The Paper Wasp

by Lauren Acampora

  “You don’t have to do anything,” I repeated.

  “He’s wonderful, and so good to me. But, my God, he’s such a flirt. You have no idea. I don’t know if I can trust him, I mean long-term. Not as a husband. And I’m nowhere near ready to be a mother. Not now. It’d be suicide for my career. It’d be like stamping myself out for someone else.”

  A cold wave ran through me, and I lifted myself to standing. You looked up at me like a little girl. “You don’t have to do anything,” I said again. “You don’t have to marry anyone.”

  You stared up at me in hope, or wonder.

  “I’ll raise the baby with you,” I said. “I’ll help you. One stupid mistake isn’t going to ruin your life. I won’t let it.”

  You smiled. With an effort of arms and legs, you gathered yourself and stood, then put your arms around me. “Oh, Abby. Thank you for being such a good friend. You are so kind, and so crazy.”

  I accepted your embrace. Despite myself, I felt a detonation of anger. You were stupid to let this happen, mind-numbingly stupid, no different from any naive young starlet, falling into the easiest pit of all. And now you’d be punished for it. This was a virulent place, contaminated by lust and materialism. You were already infected. You’d be a terrible mother, and you’d have a miserable child.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have the baby,” you said quietly.

  I pulled away. In that moment, your face blotched and contorted from crying, you looked deformed. You turned from me and went into the living room, where you fell onto the couch. I followed and sat across from you. Your face was dry now, and you pulled your hair out of its elastic, letting it fall Madonna-like over your shoulders. I stared at you, but your gaze was caught on something in the middle distance.

  “Have you told Rafael?” I asked quietly.

  You didn’t answer.

  “Are you afraid to tell him?”

  “No, of course not.” You sighed and pulled your legs up. “Oh, Abby. I shouldn’t complain about him. Raf’s wonderful. I mean, he’s the most romantic man I’ve ever met, without question. It’s still like living in a dream, every day. But, how do I put this?” you breathed. “There’s a kind of arrogance there. It’s partly his culture, I know, but sometimes I feel like I’m expected to put up with his bad behavior just because he’s a man. Like he has some special freedom that I don’t.” You looked at me for a cold moment. “Not much I can do about that, I guess.”

  Our eyes were mutually fixed now. “Are you sure?” I said.

  “Sure of what?”

  “Sure there’s nothing you can do about it.”

  “What do you mean?” There was a shift in your voice, a hint of defensiveness.

  “I mean you should leave him.”

  You stared. “No.”

  “What you’re saying about him is true, Elise. Have you noticed how he acts around that French woman, Mireille Sauvage?”

  “What are you saying?” You stared. “Don’t you think I’d know if he were actually cheating on me? He’s not perfect, but he wouldn’t cheat on me. Ever.” You unfolded your legs and stood. “Listen. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have broken down like that. Of course I want to have the baby,” you said. “That’s not a question. I’ll figure it out. Raf and I will figure it out together.”

  You went out of the living room and into the entrance hall where you’d dropped your bag, a puckered leather backpack. You lifted it from the floor and put the straps over both shoulders like a papoose. Your eyes had dried and hardened again into jade.

  Suddenly, I wanted to tell you about the bridge. For the first time, I wanted to tell you, to drop it all at your feet. I wanted to describe what had happened after I’d jumped. The hospital room, my parents’ faces blinking in and out of focus. The hard, throbbing pain where the incision had been made for the nephrectomy. The television that was latched to the ceiling, displaying nature images, a butterfly folding and opening its wings. Wings up, wings down. The proboscis unfurling, dipping into a flower. A caterpillar creeping over a banyan leaf. Coming out of anesthesia, I’d asked the nurse to show me the destroyed kidney. It had been shredded by the ribs that broke upon my impact with the ice. The nurse had refused. I still dreamed about the kidney sometimes, like an aborted fetus, a horrific red lump. After the hospital, I’d gone home to my bedroom, the old rabbit wallpaper, the dim, sour light. I groped at my abdomen and found the layer of gauze, thick as a book. Inside my core was a deep ache, a tightening coil. The coil hardened and cramped, and when I pulled the gauze away from the wound, it exposed a deep red concavity, an open pool with no hope of healing.

  XI.

  WHAT I’D said must have stayed with you, because I heard Rafael shouting on the other side of your bedroom door: “This has nothing to do with Mireille.”

  I stood in the hallway and listened as your voice rose in indignation. I couldn’t make out your words, but I heard Rafael say, “This! This is what I mean. You’re like all American women. So jealous, always. I can’t be free with you if you want to keep me like a pet. I’m a man, not a dog.”

  I smiled despite myself as I heard something smash. You were throwing things, as you should.

  “And your friend, why is she always here? It’s not normal. You want me to live here, but it’s like you already have a wife. You need another wife? You need so many pets?”

  You were screaming back at him now, incomprehensibly. I caught the words “friend” and “trust” and heard you say “more loyal than you.” My smile spread, and I pressed my ear closer to the door.

  “What baby?” Rafael was shouting. “There is no baby. There can’t be a baby. Are you crazy?”

  There was another crash, and then quiet. After a moment, I heard the sound of you crying, gasping for words. Your voice rose steadily as you repeated yourself. “I won’t do it, Rafael. No. I won’t. I won’t do it.”

  “It’s the baby, or me,” Rafael said. Those last words were loud, unmistakable.

  Later, after Rafael had gone, you came to me in my room. Your face was puffy and red like a little girl’s. You told me what had happened, in a quaking voice, with your hands on your belly. When you finished—after you’d told me that it was all over, that Rafael was gone—violent sobs shook your body, tremors from your core.

  I felt the need to calm you quickly. I thought nervously about the developing fetus drinking in the poisonous chemicals that were flowing through you. I wanted to protect the baby from any contact with sorrow, especially such unnecessary and misguided sadness. I was angry with you for bombarding your baby with it.

  “Come here,” I said, and you obeyed, coming to sit beside me on the bed. “You did the right thing,” I told you, rubbing your back. “You did the best thing for you, and your baby. You did the right thing.”

  You collapsed, then, and laid your head on my lap. I felt the surprising solidity of your skull on my thighs, the rigid cranium. I stroked your hair, which slid over your face and unveiled the side of your neck. I was rarely in such close proximity to another person, and I was struck by the physicality of you, by the textures of skin and hair and by the visible pulse at your neck. No one had ever offered themselves to me this way. I felt what it must be like to be a mother. It was a warmth and wonder that I wanted to last forever.

  “Everything will work out,” I whispered to you. “Everything will be fine. It will be wonderful. We’ll be like Joan and her family, here in Malibu. We’ll work together, you and me, and raise our child together. Maybe it will be a little girl.”

  You didn’t say anything, but I could tell you were listening. Your sobbing had stopped, and you were breathing steadily now, on my lap. I thought perhaps you could see what I was seeing: the two of us, sun-kissed and loose, invulnerable in our sealed paradise. We would live in harmony, like children, creating our own worlds together again. But this time they’d become movies, and the whole world would see them.

  You didn’t mention Rafael after that. You went back to filming, stoically, and I wa
s surprised by your strength. I was proud of you for letting him go, for staying firm. He’d wanted you to end the pregnancy, you said, but you’d refused. You never mentioned what he’d said about me, but I knew that you’d come to my defense. You’d chosen me.

  My own phone almost never rang. So, when my parents’ phone number appeared on the screen one early June morning, I was so blindsided that I answered almost without thinking. Perhaps the impulse was born of the new optimism I was feeling, now that my course to happiness seemed fixed. Michigan was no longer a threat; it no longer even seemed real. I heard the brightness in my own voice as I said hello to my mother, unafraid.

  “I’m calling to tell you that you’re an aunt,” she said. “Shelby gave birth to a daughter last night. I just thought I should tell you.” Her voice trembled slightly, as if she were trying to contain some insurgent emotion. When she spoke again, her voice was low. “She still asks for you, you know. You should really visit her, Abby.”

  I didn’t respond.

  “Did you know she changed her last name? Obviously she didn’t marry the father of the baby. I don’t know why she changed it, to be honest, or where she got this name. She calls herself Shelby Hightower now.”

  “Officially?”

  “Apparently, yes, though I don’t know why.”

  The farcical image came to mind of my sister cross-legged atop a water tower, refusing to come down.

  “You should try to have a good relationship with her, Abby. She really doesn’t have much. And when your father and I are gone, you’ll only have each other.”

  I swallowed against an eddy of bile and waited a beat before asking, “How are you and Dad?”

  “Not good,” she said. “Your father’s health hasn’t been great. He’s been worried about you, Abby, and it’s affecting his blood pressure.”

  I hung up the phone.

  A few days later, you surprised me with a gift. “I found it at a vintage boutique on Melrose,” you said. “They had a whole costume section. It was hard to choose, but this seemed right for you.” You took a bundle of black fabric from a shopping bag and handed it to me. I held it up, and a velvet robe unfolded, with a hood and flared sleeves.

  “It comes with an eye mask, too,” you said. “I thought it looked kind of powerful.”

  Standing in the living room, I put the robe on over my clothes and let it drape to the floor. It was like a longer version of the witch shawl you’d bought me on Abbot Kinney. You gave me the mask, and I pulled it over my eyes. I looked at you questioningly through the oblong holes.

  “It’s for the Rhizome’s solstice party,” you said. “It’s a giant masked ball, really glamorous and wild. It’s the biggest event of the year, always on the night of the summer solstice. They encourage everyone to go and to bring a guest, because it’s a chance to bring dream imagery into the waking world, to inhabit our dream roles. People get really creative. I think you’ll love it.”

  I wanted to shake my head. The robe felt too heavy on me—it was making me light-headed—and I wanted to take it off. The thrilling prospect of attending a party with you was subsumed by dread. I reminded myself that only Tello and the daycare workers knew me at the Rhizome. Only those few people would possibly recognize me, would possibly approach me. And, it was a costume party. How would they find me in my mask and cloak? Still, I was afraid that the moment we entered the building you’d somehow sense that I’d been going there, that I had a life beyond your orbit.

  You cheerfully drew a zebra-striped bodysuit out of the shopping bag, and a half mask with attached ears.

  “It’s from this dream I keep having, that I’m in a herd of zebras running from danger. I don’t know what we’re running from, but it’s a feeling of being pursued, a life-and-death situation, and I always have to wake myself up from it. It’s a nightmare, I guess. I’m hoping that dressing up like a zebra in real life might help.”

  I was having trouble taking full breaths but managed to say, “Maybe it’s about the media. Symbolically.”

  “Huh,” you said. “Interesting theory.” You stood for another moment in your zebra skin, then brought me with you to the powder room, where we looked at ourselves in the mirror. “You look spooky,” you said.

  “What am I?” I asked thinly.

  “I’m not sure. You’re a dream sorcerer or something. A dream magician.”

  So that was how you saw me. I let it sink in. As I looked at the two of us in the mirror, there was no question who was dominant. I was reminded of our childhood games, our animal imitations, and remembered my original role as your leader and director. My anxiety abated.

  “Will Rafael be there?” I asked.

  “No.” You frowned beneath the mask. “It’s members and their guests only, and as you know, he always refused to join.”

  The night of the party, tiki torches lined the entrance path to the Rhizome, and a large man in a jester’s costume stood to the side of the door, surveying the guests as they approached. You presented your membership card, and the jester waved us inside. The marble lobby was decorated with flowered garlands and candle sconces, and a bar was set up near the reception desk. Voices roared to the ceiling. People spilled into the garden courtyard, where lights sequined the trees and torches studded the periphery. There was a woman in a powdered wig and bustle, holding a fan. There was a Carnival dancer in a lamé bustier. A geisha and a mime, a lion and a lion tamer. The music was percussive, ritualistic, without any discernible melody. I lost you in the crowd immediately, and felt both distressed and relieved. I didn’t want to be exposed, but I also didn’t want to be alone. Throughout the next few hours I caught an occasional glimpse of your zebra stripes in some knot of laughing people, but I resisted going to you.

  On my own, I could find no social entry point. I stood in the courtyard, near the tiered fountain, apart from the jostling crowd. It was disorienting to be surrounded by masked figures. I riled myself with the thought that Perren might be among them. A tall, thin person dressed as the Tin Man appeared in my field of vision from time to time, leaning over this woman or that. Each time I saw him, my chest clutched. If there were ever a time to approach, to take a chance, it was now. With just a few words, I’d know if it was him. All I had to do was walk over.

  The Tin Man withdrew and disappeared behind a wall of people. Some were dancing, rotating bare shoulders, shuffling platform shoes. Lipsticked mouths pouted beneath eye masks. I saw you scamper through the courtyard, nimble game animal, and enter the building with a Renaissance king. A group of men in capes swept past, intent on something. A mummy lurked in the shadow of a jacaranda. A red-eyed gorilla sprang upon a Greek goddess. As the evening deepened, I stayed in place and watched the movements of the crowd intensify. My breathing turned shallow, and the drumfire began in my skull. This hadn’t happened in a long time, not since I’d come to California. For these past months, I’d been balanced, content, complacent. Now, the old feeling of emergency powered through me. One of these horrifying creatures would, at any moment, pull out a gun and turn the bacchanalia into a bloodbath. It was at times just like this that it happened. Everything was safe, until it wasn’t.

  I felt that I needed to find you right away. I pushed through the people, their puppet mouths and drink cups. I went into the building and flew up the staircase to search for you. The door to the actors’ lounge was open. I saw a sheikh and a mermaid sitting on the floor with a hookah. And there, sprawled on a royal-blue daybed, I found your striped carcass.

  At first glance, I thought you were dead. I was too late, and you’d overdosed on something. For one expanding moment, time stopped. You looked so small in your costume that in a confused flash I saw you as a child again. I remembered the hair-braiding trains, the dark chants. Concentrate, concentrate. After pummeling each girl’s back—after cracking the egg and stabbing the knife—we’d give her a shove, make her lose her balance. She was being pushed off a high ledge, we’d tell her, and whatever color she saw when she fell pred
icted the manner of her future death. There were so many colors: blue for drowning, yellow for poison, orange for fire. There was one for everything. Whatever color you’d report to me, I’d always tell you it meant you would die of old age and go to heaven.

  I went to the daybed and dropped to your side. Like a penitent, I put my hand to your cheek, bracing for the feel of chilled marble. But your skin was warm. Your eyelids fluttered. The relief I felt was undercut by white fury. I prodded you and pulled you to your feet, perhaps more roughly than necessary. Brusquely, I took you down the stairs, through the parking lot, and into the Mustang. Your head lolled to the side as I drove, and you murmured something unintelligible.

  Several unfamiliar cars were parked outside your gate when we arrived. Their windows were rolled down, and camera lenses jutted out. The shutters clicked as I reached out to enter the code for the gate. “Get down,” I commanded, but you were asleep. The telephoto lenses could probably capture something. It was amazing what they were able to hustle. The zebra mask had been displaced, and I could already see the photographs that would run: the blurred but unmistakable profile of your stupefied face.

  I hadn’t told you about all the other times photographers had staked out the property. It would have only upset you. I hadn’t told you, either, about the phone calls from reporters and how often I’d hung up on them. Some of the most brazen ones had even approached me in person while I was on my errands and ambushed me with questions about you and Rafael. You didn’t know how I deflected them, how I stared daggers at them and threatened to call the police. You had no idea how much I did for you.

  XII.

  I HARDLY saw you the next few days. You were in and out all weekend, carrying your thermos travel mug, which I now suspected contained something other than kombucha. As stupid as it was, I knew you were avoiding me. You were embarrassed about the solstice party and probably thought I’d lecture you about drinking during pregnancy. You were right about this. You had every reason to be humiliated.