by Emma Forrest
‘Please. Just pretend. Just for a minute.’
‘Nooo.’ He shook his head as though he knew his reluctance to method-feel my pain was a great shortcoming. ‘Nooo, I can’t pretend, but I can get you help if you want it. I’m pretty sure you’re bulimic, aren’t you?’
‘I am,’ I answered firmly, with inappropriate good cheer.
‘And I know you’ve been cutting yourself,’ he added, gathering courage.
‘That too,’ I agreed, smoothing out my skirt.
‘Well, if you know what you’re doing, well, then why?’
I raised my arms up above my head and, in bringing them back down, let the backs of my fingers rest on my closed eyelids. I didn’t move my hands as I answered his question: ‘I’ve started so I’ll finish.’
Sean closed my trailer door as quietly as he could, as if fearful of waking a beast. He let me go for the rest of the day. But when I got back to the Chelsea, he had left me a message insisting that I must, if nothing else, move out of the hotel and back to my apartment. I spent one last night in my mint-green suite. I intended to watch TV all night, but when it came to it I ended up looking out of the window for most of the evening. It’s not a lovely view: just traffic trying to get from 8th Avenue down to 7th, movie patrons leaving the cineplex, ripped off and grimy, bums thrusting styrofoam cups in the startled blond faces of Swedish backpackers. It’s nothing to look at. But I did anyway.
I felt angry at myself for letting Sean down. He believed I could be a great actress and there I was repaying him in puke. Even a bad person can feel bad, even when in the process of being bad. But that doesn’t mean they can do anything about it.
‘I’ve started so I’ll finish. I’ve started so I’ll finish.’
The next morning, I took my suitcase and hailed a cab. I asked the driver to wait until I was inside my building, implying fear of muggers, when really I was just fearful. Of my apartment being burned down, robbed, taken over by squatters.
‘Can you just wait here, please driver, until I stop being so afraid of life.’
It had been so long since I was home, part of me was fearful it might not even be there at all. But it was there. First the entrance door. Then the hallway. Then the stairs. Then my stairs. Then my door, which I slipped open like a burglar. Then I was inside my apartment and it was all there – all the walls, all the furniture, my bed, my belongings. The lightbulb in the bathroom that had needed changing when I left still needed changing. The milk in the fridge still needed to be thrown out. I still could not bring myself to do either.
I lay on my bed and thought about Liev.
way back when
Liev stayed with us for three months. Two years after he left, I lost my mother. The year after that, I left my father, a sixteenth birthday present to myself. They dance with each other, through each other, like ghosts in a ballroom. From my vantage point at the bar, it’s not always easy to tell who is who and which memory goes where.
Here is what I remember about Liev. Here’s what I know to be true. I gave him his nickname. No one used it but me, which begs the question, if there is no one around to hear or share a nickname, does it still exist? Like if I said, ‘Hey everyone, call me “Skip”!’ would you call me that? No. No, of course not. See, that isn’t being organic. That isn’t playing fair.
Call me ‘the Boss’.
Call me ‘Aladdin Sane’.
Call me ‘Little Stevie Wonder’.
Call me ‘the It Girl’.
Call me ‘the Velvet Fog’.
I’m ‘Slim Shady’.
Liev said even if it was just me who used it and my mom and dad who heard it, the nickname was still valid. Besides, he said, it was the first nickname he had ever had. It came to me the first time I met him, but at first I just volleyed about his pet name in my own head. ‘The Vampire’. The logic of the nickname?
I called him The Vampire because he was from Eastern Europe and because his two incisor teeth rested on his lower lip, lazy and white, like trailer trash. I made Liev a button that said ‘The Vampire’ with a kit I had been given as a birthday gift. He wore it delightedly, answering, if asked, that The Vampire was the name of a British band. He told me that one girl had said she couldn’t believe she’d met someone else who was so into them: she had all their B-sides and everything.
Girls were always saying stupid things to try and start conversations with Liev. The problem was, he really didn’t like to talk. His voice, which was somewhat reedy and a few notes off grating, did not fit well with his dark, brooding looks and he knew it. I often think that my low expectations of men stem from my childhood experience of living with two vain men and one woman who did not bother with mirrors. I’m still working out whether my mother abhorred looking at her own reflection because it upset her, or whether she simply was not interested.
When I was little, Mother was very beautiful. She didn’t know it. She believed my father when he told her that she was not. Because she had no compact to consult, there was no proving him wrong. I’d try to tell her but she would hush me and say that she did not care to concern herself with such things and neither should I. But I did. I was proud, when she collected me from nursery school, that my mother, with her wavy mahogany hair and dark-lashed green eyes, was noticeably so much more attractive than the other moms. I am the winner, I told myself. The next day, with the boldness of one who had just learned how to talk, I said it in front of class, during circle time, as I recall. Overwhelmed by the urge to share, I raised my hand.
‘Yes, Ruby.’
‘I,’ I answered, rising from my seat, ‘am the winner.’
‘And why is that?’
‘Because my mother is so much more beautiful than everyone else’s mother.’
To boos and hisses of my assembled classmates, I was corrected.
‘What?’ I asked, brow furrowed. ‘I didn’t say everyone else’s mother was ugly.’
The teacher, a progressive woman, shook her head. ‘Ruby, you are far too concerned with beauty. You must get over it if you are to function as a grown-up in the real world.’
I never got over it. The world never got over it. As I got older, it became, increasingly, our prime concern, me and the world. Neither of us functioned properly, so the principle was at least half right.
My mother was appalled. She had raised me organically, in food and deed. She had me wear slacks instead of dresses. I owned nothing in pink. And yet I was turning out like a child dipped in Marabou. Sitting me beside her in the kitchen, she tried, as she cut the ends off string beans, to explain why I could not go around thinking such things, let alone speaking them out loud. I did not understand. She did not understand why I did not understand.
In a matter of weeks she began to gain weight and got her first gray hairs. By the time Liev moved in with us, was fifty pounds overweight and her hair, once so wavy and gleaming, had become a silvery Brillo brush. As she chopped the ends off the string beans, her final word on the subject had been; ‘Please do not tell your father about this.’
‘Why not?’
‘You know why not. It will make him angry at both of us.’
That was true. My father was an ugly man, scientifically so. Though originally entranced by her beauty, he became resentful of it and sought refuge in the arms of women as painted and plucked as my mother was untouched. My father, like his girlfriends, had hair appointments once a week. The foul-smelling Fabrice would come by our house and cut my father’s hair in his study. He would snip for forty-five minutes, and then my father would come downstairs looking exactly the same, although his expression was perhaps smugger even than before. My father was not a cruel man, nor a dull or stupid one. He was quite brilliant and quite foolish. As many affairs as he had, my mother put up with them all. This incensed him and led him to loathe her, for he thought she was deliberately ignoring his infidelity in order to make a fool out of him.
Liev was vain in a different way from my father. Liev’s vanity was selective
and well thought out and rooted more in good sense than insecurity. He chose not to talk because his voice was such that even he could not stand the sound of it. He chose not to be upset by my dubbing him The Vampire because he recognized it immediately as the huge compliment that it was intended to be. I was saying, more eloquently than all the women in his life before, that he was mysterious, handsome and that he haunted our dreams.
‘Don’t call our house guest “The Vampire”. That’s not nice,’ said my father. ‘You know, don’t you, that the vampire myth is rooted in anti-Semitism?’
‘No, I don’t know,’ I spat. ‘I’m twelve. Anyway, Liev doesn’t mind, do you, Liev?’
Liev shook his angular head, responding, as he always did, silently to my father and physically to me.
‘I like vampires,’ I added slyly. ‘I think that they are beautiful.’
My father did not hear the lust in my praise. He did not, since it was not directed at him, hear my praise at all. I think he would be OK with incest. He could forgive the moral horror for the glory of another woman wanting him.
‘Ruby, I’m not kidding: you’re perpetuating a legend whose root finds itself in fear of the Eastern European coming to America and sucking the lifeblood out of the economy. A lost tribe of outcasts, wandering the earth, trying to pass as “ordinary”. I wouldn’t joke about vampires.’
‘I’m twelve,’ I told myself again, for my father was no longer listening. When his theory was finished, my usefulness was finished too, because, for my father, the point of other humans – women, children, friends and enemies – was to listen to him be clever. And then leave. In later years, I would see other men talking the way he did. They were at industry parties, and their jaws ground like jack-hammers and they kept coming out of the bathrooms with red noses.
I didn’t know what anti-Semitism meant. I knew that ‘anti’ meant against. But against what? There was a lot of sex talk in our house – intellectual discussions about eroticism. Semitism sounded like it was bound to be something sexy too. I decided that people were jealous of the Jews because we were too sexy. In retrospect, thinking about Kirk Douglas and Lauren Bacall, the twelve-year-old me was probably right.
Liev was carved in the shape of sex, in the texture of sex and anointed with its scent. I tried to pinpoint the epicenter of it all. One day, sitting in his lap, I traced the point from where it was emanating to the shiny gold Star of David around his neck. It nestled in the black chest hair that sprouted from his selection of V-neck sweaters. Although he always wore his sweaters with nothing underneath them, he never had sweat stains and he always smelled good.
The first time I got close enough to know how he smelled was at the debut of his artwork, a collection that my parents had sponsored. The ‘opening’ was held in our front room. Liev was remarkably cool. My father was not. His biggest worry in reference to other people was not that they might be sad or nervous, but that something they might do, eat, breathe or sleep, let alone make, would reflect badly on him. He was quite the wrong kind of man to discover new talent, and yet he had been right time and time again.
My father’s mere interest in a young artist guaranteed them press coverage. He fretted in mock silence. Behind barely closed doors I heard him hiss to my mother that Liev wasn’t ready for this and that he was going to embarrass our family name. Liev heard too. His cheeks burned furious pomegranate, and, taking him by the hand, I led him into my bedroom for a game of chess. I used to be brilliant at chess. I was something of a child genius. Learning to play chess came just before the realization that learning something – anything – is mostly difficult and time consuming. Anything pre-chess, I can still do: reading, writing, doggie paddle. But I cannot swim breaststroke or do mental arithmetic, because the decision was already in place. Over the years, despite pleas from my parents, the decision remained upheld.
We stayed hunched over the chessboard, as the doorbell began to ring. My mother poked her head around the door and, bowing in defeat to me, Liev followed her out of the room to be defeated by my father. Lying stretched out on my bed, I heard Daddy announce, ‘So here he is. This little boy I picked up on my travels in Eastern Europe. Not so little if his last girlfriend is to be believed!’ Everyone laughed. I covered my face with a pillow. I gritted my teeth, fully aware that the rumor was true: Daddy and Liev had shared a lover, and that was how they met. Lila was a brilliant young artist. Daddy was going to make her a star. But then she went on holiday and fell in love with Liev. She no longer wanted anything to do with a self-obsessed old man, cheating on his wife and child. Daddy was so furious when she broke it off that he decided to make Liev a star instead of her.
Liev was ambitious. Lila was not. No one ever quite understood why she didn’t make it, or, more to the point, why she stopped being interested in making it. Not long after Liev became friendly with my father, she moved to Philadelphia to work with unwanted children. I dreamed about joining her, my father’s former lover, to see if she might want me. But then Liev moved in with us. And I decided that I wanted to stay.
I wondered about the darkness inside Liev that allowed him to leave his girlfriend, whom he knew to be more talented than him, for the prospect of stardom, which he knew he did not especially deserve. I put the question out of my mind and, curling it tight in my hand, made a fist for the rest of the night.
As the guests followed my father into his study, Liev retreated to the kitchen. He had sold one painting: to a woman who bought whatever my father had to offer. Even if he had taken the path of his brother and lived in the East End of London selling violins, she would have bought up every one of them.
I joined him in the kitchen, perching on a stool beside him as he leaned against the table. His head was in his hands. He looked like he was crying, but there weren’t any tears.
‘Why aren’t you crying, Liev?’
‘Because I am sad.’
‘No, silly. I said: “Why AREN’T you crying?”’
‘Oh. I guess I aren’t crying ’cos I guess I aren’t sad.’
‘Good. Then I aren’t sad with you.’ I leant against his chest. He smelled of fresh leather.
He bent down and put his face in my hair. ‘You smell of freshly laundered chickens.’
‘Freshly slaughtered?’
‘Freshly laundered …’ and then he started crying. ‘Oh Ruby, let’s not talk anymore.’
My mother lent Liev no comfort. By then she had retreated to her room, gray, overweight and dejected. She was humiliated, once she began to lose them, to realise that her looks were more important to her than she thought. She forgot that she had once been interested in Liev and, though I never doubted she loved me, I could see that I made her head hurt.
They had promised Liev an umbrella of support and not only were they not coming through, they were also pretending it wasn’t raining. I could not work out what there was to keep him, and I sensed, with rising alarm, that neither could he. When my father was in his study, I would crawl into bed beside my mother and nestle up close to her expanding girth. She’d put a sad, heavy arm around me and kiss the top of my head. Although her arm was now heavy enough on my back to cause me serious physical discomfort, I would not allow myself to move it until I knew she was asleep.
That year, she drifted in and out of sleep and in and out of my life.
The less my mother left her room, the more Liev and I played together. My father wavered between boredom and hostility towards Liev – his show had been, as Daddy had feared, completely derided – and relief that he was there for me to play with. Several times Liev said he felt it was time for him to move on and each time my father gave him incentive to stay, promising that they would mount another show for him. Daddy was over Lila, could barely remember what had brought any of them together. He never held grudges because he never held people in his head long enough to develop ill will toward them. His vengeance was swift and neat, then over and forgotten.
He did not want Liev to go. If he did, we would b
e living as a normal family and might be forced to function as such. I suspected that if Liev were not there, Daddy would have to help me come to terms with my mother’s nervous breakdown, maybe even help her. Ostensibly, the lodger’s purpose was to try and distract me from the disintegration of my mother. In retrospect I think I was supposed to entertain him too. And I did.
We painted together. We wrote plays. He took me to the movies. He dropped me off at summer theater camp and picked me up at the end of the day. Of course eyebrows were raised at the end-of-course meeting, which neither my mother, nor my father, nor Liev deigned to attend. And that infuriated the teachers and the other parents because they correctly suspected that Mother, Daddy and Liev felt there was nothing the teachers could tell them about me that they didn’t already know. And if there was something – well then it was not something they cared to find out. They knew that there were directors, actors and writers at my father’s get-togethers, people who could pluck any one of them out of their get-by jobs at junior-high theater camp and into the big time.
If Mom, Dad or Liev had attended, they would have learned that I was well behaved if somewhat detached. That I had no friends, but did not seem unduly concerned about it. That I did tend to linger outside the staffroom during lunch hour, seeking to continue discussions that had ended in morning class. That I could not eat in the cafeteria because I hated watching other children chew, but that I snuck my lunch out onto the theater stage and crouched in a corner behind the red curtains. And that I had cried and cried when I was chosen to play Puck, not Titania. ‘No, no, I’m not mischievous. Fuck you, motherfuckers, how’s that for gamine? I want to be the Queen because I am the Queen and if you can’t see that I fear for my place in the world.’
A couple of evenings after theater camp, Liev and I watched The Breakfast Club on tape. I liked it, despite the things I didn’t understand. When I was twelve, teen films felt like a language I could read immaculately from the page, without even knowing what the words meant. Part of the reason that film appealed to me so much was that I knew I was too young for it. Liev was young enough to miss his youth just as it was slipping away. The worst kind of loss – the one that is happening as you feel it.
