The Sleep-Over Artist

by Thomas Beller

  He went upstairs to look for her. His feet were quiet on the carpet. The room was dark; a slash of light coming from the bathroom lay on the black floor. By the time his eye had her in its sights it was clear that she had not heard him.

  She was propped regally on the toilet, her skirt and panties down at her ankles, examining her hair for split ends. Every now and then she brought a strand to her mouth and bit it off. Her full ass and thighs bulged out a bit on the seat. Something about her thighs on the toilet was very sweet and childish, as was the way she was absorbed in looking at her hair. He watched her like this, and then became aware of just how intrusive he was being, and how difficult it was therefore going to be to alert her to his presence without scaring her half to death.

  He clucked his tongue. A woodpecker’s single peck. She didn’t start; her eyes simply moved to where he stood.

  “Hi,” he said. “You look really cute. You look like a little girl.”

  She smiled sweetly.

  “DON’T SPY ON me,” she said when they were rearranged on the couch. “Sam used to do it all the time and I hated it.”

  Alex felt the usual pang of curiosity about and hostility toward Sam. She had told him little about her marriage, and for a while Alex respected that distance. But now his imagination was filling in the blanks.

  For the first months of their relationship his thoughts about her marriage organized themselves around a single question: what had the bastard done to her?

  Gradually, though, another competing question began to form: what had she done to him?

  But then he reproached himself for the preoccupation, and for thinking of her as a little girl. What was his relationship to this little-girl quality he so liked to see in her? Was he prepared to take responsibility for her? For her son? Was all the vaguely paternal posturing he performed in bed a kind of sick joke on himself, play-acting a grown-up when he should have simply been one? There were moments when he felt an outrageously powerful connection to her, and moments when he felt he was just shooting his own home movie which years from now he could fondly consult for the memories.

  After a while she went upstairs to get ready for bed and he spent some time flipping the channels, taking in the late-night offerings. At some point he came across a shot of a plain of tall grass over which the sun was setting. Giraffes grazed, other animals were shown lolling about. It was stirring and somewhat familiar. He watched for a few minutes and it got more and more familiar. Then he saw an animal that looked extremely familiar, and the announcer identified it for him. He was watching the Migration of the Wildebeests.

  “I COULDN’T MOVE to London,” he said.

  “Why not?” she said.

  “Because New York is where I live.”

  “You seem to be alive right now.”

  “But it’s where my friends live.”

  Her eyes narrowed.

  “Do you know what is going to happen to your friends?” she said.

  “You’re going to kill them all.”

  “No. They’re going to get married. And then they’ll have children. They’ll be busy with their families, busy supporting their families.” Her voice was incredibly cold and matter-of-fact, like that of a judge reading a sentence. “And then they won’t be your friends anymore, or not in the way you mean when you say that word. Some of them will not be able to afford to stay in the city and they’ll move away. And you know what all that is called?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “It’s called growing up!”

  ASHLEY IN BROOKLYN. Her summertime milk-and-honey skin and soft brown hair. Her almond-shaped eyes with their cunning, quiet perceptiveness. Her deceiving aura of meekness. Her sexual authority over him. The enormous amount of worry and anxiety that was bound up in his love for her. In London, he thought of Brooklyn. They were both places of adventure for him, and sex. They were places of salvation. The network was a bit like high school—he had been expelled from both. In one instance he was rescued by Brooklyn, in the other, London.

  He had been such a child with Ashley. And she had been a beautiful, full-grown woman, and a child too. He drifted back to her presence, the clean smell of her skin and hair, his virginal fascination with her.

  “Are you a virgin?” she asked him one summery evening as he walked her home.

  “Of course not!” he yelped. It was the sound that dogs make when someone has stepped on their paw. And then, “Are you?”

  She looked at him with a detached look that suggested that all the information she took in had to travel a long way to the place inside of her that did the perceiving.

  “You know I’m not,” she said in a calm voice.

  It was true. The whole school knew. Ashley was a girl about whom people whispered. That she appeared to be such a sweet, innocent girl made her all the more mythological: “Hurt me.”

  For all her quietness there was within her something reckless and raging for experience and sensation. He hadn’t known what to do with it.

  “WHAT’RE YOU DOING?” said a voice behind him.

  It was the small, inquiring, fearless voice of a seven-year-old boy. Nine months earlier this voice would have been more frightening to him than the roar of a wild animal. Now he was just startled, and only a tiny bit terrified.

  “I’m opening and closing the window,” Alex said.

  It was, like so many of the statements uttered in this house, a partial truth. What he had been doing was holding the cold brass knobs of the French doors that led onto a small second-floor balcony and opening and then closing them, again and again, while staring out at the changing leaves and rooftops.

  Alex was susceptible to autumn. He was finely tuned to endings, and to their beginnings. He was trying to quantify the difference the window made to his experience of the view, and marveling at how clean this boy’s mother kept the windows.

  Closed: Nostalgic wistful scene of changing leaves, filtered autumn sun, and bright blue sky. Sad and hopeful.

  Open: The burst of cold air, the sound of engines revving in the distance carried in on the breeze, raw, bracing, real.

  Closed: Silence. The picture has a frame. A sense of closure or possibility makes every changing leaf seem poignant. He is safe.

  Open: The sharp air on his face, the grinding gears of the world going about its business, the vicious Darwinistic forces taking their toll on people near and far.

  “Have you seen my gun?” said Patrick.

  He hesitated. Did Patrick mean had he yet seen the gun? Or had he seen the gun lying around somewhere in the house? For several days Patrick had been running around with his gun, pointing it at various targets and pulling the trigger.

  “I haven’t seen it,” he said, still looking out the window.

  “It’s got caps,” said Patrick.

  He turned just in time to see Patrick fire off a few rounds with squinting concentration. There were some duds, but also some very loud pops and good sparks to go with them, and tart wisps of smoke rose into the room, an incredibly evocative smell for Alex. He used to love that smell. Patrick was pointing the gun right at him as he squeezed the trigger.

  “That’s not nice,” he said.

  “What’s not nice about it?” said Patrick. “It’s just a toy gun.”

  “It’s a bad habit,” he said rather stiffly, and tried to imagine what he would say if it were his own child.

  ASHLEY BABY-SAT FOR a four-year-old girl every afternoon, and sometimes Alex would walk her to the playground as she pushed the stroller, and they would discuss whether or not people thought it was their child. Then one day she let him come up to the girl’s apartment. Ashley poured him an iced tea in the kitchen and put the girl in the next room in front of the television. It was a sultry hot day. She walked into the kitchen and he lifted her shirt and began sucking her breasts with an ice cube in his mouth. Something about the child next door inflamed him. In a minute they were on the floor. He went through a kind of cosmic shift upon entering her (life w
ould never again be the same), exploded, and then she pulled her shorts up and remarked, in the same matter-of-fact voice she used for all occasions, “It usually lasts longer than that.”

  IT WAS NOW early December, nearly a year since they’d met. Alex heard the tumult of Patrick coming home from school with Katrina. He was on the top floor, reading, and he stayed up there, knowing that Sam would be arriving soon. He wondered what Katrina and Sam had been like as a couple and sometimes tried to read it in the eyes of her friends when they looked at her with this American.

  “What do your friends think of me?” he once asked.

  “They think you’re really nice,” she said. “Nina says you’re very handsome.”

  “And what do they think nice and handsome mean?”

  “I think handsome, coming from Nina, means I should enjoy myself for a while before I go off and find some responsible rich man who can take care of me. Which basically means Sam.”

  He went to the window and peered down, watching the idling car with its small wisp of exhaust rising in the cold air. He had just returned to London after a very productive stretch of time in New York. He had managed to get a new apartment, and some work opportunities were shaping up. Katrina had responded coolly to both pieces of news. He stared down and waited for the two heads to appear, with their similar coloring, the boy he had come to know so well, and the man he had never met. What must Patrick make of all this? he wondered. Did he talk about his mother’s friend with Sam? Alex hoped not.

  They appeared, the car rolled off, and Alex went into the bedroom and lay down. The sky was full of low clouds. Soon he heard her footsteps on the carpeted stairs. She entered the room and lay next to him, curled away from him, yet against him. Her socks were thin, brown, feminine, and she pressed the bottoms of her feet against his shins, one then the other, with the gentle padded paw motions of a cat. The afternoon light filtering into the room was dimming quickly. She lay next to him, breathing, and he didn’t move and she didn’t move except for their breathing. There was a kind of docking going on, two spaceships merging in outer space, securing a passageway, equalizing the atmosphere, making it safe for the inhabitants to commingle. He pulled her against him, pushed his hand under her shirt so he could feel the warmth of her skin.

  She resisted.

  It was as though they both had to relinquish some resentment harbored against the other; it was connected to the vast distances they had to travel in the course of any minute to arrive on common ground, and also the doubt they each had about how long they could hold this shared space before gravity ripped them apart. She had arrived at this moment having just given her son over to her husband for their midweek visit. He had spent the day wandering, lost, at once exalting in his unbound freedom and vaguely craving something to feel bound to.

  And now their intimacy looming. It was such a pressure on intimacy, for it to be the main event, not something stolen but the main attraction. This silent lying next to one another, the exciting mixture of affection and animosity, was their foreplay.

  He rested his hand on her hip. He ran his hands up under her shirt, running his fingers along her vertebrae as if they were keys on a piano, squeezing here and there. She remained rigid. Then she turned to him and squirmed against him, her hands balled up into fists; she buried herself in him like an ax in a tree. Finally she embraced him, and their clothes were torn off in an awkward exasperated frenzy. From the beginning the thing they most explicitly shared was an appreciation for urgentness and that trancelike, unreal world to which lovemaking was both the key and the destination. Their connection had to exist now, because the past was too ephemeral and the future was too painful to contemplate, one way or another. They had to recuperate from their real lives and find their way back to the small space they shared, as though they had to forgive each other; they had to push so much life away to arrive at these seconds of pleasure within which was so much of what made life worth living.

  They began in haste, in a panic almost to retrieve what was good between them. After a while he slowed down and they both softened. They began like possessed strangers, but they finished as lovers.

  Then they lay sprawled and entangled across the bed. He pulled the white comforter up over them, and held her. For a moment he thought everything was as it should be. He held her tightly against him. The sky was darker now, blue and dim. They fell asleep in the dusk. It was a mysterious time. When they awoke it was dark.

  New Windows

  ARNOLD LOVELL STOOD UP TO MAKE HIS SPEECH. HE SURVEYED the crowded lobby. It was filled with metal folding chairs, a sea of them, on which sat an attentive audience waiting for his words—these were his neighbors.

  Arnold’s nose was a long and winding road at the end of which was a kind of cul-de-sac. Several women had, over the course of his amorous adventures, called his nose sexy. His wife had once said, “Your nose is fascinatingly disgusting.” She had also once said, “Fuck me with your nose.” These remarks were made during a more auspicious point in their marriage—before it began. It was a running joke between the two of them that their marriage was best before it actually existed. It was best when it was a concept about which they fantasized, together, like two castaways on a raft, adrift on the ocean, clutching at a map that predicted a piece of land was due to emerge from the mists.

  His wife now looked up at him, smiling in a way that inspired in him a complicated mixture of hostility and friendship. She was waiting along with everyone else in the lobby for him to begin his speech. Each second ticked by with the slow and languorously deliberate speed of a giant church bell starting to toll; he thought he could hear his own heart…how long would it keep pounding? If he had a heart attack at the board meeting would they change their mind about the windows? Was he willing to have a coronary seizure to make his point?

  He peered down at his wife, and she, through her modern glasses frames, those rectangular things that he had, in spite of every effort to restrain himself, criticized as being too modern, looked up at him. The expression on her face was not exactly supportive. She had warned him, two years earlier, against investing in new window frames, a murmured opinion, but still enough to warrant an “I told you so” should she want to inflict that phrase on their already shaky relationship. She did not. But now she seemed amused as she looked up at him. He was not a public speaker, yet here he was, about to speak publicly.

  He scanned the faces, making reflexive, impulsive, and weirdly gratifying assessments of the net worth of his neighbors, their fidelity track records, guessing, from a turn of a mouth or the application of eye shadow, at the psychic pain or pleasure these various parents had experienced with the departure of their children for college, and wondering if the consuming rage and anger that had propelled him to this moment was shared by any of the other tenants.

  He had written out his speech and he was alarmed to see that the pages were trembling in his hand. His neighbors were silent and watchful. In the back, where it was standing room only, he saw Benny Brown shift his weight from one leg to the other. Benny was a huge hulking man who lived on the C line and wore exquisitely tailored suits. He was black, or light mocha; his hair was always in a kind of semi–jeri curl. His wife was beautiful and voluptuous and kept her sunglasses on indoors. Arnold had always enjoyed Benny’s presence in the building. Benny had good karma. Elevator rides with Benny were a pleasure—the smell, the grooming, the gold watch, the Burberry raincoat. But even the encouraging sight of Benny Brown was not enough to stir the words up from within, not enough to fasten his eyes to the piece of paper and make him begin his speech. Other speeches drifted through his mind: “Give me liberty or give me death…” “I have a dream…” “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for…”

  At the front of the room, behind a table set up on sawhorses, sat the co-op board. Nine of them, like the Supreme Court. In their midst, like some fierce animal, sat Ms. Ganesh, the president, the proverbial chief justice.

  Arn
old cast a long apprehensive glance at Ms. Ganesh. Her nails were painted a fiery red. All the better to claw you, he thought. And from her ears sprouted bulbous little earrings that were a glaring bright gold; they were shaped like tortellini and had the effect of lights strung up around road construction: slow down, stay in lane, proceed with caution. Her hair was cut in a short brown helmet of curls that had been laminated into position. He had never seen her with a hair out of place. And the red lipstick on her mouth was applied with the precision of diamond cutter. For a fleeting moment Arnold Lovell found Ms. Ganesh attractive, or rather he had something akin to a sexual feeling for her, but then that subsided and was replaced by the customary hate. This was the woman who was making his life miserable, if only because she was sopping up so much of it.

  “I’m Arnold Lovell,” he began. “A resident of the building for twenty-four years.” He paused to let this sink in. It was as though he were talking about military service, not a co-op on the Upper West Side. But he was in a battle frame of mind. Twenty-four years!

  “I’ve lived here without any incident or cause for complaint all this time. I’ve been a good citizen, if that is a word one could use in this context, for all my time here. Ever since I moved in I’ve enjoyed the building, and my life…”

  He hadn’t written “and my life.” It was an ad lib. He paused to chastise himself for this outburst. It sounded ridiculous. This isn’t group therapy, he told himself. This is a board meeting. And yet his hands shook and he felt his own words in his chest vibrate with emotion. He scanned the room briefly to see if people were listening. They seemed to be listening. His eyes caught Ann Melrose’s, and she gave him a tiny nod of affirmation. Ann was one of the small group of schemers who had put him up to this.