* * *
—
I felt proud and lost. I know now which feeling lasts.
CLEARWATER
I tell the policeman I didn’t touch the rib cage. This isn’t entirely true. I was walking the Florida sandbar, observing a floral pink stripe of sunset on the horizon, thinking (okay, selfishly) of what would happen to me once Jeffrey passed, when I tripped over the bones. Disturbed, they leaned and relaxed with the incoming tide, the gait of a rocking chair.
“Where’s it?” the man asks me. He’s young, red weals pocking his face beneath the recent stubble of a shave. His badge reads: Clearwater PD. Gray birds wheel overhead, having spotted an easy kill in the parking lot.
I point toward its location, near a lone buoy. Two teen girls volley a rainbow beach ball feet away from where I suspect the bones rest. He whistles sharply, calls them in. They chase each other out of the water, laughing, an imagined shark at their heels.
“You sure it was a person’s?” I can tell he doesn’t think I’m sure.
“I think so,” I say.
Hours ago, another horror: Jeffrey’s chest glowing, paranormal, up on that screen in the hospital, a phosphorescent blossom on the right side. The doctor then held up an identical photo, a smaller bud of white, a poisonous flower yet to bloom: “And this was two weeks ago,” he said with a sigh. Later, I told Jeffrey no one was to blame as he finished a cup of shivering red Jell-O. A lie we might as well believe.
“So you’re not sure,” he says. His radio clicks with static. “Divers are on their way.”
He retires to his idling car, and I walk toward the shoreline. That he’s let me wander assuages my fear I might be suspect in some unknown murder, one of those killers hopelessly entwined with their victims. I remain on the beach partly out of a sense of obligation for having located the bones, but also because I want to see them found, lifted, bagged, gone.
Sitting on the sand, it occurs to me for the first time that beneath the waves there may be other parts: elbows, femurs, submerged spines and patellae. They have to be out there, somewhere. On other beaches, in other countries, rolling up in warm, shallow water, caught in the wire of fish traps set deep out in bays. Every day things like this must turn up, though we can’t recognize them. I make an impression with my palm in the sand. When I lift my hand, its shape is quickly lost to the wind.
TOURNIQUET
I used to think a tourniquet was a kind of flower. I was sure I’d heard my mother say she planted rows of them when I was younger: bulbous yellow things, unburdened by petals, slick with dew, shining like sugar in the frost of a March fog. It wasn’t until I’d gone to nursing school in my mid-twenties, one of those fresh starts, that I learned a tourniquet is a compression tool, a vise for flesh, a thing that says, I am holding you together. I don’t remember which flowers I’d mismatched, improperly bouqueted out of their meanings. Years later, on the drive home from a shift cleaning knife wounds and wrapping burnt hands in gauze, I’d stop at a farmers market, poring over flowers, remembering. “Azalea,” a woman told her daughter, pointing to a red-pink haze. “Chrysanthemum.”
IN THE PALM OF HIS HAND
The first thing I have to confess is that pretending to have a relationship with the church (The Church?) came easily to me, in a way that at the time did not feel like a sin.
“A relationship with God, you mean. You’re not praying to a building.”
My friend Maggie had been out of Fordham for four months and found, back in her Vermont hometown, a need to reaffirm, at every turn, her hundred thousand dollars of intelligence and acquired wisdom. The phone crackled with static, her bad reception up there in the woods. I imagined her in the middle of a brown leaf pile, neck high, and stifled a laugh at the image. She continued disapprovingly, “It’s worth asking: Is this ethical?”
“You mean moral,” I said.
“No,” she said, aghast with the special irritation at having been corrected by someone who graduated from a state school. “I mean ethical.”
“I guess I’m not worried about that,” I said. She didn’t reply immediately. I could tell I was upsetting her more but pressed anyway. “Didn’t you do kind of the same thing? Saying you played tennis for Bryan?”
“That actually could have been true. I have the body for it. Plus, I can pick that up anytime.”
“And I can’t just start going to church?”
“Again,” she insisted, “it’s about going to God. And for your first relationship?”
“Plenty of people who go to church don’t believe in God.”
“Ugh,” she said. “You sound like Bill.”
Bill was a contrarian who Maggie had dated and complained about through her sophomore year, a Columbia guy with long black hair he modeled on weekends who pushed back on everything she said, and who once infuriatingly “iced” her on a fire escape during a party. A shame memory for us both. She’d called me right after, and I’d been too drunk myself to be of any help. She still hadn’t gotten over him, I knew, and I felt awful that she still couldn’t see a fact so clearly before us both, obvious even at the time: Bill never really liked her. She was trying to become him now, though I’d never tell her that. You sound like Bill, I wanted to fire back.
“Sorry,” I conceded instead. Throwing the conversation in the trash, I said pointlessly, “What are your plans for the day?”
She ignored the question, the phone making a crinkling, fading-out noise that suggested the fraying of our friendship with each of these less and less frequent calls.
“Why are you even doing this? Is a guy worth all this energy?” She strung up those words, put extra spaces between them for emphasis: All. This. Energy.
It was something I would have said to her, might already even have. I had the urge to get off the phone, which seemed to come at me from out of the blue but in truth had been lurking all along. I touched my chest where I imagined the metal Jesus resting, proving my devotion.
“Maggie, you just have to understand. He’s like—he’s so, so hot. He has one of those fucking butt chins.”
“So you said you were Catholic?”
“Christian,” I corrected, not totally sure of the difference. “Leaves me options, right?”
“Is this worth eternal damnation?” she said. I laughed.
We were two different people now, and scheduling the conversation felt like a display of my loneliness, a feeling the city often made me think I might finally be getting rid of. The past few months, I had started to know that Maggie hated that we had switched places, and now it was my turn in the city, and despite what we’d both believed would happen, I was the one making it. And in fashion. It felt like a gift that I had to succeed at all costs. Not because I wanted to pull for a September issue or boss around an assistant, but because it created distance between who people thought I used to be; it made them know they were wrong.
“Probably I’m already damned,” I said. “Is avoiding that even an option for me at this point?”
* * *
—
Eric and Amy moved their chairs up to my desk, rolling them noisily along the long corridor of glass conference rooms, revealing to anyone within earshot their status as forever-assistants, unpromotable people who never get why they’re not promoted. They were the kind of people I risked letting myself become when I indulged their gossip and exclusive group lunches. Their unprofessionalism was contagious in that it gave the impression I was like them, which I wasn’t. Charm Magazine handed out one promotion every two years, on the same date—the next day. People called it the day someone gets Charmed. New though I was, six months in I’d heard during a performance review that I was being eyed for it. A secret I’d kept at all costs.
“So the date,” they said. “The church guy.”
“His name is Simon!” I said.
“He’s so hot,” Eric said. “Like, dreamy. I went on
a date with a guy like this once. He ordered sushi. I could barely speak.”
Amy and I stared at him. The sushi detail read as pathetic.
“How are you playing this?” Amy said. She rolled her chair up closer. “You need a game plan.”
“I should get a cross,” I joked.
Eric gasped loudly. “My God, that’s genius.” In her office his boss, one of the top fashion editors, leaned back in her chair, wondering what had caused it.
“Probably worth a shot actually,” Amy said.
“I don’t know if I’ll see him again.”
“I have to pull for the deciduous shoot this afternoon. I’ll see if we have a prop or something.”
The “deciduous leaves shoot” was Eric’s promise at a good idea that every one of us knew would get killed last minute, and we were thankful for it. He’d saved up all his trust for this moment. The gift of self-elimination.
“Eric,” I said, “if I do it I’m getting a real cross.”
He nodded and I told them I needed to get back to calendaring lunches. Overkill? Maybe. It seemed worth it, to have this insane attention to detail. As they screeched their chairs down the hall, I wanted to tell them how I’m succeeding and why they’re not: that I come in on Sunday nights to do memos. Call down to the front desk to have the nineteenth floor lights turned on. I leave with strain in my lower back from hunching over my keyboard for hours. I shut myself up pretty much all the time. I wanted to just finally say, Stop talking to me. You aren’t getting Charmed; I am.
* * *
—
My roommate, Dave, was a gaymer on weekends and, during the depressive episodes that were becoming a regular feature in his life, every other day of the week too. He’d quit two good jobs and been left unable to find another.
When I got home from work, he was talking into an earpiece with several other men like him, gays who don’t moisturize and spend their money on consoles not condoms. He met them all on some online forum I had been avoiding asking about, and I resisted the urge to pity him because he was such a nice guy. Even asking him to help clean the shower left me doused with guilt.
“Hey,” I said. “How’s the day?”
He took off his headset fast. “Hey! Okay. How are you?”
“Wiped,” I said. “Long day.” I didn’t mean to upset him, but bringing up that I had a salary touched a nerve, I could tell, so I kept on. “How’s the game?”
“Oh, it’s good! Yeah, good.”
“What’s the point?”
“Kill the bad guys,” he said, laughing a little. “As always.”
“Who are the bad guys?” I dropped my brown leather satchel near the couch and walked toward the screen.
“This one is pretty messed up. You go to different areas and, like, take whole places out. They’re filled with bad guys though. But weird I guess.”
“Almost makes you seem like the bad guy, huh?” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. He was choking through his words a bit, flustered. “But I’m not.”
I normally never got this close to Dave. He had an aura of palpable sadness, covered up with desperation. I could always see it from a distance, but getting too close left me unable to exit conversations gracefully. I always had to shut him down, and every time I did, I knew it just made things worse. He had paid his rent on time these past few months, with life-or-death deadline urgency. Last month he told me, his forehead shining with anxious sweat, leaning nervously on my bedroom doorframe, that he’d be a little late. He’d been close to tears. I couldn’t help but think if I were him I’d have just secretly sent my check in late, that it really didn’t matter. Later on, he’d shown up in that doorframe again and asked if I wanted to get a beer. The first time we’d have hung out. I told him I had plans, and then quickly made them, as if to prove to myself I could do such a thing. An hour later, I was laughing at a bar down the street with Ashley and Lauren, hoppy foam on my upper lip.
I sat down next to him on the couch and saw the thin gold chain around his neck. “I like that,” I said.
“Oh!” He took it out, the chain hung slack. “My mom gave it to me. She said I should always wear it.”
“It looks good on you,” I said, offering him a kindness I didn’t mean.
“Thanks! I have others if you want this one.”
“Really? Or I could have one of the others,” I said. Are you this entitled? I thought, just to myself. Taking your roommate’s cross?
“Yeah, it’s totally fine!” He struggled it around his head and cupped it in the palm of his hand, holding it out for me. “She sends them to me a lot.” I took the cross from him. There was a greasy quality to the metal. He grabbed at his headpiece fast, noticing something blinking on the screen.
“Sorry,” he said. “We’ve been waiting on this battle. We finally got access to the vampire armory.”
“No problem,” I said, hoping the secondhand embarrassment at his lameness wasn’t obvious in those words. And then I went off to wash the cross in the kitchen sink.
* * *
—
I lifted my head from his pillow, sitting upright on Simon’s couch, and adjusted my shirt (as planned) to the side so that the thin gold chain that led down to a crucifix, carved out with a tiny Jesus, flashed against my neck.
“Oh,” Simon said. “Did you have that last time?”
Glad as I was Simon had noticed, I expected for the noticing to go something like this: a quiet acknowledgment I was religious too. Eventually, a new intimacy deepened by the respect of this choice, which would (also eventually) lead through a few small devotion-proving fights to love and then marriage. I had not expected to have to confront my religiousness aloud just yet, and for a moment the lie seized me around the waist. “Yeah,” I told Simon, measuring my voice, trying to make the word sound aggressively mundane, as if I spoke of the chain often. “I wear it everywhere.”
I had worn it only once, to the grocery store the day before, in a dumb practice round of trying to pull “the look” off in public after he’d texted to ask what I was up to the next night. What is the look? I wondered to myself. Do I walk differently now? Does this make people think I’m not gay? That I’m not comfortable with my gayness? My internal dialogue was running at such a high level that I had forgotten half of what I’d gone to the store to get—chicken and rice, a roll of toilet paper Dave hadn’t bothered to buy despite the recent assurances of his accountability. (“I know it annoys you—sorry, I’ll get it tomorrow!”)
“That’s really cool,” Simon said, placing a glass of water in front of him. What would have been a normal gesture of hospitality felt oddly like a profession of love. Really cool. Not just cool. It pleased me; this was working.
“Thanks,” I said, injecting a hint of weariness into the word. “A lot of people don’t understand it.” I adjusted my shirt so the chain disappeared, and we got back to talking about the movie we were about to watch, a Christian horror film called Bells of Reckoning in which nuns become vampires and then turn absurdly and confusingly back into nuns.
“Have you seen this one?” Simon asked.
“I haven’t!” I said. Obviously, I thought to myself. The movie case looked like a bargain-bin novel, fanged nuns in idiot red tones. I was comforted by the fact we had ended the moment on a note of my honesty (no, I had not in fact seen this movie), and placed my head at an angle, so that if Simon wanted to, he could nudge me to fall romantically onto his lap. The only scene that held my attention was the one where the nuns become unpossessed, their fangs shrinking back to human teeth. It reminded me of the cool crucifix above my heart, and what it would mean for me to break through the illusion of my Catholicism, which was amazingly simple to pull off.
“Church Sunday?” he asked.
“Of course,” I said. Of course.
* * *
—
; Maggie called me at exactly five thirty the next day, a punctuality that seemed desperate. “I have him wrapped around the palm of my hand,” I told her excitedly right when I picked up, walking to the subway. I wanted her to say anything that would support this decision, this certainty that we can change for other people, or ourselves. Maybe private school taught that.
“Isn’t the expression ‘in the palm of your hand’?”
“Both!” I said.
“It can’t be both. That doesn’t make sense.”
“How’s Bryan?”
“Rough patch but every rough patch ends.”
“Yeah, I hope so too,” I said.
“You hope what?”
“That every rough patch ends.”
“I didn’t say I hope. I said it does.”
“Sorry,” I said, letting her win.
In the background, over the bustle of cars and distant horns, I heard, “Mag, where the fuck you put the tomatoes?” I winced at how embarrassed it must have made her feel, knowing I heard that.
“I have to go,” she said. “Did you get the cross?”
“I’m wearing it now,” I said. “I actually like it.”
She sighed loudly, sparing me the sense this was about me at all.
“I have to go too,” I said. “Dinner with friends in the Village.”
She didn’t tell me what she was going to do, so I was sure it was nothing she wanted me to know. I walked down into the subway and waited ten minutes for a train and didn’t think of her once. I imagined myself going through Charm’s closet with Eric in the next few days, pulling out church-wear. White and black, I told myself. But I honestly had no idea.
I Know You Know Who I Am Page 15
