That is to say, my grandmother was cautious about fraternizing with dark-skinned men. But then she took a typing gig in Queens and met my grandfather, a West Indian cad who was fresh off the boat. He was a gifted pianist with double-jointed fingers, a natural mimic whose classical training was just a dot over the i, a scrawl on a tea-stained island certificate that got him off the boat and government-approved. He saw my grandmother coming out of the Woolworth’s one day and that was that. Against the wishes of her family, she darkened the line and gave him eleven children. My mother was number six, smack-dab in the middle of a transition from tall, blue-black boys to bodacious, kinky-haired girls.
* * *
There were plenty of reasons to be worried about my grandfather. The most pressing of which being the devastating charm of the Classic Trinidadian Man. The lore slants a little differently depending on the island, but the conventional wisdom holds that there is no man more equipped to ruin a woman’s life. By ruin, I mean it both ways, as in, ruin (/roo-in/) noun 1. The total disintegration of your hopes and dreams, fantastic carnage (see Pompeii) or 2. The inability of any man to compare (Ex. Don Omar has ruined me for other men. Ex. Niggas!). Trinidadian men do not just have eyelashes for days, they have something more subliminal that does not make itself known to you until it is nuclear and you are stuck with eleven kids in Jamaica, Queens, while he is tickling ivories for a traveling circus.
* * *
That is to say, Granddad disappeared. My mother had as good a childhood as one can have with ten brothers and sisters, sleeping three to a bunk, ushering a collection of feral alley cats into hidey-holes Grandma could not hope to find, one link in a massive West Indian brood that year by year was proving to take after my grandfather’s side, meaning they were prone to disastrous dalliances with the arts and the things that make the fiscal wasteland of the arts worth the risk—the sex and drugs.
* * *
At sixteen, my uncle Pierre would die in a flophouse in Crown Heights cradling his trombone. At twenty-three, my aunt Claudia would emerge from a small Harlem cult talking about active galactic nuclei and the benefits of Himalayan crystal and tumble onto the tracks of an uptown D. Others would do okay, move to Sweden and Cape Town to sing opera and paint erotic renditions of driftwood, but my mother would take a different tack. She would take her body—this dark, powerful, curvaceous thing—and wield it all about town. After Grandma kicked her out of the house for general promiscuity and insolence, my mother would deal subpar narcotics from Bushwick to Sheepshead Bay, reinforcing the calluses on her large, archless feet with the occasional trek to a supplier in Connecticut, where she had a girlfriend who did not like to get high alone. And per this girlfriend, gradually my mother did less dealing and more using until she was strung out, living on a diet of cream soda and Greek men. Because for all her recklessness, she was not far gone enough to date an island man.
* * *
Until my father. A gruff ex-navy man with relaxed silver hair and gold fillings in his teeth. A man who spotted my mother in a bar and bankrolled a stint in rehab where she found Jesus and got clean. It wasn’t until after they moved upstate and settled at a small Seventh-day Adventist church that my mother noticed his deliberation. The way he would stand before the mirror and practice his smile. The way he was exact and vain, particular about the creases in his trousers and the part in his hair. As he dressed for church, he rehearsed his testimony under his breath. He weighed each word carefully and searched for the most effective places to apply stress. Like a comedian, he came prepared to handle the fickle demands of a room; in church, these rooms were full of women. They leaned toward my father, awed by his grisly accounts of war. They competed fiercely for his favor, and he happily indulged the most vulnerable ones. By then, my mother was already a husk of herself, and I was seven years old, looking how I will always look, which is like I have a single biological parent, like my father has had no part in my creation, which, in a way, is the truth.
* * *
When I get up in the morning, I look in the mirror and I see only my mother’s face. But the fact of our resemblance is such old news that to recognize it anew feels pointed, overly Freudian, a remnant of a dream I am still half inside. When she died, of course I was given to dissecting my face in the bathroom of Friendly’s, or avoiding my face altogether in Macy’s dressing rooms lest trying on jeans become any more demoralizing. But now I am seven years removed and there are some days I don’t even think about her, though on these days a siren will keen from the end of DeKalb and it will be 3:00 a.m. and a cloud outside my window will constrict into the shape of a lung and I will hear her voice.
* * *
This morning I look in the mirror and find a bruise that makes the resemblance more pronounced, and it makes my bowels a little shy. I retreat to my room, where I kill a few roaches, take a few pictures of my face, and do some quick acrylic studies. I have never been able to finish a self-portrait, but in these studies, in the burnt sienna and purple that is meant to be my face, I see the bruises clearly, and it fills me with relief. On the train, I listen to Rebecca’s voicemail over and over again. I arrive at the office with the intonations memorized. My plan for the day is to confirm the pub date for a new title about a vain giraffe and then fall down an internet rabbit hole of Rebecca Walkers who raise the dead.
* * *
My routine is always the same. I dart from the train and immediately wash my hands in the office bathroom. I load up on the free hand lotion the publisher started putting out after it was revealed that the women in the company (a whopping 87 percent of the employee base) are still making less than the men. The hand lotion has slightly increased morale, even though the quality is on par with that diabolical drugstore cocoa butter that leaves you ashier than before. I post a joke about the L train on Twitter, and I delete it when I don’t get any likes. I listen to a newly pregnant publicity assistant retch (lately always between 9:03 and 9:15) in one of the stalls, and I firm up my ponytail. I kill a roach in the kitchen, grab a cup of tepid coffee, and sit at my desk, where, before I start work, I browse through some photos of friends who are doing better than me, then an article on a black teenager who was killed on 115th for holding a weapon later identified as a showerhead, then an article on a black woman who was killed on the Grand Concourse for holding a weapon later identified as a cell phone, then I drown myself in the comments section and do some online shopping, by which I mean I put four dresses in my cart as a strictly theoretical exercise and then let the page expire.
* * *
Then I start work. I look through the Tuesday publications, confirm jacket copy, triage my inbox for panicked emails from production assistants and editors trying to soothe anxious authors with quick TOC and index corrections. Details so minute as to be absurd, an em dash, the romanization of a quotation mark, a last-minute change in the acknowledgments from I would like to thank my wife to I would like to thank my dog, but, and maybe this is surprising, I am good at all of this. Arguably it would be hard to be bad at it, but if a person comes to rote work with the expectation that she will be demeaned, she can bypass the pitfalls of hope and redirect all that energy into being a merciless drone. She can be the ear for the author who calls frequently to chat about the fineries of ichthyology depicted in his series about a bullied flounder, and she can wage war with large corporate vendors whose algorithms sweep book files for errors but have huge blind spots for the speculative lexicon of science fiction, and she can say to them: This is not an error; this is human; this is style.
* * *
Today at the office, the air is still. At my desk, something is different. My manager’s eyes, which, because of the open office arrangement, I can never seem to avoid, move quickly away from me. The editorial assistants are too alert, engaged in the performance of work. Then Aria comes in with a box of doughnuts. This would be cause to celebrate, except the person who helps her through the door is Mark. I see his hand, his desecrated fingernails and large knuckle
s, and I turn away and look into the dark face of my phone, which reflects a bruised iteration of my face. It occurs to me that I should’ve covered it up, but more pressing is the reality in which Aria and Mark just happen to be having the sort of conversations that spill into other rooms, because I’m certain they have nothing in common and no overlapping professional tasks.
* * *
I eavesdrop on them, which in an open plan is not eavesdropping so much as accepting your silent role in everyone’s conversation, and they are talking about a comic book I can’t place, Mark doing this thing where he prefaces every one of his observations with what you need to understand is, Aria’s breathless reception of these condescensions so pure and sweet. When he is gone, I try to make meaningful eye contact with Aria, but she will not indulge. I try to find Rebecca on the internet, but there is a new message from HR. Early August is generally when employee evaluations start, and I have prepared a diplomatic way to say that I loathe everyone here, but the message does not seem to be about this. It is a vaguely worded invitation for a meeting at 4:00 p.m.
* * *
I step outside and smoke a joint, and there are interns everywhere, beaming and overdressed and happy to be paid in experience. I wonder if I have looked too miserable at my desk, if I forgot to use a private browser when I was active on SugarBabees.com. Anyone could do my job with the proper training, and if I fell down the escalator of the Times Square Forever 21 and severed my spine it would not make office news.
* * *
I grab a doughnut and arrive at the meeting with two minutes to spare. The HR rep smiles at me and asks me to close the door. My boss, a squirrelly little editor who came up in sales and frequently lurks behind me after her bathroom breaks in an attempt to peer at my screen, is seated next to him. I smile at her and try to pretend that she is not pro-life. I lean forward to show my engagement and try to summon the spirit of the Grateful Diversity Hire. They start out with a few compliments, which I receive readily. Yes, I’ve whipped the digital archive into shape. Yes, I delivered on the K–5 Maya Angelou and Frida Kahlo biographies, wherein the sexual assault and bus accident were omitted per a Provo parents group who weren’t ready for their kids to see the blood women wade through to create art.
* * *
“Still, you have been on probation twice,” the HR rep says, trying not to look at the bruise on my face.
“I fell off my bike in Central Park,” I say, which only seems to make the bruise into a bigger deal. My boss and the HR rep glance at each other. “And yes, I completed two probationary periods, but the second time there was sort of a misunderstanding. HorseGirls.com was a link featured in one of our middle-grade ebooks, but domains tend to change over time. A parent called about the adult content, and I just wanted to do my due diligence,” I say, and my boss coughs, though it is one of those snide, performative coughs that most people stop doing after the age of twelve. I can’t think of a single moment she has ever been straightforward with me, and, even now, she redirects the conversation with words like tolerance and inclusivity before the HR rep cuts to the chase and says that some men and women in the company feel I’ve been sexually inappropriate. They are both being very sensitive about it, clearly upset by the optics of the whole thing, bracketing what is happening in such carefully neutral language that in a way, I feel sorry for them. And what is happening is that I’m getting fired. There are emails. Pictures sent over company servers. Complaints about which they are not permitted to offer any details.
* * *
There are a few encounters that come to mind, ingenious anatomical feats that, sure, happened on company time. Coworkers with elaborate, transgressive fantasies that I was dead enough inside to fulfill. And, of course, there is Mark. When I try to explain, there is a tremor in my voice. I try to regain my composure, but I am sensitive to the power even of authority figures I despise. I close my eyes and will myself not to cry, but I was so close to being able to spend eleven dollars on lunch. All I can do is take the doughnut out of my purse and press it all into my mouth at once. I stand up, knowing I only have so much time before the tears, and I go to the bathroom, lock myself in a stall, and puke.
* * *
But the impulse to cry has vanished. I imagine the high traffic I will meet on my way back and try to get the tears out while I have the privacy, but nothing happens. When I go to my desk, a conversation in full swing dies abruptly as I gather my pens, unscrew the lightbulb from my desk lamp and toss it in my purse. I take some pink Post-its, my work slippers, and a legal pad where I have the beginning of a story about a wolf who can’t find the right pair of glasses. Someone has left a plastic bag for me, which is such a nice gesture that for a moment, I am out of breath. But as I put my thermos of Tanqueray into the bag, I think of when I first arrived, Tom showing me how to clock in and declare PTO, and how at the end of the day I took the scenic route home, the sun in one borough, the moon in another, this desire in me to clap my hand over the lens of a tourist’s camera and say, Stop, there isn’t enough time.
* * *
I feel everyone in the room can see these two versions of me, like a before and after. In the after, I am even fatter. I want to say something before I leave, but I’ve never been good at parting words and the pressure makes me nervous, so I say Please invite me to lunch sometime to the one assistant I like best. As I leave, I really wish I could take it back.
* * *
I go back to the bathroom and try to cry again. When nothing happens I listen to Rebecca’s voicemail and press the bruise on my face. I think of Eric’s slack, hungry face, the thrill of pulling my body from his and shutting the car door, which is maybe what it feels like to have the last word. I want to believe this is intolerable to him, but he hasn’t been in contact. I text him and say miss you, and when I see the ellipses on my phone, I can tell that he has opened the message and is beginning to reply. But then he doesn’t, and so I take a slug of gin and head to Mark’s office.
* * *
Even with the necessary lubrication, I find myself paralyzed in the stairwell, thinking of reasons not to go up to his floor. I find myself becoming sentimental about what I will leave behind, the whiff of Lysol and ink, the stack of someone’s homemade zines on the sink, and this very stairwell, in which I have regularly pleaded for student loan deferrals and set up pelvic exams. I have said goodbye enough times to know that departure has a way of gilding what are, at best, slow quotidian deaths, but still each time I think of everything I will lose.
* * *
When I walk into his office, for a while he proceeds as if I’m not there. He leafs through a fat folder of proofs, jots down something on his Wacom, and leans back in his chair with a lukewarm smile. He is cool, which is very out of the ordinary. A departure from his usual frequency—a distinctly uncool vibration that once engaged is effusive to the point of violence, a nerd’s nerd so smitten with the niche corners of eighties ephemera and pan-Asian iconography that his office, like his apartment, is a precarious collection of teacups, toys, and squat fertility figurines. The effort behind his demeanor should put me at ease, but actually it hurts. And this is not how I expected to feel. I close the door and take his katana off the wall.
“Do you remember when we went to Brighton Beach? It was maybe the only time you and I went outside together.”
“Please put that back. It’s ceremonial.”
“There was a used condom in the sand. And it rained. I slipped on the boardwalk and I was embarrassed. You don’t know this, but I had done a great deal of preparation the night before. Because you had only ever seen me in the dark.”
“Muromachi era,” he says, and behind him is a large print of The Great Wave off Kanagawa, the tallest wave cradling the shiny crown of his head. When I unsheathe the blade, it makes such a satisfying sound that I do it again.
“I got fired today.”
“What?”
“Don’t do that. Act like it wasn’t you.”
“You think
I got you fired? Edie, baby.”
“I never said no to you. Not to anything. That documentary about Norwegian puppetry was three hours long.”
“Listen, I have been on probation since the late aughts, okay? I have nothing to gain in telling anyone about what happened with us,” he says, and I turn the katana over in my hands. The weight is concentrated toward the hilt, which briefly destabilizes me. All at once the color and grain of the room distill into high focus, and I note the old shaving scar beneath his lip at the same time I note the seriousness of the blade, which I assumed would be dulled.
“I did everything you asked. Even that thing with the tengu mask.”
“My love, this is the problem with your generation. Instant gratification,” he says, and because it took him, on average, forty-three minutes to come, because I put on the ears and the tail and learned the lyrics to “Painting the Roses Red” backward and forward, because I drank approximately five gallons of cranberry juice over the course of our relationship, and for a day or two required the use of a cane, I take issue with his definition of instant. Though there is still a part of me that is vulnerable to his casual use of my love, which, when we were together, appeared without warning at the end of his requests for me to get the door and pass the remote. “You think you should get what you want, when you want it, and life doesn’t work that way. Art doesn’t work that way, and that’s why you’re not as good as you could be,” he says, and the fact that he doesn’t appear to have said this in anger, the fact of him offering this insult as practical advice, is something I feel in the most inaccessible parts of my bowels. So he may not be the reason for my sudden unemployment. In the wake of this possibility are dozens of new culprits, minor office affairs all about the building, but there are too many to parse, and so I take the katana, maneuver the blade between my fingers, and press it down into the flesh. Directly after the act comes a clarity so sharp it feels enhanced, the room ballooning such that his shout reaches me belatedly as I squeeze my hand into a fist and watch the blood well between my fingers. And even then, I feel nothing. But when I look at the carpet, the spot there is excellent, is proof, spreading into the shape of a smile.
Luster: A Novel Page 6