Vapor

by Amanda Filipacchi

  I looked at Damon through the one-way mirror. He was sitting in bed with his chin in his palm. I felt bad. I went in there cheerfully and said, “I bought a good dinner to celebrate.”

  “Celebrate what?”

  “Your captivity.”

  While we were eating, he said, “I hope you don’t eat things like this all the time, or it won’t be long before …” and he raised his eyebrows meaningfully, not bothering to finish his sentence.

  “Why did you leave your finger behind, after I chopped it off? Why didn’t you take it with you and try to get it sewn back on?”

  “Oh, there are lots of reasons for that,” he said, eating caviar, and sucking on some of his remaining fingers. “First, I wanted to accept the punishment you had given me. I deserved it.” He picked up his glass of champagne and said, “Shall we drink to that?”

  We clinked glasses through the bars of the cage, and drank.

  He continued: “Second, I thought it would be a nice souvenir of you and from you, this absence of finger. An irreversible souvenir.”

  We clinked our glasses to that one too.

  “And third, and most importantly, it would remind me of the sacrifice I had made for you, the thought of which would cheer me up in moments of melancholy, making me feel better about myself.”

  He extended his glass to get it clinked again. Instead, I threw my champagne in his face and stared at him impassively.

  He blinked from the sting in his eyes. He clinked his glass against one of the bars of the cage, drank, and resignedly said, “Everyone is entitled to their own reasons for leaving a finger behind.”

  “Did I escape?” I asked.

  “No, of course not; you were released,” he answered, wiping his champagne eyes with his napkin. “I gave you a sword.”

  “Why did you fight me, then, and resist my departure, and push me to the point cutting off your finger?”

  “To give you the illusion of escape. I was afraid that if I released you in a straightforward manner and told you the truth, which was that we had achieved our goal and that you were now ready to conquer the acting world—I was afraid you would be more resistant to this destiny that I had so painstakingly planned for you and prepared you for. Whereas,” he stressed the word by holding up his plastic knife, “if you thought you had escaped, or even if you weren’t sure, you would then have a sense of control over your life and over your future, you would feel powerful, self-reliant, and self-satisfied at having gotten yourself ‘out of this jam.’ ” He made the quote marks in the air with his remaining fingers.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The days passed. Damon kept asking why I wasn’t releasing him, and I said it was because our little conversation wasn’t over yet. He got into the habit of frequently throwing things at me: his toothbrush, toothpaste, soap, the roll of toilet paper, the stopper from the bath, his shoes, his watch, his plastic cup to brush his teeth. I wanted to believe he was not really trying to hurt me, but I couldn’t, particularly when the heavy metal stopper hit me in the cheekbone, cutting me slightly. I then would shout at him some French words that a French friend of mine said to her cat when it was being bad: Méchant! (bad); Arrêtes! (stop); Fais gaffe! (watch out).

  During many hours a day I would sit on my reclining chair outside his cage and watch him and talk to him, and, on the whole, get what I began to call “my Damon tan.” I enjoyed these sessions; they charged me up, like a battery. I kept a bucket of ice cubes by my chair, from which I practiced my aim when he annoyed me. My spirits were very high in those days. Damon was my human pet, my hobby, my adviser, my therapist. I asked his advice about all sorts of things. We’d have deep, serious conversations about issues, such as: me. Mostly me. For example, he’d tell me how I should deal with such and such a person. And then he would throw his razor at me with great force. When I asked him why he did that, he said it was because it was normal.

  Every weekday we watched The Bold and the Beautiful, and Damon cried. I never understood why. The plot of the show concerned itself with the romantic problems of a family of successful fashion designers, and how one character, the long-lost legless brother, Stem, was making everyone’s life better.

  “Why is that so sad?” I would ask impatiently. “Why are you crying? I think it’s kind of nice that Stem told Brooke that Ridge really loves her. It means they’ll get back together. So why are you crying, god dammit! Tell me!”

  “Please be quiet,” he’d say, putting his hands over his ears.

  As an experiment, I made him watch The Young and the Restless one day, which ran an hour before the other soap. And he didn’t cry. It was therefore something about The Bold and the Beautiful that devastated him. I scrutinized his face, while he watched, and tried to detect a pattern to his crying, but found none.

  Occasionally, I would be interviewed at night on live TV, about the movie I was doing, and then go home. After throwing things at me when I entered, Damon would tell me he had seen my interview and found it great.

  When the interview wasn’t live, we would watch it together, our feet propped up on things, just like friends, the only difference being the few bars between us. We would drink mint, peach, raspberry, and cocoa liqueurs, and eat unpasteurized cheeses, and chocolate truffles, and Damon would laugh at my jokes to the interviewer or scowl at a stupid question of theirs.

  As the evening would wear on, Damon would try to control me from the cage, saying, “Okay, you’ve had enough truffles now. If you don’t moderate yourself, I’ll have to confiscate the box.”

  I would then stare at him and stuff three truffles in my mouth and chew them noisily, making sure he saw lots of glistening brown paste rolling around my tongue and over my teeth.

  “Oh, Anna,” he’d say, covering his eyes. “What are you doing to yourself?”

  I responded once by throwing a truffle at him, which left a circle of cocoa powder on his cheek before it dropped to the floor. Damon carefully picked up the truffle and placed it on the edge of his bathtub. “I am confiscating this truffle until you control yourself.”

  I had twenty more in the box, and I threw another one at him, and he repeated the procedure until he had six or seven truffles lined up on the edge of his bathtub. Then I got bored, and low on truffles, and stopped.

  Damon wanted to listen to music. So I got him a tape deck, which I placed outside his cage, out of his reach, so that he couldn’t fabricate an escape device out of it. I played him some of my tapes, including the one of Nathaniel playing the cello, without, however, telling him that Nathaniel was my boyfriend, or that I knew him in any way, or that I even had a boyfriend. Nathaniel’s cello compositions made a strong impression on Damon. He seemed mesmerized, and didn’t want me to play anything else. My questions to him, of course, yielded no results, and this happened in the following, rather typical, manner:

  “You really like this music?” I asked.

  “No, the word like doesn’t apply here,” he said, stretched out on his bed. “I feel a communion with it. It reminds me of certain emotions I’ve felt, and of other emotions that were not mine but were present in the atmosphere around me during a time in my life.”

  I threw an ice cube at him. “What were these emotions?” I asked, staring at him intently through two bars.

  “The same old thing, Anna. The same old thing I can’t tell you about.”

  “That thing that makes you cry during The Bold and the Beautiful?”

  “Yes. It all goes back to the same old thing.”

  “Will you ever tell me what that thing is?”

  He was thoughtful for a long time, staring at the ceiling, his arms clasped behind his head. “I don’t know. I’m not having much success imagining a time when I would feel compelled to tell you.”

  I threw another ice cube at him, which he then brushed to the floor, so it wouldn’t wet his mattress, I suppose. “To tell me or to tell anyone?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Anyone, perhaps. Perhaps you more than some ot
hers,” he said, glancing at me.

  “If I tortured you, would you tell me?”

  He chuckled. “It’s hard to know in advance. What kind of torture?”

  “Is there any kind that would be more likely to work?” I said, walking circles around his cage.

  “I don’t know right off. Maybe if I were inclined to think about it, I might come up with one that might strike me as being more likely to work. But I’m not inclined to think about it.”

  “Is there any other circumstance under which you could foresee telling me about that thing?”

  “I’m not inclined to think about that either right now. Could you please put the music back on.”

  I did, hoping I might find out more from his facial expression than from his words. But I didn’t, as it turned out, even though he kept listening to the tape over and over, that day and the next.

  Three days later, not having seen Nathaniel since the acquisition of my new man-pet a week before, I agreed to have dinner with him at a restaurant. I informed Damon of this.

  “You have a boyfriend?”

  “Of course, what did you think?”

  “Nothing. It’s good. You just never mentioned him.”

  “That’s true. And I also never mentioned that he’s the one who composed and played those cello pieces you like so much. I mean: that you feel such communion with.”

  “Really? That’s funny,” he said, without smiling.

  During dinner, Nathaniel said to me, “Something weird is going on that you’re not telling me.”

  “No.”

  “Yes. Something has happened, hasn’t it?”

  “Like what?”

  “You tell me. Have you met somebody? Are you interested in somebody else? Or is it Damon? Have you seen him again and you’re not telling me?”

  “Yes. We’re cohabiting.”

  “Just tell me the truth. It’s fine if that’s what it is. I just want to know. Please.”

  “That’s not what it is. But I think you’re taking our relationship a bit too seriously. Maybe we should take it easy for a while.”

  “No! You mean sexually? Sexually, that’s fine, but not as friends, not as people. I don’t want us to take it easy as people.”

  I was touched. “Okay, but then ease off a bit, okay?”

  “Sure. Are you living with someone?”

  “No. Are you kidding?”

  “Just answer me.”

  “I did.”

  “Prove it then. I want to see your apartment.”

  “Why?”

  “You haven’t let me see it in a while.”

  “No.”

  “If you don’t, I’ll assume you’re living with Damon, which is fine, I just want to know the truth.”

  “First of all, why would you assume such a thing? And second of all, I don’t care what you assume.”

  “You should. If you tell me, or show me, that you’re living with Damon, it’s fine. I’ll be sad and jealous, but I’ll accept it. But if you leave me in a state of assumption, I will react to it; I’ll notify your parents and the police. I’ll tell them you’re living with him.”

  “Do you think this endears you to me?”

  “I don’t care!” he shouted, slapping the table with his palm. “I just want to know the truth!” He was on the verge of tears, and added: “If you do show me your apartment, though, you must do it right now, so that you don’t have time to hide anything.”

  I thought about this for a minute, and then said “Okay.” I didn’t want to risk having Nathaniel talk to my parents or the police, filling their heads with this absurd idea that I was living with Damon. And anyway, I had locked everything sensitive before leaving: Damon’s room and the new closet with my control panel.

  I took Nathaniel to my apartment, and he noticed the new closet, and the open sofa bed.

  “Who’s been sleeping here?” he asked.

  “Me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the heater in my bedroom is broken, and I can’t have someone come in to fix it because it’s too messy in there.”

  He marched toward my bedroom door and tried to open it. “Why is it locked?”

  “Because it’s so messy. I don’t want anybody to see it. It’s embarrassing.”

  “This is too weird. I want to see your bedroom.”

  “No.”

  “What kind of relationship do we have if I can’t see your bedroom?”

  “A not very important one.”

  “Why are you being cruel?”

  “I’m just being factual. I don’t want to lead you on.”

  “You could be living with someone in your bedroom.”

  “Yes, I could be. And I lock him in when I leave my apartment.”

  He laughed. The tension seemed to have eased, but suddenly his body stiffened. “Where’s your TV?”

  “It’s in my messy bedroom.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the person I’m living with, in my bedroom, enjoys watching TV.”

  We laughed, and I added: “Particularly that soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful.”

  At this remark, his eyes opened unnaturally wide.

  As I stared at him staring at me, it occurred to me that I should write a letter to those producers of The Bold and the Beautiful, asking them if they had noticed a phenomenon involving men and their show, and if so, could they explain it to me.

  Finally, he turned away, mumbling to himself, “This doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”

  “But maybe it does mean something,” I said. “And if it does, Nathaniel, what does it mean? What is the meaning of The Bold and the Beautiful?”

  “None, as far as I know.”

  “Then why does it disturb certain people, like you?”

  “And who?”

  The conversation went nowhere. I had sex with him, to put his mind completely at ease. It was an interesting sensation to have sex while someone was in a cage nearby.

  Nathaniel wanted to see me again, a couple of days later, as was normal for a lover, but I had very little desire to see him. I kept making excuses. He got paranoid and suspicious again. So I saw him.

  “You look unhappy,” said Damon, when I came home after being with Nathaniel. With the remote control to the tape deck, he turned off the cello music, which he had rarely stopped listening to since I had introduced him to it.

  I plopped down in the lounge chair. “I want to break up with my boyfriend, your precious cellist.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he threatened to tell my parents, and the police, that I’m living with you. Can you imagine?”

  “What gall the man has.”

  “I know.”

  “So you told him?”

  “No. I mean, not seriously. He’s paranoid.”

  I wasn’t exactly telling Damon the truth. Nathaniel had not, this time, threatened to tell my parents anything. I wanted to break up with him because for some mysterious reason—a reason I didn’t want to delve into too deeply—the thought of him having sex with me didn’t appeal to me anymore. Not that it ever had. But now, I didn’t even feel neutral or indifferent about it. I was opposed, turned off; I had an actual aversion to it, and the strange thing was that it didn’t have much to do with Nathaniel.

  Damon was wrong. I was not unhappy. I felt cheerful and liberated at the thought of breaking up with Nathaniel, light and playful. I imagine it was the same sort of feeling people have after taking a laxative that worked. I didn’t know if I would have the courage to do it, though. I felt sorry for him. But I soon forgot about it as I spoke of other topics with my pet.

  Two days later, Chriskate Turschicraw called me, saying she had something important to tell me and asking if we could meet somewhere. We met in a coffee shop. She was disguised in a black wig and sunglasses. She informed me that she had not stopped loving Nathaniel, that she had simply put on a show, hoping to perk his interest. She told me frankly that she was distressed that I was going ou
t with him and that she needed to tell me about something that happened in her past with Nathaniel.

  “A few years ago,” she began, “when I was just starting out as a model, and not very successful, I fell in love with Nathaniel. He told me he found me wonderful, but that there was just one thing preventing him from being outright in love with me. He said there was something about me that turned him off, and that thing was that my nose was slightly too long. One millimeter too long, to be precise. Nobody had ever told me I had a long nose, so I was surprised. I was very sad and asked him if he was sure that meant he couldn’t love me. He said yes. I thought that was the end of that dream. But then he said there was a possible solution: I could get plastic surgery. I agreed to do it. He gave me the name of a good surgeon, offered to pay half the price of the surgery, and gave me precise written instructions to give to the surgeon as to how my nose should look. I had it done and went back to see Nathaniel once it had healed. I was very nervous because I wasn’t sure the result would be exactly what he had wanted. But it was. He said the surgeon had done a very good job and that the length of my nose was exquisite. I assumed this meant he would be able to love me, but I was wrong.”

  “What happened?” I asked, suddenly realizing I had been gaping for a while now.

  “Well, I sensed a certain reticence on his part, so I asked him about it, and he said there was one other thing that he found problematic and was trying to overcome. It was that my eyes were slightly droopy; the skin above my eyes covered my eyelids a tiny bit. He said that plastic surgery could easily take care of that. He once again gave me carefully written instructions to give to the surgeon. He assured me that after that there would be no more obstacles to his love for me. So I had it done.”

  “And?”

  “And he loved the result. He said it was beautiful. I asked him if he thought he could love me now. He seemed uneasy. He said, ‘Well, there is one other thing, but I hesitate to ask.’

  “ ‘What is it?’ I asked him.

  “ ‘If your top lip could be a tiny bit fuller.’ ”

  Chriskate’s story was very distressing to me. I couldn’t contain myself any longer: “And didn’t you object, at any point, to this charade?”