by Emma Forrest
‘But I can’t. I’m not ready.’
‘What are you wearing?’
‘Just old shorts and a T-shirt.’
‘Then you’re ready.’
I met him at Penn Station, in half an hour, wearing what I had surmised to be a sailing outfit, extracated from the unhung heaps of clothes lying on the bedroom floor. I had on black ballet pumps, black pedal pushers that I had to struggle to zip, a white and navy horizontal-striped T-shirt which strained under duress of Play-Doh breasts. I wore fresh red lipstick and large lunettes tinted blue. The maybe-maybe hairdo was hidden under a yellow scarf tied around my head.
He met me, wearing flip-flops, paint-spattered surfer shorts and a tank top, which emphasized his broad shoulders and muscular arms. His hair was arranged in punky Afro twiglets, the one aspect of his appearance that appeared to have required effort and forethought.
He stretched his enormously long legs across the compartment, resting his feet on my thighs.
Though I darted my eyes away from him in what I had always taken to be the internationally acknowledged sign for ‘Stop talking now, please’, Sebastian maintained a steady stream of conversation, most of it babble. Closing my eyes, I let the babble lick my limbs, like warm waves. He didn’t seem to mind my zoning out. In fact, he too seemed to have zoned out, only through words rather than silence.
Time passed amiably this way and I realized that one needn’t understand someone, or even attempt to understand them, to find their presence soothing. We got off the train by the Jersey Shore, where we were met by a middle-aged lady in a silver Range Rover.
‘This is my mother.’ Sebastian’s mother was about the same height as me but far more beautiful. She wore khakis, pink patent flats and a white polo-neck. Around her swan neck hung a slim diamond crucifix that glittered in the sun. ‘Hello, Mrs Chase. So nice to meet you.’ I wanted to add that I had heard so much about her, but I hadn’t, except for in my own head.
They had an exhaustive library in their house. Check Chekhov, check Dostoevsky, check Sartre, check Henry James and Jane Austen, check stories of James Baldwin and plays of Arthur Miller. I couldn’t find any embarrassing books, not one Jackie Collins or Len Deighton. On a top shelf I spied the autobiography of LL Cool J, but, reaching up to grab it, I found it stiff and unread, not a single page bent.
Mrs Chase made spaghetti, whilst Sebastian weaved his arms around his mother’s trim waist. I beamed inwardly because mummy’s boys are always good at cunnilingus. Mrs Chase retired to her room to read and we got back into the car, trailing a cut-glass moon round the forks in the road.
Sebastian was determined that I should make acquaintance with his boat before we sailed it the next morning. I had been expecting a yacht, because of his mother’s thinness and elegance, I suppose, and was shocked to find that he had been waxing lyrical over a tiny Sunfish. Charmed, I took his hand in mine.
‘What is all that on your arms?’ he asked, as we watched the moon to see if it was planning anything.
‘Oh, those?’ I answered coolly, as if I hadn’t noticed them before. ‘I had an Iggy Pop moment.’
‘Just a moment?’
‘Yes. Only a moment.’
We slept in his childhood bed. He stripped to his boxers and loaned me a T-shirt. When he curled me under the crook of a huge arm, I began to cry.
‘I love you,’ I whispered. I didn’t, but I wanted to explain, to myself and to him, the parade of tears streaming down my cheeks, like floats in a carnival.
He pretended he hadn’t heard me, as he wiped the tears away.
‘Sorry this bed is so hard. Same bed I’ve had since I was fourteen.’
I couldn’t answer and, nervous, he kept talking.
‘I love sailing. My father taught me how to do it before he passed away. A white man’s sport. I love skateboarding and snowboarding too. And surfing. I think skateboarding is hardest. With sailing, if you fall, it’s on water. With snowboarding, if you fall, you fall on snow. But with skateboarding, when you fall, you’re falling on concrete. I broke my ankle last summer on Brooklyn Bridge. But that’s still my favorite place to skateboard. I love it.’
He kept saying the word love until, through my tears, I choked out a question. ‘Sebastian, who was the love of your life?’
He held me tighter as he recalled the love of his life, as though he were revealing an affair to a girlfriend he had been with for six years, restraining me against a crazed reaction. ‘Erica. She was a girl on the athletics team, back at college. We were together for five years, but then we kind of drifted apart. She’s engaged now, to a banker. Why, who was the love of your life?’
‘Liev,’ I sighed miserably.
‘Who was he?’ he demanded in the fake-soft tones of a man who was already jealous.
‘Oh, he was just this vampire we had staying with us when I was twelve.’
‘Oh.’ Sebastian seemed satisfied with my response.
And then we went to sleep.
The next morning, he fixed eggs Florentine and coffee and picked me more appropriate footwear from his little sister’s closet. Then we went down to the docks and he strapped a lifejacket around my chest before placing me at the back of the boat.
‘Weave!’ ‘Duck!’ ‘Tack!’ ‘Mack!’ I couldn’t make out his instructions, as they spilled, rapid fire, from his plush lips.
‘I DON’T UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU’RE SAYING,’ I sulked, and then, with greater force, ‘I don’t understand what you’re saying. I want to go back to New York.’ Under my breath I added, ‘You fake WASP motherfucker.’
I hated the wind and the waves. I hated the sun and the sky. I hated the shoes he had made me wear. They were ugly. They were FUNCTIONAL.
‘Calm down,’ he said. ‘Calm down.’
For reasons I don’t understand, I did calm down. I opened my eyes and the sun made me laugh. The waves and the wind and the sky made me happy. I liked his little sister’s dorky deck shoes. Reflected in his perfect chest, my petulance bounced over the side of the boat and under the sea.
After a couple of hours, he tied the boat back onto the dock and we spilled into the shallow water: When we got home, we found a note from his mother saying that she had left for a garage sale. After showering off the sand, we crawled back into his schoolboy bed.
Sebastian smelled of brine and raucous good health. His skin was still warm from the sun. The hairs on his arms and the down on his chest were sunbaked to perfection, channeling the spirits of all the happy cats who had ever stretched on windowsills.
‘I love you,’ I said again, although I didn’t. I just wanted to think of an excuse to explain why I couldn’t stop smiling. We took the train back to the city and when he went home, he took me with him. It was a week before, nervous as a burglar with bells glued to her shoes, I tiptoed back into my own apartment. Gathering a few outfits, moisturizer, deodorant and my favorite underwear, I hopped a cab back to Sebastian’s, where I already had my own toothbrush waiting by his sink.
Sebastian held my hand when we went out at night. He woke me up with kisses. He bought me presents with money he had earned from me. He only, once or twice, suggested it was perhaps time for me to go back to work, to call my agent back and hit some auditions. I was proud that I was with a beautiful black man. He was proud that he was with a semi-star. The longer we spent together, the more the semi started to disintegrate, chopped first to demi, then quasi and finally pseudo. I was happy that way. He less so.
He didn’t like working with actors or actresses he felt were less talented than me, less beautiful. He’d snap at the ones who flirted with him and they loved him even more: the personal assistant who cannot hide his contempt for his clients. He became all the rage. He got a job working for De Niro and he started earning good money, better than he had with me, which he used to blow on clothes. Shopping excited him. He dragged me around SoHo, to Helmut Lang, Prada and Louis Vuitton. Seeing myself in the boutique mirrors, I looked like a grumpy child being taken to the
Museum of Modern Art.
‘I don’t get it,’ I’d snarl, as he held up a three-quarter-length micro-fiber jacket for my delectation. ‘I want to go home.’
Sebastian wanted to be my stylist.
‘Sweetie, I thought you’d look so good in this color.’
He’d sling an olive cashmere scarf around my neck and tie it and re-tie it until he was satisfied it was falling right. It was never falling right.
He bought me a Louis Vuitton traveling bag that had five zips.
‘You think I’m going somewhere, Sebastian?’
‘God, I hope not.’
‘Perhaps it’s a good idea.’
His eyes clouded and he took the bag back to the store and exchanged it for a bikini. He thought I was so much thinner than I was. I took it back and exchanged it for cash, which I put in his wallet that night as he slept. I don’t know if he even noticed it. He never said anything. Most of the places he wanted to go, I couldn’t have heard him anyway.
We went to parties with guest lists. We went to clubs with guest lists, velvet ropes and VIP rooms within VIP rooms. He took happy drugs, up drugs that made him want to hug and kiss and squeeze me all the more. At every bar, at every club, in each and every VIP room, I made my child-bored-at-the-art-gallery face, until he said we could go home.
For a time, his skin maintained the immaculate glow of the chosen. Infuriated, I decided to suck it out for myself. ‘Why do you always want to give me blowjobs?’ he queried one night, ‘Not that I’m complaining.’
Not long after, I got carried away and he got frightened. ‘Ruby. RUBY! That’s too rough. Honey, you’re being too rough on me,’ and he pulled away to the other side of the bed.
‘Why? Is it that girls aren’t supposed to enjoy doing that? Is that the problem?’ I screamed, slamming the bathroom door behind me.
‘No, Ruby. No, I love it. I love you. Knowing that you like being with me is the best feeling in the world. But you were hurting me. I had to say something.’
I looked in the bathroom mirror. Even with the draconian lighting I could see that my skin had acquired a rosy glow. Outside the door, Sebastian picked at a spot that was forming above his eyebrow.
It went downhill from there – his skin kept time with the disintegration of the relationship. I was gloriously robust, a punk-rock milk maiden. There was no longer a trace of fat, no wobble or flab. Just acres of creamy flesh and rosy cheeks. My agents finally had their call to Merchant Ivory returned.
I picked the spots on his back for him, squealing with delight as a blackhead wriggled, short and hard, from his anguished flesh. He no longer looked quite so fetching in his tank tops and handed them down to me, defeat in his eyes. My tiger’s-eye irises shining with glee, I slashed the tank tops into crop tops and wore them with pink bra straps hanging out.
At night, I felt greater compassion for Sebastian, felt guilty for all the darkness I had shown him. I saw it dancing in his dreadlocks and, as he slept, I tried to pick it out. It didn’t work. Though I had put it there, I couldn’t take it away. By then, he cried more than me and breathed choked dreams in and out of his short, straight nose all night long. I always slept under the crook of his arm, even though his arm was so thick and heavy, sometimes I could barely breathe. I would never move him or say so much as a word. I tried very hard to wake up in the exact same position in which I had fallen asleep.
Sebastian smoked his way through a particularly tense dinner. ‘Have you ever seen any plays by Chekhov?’ I asked, picking at my risotto, then cut myself short. ‘No, of course you wouldn’t have.’
Sebastian stubbed his cigarette out. ‘Why do you do that to me? Why do you think I’m stupid? Unlike you, I actually went to college.’
‘To study English literature, so I hear.’
‘I have a good job,’ his voice rose.
‘Sebastian, you’re a whore. No, wait. You’re not a whore.’
‘Thank you.’
‘No, you’re a fucking pimp and that’s worse.’
He scrunched his face and turned away and when he turned back a tear slipped into his meal, a salty garnish on his spinach and mashed potato.
I always felt bad when he cried. He always felt bad when I cried. ‘I think we do this so that we can comfort one another,’ I whispered, taking his huge hand in my tiny one.
‘I used to do that to my sister,’ he sniffled. ‘She was so independent, even when she was four years old. She would never let me hug her. So I would pinch her, scratch her, bite her good and proper until she was so upset, she’d let me hold her. She’d be in so much pain, she would temporarily forget that it was me who hurt her in the first place.’
‘I know,’ I soothed, kissing his cheek, ‘I know.’
We paid the check and walked back to his apartment arm in arm. We lay on his bed, swathed in Irish linen, listening to Air and stroking each other’s faces. He kissed me gently and smiled.
‘I know how hard it is for you to be straight with me. And I want you to know, I believed you from the first moment you told me that you loved me. I know how much you care about me.’
I kissed his forehead and, in tones of silk and sugar, sing-songed, ‘I don’t love you. I don’t love you and I don’t care about you. I never did. I just had nothing to say to you and “I love you” seemed as good a sentence as any.’
Leaping out of bed, he backed himself against the bathroom door.
‘What the fuck is wrong with you, Ruby? Why are you so fucking cruel?’
Following him out of bed, I leant my head on his chest and laughed, ‘So much Louis Vuitton!’
‘What? Speak in fucking English,’ he cried as he slammed me against the wall. ‘Speak in fucking English, you fucking bitch.’
Sebastian sank to the floor, so tired of this, so ashamed that he had laid his hands on me, something he had never, ever done before.
I leaned against the wall, marks on both my arms where he had grabbed me, a smile tickling my mouth.
‘So much baggage.’
co-starring
Sean showed rushes of Mean People Suck to the backers. They hated it. They thought I was too unattractive. They thought he had indulged me too much. It was more graphic in its violence than they had expected. Most damningly of all, they thought I had no chemistry with my co-star. Was that Aslan’s fault or mine? I had had over five years’ experience as an actress. It was Aslan’s first movie. He hadn’t even wanted to act, but the casting director discovered him strumming a Gibson Sunburst in a guitar shop and persuaded him to audition.
The first time I ever met him he was leaving makeup, trundling down the steps of the trailer with headphones around his neck. He carried his Walkman in the deep pocket of his winter coat as if it were a gun: he needed it to walk the streets of Manhattan at one thirty in the morning, even if it were just across the block to the set, his fingers ready to hit the play button at the first sign of danger. I had been filming all day and was going home to sleep. He was wearing tan cord pants, a beige duffel and a loopy grin.
‘Hello,’ I said.
‘Goodbye,’ said Aslan.
His peers called him Aslan because they decided that he goes through his wardrobe at night into a whole other realm. Aslan was so mysterious that his hair and eyes and skin didn’t have a specific color. Usually beauty is about definition – black hair, say, with bright blue eyes and alabaster skin. Aslan was a beauty and we didn’t even know why, although we spent many evenings discussing him.
His shoulder-length hair was tousled and sort of dirty-brown, his skin was both tan and slightly jaundiced. His eyes might have been hazel if they weren’t olive. Almost all of him was in earth tones, as if he had been created by a team of camouflage experts. When I asked the casting director, she claimed that he came from Colorado to play in a band and that when she found him in the guitar store, he was singing Steely Dan songs slightly out of key.
Aslan, we concluded, was that boy on the baseball field who stood off in a corner twirling
as the game happened around him. He was the one humming to himself while the ball flew past his ear.
Sean had been adamant that we not meet each other until the last possible minute, since he feared it might adversely affect the authenticity of our relationship. The morning after I saw Aslan, I greeted Sean with the ultimatum that he introduce us NOW or I was planning on being very difficult. Sean dragged me by the arm and into the makeshift cafeteria where Aslan was having his breakfast.
‘Aslan, this is Ruby,’ drawled Sean. I was wearing faded jeans and a worn T-shirt – both the jeans and T-shirt had been especially distressed by the costume designer who made them.
‘I don’t know you,’ he said happily, flashing a Chiclet-tooth smile that cut from ear to ear.
‘That’s OK, you don’t need to know my films.’
‘No, I don’t know you. I haven’t met you before,’ and he bowed his head in formal introduction. Head still bowed, he peered at me with a luminous no-color eye through a strand of no-color hair arranged in no specific style.
‘Yes you have!’ I answered, my indignant shriek raising the director’s hackles. ‘Yesterday, as you were leaving make-up.’
He said he didn’t remember. And, smiling, he moved away. Sean and I sat down at the table and Aslan returned with a banana, which he ate absentmindedly, entranced by a cobweb dangling from the chair. Every minute or so he would nod in agreement with some invisible power. Sean quickly excused himself to go to the bathroom. I cornered him outside the stall and screeched, ‘What the hell’s up with that kid? He won’t even talk to me.’
‘Lower your voice,’ whispered Sean. ‘Dude, Aslan has serious spirit guides in the form of prairie animals. He was probably just busy talking to them. Don’t take offense. It’s his first time on a movie set. What do you want from him?’
I wanted to hold him. But I don’t know what it was I wanted to hold, since it was only the second time I’d met him and there was nothing about him within my grasp: clouds in the shape of Ireland, premonitions about the deaths of celebrities, the bass line from a Rolling Stones B-side. Aslan existed in too many forms for the room. At least Sebastian Chase, who did not exist at all, had created a body of taut contoured muscle for me to cling to. If I could just fuck Aslan, if I could feel him inside me, I might know why I was so touched by him. I might know that he had some semblance of a notion that he was touching me too. And that maybe, just maybe, I was touching him.
