His leaking nostrils and undisciplined tongue, his swollen testicles, knocking back and forth.

  After dinner, Arthur hailed a cab, something foreigners were discouraged from doing. He insisted the danger was overblown. I didn’t necessarily agree, but I assumed this was how other people’s adventures came to be. The car was small and white, and there was a palm-size hole in the floor. I watched the asphalt speeding by until I felt sick. It was surprisingly mesmerizing.

  Arthur couldn’t understand the driver. He’s speaking too fast, he said. Too much slang. He pressed his forehead against the glove compartment in distress. I covered up the hole with my shoe, to stop myself from watching.

  The cab dropped us off at a hotel I didn’t recognize as our own, and it became clear we didn’t have enough money for the fare. Arthur presented his credit card. The driver looked at the plastic, unimpressed. Arthur checked his pockets a second and third time. He said we were only a few dollars short, but he didn’t meet my eyes. Eventually, he got out of the car, assuring the driver he would be right back. I wondered if he noticed he was speaking English. He went into a nearby convenience store, and when he returned, he was holding two loaves of bread and a liter of soda. He passed the items through the passenger-side window. By then, he had collected himself. Lo siento.

  Back in the hotel room, Arthur kissed me and held my face gently between his hands. He said flattering things that I couldn’t make myself believe. His fingers smelled bad, like coins. I was surprised I could smell him at all. I tried my best to think about sex, but instead I thought about the loaves of bread. I pictured the slices palmed into perfect balls, swallowed with Coke straight from the bottle. I pictured sandwiches with multiple meats and sandwiches with nothing but mayonnaise. I pictured them abandoned under the front seat, green then grey then black.

  I turned away from Arthur. I apologized in a language I didn’t understand, mimicking his accent, and it made me feel a little better—a little less like myself.

  * * *

  —

  The day after the celebrity’s funeral, an ex-girlfriend of his had announced that she was pregnant. She was, as far as her fans knew, currently single. She did not elaborate; she let everyone speculate. Some people were made ecstatic by this news. The ex-girlfriend, like the celebrity, was extremely attractive, and this seemed to be cause for celebration: the mixing of two auspicious gene pools. Other people were outraged. She was smearing not only his name but his legacy.

  I didn’t believe the ex-girlfriend, but I thought I understood her. I, too, could feel the celebrity rattling around inside me. The kick of a heel against my ribs would have been a comfort, because it would have made it real.

  Ever since I had quit school, my period had been behaving irregularly. It came three weeks in a row, or else it didn’t come at all. When Arthur left, I told the gynecologist—he had the same vague accent as my adviser—that I wasn’t having sex, and he nodded with stern approval. He told me to eat fortified cereal and sleep eight hours a night. I was supposed to keep track of my period with an app, which also let you keep track of your mood—a smiley face or a frowny face—and your pain. You could choose between one and four lightning bolts. I ign
ored the app and kept track of the ex-girlfriend’s pregnancy instead. In pictures, she wore tight-fitting maternity clothes and cradled her stomach. I could see her belly button through her shirt.

  I had been a nanny for only a month when the ex-girlfriend was spotted in Cancún—her stomach huge and in the sun—with a man no one recognized. He had good hair and impressive abs, but he wasn’t famous. Apparently, he was the father. I read a few headlines that I couldn’t bear to click, and never learned his name. A few days later, my period came, more brown than red. I wrapped a tampon, swollen and smelling, in layer after layer of toilet paper and buried it in the bottom of Susan’s trash can. Lying in bed, I drifted in and out of sleep and dreamed that she found it anyway. She was cupping something red and dripping in her hands, something that looked a little bit alive. In the morning, I fished the tampon out and brought it home in my purse, because I didn’t want her to be afraid.

  * * *

  —

  One night—what became the last night—I arrived and Susan was not in her pajamas. She was wearing a floor-length dress, which she held an inch above the floor, revealing a pair of white patent-leather shoes. The day nannies were clearly upset. The three of them had already packed their bags. One of them summoned the elevator impatiently.

  “It doesn’t come faster if you press it more,” Susan said, sounding a little haughty, though mostly sounding sad.

  “You’re not the mother,” the nanny said.