Now she sighed. “The whole shaved-pussy thing is gross anyway.”
“Yeah. It’s so transparently about porn. I’m like, Aren’t you guys ashamed that you want to fuck prepubescent children? Don’t you get that this is what this is about?”
“Yeah, it’s disgusting,” she agreed, and then, “Porn,” she mused, in such a speculative, leisurely tone, that I giggled. “No, I mean really. It’s a thing. It’s a”—and she put on her best newscaster voice—“it’s a force shaping our world today.” We both chuckled, loose from the red wine, and the air too was dilating, making space in our tipsiness for something to grow.
“This one time,” she said in a wondering voice, “actually, it was the first time I was with Ian,” and it was as though someone had lifted me up by the scruff of my neck, “I started to cry.”
“Wait, why?”
“He was just being so gentle, so tender. And it had been so long, you know? So long since someone had done something more than just put me through a series of porn positions.”
“Wow.”
“You know what I mean?”
“Yeah, no. It’s like a checklist. I had never thought about it that way before, but you’re totally right. It’s so mechanical.”
Always, my most showy displays of submission—me on my knees, me whimpering, me helpless, or with my shoulders pinned—got the biggest grunts of satisfaction from men.
“I mean, I’m sex-positive, I believe that for some people, kink is a way toward intimacy. Absolutely. But a lot of it just feels like misogyny dressed up in new clothing. You know? It’s like this massive collective fantasy of humiliating and overpowering women. And I’m like, actually? Being choked doesn’t turn me on.”
“No, it’s true. It’s depressing when I think about it.”
It was depressing, and I also felt—what? Proud of Lacie for noticing it? Proud of her for naming it? As a teenager she had been so adored by men that now I loved hearing her trash them.
“Pornification is real,” she declared.
It was real, but the tricky thing was that sometimes it turned me on. Sometimes I hated that it turned me on. My pride in Lacie withered to envy: yes, I envied Lacie, who hadn’t gotten all scrambled by culture, who could definitively say she didn’t want to be slapped or choked.
Tentatively I said, “This one time, I was having sex with this guy, and he kept spanking me. Just like, Wham! Wham! I mean, it hurt. And afterward I was like, Why do you like hitting me? And he said, it feels nice. And I thought, Really? It feels nice? We just met, we’ve never had sex before, and already it feels so boring you have to add spanking to the mix?”
Lacie was nodding. “Yeah, exactly. Good for you for asking.”
I flushed under the compliment. I didn’t deserve it: I had been stupid enough to be flattered by his answer. It feels nice. The truth was that I liked turning men on. I liked feeling them flush with pleasure. I liked feeling feminine and small and weak; I liked their gasps of disbelief. I couldn’t be cavalier like Lacie; I couldn’t afford her anger. The affection of men was too precious to me. But when I thought too much about that, I felt ill.
I wanted to ask—oh, how I wanted to ask—if Ian was still tender in bed. Wouldn’t it be normal to say? Why were we still talking on this abstract level? But I couldn’t find the guts. I didn’t want to smash the warm circuit between us.
Lacie yawned and reached for her phone. “I’m afraid to look at the time, but let me just see.”
Predictably, it was shockingly late. We groaned and chorused, “We have to go to bed,” setting our wineglasses in the sink. Outside Lacie’s bedroom we paused awkwardly. “Good night,” she said, giving me a tentative half-hug. “This is so amazing. We get to have a sleepover every night.”
I grinned at her. She looked so pleased. “Yeah. It’s the best.”
Lacie left every morning around eight for work. Once the door slammed I would settle at my desk and open my laptop. I never started writing until she left. I needed to be alone.
Once she was gone, though—oh, how I wrote, with a faith that now breaks my heart. It was this simple: I believed I was writing a novel. For years I had believed this, but now I had an agent, and a solid draft, and all I had to do was fix it, fix it with all the vision and force within me, and glory would be mine. Though I am not that much older now, I look back on that girl with pity and frustration. She had such faith that her effort would be rewarded, that if she just dug in and worked, she would be lifted out of her life, the ordinary humdrum of tutoring teenagers, to a lifetime of mornings.
For my mornings—daydreaming at my desk, polishing a few lapidary sentences, scrawling out my dreams, sipping coffee—were the best part of my days. On the other side of publication there would surely be a lifetime of it. On scraps I tried out alternate exchanges of dialogue; breathlessly I whispered sentences, then swooped with my pen to correct errant syllables.
The novel focused on the friendship between two girls, one beautiful, the other plain; one popular and kind, the other closed like a fist. There comes between them a beautiful boy. Betrayal. Then violence—strange, ambiguous violence.
The problem, as you may have deduced, is that there are approximately one million other novels with this plot. The glamorous, beautiful one; the plain, smart one. A rueful adult narrator still puzzling over the past. Oh, it was all familiar territory—I was counting on my language, my beautiful crystalline language, to launch my career—but there was another problem too. Portia could no longer see it.
She kept sighing. “I just don’t understand the stakes of this story. I don’t get the why of it. Why does this book need to be written?”
The book needed to be written so that I could get on with my life. The book needed to be written so I could get a polite, middle-class sum of money, quit tutoring, which even after a month I already despised, and move into the adult part of my life.
But that was just me being glib. Glib was not a good strategy. I tried earnest: “The stakes are, she’s a girl who never goes after what she wants, and you sort of want her to go after what she wants, but when she finally does, it’s a disaster.” Phone cradled to my ear, I paced.
“So what’s the consequence of that? Why does this story matter?”
“Well, it’s about guilt. And shame.”
Silence. I looked at Lacie’s bookshelves. Barbara Comyns, Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Bowen, Elizabeth Taylor. All the subtle British ladies who believed in subtle emotional devastation.
“I think, in this next draft,” Portia spoke slowly, and I pictured her in her glassy gray office, eyes distant as she reached into my project, into me, “you should try—maybe even as an exercise—writing from Lacie’s point of view.”
“What, really?” The idea viscerally offended me. “Why?”
“I just think we need to understand her more.” Portia’s voice darkened like a purple-black bruise. A warning, almost.
* * *
—
After the phone call I wandered through the house, touching Lacie’s things. That’s what I did sometimes during these long lonely daylit hours when I was supposedly writing my book: touch Lacie’s things and wonder about her. Why had she let her subscription to Harper’s lapse? Why was she invited to Fabienne Hook’s solo show about bioluminescence? Did she ever eat her dark chocolate?
Living with Lacie while writing about her had gone from deeply bizarre to completely normal in a remarkably short amount of time. After all, I wasn’t writing about the real Lacie, but the cipher in my mind. It seemed simple enough to hold them apart, though every so often I plucked a detail from her life. No harm in that. But now Portia wanted me to get into her head.
That day, I found myself standing in the doorway to her room, looking at the unmade bed, the accordion drying rack, the stacks of paperback books. Right, I thought. This is what I haven’t let myse
lf do.
I didn’t snoop. I will say that for myself. Okay, maybe I opened her underwear drawer, but the sight of the Victoria’s Secret bra—we’re talking red lace, push-up, wires—discombobulated me. I thought Lacie was better than that.
Then I went through her closet, but only because I wanted to find the dress she had been wearing that morning at the farmers’ market. It was a cheap dress, pale peach, with a sweetheart neckline. I saw her again, picking through those fresh herbs. The way the cheese man had held out his knife. Her fear when she had first seen me.
Soon I was kicking off my jeans. Pulling my shirt over my head. The dress swished as it settled around me, clung to my hips as it clung to hers, scooped a soft line above my breasts. I studied the mirror.
In the pale dress I looked like Lacie. Sexy. I smoothed my hand over my stomach, sighing. Was this what Ian liked? Had he seen her in this dress, did it make him want to fuck her? What was their fucking like? Did he still make her cry?
I hurried to my desk and began to type.
Once we were pirates.
Standing in the hot black wings, my face stiff with makeup, eyelashes gummy, lips tacky, I buzzed: with Leo, with Lacie, with us. Leo flicking dust off my costume, Lacie straightening his crinkled stockings, the two of them laughing and mouthing the words to every song. Best of all, the long fight, cheering on Captain Hook, our knees sore against the auditorium stage, Leo’s thigh against mine. Scalding.
Why, even? He was just a boy. A pretty boy, long and lanky, with a loping walk and dark, smeary eyes. Skin so pale you could see blue blood beneath. He played the guitar. He was, in seventh grade, still nice to girls. Once he borrowed my eraser in math class; once he said he would write a song for me, though he never did. Leo, Leo Kupersky: every class has a boy like him, delicate, fawnlike, more beautiful than handsome, upon which adolescent girls can safely pin their fantasies. They should stagger under the weight of our dreams, these pretty boys, but no, Leo enjoyed our love, he loved it.
We roamed the halls of the school during the first act, pressing our faces against the dark windows of the locked classroom doors, our dull jail cells suddenly exotic on a Saturday night. In our striped tights and felt vests, we clowned around, slaying the dead hours cottoning our brief moments onstage. We squinted and said, “You’ve got lipstick on your teeth,” and “Can you give me a back rub? My shoulders are tense.” Leo always gave the back rubs, his long hands, muscled from guitar, working first Lacie’s shoulders and then mine.
We were cast as Starkey, Bill Jukes, and Noodler, and our big moment came when we brought the theatrically squirming Tiger Lily to Captain Hook. Pure heaven: the three of us in a music classroom with Lydia Firkins and Walt Stevens, learning how to drag Lydia to Walt, how to coordinate our limbs.
“Arrgh, Captain, look what we found,” Leo was supposed to say, though he always mumbled it, and then I would burst out with, “She was fixing to board the ship!”
* * *
—
At the end of the final show, while the Darling children were singing in their nursery, Jesse and Leo tried to light themselves on fire. From the back corner of the cooking classroom I watched. Wedged together, they fiddled with a stove until blue flames shot up. Grinning madly, Grogan brought the sleeve of his Lost Boys costume close. Its fringe began to smoke, and slowly the room filled with a flat chemical stink.
All of us, pirates and Lost Boys and Indians, were penned in, ready for our curtain call. This was always the moment it seemed we might collectively go insane: the hours of waiting, the adrenaline of performing, the drama of who had missed their cues and smudged their makeup, ramped up all night, and would Joe get kicked out? Where was the cast party? What should we do with all this crazy energy, us sixth, seventh, eighth graders? Hyped up on hormones, teasing and pushing and whispering, we had so much electricity in our bodies that the parent volunteers could only stand by the entrance with their arms crossed and try to make sure we didn’t set anything on fire, though they were obviously failing even at that.
It was up to Lacie, deftly maneuvering between the two boys, to twist her wrist and vanquish the flames. With an imperious nod she dismissed Grogan. He shook his head, balled his fists, and, with a twist of his mouth, drifted off to harass Tinker Bell.
From my post by the window I watched. The day before, I had explained to Lacie how Leo’s thigh always lingered against mine during the fight scene, how I thought he was just a little too eager to give me a back rub. “I think he might like me,” I had confided, raising my eyebrows. “Do you like him?” she had asked immediately, and though that was the obvious response, I was still somehow unprepared. “A little,” I finally answered, and she nodded and agreed to investigate. Together we had worked out the exact wording, which struck us as precise, almost legalistic: “Leo,” she would say. “Do you like Rose? Like, like her like her?”
Now Lacie leaned close. Seeing them together, I went cold. Lacie’s lips brushed his ear. His eyes widened. She pulled back, and he shook his head. No.
* * *
—
A week after the play ended, I came swinging into the locker room after gym and heard from behind a wall of lockers a flutter of girl giggles, and then: She was fixing to board the ship! The voice exaggerated, humiliating in its theatrical growl. A round of glassy, high laughter. I stood in the shock of it, pressed against the hand-dryers, realizing I had become a joke, that there was something faintly ridiculous about me. I was aghast. But not, somehow, surprised. It was all there in how I said that stupid line: my dorkiness, my puppy-dog desire to please, the way I was simultaneously tainted by sex and helplessly a child. How could Leo love me? How could I ever have imagined he might? These girls despised me. They smelled what was eager on me. They scorned it.
These were the kinds of memories I wrote down. Wrote down, and embellished, trying to decipher their significance. Trying, also, to write from Lacie’s point of view, though it wasn’t easy. To enter her mind I had to go into a kind of trance, as if listening for a quiet song playing far away. I’d hear a lilt, and rush to write it down; sometimes the caught detail would lead to others, and I’d find myself scribbling a page or two, riffing about coming home every day to a depressed, withdrawn mother and an absent father; or having a gawky best friend lost in love; or discovering a strange power over boys but not knowing what to make of it.
I could never plan or force these scribblings; they just fell over me. I had the sneaking suspicion they were very good, maybe some of the finest writing I had done; on the best days, the book opened up. But work was slow and inconstant.
One day, pretending to myself that I was curious about Joy Williams, that I wanted to read the collection Lacie had carted off to bed last night, I found myself rifling through Lacie’s underwear drawer again.
This had been happening to me more. Having broken the seal on her bedroom, I kept going back. I liked looking at her things. I liked touching them. They helped me feel her. They helped me get her on the page. In those minutes in her room I somehow felt closer to her than all the nights we spent talking.
Now I fished out the red Victoria’s Secret push-up and pulled at the tag. We wore the same size. It was nice to see it declared there in a plain gray font.
Careful not to think too much about it, I pulled off my flannel top. Unhooked my Macy’s bra, and then threaded my arms through her straps, latched and straightened. Looked in the mirror.
The contraption pushed and hoisted, creating from my bony rib cage a valley of flesh. Was this what men liked? I touched the cups, twisting my body like an odalisque. It was all so cheesy. But maybe—I reached into the closet, back to where Lacie kept the peach dress, and slipped it on. Studied myself. Yes. In her bra, with—I scanned her dresser, snagged a tube of color, put her lipstick on my lips—I looked even more like her. I felt even more like her. Shifting my weight, cocking my head, raising first one shoulder a
nd then the other, I tried to imagine how it would feel to wear these clothes in public, to snag second glances wherever I went.
Behind me in the mirror I could see her bed, all crumpled sheets and creased paperbacks, capped pens and shrugged-off sweaters and socks. The pillow crumpled up against the wall.
In a flounce I threw myself down. Inhaling deeply through my nose, I took in the sour smell of her sleep, the tang of sweat and something deeper, almost vaginal. On the pillow was a single dark hair. Beside it, a notebook. Opened.
I started flipping pages. I knew it was bad. As a writer I particularly knew it was bad. But I couldn’t help myself. The book was already opened.
This was what I found:
A recipe for za’atar
A note to pick up cheesecloth
The phone number of someone named Sandy
A note detailing the dimensions of something called the EZ-5460
The date and time of the next JFREJ meeting
A diagram for what looked like a chrysalis
A second diagram of the chrysalis, this one more detailed, crosshatched, with precise measurements (6'73/4", 4'3") in faint indigo handwriting
A sketch of a woman asleep on a couch. The woman was me.
For a long time I stared. My mouth was a slack hole, unrecognizable. But it was definitely me: she had even filled in the blond hair with a colored pencil. At the bottom, there was the date (9/13) and time (10:37 P.M.).
I remembered that night. She had stayed up late working on her loom, and I, lulled by the rhythmic clacking, had let my book slip from my hands and a deep sleep suck me down. As I had been sinking, some bright thread of conscious thought flashed: this is real friendship. To fall asleep in the same room, to let my guard down so completely. I was home. I slept.
Everyone Knows How Much I Love You Page 6