And Again

by Jessica Chiarella

  “Is Harry in?”

  “He is but . . . do you have an appointment?” she asks, faltering a bit, her eyes flitting between me and the blue glow of her computer screen.

  “No, but he’ll want to see me. Tell him Connie Kavanagh is here.” I give her my stage name, because telling her that he’ll want to see Connie Duffy would probably ruin the effect. She’s too young to recognize my name so she just nods, pressing a button and speaking into her headset, her eyes on me as I stand there tapping a fingernail on the glass countertop. I should have a manicure, I realize, though I’ve been enjoying the clear smoothness of my bare nails, now that they aren’t thickened and discolored with the fungus that overtook them in the past few years. It’s all in the details though, this business, so it’s a mistake I’ll have to correct by the next time I see Harry. The girl presses another button and looks up at me with wide eyes, like a teenage babysitter who’s been caught smoking a joint after the kids are asleep.

  “He’s on an important call at the moment, ma’am. But I can set up an appointment for you if you’d like to come back. Maybe sometime next week?” I know how this goes, I’ve partnered in this particular dance before. Harry became an expert at dodging me after I got sick, back before I realized that my career was already gone. He’d cancel appointments and reschedule me and have business trips or personal crises pop up at the last minute. Once he even stood me up for lunch in Chicago, leaving me sitting alone drinking glass after glass of chardonnay at the Park Grill until I finally staggered into a cab and cried all the way back to my apartment. I heard later from a mutual friend that he’d had a minor breakdown over my diagnosis and spent the next six months bingeing on OxyContin and having panic attacks until his own HIV tests came back negative. It didn’t make much sense; we’d had a brief string of sexual encounters years before I started doing heroin, but he apparently didn’t take my word for it. Serves him right, I thought at the time. That’s what he gets for his aversion to condoms.

  It occurs to me again that I should find a different agent, that Harry’s behavior—and our history—should disqualify him from benefitting from my newfound advantages, but the only thing more dangerous than having Harry on my side is having him find out I’ve started working again with someone else. Hollywood has a fifteen-minute memory for people like me—actresses with all the potential in the world who never really make it past that first starring role—but agents like Harry never forget a face they’ve represented, no matter how altered it’s become by time or cosmetic surgery or genetic rebirth. No, I need him working with me to keep the transfer a secret, so I smile at the girl at the desk until she practically wilts in front of me, a flower burned by too much sun.

  “Listen, sweetie, a word to the wise—I know you’re about fifteen years old—but women like me are always ‘miss,’ never ‘ma’am,’ understand? Very important.” I tap my finger on the desk to emphasize my point. She turns the color of an under-ripe tomato, her blush competing with an almost green tinge of nauseated embarrassment.

  “Of course, miss,” she says.

  “Well, if you don’t mind, I’m just going to pop in and say a quick hello.” I move toward the frosted glass of the door to Harry’s office and the girl half-rises out of her chair, unsure how to halt me in my progress, or maybe debating whether or not to try to warn Harry of my impending intrusion.

  “But, miss—” she says, though I’m already through the door. Harry is at his desk, a paper napkin stuffed in the collar of his shirt and what looks like a ham sandwich spread before him on his desk. He nearly jumps from his seat when I enter, forgetting to remove the napkin, and I watch his face transform from shock to outrage and back again with almost comic rapidity. He’s a short man with round glasses, and, though he still has most of his hair, the years of sunning himself in the Bahamas have caught up to him in the soft mesh of lines on his face. He gapes at me like a well-dressed trout.

  “Afternoon, Harry,” I say, wishing I’d worn white gloves that I could pull off and tuck in the crook of my arm. But, despite my lack of props, I make a good show of dropping into one of his chairs and crossing my legs. The dress rides up a bit. “Please, have a seat,” I say, motioning to his chair. He drops back into it like he’s been knocked over by a gust of wind. See, I think, this is the man whose attention I begged for five years ago. This is the man who swept me off his desk like so much old paper. But now he’s sitting down, in his own office, in one of Los Angeles’s most fantastically expensive high rises, because I told him to. This is the power my mother worshipped so enduringly.

  “Connie,” he says, bringing his hand to his mouth and brushing the napkin as he moves. He glances down then yanks it from his collar and balls it up in his fist.

  “It’s been a while,” I say.

  “Yes, and you look, hell, you look . . .”

  “Better than the last time you saw me, I’m sure,” I reply, unwilling to let him say anything until I’ve finished. “I’m ready to start working again, Harry. Despite how we left things, I decided I owed you the professional courtesy of coming to you first with the opportunity of representing me.”

  He looks at me like I’ve propositioned him using the most pornographic language imaginable; it’s a mixture of carnal awe and blind disbelief. “Representing you?”

  “I’ve decided to return to acting. I assume you’re still an actual agent and this isn’t all just for show?” I motion around the office. I feel like I’ve turned up a winning hand in high-stakes poker and I’m watching the man across from me debate whether or not to call. It’s a moment of pure, vengeful jubilation.

  “Of course, but . . . my god, Connie. What on earth has happened to you?”

  “Modern medicine, my friend. Now, would you be a dear and get me a glass of water?”

  I detect a bit of a tremble in Harry’s hand as he reaches for the button on his intercom.

  Hannah

  I bring the awful second painting home, propping it up on our kitchen table, and wait for Sam. His flight got in this afternoon, but I know that he’ll stop at his office before coming home, getting some last moments of work in. Since I’ve recovered from my illness, he’s recommitted to his job with the fervor of a kid diving into summer vacation. As if his work is the reprieve from everything outside of it.

  I don’t know what I expect when he arrives, but he lights up when he sees me with a canvas. He barely kisses me hello, a chaste peck on my forehead, before his eyes alight on it.

  “God that’s incredible,” he says, picking it up and holding it at arm’s length. “It’s really, really great, Hannah.”

  “No, it’s not,” I say, already weary at his ignorance. He warned me about this, I remind myself. That night in the gallery, he told me he knew nothing about art. And I have grown to resent him for it, his disinterest regarding the hinge on which my whole life moves.

  “Of course it is. It’s the best painting I’ve seen in a long time,” he says, setting it down on our coffee table. “It’s just great that you’re painting again. Reentering that part of your life.”

  “All this does is prove the fact that we’ve been avoiding this whole time. I can’t try and force everything back to being the way it was,” I say, willing him to understand, to stop avoiding all the ways in which we are ruined. In which I am ruined.

  “But you did it,” he says. “It’s right here. And it’s great.”

  “It’s not great.” I say the word like it’s something sour and raw I need to expel from my mouth. “It’s not even close to great. It’s a failure. That’s what it looks like to fail at the only thing I’ve ever been able to do.”

  “You just need to keep working at it,” Sam says, though now his voice is threaded with tension. His veneer of calm is wearing thin.

  “It’s not going to make a difference.”

  “Fine,” he says, throwing up his arms. “So paint for yourself then. Forget what anyone else thinks. It didn’t matter to me what prizes you won. It never mattered
to me.”

  “Of course it mattered,” I say, because this is what I want. This argument. It’s why I brought the painting home in the first place, for this reason alone. Because losing my ability to paint is perhaps the most profound tragedy of my life. And for Sam, it doesn’t even register. The thought of it makes me so angry, I have no compunction about going for the throat. “It mattered. That’s the thing about being a hotshot journalist, isn’t it? It looks damn cheap if your girlfriend’s only marketable skill is taking her clothes off for worthless art students.”

  “I don’t care what it looks like.” I can feel him disengaging.

  “Of course you do. This is what you want. This is just the right turn for you, isn’t it?” I think of the expensive clothes I threw out, the perfect apartment I helped create. How hard I tried to become the sort of woman he could love. Someone wholly unlike the girl I was. “There was always too much about me that wasn’t what you wanted. And that was fine in the beginning, because you were twenty-seven, right at the point in your life when everything you liked started to seem boring. That’s what made it interesting at first, that there was a lot about me you didn’t like.”

  “I never asked you to change anything,” he says.

  “No, you didn’t ask. But you’ve always wanted it,” I reply, stepping toward him. “Don’t you like me like this? All perfect for you now?” He is grinding his back teeth together, everything in him straining away from his own anger. But I want it, I want his rage, I want something from him that will match my sadness, my guilt. “Maybe I can be what you want now, hmm? Maybe I can be what you’ve always wanted, the perfect replacement for Lucy, staying home and keeping your house and having babies for you?”

  There are tears in his eyes when he looks at me. And I hate him, in that moment. Hate him because he can’t be as strong or as cruel as I am. He is no match for me, for the things of which I am capable. Hate him because he is a good man, and so all of his cruelty is born of weakness. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” he asks. “What makes you think I deserve this?”

  “You know,” I say, everything in me hardening with resolve. “You know. Don’t make me ask.”

  He shakes his head, unfastening his tie and throwing it on the table. Doing anything he can to keep from answering. Finally he looks up at me.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  A laugh tears its way out of me. It’s all become so absurd, absurd to the point of comedy, that we could keep this farce going even a minute longer. I want to tell him that this body isn’t his. My old body might have belonged to him, but not this one, not anymore.

  “Do you really think saying it out loud will make any difference?” I ask. “How about this? I’ll go first,” I say, because I’ve forgotten not to hurt him. I can feel all of the sadness and regret wash out of me, my anger like a purifying fire. “I slept with David Jenkins. Your turn.”

  Both his hands come down on the table, fast, and I jump at the noise. It silences me, both of us. We stand there. He doesn’t look at me. And his expression changes then because he finally understands what this is. He knows that this is how it ends.

  “Goddamn you,” he says, his hands tightening into fists as he straightens to face me. “Fine. I didn’t have the flu. All right? Is that what you want to hear?”

  “Maybe,” I reply. I think of Lucy crying into his shirt, the way he held her, the intimacy there. Yes, I want to hear all of it, every detail. If for no other reason but that it will wipe away my guilt over David. “Tell me about what happened with Lucy.”

  “She covered for me. She lied, even though she didn’t want to. She did it because I begged her to.”

  “What happened, Sam?”

  “I couldn’t stay,” he says. “The doctors, they told me that you wouldn’t survive the week, your numbers were too low, you weren’t going to make it to the transfer. And I couldn’t stay there and watch.”

  “What?” I have never heard this. No doctor has ever told me this. But the pain of that week was so intense, so wrenching, I know it must be true. I know that I was dying.

  “I couldn’t watch that, not with you. So I got in my car and . . . drove. For days. Just drove, to Montana, Wyoming, I think. Waiting for Lucy to call and tell me . . .” He’s crying. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him cry, in all the years I’ve known him.

  “Oh god.” I grip the back of a chair. My palms are wet. There’s a taste of metal on my tongue. I sit down carefully, my mouth pressed into my hand.

  “I was out of my mind. I can’t even . . .”

  “You need to go,” I say, but there’s no air behind it, it’s the barest of whispers. This is too much, too much for this new body, maybe. I’m cold, a deep cold. As if this truth, the one I had not prepared for, has set off some terrible chain reaction within me. I’m worried it’s more than this body can take. “Please. I don’t want you to come back here.”

  “Hannah.” He drops to his knees in front of me, clasping my hands in his. He is so warm that I want to curl into him, let him gather me up. But I can’t. I can’t stop remembering what it was like to wake up day after day and ask for Sam, because Sam was who I asked for when I was scared. And he was gone.

  “Please. You have to go.” I can ask this of him, and I know he will give it to me. His body shudders a bit, and then he straightens.

  “I’m sorry. Please, know that,” he says. I can only shake my head. He should have chosen someone good, someone like him. He knows that I am not one for forgiveness. So he takes his keys out of his pocket and works the silver one off the ring, setting it on the table between us. Then he picks up his suitcase and leaves.

  David

  Hannah calls me in the middle of the night, but I’m awake. I haven’t been sleeping well since Beth left to go back to Wisconsin to be with David Jr.; since the call with Burt Leeland. The apartment feels foreign, cold, and hard around me like everything in it has been carved from stone.

  “I need to talk,” she says, a strange crackle in her voice that I mistake for the static of her cell phone.

  “It’s a little late,” I say, and then wait for a response. “Hannah?” Nothing comes. I let out a long breath. “All right, come over. You remember the address?”

  “Yeah,” she says.

  She shows up at my door and she looks bad, like she has an awful head cold. But when she steps closer, steps inside, I can see that I’m wrong. She’s not sick. She’s upset. She glances around the darkness in my apartment, the flicker of the television strobing against the living room wall, the college basketball game I’ve been dozing in and out of for the past hour or so. Her eyes look hollow in the dark, her hair lank around her shoulders.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask, but she shakes her head. It’s a cold feeling, when she kisses me, so different from the scorch of that kiss on the rooftop, or Beth’s tepid embraces. Even her skin under my hands feels chilled by the winter air, and she tastes of salt, and I think of water, huge expanses of dark water. And I know that I’ve been lying this whole time, when I’ve been shouting to myself and anyone else who will listen that I’m a different person. A better man. That I’ve changed, that last time was a one-off, a misstep that can be corrected. Because this girl, this damn girl, knows me too well already. She knows that I can’t say no. Not here, alone in the middle of the night in the darkness of my apartment, with this cold girl in my arms, where the possibility of daylight feels very remote. Here there is only going under. Here, there is only giving in.

  It strikes me anew, when we’re upstairs in the muddy streetlight flooding my bedroom, how different her body is from the other women I’ve known. She feels like bone beneath my hands, and her skin is distractingly flawless, so different from Beth’s marks and moles and the dark seam of the C-section scar that traverses her belly. Hannah is thin and supple and pliant beneath me, and I want her with such force I’m afraid of hurting her. There is something so tender and vulnerable about her, like the skin of a nectarine, as if I could
bruise her with simply the press of a fingertip. And it’s all a little sickening, the strength of my desire and the ferocity with which she answers it. This is how people are ruined, I think. This is how kingdoms are toppled. Wanting, like this.

  It’s only after, when she’s lying facing away from me on the bed with the sheet curled around the jab of her hipbone, that I think of Beth and the second chance I’ve already begun to squander. The thought makes me angry.

  “Where’s Sam tonight?” I ask, because I want to be a little mean to this girl, as she has been to me by showing up at my door tonight.

  “Gone,” she says, her voice flat. She doesn’t cry, or even breathe any differently after she says it. It’s as if all the emotion has been drained from her, left her still and empty, and I think that I’ve been the tool of this transformation.

  “His choice or yours?”

  “His,” she says, but I think she’s lying. My lower lip is bleeding from her teeth. Tonight was a palate-cleansing sort of fuck, like she’s trying to blot out the memory of someone else. And she doesn’t seem like the sort of woman that men leave.

  “Too bad.”

  “Where’s your wife?” she asks, and there’s more than a little cruelty in her voice.

  “Wisconsin. With my son.”

  “Must get lonely for you here.”

  “Sometimes.”

  She turns to face me then. “Does she know?”

  “Does she . . .”

  “About your extracurricular activities.” The way she says it makes me want to kiss her, or throttle her, to wipe the smugness out of her expression.

  “What makes you think I’ve done this before?” I ask.