by Meg Howrey
“He says he’s in love with me.” Gwen shook her head. “And I don’t know whether I should say it back or not. Should I say it? I should say it, right?”
“Well, do you mean it?”
I hated talking about Hilel with Gwen. The whole thing should have been weird, right? She was sleeping with someone I had been sleeping with four months before. There should have been at least one offering of “Hey, are you okay with this?” That wouldn’t be unreasonable, right? Even though I was being so perfectly poker-faced about the whole thing? But I couldn’t even be justifiably resentful. I had completely concealed my real feelings for Hilel, and I couldn’t expect that Gwen could magically divine them. So I had to suck up the price of being so guarded. It was all very complicated, but only inside my own head, which made Gwen’s blitheness even more exasperating. What should have been the pink elephant in the room was just my own personal invisible elephant. Sitting on my chest.
“I thought I loved him the other day,” Gwen had prattled on. “When I was watching him in class? He had on those black sweatpants? You know which ones?”
“Ummm … maybe,” I lied.
“He’s just got that thing. I know it’s like, wrong or whatever, but I couldn’t be attracted to someone who wasn’t an amazing dancer. I love watching him dance. And it lasts, you know, knowing that he’s so great. Because even when we’re just talking or having food or hanging out, or sex or whatever, and he’s not actually dancing, I still know that he’s a great dancer.”
I knew exactly what she meant, although I would never have admitted it. There is a particular glow to being with someone who is supremely gifted. It’s not just the status it gives the person. Talent is its own kind of romance. You can make out with it all by yourself if you have to—which is frequently the case, since really talented people are often thinking about things other than yourself.
“It’s not all about that though, right?” I asked, half to Gwen, half to myself.
Gwen pursed her lips, thoughtfully. We were doing our makeup together in the bathroom. The thing about Gwen is she’s very honest, in her own way. Sometimes this gives her a savant-like quality, her ability to reduce complex questions to a singular basic component. It can be amusing or deflating, depending on your point of view at the time.
“Why does he think he loves me?” Gwen countered. “Isn’t it the same thing, really? Would he love me if I were just some normal girl?”
I looked at Gwen’s reflection in the mirror, and then at my own beside it. That’s when it became very clear to me that as Hilel was to me, so was Gwen to Hilel. Of course he was besotted with her. He was sunning himself in her glow. He was making out with her genius. The answer to her question seemed very clear. No, he wouldn’t.
“So what do you do when he says, ‘I love you’?” I asked brightly, so as not to collapse in tears and whatnot.
“Eyes, napkin, corner, inhale,” Gwen said calmly. “But I can’t keep doing that.”
“Eyes, napkin, corner …?”
“Irina told me about it,” Gwen explained. “I forget what it is in Russian. You look at the guy’s eyes, and then you look down at your napkin—or your lap or whatever—and then you look up at the corner of the room, and then you inhale.”
Gwen demonstrated, turning to look deeply into my eyes, her lips slightly parted. Then she lowered her eyes modestly at the bathroom sink as if overcome, then raised them to the corner of the ceiling as if seeking divine help for the storm inside her. Then she inhaled sharply, a little gasp.
“Jesus,” I said. “Well, that should hold him for a while.”
“Good, right? You’re supposed to do it to get the guy to fall in love with you, but it also works if you don’t know what to say.” She smiled the Gwen smile I love best, the one where the corner of her mouth indents and her shoulders curve girlishly, making her delicate collarbone stand out in the prettiest way.
I let the subject drop, but I remember that I felt fairly tormented, at the party, watching Hilel watch Gwen. I imagined him telling her that he loved her, and then falling even more deeply in love whenever she did eyes, napkin, corner, inhale at him.
And then Suit Guy walked in. I noticed him right away, but I was too depressed to do anything about it. I was also pretty drunk. And even though he was standing there so confidently, who was he, anyway? Tamara had reported that he was an investment banker from Connecticut, two things that seemed to rival each other in dullness.
Knowing Andrew as I do now, it makes perfect sense that he would pick out the most miserable girl at a party. He always said he was attracted to my independence and my calm, but I think he must have some sort of internal divining rod for buried drama.
How did I let that relationship happen? As fucked up as I was at the time, I wasn’t deaf, I wasn’t blind. I could see that he fell hard for me, that he wanted me very much. I could even see the red flag of his great need to be needed flapping in the wind, but I ignored all these things. I moved in with him six months later.
I wanted to get away. I wanted something of my own. I wanted to be someone’s star.
These are the kinds of wants you should probably ignore when it comes to relationships. In fact, you should probably ignore all wants when it comes to relationships, including “I want to fuck him.” Wait until someone hits you over the head with a rock and drags you back to his cave. This is a decent, honest method, and it’s the only way to circumvent how terribly shaming it is to be unsatisfied when all your wants are met.
One thing that definitely scrambled my judgment was the sex. This would be the most positive aspect of Andrew’s giving nature. He had even read a book about going down on women, What She Wants and Where She Wants It, which in my judgment has been egregiously overlooked for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Previously, my only sexual experience had been with male ballet dancers, who, probably due to the sultan-like nature of being a straight guy surrounded by innumerable willing girls desperate for someone to stop yelling at them and tell them they’re pretty, never expended a great deal of effort in that department. There were lots of things to like about Andrew. Even the things that irritated me were the sort of great things other girls would really want. I just wasn’t used to someone wanting to be “there” for me. It never occurred to me that there was a “there” there, if you know what I mean, and so I was always making sins of omission. Like not inviting him to come home with me for Grandpa Crane’s funeral so he could be supportive. Not telling him about little disappointments at work, or not waking him up when I had a nosebleed.
Never really explaining about Gwen.
I didn’t tell Gwen much about Andrew either. Certainly in the beginning I was cautious. Like my real affection for Wendy Griston Hedges, I kept it secret, which is the only way to maintain ownership of something. And like with Wendy, I passed it off publicly to Gwen as something of a joke.
“So how was it?” Gwen asked, after the first time I spent the night with Andrew.
“He’s got a hairy chest,” I said. “I was totally frightened.”
“Ew. What’s his furniture like?”
“That sort of dark wood/brushed steel kind of stuff.”
“Weird. So, are you all in love now or something?”
I always said no. To Gwen. The first time Andrew said it to me it was just after amazing sex, so I’m not to be blamed for replying in kind. But I was surprised by how good it felt to say it. It was something I could give him, something that made him happy, something that worked.
Gwen broke it off with Hilel, saying only that she wasn’t ready yet for something “more,” and that Hilel made too many demands on her.
“It’s hard to concentrate,” she told me. “With someone around you like that all the time.”
“Hmmm.” I was frequently exhausted by the time I saw Andrew at the end of a day, but he worked hard too, and so we mostly had sex and then went to sleep. On Sundays, which I had off since we were in rehearsal, we added food to this
routine, sometimes supplemented with an “event,” since Andrew worried about our lack of dating rituals. He was surprised by how many things I hadn’t done in New York. (“You’ve never been to Coney Island? You’ve never been to the Blue Note? You’ve never gone to a Knicks game?”)
“I like my routine,” Gwen said. “I like to be able to do my own thing.”
This sounded ominous to me, with my knowledge of what Gwen’s routines could consist of, and I wondered if we were in for another spell of obsessive cleaning and paranoia. But things seemed more or less under control. Hilel was miserable, and his misery was still painful for me to witness, even though I was officially getting what I wanted, where I wanted it.
At that time I was worrying constantly about my place in the company. I was dancing a lot of soloist roles, but Marius hadn’t promoted me. And most of my good parts tended to be in the more contemporary dances of our repertoire, which signified to me that Marius didn’t see me as a serious ballerina, someone worthy of the white tutu and tiara. Gwen had been made a soloist a year earlier, had danced her first Aurora in Sleeping Beauty.
I kept everything in boxes. A box for work, a box for Andrew, and a box for Gwen. But the lids to all the boxes wouldn’t stay shut. Their contents kept spilling over, demanding more room. The company had a three-week tour in Europe, which I planned on using to recommit myself totally to dance and showing Marius what I was made of. I sprained my ankle slightly the second night on a rain-slicked raked stage in Spain, and lay on my single bed in the hotel room I shared with Gwen for four days, reading—for some reason—Middlemarch, watching Spanish television with the sound off, and feeling a general sense of thwarted desire. My ankle was better by Lyon, where Gwen suffered from a bout of stage fright and woke me up in the middle of every night, convinced she had “forgotten” the choreography. Andrew offered to fly to London for our final stop and was hurt when I said it wasn’t a good idea, I wouldn’t be able to spend time with him, I needed to focus. The company returned to New York. Andrew had cleared a drawer, a bathroom shelf, and three inches in his closet for my use. I saw the words “Move in with me” hovering in a cartoon thought bubble above his head. I sensed he was waiting, scanning the air above my head to see the words form in my own cartoon bubble, where the letters were still hopelessly garbled. I brought over a bag to his apartment filled with contact lens solution, underwear, sweaters I never wore, and I did eyes, napkin, corner, inhale at him, hating myself. The company went on summer break. Gwen and I flew back to Grand Rapids to dance a benefit gala for the ballet company there. I felt myself eclipsed within my own family. My younger siblings were flush with success. Two years on the pro circuit and Keith was already making a name for himself—endorsement deals, a Sports Illustrated article, a Scandinavian model girlfriend. Gwen had danced Giselle for the queen of England. Marius had cast her as Juliet in his new staging of Romeo and Juliet. When my mother turned to me at dinner and asked, “Well, and so how are things with you, Kate?” I wanted to crawl under the table.
Back in New York, we began rehearsals for Romeo and Juliet. I learned that Marius had given me the role of Lady Capulet, Juliet’s mother.
“It’s actually a very good part,” I told Andrew. “There are hardly any featured roles for women in Romeo and Juliet other than, obviously, Juliet. Lady Capulet is a soloist role.”
“You should be Juliet,” said Andrew. It took years before he learned that I didn’t find it helpful when he was indignant on my behalf.
“No, no. You see, we’re all pretty much the same age in the company. I mean, there’s not a big spread,” I explained. “So someone has to dance someone’s mother. It doesn’t mean I’m old.”
“You’re twenty-three,” said Andrew, who was himself thirty. “You’re a baby.”
“Not really. We’re like dogs or something. You know how you say a four-year-old dog is like, twenty-eight or something, in human years? That’s how it is for dancers. I’m only a baby to you.”
“I still think you should be Juliet.”
“I don’t want to be Juliet. Lady Capulet gets to act up a storm. When I learn of Tybalt’s death, I actually get to rend my garments.”
“I’ll rend your garments,” said Andrew, who wasn’t usually funny on his own, but could piggyback on my funny pretty well.
I told Gwen that things were becoming more “serious” with Andrew.
“I think he wants me to move in with him,” I said.
“Oh no,” Gwen said. “Poor you. How are you going to get out of it?”
“I don’t think I want to get out of it,” I said. “I think I want to get … into it.”
“Oh.”
“You could afford this apartment on your own,” I said. “And it’s really too small for two people. I mean, it was fine when we were all students, but … anyway, you’d be happy not to have to pick up after me all the time, right?”
“Huh.”
“He hasn’t asked me yet. I just thought I’d let you know what direction things seem to be moving in.”
I said that as if I had no control over the direction things were moving in myself. In fact, I was desperate for something to control. Gwen would have understood that, I think, if I had told her. I did not. After a while she went into the bathroom and shut the door. I listened to the taps of the bath come on.
That was all for a week or so and then Gwen sat me down and gave me a long speech about how she thought it was really great that I had found somebody and that she could “see” me having this really great, happy life. “A normal life,” is how she put it.
But I didn’t want a normal life. I wanted an extraordinary life. I didn’t know which box that life was in, although Gwen seemed to be destined for one. But that was her own box, and I couldn’t fit in there.
Gwen went through another crisis of nerves, worse than the one in France, or maybe she felt more comfortable freaking out in the privacy of our own home. I went to Andrew’s—“fled” is really a more accurate verb—when the masking-tape Xs started appearing again. One day I came home to find all the house-plants missing.
“Gwen, what happened to our plants?”
“Your plants? They died.”
“They died?”
“Your plants died last week,” she said, turning a leaden face to me. “So I threw them out. You didn’t even notice.”
“They were our plants,” I said. “You could have watered them too. They were ours.”
“I can’t take care of everything,” she said, her face crumpling. “If you don’t take care of things they die. I didn’t know what to do.”
Frustrated, I stormed out of the apartment. Got about a block away. Then came back. Gwen was curled up on her futon bed with Clive in her arms, crying into his fur. I sat down next to her.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’ll get you new plants. I’m sorry I’m not being better. I promise I’ll try harder.”
I knew she meant it. Mostly I tried to pretend her suffering was just excess theatrics, and sometimes … maybe … it was, but when the tears weren’t pretty, when her hands shook and she destroyed things I knew she cherished (she had given those plants names, for fuck’s sake), what could I do?
I put my arms around her, she curled into them, and Clive jumped off her lap.
“See?” she sobbed. “Even Clive doesn’t want to be around me anymore.”
“I’ll try harder too,” I told her. “We’ll do better together.”
Later that day, I called Andrew and told him that my sister was going through a difficult time, and that I needed to spend a little more time with her.
“What’s wrong?”
“She’s just … she’s feeling a little lonely, I think. She’s used to me being around more.”
“Is this about your sister or is this about us?” he asked.
I wasn’t going to plead with Andrew. The minute he heard the coldness in my voice he switched tactics.
“Maybe we could include her more,” he offer
ed. “Saturday? I’ll take you both to the Hamptons. It’s the last weekend we have the house. You won’t have to do anything, just lie in deck chairs and eat barbecue. Tiny amounts of barbecue. Low fat-barbecue.”
“Thank you,” I said into the phone. “Thank you for being such a great guy.”
“Everything will be okay,” Andrew promised.
Because of my whole separate-box program, Andrew and Gwen hadn’t spent much time together at that point. On the car ride out to the Hamptons, I let Gwen ride in the front seat, knowing how carsick she got. I had warned Andrew that my sister was a little “depressed” and to be kind. Totally unnecessary, of course. Andrew took one look at Gwen’s wan little face and switched into hero mode. By Sunday, she had worked her magic. She lay on her deck chair and accepted the things Andrew brought her: a blanket, a gin and tonic, a sun hat, the Style section of the Times, grilled asparagus. Gwen made fun of herself, of her incompetence, always pointing out how stable and capable and competent I was by contrast. I saw her put her hand on Andrew’s forearm. Her fingers trembled. I thought I might actually throw up. That night we drove back to New York and I insisted on dropping Gwen off at our place and continuing on to Andrew’s.
I knew I had to move fast. I also knew I couldn’t out-Gwen Gwen. That night I climbed on top of Andrew in bed and held his wrists down with all the strength I had while we were having sex. I told him—in the most indelicate of vocabularies—how much I wanted him. Basically, if I had had access to a hot iron, I would have branded him. Afterward I coiled around him and said the three words I knew he most wanted to hear.
“I need you,” I said.
By the time we fell asleep, Andrew had asked me to move in with him.
Let me just say right now that even then I had some inkling of what I was doing. And what I was doing wasn’t securing my boyfriend against my sister. I was stealing my boyfriend from my sister. Gwen and Andrew would have made a great couple. He would have taken care of her, would have taken pride in taking care of her. She would have felt protected. She might have been saved.