by JoAnna Novak
“But Tuesday,” I say again. Another time, another date. “Okay?”
“We’re all good. What now? Did I rescue you from pure Kafka or what?” Rot says.
The hall is vacant. Echoic. Cold. I wonder if yesterday’s thermostat problem persists or if facilities were told not to heat #13 Humanities on a day the college isn’t in session. Across from my office, the windows to the faculty lounge are dark.
“Have you even read Kafka?” I ask. “Or did you just get that from Congo?”
“Anna! With the way-back score. Dayum.”
“That’s not an answer,” I say, unlocking my office. I flip on the tentacled pole lamp, rosier than the fluorescents. “You wanna come in?”
He steps inside, courting liminal space. How do you define a door frame? Half-in or half-out? How do you define adult? Eighteen? Twenty-one? Fourteen? Forty? Half-alive or half-dead?
Rot unbuckles the wrist straps on a pair of black nylon gloves. He pulls them off, holds them like a bunch of black bananas.
“Everyone reads The Trial in high school,” he says. “‘The Metamorphoses’? ‘The Hunger Artist’? Actually, we spent more time on that dude than I thought.”
Usually, I let a student sit first. Power is a stickler for height differences. When I was first married, I tried on antifeminism, settling my head lower on the pillows than Rolf’s. Did I want subservience? (Not with him.) Now, I perch on the edge of my desk. Let Rot tower.
“I didn’t read Kafka until graduate school,” I say. “In high school, we read Moby-Dick, if you can believe that.”
“Avoiding the easy jab there, Anna. Cuz … yah walked right into that one.”
My jaw relaxes. “What can I say? I don’t fear the obvious.”
Rot drops into my desk chair. “I can’t believe you saw Congo.”
“My daughter’s in junior high—that was, what, eight years ago for you? Seven? You know the extracurricular drill. It’s not like I’m getting to Godard retrospectives at the Music Box every night.”
“Yeah, but your kid? She’s gotta be smart. Eighth grade, seventh?”
“Elliot’s fourteen.”
“Yup,” he says. “Time to plant that Jean Seberg seed.”
“And what makes you the Dr. Spock of fourteen-year-old girls?”
He pauses. Rubs his nostril. “Sisters?”
“I didn’t know you had siblings.”
“Have and—had. My older sister passed away.”
I look at my lap, my crossed legs, the crest of my knee. Apologizing for someone’s loss: I’ve hated that, now, for more than two decades.
“It was over the summer. Kinda crazy how that feels like another lifetime already. Not that it lessens the loss, but—she—she was pretty sick.”
I try not to pathologize or narrativize or analyze, but I can’t help it. I close my eyes and see Rot younger, shoulder muscle sheared, shadowy facial hair Wited Out, trying to read Kafka on the bus. He can’t concentrate. He pictures his pretty sister, so sick. The last time they were familial and wholesome, holidays, cider bobbing with cinnamon sticks, sneaking tipples of boozy eggnog, skiing. He senses disintegration will repair his heart. He bums a cigarette, trudges home, raids the liquor cabinet and pours tequila in a water bottle, wanders the grounds, getting dizzier and dizzier until the peacocks’ feathers blur into a NASA-shot of Earth.
“You have another sister?” I say gently.
“What?”
“Sisters. Plural. Now—”
“Oh. Yeah. My little sister. She eats movies up. How many times can a person watch Clueless?”
I laugh. But the juncture in our conversation is visible, begging, like a fort of empty cardboard boxes we need to kick through.
“So what’s up? We resolved the … confiscation.”
“You wanna chill?” Rot says, swiveling in my chair. His legs are spread wide.
My heart runs into a brick wall: it feels so good.
“Not here.” His voice is clipped. “Is that okay? Can we go someplace else? Do you have another one of those session things?”
I grab my tote. “Not until two. We break for a late lunch—that’s … Sure. We can go. Where did you have in mind?”
“Will you follow me?” he says.
“What?” I blurt. “I mean—Of course.”
“Probably best to take two cars.”
He is sensible, too. How many ways can one man be meritorious? Did I ever have reservations?
I slip off the desk and land between his legs. “Sure. Right. Good thinking.”
··
Carousel Gardens is fifteen minutes from the college. The fifty acres of land comprise an arboretum, behind the eponymous county hospital. My students visit for landscape architecture or horticulture or nature drawing classes: I know from letters, form excuses penned by professors, detailing absences, duration and purpose. The drive is a straight-shot, past the glassine river, over two wooden bridges unphased by snow: me in my black coat in my black car trailing Rot, green in green.
The Wednesday before Thanksgiving, his boxer-briefs were black, ARMANI in silver. Two Saturdays after, navy and hunter.
“Open to the Public” reads a placard mounted on the wrought iron gates. Inside the arboretum, the unplowed road wrenches and curves, unmarked by signs. Rot steers without hesitation. I slink behind. To be following, staring at the blue-and-white BMW insignia, in wait, suspended, wanting, approaching, closing in on an encounter—I love this. This rush. My drive. My gamble: At a freight train, I debooted, wriggled out of my tights, tugged off my panties, stuffed them in the glove compartment over that childish phone. Husband walkie-talkie. The crossing dinged. I only had time enough to jam my driving foot back in a boot before the candy-striped arms raised.
Rot turns into an empty, kidney-shaped lot. My tires sniggle over his tracks. He parks close to stairs leading to a conservatory. There is a glasshouse, like a Victorian fairy palace. The building is wet iron and verdurous windowpanes licked with frost, a mansard roof Mohawked with snow.
I roll down my window, without touching the heat. It blasts my bare legs. I spread my feet and tilt my pelvis forward and open my knees and the warmth blows up my skirt. The air is all windchill in Chicago. It burns my cheeks.
The snow on Rot’s window smushes as it lowers. “Oh hey,” he says. “Didn’t I take, like, a class with you?”
“Me? I don’t know.”
“Yeah, weren’t you in that lady’s writing class in the fall. You were the super brilliant babe everyone was intimidated by.”
“Right, right.” My voice loosens. “Gosh, I had no idea you felt that way.”
“It’s too cold to do this!” Rot calls. A gust of wind blows and snow chords his words and flies inside the BMW. “Wanna come in?”
I pocket my keys and pull on my other boot.
He leans over the parking brake and opens the passenger door. I’m inside. The car snaps like a suitcase.
“Is this awkward?” he says, facing me. His coat is unzipped and his cheeks are flushed. I glance at the cup holders. There’s a soda from McDonald’s.
“Because of yesterday? Believe me, the stuff will be back in your possession before—”
“We’re cool, I told you. Just awkward ’cuz …”
“I’m old? If it’s awkward,” I say, “it’s me. I made this … this. I changed the record.”
“What’d you put on?” he asks.
“Something horrid. The Partridge Family? Cheese, when I was your age, the sort of thing total Stellas would listen to.”
He cringes. “Don’t say that.”
“Say what? Partridge—”
“‘When I was your age.’ Don’t go there, all right?”
“Well it’s a fact.”
“Facts are overrated.”
I nod. “Touché.”
Rot presses the volume button. “So I’ll deejay, old lady.”
My bones reassemble themselves: The Clash. “Death or Glory” barks. We sit until the
bridge, our listening knitting the windows with woolen fog. It is so different from what I remember—the rush of youth, the expedience of action, the drive to grope, ashes piling in ash trays. This car smells clean, lemon and leather. We wait, breath bated, until the final drum kick. Rot turns down the volume. Nature raises an eyebrow: outside, thunder unfurls.
“Wanna drink?” he says, flicking the McDonald’s. Hazy through the lid, I can tell it’s not Coke. “Not quite Dom, but hey—my parents burned through the last case on New Year’s.”
“Orange soda?”
“Absolut and Crush. Così deliziosa.” He takes a sip. Touches his lips. Puckers.
“What the hell. It’s like orange juice. Breakfast.”
He holds the cup and grabs my bare thigh, twisting his fingers on my skin. I lean over, but he’s moving, his chest covering mine, his mouth on my lips, his tongue sugary and orange. I close my eyes. I try not to cry.
“What?”
“You’re not mad about yesterday?”
He snorts into my neck. His voice is lower now, croaky. “I’m not squirreling some pathetic nut. I have as much as I want.”
“Mr. Cartel,” I whisper.
“It’s not that. You’re such a teenager, yah know? For someone, like, twice my age, you’re really … arrested development? Is that a thing?”
“Thing’s a thing,” I say. I tongue the star of his chin. “Chin’s a chin.”
He combs his fingers through my hair and turns up The Clash. “Spanish Bombs” goes off on the radio, vanishing us swift and melodic. I close my eyes, pull at the straw. The sky around us brightens. Snow packs us inside the car, like kids buried in sand, and he’s moving my skirt and I’m kissing his neck and he’s reclining my chair. The world disappears inside a chamber of our heat. Languid, sighfully, oohing, I say to his head in my lap: “I like how you gnaw me.” A second later, I yap.
··
I straighten my skirt and swish soda in my mouth, open the door and spit in the snow. An orange splotch shaped like Illinois.
“That,” I say.
“So that.” Sweat cribs Rot’s face. His tone is plowed.
Rolf was the sort of lover who made me do the moving, the insipid bounce and thrust, grinding, riding until my hips ached, my back was textbook lordosis. All the while he stayed cool. Unmussed. Hair moussed, hands manicured. I never want that again.
“What is this—that? A conservatory?” I say. “I’m assuming you’ve been here.”
He nods.
“My family, um, donates to the arboretum. Especially, this. The glasshouse in particular. My sister loved it.”
“It’s gorgeous,” I say. I imagine the winter away and picture us, two miniscule bodies, roving around a greensward. “Show me around.”
“I wish I could. But the weather’s supposed to get bad-bad. We have to get you back to school, missy.”
“Let me ditch,” I say. “I like to be your teenager.”
“This is fun. You’re fun. Let’s keep it that. I don’t mean to be an ass. But—”
“But nothing. Whenever it happens, it happens. Whatever whatever. I wish I were a teenager.”
“I think you should say what you mean,” he says.
I can feel my shoulders inching toward my ears. “What do I mean then?”
“It has nothing to do with not being a teenager. You’re like every girl who wants to grow up and become someone else. The problem is, you’re there. You’re grown up and you’re not who you want to be.”
I scoff. Joe Strummer wails on “Rock the Casbah.” And it’s like the noise of our fucking has been squelched under ice. The windshield is poxed with snow.
“What makes you the every girl expert?” I say. The wine-sleep of last night hits me. I’m tired. “Who do you—”
“Fine, not every girl. My little sister’s not like that.”
“And how old is she?” I say, ready to spar.
“Fourteen.”
“My daughter’s age. Give her time.”
“That’s a pretty shitty way for a mom to think.”
“Maybe I’m a pretty shitty mom.”
The CD stops. The more serious Rot gets, the harder his jaw squares.
“You can dispute that,” I say, trying to laugh.
“I’m not into lying to people’s faces.”
“Noble of you. What’s your sister’s secret?”
With the heel of his hand, Rot rubs his left eye. He grimaces, like he’s suppressing a stretch. Then he’s cackling, laughing, a wafery huff.
“I crack myself up,” he says. “Sorry. Sorry. My sister? She does what she wants.”
I wave my hands, at the car and the greenhouse and the snow and the soda and the skirt, at Rot. “Isn’t that what I’m doing?”
“If you are, you’re not very convincing.”
“I’m forty,” I say. “You know that, right?”
“Whoop de fucking doo. A couple months ago, John Glenn—at seventy-seven—took his old balls into space. Tell me again what’s so special about age? What does how long you’ve lived on this earth matter? John Keats, Mozart, Charlie Fischer?”
“Bobby Fischer.”
“Whatever. Who cares how old you are?”
“I don’t know.”
“I do,” Rot says. “Forty isn’t old at all. Forty is when you have enough shit under your belt that you can actually make a go at your dreams. Forty is when you take that hard look at your life and say, damn, I’m a zombie. Or, fuck. I hate who I’ve become—except, oh wait: now I’m smart enough and, like, capable enough to change.”
“I think you’re young.” It’s so depressing. “You have a beautiful hopefulness. And I’m sorry if I—”
“What do you want?” He’s in the driver’s seat, his body angled toward me. “And don’t say a bad boy.”
I shake my head. I want to tell him how naïve he is, how responsibilities alter everything, that marriage and children demand time and remand aims, how the ways out dwindle, but I can’t. I don’t want him to hear me lying to myself.
“I don’t know.” I open the door. The cold lashes my skin, the sweat. “Life is funneling you through, squirting you out empty. I just want to be left with something.”
He gets out of the car and comes around, puts one of his green jacketed arms around my back. He ushers me into my car.
In the side mirror, I glimpse myself: snow in my hair, on my eyebrows, my bare hands. The heat is still blowing. He holds up a finger.
One moment.
A sumptuous minute. I close my eyes. Orchids and ferns garlanding stone cupids, I picture, vines and tendrils, verdure inside the glasshouse, trellises and gardenesque fascinators. You can fantasize without a specific object. Flange me, Eros. Then, a rapping on the Saab’s pane.
Rot bows, his arm behind his back. For madam, let me slake thee: a half-drunk Crush.
6 ·· ELLIOT
WHAT’S SCARY ABOUT LIFE IS how clearly you remember the bits. Reposed on my bed, on top of the covers, in my coat, baggie of heroin on my sternum, a tableau muy elegante with spindle legs and white stuff and black fabric, my Larry bussed hood, I wore headphones, like indoor earmuffs. On Repeat, the Smashing Pumpkins murmured “Perfect.”
Billy Corgan’s voice was a wishbone: pull, pull, split. He sang purr like a raft to float away on, Ophelia down the I&M Canal, and his every word sent more of my heart to Lisa.
Stuck in my head was a phone call from more the start of the school year, the night I talked to Lisa after I stumbled into another client. One sec Sheena Sharma and I were in her basement, coloring a poster for Science, drawing the prairie dropseed we’d sniffed (it smelled like popcorn); the next, Sheena was pivoting in her pointelle undies, sobbing that she needed to be smaller for beam if she wanted to make state.
Now, from my bed, I could see the computer screen. The music was soft, knitted inside me; it could’ve been my own breath. I listened through the lyrics for the creaky door that meant someone new had signed on to AOL.
She wants me to help her diet, I’d told Lisa that day with Sheena. Isn’t that so random?
Not really. Lisa’s tone was game-on, not judgy. Dr. Ogbaa says anorexia kinda wrangles girls. Sorry. Everyone wants to be thinner. Even the president—he’s fat, one day he’s jogging, the next he’s condemning heroin chic, the next he’s got a Big Mac. We’re a yo-yo nation: size six to zero, Hardee’s to Snackwells. And you’ve been anorexic since fifth—you’re like the Doogie Howser of EDs. Sheeney probably thinks you’re a mini celebrity.
You too, Miss Hospitalization. Miss Feeding Tube. You got thinner than me.
Yeah, but, how long did that last? Your parents let you maintain a weight of … what—?
Eighty, post dinner, I’d said.
Damn. Not crushin’ on that, believing my body is beautiful at any weight. Actually, hear that? There’s like two of me: anorexic-me, who wants to be like you, and fighter-me, who’s doing all this therapy. If there’s a recovered me, she’s like … one toe in that lake.
Lake Michigan?
Um … more like Goose Lake, Lisa’d said.
I’d laughed. Oh, the manmade drainage ditch thingy in our subdivision?
Yeah, and it’s a shaky, unpolished toe that’s totally freaked out about getting a staph infection from all the goose poop in the lake.
But also, it’s a very small lake.
Right, Lisa had said. One toe in, and before you know it, I’m walking on the other side.
“Perfect” was starting again. I buried my face in the pillow: it smelled like my dad’s mousse, like apple pie jellybeans. When I started with Sheena, Lisa didn’t think coaching was so sick. She didn’t pose ultimatums. Refeeding, Monday night LoveThySelf sessions, family therapy with Kim the Harridan—recovering was her deal, not changing me. What had changed her? I wanted Larry Breit to be right. For the diet pills to have been more than something she forgot to trash. I wanted to believe I knew Lisa, even though, in my heart, I wondered. I wondered who I was, too. And I wondered who I was waiting for on AOL.
A ding interrupted the song. I squeezed my eyes, my brain tumbling in an ocean of Scotch. A ding wasn’t a door. A ding wasn’t Lisa pleading, Ellie. Rescue me. Use your $$$ to send me a limo. Did ED units even let girls use computers? A ding was a client: other than Lisa, those were my contacts. And I’d wager all $370 of my Real Talk profits on which one. After Mr. Breit dropped me off, I’d logged on to a chain of messages:
