She touched my wrist. Her fingers sent a zap over my skin and down into my joints, which reverberated for minutes afterward. I’d always found her attractive, but her index finger on my wristbone short-circuited something. It was my party and I had to go sell, but throughout the night, I darted back to Annika. She’d touch my shoulder, introduce me to her artist friends. I nodded, smiled and took their business cards, but really I was returning again and again for her electric fingertips. I steered her by the shoulders to introduce her to buyers as the visionary Annika. I described her work as cerebral and daring. It wasn’t her I was selling that night, but I needed to say her name, the hard k and then the ah almost like a sigh. There was a tingle of danger in her name, the way there never is again after you’ve fucked. Love is wonderful but fingers wearing gold bands don’t sing electric.
I reminded myself that Mimi called the orbs four-figure lampshades. Mimi had never liked “fine” artists. She suspected, rightly, that they looked down on wedding invitations and the people who designed them. “Once a month, some miserable asshole cries in front of the Met’s Jackson Pollock. Every single fucking week, I’m trying to design a single, perfect moment. A piece of wood pulp has to carry all these hopes and dreams, and yet not cost more than 59 cents to mail. A graceless invitation starts someone’s whole marriage off wrong. So these piss-bottlers can shove their concepts.”
Mimi viewed my association with fine artists to be almost as unfortunate as my bald cat. Still, they paid the bills. And once she got past her dislike of the individuals, she had impeccable taste. She could walk into a room of blue canvases and pick the shade that would catch a customer’s memory of their grandfather’s pinstriped suit. I never committed to representing an artist without consulting my wife first. I loved Annika’s orbs down to the rubber-coated plugs. She said it was up to you whether you took the sunset all at once or eked out summer-under-apple-trees all winter long. Mimi thought they were moronic, but probably collectable. With this half-blessing, I took Annika on as a client. She sold.
I stepped outside to call Mimi, checking in to make sure she and the baby-to-be were okay. She picked up the phone, voice wet with sleep. I told her I wouldn’t be done for a few hours, but I could come upstairs. We lived in an apartment above the gallery. She hung up with a simple don’t bother. In that last week, she held me responsible for her swollen feet, the vises squeezing her eyeballs, the whole fucking baby-shebang.
Annika slid out the glass doors.
“Want some of my cigarette?”
“Gave them up when Mimi got pregnant.”
“Then hold my champers while I destroy my lungs.”
“Champers?” I asked. “Oh, champagne. Yes M’lady.” The Britishism had thrown me. Annika, like many children of the internationally wealthy, had grown up with a dialect buffet. I took her drink, which was really South American sparkling wine, not true champagne—I ran an art gallery, not an investment bank.
“So where’s the old lady?”
The old lady was upstairs with her yogurt drinks and bath soap that was somehow not soap, but actually a compound of oatmeal. I said all of it with the tired indulgence of a sitcom husband. Annika refused to play the studio audience.
“Children close a lot of doors.” But her tone had more hanker than scorn. She was looking down at her unpainted nails. There’d been a stable boyfriend when she signed. I hadn’t seen him in a long while. Still, it’s gauche to point out that sort of desire in a woman, even when it is rippling just under the surface of her gleamingly moisturized skin. I tried to make a joke of it.
“It’s not as if I have much choice now.” I didn’t tell her that sometimes, I thought of leaving. I mean I turned out fine with one parent, didn’t I?
“I suppose.”
“And yeah, it changes some things, but there’s also this whole new set of questions I have about everything. How is it that they’re finding plastic inside women’s breast milk? And like is anyone actually happy their parents made them learn the oboe?”
“Aren’t you the model daddy?”
She sucked on her cigarette. We looked up at the towel of light that draped over New York even at night. She spoke first.
“Do you ever feel like the sky might close in on us? I know we’re supposed to feel free in the infinite darkness. Tiny but free. I’ve always felt walled in by all those unknowables.”
“My math teacher used to say the universe is made of infinite mysteries. Like all the digits of pi—no matter how many you find there’ll always be more. Every time we ask a question, we get more questions.”
I was proud of having carried this with me all the way from my earnest Calc TA. It was the last time I’d been interested in math—she had a phenomenal ass. I could hear my party getting on fine without me. Annika rolled her eyes and asked, “And what’s the point of mysteries without discoveries?”
“God, I haven’t had a two-in-the-morning philosophy symposium since college.” I looked at my watch. “And it’s not even past ten. I need to go back inside, but don’t let the mysteries get you down.”
I held out her champagne glass, almost dropping it when our fingers connected. She shrugged.
“Some mysteries are better than others,” she said. She gave the sort of wink that was absolutely ironic, except maybe it wasn’t.
After the guests had dribbled toward home or the bar, she was still there as I was picking up plastic champagne glasses and tossing them in the trash. Normally, the intern would clean up, but after the pot incident I’d fired him and hadn’t found another. I thought I might not look. I’d never liked interns—they lose credit cards, drop paintings, and sue you when you don’t pay them, which I couldn’t afford. Annika watched me clean. As I chased after napkins, I got a clear view of her slim ankles in her black clogs. She was the sort of woman who made clogs look sexy.
Take a minute to remember: I was really truly in love with my wife. My wife was my Alice Through the Looking Glass Self, or maybe my real world self, and I was the looking glass; either way, she was me. There didn’t seem anything more perfect than having a baby together. But now she was two people and I didn’t like to press my head against her warped belly. It frightened me. I’d grown up just me and Dad. Every part of who I was, down to the pointed capitals of my handwriting, was his. And I didn’t know how to do that for a baby. I’d just figured out how to be myself.
I’d like to say Annika kissed me, but all she did was hang around. Out the window, I could see the tiara of Manhattan, and my playlist had run out. I bent down to pick up a silver hairpin at her feet, and as I stood, I was so close to her face, to the purple lipstick. I slid the pin into the dark hair. Oh, and then I kissed her. Our tongues tasted of old champagne. When you’ve kissed one person for years, you forget other people kiss differently. Annika kissed open-mouthed, cool air seeping in, and her tongue pressed against the roof of my mouth. Mimi kissed with her teeth; running them along my lower lip, gently clamped on my tongue before letting go. Annika’s tongue was spit-warm.
In a corner of the gallery, Celeste’s water bowl caught the light, glinting at our transgression; after all it was Mimi who’d demanded the cat be sent to Dad’s. We fucked, not on the floor or the table, but on the chaise longue I kept in my office. It gave the room a classic look. Sex was pleasant. I wish I could say that I risked my marriage for something earth-shattering, life-changing, cum-splatting, but it was simply pleasant. Our bodies were boozy warm. We moved well together. And it had been a whole trimester since I’d been able to fuck.
I like to watch women get dressed. Watching a woman get undressed, you don’t really see the process. It’s all anticipation. Watching a woman get dressed was like reading a good book the second time. You know what’s going to happen next, but there’s a pleasure in seeing how it’s all put together. Annika dressed slowly. I sat naked, flaccid dick lounging between my thighs. She pulled her bra pre-hooked over her head, stretching the fabric before it snapped into place atop her breasts.
Her movements were languid but not deliberately sexual. We were done with that. Her slowness seemed entirely for herself. She pulled her black leggings up and over the belly I’d only just run my tongue over. The leggings cut her in half, pinching the flesh of her stomach so that it rolled out like buttercream squeezed between two pieces of cake.
“You know, I’ve never done this before.” I didn’t know why I was telling her. The condom, provided by Annika, lay slimy and awkward in my palm. “Cheated on my wife I mean. No, really, I haven’t. I don’t know what came over me. No, I didn’t mean it like that. You’re very sexy. But, I never thought of doing this before.”
“Okay then. Never.” She rotated her ankles and cracked her spine. “You know, I slept with Quentin once.”
I pulled my boxer shorts on. “Quentin, asshole ex-boss, who’s-trying-to-steal-Nirmala-Quentin?”
“Yeah. Quentin.”
“Did he ask you to show with him?” I felt viscerally betrayed.
“I wish he was using me for the art.”
I paused, hoping to be tactful. “So you don’t think he’s going to steal Nirmala?”
“How should I know?”
Her dress was a zipless tunic, and there was nothing I could help her with. She checked her reflection in the time-dimmed antique mirror.
“I don’t know why I try. I got it permed straight once. I thought I’d like it but I looked like a freak.”
“I’m sure you didn’t.”
She shrugged, my surety meant nothing, and shoved her feet back in the clogs.
I called her a cab, and then I walked around the right side of the building to the blue door and let myself in. The residences had their separate entrances. So yes, I cheated on my wife exactly two floors below where she lay pregnant and asleep. As I waited for our decrepit elevator, I thought about sheep.
My Canadian grandfather had been a farmer. Farmer sounds cute. His ranch stretched from his house to the nearest post office, a forty-minute drive away. One spring break visit, I was maybe fourteen and thought I was a man. We were driving along in his green jeep, and I was staring out the window, headphones plugged in, when I saw it. The animal was running, its gray lips peeled back from yellow teeth, its wool matted brown, and trailing behind it was this pink lump. Pink was the general impression, but there were purple blotches and red stripes attached by a long red rope. I made my grandfather stop the car. I remember how upset he was that something spooked her. Sheep lose their babies when they’re spooked, and once one’s spooked, others will follow. You can lose half a flock that way. Did I want to spook my wife? No, I didn’t. I couldn’t. I would wait until after the baby was born to confess.
Eliot was approaching her half birthday. Annika was leaving me and I still hadn’t said anything at all. In the dark, I clicked on my phone again, and reread my email without saying anything to Mimi. The screen’s light stroked the slope of her neck and my hand reached out to follow it. But then instead I refreshed the gallery’s Twitter. My wife snorted again, and kicked me in her sleep. Or at least, I thought it was her sleep.
Yuki
1970, Carmine
A pollution of the Sanskrit for bug-generated. It’s beetle blood. Raspberry jam in a viscous glob, a crying child’s cheeks, pickled plums on a bed of white rice, a drunken nose, helium balloon hearts.
Odile left for Italy the day after New Year. She took the hairdryer. “I’ll bring you back a spare Italian,” she shouted from the front seat of Trench Coat’s car. Yuki stood alone on the step waving them goodbye. When she slipped back into the apartment, she thought she saw Lillian’s face pressed down on the typewriter keys. But maybe it was a trick of the light, because a blink later and Lillian was upright looking out the window, tumbler of whiskey swirling cheerfully in one hand.
“I guess it’s just the two of us now,” Lillian said. Yuki waited for the sharp-toothed comment but it didn’t come.
Later, Yuki thought of asking Lillian for Odile’s number and telling her that when Lou walked past reception, Yuki’s lungs tried to flap after him. Odile’s tongue would tick against her teeth, and she’d puff out an exaggerated sigh. Oh, but dahling he’s a dreadful tiny man. But what if Odile was on her mother’s side? They were blood. They rolled their eyes and their wrists in the same way, had the same habit of tilting their chins and standing too close to the apartment’s dirty mirrors.
Yuki had no idea how to seduce a man. So she concentrated on willing him to choose her. The energy that had previously been directed toward bicycles, she now beamed at Lou. She drew his nose fifteen times in a line at the top of her paper. She went to the art store and bought paint the shade of his eyelashes. A burgundy scar stained his forearm, like a wine-glass stain on a fresh napkin. She copied its arc, twisting it, overlapping it, tessellating it. The weird thing was that wishing worked.
Almost every day, Lou ate lunch with her on their bench, deep in the slipstream of cars. He took her to movies. Yuki held the popcorn carton and he squirted hot butter sauce. In the dark, she sniffed her fingers. The sweet yellow smell was Lou. Despite the flowerpot, he never offered to take her to another museum, but she didn’t blame him.
In early March, New York’s magnolias grew white-clawed buds. Girls walked without gloves, their fingers sheltered inside their boyfriends’ palms. Lou came back to Lillian’s less and less. But more and more, he showed up at Yuki’s desk. On a Monday, he asked her to dinner. They went to a Chinese place. He ordered Moo Shoo pork and a beer. He paid for Yuki’s fried rice—did that make it a date? On Wednesday, he took her to a pizza place.
“This is my favorite pizza place.”
“Now it’s mine,” she said and was so embarrassed she bit her tongue as she shoved the slice back in her mouth.
“Where did it beat?”
“Um, I didn’t actually have a favorite.”
“And you call yourself a New Yorker.”
She didn’t remember calling herself that, but it felt good. They were two New Yorkers eating pizza together.
On Friday, he kissed her at a diner, in full view of the clientele. The gesture was so smooth and unflustered that she thought he was reaching for the ketchup. Her mouth was open, about to ask if he wanted to watch 2001: A Space Odyssey that weekend. Their lips connected above her New England clam chowder. The kiss was dry, delicate, there and then gone. After he kissed her, he grabbed the ketchup.
“Oh,” she said. “Why?”
“I felt like it, that a problem?”
“No,” she said. “Of course not.”
Lou, I’m moving in with two of the girls from Copy. Starting Saturday. I bought snapdragon seeds for the flowerpot.
She sealed the index card inside one of the yellow inter-office envelopes. The Copy girls still snubbed Yuki, but their room-mate had gotten engaged. As they told her the rent, they smiled at her, mouths glossy with greed. Yuki couldn’t watch Lillian apply Apple Red to her lower lip knowing that it had also pressed against those salt-sweet lips. She couldn’t watch the fingers tap the Olivetti and imagine them pressing into his freckled back. She reread the note, she wanted the right tone of nonchalance. She folded it four times, until it was the size of a playing card. On the front she wrote LOU in thin caps. The U was wider than the O. Should she rewrite them?
“Hey there.” Lou strode through the door, papers under one arm, the very picture of a reporter. He smiled at her. He’d smiled after their kiss. She touched her own mouth, then remembered the note.
“Wait.”
He stopped. She held up the note. “Read it later,” she said, because what if he didn’t understand it? She couldn’t bear to explain herself. He slipped it into his back pocket.
“Okay kid,” he said and shook his head.
That night Lillian said, “Every young woman should spend time with girls her own age. If only to find out who she is not.” Reapplying her lipstick, she added, “Leave your key under the mat when you go.”
Lillian didn’t offer to return the money Yuki�
��s father had paid for the year. But then again, they were both thieves. Yuki had pocketed the flavor of Lou’s smile and she wasn’t giving it back.
Yuki pressed her sleeve to her nose. The new room smelled of the scum that collects between toes. She got undressed, then dressed again. It was so cold. The sheet provided only a tissue’s worth of warmth. This was her home now. She closed her eyes, feeling the darkness. The front door banged as someone went out. A date. For a moment the darkness held its hand over her eyes and she slept. But then she woke to the cold pressing down on her throat. It was like living in the belly of the Nothing. She felt herself slowly dissolving in its icy stomach. She turned on the light. She got out her pencil. Perhaps if she could draw this place, she could tame it. She held the pencil perpendicular to the bed. The lines of perspective, each peeling tile, the battered plastic chair, the washstand’s belly, should all arc to the vanishing point. The grid pulled her on and on—into only white wall.
When she was done, the room and the picture gave her twin stares. Their faces each empty, each uncomprehending what she was doing there. She turned off the light, and tried to think again of the way Lou stopped by her desk, and the way he had once made a joke, his fingers tugging down on her earlobe like he owned it. She dreamed that she colored each vanishing line in the milky green of his right iris. And when she woke, she was sure she had painted it perfectly.
After a month, Lou finally decided to take her to his apartment in Queens. It was a Monday. He gave her no warning, appearing at the reception desk and saying, “I’m making you steak tonight. Wait for me.” They rode the subway together. He had glass jars of dried basil and a plastic pepper-shaker large as a club. The thin strips of hanger sizzled. She tried to remember what underwear she was wearing. The edges of the meat cringed, curling away from the skillet. He slapped them down on their plates. There weren’t any vegetables. He finished his steak quickly.
Harmless Like You Page 10
