“Ben Dickinson’s in on this?” She looked at me with genuine astonishment.
“I had lunch with him today. That’s why I asked you about him. Which leads me to the good news—”
“Fucking Celeste,” Susan said under her breath. Ah—bait taken. I grabbed a few limp crudités and followed her toward the folding chairs. Susan hated Celeste. Always had, though you’d think she’d at least in theory appreciate that I had a powerful female boss. But to Susan, Celeste wasn’t actually interested in shifting the sands of power in any way beyond aesthetic. Celeste had power and used it, as Susan had put it a bajillion times, to quote-unquote reinforce distorted messages about women, and was clearly more interested in amassing her own fortunes than changing the status quo. “She manipulates you,” she’d told me once after I’d had a bad day at work—some pitch gone sour. We’d been drinking wine all evening, and in vino were being very veritas. “She wants you to be just like her. You’re not, but you are gullible. If you keep trying to impress her you’re either going to drive yourself crazy by pretending or”—I remember the pain at the corners of Susan’s wine-stained mouth—“spend so much time pretending that eventually you do become just like her.”
I’d laughed it off then. “Oh, please. I’m not like Celeste at all!”
But Susan hadn’t laughed with me. “I’m serious. I do not trust that woman. I don’t know what she has on you that keeps you working there.”
She makes me feel special! I’d wanted to cry. Susan didn’t get it. She assumed that, like her, people walked around with a clear sense of who they were. But some of us girls wait dutifully to be told. Celeste was someone who told me who I was and, unlike with most people—my parents especially—I didn’t hate the answer. But it’s hard to speak plainly like this, even with your best friend, even with yourself. So I’d drunk more wine instead.
Before I could get any further with needling Susan into a response, Gina came and sat down next to Susan. “Hey, you guys,” she said, in a voice so muted and affectless I had to bend over to hear her.
“Gina, this is my friend Casey. Casey, Gina. Sorry we left you like that,” Susan said to her. To me: “Gina’s an incredible poet.” To her: “I can’t wait to hear you read tonight.”
Just as I was registering that Susan hadn’t used the word best before friend, hadn’t said anything about my incredibleness at, say, creative directing or dance fitness, either Pat or Patty took the stage to welcome everybody and introduce the night’s first reader. I settled in and prepared myself for two hours of earnest droning. I forked a piece of cake into my mouth, listened ironically to a rail-thin man talk about train hopping, and waited for a good snarky one-liner to pop into my head so that I could lean over and whisper it to Susan.
But when one came to me (Why do sad writer boys love pretending to be hobos?) and I looked over, I saw that Gina and Susan were murmuring with each other. Gina! I hated her. I would smite her with my thunderbolt of Susan-specific expertise. Bet you don’t know her favorite Counting Crows album, I would thunder as soon as Susan was out of earshot. Yeah, that’s right, Gina, if that’s even your real name. Bet you didn’t know she secretly likes Counting Crows either.
Oh, but who was I kidding. I didn’t have the heart to smite Gina. I only felt the pang of left-outedness that dated back to kindergarten, even before that, an ache that did not lessen with time but rather that time added to with layers. Watching them, I understood awfully for the first time that Susan had a whole life that had nothing to do with me. No wonder she didn’t care about what I was doing at work. I was too outdated for her milieu, which was currently filled with bespectacled poets like Gina and Marxist punks and grad students who spent the mornings on their dissertations and afternoons on their novels. Intellectuals and artists, self-described and self-important. Probably they looked at me the way I, too, had looked at friends who invited their high school and college friends to parties. They were fine most of the time, nice enough, but often it was clear that they had served as useful waysides on the road to someone actually becoming themselves and did not belong at later exits.
These thoughts were socks tumbling around the dryer of my brain, hot and constant. Sure was easy to feel inadequate in this world. But I didn’t just feel inadequate. I felt many things at once. There were probably German words for these sensations, complex nouns like competitionfriendship and IneedyoutoremindmewhoIamness and occultbookstorespecificsorrowatlosingyourbestfriend, but these sorts of ambiguously poetic constructions didn’t exist in English, so I was stuck with my sadness. So I emotionally ate cake.
The reading was fine. Good, even, if I allowed myself to see it purely for what it was, to let it stay, as the old saying went, “in its lane.” But charity, according to a recent online quiz, was not one of my top three virtues, so my mind continued to drift and ruminate. I’d put my phone on vibrate, and when I heard it buzz in my purse I leaned over and dug for it with a sense of relief. Finally, something besides the present moment to occupy my attentions.
It was an email, I discovered, turning my body discreetly away from Susan, from my contact at the production company that had gotten me the audition for the organic dairy commercial. The tone was apologetic. The company was “streamlining” its talent in order to “incubate” their business, and while they were grateful for the opportunity to work together, albeit briefly, they would be moving forward without me. In other words, they were firing me, even though I’d never worked for them in the first place.
Stupidly and involuntarily, tears sprang into my eyes, like in gym class when you caught a basketball too hard in the chest. I didn’t want to cry—there was no reason to cry, I was losing something I’d never had in the first place, I’d dipped a mere toe in the waters of another kind of life while my real life remained intact—but look, the body knows what the mind doesn’t want to admit. In such moments I was reminded that there was this whole bloody, desirous animal beneath this well-groomed exterior of mine. One always feeling and wanting things too hard. She stayed there, relentless, this animal. No matter how hard I pushed her, muted her, numbed her silly, she never went away.
I sniffed and blinked the tears back. I would not feel anything unless I had to and no one could make me. I put my phone back in my bag and returned, arms crossed, to the scene in front of me. It was Gina’s turn. From Gina I learned that duende was not a magical word-breathing goblin at all, but a force with which human beings could create. It came up like a reverse lightning bolt from the earth; one had to wrestle with it the way Jacob wrestled his angel. It was a power, not a work, Gina quietly slammed. Action, not thought. Blood, not brains. At once I longed for that force to come up through me, fill my blood, power my work, offer my life the meaning I’d always longed for and could not quite find. But oh, maybe Susan was right, that sort of longing—what am I meant to do, blah blah—was reserved for spoiled rich people. So I made like an angel-wrestler and shoved it right out of my head.
* * *
—
I went over to Susan’s apartment after the reading. she needed a ride home, and she’d just finished reading a book that she wanted to give me, a book of poems. Accepting the offer seemed like a way to repair, or at least start repairing, the crack between us that seemed every day to be widening. Hell, maybe I would actually read it, and we would stay up late talking about it the way we did years ago.
Susan’s studio apartment was in no more disarray than usual. She’d always been messy, but in the years since we’d lived together her living habits had taken on a feral quality. Her unmade bed, really just a mattress on the floor, was piled with books and papers, and a dirty plate and fork sat atop her bedside table. She used a folding table in her kitchen, owned two scuffed-up armchairs, and had nothing but rice, beans, and canned tomato sauce on the exposed pantry shelves. The only thing of quality she owned was her writing desk, which had been given to her by her grandmother and sat in
the middle of the room. It, too, was covered with books and papers. We took a seat in the armchairs and faced each other, our legs tucked beneath us, the way women do when they talk in yogurt commercials.
“You want a drink?” Susan asked me, and pointed to a bottle of rye on the floor by her desk.
I shook my head. “I started at noon, thanks to my new friend Ben.”
“Oh yeah.” Susan leaned over and picked up the bottle from the floor. “I meant to ask what happened with him.”
While Susan poured herself two fingers, I recounted the afternoon Ben and I’d had together, careful to leave out just how much I’d liked him. That needed to stay between me and me for a little while. Susan’s and my sacred ritual of talking about boys was a decade old at that point, however, and the ease with which we both settled into it comforted me. I’d tripped on a worrying wire at the bookstore, feeling the space between us, but maybe it was nothing, that wire. A false alarm. A trick of the imagination addled by drinking for three hours straight. “Point is,” I concluded, “he’s totally amazing and I think I’m in love!”
Susan smiled, because she knew I was kidding. We weren’t cynical, but we were cool—there was a difference. Love was for single women who bought bridal magazines, pinned on Pinterest, and made careful lists of the qualities they were looking for in a boyfriend. Probably they had parents whose marriages were held together by something more substantial than real estate and denial. Probably they did not think much about just how useful myths of romantic love are for existing power structures and birthrates.
Ah, but beneath this jadedness of ours, as is usually the case: a whole compost heap of hope and hurt. I longed for love, what human doesn’t, but I feared love was a lie—or, at best, temporary. Susan had this compost pile at the bottom of her, too, though she dealt with it differently than I did. Susan was too sensitive for casual affairs, attached fast and hard, was devastated for a long time after they ended. As a result, she abstained for long periods of time. At times I felt she thought this tendency toward observation in lieu of participation made her superior, that she looked down her aquiline nose on my messy, frequent, and all-too-human exchanges.
But that last part could have been just a projection. What can be said for certain about Susan was that she did not crave the attention of men the way I did. She did not seek it out with, for example, the intensity of someone who’s fallen down a hole and is waiting either to be rescued or for the hole to be filled with rainwater she can float in.
“Speaking of love, before I forget—” Susan said, and abruptly jumped up from her seat. She trotted toward the walk-in closet, which she’d converted into a giant bookshelf. Besides the bathroom, it was the only separate part of her studio. “—the book.”
“Speaking of books,” I said, standing up myself and wandering over to Susan’s desk. “How’s the novel going?”
“Good. Fine. Terrible. You know how it is.”
“You figure out how to raise the stakes yet?” Susan’s novel was a bildungsroman about a group of friends who originally met at summer camp. Her worst fear was that it was boring.
“No. It’s still all backstory, no story.”
“Something big needs to happen.” I moved some papers around. “Maybe to Sheila.” Sheila was Susan’s main character, a struggling writer. Sheila was not at all, Susan would insist on telling people, based on herself.
“I know, but I don’t know what it is yet.”
“Can I read it? You haven’t let me read it in forever.”
“Not yet!” Though a wall separated us, I could hear her tone. It meant Don’t fuck with me on this.
I picked up a sheaf of papers and started leafing through. “What about the story you just sent out? Can I read that at least?”
“Maybe later!”
That same tone of voice. Instead of forcing me back from the edge whence the tone came, something pressed me forward. There was a secret part of me that liked edges. I picked up another pile of papers. A sequence of poems based on a photograph by Diane Arbus. I picked up another pile of papers. The short story in question. The thing about pushing on edges is that if something breaks—if you break—at least you know what happened. You’re not waiting.
I stuffed the papers in my bag. Pure impulse, lizard brain, the same brain that swiped through hookup apps as I walked down the street and ate entire bags of tortilla chips at eleven P.M. and cheated on boyfriends and lied to Lindsey and went drunk shopping. The front part of my brain, meanwhile, was formulating my justifications if and when Susan figured out what I’d done, noticed the pages were missing, caught me red-handed. I would say, I wanted to give them to Ben, Ben knows people, he said he’d call me, he’ll put this in the right hands.
What I would not tell her was that I, too, had been rejected that day. That if my dreams were just superficial delusions I could at least live vicariously through hers. I would not tell her that I envied people like her and Ben because they had never felt they had to grow up and let go of their childish things, the things they loved and were passionate about. I would not tell her that sometimes I wanted to punish her for this, for having such a clear vision for her life. I would not tell her that I needed to do something drastic so that she would not go away.
Because if I passed the story on to Ben, and this jump-started something for her, there would be no chance that we would stop being friends. See the logic? I would say. Yes, I was preparing to say and not say everything that was in my head, but in the end there was no reason. I was back in my armchair, arranging myself to look as though I’d been resting idly, by the time Susan emerged from the closet.
“Here it is,” she said triumphantly with the book in her hand. It was a slim volume written by an American woman in the seventies. Susan told me she’d lived in Greece for a few years and had come back from the Hellenic wilderness with a light in her eyes and this fistful of poems. Reading it, Susan said, would change my life.
“I can’t wait,” I said, which was not true. I did want it to be true, though.
When I got home, before I went to bed, instead of swiping on my hookup app or buying shoes, I opened this volume of verse. The first poem in there was about a girl dressed in white. Her hands were gnawed off, her nails gone. She lived in a beautiful garden, but she was covered in blood. She’d done it to herself, the poem said, so she wouldn’t have to feel the other things.
The poem didn’t say what these things were. It didn’t have to. A girl comes into the world knowing these things. I myself knew them well.
Rake died of an aneurysm my junior year of college. Came out of nowhere. When my mother called and told me the news, it was a late-February afternoon, and a grimy fog had begun to settle over the matted-down grass in the commons and dirty piles of snow. I walked across campus in a daze and looked up at the bare trees. Through her own tears Louise kept murmuring “Mama’s here, Mama’s here,” but I could not feel her, and never had.
When she finally asked, quaveringly, if I was all right, I said that I was. Though I knew in some terribly clarifying way that I was not all right, and would not be all right for some time. It’s common as dirt, parents dying before us, and yet when it happens we can’t help but think bewilderedly: why has no one prepared me for this? The answer, of course, is that we would not have listened.
After I got off the phone I wandered into the student union, where luckily I found Susan. She was sitting in a big leather chair, her face buried in a library copy of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. I stood in front of her until she looked up. Then I put my hand on her armrest for balance.
“My dad died,” I said, swaying back and forth a little.
Her eyes widened with shock. I opened my mouth again but I couldn’t find the words to explain what I already knew in my body to be true: that my life as I knew it was ending.
“I have to go home,” I finally said. “For the fun
eral.”
Susan put her book in her bag. “I’m coming with you.”
I shook my head, faced the floor, bobbed and weaved.
She stood up and reached out to catch me. “Yes, I am.” Yet by the time she took me by the arm, my mind had already wandered off. The thing about losing your mind is that it rarely announces its departure. It doesn’t cut your ear off or leave you raving in the streets or stick your head in the oven. All it does is slip away when your back is turned.
At the funeral Susan served as my proxy with the bereaved while I hid behind oversized sunglasses and silently contradicted every beatifying story they told. He helped save your marriage? Well, he ruined his own. He got you into AA? He drank in secret every night! Louise, on the other hand, swanned around the church, relieved, I think, by the beatification process, its forgiveness of any obligation she might once have felt to reconcile her husband’s duplicitous nature. A death in the family knocks everybody into highly subjective and private realities, and, at least for a while, the realities my mother and I lived in would find no overlap.
There’s no way to explain the following year except to say that grief ripped through my body like a hurricane rips through trees. I slept with more people that year than I had in my whole life. I made a hundred new friends and abandoned them with impunity. I lost weight, gained it back. Six months later I gave away half of what I owned. I rarely thought consciously about Rake, which was, I suppose, the whole point. I wish I could say that eventually I emerged from that time triumphant, but in truth I emerged like the survivor of any natural disaster: intact but permanently shaken. No, I did not learn anything from my father’s death except how fragile I am, how fragile any “I” is, and to be honest I’ve been trying to calm down how much I know this ever since.
Though there is something else I learned. One day Susan took me to the park down by the river near campus carrying tinny portable speakers and a pack of cigarettes and a cheap bottle of wine. It was summer, but I could barely feel the warmth on my skin. We drank the wine and smoked the cigarettes and listened to a new record by a group of riot grrrls who by now were women and still believed the world had hell to pay. I was going through the motions of being a person but was, I thought, made of nothing inside.
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