Sweetness and Light

by Liam Pieper

  The professor let air hiss through his teeth, wrapped his hands around hers and confiscated the pipette. He walked off without a word, continuing his prowling circumnavigation of the lab.

  ‘You know,’ he announced, as he reached one end of the room and turned to face the class, his voice light and conversational. ‘A lot of you aren’t going to make it.’

  The class dutifully turned to listen to the professor, who dropped the broken pipette on the table in front of him. His mouth soured at the edges as he talked. ‘I’ve been doing this a long, long time. I already know which of you aren’t going to make it. I can even tell which field you are all going to end up in.’

  He stalked deliberately, down the central aisle of steel benches to the table by the door where the students had left their phones, wallets and watches before putting on their scrubs.

  ‘The watch you walked into my classroom with is a better predictor of your future than your GPA. The watch you left mom and pop’s house wearing, that’s you for the rest of your life.’

  He grabbed a vintage Casio off the table, held it up. ‘Who does this fetching retro little number belong to?’ A student raised his hand reluctantly and the professor pointed to him. ‘This watch tells me you’re an “individual”. You like to pretend that you’re not from money. You’ll spend two summers in Médecins Sans Frontières then wash out, marry a nice white lady and move to the suburbs.’

  He went down the line of watches. ‘General practice! General practice! Small-town quack. Paediatrician. Baltimore triage nurse!’

  He stopped at the next watch he got to, a shiny silver-and-black Montblanc, and picked it up. He laced it over his own wrist without doing up the buckle and demanded to know whom it belonged to.

  The TA, busy preparing samples across the lab, raised his hand. The professor beamed at him and held the watch aloft. ‘And here we have a surgeon, the apex of the medical profession. This watch says you were born into more money than you know what to do with. It says your mom and dad are so comfortable and distracted by their power that they have no idea who you are. It says you are going to spend the rest of your life trying to solve some Oedipus riddle. But at least you get to have nice things.’ He put the Montblanc down gently. The TA remained neutral through it all, his eyes resting on the professor.

  Finally, he reached the end of the row and picked up Sasha’s watch.

  ‘A Seiko!’ he proclaimed. ‘Whose is this?’

  Sasha stayed silent, mortified, while the professor pretended to scan the room, finally landing on Sasha.

  ‘You, Seiko, aren’t going to make it. This is the watch of a woman whose need outstrips her ability.’

  If the professor wanted Sasha to fight back, to protest, to launch some complaint he could use to drill her out of his course, he would be waiting a long time. She made her face perfectly impassive, setting her jaw and concentrating all her feelings into a bitter little pill she could grind like cud for the rest of the week. She stared levelly at the professor, who met her gaze and called an end to the class.

  She was stripping off her scrubs and strapping on her watch when the TA slid up next to her to retrieve his Montblanc. He’d ditched his gloves but still wore his surgical mask.

  He nodded at her in greeting. ‘Seiko.’

  Sasha nodded back curtly. ‘Surgeon.’

  He reached up and pulled his mask down loose around his neck, and Sasha’s breath caught on his cheekbones. She was agnostic about brands and fancy things, but the Montblanc made perfect sense on him; he looked like someone who couldn’t roll out of bed without being pestered by scouts for a J.Crew catalogue.

  ‘That’s me,’ he said. ‘I also go by Stephan.’

  ‘I can see why you prefer Surgeon.’

  ‘I prefer Mr Surgeon, actually.’

  It took her a minute for this to register as a joke, but Sasha had laughed at worse jokes, and from less handsome men.

  They made small talk as they stripped off their scrubs. His body matched the face – corn-fed, gym fit, Lacoste polo fitted like a gilt frame. His fingers were long, slender – she imagined them racing over piano keys, imagined the sort of house, the childhood, that produced skin like his. Walls lined with books and dining tables with white cloths. He helped her clean up her station with quiet efficiency. They left the lab together, walking at an easy pace.

  ‘The best thing about studying medicine,’ he said, ‘is it gives you the wisdom to never leave your body to medicine.’

  She shrugged. ‘What do I care once I’m dead? We’re all just meat in the end.’

  ‘Do you really want to end up in a bucket? You want to look down from heaven and know that asshole teacher can do whatever he wants with your disembodied head?’

  ‘I’m sure I’ll have better things to do in heaven.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Hang out? Walk a cute dog? Heaven must have a strong puppy game.’

  ‘I’m not sure dogs go to heaven. They go to a farm.’ He shrugged and reached up to rub the back of his neck – a sheepish gesture, undone by the Montblanc flashing on his wrist and the arm muscles that circled each other like cage fighters.

  ‘Do you believe in heaven? A non-canine heaven?’

  ‘I’m from Manhattan, so yes, very much so. I was raised to believe heaven was a Park Avenue brownstone.’

  ‘So, you are rich?’

  ‘We’re well-off.’

  ‘That’s what people with too much money say.’

  ‘There’s such a thing as too much money?’ He said it lightly, playfully, and for a moment Sasha caught a glimpse of what his life must be like, the endless possibilities available to him.

  They reached the end of the hall and, with it, their conversation. Still, they paused, the moment hung, and Stephan broke it with: ‘Listen, I feel like an asshole for not standing up for you back there. Let me make it up to you. Can I buy you dinner?’

  ‘Why would you do that?’

  ‘I’m being friendly. Are you? It’s hard to tell.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She really didn’t. When would she find time to date? When she wasn’t studying, she was waiting tables at a cafe in Greenpoint. She might have been lonely, if she’d had the time to feel lonely.

  ‘Make up your mind later,’ Stephan pushed gently, holding his phone out for her. ‘You’ve got to eat. Give me your number, Seiko.’

  For weeks they texted, often late into the night. He was a few years ahead of her, already on placement, and so they passed the time during his comparatively quiet night shifts at the hospital, when she was at home studying, popping Ritalin to fuel all-night cramming sessions. She’d been nonplussed to find that everyone studying medicine took some kind of pep pill. There was a sacred and long-standing tradition of patronage in which older graduates and doctors prescribed them to students, who in turn became doctors that kept the next generation stocked with the teeth-grinding, burnout-inducing pills that made medical school manageable.

  She enjoyed the strange, foggy reserves of endurance they gave her as she churned through coursework, but found that they seemed to tilt the world away from her, as if she were interpreting everything a half-second after it happened – like a video where the sound and vision weren’t syncing. Whenever Stephan texted it startled her out of deep reverie, and it would take her a minute to adjust, so she was glad of the staccato nature of texting; it gave her time to think.

  Often, around 11 pm, when his break started, she would receive a salutary text. ‘You up, Seiko?’ His gentle teasing about her shitty watch had evolved into the nickname and from there they’d built up a labyrinth of riffs, in-jokes and references that would refract and shatter into smaller jokes, only to circle back into the orbit of the original thread.

  She liked his sense of humour, a little lame, a little caustic. When he sent a particularly borderline message, and she was staring at her phone trying to interpret it, it would be followed by a gentler addendum with an emollient to take the sting out.

&
nbsp; When she texted him, he would fire back straight away but then fall silent for days at a time, only to pick up the thread where they had left off. She liked the way he wrote, with sentences all typed out, none of the broken shorthand she’d grown up using.

  She couldn’t figure out if they were flirting. She wasn’t sure if she wanted him to flirt or not. She wished she had an impartial friend, a woman she could show the texts to and ask if she thought his intentions were romantic. Eventually, she straight up asked him if he was flirting.

  He texted back: ‘Apparently not very well.’

  ‘Well, that’s one thing we’ve got in common,’ Sasha shot back.

  There was a long pause, and Sasha started to type another message to accompany her last one, but she got three words in and found she didn’t know what to say. She typed a sincere message, hesitated, deleted it, tried again, became acutely aware that on the other end of the phone a little blinking cursor was showing Stephan that she was typing a message and then deleting it, and felt sufficiently foolish to give up.

  She was returning to her books when her phone chimed: ‘How about we abandon the flirting and I just take you for a romantic dinner and then home for some sex that we might also be not very good at.’ This was followed a second later by a smiley emoji, a nerdy little flourish that prised a laugh out of Sasha.

  She’d never dated before; Stephan was her first real boyfriend, and the first months were full of lessons. The most important: all of her lovers to date had been bad in bed, but each in their own way – the overly timid, the performatively anxious, the sweaty messes who plunged in as though she were a swimming pool and the heat of the day was too urgent to waste any time testing the temperature of the water.

  Stephan was, well, surgical – an expression on his face like he was solving a math problem, fingers that found spots inside her she’d only ever read about. He would coax orgasm after orgasm out of her until she grabbed his hand and pushed him away so he could get on with finishing.

  He was one of those men who seemed to come truly alive only when talking to you, the force of their attention like a carnivorous flower unfurling when brushed by prey. It was one of the things she liked most about him; it was marvellous to be on the receiving end of it, thrilling to feel his world shrink down to the size of two people.

  But it was strangely jarring to see it from the outside – the way he would light up for anyone he was dealing with: a taxi driver, the maître d’ at a restaurant. And the way he would rapidly switch off – the arc lights of his dark eyes dimming, the charming exuberance sloughing off his face, his whole body, once he’d gotten what he wanted and his attention moved on. She’d never known him to not get what he wanted.

  He navigated the world like it was a sleepy suburban street he’d driven down every day of his life, taking the corners as though the possibility of disaster had never occurred to him. She supposed it hadn’t, couldn’t. He would, for example, if he found a restaurant meal to be unsatisfactory, summon a waiter with a gesture, explain the problem, and send the meal back, a prospect so mortifying to Sasha that every time he did it she squirmed in her seat until a new meal was set in front of him. The idea that this could be something to be afraid of was incomprehensible to him. When she tried to explain her anxiety, he laughed, and sent back the steak he was enjoying, just because he could.

  His apartment was uptown, and in the evenings, when they crawled out of bed to eat, he took her to places she’d practically lived on top of her whole life but never known about – little red-sauce restaurants where the waiters wrote the order on the tablecloth, a speakeasy reached through a secret door in a hot-dog shop. The more he showed her the more she realised they’d grown up in entirely different cities. Long Island was only a train ride away from Manhattan, but for a young woman who couldn’t afford the fare, it might as well have been the other side of the world.

  For her birthday he picked her up in a town car and drove her upstate, plied her with champagne on the way. At a farm restaurant the waiter delivered a long, enthusiastic lecture on the provenance of every vegetable. ‘You think you’ve had a carrot,’ he said solemnly, placing a single roasted vegetable on a wide, wide plate in front of her, ‘but you’ve never tasted a vegetable until today.’

  When the meat course arrived, she grabbed at her cutlery, grateful the waiter did not provide a family tree with the cow’s lineage.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Stephan asked, smiling.

  She looked down at her food, up again, scanned the room.

  ‘Your fork. What are you doing?’

  She glanced down again, made sure that, yes, she was eating with the correct fork, selecting the utensils furthest from her plates, working from the outside in. ‘What do you mean?’ she asked, baffled.

  ‘That’s . . . that’s not how a fork works.’ He laughed.

  He showed her how to hold a fork with the index finger stretched down the back, holding the tines in place. Until that moment she’d always used a fork as her mother taught her, fist wrapped around the handle like it was a dagger, stabbing morsels to bring them to her mouth. It had never occurred to her there was a wrong way to use a fork. The downside of growing closer to someone: an education on the million tiny errors in the way she walked the world.

  ‘Listen,’ he said one day in a pizzeria under the Brooklyn Bridge, blotting a greasy slice with a napkin. ‘Why don’t you ever invite me to do things? Like, hang out with you and your friends? Don’t you think that’s kind of weird?’

  Weird. The word reached right inside her and squeezed the juice out. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s just that – we’ve been dating for a while now, and I haven’t met anyone in your life. It makes me wonder how serious things are between us. I mean, is there someone else?’

  She snorted, almost choked on her slice. While she struggled to swallow she shook her head, no, there was no one else. ‘I just don’t have . . . many friends,’ she said, which wasn’t quite true, but to say she had no friends at all was too sad to vocalise.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I mean, it’s hard to stay in touch with anybody – if I’m not studying I’m working, and if I’m not working I’m with you, and if I’m not with you I’m with Mama.’

  ‘Well, that’s another thing. When am I going to meet your mom?’

  The thought was so preposterous she laughed, and his face fell. She fumbled for the right thing to say. ‘Look, yes, maybe one day, but my mom is . . .’ She had no words to untangle the complicated knot that sat heavy in her belly.

  How to explain her mother? In the years since that morning when Mama had cleaned up the blood-soaked bedsheets, she had grown only more vigilant, jealous of Sasha’s time. Every night she’d be waiting in her armchair, bottle by her side, until Sasha came home from college or work, requiring an account of every minute of her day, which, in order just to live, necessitated a life of careful subterfuge, the scrubbing of phone messages, an ever-more-elaborate string of half-truths and misdirection until, finally, Mama was satisfied and would heave herself up to make dinner. That was a bigger conversation than she possibly knew how to start, so instead Sasha said, ‘She’s . . . very Catholic.’

  Later, when she was home, deep in study and popping pills to make it through her coursework, her phone pinged with a message from Stephan.

  ‘Seiko. Miss you. Did you enjoy dinner?’

  ‘Very much. You?’

  ‘Yes, although I’m a little disappointed I picked up the check but didn’t get to see you naked. Would like that remedied.’

  Was he kidding? Her thumb hovered over her phone. ‘Are you kidding?’

  ‘I am. Unless you’re into it, in which case I am not.’

  ‘Absolutely not.’ She texted, and then, after a moment, ‘You go first.’

  Seconds later, a picture message lit her phone up. It was a slightly blurry shot of a man’s stomach, dimly lit, an Oxford unbuttoned to reveal the obliques leading into the waistband of a pair of ch
inos. The picture arrived so quickly that she was worried he already had it prepared, which meant he was the sort of man who kept pre-fabricated sexts on his phone and must ply this line all the time.

  Nevertheless.

  It took her some time to take a suitable picture. She was methodical, applied production values – changed the angle of her lamp, the floor length mirror she was capturing her reflection in, the way she held her torso – using his photo as a guide. The work took thought, but she wasn’t really thinking about it, not exactly – she had the light airy distraction of incipient arousal, which was more mental than physical at this point, and the pleasant floating sensation of being on Ritalin, being pushed downstream by some pre-determined river.

  The pills took the effort out of endless revision of lecture notes, of taking a selfie that skirted the line between playful and sexy. In the end she settled for a demure one, her body cast into a soft silhouette by her reading lamp, wearing underpants she had changed into especially for the photo, topless, one arm folded across her chest.

  She sent it off, and, after a long pause, Stephan sent one back.

  Later, when they were all done, she floated in that fizzy, ambivalent mood. She returned to her studies and later, once she was in bed, scrolled back through the exchange with a smile on her face and clumsy, uncertain happiness fluttering through her body.

  Sasha woke up reluctantly. The downside of taking these pills was the mornings, which were choppy and ragged. She’d slept badly, disturbed by formless, anxious dreams that slipped away the moment she stirred but left her with a pulse that ticked in her ears and a sore jaw from grinding her teeth.

  She had no idea what time it was. Before bed she’d drawn the blinds against the dawn. She rolled over and reached for her phone on the nightstand, but it wasn’t in its usual position. She propped herself up on a shoulder to search for it, and it took a full minute for her mind to catch up with her lurching heart and realise what had happened.