Luster: A Novel

by Raven Leilani

  “Could you throw this out?” he says without looking at me, as Akila comes down the stairs wearing a wig, a green one this time. Rebecca is close on her heels looking wrung-out, but I notice that she has put on mascara and let down her hair.

  “Sorry, Pradeep,” she says, smiling with her teeth. I realize she is flirting, and it is so unsettling that I go back up to the guest room, where I try to calm my interview jitters by streaming Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. For a moment it works. In the neighborhood of make-believe King Friday is judging an art contest, but Lady Elaine Fairchilde will not submit to his judgment. She says art is subjective, and technically that is the moral of the story, though it is also implied that everyone in the kingdom thinks her art is bad, which—if she is making art that is meant to be seen by others—is a serious tough-titty, the comfort of audience subjectivity pretty much null when the audience is everyone, and everyone has decided, subjectively, that the art is bad. Then Mister Rogers takes us into a crayon factory, and when two disembodied hands pour yellow wax into a trough filled with holes and the piano accompaniment comes in, it is just too much. I pause it and find the Wikipedia for Pomeranian, so that I can go into my interview with talking points about the office dog, who is, per Wikipedia, one of an extremely horny breed. The guest room is hotter than the other rooms, and so I head downstairs to gather myself, but while I’m on the stairs I hear Pradeep say, a monkey could do this, and all I can see is the back of Akila’s head, the halo of green, synthetic frizz.

  “I’m trying,” she says, a tremor in her voice.

  “You’re not. It’s simple math,” he says, and I go down there and start looking for the Captain Planet mug, though it is just an excuse to linger. I glance at Akila and she looks upset, though I can sense that my looking at her makes it worse.

  “Hey,” I say, turning to Pradeep, my small voice back again. “You can’t—”

  “Can you not?” Akila says, and so I don’t. I grab my things and take a bus to Jersey City, where I find that the clown academy is housed in a squat, neoclassical building that, compared with the bagel shops and degraded coworking spaces along the block, appears eerie and slightly outside of time. Inside, it is like a chapel, replete with modern fresco, the imagery familiar only in its rippled triceps and biblical postures, because upon closer inspection every figure depicted is a clown. Above the receptionist’s desk there is an engraving that says, The clown stands on his head and sees the world the right way up. The receptionist is an impossibly chic Asian woman with long, tattooed hands and some sort of head cold. Naturally it heartens me to see some color in the place, but when she escorts me to the waiting room she sneezes and tells me that I’m underdressed. This is an understatement. Per my cursory scan of the company mission statement, the ball pit, break room Ping-Pong, and office dog, I thought the office dress would be casual. But when I step into the room, there are five other applicants combing furiously through their notes. They are all wearing pantsuits and they are all Asian. I sit down and pull the school’s website up on my phone. When the interviewer calls my name, his eyes sweep over me with confused disinterest and it is humiliating, but I feel a vague racial obligation to see it through. So I sit down and immediately there is a mutual feeling of us just going through the motions, though the interviewer, a white man decked out in Tommy Bahama who tells me to address him as Maestro, gives me a rundown of the school beginning with an extremely defensive condemnation of the Ringling Brothers and magic of the lowest common denominator, which includes the decorative—cards and spitting flowers and buzzers—but not, he stresses, the intricate art of tying balloons. This interview seems to be mostly about him getting things off his chest, which is fine because I’m clearly not the front-runner for this job, and the more he talks about the historic model of the Italian buffoon, the more I realize I have misunderstood the requirements of the job. For a brief moment I think that the format of this interview is itself a joke and the successful applicant is meant to call the bluff, but then he goes on a tear about glove puppets and the mime’s blatant appropriation of indigenous clown rituals, and I just feel disappointed in myself for needing this job so desperately and for being as black as I am and for coming unprepared.

  He tells me that he’s firing the current receptionist because she is too whimsical with visitors, and I tell him that I thought clowning was supposed to be fun. He leans back in his chair and closes his eyes, which seems a very dramatic response to an extremely unsurprising observation. In the protracted silence, I notice that Anakin the Pomeranian is sitting stoically in the corner, apparently not horny at all. Then Maestro leans forward and places a clown nose on the desk. He asks me to look at it. He asks me if I feel like laughing. When I tell him I don’t he smiles and says that’s because clowning is about interrogating the human condition, that it is art, and that these are serious things. He tells me that the art that matters is the art that is wrought and consumed with great difficulty. He tells me a laugh is easy, and when there is a prioritization of fun, clowning ceases to be art and becomes entertainment. Then he gives me a grave, buzzerless handshake and tells me my time is up. On the bus back, I keep thinking about the nose. About how strange it looked out of context. I don’t mind his condescension, and I can’t remember the last time I laughed.

  * * *

  When I get to the house it is dark. Rebecca is doing yoga in the living room to a muted video, and I am primed to go feel more nothing in my room, but I see the sofa and find it more attractive than the stairs. I splay on the sofa and watch her, her taut tadasana and uttanasana, and her unimpeachable plank. She is efficient but imperfect, seamless but still apparently holding the form in the front of her mind, the effort to arch her feet and compress her abdominal muscles propelling her out of her pose. She trembles through a half moon, collapses, and shimmers on the mat. She glances at me, but doesn’t ask me to leave. When she continues on into her next pose, I realize I hoped she would. It reminds me of how she undressed in the morgue, and I envy the nonchalance she has about her body.

  * * *

  It is not a perfect body, and in fact mine is better, though hers is smaller by a size or two. I feel boring for the compulsion to compare myself to her, and even a little mean, but her serenity bothers me. It bothers me that she doesn’t wear prettier underwear, that her marriage is inscrutable and involved, and that I am somewhere inside it. I get onto my knees and join her on the carpet, and even this small action is enough to render my body into a font of unsavory noise. Rebecca makes room but does not look at me. We enter corpse pose, and as we lie side by side, I hear her short, irregular breaths and understand the degree of her effort. It feels personal. The finite oxygen, the smell of yeast and salt, deodorant and shampoo, the body when it is most conspicuously an organism, a thing that can weep and degrade. I rise with her into something called dolphin pose, and it feels silly until it burns. I used to exercise with my mother. A new diet guide or juicing blade would arrive in the mail, and for a week we would eat only cabbage soup. For a week we would attempt a kosher Atkins, my mother emerging from the Seventh-day Adventist pantry with steak substitutes made of plant protein. We bought in bulk but always seemed to eat very little, one week just coffee with Danish butter, the next week only foods that were yellow or green. While my father took women into his study, we descended upon the living room in Lycra for Zumba, eight-minute abs, or whatever lo-fi glute blasting was available via early aughts on-demand, alternating between tearful, formerly fat barre gurus, white capitalist body-posi rah-rahs with creepy yonic overtones, and the more classic motivational speakers who slap you over the face with a box of Ho Hos and compel you to squat. We were bonded in our mutual hatred of our bodies, though my hatred was adolescent and hers was infinitely more developed, partly a trick of her newly sober brain, which found in food a substitute for the narcotics that had kept her lean. By the time she killed herself, she would still be eleven pounds shy of her goal.

  * * *

  After another meas
ure in corpse, I follow Rebecca into the kitchen and watch her portion ingredients. She pushes a clove of garlic in front of me and offers me a knife, blade first. When I take the knife, a thought comes to me fully rendered, complete with texture and aftermath: I could, in the right state of mind, murder her and carry on with my life. Really it would be her fault, for inviting a stranger into her house and providing the knife. Her composure is infuriating. I start to tell her that when I fuck her husband, I’m the one who does the fucking. But the impulse passes, and I spoon the garlic into the oil. The sirloin follows, and as the potatoes are coming out of the oven, one of Rebecca’s big oven mitts slips off and onto the floor. She sucks the burned finger and then forgets about it to take a bite of the steak. She offers me her fork and I follow suit, the meat bloody and tough. It is the best thing I have eaten in weeks. I close my eyes. When I open them, she is smiling.

  “How long have you known Pradeep?” I say, and she tilts her head.

  “I don’t know. A few years. He’s a good kid,” she says, good kid a little gooier than the rest of the words.

  “You like him.”

  “He’s young. He hasn’t been disappointed yet. Sometimes I forget what that looks like—you know, optimism,” she says, and I want to ask how old she is, but I refrain. “Why do you ask?”

  “It just seemed like he was being kind of hard on her.”

  “She needs a firm hand,” she says, though she has stopped eating, stopped smiling.

  “It wasn’t like that. The way he was talking to her, it felt—specific,” I say, and there is no fluffy alternative word for what I’m trying to convey, no way to effectively explain violations that are not overt. It is a rhetorical hellscape. A casual reduction so frequent it is mundane. Almost too mundane for the deployment of the R word, as with a certain sect of Good White Person the accusation overshadows the act. Racism! I should yell, because I’m sure Rebecca will receive it in the uppercase regardless, and already I feel her seizing on the drama of its implication, even though racism is often so mundane it leaves your head spinning, the hand of the ordinary in your slow, psychic death so sly and absurd you begin to distrust your own eyes. So it has taken a long time for me to get here. To say, Yes, this is what happened. It happened just like that. But when Rebecca turns and scrapes the rest of her food off the plate and into the trash, I feel like a jerk. She looks at me, any goodwill that existed between us lost.

  “I am her mother,” she says firmly, though there is a hitch in her voice and her face colors. “You are a guest,” she says before she sweeps out of the room, and I find it very rich, to have been invited here partly on the absurd presumption that I would know what to do with Akila simply because we are both black, and now be rebuffed when I have not performed the role of the Trusty Black Spirit Guide to her taste. I go back up to the guest room and pack my things. I wait for her to put me out. I lie in the dark with my shoes on, wondering if I was wrong to say anything. I compile everything I could have said if I were faster, smarter. By midnight, I have a carefully footnoted Spike Lee joint, an entire treatise on the conspiracy of oppression, though at one o’clock when I have rehearsed my supporting data and reimagined our conversation as one in which I don’t let Dr. King down, I suddenly feel that she can go fuck herself, that my intellectual labor should be subsidized and the onus is not on the oppressed to consider the oppressor, though in the morning after I take a shower, I look out of the window and see her lugging a bag of mulch across the yard and I feel guilty all over again. Her chunky, tragic sneakers and freaky competence. The way the windows around the cul-de-sac are dark and she is the only person outside, already engaged enough in her task to be making a lot of supremely unsexy noise. It becomes clear to me, how keenly she is alone.

  * * *

  I creep around the house and try to be racially neutral. I avoid her as best I can, though I hear her all around the house: doing dishes, Pilates, and some involved activity with a power drill. In my effort to be sensitive to where she is, I find that she is an extremely noisy person. I can’t say whether this is for my benefit, but even on the other side of the house the noise feels indirectly violent, her predilection for walking on her heels and shouting yes! to her Insanity DVD well within the realm of plausible deniability, but intimidating nonetheless. So I keep mostly to the guest room and scan through jobs. I look at availabilities in the city, but even if I was granted an interview, I have no idea where I’d be commuting from. I browse StreetEasy, and every neighborhood in my price range is lousy with sexual predators. Just as an experiment, I see what comes up if I keep my search within Jersey. I check the commute from the house to a small textbook publisher in Hoboken, and it is a straight shot. I imagine what it might be like to ride exclusively on NJ Transit, which has significantly less feces than the G. I read through requirements for entry-level jobs that are not requirements so much as requests that the applicant have “a good sense of humor” and basic tech literacy for 41K a year. I tweak my résumé, omit coordinator from my title, and revise my role as more author-facing. I stress my editorial involvement, though the author of the Flounder series stopped calling me when I made him a mixtape.

  * * *

  I pull up our email chain and find the mixtape. I sent it at 1:43 a.m., after the author wrote to tell me that squid have doughnut-shaped brains. I look at the track list and wonder where I went wrong. The esophagus passes through a central hole in the brain. If they overeat, they risk brain damage. I wonder if I was too earnest, if I relied too heavily on Mazzy Star. I stop applying for jobs and look for a reputable camgirl site, though I have some trouble linking my PayPal and the traffic is low. I sit in front of the camera in my bra for half an hour and only get one patron. Mostly he just reads the paper, but then he folds it up and sends a message through the chat that says kill yourself, nigger bitch. I log off and think about the clown nose. I look outside and Akila and Rebecca are in the garden wearing wide-brimmed hats. They are kneeling in front of a single tomato, and for a moment, they look completely alike, the plant the center of their silent communion. Then Akila takes off a glove and cradles the tomato in the palm of her hand. They turn to each other and laugh. I try to figure out what was funny, but I can’t, so I go to the master bathroom and look through the cabinets, and inside everything is generic and mostly expired except for the narcotics. I take two Percocet and save a fentanyl patch for later. The bottles all bear Rebecca’s name, though the triazolam is the only one with her middle name, which turns out to be Moon. Underneath the sink, there is an old-school douche bag that is warm to the touch. There is a modest purple vibrator with three speeds, cotton balls, hydrogen peroxide, hair dye, and black nail polish. I take the nail polish. I can’t imagine her painting her nails, but I can imagine her on the bathroom tile, prepping the douche with Vaseline. When I imagine it, she is indifferent, her vagina defying all etymology, not a pussy or a twat but an abstract violence, like a Rorschach or a xenomorph. For me, I’ve had little choice. The moment I left Clay’s house, my vagina was a cunt.

  * * *

  I go to the window and make sure they’re still out in the garden. I take a few pictures of them and delete the ones with too much sun. I do a sweep under the bed. There are board games and unopened bags of soft, red clay. There is a battered version of Sorry, a Boggle with a cracked dome, and a sleek chessboard with a compartment for pieces. Inside, there are two queens and a pouch of tulip seeds. It seems strange that these would be kept under the bed, strange that they would have board games at all. Everything is too ordinary, too sweet. I can’t imagine Rebecca suspending her disbelief long enough to move a piece, I can’t imagine Akila tolerating the cheer of her father, and yet there they are outside in the garden, laughing with each other. My mother was not a woman who laughed. She didn’t laugh because (1) she could see that everyone who heard it was unpleasantly surprised and (2) after we moved upstate, nothing was funny. She told stories about the home economics courses they offered in rehab, about how they gave he
r a succulent shaped like a hand and taught her a different way to pack a suitcase. These stories were not humorless. She smiled when she talked about the holding cell in Harlem, about the plainclothes police officers who sat outside her apartment in unmarked cars. She told me that cowboys could be women, could be black. She watched multicamera sitcoms exclusively, left the TV on low during the night so that my dreams became elastic and improvisational, primed to make sense of the canned laughter always in the air. She was disappointed to find I had inherited her ugly, glottal laugh, and encouraged me to hold it behind my hand.

  We went to church and clapped softly to an instrumental of “He Lives.” We wore plain, shapeless clothes and washed each other’s feet. At a more relaxed, secular church a mile down the road, the pastor gave the sermon from his drum kit. In our church, my mother tried to befriend scared vegetarian women who smelled the city and turned their heads. The sun went down and the TV turned on. We went to Waldenbooks and my mother bought my weekly sketchbook. She stood in Self-Help with her hand in her hair. At home, she put on “Dancing Queen” over the TV. Underneath ABBA, Suzanne Somers emerged from the shower as John Ritter placated the landlord with his floppy wrists. My mother danced and waxed poetic about 1977, the year she was seventeen. She lay on the floor and said, It’s all boring when I’m not high, the ceiling fan turning in her eyes.

  * * *

  When I put the chessboard back, I notice another game a little farther back, underneath a pair of dirty gingham shorts. When I bring it out, I see immediately that it is Monopoly, which was my father’s favorite game. It was his favorite game because he always won, and he always won because he always played against me. He believed in the purity of competition. He did not believe that a child deserved to win simply for being a child. He scooped up my properties and smiled, showed the gold fillings in his teeth. Once, I tucked a few blue dollars into my dollhouse in the middle of the night. Now I look for my father’s favorite piece, the boot. But the game and the pieces are missing, and in their place is a Glock 19. This was one of Clay’s favorites. He owned three, and in his apartment, one was always nearby. When he held it, he held it casually. When I take the gun into my hands now, it does not feel casual. The gun itself is ugly. It is heavy and inelegant, but in my hand, I see how it is lethal, ingenious technology. Rebecca texts me from outside and says that she and Akila are going out for back-to-school supplies, and it occurs to me that it is September. I stand at the window, and I watch them drive away. I consider the gun and notice I have an incoming call.