“I’m choosing my words carefully.”
“I expect nothing less.”
“Now,” he said, “while it’s true we’ve had a very compelling, uh—” He tried to locate himself on the page. “I was—okay. Now. While it’s true, it’s been true, that we’ve had a good time together, I’m sorry to tell you, sorry to say it but I’m no longer okay with the way you and I get along. I admit that the past two months have been great. But to my mind that’s outweighed by the fact that I can’t see it going anywhere, and that I’m a little uncomfortable, actually very uncomfortable with the way you’ve been behaving recently. I don’t like the, the—I don’t think I can provide what you need.”
“You can.”
“Can I—”
“Sorry.”
“Please.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I—shit. Okay, look. Now I know you think I can, but the last few—times, have shown me that—I’m not…” He stepped closer to her. “I’m not going to hit you.”
“You don’t have to.”
“Or allow you to hit yourself, or get involved with, with that.”
“Jonah Stem. May I interject? I’m not sure you understand what I’m all about.”
“That’s probably true, it’s certainly true, but all I can tell you is how I feel about what happened last time, and I—I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to be with someone who needs that. It sucks for me to have to say that, and I’m sorry to be so blunt. But I want you to understand exactly where I’m coming from, it has nothing to do with what kind of person you are. You’re a terrific woman, and you deserve someone who can give himself to you one hundred percent, who won’t feel conflicted. It’s not right for me to get any more, uh, involved. So this is it. I’m sorry. It’s been crazy, the way we’ve—and the—but now it’s over. No more. Am I making myself clear?” He wiped his forehead with his sleeve.
“Well said,” she said. “Shall we to the boudoir?”
“Are you—did you hear me?”
“I did, Jonah Stem. Hand me your keys, you’re not well to drive.” She reached for his coat pocket, which he stapled shut with a slap.
“Very well.” She began to sing “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road.”
“Eve.”
She sang You drive me crazy, Jonah Stem.
“Eve.”
You’re such a cutup, Jonah Stem.
“Talk to me like a normal human being.”
“Think of all the ways in which you’ve tooouuuuched me,” she sang. The original melody had been lost.
His hands sweaty and her staring at him, he dropped his keys, and as he bent to get them she dove forward; they knocked heads and she went tumbling down the front steps, rolled around on the sidewalk, holding her head and laughing. He snatched up the fallen keys and went quickly to let himself in. Not fast enough; she slipped in behind him and began following him up the stairs, talking as she went.
“Let’s explore your feelings,” she said. “How long have you hated your mother?”
Five fucking flights. He ached from standing all day; his bag dragged like granite.
“You’re certainly in a hurry.”
“I know what you’re doing,” he said. “You’re trying to provoke me. I won’t do it, so forget it.”
“Don’t you think you’re being a tad hasty?”
“No.”
“I love you.”
“You do not l—”
She screamed. The noise pinned him to the wall.
“Now that I have your attention,” she said.
“Jesus Christ…”
“The problem is you’re not aware,” she said. “You’ve never seen my work, you can’t apprehend the perfection of our fit.”
His ears were ringing. “Jesus fucking Christ.”
“Love is powerful and blinding. But get to your feet, lad.”
She opened her arms.
He bolted, taking the steps three at a time.
“Jonah Stem, don’t run.”
His legs were much longer than hers, and he outpaced her; but the ground he gained disappeared in the time it took him to turn the lock. He tried to slam the door but didn’t quite succeed; a hollow crack rang out as Eve blocked it with her head. She stumbled into the apartment, crashing into his arms. For twenty or thirty seconds they staggered around.
“What the fuck are you doing.”
“I hurt myself,” she said.
“What was that.” He dragged her to the sofa. “What the, what the fuck.”
“May I have a glass of water?”
“You may get out of here is what you may do.”
“Look.” She touched her head; her palm came away bloody.
“Shit.”
“I’m going to stain the upholstery, call for a transfusion. Medic. Medic.”
He laid her on the living-room floor. Like most scalp wounds, hers was superficial but profuse. He cleaned it roughly, making it bleed worse.
“You’re so good,” she slurred. “I love it when you heal me.”
He said nothing.
“I would die for you.”
“I’m not asking you to.”
“I’d do it anyway,” she said. “I’ll send you some of my portfolio. We can do a new project together, I have ideas…”
He applied Neosporin. Much more of this and he’d have to start ordering by the case. All the while she mumbled.
Jonah Stem shall we have children? Jonah Stem do you want to kiss me? Jonah Stem I think we ought to find a studio in the countryside so we can work undisturbed.
When he finished he pulled her up. She was too unsteady to put up serious resistance. He wrestled her out onto the landing, and forced her to sit on the top step.
“I’m coming out here in ten minutes,” he said. “And if you’re not gone, I’m calling the police.”
She fingered the ugly sharp line of bruise on her temple; the messily dressed wound. She held up her bloody hand. “What will you tell them?”
He stared at her. Believe me, officer—
He walked back into his apartment.
A few minutes later he heard her leave.
He kicked his backpack across the room. He should’ve slammed the door on her a second time, a third, kept at it until her skull bulged. This was not him; he did not have these terrible thoughts. Throw her against the wall and pound her body until her womb fell out like an overripe peach. Push her out the window and watch her scatter into a billion irreconcilable fragments, like the camera. This was not him. He ran to the fridge and took a beer in one long draught, not for thirst but so he could crush the can and whang it against the far wall. Primum nocere. He wanted to throw the easy chair against the TV; wanted to hear the vacuum tube crack; wanted to tear the stuffing from the sofa with his hands until springs poked up like little frozen upside-down lightnings. This was not him, this was her effect on him; this was what she wanted, to turn him into a thing of violence. He opened a kitchen drawer and grabbed the largest deadliest object, a chef’s knife with a stained blade, he hammered it into the counter, left it there, grabbed the crisper drawer from the fridge, and dumped out its contents. The knife left a black line in the Formica as he yanked it out and went to work: scallions bent and bleeding; her kidneys, mushrooms hacked apart. Her heart a tomato puking seeds and slime; her lungs two long hothouse peppers crushed flat. Juice slashed the cabinetry; tendonous stems and wrinkled vegetal skin matted his forearms, landed in his hair. He beat maimed killed. Not him. He took out five eggs and broke them one by one in his hands; he squeezed a stick of butter and it squirted from the ends of his fist like a deep-sea fish reeled in too fast, coughing up its own swim bladder.
From across the room he watched himself, his black-hearted double, sinking knees-first into a mess of his own creation.
SHE DID NOT come for a week and a half. Every so often, once a day at first but then more frequently—every two hours or so—she would call; he could identify her by the words that disp
layed on his phone in block letters.
ID UNAVAILABLE
He deleted her voicemails without listening to them. He didn’t care what she had to say, as long as she continued to steer clear. Eventually she would see it his way.
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2004.
SHELF EXAMINATION.
The written half of the exam consisted of a hundred questions ranging from boring to extremely boring. Passing was a shade over fifty percent, and he finished with time to spare. Then came the oral, a ninety-minute one-on-one pimp-a-thon. The attending asked “thought questions,” open-ended cases for which Jonah had to present an appropriate plan of surgical treatment. As a test of his knowledge such questions were wholly inappropriate: for twelve weeks he had ceased to think, functioning as an android, executing tasks—and menial ones, at that. It wasn’t as though he could cure anyone. When asked, “How would you begin to deal with a patient whose neglect of a peptic ulcer has resulted in hemorrhagic shock,” he had to bite his tongue in order not to respond, “By paging the resident.”
He began by inquiring after dietary habits, allergies, socioeconomic status—
“The patient is bleeding to death,” said the examiner. “Life moves at a speed that’s not always convenient for us.”
Jonah didn’t know whether to be flattered or repulsed. Us. What earned him admission to that club? The American Association of Obnoxious Doctors. The League of Being a Smarmy Jerk. The Society for Intimate Knowledge of What It’s Like to Watch Other People Writhe Within Your Grasp.
But he faked his way through that question and the questions that followed. As he talked, the noise of St. Aggie’s leaked through the vents: carts and beds and humans in transit. Rattling chests. Feet in paper slippers. Beeps and blurps and whoopsy-daisy. Halfway through Jonah’s sermon on nuclear scintigraphy, the examiner said, “Don’t mind me,” and, in flagrant violation of hospital policy, produced a pack of Marlboros and an ashtray carved from a hockey puck. Smoke filled the room, invading his clothes, tickling Jonah’s sinuses. Sweet and cheap, an offering to a low-rent god, the God of Surgery. Bowels and blood, the insides of the insides, Holy of Holies, places no man is meant to look at, private lives torn open.
Not bad.
“Not bad.” The attending squinted at him. “Aren’t you Superdoc?”
Jonah said, “That’d be me.”
“Huh. Who knew. Well, congratulations. Fly on home.”
He rather staggered out. He had a dehydration headache and he would need to dry-clean his blazer. But he was done cutting people up.
HE STEPPED INSIDE his apartment and let out a victory yawp that drew Lance out of the editing room.
Jonah said, “You are going to buy me a slice of pizza.”
“Roger that.”
On their way out Lance pointed to a pile of mail that Jonah had been neglecting for two weeks. “Your public awaits.”
Jonah flicked an envelope. “The electric bill’s probably due.”
“It came on Saturday.”
“Sorry, I’ll get to it tonight.”
“Done and done.”
Jonah was touched. He said thanks.
“You looked busy. But, look, can you stop being a depresso-stressball now? Cause I’m sick of you sounding like Eeyore with a fuckin head injury.”
Lance deemed pizza an inadequate reward. They needed to live it up, and that meant knishes from Yonah Schimmel’s. The bakery itself was closed, but he knew a pastry-pushing restaurant where they resold after-hours at a slight markup. Belching, potato-breathed, they then wandered to a Lower East Side dive favored for its spectacularly coherent design scheme: a top-to-bottom reproduction of a New York City sewer. The walls glistened with runoff and multicolored “moss.” The bar, a slab of concrete, leaked steam at strategically random points and was slathered in unidentifiable sludge (as were the bartenders themselves). After blowing seventy-five dollars on four drinks, they moved to another bar, this one made up like a Vietnamese village and called Napalm. Its delicate, obsequious waitstaff dove for cover when customers made sudden movements. Lance’s tips induced kisses on the cheek. Have another. A Jersey girl bachelorette party asked Jonah to sign the bride’s left bra cup. He obliged and they graced him with a necklace made of plastic penises. Have another. A band called Liquified Chicken played a noisy thirty-minute set that concluded with a radically deconstructed cover of “I Have a Little Dreidl.” Lance bought the bassist an absinthe. Another. A flashbulb popped another. By this time Jonah was as wasted as the entire U of M rugby team, and Lance acutely desirous of going home to get stoned.
Somehow they got upstairs. Lance ducked into the bathroom with his stash and a roll of duct tape. Jonah sorted mail. He flipped through a Victoria’s Secret catalogue. How’d they get his name? He didn’t mind, he found catalogues an affirmation that he filled a desirable marketing demographic. A tuition bill from HUM. A thank-you card from a wedding he’d attended a year ago. A postcard from a local theater company. A package addressed in his mother’s hand; for some reason, his parents insisted on mailing him the mail he got in Scarsdale. He had tried to get them to stop wasting postage. He didn’t need his high-school alumni newsletter. But his father said Tampering is a federal offense. From Kate he received a malapropian headline snipped from a financial newspaper: PROFESSOR ASPIRES TO BE FED CHAIR.
Chortling, he went to use the bathroom.
“…hang on.” Lance sounded strangled.
“Are you gonna be long?”
Smoke snaked through the doorframe.
Jonah rattled the knob. “Lance?”
“I am on Venus.”
The door popped with the sound of ripping tape, and smoke poured out, making Jonah’s eyes water. Lance, lying in the bathtub, floundered like an overturned crab. The sink was full of ashes, formerly eight hundred dollars’ worth of marijuana. “Close the door, you’re letting it out.”
It was too late to contain the gray cloud spreading into the hallway. Thankfully, the smoke detector was dead. As Jonah prized open windows, he noticed that his room looked funny, everything looked funny, the world fishbowled and dripped. He was well on the road to being extremely high.
Groaning, he opened the front door to wave smoke out.
There was something on the threshold.
It appeared very far away. He squinted, swayed, knelt, picked it up. A manila envelope, addressed to him in tight cursive. He tore it open and shook out a sheet of single-spaced type and a jewel box.
My Dearest—
Doubtless you wonder where I’ve been.
Having confined myself to thoughts of our most recent exchange, I find myself culpable. It is my unpardonable coyness that has caused you to act this way. It’s not easy to find people who sympathize at all with my passions, much less complement them as sublimely as you. Perfection is a rare and precious bird, thought by many extinct. Surprising, then, when it alights on our sill and pecks for entrance. We may pardon the skeptic.
It is important that you watch the enclosed portfolio carefully and to the end. You must understand the project as a complete Body of Work / Work of Body if you intend to contribute to its future. Remember,
nemo enim ipsam voluptatem, quia voluptas sit, aspernatur aut odit aut fugit, sed quia consequuntur magni dolores eos, qui ratione voluptatem sequi nesciunt,
neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum, quia dolor sit, amet, consectetur, adipisci velit, sed quia non numquam eius modi tempora incidunt, ut labore et dolore magnam aliquam quaerat voluptatem.
This, I believe, is what has been missing. Our Love, already resplendent, will achieve wholeness. You will like what you see, and you’ll understand what a mistake you’re making in being so recalcitrant.
You are a great artist. Now we can create together.
Yours sincerely,
in Love and War,
Eve Gones
• 17 •
THE DVD WAS UNMARKED, its readable surface red and shining like wet meat.
Af
ter checking on Lance—he’d passed out in the tub—Jonah locked himself in the editing room and pulled a chair up to the elaborate AV rack, which housed four DVD players, two VHS decks, a cable box, and various devices to accommodate Super-8, 16mm, and various unfamiliar media, all wired to a fifty-five-inch flat-screen TV. He wondered if this was the best time to start watching whatever it was she thought he’d find so compelling. He felt faintly sick, and could sense a massive hangover kicking up dust in the distance.
He looked at the disc. He could throw it away.
Getting the screen on took a fair bit of fiddling. The sound ran through an old Pioneer tuner; hearing nothing, Jonah twisted the knob up, curdling the background hiss to a growl. He tripped across the room and eased into Lance’s rolling desk chair with the bent leg, the one that would slip out from under you if you weren’t careful, which Jonah was not; he pitched sideways, his stomach burbling. He righted himself, waited.
PURE BEAUTY
fade
A PORTFOLIO
PREPARED BY EVE
fade
FOR HER ONE AND ONLY LOVE
JONAH STEM
fade
PART THE FIRST: JUVENILIA
(THE EXPLORATION OF SENSATION)
Then nothing.
Wondering if the disc had jammed, he stood up to check, getting midway across the room before a mindsplitting screech sent him reeling, his chest a popping grape. He fell on the chair for support, causing it to roll out from under him, dumping him to the floor, hands clamped over his ears, the AV system’s towering wood-paneled speaker stacks vibrating like lawnmowers, the detritus atop them—pencils, quarters, cigarettes—skittering like spooked rats. He thought that he’d died, that what he was listening to was his soul being torn from his body. Where was Lance, how could he sleep through this. He tried to get to the tuner but standing—while he was this drunk, without unclamping his ears—proved impossible; and he was crawling for the door when without warning the sound broke off, leaving a vacuum that seemed somehow louder, filled as it was with the roar of his own blood.
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