“I don’t,” I said. “It’s not true. I don’t hate you.”
I took a deep breath. Then I put my hand on top of Miriam’s, the one that was bleeding.
“I’ve liked you since the first day I met you,” I said, looking Mrs. Schwebel right in the eye.
Miriam pulled her hand out from under mine. I immediately felt sorry I had done it.
This was not what I had planned. I was being brave, but it wasn’t for me to be brave. I was being brave with someone else’s family, someone else’s territory, not my own. I was laying claim to someone who did not want to be claimed. I was being brave on false terms. I’d never once told my own mother anything about Miriam.
“I think you should leave,” said Mrs. Schwebel.
“Please,” I said. “Please, I’m sorry.”
I felt like I was going to cry. Miriam didn’t say a word in my defense, but I don’t know what I would have expected her to say. If I were in her position, I don’t know what I would’ve done. Mr. Schwebel got up from the table. Ayala followed him into the kitchen.
“You’ve ruined Shabbat,” said Mrs. Schwebel. “I’m asking you again, nicely, to please leave.”
Miriam finally met my eyes.
“I’m so sorry,” I said to her, then looked down at my hands.
A tiny smear of blood, the size of an eyelash, had transferred from her finger to my palm.
“Just go,” she said.
CHAPTER 64
On the way home from the Schwebels’, I passed a barbershop. I slowed down my car and looked in the window. Then I parked and got out.
“I want a very short haircut,” I said to the barbers.
There were two of them, both handsome, with dark hair and eyes. One was tall with a muscular chest under a very low-cut black V-neck T-shirt. The other was just a few inches bigger than me with scruffy hair and a headband like a soccer player might wear. They smelled strongly of cologne, something with patchouli in it.
“Nooooo,” said V-neck. “You’re crazy! You’re so pretty as you are.”
“Just a trim, that’s it,” said the soccer player.
“Do you want my business or don’t you?” I asked.
V-neck sniffed and cleared his throat.
“Well, then,” he said. “Sit down.”
He pointed to the barber chair in front of him and snapped his scissors twice.
“So what kind of cut are you looking for exactly?”
“Not like yours,” I said.
He had a Caesar-looking thing, cut very short and combed forward into a bangs situation. He didn’t crack a smile.
“Do you want me to leave it a little long?” he asked. “Let’s do a lob. That’s a long bob; it’s very trendy.”
“No,” I said.
I pulled up a photo of the two remaining Beastie Boys on my phone and pointed to Ad-Rock.
“Can you do that?” I asked.
I imagined Miriam grabbing me by the back of my head, the way a rough buzz would feel in her fingers. I pictured her guiding me by the ears down to her cunt, then tousling my forelock as I licked.
“Of course I can do that,” he said.
He didn’t move.
“Okay,” I said. “So do that.”
I closed my eyes and felt him moving his hands through my hair, then parting it on the right and combing it. When I opened my eyes and looked in the mirror, nothing had happened yet. My hair was no different. But staring into my own eyes, I felt like I was already changing, that another person was looking at me. Then he moved the scissors around my head with a rapid motion, and I saw some of my long locks fall to the floor. As they fell, I felt that they were the locks of another person—not mine. I imagined they were the payos of Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel. I closed my eyes again and listened to the buzz of the electric razor, humming along. I hummed “Oseh Shalom,” the old version of the song I had known. I felt a wild rush.
I was still humming when I got into my car. It had been a few minutes since the barber had cut the last of it off, but I had no regrets. I looked in the mirror. I was handsome, foxy. I liked my long neck. Or did I look like a potato? No, I had a nice-shaped head. I started the car. Then I looked in the mirror again. I saw a flash of colors behind me: pink, blue, yellow, green.
I turned around and looked at the back seat.
“What the fuck?”
Lying there, as though it had been with me all along and was just coming for another ride, was the clay figure.
CHAPTER 65
I thought about throwing it out the car window. But that wasn’t good enough. What if it came back again, like a zombie in Breathers?
I decided I would burn it. I bought a lighter at 7-Eleven, but Theraputticals was apparently nonflammable. I just kept singeing my hand.
I decided I would microwave it to death. But when I took it home, I brought it into bed with me instead. I lay there on my dirty sheets, crying next to it. It smelled like baby powder.
I wasn’t sure if I was crying over Miriam or the strangeness of finding the figure again or because of my missing hair.
The heart gets wounded—so what? I thought. I’d seen all the plays. I should have been prepared. Love goes. But what I hadn’t known was how good the love would feel when it was there, like a hymn moving through me all the time. Or if Jews didn’t have hymns, then a rhythm. I’d moved my body in time to it the best I could. But I hadn’t been able to hold on.
I touched my hands to my head. I noticed I could feel them more closely against my scalp. It felt good at least to be able to offer myself comfort in this way, so close, skin to skin.
I rubbed my head and cried for a long time. Then I stood up and went to the mirror, mussing my hair around, what was left of it, pushing it forward and back. It looked better like this, messy on purpose, not frozen stiff the way V-neck had gelled it. It was maybe even cute. It looked cool when I parted it on the right side and tousled the left and the back. There was a surfer iteration where I pushed all the hair forward and roughed up the front.
“Punk,” I said out loud and gave myself the finger, kissing the air.
My stomach felt hollow. It made a little noise like it was crying. I called the fake ’50s diner down the street and ordered a grilled cheese, french fries, a chocolate milkshake, and a Diet Coke. After I ordered, I played with my hair some more in the mirror.
“What do we think?” I asked the clay figure.
The clay figure said nothing.
“What good are you?” I asked.
I took the figure outside with me anyway. I walked down the street with it dangling from my hand, like a child holding her favorite dolly. People looked at me as I walked. I wondered if they were looking at me because of my new haircut or because I had been crying or because I was clutching a colorful clay figure. I didn’t care whether they thought I looked good.
CHAPTER 66
“Damn, Rachel!” said Ofer when he saw my hair.
I wasn’t sure if it was a good damn or a bad damn, but it seemed like a bad damn. Regardless, he caught himself quickly. I watched him flay himself internally, probably using the phrase body shaming.
“Cut your hair, I see,” he said, trying again. “Looks—empowering! Great to see you empowering yourself.”
Just shut the fuck up, I thought.
“Yep,” I said, tucking the clay figure under my chair. “Feeling mighty.”
I’d brought the figure into the office with me and kept it on my lap, touching it with my left hand while my right hand typed. I felt attached to it now—like a kid’s blankie, or the way people talked about their relationship to crystals. As long as I was touching the figure, I felt like I could keep from crying.
NPR Andrew didn’t address my hair directly. But I could see that it won me some points with him—made me look more indie, I guess.
“Ever seen Salmon Jelly?” he asked. “Danish youth movement film from the seventies. Watched it this weekend. Tragicomic exploration of pornography, melanchol
ia, and nationalistic conformity.”
Then Ana walked by.
“Rachel! What on earth have you done to your hair?” She made a noise that sounded like a cackle.
“Cut it,” I said casually.
“I see,” she said. “Well, it is a rather… interesting look.”
“Interesting how?” I asked.
She moved closer to my desk.
“You look a little bit like—well, between the hair and the suit, it makes you look a little…” Her voice trailed off for a moment, then she whispered, “Gay.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Not that it’s a bad thing. But is that the look you’re going for?”
I wished I could cry to her. I wanted to be held by her, comforted, seated on her knee and rocked against her breast, transported into that white floral scent. I wanted kindness, wisdom, infinite understanding. I wanted to be mommied by a woman who was kind only to me. I wanted her to be a completely different woman than she was.
CHAPTER 67
“I feel okay about being intimacy avoidant when it comes to my death,” I said into the microphone.
I’d returned to This Show Sucks to try to get a little serotonin going by way of natural disasters. The show was now being held two nights a week, and in my absence I’d been cordoned off into the inferior Wednesday slot. I hoped that if I could really nail the annihilation piece of my mudslide bit, I might be re-promoted to Thursdays. With the way I was feeling, I had plenty to say about obliteration.
“Anyone else here hoping for a quick and painless death?” I asked.
Only a few takers. A quick and painless death was less popular than asking if anyone came from the East Coast.
“I think it’s fucked that there are mean people who get to die peacefully in their sleep and nice people who end up suffering for years,” I said. “It’s like, check your death privilege.”
“Check your death privilege!” someone called out.
It was Jace.
Later, he found me at the bar. I was drinking a beer, a regular one—Guinness—not even light, when he tapped me on the shoulder.
“Oh, hello,” I said.
“You were really great tonight,” he said. “Best I’ve seen you.”
“Thanks. It wasn’t me up there. Just almost-me.”
“What?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I’m surprised you’re here. I thought you were shooting the second season up in Vancouver.”
“They put Liam in a coma,” he said.
“Sorry to hear that.”
“Nah, it’s okay, just for two episodes. When did you cut your hair?”
“A few days ago.”
“It’s cool. I like it. You look really intense or something.”
“Thanks?”
“No, I mean it really looks good. It’s a totally different look for you. It’s probably your soul aesthetic.”
“My soul aesthetic?”
“Yeah, that’s what my acting coach calls it. It’s when your look and your soul align.”
“Oh.”
“Like this,” he said, pointing to his leather jacket and his rosaries. “This is my soul aesthetic.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Of course, my stylist is trying to rebrand me. She thinks I need to go more nineties, like an early Luke Perry vibe, may he rest in peace. But I see myself as more of an… eclectic. A little James Dean, a little gothic, a little spiritual—that’s me. A hybrid. That’s my soul aesthetic.”
“Right.”
“Everyone is always trying to change you in this town.”
“I think that’s part of the job,” I said. “It comes with celebrity and getting shit for free and making lots of money and getting to have people look at you all the time and tell you how great you are.”
“I don’t even care about people looking at me.”
“If they weren’t looking, you’d care.”
“Maybe,” he said. “But I’m just interested in making good art.”
Was he really referring to Breathers as art?
“You’re a real artist,” he said. “I can tell.”
He reached out and chucked me under the chin. Why was he touching me?
“It’s all about the craft for you,” he said. “Not that you aren’t ridiculously adorable too. So cute.”
He moved his hand to my left cheek, stroked it. I flinched.
“Sorry,” he said, snapping his hand away. “I’ve wanted to do that for a long time.”
I looked down the bar. There were four college kids, out-of-towners, gawking at us. I was excited that they’d seen him touch my cheek. The thought of it made me feel giddy, much giddier than the actual act of him touching my cheek.
“How long?” I asked.
“What?”
“How long have you wanted to do that? Did you want to do that when we ate the hot dogs?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Damn, I had no idea. What about at lunch with Ofer?”
“Definitely,” he said. “Even when I caught you eating in the bathroom at the cast party.”
“A defining moment,” I said.
“But tonight. Tonight you’ve got the soul aesthetic!”
I burst out laughing.
Jace’s friend Paul from Akron was onstage, newly bearded and wearing a checkered beanie. Apparently, he’d been demoted to Wednesdays too. He was making his way through a set about air travel.
“Every plane is stuck in 1997,” he said. “Somewhere, embedded on every aircraft, is a secret room where Bill Clinton is always getting a blow job.”
“Wanna get out of here?” I asked. “You can touch my other cheek.”
CHAPTER 68
From a technical standpoint, Jace was a good kisser. But making out with him in my living room felt like being under slow siege. He moved gently and caringly and that was the problem. I couldn’t tell what disgusted me more: him feigning tenderness, or the possibility that it might be real. I wished the out-of-towners were still watching. In my mind, I kept repeating, Liam, Liam, Liam, to remind myself that a lot of people out there would love to be in my position.
When he began to eat my pussy, I felt a murderous instinct well up within me. His tongue meandered leisurely in the neighborhood of my clit, without zooming in on the clit itself.
We got all night, his tongue was saying.
Can you just expedite? I wanted to cry.
He moaned a lot down there, as though he were having his own zombie apocalypse. I squeezed his head between my thighs to muffle the sounds, but he only took this as a sign that I was having an awesome time. He increased the speed of his casual crawl, tonguing harder, still circumventing the clit itself, moaning all the way.
“You wax your chest?” I asked when he took off his shirt.
His chest was bare, with some stubbly regrowth between his nipples.
“The stylist makes me,” he groaned.
He had nice, thick pubes, though, and a perfectly lovely penis—clean, handsome, just above average—a penis that all the Liam lovers out there would be delighted to discover.
There really was nothing wrong with the aesthetic part of Jace’s “soul aesthetic.” It was the soul part that was missing. That was what was lacking in his pussy-eating. You had to be really smart about the way you handled the pussy, and not only smart, but intuitive. You had to listen to it. You had to follow the moisture. Jace looked good performing, but he wasn’t intuiting.
“Let me get on top,” I said.
I sat on his cock and began to ride him. I imagined I was the one with the cock, that I was Liam. But if I was Liam, who was he? He was still Jace. So I was Liam, played by me, fucking Jace with my psychic cock.
“Spread your legs wider,” I said, wandering my hand down to the skin between his balls and his asshole.
With confidence, I inserted the tip of my finger into his ass as I fucked him. I felt his asshole twitch around my finger in pleasure. He moaned and writhed against me.
“Say my name,” he said.
“Jace.”
“No,” he said. “My real name.”
“What do you mean?”
“My name is Jason Blagojevich. Say it.”
“Jason Blagojevich,” I said.
“Louder.”
“Jason Blagojevich!”
I said it with all the passion I could muster. My performance was strong, actually.
Acting is behaving truthfully under imaginary circumstances, I thought, remembering my college textbooks. More like behaving imaginarily under truthful circumstances.
“Jason Blagojevich!” I laughed.
I was no longer Liam, I was just me. Jace’s zombie moans rose to a crescendo. Then he came.
CHAPTER 69
I called an emergency morning tea with Ana in the kitchen. I was eager to share my news. I wanted a witness to help elevate the drab reality of sex with Jace into an intoxicating story. I wanted her camaraderie, and more than that, I wanted her approval.
Someone had left half an entire sheet cake, white with white frosting, just sitting on the counter, with a sign that said EAT ME! Eyeing the cake, I recounted to Ana everything that had happened the night before. I excluded nothing except the part where I’d invited him to come over. I wanted to make it seem as though he had initiated it, which he sort of had with the cheek-touching—but not fully. I wanted to seem wanted, to wow her, and give off zero whiffs of desperation. It had been confirmed: I was the object of Jace’s affection. That was it. For good measure, I even told her that he’d begged me to stick the finger in his ass. That’s how much he’d wanted me inside of him.
“So he’s gay,” she said, when I finished my story.
“No!” I said. “A finger up the ass has nothing to do with his sexual orientation.”
I didn’t like that she was coming up with her own interpretation of this detail of the story, the part where I had shined so bright. Did he have to be gay in order to agree to have sex with me—as though I were an afterthought, an accident, maybe even a beard? Why couldn’t she see me as a person that he could genuinely like?
Milk Fed Page 18