Likes
Page 18
“I hope you like chamomile,” she said. “It’s all I have.”
He couldn’t find an obvious place where he was meant to sit. He couldn’t figure out what had been stolen. The room had a slightly tousled look but seemed otherwise intact.
“How did they get in?”
She turned from the stove and looked at him uncomprehendingly.
“The—robbers.” He corrected himself. “Intruders.” But maybe it had been someone working solo. “Intruder,” he said, finally.
She blinked once, then twice, as if trying to bring him into focus. “It happened on the subway,” she said. “Is that what you mean?”
“I don’t mean anything. You’re the one who said you were robbed.” He glared at the apartment around him, searching for signs of entry. “And I said that I would come right over. Which I did.”
“Thank you,” Meg said. “Thank you for coming over. You didn’t have to. I feel bad that it’s so late.”
“I don’t care what time it is. I’m just not understanding what you—”
“It happened on the subway,” she repeated. “It must have happened when I was on my way home from work. Because then I got back and took a shower and ordered Thai and when I went to pay the delivery guy I reached into my bag and it wasn’t there.”
“Your wallet?”
“Yes. It was gone. The last time I had it was when I pulled out a token.”
“You think someone stole it on the subway,” he said dully. “Hours ago. Like a pickpocket.”
“Yes,” she answered solemnly, and handed him his cup of tea. “I do.”
Before taking the cup, he put down his backpack, heavy with the hammer and nails he had brought. The tea smelled medicinal and was too hot to drink. He had paid thirty-eight dollars for the car service, with tip. He was overcome by the sudden, profound tiredness that comes right after a stupid expenditure of energy. Meg was now sitting on the edge of her bed, still wearing her jacket, as if she, too, were a guest. Without asking, he sank down beside her and placed his cup on the floor. He was too exhausted even to be angry anymore.
“So,” he said. “This is your place.”
“Welcome,” she said, and with a little sigh rested her fragile head of hair on his shoulder. “I’m glad you’re here.”
* * *
At least that’s how Ezra’s wife has imagined it, their unpromising start. Some details, such as the poster of the Flatiron Building and the mound of fancy pillows, she is familiar with from the video; some—the lat machine, the good purse, the booths at the Polish restaurant—she knows firsthand; the rest are the result of inference and extrapolation. It is rare for her to think at all of Meg Sand anymore, but the mention of Julia Roberts there in the dark has brought her back.
When Ezra recalls his years in graduate school, his memory has occasionally confused or conflated the two of them—her and Meg. To be fair, the instances have been very few. In one case, she had to remind him that they didn’t watch the Knicks lose to the Spurs in the finals; she was in Florida with her parents. Also, she can say with certainty that she’s never discovered a mouse behind the toaster oven. Or been pickpocketed on the subway. She wonders if the same could be true of the rollerblading event. She believes that it was an experience he enthusiastically recounted at the time, just not to her.
Yet her memory is not without its own shortcomings. She cannot remember, for example, Meg Sand’s last name. Sand is just something she’s made up as a placeholder. Whatever the real name is, she thinks, it must be so ordinary, so unremarkable, as to be mind-numbing in the most literal sense. For a while she thought it might have been Whitman, until realizing that that was the name of the CEO who had run unsuccessfully for governor of California. Because she can’t remember Meg Sand’s real name, she hasn’t been able to repeat it to herself and she hasn’t been able to look her up online.
But she doubts that she would ever type Meg’s name into a search box, even if she could. Her curiosity is nil. There’s nothing more she wants to know. For the nearly twenty years that she’s had the video in her possession, not once has she felt the faintest need to watch it again. The first time was enough, and even then she didn’t watch it all the way through. Very clearly she remembers how surprised she was that she could operate the playback function on the camera in the first place. She’d never used the camera before or been interested in how it worked. But there was something about the way it was resting beneath Ezra’s desk, balanced casually on top of the paper shredder, its little screen popped open, that made her stop.
She put down the box she was carrying. Inside, still in its protective wrapping, was a five-piece place setting of the wedding china that Ezra’s aunts had gently insisted they register for. There was no room or use for china in their basement apartment. With ceremonial care she had been stacking the boxes in the corner of the bedroom not already taken up by Ezra’s massive computer. Though he had gallantly carried her over the threshold, marriage had done little to change their abode other than to make it feel smaller and darker. When she put down the china, the last to arrive, her hands were shaking. This is another detail she recalls with perfect clarity: her hands shaking even before she picked up the camera and turned it on.
A bed piled with tasseled pillows; a framed black-and-white poster, only a corner of which appears in the shot; a long white body, naked except for a pair of knee-high gladiator sandals. The soles of the sandals as flat and beige as pancakes.
And then from offscreen his voice, the voice that she had first heard in history class, telling the body what he’d like it to do.
She couldn’t hit the square of the stop button quickly enough. Straightaway she ejected the cassette, which was smaller than a tin of breath mints. She wandered back and forth the length of the apartment, holding it carefully in the palm of her hand. She thought about stuffing it down to the bottom of the garbage can, or wrapping it in layers of newspaper and tossing it in a dumpster, or dropping it down the echoing trash chute at work. She also thought about cracking open the plastic shell and plucking out the two black reels inside and melting them over the stove—then wondered about the strands of videotape she sometimes saw tangled in the branches of the borough’s trees. How did they end up there? Meanwhile, a cold little part of her counseled prudence: keep it safe. At which she recoiled: it would poison her. After several minutes of this, she called Ezra at the gym to say that she was leaving him. The word divorce she avoided, not wanting to sound operatic. By the time he arrived home, she had already changed her mind ten or eleven times as to what she needed to do.
He was breathing very hard. He had run the entire way from the distant subway stop. On his sweating face was the naked look of fear that comes with having loved someone for a long time. “You’re still here,” he panted. The look on his face summoned out of her chaotic feelings the lifelong habit of pragmatism, which caused her to say with formality, “She is not to see or contact us ever again,” a message that she repeated a few days later when Meg Sand called the apartment, and she was startled to hear herself speak not in her lilting telephone voice but in an unfamiliar and shaky middle register that seemed to emanate directly from her chest. She hung up the receiver before the person on the other end could respond. Her mind was still changing rapidly, hourly. The only thing she knew for certain was that the video had become hers in some permanent, irrefutable way. She buried the cassette in the deep pocket of a shearling coat she no longer wore but that still hung thickly at the back of the closet, and so it remained there undisturbed for many years and through several moves, until the technology that it required had all but disappeared.
* * *
Could the nature of the video be interpreted in a different way? The therapist at the university health center had asked her this question. Your husband is studying art, she said, double-checking the open folder in her lap. Was there anything—the therapist searched for a word—artistic about what you saw?
Grimly, she said no. They h
ad been over this before. Therapy was turning out to be deserving of the suspicion in which she had always held it, but under her benefits plan the first six sessions were free. The truth is, she was too shy to explain to the therapist why she had instantly recognized the sort of video she was watching. Just as she was too shy to keep her eyes open while making them. Darkness was essential, she couldn’t explain; darkness was key.
The darkness created when he turned on the camera and she closed her eyes—was it the same element that she’s standing in now, listening to him say good night to their child? She likes to think that it is, the dark being the only thing large, comfortable, and cluttered enough to contain all the various bits and pieces of their life together. So many years between them, and from where exactly does one begin to count? The first day of ninth grade, or the short, rainy summer after graduation? The moment they signed a lease and became residents of the basement apartment? There is no single starting point, only the density and shapelessness of experience held in common, the meals prepared and eaten, the assorted haircuts and injuries, elations and malaises, car leases and checking accounts, friends made, trips taken, a pregnancy that failed and two that didn’t. She remembers: the shock of a baby’s cold mouth on her nipple after he spat out an ice pop and chose her breast instead. He remembers: her shout of laughter. Now their younger child kicks experimentally at the comforter, unwilling to go to sleep, while the older one makes his way up the stairs, halting at irregular intervals, absorbed no doubt by the game in his hand, lighting his face from below as he moves slowly toward them.
“Pick up the pace, kid.” Ezra casts his voice toward the door. “We’re all waiting.”
It is the same voice, and also the same darkness: the darkness out of which this voice once floated, low-pitched and warm, patiently unfolding and finding her on the bed, the bed seeming to lift imperceptibly off the floor, set aloft yet lightly tethered, his voice telling her what he saw, what he liked, the things he wished to see more of. At the sound of his voice, she relaxed into the pleasure of being instructed, and then more deeply into the pleasure of being seen, and running beneath it all was a bright, nearly invisible current of thankfulness. To be called such things. In words far worse, or far better, than whatever had been said in high school. Tipping back her head and closing her eyes, she felt capable of doing anything he asked. She saw pictures: a bar of sunlight flaring on a mirror; the square, golden windows of a long motel at night. His steady voice spoke to her in the dark. “Wider,” he said, and she opened farther than she had thought possible.
ALSO BY SARAH SHUN-LIEN BYNUM
Madeleine Is Sleeping
Ms. Hempel Chronicles
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sarah Shun-lien Bynum is the author of the novels Ms. Hempel Chronicles, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and Madeleine Is Sleeping, a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. Her fiction has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Tin House, and The Best American Short Stories. The recipient of an O. Henry Prize, a Whiting Award, and an NEA Fellowship, she was named one of “20 Under 40” fiction writers by The New Yorker. She lives in Los Angeles. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT NOTICE
DEDICATION
THE ERLKING
TELL ME MY NAME
THE YOUNG WIFE’S TALE
THE BEARS
MANY A LITTLE MAKES
THE BURGLAR
JULIA AND SUNNY
LIKES
BEDTIME STORY
ALSO BY SARAH SHUN-LIEN BYNUM
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
120 Broadway, New York 10271
Copyright © 2020 by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum
All rights reserved
First edition, 2020
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the publications in which some of these stories originally appeared, in slightly different form: Tin House (“The Young Wife’s Tale”); Ploughshares (“Tell Me My Name” and “Julia and Sunny”); The New Yorker (“The Erlking,” “Many a Little Makes,” “The Burglar,” “Likes,” and “Bedtime Story”); and Glimmer Train (“The Bears”).
E-book ISBN: 978-0-374-72230-2
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