Luster: A Novel

by Raven Leilani

  * * *

  I stay up until I have the living room TV to myself, and halfway through a Rocko’s Modern Life marathon Rebecca comes home from work and falls asleep beside me, still in her boots and scrubs. At 1:00 a.m., when the Nicktoons segue into black and white, Rocky and Bullwinkle are in an air balloon and I move closer to her and she smells of formaldehyde and cigarettes, her hair damp and newly blond at the roots. I think of how my palms were dark for days after I dyed her hair. I lower the volume on the TV and watch her. She is like me, ordinary, prone to stretches where she looks bad, though unlike me, when she looks bad she looks soluble, her inertia fevered, Victorian. When the cartoon block loops back around and Jane Jetson shoots into space, I get up to leave and Rebecca grabs my wrist. You should be grateful, she says, the light from the TV illuminating her face, you have all the time in the world.

  * * *

  When the house is quiet, sometimes I put some newspaper on the floor and mix paint. I put on the post office episode of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and I collect my staple gun and stretcher bars. Sometimes I turn my phone off and hope that when I turn it on there will be terrible news beyond the assassinations I breathlessly await, something hurtling through space, an untethered moon or sleek machine full of race-ending cephalopods. Otherwise, there are things to paint. Rebecca’s boots and her half-eaten Granny Smiths, Rebecca in the garden, the six grainy pictures I took of Eric and Rebecca a month before.

  * * *

  On film it is even less abstract, even more anatomical, his scrotum and her knees, though there is a tenderness that gives me pause. I try to paint it, but none of the renditions are true. They are lurid and embarrassing in their attempt at scale. I have seen both Eric and Rebecca in various states of undress—Eric’s hard torso and heterosexual underwear, Rebecca as most people see their mothers about the house, the harried bits of nudity between terry cloth and the single functional hook of a Playtex bra—but this is different, proof they are more than where they have ended up. I wish it would stop. Every Tuesday, 11:00 p.m., Conan O’Brien on TBS. On these nights I let myself into Akila’s room and slip on a headset. I reload my rifle and clear German soldiers from the town church. I can’t get out of Normandy. My weapons are low-level and high-recoil and my avatar has tinnitus. After a blast, my controls stall and I have to wait until the ringing stops. Akila looks up from her computer and sighs, which is her passive-aggressive way of reminding me there are nobler gaming pursuits, games that require me to talk to villagers, that ask me to go out of my way to recruit crucial party members, but that have nothing on the instant gratification of blowing an enemy bunker to smithereens. Nigger! a kid from the Netherlands yells as a paratrooper falls from the sky. I slip off my headset, and Akila and I resume preparing for Comic Con, which, as she reminds me frequently, is two weeks away.

  * * *

  After we secure the tickets, Akila announces that she will be going to the con as an ifrit. There are immediate speed bumps—adapting the form of a canonically male Arabic fire lord to the body of a thirteen-year-old girl, fashioning armor and horns, and, in general, minding the mild body dysmorphia of a newly minted teenager. She pins a picture of an ifrit to the back of her door and measures her thighs. In its most common iteration, the costume is little more than a loincloth, and even with our adjustments, the costume is more skimpy than either Rebecca or Eric would like. However, because they have noticed Akila’s burgeoning disdain for her body, they don’t want to say anything to make it worse. Eric and Rebecca meet in the garden and have a hushed conversation about whether or not their reservations are unfeminist. I sit by my window and listen as Rebecca builds a case for opaque stockings and Eric frets about his whiteness and Akila’s agency. We can’t let her do whatever she wants just because she’s black, Rebecca says. That isn’t intersectional feminism, it’s bad parenting. Despite Rebecca’s protests, the cosplay moves along as planned, because ultimately both Eric and Rebecca are reluctant to tamper with the special climate that has made their somber daughter prone to smile. She comes to dinner and talks at length about how Stan Lee fought publishers over Spider-Man, how publishers did not feel it was feasible for a superhero to be a lower-middle-class kid from Queens, and she keeps a ledger of her calorie intake in a notebook with her Comic Con schedule, which is a persnickety thirteen-column document in cramped color-coordinated script.

  * * *

  Eric and I drive to Joann Fabrics and get four yards of brown pleather and a pound of multipurpose foam. We shop with our palms, sampling stiff brocade and hairy cashmere, and we look at each other to confirm if we are feeling the same thing. We try to make fire. He is not an artistic man, but he is a particular one, so serious about our materials that he stays up to make a call to a Chinese latex distributor that sent canary yellow instead of marigold. We stockpile mixed media in various yellows and reds, ask ourselves if we want the fire to be interactive or decorative. Eric asks Akila to join us on a trip to an archive in Mahwah, and when we get there, two archivists are waiting in a back room with an Arabic manuscript. They provide cotton gloves and between the steepled script there is an image of an ifrit razing a Persian town. Eric smiles as Akila goes carefully through the book, and back in the car he seems relieved. When we get home and Akila is out of the car, he turns to me and says that he needs this to be perfect. He says that Rebecca didn’t want to adopt and he wonders if Akila can feel it. We brainstorm more iterations of fire—cardboard, string lights, a rope of knotted handkerchiefs—and we only see Rebecca in passing, as she is on her way out for work.

  * * *

  The next day, Rebecca can’t find her ring. She and Eric talk for a while in the car, and when they come back inside, she is jubilant. Eric is less so. He assigns portions of the house to each of us, and we conduct a thorough search. As I’m looking underneath the couch, Akila comes down the stairs and glares at me. I go upstairs and Rebecca is reading a book in bed. Later in the week, Eric makes a down payment for a new one. He tells me the dollar figure, and it takes the air out of my lungs. He says he can’t afford it, but what he means is that it is a pain. And Rebecca knows what she wants, a marquise diamond on a white gold band, bracketed by musgravite and citrine. On an evening when she has to work, she asks me to check on it, just to see how it’s coming along. I go to the jeweler, and no one asks if I need help. I ask about the ring, and they say they are not authorized to show it to me. They watch me closely until I leave, and in the morning I tell Rebecca that it looked beautiful.

  * * *

  A few days later, Eric books a room at the Jersey City Marriott for the afternoon, and there are a few things happening downstairs that have put him in a bad mood, a conference on constitutional law and a K–8 concert that involves a popular squirrel character. The lobby is full of lawyers and kids on leashes. He takes a call from his assistant, who is managing a fiasco that has to do with a shipment of acetate film. Are you saying we are dealing with vinegar syndrome, he says as I undress. He hangs up the phone and sets his shoes by the door. He examines me with the back of his hand, and without the palm, the contact is remote, a quiet scrutiny I try to meet casually, though I am insecure about my breasts, which hang apart and feel deadened when I am not turned on. He asks me to take off his watch and I do it, clumsily, as he peers at my face. I try not to be worried by his expression, but he wears it even after he removes his pants, the searching look of a person who keeps finding nothing, which gives me the impression that the nothing is me. There is too much foreplay, a salvo of businesslike kisses that feel less like kisses and more like place setting, the fork and the spoon, and his fingers operating all the reliable dials. But he can’t get hard. I do my best. An endless hand job and obliterated bicep, the condescending suction of a hopeful but ultimately futile blow job, and the desperate wish that sometime this all will end. When it does I lie next to him and think of the pictures, the soundless rutting of husband and wife. I squeeze his shoulder, and when he pushes my hand away I am relieved.


  * * *

  After an hour of trying to find something on TV, we go downstairs and sneak into the concert. The kids have been let off their leashes and are crowding the stage during a soft techno prelude to “London Bridge Is Falling Down.” When the lights come up, a seven-foot-high papier-mâché Big Ben is there with two enormous, functional human hands. Behind it, there is a projection of a throbbing London Eye. When Eric passes me a flask, I notice Big Ben is telling the correct EDT. There are parents, zoned out or pathologically alert, a man using his wife’s back to sign some papers, a woman pumping milk next to the hot dog cart.

  * * *

  The squirrel turns out to be animatronic, but when he comes out, the hall erupts, and a few kids need to be carried away. Eric and I are trying to be cool about it, but as we pass the gin back and forth it turns out that “Wheels on the Bus” is not so bad at 150 bpm, and while we are not the target demographic, we are stunned by the squirrel, whose eyes are dark and wet. When Eric looks at me, I know we are somehow having the same thought, which is that kids these days have never had to see the prototypes, and now the uncanny valley is gone.

  * * *

  Back in our room, we are both mellowed. He opens the window and puts the radio on, and we smoke a flat joint I find in the bottom of my purse. He keeps saying he doesn’t feel anything, but then he takes a comb out of his briefcase and spends a while putting different parts in his hair. He comes back from the bathroom with a middle part and takes me into his arms, and all the faucets are on. There is a song on the radio that he likes, some supermarket standard that was big in the eighties, and I am coming to the realization that he is high and I am not. I’ve pulled too hard on an insufficient joint and I feel the exertion behind my eyes. He asks me to dance with him, but the song is bad. I think you need to have been alive in the eighties to like the music. I think you need a specific neural groove, a pane of nostalgia to sweeten what is sexless and extroverted and most suited for the mall. Still, I dance with him, though with the lights up I can’t relax. I try to make it funny, but then I see Eric’s disappointment and I don’t know what to do with my hands. He asks me to stop and tells me to lie facedown. I ask him if something is wrong, and he hoists me up and takes me from behind as a sleepy radio voice is introducing “Come On Eileen.” You have nowhere else to go, he says. He asks me to say it back to him.

  “I have nowhere else to go,” I say, and when it’s over, he takes a shower for a long time, and then he apologizes profusely. He tells me that as a kid he had intricate immune deficiencies that sometimes forced him to keep his teddy bear in a jar, and it is this same immune response that dampens his ability to produce sperm. Because this deserves reciprocation, I tell him I got an abortion around the same time I learned to shoot a gun. I tell him more about the Polaroid camera I received from my mother, how for weeks I took photos of trees and telephone wire before I turned the lens on her. How she was a willing subject, until she saw what she looked like in the photos and asked me to stop. How I thought her resistance was petty and vain, a boring thing I’d seen less interesting adult women do, then I looked at the pictures and knew that she was right. She wasn’t simply unphotogenic. She was bare in a way that film betrayed so dramatically that she became grotesque.

  * * *

  At home, we create a flank of fire with red and yellow tulle. Akila drapes it over her shoulders and shreds newspaper for the papier-mâché. Eric brings up some vinyl and we shape the horns to “Dancing Queen,” though we are deep into ABBA’s lesser-known songs by the time we fashion the breastplate from foam. After the hot glue dries, we go outside and spray-paint it silver. Akila shows me her archive of comic books, and aside from a few that I am not allowed to touch, I am free to browse. They vary in condition and age—thin newsprint issues with ads for milk and Tekken, Girlfrenzy! issues that skew more female, and incidentally a little more butch, older issues openly courting Generation X, between the ads for Gap and Gushers the grungy, long-haired Gothamite that is Bruce Wayne’s son, a coked-up twentysomething cramped by his dad’s Depression-era style.

  * * *

  Eric and I make more mistakes. Most notably the first (and last) time Eric calls me baby, which happens as he is trying to direct my attention to the mail, and which I can see he immediately wants to take back, because it feels preposterous, and because, we realize a moment later, Rebecca is in the room. The next day, we meet for lunch at a Wyndham in Teaneck and I arrive back at the house and find Rebecca crouched in the garden with her trowel. She picks through the fennel and lavender with her hands and inspects her palms. She says it was meant to be a butterfly garden, but this season a few things have gone wrong. The flowers came up pollen-poor and the population of natural predators was high. Curious deer. Beetles and spiders waiting in the daisies for painted ladies and red admirals. Hummingbirds deterred by sterile lilies. Now the garden is full of weeds and exoskeletons. Rebecca takes her trowel and starts prying out the weeds. I ask if she wants any help, and she says that she is fine. Her T-shirt is damp, yellow in the pits. She talks to herself, calls it opportunistic growth. She goes in with her shears and starts trimming around the lavender, but by the time she gets to the river mint, she is pulling it all up with her hands.

  “I feel like I am the only one who hears that dog,” she says, and it is only after she mentions it that I hear the baying. “We bred them like that. We made them needy and physically unfit. They used to be wolves. Now there are pugs with asthma.”

  “I never understood the appeal. Of pugs.”

  “I saw your paintings,” she says, reaching for the peat moss. She has kindly kept her back turned, but still my lunch, the room service, is rising into my mouth.

  “Which ones?”

  “All of them,” she says, and naturally I can only think of the most damning ones, paintings I went to great lengths to hide. Paintings that are reconnaissance, that are longing, and disproportionately of her. Somehow, I also wish I had been there, to see her when she saw herself in them.

  “What did you think?” I ask, and she looks over her shoulder, her face flushed and mean. I can’t tell if she is looking at me or the neighbor’s dog.

  “I think they need work.”

  * * *

  When everyone is asleep, I look through the paintings and hate myself. I do my best to avoid Rebecca, which is easy as she has all but disappeared. Veterans from the Silent Generation have been dying en masse, and when she is not at work she is asleep. I find myself listening for the sounds of her coming home. Then as I am working on another failed self-portrait I realize I am late. I check my menstruation app and scroll until I find the last little red teardrop, logged sixty-two days before, under which I have entered a short note—the news is terrible today. Wish I was a man. Need more gesso and ultramarine. So I go to my closet, collect a few wire hangers, and sort out the clothes I have been keeping on the floor. I clean my palette with my fingernails and arrange the dried acrylic into a color wheel that turns out to be dominated by incremental iterations of blue. I lie in bed and wonder how women don’t feel it, the exact moment their bodies begin to create.

  * * *

  The next week, Rebecca insists I attend Akila’s belt ceremony and makes no mention of the paintings. When I get in the car, Eric looks at me as if it were my idea. At the ceremony, he calls me Edith and sits as far away as he can. Akila does not receive her belt. Fifteen steps in, she forgets her form and excuses herself from the mat. Rebecca ushers me over to that one black instructor and introduces me as a friend of the family. Of course, we have already met. We have already noticed each other and engaged in the light telepathy necessary in rooms like these, acknowledging that here we are, being careful and softly black. Despite the somewhat offensive ulterior motive of Rebecca’s introduction, Robert indulges her and we have a tepid conversation about making plans that neither of us means. At home, Akila is upset. The costume is finished, and while its components were exciting when they were separate and theoretical, on the body i
t doesn’t work. She looks at herself in the mirror and her smile falls. She looks at Eric, whose investment she is not insensitive to, and she pays a few half-hearted compliments, though her embarrassment is palpable, as is ours. We can’t be sure if it is shoddy craftsmanship, or the sobering reality of what a costume like this might reasonably look like on a body that is not itself a cartoon.

  “It’s fine,” Akila says, but in the days that follow, it doesn’t feel fine, the probiotics and polyethylene glycol doing nothing for my perpetually irritated bowels, though the chronic constipation is eased somewhat by my inability to keep anything down. I resume Call of Duty and introduce that Dutch kid to some friendly fire. I go to the store and buy a few pregnancy tests. I mow some grass and when I see that old white woman watching me through her blinds again, I walk up to her window and look her right in the eye until I realize the lawn mower is veering into the street.