And then for a week Eric doesn’t answer my texts, or my emails, or my calls, and I am maintaining my smile in the middle of my open office plan, leafing through this new book we’re putting out on the virtues of sharing. And now I know where he lives so ten days after having fucked him in the bed he shares with his wife I go right up to the door and find it unlocked, and no one is home, so I walk around the house and pick up these cold lemons on the counter and roll them around in my hands, and I open the fridge and take a drink of milk and carry the carton up to the bedroom where a door opens to a closet with a collection of women’s clothes and I gather the silk and wool and cashmere in my hands and then there is a voice, and I turn and standing in the doorway of the attached bathroom in yellow rubber gloves and a T-shirt that says Yale is his wife.
3
I got the abortion in my junior year of high school. There was a brief moment when I considered the pregnancy, when I tried to halve a grain of sand and accommodate its ambition to yield a pair of lungs. At the time, I worked retail at a dying mall. Eighteen hours a week smoothing chinos and shadowing aggressive Quebecois customers who came to upstate New York to exploit our low-priced bids to stay in business. There were only four stores open in the mall. A CVS that kept the animal crackers next to the douches, a Deb with five-dollar packs of high-waisted panties, a gun shop, and my store, a scrappy little boutique for the professional woman. I was a miserable sales associate, prone to confessional spirals during my attempts to move the store loyalty card, but an asset as long as I did enough work to afford the veteran associates more time to socialize. During lunchtime, I manned the store alone, and the two other associates suspended their concerns about my awkwardness with customers to go have lunch at Boston Market. That I was not invited to these lunches felt more like a kindness than a slight. They were good to me, inclined to bring back some creamed spinach and runny macaroni, which I ate by a defunct Key Bank whose ATMs were filled with honeycomb. During this time, I couldn’t tell if I liked being alone, or if I only endured it because I knew I had no choice.
* * *
I was not popular and I was not unpopular. To invite admiration or ridicule, you first have to be seen. So the story of the cell that once divided inside me and its subsequent obliteration is also the story of the first man who saw me. The man who owned the gun shop, Clay, a metalhead who was pathological in the maintenance of his teeth. He was the seventh black person I’d met in Latham. Mixed-race, a riotous Punnett square of dominant Korean and Nigerian genes, so ethnically ambiguous that under different kinds of light he appeared to be different men. The first day we met, he was smoking a cigarette on the DDR machine outside the shuttered movie theater. He told me that he was in debt and that he and his brother were no longer speaking and there was something so easy about his immediate familiarity that I told him how my mother died. How I found her with one shoe still on. How I kept painting this moment and found no format suitable. How it had only been five months since her death and my father was already seeing someone. This was the contradiction that would define me for years, my attempt to secure undiluted solitude and my swift betrayal of this effort once in the spotlight of an interested man. I was pretending not to worry about the consequences of my isolation. But whenever I talked to anyone, I found myself overcompensating for the atrophy of my social muscles.
* * *
I was happy to be included in something, even if it was a mostly one-sided conversation with a man twice my age. We met on my lunch breaks and he bought me ice cream. I sat in his station wagon and watched him load and unload his gun. I leaned over the display case with the tanto-point knives and let him run his fingers through my hair. When he asked me how old I was, I lied. When I told him my father had not been home for weeks, he made sure I had money for food, and sometimes he would call and make me tell him what I had to eat. But still there were moments I felt his caution, a surprising squareness about his use of profanity, unsubtle inquiries about the ages of the imaginary boyfriends I supplied.
* * *
On our fifth lunch date, he plucked a caping knife from the display and pressed it into my hands, the shop’s familiar rotation of Swedish death metal a murmur against the weight of the oak and steel. Even as he tried to preserve the part of me that was apparently untouched, sometimes I felt he was trying to scare me. As kids are, I was especially responsive to this challenge, determined to be stoic and game. So we got Red Bulls at the CVS, and he pierced my ears using a Zippo and a self-threading needle. We drove to his house, a squat double-wide in Troy, and he made me steak and showed me his antique guns. There was something automated about him, an offhanded perpetual motion, the inevitability of a weapon in his hands and the unconscious priming of the weapon to do what it was made to do, his attention elsewhere as he seated rounds in the magazine and tugged the slide. The way he would talk without prompting or encouragement, as if all this time, he had been waiting, desperately, for a captive audience. But there were moments that neutralized my fear, moments he passed the store as I was firming up the sale rack, and in the air was a mutual understanding that we were both looking for something to destroy, that we were people of color in a town that was colorless, a language developing between us that wasn’t so much romantic as it was breathless with shared conspiracy. So when he pressed the caping knife into my hand, I took this to mean that to him, I had become a person. He had considered me and noted my deliberation, my central nervous system, the possibility that even within my small, teenage universe, I might have a reason to kill.
* * *
At home, I pressed the cold, flat side of the knife against my thigh. I watched thirty-eight minutes of porn on the family computer, and then I took a bus to Clay’s house. He didn’t ask any questions. He only opened the door and pulled me inside. It happened in the dark. I followed him into his bedroom, and everything smelled like cordite and ash. His body was heavy and he trembled when he came. I felt my power in the high, desperate sound of his pleasure. I felt my error in how little I thought it would mean. I didn’t tell him I was a virgin because I could not bear to be treated tenderly. I didn’t want him to be careful. I wanted it to be over with. So when it hurt and I was too proud to say stop and so said more, I believed, like a Catholic or a Tortured Artist, that the merit of a commitment correlates directly to the pain you endure in its pursuit. I left his house and bled privately at home, happy to have done the thing that everyone is supposed to do. I had thought it would feel better, but I was new. Initiated and lean, like I had been shorn of all my hair and let into a bright, secret room. Each time we fucked, there were fewer words, moments a sudden and inscrutable darkness would find its way into the room as he pressed me down. I’m not a bad person, he said, as I put on my shoes. And then I was pregnant. Then my father came home, the car smashed in on one side. I didn’t ask him where he’d been and he didn’t ask who knocked me up. When I told him, I said that it was someone from school. Without comment, he drove me to the clinic, and when it was over, he drove me back home. He brought me tea and ibuprofen, and then left the house for another week. During that week, there was more blood than reasonable. There was the vague feeling I had escaped something preposterous. And there was my mother’s record collection. I hadn’t gone into my mother’s room for months, but I unearthed Donna Summer’s Four Seasons of Love and hooked it onto the player. I opened the windows and let some air in, and a laugh bloomed and promptly died behind my teeth. A moment in which a joyless and reflexive action of the throat gave me hope that at some point, another laugh might follow.
* * *
When I turn and see Eric’s wife, a current passes through an open window and it is the perfect iteration of that stale spring—the dust and vinyl, the interior of Clay’s station wagon powdered in ash, my underwear bloodied at the bottom of the trash—and there is a sound in the room, a scream I recognize as my own laughter.
* * *
My laugh, the real one, is a robust, ugly thing that has, on occasion, start
led the drink right out of a date’s hands. So full credit is due when there is only the barest inclination on her face that she has heard it. I stand there with the sleeve of her silk blouse crushed in my fist and I think how strange it would be to say her name, to acknowledge that I know who she is even as she and Eric have taken such care to arrange our separation. It seems impossible that this amorphous Essex County specter with no distinct social media presence is standing before me, and that her name is Rebecca.
* * *
I try to reconcile the woman I have imagined with the woman before me, but there is too much data, and too many of my assumptions have quietly become absolutes. I make amendments reluctantly, surprised by the beauty of her feet. Otherwise she is exceedingly regular, everything about her so nondescript as to almost be sinister, the halo of dirty-blond hair around her sun-battered face, her boyish lean, the invisible segue of thigh into calf, and the general feeling that if she took her clothes off, her body would be as smooth and as featureless as silt.
* * *
I turn away from the closet to face her as she peels off her gloves. There is a moment when I think she is preparing to punch me. She moves toward me, her carriage so upright it would be funny if it weren’t so eerie in its apparent deliberation. And it’s not that I’m scared, but the idea of forming complete sentences and listening to her complete sentences in this room with an unmade bed I have once assisted in unmaking seems unbearable, and so I turn and run down the stairs, and I look over my shoulder and see that she is coming after me, her hair catching a shaft of sun, the indignity of what we’re doing turning my stomach as I cut through the kitchen and into the backyard, where she falls through a sprinkler, her feet losing their tread on the grass.
* * *
Technically I am home free, but then I turn and see the turf on her knees. I see a neighbor kid watching from his aboveground pool, and I am embarrassed, shamed by the lazy tenor of the cul-de-sac. The gardenias and unsecured bicycles and me, breathing heavily over someone’s wife. So I walk back and take her damp hands into mine, then pull her to her feet.
“I know who you are but I don’t want to discuss it, if that’s all right with you,” she says, dusting herself off. “I just wasn’t finished looking at you. I didn’t expect you to be so young. It’s awful.”
“Awful?”
“Yes, for you,” she says, and the neighbor kid slips out of the pool and runs back into his house.
“It’s late. You should stay for dinner,” she says, thumbing a bruise that is forming on her arm, and it is an understatement to say that I would rather do anything else, but then I feel her expectation, that she is not so much asking a question as allowing me time to confirm an obvious conclusion—that in exchange for her compromise, for her coolness about what has just happened, something is owed. She directs me to a guest room with its own bathroom, looks me over, and says, Humid, isn’t it, which is an indirect way of bringing my attention to a thing I am already aware of—this glandular free-for-all happening underneath my clothes. I look in the mirror, and my face is shining. She shows me the towels and suggests that I wash up. When I emerge from the shower, a dress is laid out on the bed, cornflower blue and immediately recognizable to me as something I would likely never be able to afford, a totem of a realm where sticker price is incidental data, a realm so theoretical that when I consider what I would have to do to enter it, I can only think of my debt, an aggrieved Sallie Mae representative standing above me while I sleep.
As I try to put on the dress, it is the first time I suspect she is trying to humiliate me. It is so small that squeezing into it comes at the expense of 90 percent of my mobility. This potential cruelty is so specific, so much like a courtesy that has merely gone awry, that I feel obligated to be a good sport. I consider leaving through the window, but then I see there are cars gathered outside, a steady stream of guests funneling into the house. Standing within this wave of guests is Eric, home from work, greeting everyone at the door. He checks his watch and frowns. It is 7:00 p.m., and apparently this is when adult parties start. I remind myself that I wanted to demonstrate my seriousness, to show him that I will not be ignored, even as I consider the reality of confronting him and panic. Seeing him through the window, though, I find his aggressive normalcy insulting. I think: I can be normal, too.
So I hobble down the stairs, every degree of motion a threat to the integrity of the single zipper separating my breasts from everyone in the room. I wish I had known there would be this many people, and Rebecca’s omission of this information makes me wonder if she is, in fact, fucking with me. It’s clear she is a magician of some sort: in the short time it has taken me to shower and dress, the place has been transformed into a heavily creped exercise in adult merriment, the confetti and clusters of graphic foil balloons a disorienting mixture against the faint thrum of monk-heavy New Age. But the woman of the house is nowhere to be found.
* * *
I brace myself to be seen by him, prepare to appear incidental and cool, but still I search the crowd for the white of an eye. I seize the details, the deliberate—the fruity dental office artwork, the shelves of crystal, the unsmiling shot of Eric and Rebecca in the ruins of Pompeii—and everything fermenting underneath, the sagging garbage in the kitchen, a still-moist handprint on the TV. I take a crab cake from a server just for something to do with my hands. I want to eat it and give my stomach something more to do than churn around the bile steadily rising into my mouth, but otherwise I feel beyond food, beyond the vulnerabilities of my intestinal tract, and this is so unprecedented that it doesn’t even bother me that every available beverage appears to be nonalcoholic.
The guest who is standing beside me seems to come to the same realization, his face souring as he palms a Sprite. He turns and I feel him assessing me, trying to figure out how I fit, the makeup of the party so homogeneous it gives me up as a matter of course. Normally I would be unconcerned about this level of scrutiny, but I am completely sober, the dress hindering my ability to breathe.
Luster: A Novel Page 4