by Cai Emmons
“I’m back.”
He stared at me for a long moment. Then he said, “Glad to hear it.” His voice was neutral, almost flat. He returned to work. I hovered there a moment staring at his thick pin-striped forearms. I took a few steps backward, then forward.
He looked up again, realizing I had not left. I felt perhaps he was irritated.
“Do you know Vern Hallohan?” I said.
“Guy at ORB?”
“Yes.”
“Think I’ve met him. Once or twice. Look, I’d love to chat, but you know how it is.”
I nodded. My understandings flew away from me like tenuous threads in a stiff wind. I drifted as quietly as I could down the corridor. The following week I tendered my resignation, and I have not returned to work since, plagued by a feeling that even after a decade of practicing law I am not, and maybe never have been, suited to it.
I’ve never told Martin about this. When he asked me why I’d changed the locks, I said I’d lost my key. For a while I considered saying more, but then I wondered why no one—neither the babysitter nor the Maxwells—had said a word to me afterwards. No one asked me if I was all right or if things had settled down. The world is like that these days—terrible and confusing things happen, but no one blinks an eye or even tries to clarify what went wrong. So why bother Martin with it? He would only be dismayed and tell me what I already know—that I’ve been too timid about what’s really mine.
About ten days after Martin returned, I stepped onto the porch early one morning to get the Sunday paper. It was frosty out, a day beautifully burnished by cold, and as soon as the air hit my face I felt bright-eyed. There wasn’t any action on the street, and I stood there for a moment reveling in the rare peace. Then, I heard Martin calling me from inside, telling me I was letting in the cold, so I reached down for the paper. As I crouched something caught my eye. Laced into the corner created by the pillar and the porch railing was an exquisite silky spider web, swaying gently. It caught the light, tossing it about playfully so it winked and sparkled and tried to break free. It was a dazzling sight and I was amazed that it had escaped me until now. I wondered if my phone’s camera could possibly capture this spectacle.
I snatched the paper and rose from my kneeling position. The spider web disappeared. I blinked and squinted, but it wasn’t there. Slowly, I lowered myself again onto my haunches, and the web came back into view, as arresting as it had been a second before. I raised and lowered myself a few more times. Each time the web came into view at precisely the same place, revealing itself to me not piece by piece, but as one fully formed creation. There, not there, there, not there, there, not there.
FAT
She thought she was grownup at twenty, but on that first day of Life Drawing she stood in the doorway and saw immediately how deluded she’d been. The other students were all older, in their thirties, or even forties. They wore black as if they’d invented it. Tasha wished she had a hat to cover her ridiculous platinum hair, a last-minute choice she’d made before leaving LA. The teacher nodded her in and pointed her to one of the empty easels. His name was Rupert Pimble, and he was supposedly famous, though she’d never heard of him. He wore an unbuttoned gray cardigan and little black shoes that looked like ballet slippers. His hair ruffled out from under his black skull cap like a mangy gray bedskirt.
She entered with her head down. Only when she got to the designated easel did she look up to see the model arranging herself on a wooden platform at the center of the room. She had never seen anyone so fat. Fat slumped from this woman’s bones like loose dough. A laugh tittered up from Tasha’s belly, but she strangled it with a cough. She’d known the models would be naked, but she didn’t expect this. This model was sumo wrestler fat. Circus sideshow fat. Crazy or diseased person fat. The kind of fat with its own vocal chords yelling: Problems!
Tasha averted her gaze and sloughed her bag and took off her jacket and tried to look busy, waiting for instructions. It was five minutes or so before she realized there would be no instructions. Everyone had already begun to draw, their charcoal a quiet scritching against the room’s silence. Rupert shuffled from easel to easel, scrutinizing the work.
“Problems?” he said quietly when he came to her.
“I’m good.” She raised her stick of charcoal and made a bold line on the paper to let him know he could move on. But he lingered.
“Don’t look at the page,” he said. “This is about the eye, not the hand.”
She nodded. She’d taken plenty of art classes before.
“An exercise in seeing.”
She nodded more emphatically, her hand frozen. She could say she wasn’t a beginner, but something told her he wouldn’t care.
“Get to it. Don’t think.” She nodded again and he shuffled off.
The model sat on the platform with one leg extended, the other knee bent so the sole of her foot touched the blob of her leg. She stared vacantly into a middle distance, eyes mere pellets in the quicksand of her face, the blonde hair that dusted her shoulders thin as shredded wheat. The rills and hillocks of her seemed vast as the Saharan desert.
The middle-aged woman at the easel next to Tasha was a dervish, as if this drawing was a race. It aroused a competitiveness Tasha wasn’t used to feeling. In her high school art classes she’d always been the best—no one even came close—but when she was putting together her portfolio before coming east she worried she might only be a good technician, not a real artist. At home teachers always gave her license to do things her own way. Here there was so much to get wrong.
She tried to focus, but Art-Tasha was absent, the girl who had always slid so easily into the work. She crossed her eyes to identify an overall shape on which to hang details. Circle? Triangle? She saw various objects. Tiers of belly fat like folded blankets. Breasts like full laundry bags. The hands were starfish, the head a fringed beach ball.
Everyone else was filling page after page. The minutes were darting by, and Rupert had already circled back to her again. Except for a few truncated lines, her page was still empty. Disdain bled through his silence. The room itself was a problem, high-ceilinged and mostly empty, naked really, a no-place place. Sun streamed through a bank of tall dusty windows facing 14th Street where traffic sounds rose in a constant babble of white noise.
“Okay, Jane,” Rupert said. “New position, please.”
Jane. The name seemed wrong, too plain for a woman whose very size made her complicated. The flipping tablets sent up a choral swish. Jane lugged herself to standing and stepped off the platform and lumbered to a corner of the room where a red bathrobe was draped over an electric wheelchair. Tasha was the only one watching. The other students chatted and sipped from water bottles and consulted their phones. Tasha imagined the people she knew in LA seeing this model. Brian, Francine, her mother. And Julian—god, he would die.
Jane located a liter of Diet Coke and a bag of Jolly Ranchers on the floor. She took a swig of the Coke and unwrapped a Jolly Rancher and popped it into her mouth then returned to the platform and lowered herself to sitting again. She swayed as tethered elephants do. Her eyes shifted slightly, their focus sharpening, roving, then landing on Tasha. Tasha stiffened. She wanted to look away but couldn’t—their gazes were glued. What was Jane seeing? Her eyes jerked away, but already it was too late. Jane had seen what she’d seen.
She rose to all fours and angled herself so her crinkly rump and thighs faced Tasha directly. Her private parts were concealed, but to Tasha Jane’s entire body was one massive private part. Rupert brought towels and, quietly solicitous, helped Jane arrange them under her knees.
It was time to resume drawing. Again Tasha couldn’t begin. She was thinking of Julian. When they were together back in LA he was trying to lose weight. He was an actor and thought being thinner would help him get parts. After they made love, drowsing in the sheets, he would pinch the skin of his belly, grimaci
ng in self-disgust. When he stroked her bottom she could feel him measuring her too, for self-control and strength of character.
But Jane. It must take strength of character to crouch naked in front of a class. How many people, even beautiful skinny people, had the strength to do that?
Rupert was talking to the woman beside Tasha. “Exactly,” he said. Tasha wanted to peek at the woman’s work, but couldn’t without being too intrusive.
Tasha was the first to leave when the class was over. She hurtled out of there without saying a word to anyone, and descended to the street feeling horribly young and too emotional. No one here cared if she lived or died. She’d never been in a place where people had reacted so little to her presence. She was used to stirring things up. Even her mother hadn’t called. Not that Tasha wanted to speak to her mother, but shouldn’t she have called?
Her drawing tablet was heavy. She dumped it into the first trash can she came to, the entire day’s work—what little there was—gone, along with the unused pages. It was after 5:00, but everyone on the street was amped up as if the day was just beginning. She didn’t want to go home—if you could call the Roses’ place home. Once there she’d have to hibernate in that boy’s smelly room.
The room on Rivington Street was small and dark, and it looked out on a brick wall. By LA standards it was terrible, but Tasha, knowing she was lucky to have landed a place in Manhattan, was trying to see things in a positive light. Everyone had told her she’d have to live far from the city—in Brooklyn, or Queens, or New Jersey—so she was grateful to the Roses who’d rented her this room after their son left for college. She tried to make herself invisible, coming and going quietly, using the kitchen only when they weren’t there. Sometimes they invited her to join them at dinner, but she wasn’t sure they meant it. They were short, retiring, university people, their faces long and pale, their backs hunched. They couldn’t be more different from her embarrassing mother, and she felt self-conscious around them, acutely aware of being young and uneducated, potentially too loud, and still carrying the extra weight she always meant to be losing. No, thanks, she’d say. Then she’d go out and get matzoh ball soup around the corner.
At night, alone in the small room that still smelled vaguely of boy, she could hear the Roses rustling around, doing god knows what. It made her more desperate than ever to make something of herself as an artist. It was a horrible thought that she might end up with a life as colorless as theirs.
She was walking faster than usual, and it felt good. She was learning the pedestrian dance, the art of avoiding sidewalk collisions, side-stepping, leaping forward, looping around slow-moving clusters. Each step edged her closer to erasing thoughts of Jane and Rupert but, in exchange, loneliness rose up from the pavement and inflamed her entire body. She tried not to gawk. Did people come to this city to be anonymous, or to prove they were not?
She thought she might not go back to class, but she’d already paid for three months from the stash of money she saved while working at the Gap. And she’d come here for this. Monday, Wednesday, Friday, 2-5:00, a regular chunk of time that buttressed her otherwise wide-open life. She’d put in some applications for retail jobs in Soho, Nolita, the West Village, but every place kept telling her the same thing, check back next week.
Sometimes Rupert wasn’t in class, but the students and a model were always there. No one skipped—this wasn’t high school. A couple of times she overslept and arrived late and when she entered Rupert shook his head, tut-tut. Sometimes he stationed himself behind her easel, singling her out with quiet admonishments. Draw what you see, not what you want to see. Not what you think you see.
The models were never normal. After the fat woman there was a twenty-something guy with a bald head tinted yellow and tattoos over his whole body like skintight clothing. His dick wasn’t tattooed, but it had a bolt-sized piercing that made you wince. Then there was a very old man whose thighs were smeared with pale fuzz. They had all mastered that same vacant stare, a look that eliminated the students with the pretense of not caring.
The other students were drawing machines. They, too, stared at the models with a kind of indifference. Tasha imagined them drawing away as the world ended and fire engulfed them. She tried to emulate their diligence but didn’t think she was learning anything. She no longer threw her work away, mainly because it was a waste of money—the cost of materials was the students’ responsibility and it added up—but she didn’t review her work either. The filled tablets began to take up space under her bed at the Roses’. When she felt bleak, she thought of calling Julian, remembering how his eyes had always looked to her like aquariums, full of darting movement and trembling light, a medium for secrets. He didn’t know she was here. Julian with hair like a black sheep and shredding blue eyes. Vain Julian who was so fully devoted to his art. Well, he wasn’t the only fully devoted one.
She was on her way home through Washington Square Park. It was October and getting colder, and the wind was savage. She was thinking of her mother’s love for extreme things. She still missed the times she and her mother would, out of the blue, drop everything they were supposed to do and summon Mr. Fun. Mr. Fun sessions usually meant a drive somewhere—the beach or the desert—and they often included ice cream.
Under the arch a woman in a wheelchair was staring at the sidewalk. A green wool blanket made a puffy plain of her lap, the wind made flotsam of her blonde hair. Jane, Tasha realized, the fat model. Something appeared to be wrong—the stillness, the downcast gaze.
Tasha circled the park and entered again. Jane was still there, in the same place, weirdly stationary in the blasting wind. Tasha followed Jane’s eye-line to a phone on the sidewalk.
“Is that yours?”
Jane looked up. Her eyes, tiny and smart, were blackened by sunlight. “Fugue state. Yes, it’s mine.”
Tasha handed Jane the phone and Jane, all business, nodded her gratitude, not copping to any need. She stashed the phone in a large brown purse tucked on one side of her lap and started to roll off, the sturdy chair traveling seamlessly over the sidewalk cracks. After a short distance, she braked and swiveled. “Do I know you?”
Tasha, caught staring, shook her head. “I don’t think so. No.”
Jane’s face registered nothing—no recognition, no relief, no gratitude, no interest in connection—and she took off.
Two days later, Jane was back in class again, naked of course, with the same red robe and liter of Diet Coke and bag of Jolly Ranchers. This time her face was heavily made up, cheeks blazing with rouge, blue eye shadow, hot pink lips. She assumed a position on her back, lifting various body parts and laying them down like luggage. Her eyes, the intense scalding tips of branding irons, caught sight of Tasha. “Fuck you,” she said softly, but everyone heard.
Tasha was the first to arrive at the Chelsea café near where Julian was rehearsing a play.
She took a table and waited, eyeing other people’s plates of sparkling Danishes and chocolate-covered croissants, feeling a wolfish hunger.
Julian had always called himself punctilious. Was he standing her up? She ordered a mocha with whipped cream. He walked in just as she was licking a fingerful. In thigh-length black coat, bright cobalt shirt, and neon-green scarf, he popped out from the blandness around him. His springy black curls had been trimmed. The nine months he’d been here had made him more shiny in that blue-eyed, black Irish way. She had to remind herself of all the things she didn’t want from him.
He gripped her shoulders, pecked both her cheeks, leaving a wake of cologne-scented air. The twelve years between them lay before her like a cliff. It was hard to believe he’d once admired her cunt. He ordered a double espresso and didn’t remove his coat. “You look good,” he said.
“I’m fat.”
“Did I say that? I’d say luscious.”
“I thought you left LA because you hated people obsessing about looks.”
If nothing else he could teach her to be snarky. He wiped his spoon with a napkin, and it reminded her of so much about him, how fussy he was, how germ-phobic, girlish in the way he checked his reflection in storefront windows, tweezed stray hairs, spread lotion nightly on his face and neck.
Someone across the café was smiling goofily in his direction. He nodded back.
“Are you, like, a celebrity now?”
“Some people know me. I’m an actor, it goes with the territory.”
He wasn’t really famous, was he? She couldn’t tell. He winced as she scooped more whipped cream, but she didn’t care. He sipped his espresso. “I’ve missed you,” he said. “I need more old souls in my life.”
She was only crying because she knew him more than she knew anyone else in this city, and because he knew her, at least a little. He gazed into his tiny cup. The silence was good—she hated false comfort.
“I hope you really want it, because it isn’t easy here,” he said.
“It? What is it?” She knew, but she wanted to hear what he’d say.
“We’re not getting back together. Just to be clear.”
“Of course we aren’t. I don’t want that. That’s not why I’m here.”
“But you want something. Money? Advice?”
“I’m fine, Julian.”
“If you say so.”
“I thought we might be friends.”
He nodded. “Hey, I got a part in a Scorcese film. Ten lines.”
“That’s good, I guess?”
“Martin Scorcese.” He shook his head. “Only the best filmmaker alive.”
He offered to show her his place, a sublet on East 11th, but she said no, citing a prior commitment, proud of herself for refusing.
Jane again? A melted Buddha at the edge of the platform. What the fuck! Couldn’t they find anyone else in this city of eight or nine million? Tasha wanted to draw a stranger, any stranger, not this person whose name she knew and whose ugliness had staked out a claim of moral superiority. Couldn’t they get a beautiful model once in a while—was there something wrong with beautiful? Even thinking this Tasha knew she was wrong, knew this was the very thing that would keep her from being a real artist.
