The Sleep-Over Artist

by Thomas Beller

  He often bought a quarter pound of Swedish raspberries and made small talk. He liked these two highly particular old men, who, he imagined, had once upon a time been part of some wild gay demimonde, but now were entirely devoted to their nuts and dried fruits. Now he dashed in and bought all kinds of strange things: a Hot Wheels car, a hand buzzer, marzipan, two Pez dispensers and a great deal of Pez to go with them, dipstick, a blue handball, and several rolls of bubble gum tape.

  Alex imagined Patrick’s face as he stuffed the bubble gum into his mouth. He would put so much in his mouth he would drool while he laughed.

  “Patrick!” Katrina would cry out. It would almost be familial.

  He paid, got in a cab, and headed for the airport. On the ride out he let this familial fantasy linger.

  THE LONG-DISTANCE relationship is a form best suited to the hopeless optimist, or to the man or woman who takes a certain pleasure in disappointment. These categories are more or less the same thing.

  How else to explain Alex Fader’s presence in the gray halls of Heathrow Airport, walking with a bounce in his step, chin aloft, full of anticipation?

  There are certain ground rules in a long-distance relationship, the most important regarding endurance. How long can they endure being apart? A week is fine, two weeks bearable. Once that initial sting of separation is overcome, a month is doable. Five weeks is a serious strain. Beyond five weeks is like swimming in the ocean, past any barrier reef, where the waves are as high as mountains, the creatures are strange and lethal, and the only hope is an oblivious steamer sitting on the horizon.

  Their reunion is a splendid thing. It happens in an airport, which lends it an air of almost military formality, as though one of them had been held hostage and was only now being released into the arms of the other. Around them there are other reunions, other cries of pleasure, relief, excitement.

  Isn’t a long-distance relationship really two relationships in one—the relationship with the person, and with the place? So, like an echo, the thoughts of her skin, her lips, her warm embrace—all these have as a corollary thoughts of black-currant Ribena, Back To Basics, Maison Bertaux, and black taxis.

  There is the specific her that he is visiting, and the general them. He thinks of her accent and then more generally of accents. Her tea, the notion of afternoon tea. Her somewhat shallow but incredibly stylish and broad erudition, everyone’s somewhat shallow but incredibly stylish and broad erudition. Her, England.

  He walks over acres of Heathrow’s abysmal carpeting, and at last he sees her.

  Now, after they have gotten past those first blushing, giggly seconds of awkwardness, comes the moment they have been waiting for. That first embrace. A thrill like no other. Soon will come the small difficult reacquaintanceships—with her car, her neighborhood, her street, her house, her child. Her. But for now, in these first seconds, they hold on tight, letting their psychic heartbeats synchronize, and begin the delicious process of falling deep into the voluptuous pit of their own private world.

  LONDON WAS FULL of blooming flowers and Katrina and Alex were drunk on each other’s touch, on the luxury of such physical intimacy. Then things settled down and became a bit more complicated. They had no shared past, and it was difficult if not impossible to look to the future. So they had to exist purely in the present. Sometimes this worked, and sometimes it didn’t.

  Their fights were like small clouds on a bright windy day; no sooner had they appeared than they were whisked away by the jet stream of sex, to which the fights sometimes seemed a desirable prelude; it was as though they were engaging in a couple’s version of autoerotic asphyxiation. This mode of operation, whereby tension is created to an almost unbearable point and then dispelled with lovemaking, was more to his taste than to hers, though she was expert at it simply by virtue of her ability to parry. But their fights were not always petulant tiffs. Black clouds rolled in with sudden force. One minute they would be squabbling about some tiny irrelevant detail of life, and then they would come to a border; you couldn’t cross this border and come back in the same condition in which you left. They knew this, and yet they spilled over it again and again. It was much easier to cross this border on the way out than on the way back.

  Once, after a huge fight that had its origins in whether they would see a movie at seven or nine, he stormed out of the house. It was raining. He stomped along in the rain for a while until he came to the little green hut a few blocks from her house where the cab drivers congregated for tea. He intended to hail a cab but all the cabs were off duty, and the cars sat in a dormant row while their drivers took refuge. What was he doing in the rain? Where did he think he was going? He had to call her up on a pay phone and, trying to maintain a shred of dignity, ask to come back. She was nice about it, though. When he came through the door she had a tear-streaked look of exhaustion on her face.

  “Please let’s not fight anymore, sweetie,” she whispered into his ear as he held her in his moist arms. “I’m so tired of fighting.”

  ONE DAY ALEX and Patrick were sitting on the plush carpet of the bathroom floor. Somehow during this long summer visit the strangeness had suddenly left their relations, and Alex ate with him and sometimes even lay in bed with Katrina and read to Patrick from a book. He was amazed at how much he liked doing it.

  Now Alex was pulling apart a clementine and throwing the pieces one at a time at Patrick, who sat across from him with his back against the tub. Patrick lunged at each clementine slice like a seal, trying to catch it in his mouth. Most of the time he missed and it bounced off his face and he broke into hysterical laughter. He had bright blue eyes and often when he smiled he shrugged his shoulders, as though he wanted to bury his face in the hollow of his collarbone. His second toe was longer than the big toe, just like his mother’s.

  Every now and then Alex would toss a piece high in the air and catch it in his own mouth. Somehow, in the presence of Patrick, his success ratio was near a hundred percent. In real life, fifty percent would have been more like it. There is something about being a grown man in the presence of a seven-year-old boy that enhances one’s talents for such things as throwing clementine slices in the air and catching them in your mouth.

  Patrick squealed with delight when Alex caught a slice in his mouth.

  “Alex! You’re eating them all!” he said.

  “It’s a tough world out there, kid,” he replied. “It’s sink or swim. I’ll give you another chance, but if you miss it, you miss it.”

  Then he began taking aim.

  He threw a clementine at Patrick, who had just turned seven and did not possess even the slightest amount of coordination. He lunged spastically in its direction and it bounced off his forehead.

  “The problem is that you’re closing your eyes,” said Alex. “You can’t just open your mouth wide and lunge in the general direction. You’ve got to keep your eye on the ball.”

  He reached over, picked the clementine slice off the floor, and squinted with one eye, as though he were aiming a dart at a bull’s-eye. “Open your mouth,” he said.

  At such moments Alex sometimes thought of Patrick’s father, who really should be the one sitting here, he felt. He thought of the complex spying apparatus he sometimes was convinced was wired through the whole house, and of Patrick’s father watching this scene with the clementines.

  Patrick opened his mouth very wide. He really was a cute kid, Alex thought. There was something crushingly kind about him. His vulnerability was terrifying.

  When Alex first met him he had been frightened of Patrick. Patrick, at age six, was the master of the house. If Alex was accepted into Katrina’s house, he knew it would be at Patrick’s discretion.

  But they had made friends; at first an uneasy truce, and then gradually something warm and real developed.

  Now, however, as Alex held the clementine, he felt those dying embers of resentment towards Patrick flair, as if touched by a gust of wind. As he took aim, he could hear the distant soft thudding of
Katrina’s footsteps coming up the stairs.

  “Open wider,” he said.

  Patrick complied. His head was tilted back, his mouth a big circle, his thin arms hanging limply at his side, as though his entire being were concentrated on making his mouth as big as possible so he could snare a clementine.

  It was a perfect shot. Right down the middle. Its arc was a gentle loop, and it entered that round circle of Patrick’s mouth and penetrated all the way to the back of his throat without banging into anything.

  And from there it dropped down the wrong pipe.

  Patrick’s response was slightly delayed. For a second he began to laugh. But then the error became apparent, and his eyes bulged out, and he began to choke. He coughed in long wheezes.

  “Cough,” said Alex.

  “Patrick?” said Katrina from outside, “Is that you?” Her voice was streaked with a wispy cloud of concern which Alex knew would darken to storm clouds as soon as she walked in the door.

  Alex knelt next to Patrick, slapped his back, and tried to speak in a calm tone of voice. “Cough it up, just try and cough it up.”

  But Patrick just made a wheezing sound now, the sound of steam escaping from a radiator.

  “Patrick? Patrick? Alex? Are you in here?” Katrina pushed the bathroom door open and stepped into the small, private, clementine-scented world that Patrick and Alex had been occupying for the last half hour.

  She had been out in the world, which involved cars, and ex-husbands, and morning breakfasts with divorce lawyers.

  “He’s all right,” said Alex, kneeling over Patrick. “He’s just got something stuck in his throat.”

  But Patrick was clearly not all right. He sat doubled over, making horrible sounds.

  Katrina’s response was swift. She slapped him hard on the back. When this didn’t work she took him by the ankles, stood up, and held him upside down. Even though Patrick was seven, he was not light, but she did this without any apparent strain. “Slap his back,” she said tersely.

  Alex gave him a firm slap between the shoulder blades. He felt the boy’s bones, fragile like a bird’s, and cringed.

  “Harder,” she said.

  The clementine popped out, glistening with wet. A moment later, Patrick started crying. It started with a halting sob. Katrina pulled Patrick to her and held him as he began to sob in earnest onto her shoulder.

  As Alex watched, he reflected that the two of them were now a tight family unit of two, and he was merely a stranger, a culprit. Katrina took a brief moment off from comforting Patrick, just a split second, to flash a dark glance in his direction, an utterly disgusted enraged glance at the boy who had nearly let her son choke to death.

  THEY WERE STRETCHED out on one of her long living-room couches, facing each other, on a balmy Wednesday evening, the light slowly dimming to a summer dusk. Patrick was with Sam; the large house was empty and silent but for their conversation. They had just now showered together. She wore a white cotton bathrobe. He was wrapped in a towel, his chest bare. “There is a great similarity,” he said, “between the life of the millionaire and the life of the unemployed.”

  “Oh really?” she said skeptically.

  “Well, it’s a weekday. Most of the world is scampering around doing things, and you and I are just lying here as though we were on the beach.”

  She smiled. How wonderful it was when they didn’t seem like strangers to each other.

  “Tell me a scene from your childhood I could never have otherwise imagined,” he said.

  She thought about it for a minute. The light was getting dimmer. They faced each other. Their legs stretched out in each other’s direction. His bare foot pressed against her crotch. The terry cloth felt good against her skin.

  “One summer we collected wood for the bonfire,” she began. “I was about eight or nine. It was a big project. We built it in the middle of a field behind our country house. Every day all summer we dragged these bits of deadwood out of the forest. I was so excited about burning it. I remember thinking a lot about what a enormous fire it would be.”

  He removed his foot from where it had been resting and slid it beneath her robe, back to its original position, except now it was his skin against hers. The soft arch of his foot against her protruding softness.

  “Go ahead,” he said.

  “Eventually the big day arrived. We all gathered around. There were some neighbors there too, and their children. I remember my father standing there with a pitchfork. I never quite figured out why he had the pitchfork. We lit the fire. It was bigger and brighter than I had imagined it would be. But then a terrible thing happened.”

  “Go ahead,” he said. He nudged her with his foot.

  “It went up in flames right away. A sudden burst. And after a minute or so there was this sound, and these little rabbits started darting out from the bottom. They had built an underground warren over the course of the summer and now all these tiny rabbits came darting out of the wood and some of them were on fire. I remember being really confused and upset. People started screaming. There were these little flaming bunnies darting around, and there was a terrible horrible screeching sound coming from inside the bonfire and then I saw my father chasing the rabbits that were on fire and stabbing them with the pitchfork. He was just putting them out their misery, but I didn’t understand that. I just saw him stabbing the rabbits to death with the pitchfork, and he was all red and orange, lit up by the bonfire, and everybody was screaming, and there was that terrible screeching sound from inside the fire, and I started to scream too. I never screamed like that before. Or since, for that matter. It was like being in hell.”

  He pressed his foot against her as if he were accelerating a car. And then his big toe was inside. Neither of them said anything. Their expressions were blank; a slight hint of curiosity on his face, and a slight look of contempt on hers as he moved his toe in and out of her.

  HIS IDEA OF treating her well usually involved his head disappearing between her legs and then commencing with his tongue. His soft dark hair blended into the darkness between her legs, and she was left alone by herself. He wouldn’t stop until he got what he wanted, which was that she get what she wanted, or rather get what he thought she wanted, which she did want, but not in this manner, or at least not exclusively in this manner.

  She was, however, reluctant to complain. She didn’t want to discourage whatever small amount of consideration she could get. But when he went down there she was alone, and so her thoughts drifted, often to people and places she would rather have let lie dormant, but which instead were brought by necessity to the surface of her consciousness, and so when at last she got there and pulled her knees together to make him stop (because for some reason he often kept going a little bit beyond that point, as though more were simply better, when if he simply thought about his own feelings on the matter—the way he pulled away, needed to simmer down—it would be perfectly obvious), she suddenly found herself with a grinning wet-chinned man who seemed a perfect stranger.

  TEN DAYS AFTER Alex arrived in London he got a message that his Aunti B had died.

  That night he and Katrina were going to the theater. It had been a brilliant June day. Their taxi raced towards the West End, around Trafalgar Square, and a ray of sun shot across the black lions and landed on her neck. Her hair was up and her neck looked beautiful.

  “My aunt died yesterday. I just got the message.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice soft. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes. But it’s not how I expected it to happen.”

  “One never really expects something like that,” she said.

  He looked at Katrina and tried to connect the present moment, speeding along in the taxi in London, to his memory of Aunti B.

  “She’d been sort of on the verge of dying for a long time” he said. “Long enough to get used to the idea of her still being alive.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said again. She was very decent about it. But for a m
oment he felt a rage towards her. She could not begin to fathom the person his aunt was, the life she led. For the first and possibly only time he felt a flare of regret that Katrina wasn’t Jewish. He didn’t know why that would change anything, but he felt it.

  HE WOKE UP in the middle of the night. His lip hurt. He sat up. His lip tasted of blood. He had been biting his lip in his sleep.

  NINA WAS A tall, nearly ravishing woman with jet black hair and long, highly articulated fingers whose nails were bitten to a nub. Alex felt he knew her for some reason, more than anyone Katrina had introduced him to. What it was about Nina that he recognized was hard to say. She was happily married and lived in impressive style. Nina’s husband was a mild, almost self-effacing man whom the various servants referred to as “my lord.” At one point Alex had taken one of the butlerish figures aside and asked how long he had known the master of the house.

  “Since school days,” he said. “We all used to call him Richard.”

  Nina had been married to Richard long enough to have two young children, but she had also been married previously, and the way that Katrina had spoken of that first marriage made Alex imagine it as a wild, reckless house party that continued until the whole house burst into flames.

  Some very important thing had been lost in the fire. Its absence was something only she could detect and quantify, but it was as though her fulfillment now—her marriage, her children, her houses—was based on a foundation of self that was missing one small but essential piece. He liked that about her.

  “NINA WAS BEING very strange on the phone today,” Katrina said. They were walking through the still darkness of her street, on their way home from a restaurant.