An Invisible Sign of My Own

by Aimee Bender

  The daughter listened. She nodded. But she kept talking. “But I don’t want to cut off my ear,” she said. “I want to be able to hear things. I want to see my mother use her hands. I’d like to see my father with a nose. I want to see my brother with shoes on. I hate hooks,” she said.

  “But daughter,” said the mother, father, brother, and baby. “Once you die, you won’t get to hear or walk or use your hands or comb your hair at all.”

  All the kingdom was waiting for her answer. Some of the volunteer-death people shivered.

  The daughter stared in the distance. There were ants walking in a row on the ground. They made a perfect line.

  “I’m leaving,” she said. “Anyone else want to come?”

  The entire town leaned back. There was a wave of surprised murmurs.

  The mother shook out her sacrificial arm. “Well,” she said. “I suppose we can rob ships anywhere.”

  The father seemed annoyed. “I like eternal life,” he said.

  The daughter hugged everyone and then began walking away, past the gallows, past the flag, past the volunteers, over toward the yellow rolling hills. The executioner pirate looked rejected. The king rapidly worked equations on his paper, brow crumpled with confusion. After a minute, a couple of the volunteer-death people began following her, until a crowd of about fifteen trailed her path. The brother joined them. The mother said she’d try to meet them there soon with the baby pirate, but she wanted to pack first. The father kept shrugging.

  “I don’t know about this,” he said.

  From a long distance, the daughter turned around and waved. “Bye,” she yelled. “I’ll be next town over.”

  The father and mother waved back, and for a moment all you could see were their three hands in the air, a family, palms at each other, waving in the afternoon light like sunflowers. The hills were bright and yellow. The daughter’s fingers stayed up, still moving, and the mother’s fingers waved back and the father’s fingers waved back and for a while all their hands were exactly the same size, exactly the same shape, until the daughter’s grew smaller and smaller, and when the hill dipped down, it was gone and so was she. The mother put down her arm. The father kept waving and waving, but his hand was alone in the air now. The king was still trying to make sense of it all, pencil flying across paper. A couple of townspeople wanted to watch her longer, so they scrambled on top of the gallows to gain height. Sure enough, they immediately spied her blue-clad back again, moving forward, down the hillside, with the small troop of people trailing behind her. The viewers watched on their tiptoes, twenty feet high, as the departing group walked straight into death, and they watched as long as they could, her knees, her waist, her shoulders, the top of her head, but in minutes the path had sloped down again and even the people on the gallows could see nothing more than an empty yellow hill rolling out in front of them like a carpet of sunlit water.

  Acknowledgments

  I am very thankful for the support and sustenance of many, and in particular, this team of people who fill and refill the glasses of faith and patience. I feel so grateful for: invigorating discussions with ever-supportive Meri Trust-the-Process and David Teacher-of-Metaphors Bender; the crucial forward hurtle encouragement of Suzanne Bender, and Karen Bender who inspires; the wonderful wisdom and push of Jeanne Burns Leary; the excellent readings of Geoffrey Wolff, Michelle Latiolais, and Phil Hay. I’m ridiculously indebted to the consistent rigor and investment of: superconnected reader and friend Miranda Hoffman, structure king Glen Gold, the line-editing brilliance and support system of Alice Sebold, and thematic tsar of synthesis and much more, Teal Minton. Also big thanks for the warmth and smarts of my agent Henry Dunow and the insight and vigor of my terrific editor Bill Thomas.

  Read an excerpt from

  The Color Master

  By Aimee Bender

  Available from Doubleday

  August 2013

  The Red Ribbon

  It began with his fantasy, told to her one night over dinner and wine at L’Oiseau d’Or, a French restaurant with tiny gold birds etched into every plate and bowl.

  “My college roommates,” he said, during the entrée. “Once brought home.”

  “Drugs?”

  “Women,” said Daniel softly, “that they paid for.” Even in candlelight, she could track the rise of his blush.

  “Prostitutes?” Janet said. “Is that what you mean? They did?”

  The kitchen doors swung open as the waiter brought a feathery dessert to the table next to theirs.

  “I did not join in, Janet,” Daniel said, reaching over to clasp her hand tightly. “Never. Not once. But I sometimes think about the idea of it. Not really it, itself—”

  “The idea of it.”

  “I never once joined in,” Daniel repeated.

  “I believe you,” said Janet, crossing her legs. She wondered what the handsome couple sharing the chocolate mousse would make of this conversation, even though they were laughing closely with each other and seemed to have no need for anyone else in the restaurant. She herself had noticed everyone else in the restaurant while waiting for the pâté to arrive, dressed in its sprig of parsley: the older couple, the lanky waiter, the women wrapped in patterned scarves. Now she felt like propelling herself into one of their conversations.

  “I’m upsetting you,” he said, swirling fork lines into his white sauce.

  “Not so much,” she said.

  “Never mind,” he said. “Really. You look so beautiful tonight, Janet.”

  On the drive home, she sat in the backseat, as she did on occasion. He said it was to protect her from more dangerous car accidents; she liked thinking for a moment that he was her chauffeur, that she had reached a state of adult richness where you did nothing for yourself anymore and returned to infancy. She imagined she had a cook, a hairdresser, a bath-filler. A woman who came over to fluff her pillow and tuck her in. Daniel turned on the classical music station and a cello concerto spilled out from the speakers in the back, and from the angle of her seat, Janet could just catch a glimpse of the bottom of her nose and top of her lips in the rearview mirror. She stared at them for the entire ride home. Her nose had fine small bones at the tip, and her lipstick, even after dinner, was unsmudged. There was something deeply soothing to her in this image, in the simplicity of her vanity. She liked how her upper lip fit inside her lower lip, and she liked the distance between the bottom of her nose and the top of her mouth. She liked the curve of her ear. And in those likings and their basic balance, she felt herself take shape as Daniel drove.

  Back at home, she spent longer than usual in the bathroom, suddenly rediscovering all the lotion bottles in the cabinet that were custom-made for different parts of the body. For feet, for elbows, for eyes, for the throat. Like different kinds of soil that need to be tilled with different tools. When she entered the bedroom, fully cultivated, skin stenciled by a lace nightgown, the lights were off. Only the moon through the window revealed the tiny triangles of skin beneath the needlework.

  “Time for bed, honey,” she said cheerily, which was code for Don’t touch me. But there was no real need; his back already radiated the grainy warmth of sleeping skin. She slid herself between the sheets and called up another picture, this one of Daniel, a green bill wrapped around his erection like a condom. The itch of the corners of the bill as they pricked inside her. His stuff all over the faces of presidents. Stop it now, Janet, she thought to herself, but she finally had to take a pill to get the image out of her head; it made her too jittery to sleep.

  Daniel went to work at the shoe company in the morning, suit plus vest, and Janet slept in, as usual. Her afternoons were wide open. Today, after she had wrested all the hot water out of the shower, she went straight to a lingerie shop to buy a black bustier. She remained in the dressing room for over twenty minutes, staring at her torso shoveled into the satin.

  “So, Janet,” called the saleslady, Tina, younger and suppler, “is it lovely? Does it fit?”
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br />   Janet pulled her sweater on and went up to the counter.

  “It fit,” she said, “and I’m wearing it home. How much?”

  Tina, now at the cash register, snapped a garter belt between her fingers. “I need the little tag,” she said. “This isn’t like a shoe store.”

  Janet inhaled to full height, had some trouble breathing out because her ribs were smashed together, and said, sharply: “Give me the price, Tina. I will not remove this piece of clothing now that it’s on, so I either pay for it this way or walk out the door with it on for free.”

  When she left the store, emboldened, receipt tucked into her purse, folded twice, Janet thought of all the chicken dishes she had not sent back even though they were either half-raw or not what she had ordered. Chicken Kiev instead of chicken Marsala, chicken with mushrooms instead of chicken à la king: her body was made up of the wrong chickens. She remembered Daniel’s first insistent kiss, by the bridge near the Greek café on that Saturday afternoon, and she hadn’t thought of it in years and she could almost smell the shawarma rotating on its pole outside. He had asked her out again, and again, and told her he loved her on the fourth date, and bought her fancy cards inside of which he wrote long messages about her smile.

  By seven o’clock that night, all the shoes in Daniel’s shoe store were either sold or back in boxes, and clip-clop-clip came his own up the walkway. The sky was dimming from dark blue into black, and Janet sat in the warmly lit hallway, legs crossed, bustier pressing her breasts out like beach balls, the little hooks fastened one notch off in the back so that she seemed a bit crooked.

  Daniel paused in the doorway with his briefcase. “Oh my,” he said, “what’s this?”

  She felt her upper lip twitching. “Hello, Daniel,” she said. “Welcome home.”

  She stood awkwardly and approached him. She tried to remember: Be slow. Don’t rush. When she had removed his coat and vest and laid them evenly on the floor, she reached into the back of his pants and pulled out his walnut-colored wallet. He watched, eyes huge, as she sifted through the bills until she found what she wanted. That smart Mr. Franklin.

  He usually used the hundred-dollar bill to buy his best friend, Edward from business school, a lunch with fine wine on their sports day.

  She waved it in his face.

  “Okay?” she said.

  He grabbed her waist as she tucked the bill inside the satin between her breasts.

  “Janet?” he said.

  She pushed him onto the carpet and began to take off the rest of his clothes. Halfway through the buttons on his shirt, right at his ribs, she was filled with an enormous terror and had to stop to catch her breath.

  “For a week, Daniel,” she whispered, trembling. “Each time. Okay? Promise?”

  His breathing was sharp and tight. “A week,” he said, adding figures fast in his head. “Of course, I would love a week, a week,” and his words floated into murmur as she drove her body into his.

  They forgot about dinner. They stayed at that spot on the carpet for hours and then tumbled off to the bedroom, his coat and vest resting flat on the carpet. He stroked the curve of her neck with the light-brown mole. She fell asleep first.

  On Wednesday, Janet heard Daniel call Edward and cancel their lunch date. “I’m just too busy this week,” he said. Janet smiled to herself in the bathtub. He brought her handfuls of daffodils. “My wife doesn’t love me,” he told her in bed, which made her laugh from the deep bottom of her throat. She put a flower between her teeth and danced for him, naked, singing too loud. He grabbed her and pushed her into chairs and she kept singing, as loud as she possibly could, straddling him, wiggling, until finally he clamped a hand over her mouth and she bit his palm and slapped his thighs until they flushed pink. When it was over she felt she’d shared something fearfully intimate with him and could barely look him in the eye, but he just handed her the hundred and went into the bathroom.

  On their wedding day, Daniel had given her a card with a photograph of a beach on it. “You are my fantasy woman,” he’d written inside. “You come to me from my dreams.” It had annoyed her then, like a bug on her arm. I come to you from Michigan, she had told him. From 928 Washington Street. He’d laughed. “That’s what I love so much about you, Janet,” he’d said, whirling her onto the dance floor. “You’re no-nonsense,” he’d said. She’d spent the song trying furtively to imitate Edward’s wife, who danced like she had the instruments buzzing inside her hips.

  By the end of the week, nine hundred dollars nestled in her underwear drawer. She put the bills on the ironing board and flattened them out, faces up, until they were so crisp they could be in a salad.

  She’d thought about buying a dress. My whore dress! she’d thought. She considered sixty lipsticks. My hooker lips! she thought. Finally she just tucked the cash into her purse and took herself to lunch. Thirty dollars brought her to the best bistro in the area, where she had a hamburger and a glass of wine. The juice dripped down, red-brown, and left a stain on her wrist.

  “Ah, fuck you,” she said to the homeless man on the street who asked for change. “You really think I can spare any of my NINE HUNDRED DOLLARS that I made by SELLING MY BODY?”

  The man shook his head to the ground. “Sorry, ma’am,” he said. “I never would have guessed.”

  “And don’t you God-bless me!” she yelled at the man from down the block.

  “I will not,” he called back. “I have no interest in blessing you at all.”

  Once she was home she couldn’t bear to sit down. She couldn’t move or answer the phone. Breathing felt like an enormous burden.

  She took an hour getting dressed in a pressed slate-gray suit she’d never worn before but had bought because it was on sale and elegantly cut. The jacket had this slight flare. She swept her hair into a bun and clasped a pearl necklace from their fifth wedding anniversary around her throat. Daniel came home, and she served him rosemary lamb and chocolate-nut truffles, all bought at the gourmet food store with one hundred dollars of her money. Reinvest for greater profit later. She did not eat, but massaged his shoulders, and brought him coffee, and when he seemed calm and satisfied, she sat down with him at the table.

  “You’re being so loving,” he said. “What a week we had, didn’t we?” He warmed his palms against the mug. “And you look great in that suit, Janet. Like one hot businesswoman.”

  She set a piece of paper on the table. And then nodded, as if to signal herself to begin.

  “I know it’s odd,” she said, with no introduction, “but for whatever reason, I can’t seem to summon up any desire right now to do it without payment.” Her voice was the same one from the lingerie store when she’d walked out with the bustier on. “I need a specific amount, each time,” she said, “or,” clearing her throat, “I feel I will melt into nothingness.” She adjusted the cuffs of her suit jacket so that the buttons lined up right with the gateway into her hand.

  “What’s that paper?”

  “Just for notes.”

  “Are you going somewhere later?” he asked, sipping his coffee.

  “Did you hear what I said?”

  “I’m getting to that,” he said. “You’re just all dressed up, I was trying now to figure out why.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” she said coldly. “I dressed up for you.”

  He replaced his coffee in the center of the small white napkin. “Well, you look very nice,” he said. “As usual. But, Janet,” he said, “please, will you tell me why more money, why? If it’s to please me, I am so pleased. You and I had a wonderful time this week, and I will remember it forever.”

  “Me too,” she said, nodding. “Forever.”

  “But, then, why more money?” he asked, moving his chair closer to her. “Wasn’t it just a game? Don’t you like our sex? Isn’t sex its own reward? What can we do differently?”

  He reached out his hand, warm from cupping the mug, and placed it on her collarbone, tracing the line with his finger.


  “It’s good,” Janet said briskly, “I like it, I like how you touch me on my back, I like the pace and the kissing, and I like it.” Daniel moved his finger to the dip at the hollow of her throat, but her voice did not shift or relax. “But Daniel,” she continued, “let me make something clear. Maybe you did not know this, but nothing is its own reward for me.” She stared at his face as directly as she could. The words felt like fireballs in her mouth. “I want you to understand that. You don’t have to understand why, just that it’s true.”

  “That nothing is its own reward? Really?”

  She sat up straighter. “Now, we can of course reduce the fee to make it more financially feasible. Fifty?”

  He took his hand off her body and placed it back on the table. “I mean, Janet,” he said, “do you have any idea how hard I am working my ass off to make—”

  “Twenty?” she said. “I know you’re working so hard, honey, I know. But it would mean so much to me.” As soon as her voice softened, it began to break apart. “I can hardly explain how much it means to me.”

  “Twenty?” he said. “Twenty?” He stuck out his lower lip, thinking. “Twenty? Jesus. I suppose I could do twenty for another week, but I don’t like it. I don’t want to. And is nothing its own reward, Janet? Really? Isn’t love its own reward?”

  “Or thirty?” she asked, sorry now that she’d gone so low.

  “Twenty, Janet,” said Daniel. “And then come on, now. How much money can you really make in a week off twenty dollars? Do you have something you need to buy and don’t want to tell me about? Do you think you should reconsider going back to work?”

  “Twenty-five?” she murmured, tears in her eyes.

  He sipped the last of his coffee very slowly, and when her eyes spilled he leaned in to kiss her forehead. “Twenty-five,” he said. “Fine. Until November 1, though, and then we’re back to regular. Okay?”