There’s a pause and I hear the baby gurgle. “Have you talked to Sebastian?” she says, drawing a line under the subject of my potential demolition of the dining room via suicide attempt.
“Nope.”
“He’s freaking out, Chris.”
“Good.”
She sighs. “Look, I think he deserves it as much as you do—”
“—no, you don’t. You cannot possibly imagine how much he deserves it.”
“Okay, maybe I can’t, but come on. Don’t you think you two should at least talk?”
“No.”
“Chris, he’s distraught. He knows he fucked up.”
“I know he does,” I say, and there’s something so soothing about being this mad at him. No regrets, no apologies, no nothing. Which is what he deserves. Nothing. “Just like he knew it the first time, but he still fucking did it again.”
“Chris, what are you talking about? Are you saying he’s done this before?”
“Yep. Over a year ago. New York fashion week. He got coked up at the Versace party and banged some guy from Iceland.”
There’s a hush. I can hear her breathing. “Oh my God. Why didn’t you tell me?” she says, and it feels like someone just lanced a boil inside me. I kept it to myself, kept it even from my sister, the person I told almost everything, because I knew she would never let Sebastian forget it, and our second chance would be doomed from the start.
And now I didn’t have to think about him any more. “It was embarrassing,” I say. “And ugly. And he was so, so sorry. I gave him a pass because he was under the influence at the time.”
“You got engaged.” I can hear her calculating the timeline in her head. “Was this before or after?”
“After. He proposed, I accepted. It was part of the forgiveness package.”
She draws in a ragged breath. “Christopher, I need you to do something for me.”
“Anything.”
“You’re my brother and I love you, and I listen to your advice. I know it might not always seem that way, but I do, which is why right now you need to calmly and slowly tell me not to go round to your apartment and strangle your dirty, lying, cheating shitstain of an ex.”
“Okay. Do not kill Sebastian. He’s not worth watching your daughter grow up from behind a prison visiting window.”
She makes a hissing sound like a pot boiling over. “I knew it. I knew there was something wrong with that basic ass bitch. Didn’t I tell you? It’s that twin ESP thing, like with your appendix, only this time it was an even more vestigial and useless piece of flesh.” She breathes out hard. “Oh my God, I’m so mad. I just want to hug you right now. Are you sure I can’t come up there?”
“Jo, I’m serious. This is no place for a baby.”
“It’s okay. Maybe I could pump enough out to—”
“—it’s a five hour drive. Your tits would explode.”
“I could get a flight.”
“I’m okay. I’m angry, I’m sore and I feel like a raw nerve, but I’m cool. I’m dicking around with fireplaces and stuff. Distracting myself. And Jody’s here.”
She gasps. “The mysterious Ohanian. What’s he like?”
“Oh, you know.” He’s moving about in the hallway again. I can hear him. “He’s…um…young. Seems nice. He’s naked a lot.”
“What?” she says, just as Jody sticks his head – and then the rest of him – around the dining room door. He’s still wearing nothing but boots, and giving me serious Tyler Durden vibes. His body is lean and cut.
“It’s a sort of ongoing penis situation,” I say. “I’ll tell you later. Listen, I gotta go because this phone is at about twelve percent and it’s about to crap out on me.”
“Okay. Stay in touch. I love you.”
“I love you, too,” I say, looking Jody directly in the eye, because it’s somehow more polite than looking anywhere else. “How are you not freezing?”
He reclines against the door frame. “I don’t know. I’m a hot person. Just generally. I kind of brew up my own heat, like a boiler.”
If it was anyone else I’d suspect the nudity was some kind of power play or sexual harassment, but I think he just genuinely likes wandering around in the buff. And it isn’t like he’s hard to look at. I remember the funeral, and how I quickly shoved the disloyal comparison to the back of my mind, because he couldn’t be better looking than Sebastian. Now it feels good to be able to jettison that guilt completely, because there is no question about it: if it were a beauty contest, Jody would win. He’s all that’s best of dark and bright – fair skin, black brows, dark hair, and almond shaped eyes so brown that they look black in all but the fiercest of lights.
All the same, I hand him a pair of sweatpants, left draped over the back of a dining chair. He steps out of one boot at a time and pulls them on. “That your sister?” he says.
“Yep. Jo. Josephine.”
He throws on a ratty old sweater, ruffling his straight black hair. “Chris and Josephine,” he says. “How come you didn’t get matchy twin names?”
“Not our parents’ style,” I say. “Although I guess we were both supposed to end in ‘ine’ – everyone suspected I was a Christine, but I crossed my legs on every single ultrasound. Probably because there wasn’t any room: Jo was spreading them like she was in Hustler. There was never any doubt that she was a girl.”
Jody follows me into the living room. We’ve taken a lot of the paint off the fireplace, but there are still scraps clinging here and there in the nooks and crannies, and that’s what we’ve been attacking with paint thinner and old toothbrushes. I kneel, pick up my brush and get to work.
“What about you?” I ask. “Do you have any brothers and sisters?”
“Six.”
“Six?”
“My Mom is on husband number eight,” he says, settling on the other side of the fireplace and picking up his own brush. “The only thing she loves more than weddings is crapping out kids. Every time a marriage hits the skids she’s like ‘I know, let’s have a baby!’”
“Yikes.”
He shakes his head and gives a wry smile. From the side his profile is dominated by his nose, which is somehow both prominent and delicate, with the hint of a humpback just below the bridge. His chin looks short and shallow from this angle, which I find fascinating, because from the front his jaw is wide, with sharp corners. “Nobody ever accused my parents of making good decisions,” he says. “They were just kids when they had me.”
“Where is she now?”
“Arizona,” he says. “She’s down there making turquoise jewelry or some such shit. Because – you know – there’s not enough of that in Arizona.”
“Yeah, I heard there was a shortage.”
Jody laughs and anticipates my next question. “Four brothers,” he says. “And two sisters, although they’re so young they feel more like my nieces than sisters. They’re ten and six, down in Arizona with Mom. Oldest brother is Corey, who’s nearly twenty-eight – almost exactly twelve months younger than me – and then there’s Steve, Sloane and Jason, who are in jail, in the army or posting MRA shit on Reddit and being an all-round damaged douche.”
“So your eldest brother,” I say, trying to keep count. “He’s in jail?”
“No. He lives all the way over in Oregon, with his crunchy granola girlfriend. Skye, her name is. She’s nice, though. A lot of hippies are fucking airheads, but not her. She’s a veterinary nurse. Reads a lot. Totally turned me on to how the whole heroin epidemic is down to the pharmaceutical companies pushing opioids. You know they were handing out Oxycontin merch at one point? Like, Oxycontin mouse-mats and beach hats. Can you believe that shit?”
He’s all eyebrows and animation when he talks with any enthusiasm. Sebastian started getting preventative Botox in his late teens and had a limited range of facial movement. He also never read anything from the non-fiction section, unless you counted self-help books. Once again I feel an almost sexual thrill at comparing him unfavorabl
y to another man.
“What about your father?” I say.
“Ugh,” says Jody. “Grifter. Moron.”
“Harsh.”
“But fair. This is the man who failed to wrap it before he tapped it twice before he was even twenty years old. That’s how me and my brother wound up being Irish twins. Knocking someone up when you’re a teenager is stupid, but you can kind of forgive it on the grounds of general teenage stupidity. But twice? Come on – that speaks of some kind of fundamental inability to learn. Same with Mom and her wedding cake addiction.” He taps the side of his head. “These are not bright people. It’s a miracle any of us kids turned out even slightly normal.”
He sits back on his heels, gets to his feet and walks to the other side of the room. “You okay?” I say.
“Yeah,” he says. “I just needed to step back and take a look at what I was doing for a moment. You know how it is when you’ve been up close to something for too long.”
“How’s it looking?”
“Come and see.”
I get up and join him on the opposite wall. My enthusiasm for fixing the fireplace dimmed slightly when I realized we couldn’t just whisk off the paint in one chemical peel, and lately the rags and tags of clinging paint have threatened to defeat me, but we’re very nearly there. The marble beneath is a glowing duck-egg blue, with veins of gray that range in shade from pale dove to gunmetal. The paint is almost completely gone from the grooves and swirls of the two miniature Ionic columns that support the mantel, and – perhaps because I’m seeing through his appreciative eyes – I realize what a beauty we’ve uncovered together.
“Oh, wow,” I say.
“Looks good, huh?”
“It’s beautiful. Just stunning. Who knew?”
He grins and squeezes my shoulder. “Just you wait and see, Boo. This house is full of hidden treasures. When we’re done, this place is going to make Hearst Castle look like a shitbox.”
Not hard, in my opinion. “Sure,” I say. “And stop calling me Boo.”
“Why? Don’t you like it?”
“Would you like it if I started calling you a dumb pet name out of nowhere?” I say.
Jody shrugs. “I wouldn’t mind,” he says.
“Please yourself, Pumpkin.”
He grins, the pink tip of his tongue caught between his teeth. “Always do.”
I lean back against the wall, not completely sure that the whole thing won’t crumble behind me. This place has a million cracks and holes, and when you run the water the plumbing shudders and screams like it’s auditioning for a role in a horror movie, but that fireplace feels like a commitment.
“What then?” I say, which is the closest I’ve ever come to even acknowledging his fantasy that this could be anything other than a demolition site. “We fix up the house, and then what?”
He shrugs again. “We fall in love and live happily ever after?”
“I thought you didn’t do rebounds?”
“I don’t,” he says, elbowing me lightly. He looks back at the fireplace and smacks his lips in thought. “I guess we flip it. Assuming there’s anyone with that kind of money in this part of New Hampshire.”
“Bloggers,” I say.
“Bloggers? What? Nerds who spend all day in their pajamas?”
“They’ve evolved, I’m told,” I say. “Got affiliate links. Sponsorships. Six figure incomes and chevron habits.”
He arches an eyebrow. The left sits higher than the other even in repose, so that he always looks as though he’s laughing at some private joke. “And you know these people?” he says.
“No, but apparently they’re usually white girls named Ashley. I’m sure there’s more than one of those in the state of New Hampshire.”
“Chris,” he says, with mock seriousness. “What the actual fuck are you talking about?”
“Ignore me,” I say. “I’m rambling. Must have huffed too much paint thinner.” I think once more of Sebastian and his delusions of country living. He’d have fled screaming as soon as he realized he’d be reduced to scrubbing his taint in the kitchen sink. “You really think we can do this thing?”
Jody nods. “Sure. I think so. Might be a bit of a learning curve, but if you go through life never learning anything then you might as well be dead. Or either one of my parents.”
“It’s a big commitment, Jody.”
He sighs and that eyebrow goes up again. “Yeah, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we already own a house together? That’s more of a commitment than some married people ever manage.”
*
“What are you doing for Thanksgiving?” he says, one night when we’re in the dining room, huddled around one of the two working fireplaces. We shunted the table into the kitchen and brought in the armchairs from the parlor. Jody sits on the floor anyway, hunched over the knob he unscrewed from the door of the smallest bedroom. He’s been working at it to remove the paint.
“I don’t know,” I say, and as soon as I say it I realize I’d like to stay here. It’s cold and it’s uncomfortable and the wifi is flaky at the best of times, but up here I feel safe from Sebastian. If I go back to New York there’s a chance I might have to deal with him, and I’m not sure I’m ready for that. “Haven’t decided yet. You?”
“Meh. I don’t really do Thanksgiving. There’s a small possibility my dad wasn’t totally lying about being part Oneida and it kind of makes me feel like a race traitor.” He glances up at me. “What are you reading?”
I turn the tablet around to show him. “National Register of Historic Places.”
He makes a low, bored, groaning noise. “Why can’t you just be looking at porn?”
“I don’t like porn.”
“Bullshit. Everyone likes porn.”
“I don’t.”
Jody sets down the doorknob and stretches out on the braided rag rug in front of the fire. I know that look in his eyes already; that’s the way he looks when he’s got a new thing to strip down and expose. “Why?” he says.
“I don’t know. It doesn’t do anything for me,” I say. “I’m not into watching human beings being treated like a series of holes.”
The eyebrows go up again. “You just described my perfect Friday night,” he says, batting his lashes incredulously. They’re thick, black and curly, and I can’t help but be fascinated by his beauty. I’m so used to someone who knows that he’s beautiful, whose beauty informs his career to the point where it controls every last bite that he eats. And then there’s Jody, who’s at least five inches too short to make it as a model, but far more arresting than any of the gorgeous, gaunt skeletons that made up Sebastian’s circle of friends. Jody – who allows himself the luxury of facial expressions, and whose full, curving lips finish in two tapering flourishes as fine as pen strokes. He just walks through the world looking like that and doesn’t seem to care.
He reaches out and runs his finger up and down the instep of my socked foot. “I know this girl,” he says. “Who does this thing with an eggplant.”
“An eggplant?”
“Well, it’s not actually an eggplant. It’s plastic,” he says. “But it’s about the same size. And the same color. It sort of shades towards green at the bottom, like—”
“—an eggplant,” I say. “I’m kinda scared about where this conversation is going, but carry on.”
“She sits on this thing,” says Jody. “Takes the whole thing inside her. I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t seen it myself, but she does. Makes a fortune.”
“Good for her.”
He’s not buying it. His eyebrow is in overdrive. “Good for her?”
“That’s what I said.”
“In a slightly judgy way.”
“I’m not being judgy, Jody. If you’re enjoying yourself and you’re not hurting anyone then go ahead. Mazeltov. I don’t care.”
He chews his lip for a moment. “Would you judge me if I did porn?” he says, and I almost laugh, because it’s all upside down. I’ve known
him for less than two weeks and already he’s coming clean about doing porn. Meanwhile, the person I was about to marry – after three years together – was fucking around behind my back.
“Have you done porn?” I ask, trying not to picture him spread-eagled and open mouthed, moaning his way to a money shot.
“No, but I’m thinking about it,” he says. “Seriously. Pegging is so hot right now, and she loves to do me with a strap-on. She’s got these weighted ben-wa balls that she—”
“—yeah, okay. Too much information.”
He laughs. “See? Now you’re being prudish.”
“No. I’m just telling you not to waste your time telling me about this. If you’re going to talk to me about vaginas you may as well be speaking Urdu. I have no frame of reference.”
“Really?” he says. “You’ve never…?”
“Uh uh. Strictly dickly. Gold star gay.”
“God. You are missing out. Those things are awesome.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” I say, partially returning my attention to the National Register website. “And good luck being anally invaded on a webcam.”
“Thanks, buddy.”
“You’re welcome. It’s your butthole. If you’re happy with what goes into it then I’m happy for you.”
“That’s very sweet of you.” Jody gets up from the floor. He perches on the side of my chair, balancing on one hip, his arm thrown across the back of the old wingback armchair. “Sooo,” he says, turning the word into a gravelly purr. “How about that National Register of Historic Places, huh? Is that getting you all hot and bothered down there.”
“I’ll say. We could get tax breaks.”
He gasps. “Okay, now I’m aroused.” He leans closer to peer at the page. “That’s fucking hot.”
“You’re not,” I say, wincing at the chill of his fingers on my wrist. “What happened to your boiler powers?”
Jody sighs and sways against me. “They’re no match for a New Hampshire winter,” he says. “Don’t take it sexually if I start crawling into your bed at night. We may have to start huddling for warmth.”
The Other Half Page 8
