“How do you know the couple?” he asks, and then something catches my eye across the room. A black child in a pink wig and a tummy shirt, smoking a candy cigarette.
“Who is that?”
“Because I’ve never seen you before.”
“What?” I say, scanning his muppety body for any sign of definition before I turn and see that the girl is gone.
“You didn’t go to Yale, did you?” he asks, and the phrasing of this question doesn’t escape my notice. I can’t say why I have always felt obligated to impress even men I don’t want to fuck, but I’m embarrassed by the prospect of his pity, this man I don’t know and will likely never see again. So I don’t say I dropped out of art school after sending some incoherent Comic Sans poems to the department chair. I don’t say I enrolled in an indistinct community college, threw away most of my paintings, and graduated with what is arguably a more useless degree.
“I work with Rebecca,” I say, which, out of all the available lies, is the one I can support the least. I think I see Eric on the other side of the room but it is just a lamp.
“So you raise the dead.”
“What?”
“I guess someone has to do the dirty work, right?”
“Yes, I guess.”
“I can’t believe they made it fourteen years.”
“Who?”
“Rebecca and Eric?” He points above me, and when I look, I see there is a detail I missed. A banner that reads: The Lace Anniversary. “Kind of a weird one to celebrate. Though I guess it is a feat. Do you ever look at them when they’re together? Like different species,” he says, and we look at each other as I catch up to the conversation we are really having. A conversation that always happens on the fringes of someone else’s good fortune—the murmurs of disbelief, envy. It puts me at ease. I smile at him and move into the crowd.
* * *
I am not good at parties. The music, either a squeaky-clean parade of Now That’s What I Call Music, or curated by someone who thinks they discovered Portishead, everyone waiting for the segue into late-night power balladry or self-conscious karaoke, looking around to gauge the right amount of participation, “Don’t Stop Believin’” or “Push It” underneath the inevitability of a regular colonoscopy. The too close and too wet—the shout I receive into my face, a stranger’s spit underneath my eyelid, in my drink, the wine spilling between my fingers as I try to escape the person at the party who is especially desperate not to be caught standing alone. It is a foregone conclusion I will once or twice hurt someone’s feelings deeply because of something I say or a face I make, which I will of course think about when I ride the train home, and actually, forever, even though I tried to be merry and keep the conversation light, even though I can’t sleep and I can’t shit, and someone is dying but that one song tells you to slide to the left and you have no choice.
* * *
I stand on the fringe of these starched, professional circles and try to follow the narrative arc of a stranger’s portfolio. And then as someone is deep into an account of a deck renovation and simultaneously a screed about the sympathy we should all have for the police, the child in the pink wig is climbing the stairs, her brown Kewpie face opening when she turns and looks directly into my eyes. The moment it happens, it’s clear the eye contact is a mistake, that she’d glanced at the crowd and did not mean to find me looking. But the surprise on her face is short-lived as she cools, turns away, and continues up the stairs. Then Rebecca appears, practically out of thin air.
“I could use your help,” she says, pulling me across the room and into the kitchen. Once inside, I swat her away and try to regain some dignity.
“Happy anniversary,” I say as she shakes the drawer, reaches inside.
“Thanks,” she says, arching an eyebrow at her watch. I take her in. She is, I suppose, sexy in the way a triangle can be sexy, the clean pivot from point A to B to C, her body and face breaking no rules, following each other in a way that is logical and curt. Of course, in motion, when she turns and stoops to open the oven, the geometry is weirder. She takes the cake out and kicks the door closed. She opens a tub of frosting, pops the tabs on the cake tin, and takes a generous dollop of frosting onto the spatula.
“Is my husband drinking?”
“What?” I ask, watching as she tries to frost the cake, which is still too hot to take the spread.
“Does Eric drink when he’s with you?”
“No,” I lie, adjusting my breasts. I put a palm to my forehead and find that it is slick.
“He shouldn’t be drinking.”
“Why?” I say, wiping my palms on the dress, only to find that the fabric, this slippery second skin, does not absorb the moisture. Rebecca looks up at me through her hair, a bead of sweat pearling at her hairline, rolling down onto one false, mink lash. As Rebecca reaches into a bag of confectioner’s sugar with her bare hand, I think of Eric’s flushed face, the time he pushed me to the floor. How I wanted him to do it again.
“I know you’ve been here before.” She stacks one layer on top of the other, filling oozing down the sides. She looks at me directly, and this is the first time I notice her eyes are gray.
“You were in our bedroom,” she says. “I could feel it. Everything was so neat.” She puts her hand on my shoulder. “I know you don’t understand. I can tell you’ve never owned anything,” she says, and then she withdraws and says it’s time to bring out the cake. When I look at it, it is perhaps the least appetizing thing I have ever seen. She puts the cake onto a platter and carries it out to the party. As I follow her out, I notice that there is a door by the pantry, and beyond this door a dark side street, haloed in lamplight and slick with rain. She is halfway into the other room, something exhausted between us that makes me certain it wouldn’t matter if I left. I can’t say why I don’t.
* * *
And there he is, standing in the center of the room, the lights dimming as Rebecca gives him the platter. He holds it awkwardly, frowns as a camera flash blooms from the back of the room and throws the moment into sharp relief. Rebecca pulls a candle from behind her ear, asks the room for a light. When one is supplied, she turns to me and places it in my hand. Amid his effort to balance the cake, Eric notices me. What happens to him then, a sudden and swiftly contained conniption that draws all the color from his face, is not half as delicious as it should be. Eric’s fly is down and this current iteration, this soft, breathing haircut—I can’t say what it is, but I get this feeling that this is actually his most honest form, and it really pisses me off.
* * *
So I light the candle and recede into the dark as another flash tears through the room and Rebecca starts singing into a mic with a cord that a guest coming from the bathroom nearly trips over, her hair platinum in the flash when it becomes apparent to everyone in the room that Rebecca hasn’t opted for a standard lovey-dovey Beach Boys or Boyz II Men but a Phil Collins joint, arguably the Phil Collins joint, with no musical accompaniment, the negative space of the original song having nothing on this rendition, this staggered delivery that makes clear to everyone in the room that she is taking no artistic liberties and remaining faithful to the song’s true pacing, which in a silent room makes it sort of an ordeal, creates a desperation on the part of the crowd that after each curt pause, her voice be able to take these familiar turns. Her voice is mostly amelodic, and between the choice of song and the cramped space of the living room, everyone is attuned to her copious lyrical mistakes. It is unclear if she is singing to anyone in particular, though Eric is doing his best to be a good audience, smiling wearily for whichever lovers of chaos are still taking photos with the flash. The cake nearly slides off the platter when he turns to look at me, and I turn to look at Rebecca, who is, despite everything, the most comfortable person in the room. She raises her arm above her head on the segue into it’s no stranger to you and me, and as one is wont to do after this verse, the whole room is braced for the breakdown, which Rebecca accommodates with a p
ause so sustained that I hear someone across the street scream, Where is the dog! before Rebecca ties up her cover, brings the lights back up, and starts clapping for herself, which we all dutifully echo back.
* * *
All this time Eric hasn’t looked away from me, within his confusion a promise of retribution that I find thrilling—historically the sort of high sweetest at its inception, when a man’s wrath is just a consideration, when he curtails the impulse because he thinks he’s different while you know he is the same. As Rebecca takes a handful of cake and forces it into his mouth, the room fills with laughter and I turn and climb the stairs, partly to go to the bathroom and partly to be alone. I look through their cabinets and find it a surprisingly unsatisfying activity, not just because everything is generic and OTC, but because I have come to the part of the night where I am incapable of any uppercase emotion, and every circuit responsible for my cellular regeneration has begun to smoke.
* * *
This is the conclusion to most parties I attend, and it usually helps to take a moment alone in the bathroom, though the inevitable presence of a mirror can complicate things. Even if I have done the adequate mental jujitsu to convince myself that I appear like a normal human being, a trip to the bathroom to regroup can on occasion turn into the kind of fun-house voodoo that happens in DMV photos and long exposures of Victorian children. There is something about looking into someone else’s mirror, something that always gives me more information than I need. In the past three years I have tried to turn lemons into lemonade by reciting old Tumblr affirmations into these mirrors, but it hasn’t helped.
* * *
I take some cough syrup out of the cabinet and take a long drink. I look in the mirror and I do not hate how I look, nor have I ever, even though I am not usually the prettiest person in the room. My biggest issue when I look into the mirror is that sometimes the face I see doesn’t feel like mine.
“I am happy to be alive. I am happy to be alive.”
“What are you doing?” a voice says, and I turn around and find the kid in the wig eating a slice of pizza.
“You’re real.”
“Obviously,” she says. There are times I interact with kids and recall my abortion fondly, moments like this when I cross paths with a child who is clearly a drag.
“Obviously,” I say, screwing the cap back on the cough syrup.
“I’ve never seen you before.”
“Probably because we don’t run in the same circles, kid.”
“There are no black people in this neighborhood,” she says, and I catch my reflection in the mirror and feel a tightness in my chest.
“What’s your name?”
“Akila.”
“Are there really no black people in this neighborhood?” I ask, just as Eric appears behind her.
“Go to your room, please,” he says, and Akila shrugs and disappears down the hall. He waits for her door to close and then closes the space between us, and when I look up at him I receive him anew. His overwhelming height, the intensity of his eye contact, the general feeling that he is not a man who sleeps. To some extent I’ve had to revise him every time we’ve met, but this feels different. The last time I saw him was the first time I ever saw him come, an elastic split second made for paint, somehow analogous to the expression he is making as he tries to find the words, his mouth opening and closing without sound. I like this part. I remind myself of this when I realize I am nervous, when I notice how incongruously this degree of anger hangs on him, and that I cannot anticipate how this anger will manifest.
“What are you doing in my house?”
“Congratulations on the anniversary.”
“What is the matter with you?”
“Everything is the matter,” I say, just as Rebecca appears. She pauses and looks at us.
“I was thinking we could start a game of Trivial Pursuit,” she says, and now that I look between them and consider them as a unit, they do seem like different species: Rebecca a lonely, carnivorous bird, Eric a vegetarian mammal with a short, panicked life.
“I’m going to take her home,” he says.
“This is our anniversary party.”
“Yes, I know.” He fishes his keys out of his pocket, grabs my arm, and starts ushering me down the stairs.
“Okay, so call a car,” Rebecca says.
“The capital of Kansas is Topeka. Rosebud was the sled,” he says before he pulls me down the stairs and out of the door, then stuffs me into the car. Nothing about the interior of the car has changed. It is still vaguely moist, still smacking of something lightly fried, still old in a way that has less to do with the window cranks than the whine of the steering wheel, the car taking the road in rough licks, so distressed by the transition from Jersey to New York you can almost feel it burning through the fuel. Of course I can’t help but think about the night our route was reversed, when Rebecca’s name emerged in LED, my thumb above Decline. When we were high and inoculated against embarrassment, the car crooked at the curb as he pulled me up the stairs. But when you have nights like those, anomalies where all the stars defer, and you are not faking, not even a little, the polite thing is to never mention it again. Eric reaches into the glove compartment and retrieves a flask.
“Do you understand that this is not okay? This is my family,” he says, taking a long drink. I watch him, count the seconds during which his eyes are closed. For a moment, the car veers onto the shoulder. “I don’t owe you anything. I was clear. I have a life, a job, a wife—”
“A child. A child who is black.”
“What does it matter if she’s black?”
“You could’ve mentioned it.”
“I didn’t mention it because it doesn’t matter. My family is off limits.”
“And your wife. Jesus.”
“She wasn’t always like that.”
“What are you doing? Don’t defend your wife to me.”
“Marriage is hard,” he says without any conviction, like it is something he’s rehearsed.
“So hard that you can’t respond to a text?”
“This is the thing with your generation. Everything is always now. There was a time when you could not reach everyone all the time.”
“Maybe my life isn’t as serious as yours. But I’m a person.”
“You’re no more a person to me than I am to you.”
“What?”
“I mean I am of use to you. I take you out, and for another night you are spared from trying to hold a conversation with a boy your age.”
“I don’t need you.”
“Of course you don’t, that’s the fucking point,” he says, turning the wrong way onto a one-way street. Luckily the stretch is short, and we turn onto my block, my building looming in the city fog.
“We adopted her two years ago. She’s really struggling and I don’t know what to do,” he says as we pull up to the curb. I think about Akila—her big, watchful eyes. The way she moved through the party, an invisible girl.
“I’m sorry,” I say, and he looks over at me, his face flushed.
“I’m sorry I said I loved you. I feel awful about that.”
“It’s not a big deal. I didn’t take it seriously.”
“It had been a while for me.” He pauses, slides the key out of the ignition. “You’re wearing my wife’s dress.”
“Yeah. Is that weird for you?”
“Not weird, just—” He traces a seam in the dress thoughtfully, and it feels weird to me, the idea that he understands this dress better than I do. “I feel like I want to hurt you,” he says suddenly, thumbing the collar of the dress.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I’d like to hit you.”
“Okay.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, okay,” I say, and it’s odd how he rolls up his sleeve, the premeditation of it, the procedural flexing of his hand that makes it feel like he has already thought it through. And no guidelines have been established
per se, but somehow I just know to present my face, to close my eyes. When the first blow comes, I feel it in my ears before I feel it anywhere else, the roots of my eyeballs curling, the general feeling like my head is sitting on a single pivot, like an owl. I bring my hand up to my cheek, almost out of expectation that the pain be concentrated here, but in a way, it is everywhere.
“Again,” I say, and this time it is harder. This time I keep my eyes open and admire his focus, whatever high or extremely low regard of me is moving him to use such force. Because it is a little impolite how gamely he satisfies this request. No doubt or initial softness, just his wide, rough palm and all the liquid centers of my teeth. And this whole time we have both had our seat belts on, but he unhooks his and I unhook mine, and I look around to make sure the street is free of police and slide into his lap, where I yank the lever and recline him all the way down, this old car and its trappings made foremost to take the air out of any sexual moment, his nose in my eye as the seat flattens swiftly from 90 to 180 degrees, his cry as I hike up his wife’s impossible dress, finish him, and promptly eject myself from the car. I unzip the dress before I climb the stairs so that when I reach my door I am already halfway out. I sit naked in my room and eat half a rotisserie chicken with my hands. I open my phone and find a voicemail from a number I don’t recognize. While I am prepared for the voice to be hers, I am not prepared for her familiarity. I am not prepared to hear her say my name, the minor background chaos warping her voice when she says, softly, I enjoyed meeting you, let’s do that again.
4
Here is how my mother met the man I call my father.
Grandma was a sheltered southern belle from Kentucky. The sort of high-yellow woman who believed her fair complexion was the result of an errant Native American gene, but who was, like so many of us, walking proof of American industry, the bolls and ships and casual sexual terrorism that put a little cream in the coffee and made her family loyal to the almighty paper bag.
Luster: A Novel Page 5