8
Ashley looked at her plate, large and white, a gallery for these lonely slivers of raw fish, so recently dead they still seemed a little alive, and being this close to this edge of life and death made her wonder which of the people in this restaurant, thousands of dollars in their mouths, had the fewest days left to live. She was wearing a dress someone else owned, these weird sensors hidden beneath it, and makeup someone had put on her face. So as she ate all this money, and knew her bank account held less than half what she owed this month, the invisible time limit everyone had, the wealth none could accrue, was the only thing that made her feel even with the people in this room. Ashley felt sure that she was the only diner in the restaurant who had mopped a floor in recent memory, though she wasn’t sure what that fact indicated, if anything.
High above her head were massive light fixtures that looked like jellyfish riddled with diamonds, and Kurt was still discussing the merits of unfiltered sake with the sommelier. The seriousness of their tone annoyed Ashley. It was fucking juice. A pinched ache moved across the sommelier’s face, as if he knew so much about rice wine that it had become painful to him, that his knowledge created pressure in his skull. Ever so slightly, the jellyfish swayed.
This was Ashley’s first public Relational Experiment, during which she was supposed to seem unanimously interested in everything Kurt said for the first hour of the date, then to turn slightly sour, to insist nothing was wrong when he asked what was wrong, but to begin subtly undermining everything he said, then to berate him for how long he was taking to finish The Walk, storm out before the dinner was through, wait in the backseat of his town car, slap him when he got in, let a tense silence grow between them before wordlessly getting out of the car, hailing a cab, and disappearing into the night.
At her apartment and looking back on the evening, she’d been surprised by how easy it had been, that one night’s work had earned her as much money as she could make in a week of good tips—more than a few sessions with her trainer.
Slapping Kurt had felt less ridiculous and happened more intuitively than she’d expected, and as they sat there breathing heavily for the required twenty seconds of silence, she felt the same elation she had after a good fight, the sensation that her body somehow contained additional bodies. There is likely a way to explain this feeling from afar—the activation of certain neurotransmitters or a chug of adrenaline—but from the inside it was mythic, as unmistakable as it was addictive, that sense of being more than she was.
The omakase’s foams and drizzles had left her hungry, so a can-shaped congeal of chicken soup softened in the pot while she watched one of her favorite fights between Kit Kimberly and Shauna Matthews on her GX phone—she’d never had one of those things before—playing and replaying as Kit’s left hook took Shauna down. On the fifth or sixth loop a text came in from Matheson—the Research Division was pleased with how the assignment had gone, her activity patterns had been promising, and her next assignment would be written and sent tomorrow.
She played the fight again, and once more, and drank the soup without tasting it. That night she dreamed of her father, Omar, sitting on the high branch of a tree, his skin, for some reason, light purple. It had been years since she’d dreamed of him. He said he was sorry and asked her if she knew why. She did and said she did, then they sat there silently for a while, letting the unsaid expand between them. Then he asked her about her training schedule, and everything was mundane for a while, as dreams sometimes become—even the unconscious mind wants a little routine. He abruptly climbed down the tree, and though Ashley was aware it was her dream to control, she let him go. She woke to a silent room, morning light coming in at a serious angle.
* * *
Any day now, Omar used to tell her, any day now we’re going to get a call that’ll change everything. We don’t belong in this place. You’ll see.
But they never did see. Her mother had been a slightly successful model in São Paulo, but no one in New York seemed to care. Luisa was told she had a commercial look but she never got any commercials except that one for an ESL school that paid in a course she didn’t want to take. Omar had been a boxer who’d had a strong beginning to his career but had never rebounded after breaking his leg in a fall (he would never say drunken fall, but it was a semi-drunken fall) down the subway stairs at Eighty-Sixth Street. The only calls they got were from bill collectors or telemarketers or Luisa’s mother or sister back in Brazil, family Ashley couldn’t remember having ever met, their voices a little familiar but less so with every passing year.
How Omar and Luisa got together was a long story, one Luisa always recalled in Portuguese, as if the memory couldn’t be translated. Omar told it in the same clichés—how he just knew she was the one and how she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. Their native tongues were different, and even now, decades later, Ashley still wonders if this is the reason that their love seemed to persist so much longer than the average couple’s—that having a language barrier set a realistic expectation, that they might never completely understand each other. The unknowable, perhaps, had kept them together. But other times Ashley remembered the nervous way her mother would stare at Omar, the same way those tiny dogs look at their owners, a fearful love.
Their one-and-a-half-bedroom in the East Bronx was supposed to be the starter apartment for the young family, just until things take off, her father said, but the longer they were temporarily there the clearer it became that the temporary had become the forever. Omar kept their hope alive by pointing to certain cars and saying, That’s the one we’re going to get, and Luisa kept the Sunday paper’s real estate section on the kitchen table all week, but then Omar spent most of their savings on a used Lexus, and when he drove up outside their crumbling apartment, Luisa quivered for a minute before cursing him. She just didn’t understand, Omar said. You had to appear to be whomever you were trying to be.
We’re going for a drive, he told them, get in the car. We’re going.
They drove around Rye that afternoon, looking at all the massive and pristine houses from the car.
Nice family, nice car, and one of these days a nice neighborhood like this one, a nice house, a pool. You’ve always wanted a pool, haven’t you, Lu?
Luisa wept steadily and quietly in the backseat. Ashley was seven and just happy to sit shotgun. Your mother worries too much, Omar whispered, but eventually he sold the car and stopped talking about leaving their neighborhood and even stopped praying for it at Sunday mass. It’s nice here, he said.
By then Ashley had grown into a teenage beauty that left a trail of craned necks, and since being grabbed on the bus and subway, she’d taken an interest in the fine art of beating the shit out of people. Luisa had suggested modeling classes instead, but Ashley was tired of people looking at her. Omar thought the headshots and everything would be too expensive anyway, and she could train for free at the gym where he coached. It put him at ease to teach Ashley how to defend herself since he and her mother sometimes had to leave her alone to work longer hours. The older she got, the more beautiful she became, and though she tried to hide herself in jerseys and baggy pants, there was no hiding her face, no getting out of her body.
* * *
Sweat drenched after her training, waiting for her dad to finish with a client, she met Jason, and though she usually didn’t talk to guys she didn’t know, he got past her filter somehow—he didn’t have that knowing smile, that unhidden agenda, when he looked at her. Smiley, white, well dressed. Maybe he’s gay, she thought, and this thought warmed her, gave her permission to talk easily with him. He was almost eighteen and in acting school and soon he was going to get an agent and everything. He didn’t ask anything of her, just talked and talked. He’d just gotten this award that meant he got to meet with some famous actor. Sort of like a coach, he said, because being famous is tough, you know. You got to have someone show you how to do it.
He wasn’t exactly in acting school but in a mandatory progr
am as part of his juvenile probation after he busted in that kid’s head at the foster home where he’d lived since he was thirteen. His behavior had been good for the last two years, and compared to that of the other students, his acting was almost promising, so he’d been picked for this mentorship program for teenagers with a juvenile offense. But he abbreviated the story: acting school.
When he asked her how she got into boxing, she said it was her dad’s idea, nodding to Omar, who was tossing a medicine ball at one of his trainees, who did agonized crunches with the weight—a soft-bellied banker who still had a Rocky poster tacked up in his living room.
That’s your dad?
Omar. He’s a coach. Only then did she realize she wanted to seem parentless to Jason, without or beyond an origin.
Will your dad beat me up if I ask for your number?
She wrote it down, smiling, feeling somehow significant and uncomfortable, a nervousness that stiffened her face.
They started meeting after the gym. He said he liked to see her all sweaty in those baggy clothes, that she was beautiful no matter what she wore, and though she had come to hate that word—beautiful, what strangers hissed at her on the street—hearing it from Jason gave it a purpose. She had only kissed two boys, that guy Brandon (last winter after the first and only school dance she’d ever gone to) and Tracy Simpson’s older brother the summer she was twelve and he was seventeen, and though she wanted to replace these memories with something better, she had not exactly been looking forward to it. Her father’s only advice had come two years ago—The boys, they’re all trying to get the same thing—which she already knew much better than he did.
She kept her meetings with Jason secret and brief, at first reluctant to even let him touch her waist while they kissed, not even entirely sure she enjoyed it but curious, looking for something in it. He was both annoyed and pleased by her modesty, said a lesser girl would have put out by now, said he could wait his whole life for her. But Ashley wasn’t looking for her whole life and didn’t think of Jason as someone who meant everything to her, the way she’d heard other girls talk about their boyfriends. But he was something. He was enough. All the cliques at school had reset with puberty and she’d been left out, her silence and good looks seen as stuck-up and bitchy. Jason, her only friend, gave some continuity to her days.
On nights her dad was out of town for a tournament and her mother had the night shift, Ashley would spend the night at the apartment in East Harlem where Jason lived with his cousin. Half the time a handful of other guys hung out in the living room. Ashley hated the way their presence changed Jason—his voice lowered, he grabbed her ass in front of them, said stupid shit to sound tough, and sometimes he got stoned and sometimes he got a little drunk and sometimes he’d try too much with her even though it had only been two months, but he kept saying, It’s been two months, as if that were the longest time that anyone had ever waited for anything ever.
One night he was already half-drunk when she got there and something about the way Jason looked at her told her to leave, but she didn’t. She watched him and his friends play a video game, and two of them were jumpy and strange and Jason’s cousin would not stop laughing this constant and terrifying laughter that went on and on, even after the games were over and the jumpy guys had jittered away. After everyone had gone, Jason picked Ashley up and carried her to his bedroom and tossed her on the bed, which seemed like a joke so she smiled, even as he pinned both her hands down, even as he wouldn’t look her in the eye. Soon it didn’t seem like a joke anymore (the pitch of the cousin’s laughter cutting through the walls) and soon her dress was pushed up—a dress Jason had bought for her, a fitted basketball jersey—and everything was still for a moment, a half second she later scrutinized, wondering if that was the moment she could have done something—the moment she realized he was not kidding as he held her still and not kidding when he forced himself inside her, his hand smashed over her mouth, and she went as still as she’d been as a child during hide-and-seek (if she couldn’t be found, she couldn’t be hurt) and she could still hear the cousin’s stringy laughter in the other room but nothing felt funny, nothing had ever been funny in her life. He rolled off and she tried to hold it together, tried to be tough, tried to put all her anger into her clenched jaw—this was nothing, this meant nothing, he was nothing, meant nothing—but she couldn’t stop herself from crying.
Don’t be one of those girls, acting like you don’t want it. I know what you want. You’ve been begging me for this all week.
To this her eyes went hard and dry. She stood slow, felt a warm trickle down her thigh. Something of his was in her now, something of his terribleness. She leaned over and hooked him in the jaw, but he reacted faster than she expected, jumping up and pushing her down, smacking her skull against the bedside table, a water glass smashing off, spilling and breaking, and he got his face close to hers, held her arms down with his knees.
Don’t you ever— He didn’t finish the sentence, just slapped her hard in the face, and she spit in his eye and he slapped her again.
You like it, it’s not my fault you’ve been begging me to get fucked like that.
He made her sleep on the floor but she didn’t sleep and in the morning he locked her in his room from the outside so she pulled out his AC, climbed down the fire escape, dangled from the ladder, and dropped herself into a bush. When she found the dank alleyway out of the courtyard, she started running, slowly at first, floating, keeping something at her center solid and still. She weaved through the bodies on the sidewalks, dashed past bodies sitting on stoops. She ran past a group of boys her age who whistled and she was angry that they didn’t know what had happened to her though she didn’t want them to know what had happened to her, and she felt vaguely afraid of them and she felt angry that she was afraid of them and sorry for that fear, then angry again, angry as the city woke up, as the streets became full and loud. She was furious at mothers pushing strollers and at children swarming the playgrounds, and even more furious at men in cars, all the men in trucks and cabs, all the men in all that metal filling the streets with danger and the air with sickness. As she neared her home, she felt the cartilage and tendons knotted in her knees, a throbbing low in her back. She felt the pavement jolting through these flimsy little sneakers, felt sweat making that terrible dress stick to her body.
Her apartment was dim and silent (Luisa was sleeping off her overnight shift and Omar was still out of town) and Ashley moved quietly through it, keeping the lights off, stepping lightly. She took a shower, threw up on her feet. She opened her mouth to the shower stream, swallowed scalding water, her body hot and nauseated and hungry and repulsed. With her hair still wet she took a twenty from the emergency cash and went a few blocks over to the cheap, bad restaurant pretending to be a good restaurant. She ordered a steak and sat in a barrel-backed stool with her legs splayed open under the bar, taking up all the room she could. She went at that steak feeling that if she could destroy it, she could destroy everything that had happened, destroy that moment she had had a chance to say something but said nothing, destroy the memory of his face above her, conquer all of it, be done with it, be fine. A man at the other end of the bar was nursing a beer and watching her from over the edge of a newspaper.
What? she shouted at him.
He lowered his paper. Smiled at her.
What do you want? she said, louder, and she didn’t recognize this voice, lower now, more of her body in it, more powerful.
You like that steak, sweetie?
Without thinking she cut a piece and flung it at him. It hit his chest and landed on the paper, making a puddle of grease, and he smiled at Ashley, but she wasn’t looking. He watched her the way adults watch children, entertained by what they think is naïveté, and it seemed to Ashley that boys grew up to be men, but girls just stayed girls as long as the whole world agreed to treat them this way, liabilities, precious objects, things to be protected or told what to do. Omar had once taken the neighbor’s
kid to a parking lot to teach him how to drive, and even though that boy was two years younger than Ashley, Omar wouldn’t let her try, said she didn’t need to know, because not even her father’s love could override that when he looked at a boy, he could see the man he would become, but when he looked at Ashley, he still saw the little girl she’d been.
She ate all the meat. And the pale chunk of broccoli, still part raw. And the potato with all the sour cream and butter, skin and all.
9
Ed’s office was dark when Mary arrived, the door slightly ajar. She knocked, pushed the door open, saw Ed propped on a zafu facing the altar in the corner. He made no signal that he’d heard her, but she knew that he knew she was there, knew he was inviting her in. She closed the door. The faint light from the waiting room vanished and the dark hardened around her, broken only by a warm pool of candlelight before Ed.
Sit, he said, and she knew where to sit. He remained facing the corner. She knew he meant for her to sit on the plain wooden chair in the corner opposite him. But how did she know? She knew this so completely, so assuredly, that she did not even ask herself how she could know, didn’t even notice how she didn’t have to ask herself the question of how she knew. And Ed may not even have said the word sit aloud. He might have said nothing. There might have been another sense, another kind of conveyance between them now.
They were silent, minutes that accordioned into years, and at some point Mary became aware she was lying on her back on the table, her clothes folded into a neat stack atop the chair, though she didn’t remember the actions between sitting and lying. She felt she was falling and rising at the same time, as if water or air were rushing both up and down her body, or that gravity and a lack of gravity were acting on her at once. Though she thought she could hear some music, she couldn’t tell whether it was a recording or an instrument Ed was playing or whether it was possibly emanating from inside her, that somehow her body had become an antenna. She knew she did not need to say anything. It seemed each pore on her body had become a mouth and was breathing in great gasps, and this breathing covered her, and she felt it in her face, in the spaces between her fingers, the heavy skin along her thighs, papery backs of hands, soft lobes, all of it. Her eyes went watery and loose behind the lids.
The Answers Page 13
