More laughter. Ian’s smile deepened, but clearly he was only being polite. I became frantic to wrest a real laugh from him.
“Really, we did. And I said to the nurse, I think I swallowed a toothpick. And you know, they’re very polite in Lincoln, but she was like, ‘What do you want me to do for you?’ She got the doctor, he was like, ‘An X-ray? You’re asking for an X-ray.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, I think that would just help me go to sleep.’ So they took an X-ray, and they didn’t find anything, and it was such a relief. For me, I mean. I think I was the only one who was worried.”
Finally Ian threw back his head and laughed.
Sophie cried, “I am exactly that person. I am exactly the person who thinks she’s accidentally swallowed a toothpick.”
I had them. I had him. I felt it. All wrapped up inside this laughter, I started to believe in a New York life. They liked me. I was funny.
The soup was done. The candles had pooled waxy eggs. Dylan was pushed back from the table. The pipes began their song, and Lacie rose and stacked the empty bowls, their glazed clay dully chiming. No one joined her. Apparently all those polite, tiresome fights about helping and hosting had played out long ago. Tonight was a ritual, old and familiar.
She wasn’t lying, I thought. She does this so often they’re used to it. She’s a host. But at least I can make them laugh.
* * *
—
When Lacie came back out with a plate of brownies, to much oohing and aahing, Ian scooped one up in his paw and loped off to wash dishes. From the kitchen soon came the comfortable, easy slosh of suds, the regular clink of silverware, the confident opening of cabinets. He knew this house; it was obvious. But when had he been over? I was almost always home. Had he looked in my room? It creeped me out, and excited me, to think of him seeing my things.
At the table, we were back on boyfriends. “It’s weird,” Sophie was saying in her hushed, breathy voice. She looked like a blossom, a black-eyed Susan. “I almost feel like something happened to Aaron and his mom during Aaron’s childhood, something that neither of them ever got over. Like some boundary got crossed, and you know, it’s weird, because Aaron’s sister has been in recovery, and so they’ve all learned these new, non-fucked-up ways of being together, they’ve learned how to be supportive, and maintain boundaries, but sometimes you can feel this old way of being together haunting them—”
“Yeah,” Dylan murmured.
“It’s always weird, when you can feel the dysfunctional way of being in the new dynamic.” When Lacie spoke, I couldn’t look at her. “It’s like this shadow. Or a callus. It pushes up against everything else. It shapes it.”
“Yeah,” I said softly.
“Yeah,” Sophie agreed.
Anna began stacking our brownie plates. Dylan rose, stretched, and carried two wine bottles to the kitchen. Sophie followed with the cheese. Lacie and I were left alone. But we weren’t looking at each other. Not yet.
* * *
—
Later, I found myself lying in the dark listening for the sounds of Lacie making love. Listening, and pretending I was not. From her bedroom came quiet conversation, a low giggle, and then the croon of Sam Cooke. I pictured Lacie naked, all jutting bone and pale skin, a child’s body, though I knew from seeing her step from the shower that her nipples were large and dark, the areoles like brown suns.
The music got turned up.
My skin crackling, I strained to hear. Were they fucking? Talking? Was he touching her? Then came the unmistakable rhythmic squeak of the bed, the light, regular thump of mattress hitting wall.
Slowly, with damp fingers, I drew back my sheets. Eased one leg, then the other, to the ground. Stood. Surgically, I slid my feet across the floorboards to the wall. The feathery gray pinwheels of a head rush spattered my vision, then cleared.
My door beneath my hands opened soundlessly. Blinking, my finger pads against the wall for balance, I crept down the hall.
When I was directly outside her door, I heard above the shush, shush, shush of the bed little moans, tiny tender sex noises. My pussy went wet. Thick. There in the dark I pressed my palm against the heat in my crotch.
“No.” Lacie’s voice, a whispered stab. “No.” This second one louder. The bed stopped. The breathing stopped. “I hate that. I told you. No.”
Her voice through the music might have been honeyed with flirt—I couldn’t quite tell. Then came Ian’s low rumble, pleading, cajoling. Apologizing? I stood very still. I listened.
The thunking began again. Lacie’s quick, high breathing. Like a tiny scared animal. On socked feet I slid down the hall and dashed to my bed, where I pulled the covers over my head as if I had seen a ghost.
But once there I couldn’t fall asleep. I kept lying there, listening. My ears ached with it, my neck tingled. Finally they got loud again. Finally they forgot me. They got louder, and louder, until Lacie was screaming, high wheels of pleasure, and Ian was barking, bellowing, roaring—and that’s when I joined in. Very quietly I moaned. Right in time with them. Matching my exhales to hers, making tiny hurt, delighted noises. Crying out.
In the morning I woke to cups and bowls knocking against one another, the click, click, hiss of the gas stove, and a low murmur of voices. A thin gray drizzle fell from the sky. My tiny room was dark and silvery, silent and cold, and even before I was fully awake I wanted to be with them.
When I swooped into the kitchen, Ian smiled from the stove. Lacie said, “Morning, cowgirl. Want Ian to make you some eggs?”
She was perched on the stepladder we kept in the kitchen, wearing a black drapey dress and leggings with a long run. Between her hands she cupped a steaming mug. “Sure,” I said, standing in the doorway. “That sounds good.”
Ian cracked two eggs into the cast iron. His pale T-shirt showed off his big arms and slight belly. He was so strong, so solid, yet his eyes held a liquid sadness that freighted even a question such as how I liked my eggs with melancholy.
Ian poured me coffee. “Milk?” I nodded. “Let’s go to the table.”
We shuffled to the dining room, and ate among the stained wineglasses and spilled black pepper of the previous night.
I was hungover from jealousy and wine, and weirded out by what I had done, but as I drank my coffee and soaked my toast in gold yolk, all the blood vessels in my brain relaxed. Ian and Lacie still murmured quietly, talking about his studio in Red Hook, and though I felt apart from their ease, self-conscious and confused, I didn’t feel excluded, exactly; more like I was warming myself by their fire. The memory from the night before dimmed.
Outside the rain picked up. Ian, beside me, smelled like sweat and sleep, a body, with a high note of turpentine. It made me edgy. Being with them—I liked it, but it was too much. I began to fiddle with my phone. Two new emails.
“Oh, look, you guys,” I interrupted. “Isabel sent me her essay.”
They looked over as if they were surprised to find me sitting there.
“Isabel’s her student,” Lacie explained. “Rose is obsessed with her.”
“For good reason. This girl is insane,” I told Ian. “She calls herself a feminist but wears twelve-hundred-dollar fuck-me heels.”
Ian said, “Huh.” God, but it was hard to make him laugh.
The file finished loading. I scanned. “Oh, good Lord, you guys, listen to this. This is actually real.” I read:
BE YOU
Ever since I was a little girl I have wanted to be a runway model. The lights, and all those great clothes! To be a runway model, you have to know how you look to people. You have to understand what they see and use it to your advantage. It is almost like being an artist, though people don’t think of it that way.
In an essay by WEB Du Bois called “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” he talks about the Veil. “The Veil” is about how you can have double consciousness. This
is when you are aware of yourself, but also how you look to everyone else. This is exactly the quality you need to be a supermodel.
“Wait, what?” Lacie was laughing. “You’re making this up.”
“If only.” I kept going:
“Of Our Spiritual Strivings” was very moving to me. I felt that it spoke to my life experience. In my generation, people are always looking at each other. They are posting pictures on Facebook and Instagram. Sometimes when people are out having fun they’re just thinking about how it will look on Instagram. Obviously this is not what WEB Du Bois had in mind when he wrote about the Veil and Double Consciousness but I think it’s amazing how he anticipated modern lifestyles.
Feminism has taught me that it doesn’t matter who’s watching! And ironically the models who can look like they don’t care who is looking at them are the ones that the most people want to look at. Both feminism and WEB Du Bois’s essay have shaped my perspective as a young woman working in fashion today.
“Oh my God,” Lacie and Ian chorused.
“Yep.” I dropped the phone on the table with a dramatic clatter. “That’s Isabel West. She loves the term life experience.” Theatrically I wrinkled my face. This was what I had wanted all morning: their attention. “I mean, I thought I had gotten her to agree that double consciousness referred specifically to the black experience in America, but I guess it was just too hard to write about something other than herself.”
“Even black thought has to belong to her,” Ian said, and we all shook our heads. How thrilling to catch another white person—a seventeen-year-old girl—being racist. How superior we felt. “Who is this girl?” he wanted to know.
“She’s the richest. Of all my students, she’s the richest. Every time I go into her house, I have to take off my shoes, and the carpet is so soft my feet practically have an orgasm,” and that did it, thank God: he finally laughed.
Ian and I had met at an artist residency in a beach town during the crystalline early weeks of September, when a spell of drifty laziness, a sense that the ordinary laws of living had been suspended, had overtaken me. Winning the residency was a significant coup; it meant that I had talent, I thought, not simply potential. But after the hyperactivity of grad school and office life, the million bells of obligation, I simply did not know what to do with the gift of time except squander it. I struggled to stay rooted, like an astronaut on the moon.
The beach town was the last in a string of beach towns, and for many years it had been the lesser of its rivals, a sleepy fishing village mostly housing the help for the more fashionable environs. But in the past five or six years, the town council and the bureau of tourism had begun to aggressively market the town to young people. Nightclubs and bars opened. Motels jacked up their prices. A yoga studio appeared, then two, then a juice bar. But the pose of party town was not struck with complete conviction. The big hair and thick necks that invaded each weekend incensed the locals and at the same time pleased them, for now they had a common enemy and a unifying complaint. At the IGA, down by the docks, at the Shag Wong—the original locals bar—a giddy chorus of outrage echoed, the righteous jubilee of those who have finally been wronged.
Into this tempest we were dropped. After a lucrative Broadway smash, a famous playwright had bought an old stable and converted it to a residency house for artists, both visual and literary; the ramshackle building, bleached bone white and a milky calcium blue, had been welcoming artists during the summer months for nearly four decades, far longer than the royalties had lasted.
The towels were all thin, ragged, and rust-stained; the sheets all had the same dreadful gray, black, and white stripes, as if issued by a youth reformatory. The rooms smelled of mildew and Pine-Sol, and the salt and sand of a thousand beach days were bleached into the fine-grained floors. Everything creaked and popped. The second floor only extended half the footprint, so that the painting studios could rise unimpeded into the hot, dusty air that still carried a hint of manure and hay, the snort and stink of the twenty-five horses that once had been housed there. Great wooden rafters crossed beneath the ceiling, and at night birds and bats, drawn by the electric light, dove and swooped, casting flickering shadows on the rough stone floor thirty feet below. A haunted place, at once particular and anonymous, far removed from the faux-weathered shanties suddenly selling for $2 million, the Barn was layered by time, by the stallions who were now dead and the young artists who were now old, and yet despite its history, the place also seemed strangely out of time, an island on an island, a ruin possessing its own logic.
We had no place in this war between summer folk and locals, and the old groundsman who maintained the Barn left us alone. Not once, during my time there, did anyone ask if my work was going well, or even what I did in the hours I spent in my room with the door shut. They all assumed I was writing, but in truth, flummoxed by Portia’s notes, and unable to see my fictionalized Lacie anymore, I slumped all day at my desk, reading a book of theoretical physics.
This was during the bad time, when, trying to follow Portia’s suggestions, I had turned what had been alive into something boring. Portia thought so; after reading my new draft, I could hear her polite “feedback” avoiding the monstrous judgment she wouldn’t allow herself to say. I ran from it, unable to admit that something in my writing had soured. In a daze I turned pages, deducing from the strange diagrams and eager explanations that time was not linear but rather curved like a shining silver bowl. I imagined myself in the bottom of it, spinning.
An hour before sunset I would take one of the beach cruisers donated by the playwright and sail down the long winding road to the beach. I never wore a helmet. In Cambridge and Iowa I had; in fact all my life I had, but although there were blind curves and giant black SUVs and even larger pickup trucks barreling along these blind curves at forty miles an hour, I was convinced nothing bad would happen to me. Like the Barn I was untouched by my surroundings; I flew down straight-backed, my hair flying out behind me, my wire basket filled with towel and book, sure I was safe from tragedy.
Once I reached the beach, I stripped to my underwear and swam in the sea. I never wore a bathing suit; my bikini, the first few days, had kept falling off my narrow chest in the waves. There was no lifeguard this late in the season, but the water was warm and a sparkly deep blue, a color utterly unlike the Atlantic of my childhood, more like a lake than the sea. Even on its crashiest, biggest days it seemed to me benevolent, and so I swam alone, at dusk, with no one on shore to watch me.
Into this weightless immortality, this lulling embrace of risk, came Ian. I had known him for weeks, of course; he was one of the two artists practicing beneath the sweeping rafters, a painter who stood on his artwork as he made it. I knew because I watched him from the high observatory window built into the edge of the second floor. I watched his broad, thick arms, covered with blond hairs, as he flicked house paint around, and I watched his funny yellow shoes, pointed like elves’ slippers, which allowed him to walk lightly across his Plexiglas canvas.
We roomed across from each other in the narrow white hall built above the kitchen, and though for the first few days we kept our doors resolutely shut, I soon started leaving mine ajar when I was out—it seemed fussy and distrusting to always keep it closed. Then he started doing the same. After a week or so I stopped making my bed the instant I awoke, preferring to loll about with my coffee for an hour or so; this meant that when I left my room he could see my unmade bed. He soon followed suit, and so I could glimpse beyond the partially shut door the flung-back sheet and the round dent where he had put his head. It was a lovely, finely calibrated game of loosening standards, and it thrilled me to lead it. Meanwhile, we continued to speak politely, if indifferently, to each other.
Then I opened an email, and everything changed. The University of Nebraska had awarded me the Dwight O. McKneight Fellowship; for a single semester’s work I would receive $25,000, and all I ha
d to do was teach one fiction-writing class, two hours on Tuesday afternoons.
Wobbly, I walked in a circle around my small wooden room. I sat and read the email a third time, then made another circle. The tidiness of the news left me stunned. I had applied, figuring hundreds, if not thousands, were in the pool; I had dawdled through these weeks, figuring that soon enough I’d be back to early-morning commutes and thirty minutes of scribbling before bed. But no. Summarily, I had been yanked from my life.
I closed my computer, went downstairs, and filled a pot with water. Turned on the electric stove and let the coils darkly glow. While there were still only tiny bubbles on the bottom of the pot my eye sockets began to ache. My nose burned, my temple pulsed, and then there they were: two hot tears trailing down my cheeks, leaving in their wake two lines of cooled air. Then more.
As I was crying and salting the water and shaking the pasta box, Ian walked in—he had swapped his yellow elf shoes for boots, I remember that—and asked me what was the matter.
The story came tumbling out, in between gasps of “I don’t know why I’m crying” and “I’m so happy, but it’s just so strange” and “I feel crazy—”
“Do you want a hug?” he interrupted. I nodded and folded myself against his belly, the warm, safe swell of it, and his strong painter hands. Beneath them, I steadied.
We stayed up that night talking. After I had said all I could say about the University of Nebraska, after we had googled Lincoln together and laughed and shrieked at the boxy, bland downtown, we turned to other things: his upcoming show, my faltering novel draft, ambition, fate, the literary world, the art world, differences and similarities, rivals and jealousies. Later he put on a Britten opera, and we simply sat in the warm half-light of a single lamp, sipping red wine as the contralto unleashed her rich throttle.
Everyone Knows How Much I Love You Page 10