“No, not yet. But I have made a note.” The way Maude said note sounded as formal and permanent as if she had said interred.
“I would like to change my mind.”
“Would you?”
“Yes. I would.”
“The paper doesn’t need more flighty girls, we have quite enough already.”
“I won’t be. There was a change in my circumstances.” She gave the downward cast of the lashes she had employed in her past life to get out of gym. “My financial circumstances.”
“All right then.” Maude petted Yuki’s hand. “Would you like some casserole? I have some to spare.”
Jay
3.
Connecticut, March 2016
New York, March 2015
Connecticut, March 1998
Before the pregnancy, we were that couple. The couple who make all other relationships look like settling. My clients loved her. My dad loved her. I loved her. Our friends said, “You two just look right together.” They might have been referring to the peculiar half-rhyme of our genetic histories. Me: half-Japanese and half-French Canadian. Mimi: half- Chinese and half grab-bag Caucasian. I preferred to think that it was our taste. One Valentine’s, we presented each other with the same black leather satchel with contrasting blue lining. The only difference, the initials tooled in silver on the outer flap. It wasn’t just sartorial; we agreed on everything.
Well, not the cat. Mimi never liked Celeste, but as Mimi’s belly grew, so did her hatred of the cat. It was right on the dot of the third trimester that Mimi forced me to give Celeste to Dad. I resisted. There was too much changing. “I have a medical condition,” I told her.
“I have a medical condition too,” she’d said. “It’s called being pregnant.”
Didn’t I know it.
During the pregnancy, my dick went limp at the sight of my wife, and her teeth bared when I walked in the room. We avoided our friends. They’d once said we made them believe in romance. Let them stay true believers.
The last trimester of my wife’s pregnancy was the longest I had ever been away from my cat. Celeste pre-dated Mimi. The fainting attacks started in my last semester of high school—to be precise, the day my college acceptance letter arrived. I was holding a thick envelope and then I was on the floor, envelope flung under a kitchen chair. Dad had gone to work, so I woke up alone blinking. I was weirded out but assumed it was dehydration. I gulped down some blue drink left over from when Dad decided he wanted to run a half-marathon.
But it kept happening. It happened at school, more than once. One minute, I’d be standing, my breath accelerating. The next, I’d be on the floor, arm folded under me with a view of the tutti frutti, bubblegum stalactites hanging from the underside of my desk. They wanted to call my father, but I told them he knew. Dentists I’m fine with, but doctors scare the shit out of me. They run too many tests, and I’m always afraid they’ll dig up some flaw deep within my marrow.
I tended my wounds in secret. Mostly, I fell on my knees or ass, and so the bruises were hidden under denim, until I keeled over onto the jagged pebbles of our driveway. The flint chips bit my cheek and forehead. What could I say? I’d walked into the floor? He pressed a cold packet of peas to my face, and asked so carefully, “Who did this to you?” I was forced to confess I was a swooner, not a fighter.
The doctors couldn’t find anything wrong. A psychiatrist decided this sudden sickness was triggered by the threat of leaving home. She was riveted by my mother’s abandonment of us. I kept telling the woman that I couldn’t remember my mother to miss her. All this went down in my file. She drugged me up, and for a month I drifted from class to class in a drizzle of pink pills. Through the pharmaceutical haze, it was tough to see my own thoughts. I’d wake with pins and needles running up and down my legs. So I quit.
For a few days, it was fine. Then I wasn’t. I came to on the floor of the Photography Club meeting surrounded by sharpied Doc Martens. Staring down at me were the photo girls—nose and earrings glinting in the low light. I inhaled the sweet wave of clove cigarettes. The supervising teacher told me to go outside and get some air. Alice of the red Docs and the pink lips offered to accompany me, and we kissed with ashy mouths. But I knew not all bystanders would be so kind, so back I trooped to the shrink, who suggested Celeste.
No teenage boy wants a bald cat, but the strange thing was: it worked. Her skin was slightly loose, and I could feel the lean muscles, the tendons of flesh. Each fine rib moved in and out, visible as she breathed. If this smear of a creature was okay, so was I.
4.
Connecticut, September 2016
Mimi stood up, leaving me with the pool of kitty gravy. “I’m not trying to exile your cat.” Her voice was steady, and soft with forced calm.
Leaving Celeste with Dad had still felt like abandonment. Now, there was no one to care for her. She wasn’t a cat for most people: weird, bald and, in her old age, needing a daily suppository. I couldn’t give her away and couldn’t kill the creature that had carried me through the knock-out sorrow of my growing up.
“I can’t deal with this, not before Berlin. Please,” I said, “I need Celeste.”
The Germany card was a cheap trick, but it was the one I had. Dad left me his stocks, bonds, a cabin in the Canadian woods, his life insurance benefits. But he’d left my mother the house. The place I spent the first eighteen years of my life. The place she’d ditched. He left her the tree with the footholds, the rhododendron maze, the basketball hoop, everything.
If he’d left me the house, I would’ve had to sell it. The gallery was okay. I dealt Asian and Asian American art, which were blossoming in the wary, post-recession years. From fear of inflation, rich people were buying fine wines, houses and, of course, art. Anything solid they could sink their capital into. I had a few Asian clients with glassy condos to fill in the Financial District. They bought for the same reason that they ate Michelin-graded sushi—anxiousness for Asianness with a western stamp of approval. Unfortunately, the rent for our space in DUMBO was amazingly recession-proof. I didn’t have the spare cash to pay the property tax on an empty house in Connecticut.
But it was my home, and he’d given it away. It wasn’t even an old will. He’d made it the year before, after he was hospitalized for what he’d thought was a heart tremor but turned out to be a problem with his back. My parents were still married. He hadn’t told me. I found out in a fucking sub-clause—“To my wife, Yukiko, goes . . .” I mean he’d never told me he was divorced. But what was I supposed to think? She hadn’t been there for decades. As executor, it was up to me to discover what she wanted to do with the building. And due to some vindictive Anglo-Saxon custom, the deeds to property must be handed over in person.
In the movies, missing parents are hard to find. They are lost at sea or in the circus or on the wrong side of a war. I suppose this still happens. But I had the Internet and Google Maps and Apple Maps and a million other geo-location services. She was gone, but never missing. Despite her B- or C-list status as a conceptual artist, the Internet provided an easy path to her. Today everyone is online. I could drop a little orange man onto the street right outside the gallery that handled her work. I could read their philosophies concerning diversity and globalization. There was no quest for my origins needed. All there was to do was to fly to Germany and hand over the deeds to my childhood.
“I don’t think Dad being dead makes me special, but I’m really goddamn sad. And he did this thing, and it makes no sense. It’s like I didn’t even know him.”
It was one of those marital moments when neither of you is in The Wrong, and yet you each feel the other is closer. I could almost hear Mimi counting ten beats in her head, deciding if she wanted to concede territory.
I could see her trying not to shout. I reached out and touched her shoulders. She didn’t pull back.
She said, “I miss him too. Your dad. You know before our wedding, I had the jitters, I guess everyone does. But your dad, he kept check
ing to see if I had enough water. It wasn’t much, but it was nice. He was worried my dress was too warm. I thought, hey, sons grow into their fathers. We’ll be okay.”
“We are okay,” I said.
“Okay,” she said.
Mimi took my hand, and I knew her fury was postponed. I followed her up the stairs, our hands clasped. Her skin was cool. She had low blood pressure, and touching her always felt like picking up a glass of milk. We were sleeping in my childhood room. The mattress had sagged from years of air guitar, but I’d never felt comfortable in Dad’s room. It was utilitarian, with none of the warmth of the kitchen or the sense of purpose of the study. I don’t even think he read in bed. He went to sleep alone at midnight and woke up at six to go running. He slept on a camping cot. Whatever bed he shared with my mother was long gone. We’d set up Eliot’s crib there. Doctor’s orders; the baby needed to learn to be alone.
Mimi’s finger was pressed to her lips, and she was smiling. The night before the funeral, I’d craved Mi. I hadn’t even wanted to fuck, just to nestle in the grooves between the springs, smelling our shared shampoo. But I’d been too spaced and sad to know how to ask.
When Mimi and I first got together, everyone commented on how similar we looked. My best man asked me if I liked fucking the mirror so much that I’d married it. There was a moment when I was afraid that he’d been right. In the last weeks of her pregnancy the swelling made me feel sick. It was some fungal spore exploding inside my wife. Mimi, my mirror, was warping, buckling and distending. I kept looking down and expecting to see distortions in my own flesh. I experienced a very unsympathetic pregnancy.
As a teenager, I was subjected to enough psychiatry to know the hatred of her pregnancy was fear. My mother had left me, and now I was going to be a father. It was amazing how little such a diagnosis helped. Mimi didn’t want me to pry my dick inside her exhausted body anyway, so I had hoped my disgust went unnoticed. Briefly, I wondered if I’d made a mistake. Was I actually gay? I had experimented in college and found the experiment enjoyable.
Now, I examined this new stage in her transformation. My reading light bounced off all the ancient camera gear I’d collected as a kid. Each lens stared at my wife stripping down to her post-pregnant body. Extra weight lined her breasts and the velvet drapery of flesh where the thigh gap had been. Seven years had softened her and hardened me. We were loveworn as stuffed toys, once identical in the shop window, mauled into individuality.
She’d let her hair grow into a root system of ringlets and developed a need for glasses with round gold frames that magnified the gold flakes in her hazel eyes. She laid them on the bedside table.
Above us was the pale phospherence of constellation stickers. Under that adolescent starlight, I was relieved to find I wanted Mimi again. Freud be damned, I wanted her more. I wanted to pull this softness we’d nurtured together toward me, to lick each line of our lives together, and I did.
I believed I loved my wife as few men do. Many men settle, are deceived by infatuation, or simply find a suitable partner. I loved Mimi and wanted her too. I was determined to pull us back together. For tonight, I was content to take that literally.
I bit her ear.
5.
Connecticut, September 2016
Eliot’s screams pried open my dreams. Exhaustion sliced my skull. I lay still and steadied my breath. My arm was going dead under my chest, but I didn’t move it. Mimi heaved herself upright. Her feet smacked the floor. Relief. I never knew what to do when it was my turn to stare at Eliot’s night terrors. I’m sorry you’re a baby, but you’ll get over it?
I rolled over. Pinpricks sparked along my arm as the blood rushed back. Sleep drifted down. Then I felt the cold rush of sheets being lifted. Fucking hell. I was in for it. But Mimi pulled the sheet up so it covered my neck. She tucked it around the foot that was dangling over the side of the bed. Mimi was a good wife, a kind wife; why had I assumed the worst? I wanted to apologize, but that would give my wakefulness away. I concentrated on sleeping toward a kinder tomorrow.
After she left the room, I reached for my phone to check the time. 3 a.m. And then, because the phone was in my hand, I checked my email. It would only take a minute, I assumed.
The first email was from Annika. She was one of my best artists, and by best I meant she was beloved by both corporations and humans. Her orbs were 7" in diameter. The sides were translucent glass, and inside each was a light bulb. The difference between the spheres was the shade of glass. Each one was labeled with a latitude, longitude, date, and time. She claimed to have replicated perfectly the shade of light in each particular place at each particular time of day. A glacier blue was Central Park at 6 a.m. on a winter morning. Delhi twilight in summer had a turquoise tint. The inner bulbs could not be replaced. When they died, so did the light. Artists will tell you they don’t draw objects. They draw the way light falls. The puppet strings that jerk our emotions are woven of photons. The power of moonlight is famous. March morning light stroking your wife’s face can end a fight. A headachy, halogen glare can start one. We need light. Without it, we get melatonin deprivation, our immune systems crash, our internal rhythms get lost. In long, dark, northern winters, people shoot themselves in the head. Dangling at different heights in a room Annika’s bulbs cast a nebula of memory, the bright-moments bleeding into one another.
Dear Jay,
I appreciate everything you’ve done for me as an artist and a person. Please know I am so grateful for everything we’ve had. But I think I need to make a transition as an artist. So, I’m writing to let you know that from now on I will be represented by Quentin Taupe.
All the best,
Annika.
P.S. How’s the baby?
Fucking Annika. Fucking Quentin.
6.
Connecticut, September 2016 / New York, March 2016
Mimi glanced at me hunched over the bright screen of my cellphone, crashed back into bed and rolled straight over. Tentatively, I stroked her back down to the stately plateau of her buttocks. She snorted, and I shivered. After getting pregnant, Mimi’s sense of smell had become primordially accurate. She sniffed out the dead mouse in our ceiling vent; Celeste wasn’t really a mouser. Mimi sniffed out the pot the intern was keeping in the rolled sleeves of his distressed denim shirt. I was deeply and irrationally afraid she could smell my guilt.
Normally, if there was a problem with the gallery, we’d talk it through together. After all, we were equal equity partners in it. We had quite literally made our home above it. But, I couldn’t ask Mimi about this. I couldn’t even make myself say Annika’s name. After a few months had passed, I’d assumed I was safe. I wasn’t.
The incident happened back in March, the week before Eliot was born. Mimi was large and truculent. All she wanted to eat was soup. “Not because I’m a crazy-fucking-pregnant lady, but because it’s the only thing that doesn’t hurt to eat.” So of course, she didn’t come to the opening. I was relieved. I could concentrate on my work, and not on how much my wife’s body scared me.
This opening was not for Annika, but she was there. I saw the hair enter through my glass front door. She had a tent of black curls, tied back with a silver scarf. She gave me a tight hug. She smelled fruity and savory. In my ear, she told me that I had to come by her studio to look at her new lights. Apparently, the new ones were indoor spaces: motel rooms, cinema bathrooms, hospital corridors.
“Jay. The gallery looks perfect. Amazing turnout.” I was good at my job. Good at knowing who to pitch, and how. I knew this, but I was glad to hear it.
“Nirmala’s been getting a lot of attention lately. The political types really like her. The Guernica people just approached me about putting a slideshow of her work on their website.”
“Malaysia’s hot these days.” If she sounded dismissive, I understood. Annika’s father owned all the tollbooths on the biggest highway into Mumbai. She’d gone to an elite East Coast boarding school and then an elite East Coast art school. She
hated it when people called her an Indian Artist. It sounded too much like Lady Doctor.
I was keeping an eye on Nirmala, taking note of whom she talked to, who might be a future client, who would be touchy if they didn’t meet her before the evening was out. Nirmala was burbling at Quentin Taupe, and much as I enjoyed Annika’s company, my turf needed defending.
A good show was, well, good. But it brought a dread, like walking into a room with a girl you don’t deserve. Heads turn and you’re half-proud, half-terrified one of those amazed smiles will steal her. If my artist was talking to my asshole ex-boss, I needed to be there. Quentin was working-class and never let you forget it, even when he was wearing Armani. In fact, especially when wearing Armani. He was touching Nirmala’s arm and she was smiling, dabbing at her lower lip with the napkins I’d bought with my own two not-so-fair hands from the Duane Reade and arranged in fans on the glass podiums.
“Hi Quentin.”
“Jay, bloody great to see ya, you old bugger.” Bloody and Bugger, really? Sometimes, I thought he must be putting it on. His Britishness seemed almost cribbed from the movies.
“Nirmala, I need you to go talk to the Guernica people. They love your show and they want to know all about where you grew up.”
She looked over her shoulder at Quentin, who had his hand to his ear gesturing, call me, and she was nodding. After depositing her in front of the too-young-looking journalist, an intern perhaps, I navigated back to Annika. I grabbed a handful of “Oriental Crackers” from a decorative glass bowl on my way over.
“I’m losing Nirmala.”
“Darling, you never had her. All artists are whores, but Nirmala especially.” They knew each other from RISD’s fine arts department. “Another glass of champagne, please. It’s tax deductible, right?”
Harmless Like You Page 9
