The Sleep-Over Artist

by Thomas Beller

  “Why?” said Alex.

  Katrina and Alex had been to dinner at the home of Nina and her husband, Richard, a few times; they were the subject of regular speculation, if only because the pool on which Alex and Katrina could speculate together was relatively small. “I could tell something was odd and I’m sure that it had to do with John’s being out last night at that party without her and talking to me.”

  “Would she be jealous just because he was out without her? It’s not your fault you saw him.”

  “Yes, but I can just hear him saying, ‘Nothing much to report, I just talked to Katrina for a while.’ Oh, how that would wind her up.”

  “But what’s the big deal?” said Alex. “They’re married. If you’re just involved with someone in this nebulous…” He stopped himself. “If two people are together in a more informal way, together but not married, I would think they would constantly be looking out for signs that the other person is bored or restless. They would constantly be worried about being left. But somehow if you are married it seems so resolved. It’s done. There is no way out. I mean, you can take the one ultimate drastic step of divorce. But otherwise…”

  “But that’s the point!” she flashed. They were at the steps to her house, five high stone steps, and at the top she fumbled for her keys. The brass fist-shaped knocker seemed to be menacing him: leave her alone! For a moment there was an enormous gulf between this small mundane activity of getting the right key to unlock the door and her fury that he couldn’t understand the feeling that had once been so much part of her life. “If you are single and you are with somebody, and they don’t want to sleep with you, then at a certain point you can just go find someone else to sleep with,” she said. “But if you are married, there’s nowhere to go. You’re stuck. You become desperate. And desperate people do all kinds of irrational things.”

  She put the key in the lock and turned it.

  ONE MONDAY MORNING a bearded man in a trench coat appeared at the front door and handed an envelope to Katrina. She returned to the kitchen and dropped the envelope next to the phone. Alex picked it up.

  “What’s this?” he said.

  “It’s this week’s money to run the household,” she said matter-of-factly. “He sends it over once a week in cash.”

  “Why in cash?”

  She shrugged.

  A few minutes later, when she had left the room, he opened the envelope and looked inside. It was bulging with hundred-pound notes.

  HIS MONEY WAS getting low. The less money one has, he thought, the greater the apparent velocity of its departure, in the same way that the last inch of water in a draining bath always seems to go down the drain fastest. Yet Alex was stalled when it came to his professional life. His horizon had contracted from the very near future to the extremely near future. Patrick was spending the second two weeks of August with Sam, and Katrina had arranged to rent a house on Long Island. They would have a two-week idyll on neutral territory. Beyond that he couldn’t imagine what would happen. He knew he would soon have to move out of his apartment, now that his aunt had died. He knew he had to get some traction with his work. But meanwhile he drifted through London.

  There was a stretch of grocery stores and newsstands run by Iranians near Katrina’s house. Alex usually avoided them. He felt strangely threatened by the beautiful calligraphy of the Arab newspapers.

  One blue-and-white day he ventured inside, tempted by a large sign that said: “Iranian caviar.”

  The shop was filled with various delicacies, strange moist sweets arranged on metal trays and covered with plastic wrap, an orderly chaos from which Alex could not manage to select any one thing. He stood in front of the pistachio nuts, a whole barrel, peering down at the thin crack in each nut which leered up at him like a smile. In the end he left with a persimmon, its smooth orange skin soft in his hand.

  “THAT IS A very good persimmon,” Aunti B would have said if she had seen it. “The best!”

  HE WANDERED AROUND London and became slowly aware of a tidal pull New York exerted upon him. Curious memories floated up, such as Ellen.

  Ellen was not a romantic or even sexual entanglement, though there were weird sexual overtones to his thoughts. She had worked in the cubicle next to his at the network. Whereas Alex did (or didn’t do) quirky off-beat “essays on film,” Ellen did hard news and had been working on a piece about the inmates of the United States Penitentiary at Marion, Illinois, the biggest and most closely guarded prison in the world, where John Gotti spent twenty-three hours a day in solitary confinement. Her research included a correspondence with some prisoners. The prisoners had a lot of time to write letters. Every day her in box was stuffed with letters, all coming from the Marion Penitentiary, their handwriting full of pathos and squiggly desperation to communicate with someone. Ellen spent her days sitting in her cubicle writing back. At the end of each day, her out box was filled with twenty or thirty envelopes, all bearing the neat impressive-looking corporate logo of the network where they worked.

  She developed carpal tunnel syndrome. Yet still she typed. She typed with strange flexible casts over both wrists, her little pink fingers protruding just enough to allow her to keep typing. What was she saying to those prisoners?

  He thought of Ellen writing her prison letters. Her pink fingers typing madly. He contrasted Ellen’s static life, imprisoned in her cubicle, to the fluid ease of Katrina’s existence, her style, her money, her sense of possibility. With whom did he share more? he wondered. This glamorous London mother, or panicked, obsessive Ellen, obsessing in her private and professional New York hell?

  THAT EVENING AN old friend of Katrina’s, Ernie, was due to visit. Katrina filled him in—Ernie’s mother was a star of the London stage, a famous eccentric; his father was a penniless aristocrat who had died young. Ernie had decamped with wife and children from London to Ireland, where he taught and wrote plays.

  “God, the English are good at summarizing the big picture,” said Alex. “Where the money comes from.”

  “Everyone wants to know where the money does or doesn’t come from, as you may one day discover. And anyway, what’s so bad about the big picture? What’s so superior about the small picture? You think it’s crass to look at anything larger than an eyelash.”

  “You can make a wish with an eyelash,” he said.

  “Oh, fuck off,” she said.

  ALEX WENT BACK to Katrina’s house and put the persimmon in the big bowl of fruit that sat on the kitchen table. It was filled with oranges and apples and peaches and nectarines and green grapes. He loved that bowl of fruit!

  Not enough attention has been paid to the psychic benefits of having a bowl of fruit on the kitchen table, he thought. In addition to Prozac and Zoloft and whatever else, psychiatrists should dole out prescriptions saying: three bowls of fruit on the kitchen table per week, green and black grapes, peaches, nectarines, mangoes, kiwi. In winter, insurance companies should pick up the cost of imported grapes.

  Two days earlier, Katrina had berated Alex viciously for having vanquished a supply of mangoes that, it turned out, had been scheduled to be part of Patrick’s breakfast.

  “I always try and get some fruit down him in the morning,” she had once said, and the passing comment had stuck in his mind, something about the use of the words “down him,” as though she was literally plunging something fibrous into one end of his system so something would come out the other. He felt that in this way she was an excellent mother, attached bloodily and bodily, aware of her son’s heartbeat and his digestion, ferocious on his behalf. Alex had lessened the odds of her son’s having a productive visit to the bathroom by leaving his morning mangoless.

  “Do not eat my child’s fruit!” she had shouted, as though he was trying to mortally wound her. His thoughts flashed to that weekly envelope of cash—wife support, child support. It was not intended to be boyfriend support.

  He took the persimmon out of the fruit bowl and put it on the windowsill, so that it might e
xist apart from that scene, uncontaminated by the mixed motives of penance. It looked beautiful there, as though the light were emanating within. Then he went up to her bedroom and lay on the bed, shoeless, wiggling his toes and waiting. He was in London to wallow in sex, he thought. Katrina was a sex object. Her son was, for some strange reason he did not fully understand, but nevertheless appreciated, an aphrodisiac. These were cruel thoughts. He let them go. He thought of the tender expression of sadness and remorse that sometimes played around her eyes and mouth, as though she were regretting some long ago event.

  He thought of how the first thing she had said when he told her about his dad dying when he was ten was: “That must have been so hard for your mother.”

  He loved her for saying that.

  THE DOORBELL RANG and he went to get it.

  “My God,” said Ernie, standing in the doorway. “You’re enormous. What have you done with Katrina?”

  “She’s upstairs,” said Alex. “Come in.”

  “Christ, it’s a beautiful night,” said Ernie. Alex could smell the cold on him; he had traveled by train all the way from Ireland that day.

  “I’m Alex,” said Alex. He offered his hand.

  Ernie’s handshake was vigorous but not overly firm. But it wasn’t soft either. Alex had been humiliated several times by soft handshakes from English men. These limp handshakes were a physical manifestation of a horribly effective form of psychic kung-fu that English men had apparently perfected over centuries of evolutionary refining, a kind of passive-aggressive martial art built around self-effacement that made the other person stumble over his own forward motion.

  The humiliation was not that the limp handshaker wasn’t interested in shaking hands, exactly, but rather that it put Alex in the position of being one of those crazed, ridiculous men who are so intent on being masculine that they nearly crush to bits the hand that they’re shaking. The handcrushers always seemed to be compensating for something. Alex didn’t want to be a compensator.

  There was something feisty and childish and faintly apocalyptic about Ernie, something hearty, as though as soon as he took off his coat he would begin relating some wild series of events, a near-death experience, perhaps, that had befallen him on that day’s journey.

  They opened the wine and sat down at the kitchen table. Ernie produced a sack of pistachio nuts and a long slab of halvah. He too had visited the Iranians. Alex felt impressed and slightly jealous. They toasted.

  “So do you go crazy in London?” asked Alex.

  “Do I go crazy?” said Ernie. His black eyes, with heavy bags under them, widened.

  “When you’re away from your family, alone in the big city, is it a relief?” said Alex. “I go a little crazy whenever I’m in a new place, wander around, drink too much. And I don’t have a family. If I was leaving behind a family…”

  “You’re making it sound like I’m abandoning them!” said Ernie.

  “What’s going on here?” said Katrina upon entering the kitchen. She was transformed. Her hair was damp and loose around her face, her cheeks were bright, her smile was easy and careless. Her voice no longer had the soft intimate wounded tone with which she whispered to him in bed, but was cheery and assertive, and she was again possessed of the outrageous confidence and sense of prerogative that she carried around with her like a shield.

  Ernie stood up from his seat and they embraced. He enveloped her. Alex watched her hands spread out on his back.

  “Your friend has asked me if I’m going crazy,” he said.

  “And what did you say?” said Katrina.

  “I denied it vehemently,” said Ernie.

  “London has different effects on different people,” said Alex. “I was asking what effect it has on him.”

  “I’d like to know what effect it has on you,” she said.

  They sat down to a feast of white wine, halvah, and pistachios, Ernie sitting between them. Ernie’s fingernails were bitten down to the nub, and this made his attack on each nut even more frantic and desperate than it otherwise would have seemed. He had long fingers, and they worried the pistachios apart.

  Katrina was more delicate in her pistachio approach, inserting a thumbnail, opening the shell, chewing thoughtfully, taking breaks for sips of wine and a nibble of halvah. Alex started at Ernie’s pace, but then slowed, drifted to the halvah, its dense sweetness sticking to the roof of his mouth in a pleasant way.

  Ernie was talking very animatedly about the Maze, the prison where he taught. He spoke sympathetically of the IRA prisoners, the rituals, the hierarchies, the punishments and isolation meted out, the hardships endured by the inmates, their pride.

  “How do your kids feel about the prison?” Alex said.

  “They love hearing about it,” said Ernie, chewing madly. “Children love prisons.”

  ALEX HID EVERY Wednesday evening at six o’clock, and also Saturday afternoons at four. He didn’t, and this was very important to him, cower. He just made himself absent, either leaving the house for some errand or drifting up to one of its upper floors. The transaction he was avoiding, and which occurred every week with great precision and regularity, was between Katrina and Sam. The currency of exchange was Patrick.

  His hide-outs were, by definition, externally quiet and unobtrusive events. But they were occasions of regret and anger and weird displaced feelings, as though his life didn’t really belong to him.

  TWO WEEKS IN the country—high corn, and potato fields, and only the occasional shiny sports car to remind them that somewhere out there in the modern beach house architecture there was a voracious social scene going on. For Alex and Katrina it was two solitary, beautiful, weightless, dreamy, idyllic weeks marked by meals and lovemaking and languor, and marred by one awful weekend when two of Alex’s friends, Milo and Jack, came out to visit. Everything went fairly well until the four of them got involved in a game of Scrabble.

  C-o-l-o-u-r.

  “That’s not how you spell ‘color,’” said Milo.

  “It most certainly is,” said Katrina.

  “I hate to point this out,” said Jack, “but we are in America right now, so…”

  “They may have a point,” said Alex, already laughing at Katrina’s exasperation.

  What followed was one of those laughter-filled disputes in which somehow everyone fails to notice that one person has stopped laughing. When Katrina threw all her letters down onto the board in disgust and stormed off, the three boys noticed.

  “Christ, I’m sorry about that. I was such an idiot,” said Alex later. He rearranged various words and phrases around this theme for two whole days before it blew over. He knew she was right. He had been an idiot, siding with his idiotic friends on an idiotic matter.

  Other than this interruption, they coasted through a dreamy green world for two weeks, pausing as they biked home from the beach to watch the horses graze.

  At the end he took her to the airport, and to his surprise, she broke down in tears as they hugged goodbye. Not quiet, sad, parting tears, but real sobs.

  “I’m sorry our life together isn’t more…” And, gulping back a sob, she drew a circle with both hands. “Whole,” she said.

  He cupped her face with his hands. He thought she looked so beautiful, tan and lithe and now her cheeks wet with tears. But she frightened him a little with this comment, pointing out the truth that he had chosen to ignore. He had been wallowing in laughter, sex, and splendor, but it was purely ornamental. They weren’t having their cake and eating it too. There was no cake. This was just icing. And she was reminding him that icing is not enough.

  “JAY IS GETTING married,” she announced. Alex was back in London for October. A frost had developed between them which, even after a week, was refusing to thaw. He could hear the reproach in her voice before she even finished her sentence.

  Jay was a good friend of Katrina’s, a young man about Alex’s age with bright mischievous eyes. The last Alex had heard, Jay was mourning over his breakup with an actr
ess named Rebecca.

  “Isn’t that a bit quick?” said Alex. He remembered Rebecca; there was a beseeching quality to her eyes he had liked, because their softness coexisted with the burning, nearly mercenary ember of ambition that lit them. She had full, extravagant breasts, and she tended to move around a room as though always aware of where she would be cast in the best light. She had left Jay nine months earlier, just after Alex met them, and it had appeared Jay was in for a hard time. Now he was getting married.

  “He met a girl and they fell in love and then six months later they got engaged. That’s how it should be,” she said. “It’s much better than the man spending four years making the woman feel like a piece of shit while he tries to make up his mind.”

  “Is that what happened to you?”

  “No,” she said.

  “I don’t believe you,” he said. “That was the authority of experience speaking.”

  “I spent the four years waffling about it, if you have to know,” she said. “And I still felt like…I won’t repeat the word.”

  He loved her for not repeating the word.

  “I’M A VERY castrating woman,” she once said.

  “You haven’t castrated me,” he’d said.

  “We’re working on it.”

  PRINCESS DI WAS confessing on television; Katrina and Alex sat cuddled on the couch and watched. When it was over she went upstairs to take a pee. A man named Soams came on the screen and held forth on what a sick, deluded, evil bitch he thought Diana was, though he phrased it more delicately, and how valiant Charles had been to put up with her. He was fat, immaculate in dress, and his accent had a plummy roll to it. Alex closed his eyes and simply listened to the pitch and roll of the man’s voice, its entitlement. His accent reminded Alex of the way a python slowly devours a live duck (he had seen this on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom as a kid) with a cordial kind of brutality; the man’s voice was disgusting but fascinating; Katrina’s accent wasn’t nearly as farcical and plummy, but she had in her voice a similar kind of cordial brutality, the ability to dismiss.