by Sarah Gerard
“Stand still,” he said, and aimed the lens at my face. Though I had imagined this moment, it was disappointing to see it enacted, his seduction requiring a prop. Inside the house was painted with accent walls of lime and blueberry. A large, flat-screen TV was mounted in the living room of leather L-couches and a chrome-legged coffee table. It was very IKEA. The few personal touches were black-and-white still lifes and obvious band posters, Wilco and Bowie.
He fumbled with the button of my shorts. We stumbled past the entrance to the eat-in kitchen, and he pinned me against the door frame of his bedroom and fingered me until wetness ran down my legs. “Lie down,” he said, and I noticed then that his room was empty. It was as if he’d just moved in. No dresser, no curtains hung on the windows, an open closet with a few collared shirts. Suddenly I felt cold, but I still crossed the room obediently to a mattress dressed in white sheets on the bamboo floor. I was sparking at the illicit feel of the setting, like amateur porn. Brian followed behind me and cupped my breasts in his hands. He circled my nipples. I pulled my shirt over my head and unhooked my bra. I turned around to face him.
“You shaved for me,” he said, and knelt on the mattress. He swept his fingers over my vulva. He pushed me back and climbed onto my chest. He was still fully clothed. I sucked him until he was almost cumming; then he turned me over and laid me on my stomach. He teased me. He lifted my hips in his hands. “Does your boyfriend fuck you like this?”
WE LAY BREATHING. The sheets were undone from the corners. I was dizzy with confusion, shame, seduction, exertion, as if Brian had drugged me. “Do you like being with me?” he asked into my hair.
“Yes,” I said.
He kissed my ear. “I feel like we’re good companions.”
We were sticky, my ass nestled in his lap as he held me around the middle. I felt his dick going flaccid and was moved by the tenderness this inspired. We hadn’t had time to use a condom, so when I adjusted myself, his cum leaked out of me.
“I don’t want you to talk about my boyfriend,” I said.
HE’S TOLD ME he has an hour-long lunch break. To kill time while I wait for him, I read a craft book that includes a short story at the conclusion of each chapter. The chapter on imagery concludes with Alice Munro’s “Wild Swans,” which strikes me as a naughty choice for an academic text. I take a picture of the paragraph of the inexperienced teenager orgasming for the first time. She’s assisted or forced by the minister sitting next to her on the train. A flock of swans takes flight all at once from the wet field streaking past her window. I text the photo to Brian. A minute later, he’s standing over me. “Want to go for a walk?” he says.
He checks his phone in the elevator and glances around the lobby when the doors open, as if someone may be waiting for him there. He guides me by the shoulder out of the building, and it occurs to me that he may be trying to hide me. We turn onto the main strip and aim ourselves at a block of restaurants with wrought-iron balconies. I assume he’s taking me to the Japanese bistro with high booths where we usually go for the Love Boat special. “I met someone you know,” I say as we pass a hookah bar full of teenagers. “You worked for her father.”
He’s quiet. He takes a napkin out of his pocket and wipes his nose, as if to redirect a feeling. The girl is our new hostess at the Pizza Shack. She’s nineteen and according to her was fourteen when she met Brian, fifteen when they began sleeping together. Brian was twenty-eight, and the events manager at her father’s bookstore. They’d talk about writing while she put in shifts after school, shelving books. He read some of her early poems—then he began leaving poems in her backpack, to be found when she was alone. On the day her father fired him, Brian stood in the parking lot, screaming at him: “She’s the second woman I’ve ever loved!”
The girl was hired at the Pizza Shack two weeks ago, but because I work in the kitchen, and she’s in front, I hadn’t met her until yesterday. She happened to be cleaning silverware when I refilled one of my two complimentary drinks per shift. “I don’t always work here,” I’d told her, though she hadn’t asked me. “I’m actually a writer.” She asked if I was published. I said I write for The Planet.
Then she said, “Do you know Brian Beasley?”
“So you work together now?” he says.
“Sometimes,” I say.
He nods. He looks away from me into a storefront where an old Cuban man sits rolling cigars. “Did she tell you we dated?” he says.
“Something like that.”
“Her father didn’t support it.”
“She’s a lot younger than you are.”
“I don’t really think that matters, though, do you?” He stops abruptly. His expression implies that he’s said something radical. He turns away from me again and steps into the darkness of the cigar shop, covering his face. The Cuban man in the window has stopped rolling to watch him. He bends at the waist. I step inside as well and rub his back. He dries his eyes on his sleeve.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“Don’t be.”
“It’s been an emotional day.”
“I shouldn’t have brought it up.”
“I was never sure what I even meant to her,” he says. “She was the first person I ever truly loved.”
We walk to the bistro. It’s empty and intensely air-conditioned, with club music turned down low. They seat us in a round booth large enough for four people, and we slide in on opposite sides. Brian orders two beers. I order water.
“There’s something I need to talk to you about,” he says. I expect him to finish the story of my new coworker. “My mother is ill.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“I don’t really talk about this with many people. She’s been sick for a long time. She has a disease that attacks her brain.”
He stares at the center of the table. I watch his attention shift from the wood grain to his memory. I watch him try to wrap his mind around an enormous truth. “It’s genetic and incurable. I talked to her on the phone today and I’m going to see her this fall, in New York.”
I take his hand. I wish I had a mother with an incurable disease. Then I could value spending time with her while she was alive. I’d have the luxury of avoiding her if her suffering overwhelmed me. I could wager that she would still be there for me, at least emotionally, when I figured out how not to be a coward. I would have time to make peace with her before she died.
“Listen,” he says. His eyes are bloodshot. “There’s a chance I may have it, but they won’t even test you for it unless they know you’re not going to kill yourself.”
“But how can you know that?”
“They interview you.”
The drinks arrive. Brian orders the Love Boat. He slides closer to me and rests his hand on my thigh. He kisses me, and his tongue is aggressive, forcing its way into my mouth. I kiss him back, out of politeness.
“I’d need to prove that I have someone who’s not going to leave me if I’m diagnosed,” he says. “It doesn’t have to be a wife. It can be a sister, or a girlfriend, or a best friend. A stable, long-term relationship. Like I thought I’d have with Erin.” He rubs my leg. “Nina, I’m wondering if you can be that person.”
The sushi chef is watching us through the glass. I see him preparing our special. I say yes, and we both know that I’m lying. It’s what he wants to hear, and there’s nothing else I can say: he needs the lie to sustain him. The knife is slicing, and the chef lowers his eyes to lift a pad of fish onto the rice. Brian holds me and cries into my shirt. I tell him I love him. I try to mean it.
Six
“And then he said, ‘This is my attempt to lay a foundation, Nina. You need to address your male-domination insecurities—’”
“Wait a minute—”
“‘—and balance your acutely sophisticated psychological level of awareness with your feminine sexual identity.’”
“I don’t understand,” says Odessa.
I shake my head.
“Stop trying to d
ecode it,” says Claudette.
“Do I have male-domination insecurities?” I ask, leaning over the truck console. There are a few hours of daylight left, so Odessa and I are taking Claudette to the beach. She’s been isolating since learning that Jared is fucking Sofia, her best friend from private school.
“Does he mean that I’m paranoid of being dominated, or simply that I’m insouciant?”
“He means that his ego is fragile,” says Odessa. She ashes out the window and pulls her sunglasses down on her face. We go over a causeway, and the sun opens up over the ocean; we lower onto the barrier islands, and it disappears behind a row of pastel-colored luxury hotels.
“But I wasn’t attacking his ego.”
“You were emailing another dude.”
“He’s a contributor to Numina.”
“How do you know him?” says Claudette.
“We went to college together.”
They nod. I pack the dugout and pass it to Claudette. “Seth is a mongoloid,” says Odessa, parking in the dirt lot of a tiki bar. “And he’s petty. This is not what he’s upset about, and I know you know what I’m talking about.” We walk to the covered patio at the to-go window and wait for margaritas. Pet Sounds plays over the speakers. It’s the album that was playing in Seth’s father’s portable CD player when the truck hit him, the only thing that remained intact.
The county posted a red tide update this morning saying conditions were clear at Treasure Island, but the bloom is spreading like a bloodstain, and from here the water appears brownish. They’ve hauled thousands of dead animals off the beaches each week since the infection began. We promised Claudette that if we couldn’t lie on the sand, we’d get drunk. We’ll get drunk either way.
“He needs to come get his shit,” says Claudette. I knew this was coming. “It’s disrespectful. Moe could have asked anyone.”
Seth’s senior show for his six-year BFA was supposed to be held at Madre’s, the coffee shop where Jared and Claudette work. The shop’s artwork rotates once a month, and Moe, the owner, invited Seth to be the featured artist, but Seth is a chronic procrastinator. He’s constantly occupied, but when it comes to making work on a deadline, he can’t do it. At the last minute, unable to finish the paintings for his senior show, he decided instead to hang his “archive” at Madre’s “as a mixed-media installation querying the basis for painting.”
On the day he was supposed to hang his show, he arrived at the coffee shop with three Tupperware storage bins full of what any layman would consider trash—discarded takeout menus, prayer tracts, cardboard signs asking for change—to which he’d attached some abstract personal significance. He’d collected these items over a decade of “unconscious curation”: in other words, if he’d wanted to pick something up from the gutter, he had. Only later did he think about why. By the act of taking them all in together at once, viewers would be asked to glean the specific lens through which Seth viewed them, both at the time of their collection, or “connotatively,” and also “denotatively,” as a set. Or they could simply appreciate their surfaces: the marks of car tires, the historical weight of a discarded La Luz tour poster.
He opened a box of T-pins and commenced hanging these items on the wall of Madre’s. He’d completed half of one wall by closing time. He’s now halfway through his month as the featured artist and still he hasn’t completed the installation, nor acknowledged Moe’s attempts to reach him. The walls of Madre’s are full of holes. I’ve tried bringing it up with him, but he refuses to discuss it with me, and now, because I “insisted” on talking about it, he’s barely speaking to me. The last time I saw him, he blew up at me, attacking my character, basically calling me feral.
“It’s disrespectful,” says Claudette. “We have hundreds of customers every day.”
“Did Seth really think someone would want to buy a kid’s homework he found in the garbage?”
“He could have just said, ‘I need more time, maybe later in the year.’”
“He won’t even text me back now.”
They look at me.
“It’s about supporting local artists. I thought Seth believed in that,” says Odessa.
We find a place on the sand. We ignore the people coughing around us: the telltale scratch of red tide on the back of the throat, the essence beneath the salt on the air, mingling with sunscreen.
“It just looks irresponsible and shitty.”
“It’s entitled.”
“It’s embarrassing for Moe.”
“Will you just shut the fuck up, please?” I’m standing with our umbrella open behind me. It’s bright red with the sun coming through it.
“At the very least, he could apologize,” says Claudette.
“Am I Seth?”
“He’ll never do that,” says Odessa.
“No, he’ll ghost you.”
I walk away. I point myself at a mass grave of decomposing fish. I sit in the water and watch some teenagers make out while I tell my pelvic muscles to let me pee. A dead jelly the size of a dinner plate floats past me, translucent with a cross-section of dense tissue in its center. I visualize a water balloon untied and turned upside down, a broken egg yolk. I sit in a pool of my own waste.
When I return, they’re talking about Claudette’s continued inability to orgasm. She was raised Southern Baptist, and Jared is only the third person she’s slept with. It sometimes makes me scared for her. “I’ve reached the point now where I don’t care if it happens,” she says. “It shouldn’t be a conquest.” She reaches into her backpack and digs out a copy of Women Who Run with the Wolves. She covers her face in sunscreen. We rest our heads on rolled-up towels. “I could always tell Jared was trying to do it. It was too much pressure.”
“You need to learn to get yourself off first,” says Odessa.
“Masturbation has just always freaked me out.”
“Watch some porn,” I say.
“Porn makes me feel disgusting.”
I FALL ASLEEP for a few hours. When I come to, the sun has shrunk near the horizon and everyone on the beach has been replaced with a new person. A family is making hot dogs on a camp grill a few feet away. On our other side, a group of frat boys is openly smoking a blunt, listening to the local reggaeton station. I light a cigarette. My mouth feels pasty after I take a drag, and I reach for our bottle of water. It’s been heating while we slept and I enjoy the plastic aftertaste. I consider that maybe the men at the tiki bar who always buy us drinks will leave us alone if we tell them we’re lesbians, but then again they might not. Odessa is sleeping on her side with a balled shirt over her face. I rest my hand on her bicep. “There’s karaoke,” I say. She pulls the shirt down. We listen to the tiki bar. “Yeah,” she says. I hold the water in front of her face. She pushes it away.
The sign on the chalkboard above the bar reads Attitude Adjustment Hour, with a list of specials underneath. I mark our territory with an ashtray. We rehydrate with several Long Island iced teas. There’s a long-haired hippie on the microphone singing Creedence Clearwater Revival when Odessa leans into me and says, “Ian is out on parole.” She has a permanent restraining order against Max’s father. He’s a year younger than us and has been in prison for the last five years. “He’s doing better,” she says. “He’s working at the garden store on MLK.”
“Be careful,” I say. By the time Ian went to prison, I was living in New York, so I didn’t see the worst of it. When I did come home, I rarely saw Ian. Odessa and Max were living with him in his mother’s house at the time, a mansion on Tierra Verde. I’d run into him downtown getting drunk alone, or picking fights with other dudes at Crowbar. I’d been getting drunk with Ian since we were teenagers, but in those last few years, he began to scare me.
“I invited him here,” says Odessa.
“When, just now?”
“I want you to see him.”
They call our names at the microphone. Odessa hangs back at the bar to watch as Claudette and I wait for the opening bars of “Magic
Man” to play. We sing about love cast over us like a spell, how the failed attempts of other women to save us from going under haunt us in the end. We hold each other through the chorus. I have the distinct feeling of Odessa slipping away from me, and when I open my eyes, there is Ian standing by her at our ashtray. His hair is black like a wolverine, but trimmed, clean-cut around the ears. He watches us, rubbing Odessa’s shoulders.
“Don’t leave me,” she says when I return to her.
“Okay, baby, I won’t,” I say.
I hug her and feel in her embrace that she’s performing for Ian.
“So why are you?” she says, pouting. I pull away from her, and her eyes are blue and wet, and I look into them for the real reason she’s saying this, what she’s actually telling me she’s afraid of.
“You don’t even appreciate what you have,” she says. “You’re very privileged, Nina.”
Ian gives her some water. He stands over her, staring at me, and I weakly hand her a napkin.
“I work really hard,” I say.
“Yeah, I know,” she says, wiping her nose. “I didn’t say you don’t work hard. I work harder than you do.”
I feel Ian’s arm brush against mine as he sits, and his knee presses into me. He takes Odessa’s hand. “I don’t even get a hello?” he says.
“Hey, Ian,” I say. “Odessa, I’m sorry.”
She lights a Parliament. I watch her smoke and I turn to Ian. He reaches up and roughly massages my neck.
“Thanks for being supportive,” he says.
When he goes to the bathroom, she says, “He’s been staying over every night. I’m waiting tables and dancing, and he stays with Max. I have no time for myself, and I can’t rely on my mother anymore. All I want is some help. I want to create. I want to turn our garage into a studio. I just want some space for myself. I hope he’s ready to be a man, to be a father.”
