Those Who Knew

by Idra Novey

  Olga put down her thermos and tried to calmly indicate what a reach this was, to deduce such a convoluted message from a dead stranger based on the tag of a bra, which perhaps had been there in the drawer for years and she just hadn’t had a compelling reason to notice it.

  But, once again, Lena had wound herself too tightly around her own version to question it. In her adamant, emphatic way, Lena insisted the bra had absolutely not been in her drawer until now, said she was certain it was a second message from Maria.

  Olga sighed and lifted her thermos again. She’d been sipping all morning to stay warm and really needed to make a trip down to her house to use the bathroom. Lena yanking up her sweater, the mounting pressure on her bladder, getting pulled again into the consuming rage of crimes without consequences—it was really too much for this early in the morning. She hoped this wasn’t going to become a daily phenomenon, Lena rushing in this way, convinced of more garments from the great beyond.

  You’ll come with me to the play, won’t you? Lena leaned forward, bracing her weight over the desk. You said you were sorry you missed Freddy’s last play.

  I’d be even sorrier if I indulged this concocted logic of yours. Olga took another sip of her tea and immediately regretted it. She squeezed her legs together but it was too late. She closed her eyes. Listen, Lena, I need to close up for a few minutes and go down to the house.

  I wish you’d let me fix the pipes for you.

  Thank you, Ms. Heiress, but I’m fine taking care of it on my own.

  Lena shrunk back from the register and Olga clenched her jaw. A warm drop escaped her. Please, just let me lock up, Lena. I’m sorry, okay? I gave you my opinion yesterday, and you didn’t like it. If you want to invoke the wrath of a sociopath because you didn’t recognize a bra in your drawer, go ahead. Go and do it. Olga motioned to the door where, through the front window, they both saw Oscar crossing the street, carrying some new treat on a covered plate. He was so eager to reach them he was half loping, his jaunty, bouncing step causing the mop of his blond hair to flap against his forehead.

  Well, there’s your date for tonight, Olga said. I saw how you looked at him over your croissant.

  Transaction Log for Olga’s

  SEEK THE SUBLIME OR DIE

  September 7th

  Rough start to the morning, S. Offended Lena, pissed a little in my pants. Only consolation was a decent resale of a book for once:

  1:24, Sold

  The illustrated Kama Sutra, and to the head of Lena’s pedagogy department at asking price. Profit margin on horny middle-aged man nobody wants to sleep with:

  THREE HUNDRED PERCENT.

  It gave me such joy, S, shameless capitalist that I’ve become!

  4:28, Bought

  Nothing. Nobody else has come in since Lena’s department head, and Lena herself, trusting me enough to lift her shirt like that, to hear out her impossible logic. I didn’t mean to be so harsh, S. I just couldn’t handle it, how hell-bent she is on self-sabotage, not after forty years scraping away at the same bowl of questions and shame about being forced out of that room and leaving you there, after being so arrogant and naïve, insisting you were paranoid to think you needed to be more careful about the meetings. As if I had any idea what it was like to live on this island with a last name as obviously Jewish as yours. To have pressured you, after growing up under the cover of a name as common as my father’s, with no way for anyone to guess my mother might have gone as a child to the same little synagogue in the South End.

  If there is a reason I’ve lasted, S, I can’t fathom what it is.

  * * *

  At the sight of Lena emerging from the bookstore, Oscar nearly dropped his biscuits. The day was not quite as stingy with its light today. A few sunbeams had punctured the thinning clouds, which he hoped was the reason Lena was squinting so intently and not because she was debating whether to acknowledge him. In front of Olga’s tub of tulips, she stopped and told him Olga was closing up the Sublime and he couldn’t go in.

  If he had not seen Lena as recently as yesterday declaring revolution in a beard, or had not been adrift in the world for over a decade and at his most confident among strangers, it is possible the intersection of their lives might have ended there. Or if a produce truck hadn’t shuddered up the street just then, propelling a stray zucchini into the air like a lean green quivering bird. Or if they hadn’t been united by the wonder of the zucchini passing over their heads before it splattered on the road just beyond them.

  I knew it wouldn’t be a zucchini that killed me, Oscar said. It’s definitely going to be a root vegetable that ends my life.

  With only the faintest smile in response, Lena reached over and lifted the foil covering his biscuits. I’m assuming, she said, you were coming to donate these to the revolution.

  From the front page of The Islander

  The young senator, with his ardent eloquence and intense gaze, has become a darling of the age group least likely to vote. “The revolt my generation started ten years ago,” he said, “is not even half-finished. What’s driven our students into the streets isn’t just debt, it’s democracy, it’s the threat of a return to fascism if only the wealthiest on this island can afford an education.”

  The senator’s swell of youth support has led to predictions of an easy bid for reelection.

  * * *

  As she walked up the hill to campus, Lena found it increasingly hard to breathe in the bra she’d received from the afterlife. She wondered if Maria had intended her to feel this confined and uneasy until she took some kind of action. When she saw the way Maria beamed at Victor in the paper, she should have taken some kind of action, sent a warning. She could have looked up Maria’s student email address. And now the girl was under a tombstone at nineteen.

  Yes, she absolutely had to go to the Zodiac. Leaving the bookstore, she had no intention of taking Olga’s ridiculous advice about bringing Oscar. She loathed the way ogling northerners reduced every meaningful place in the port to a tourist experience. But then there had been the insanity of that flying zucchini, Oscar mentioning death and root vegetables, and suddenly there was sex, which she hadn’t had in over a year, coursing as invisibly but indisputably as music between them.

  She was still a good five hundred meters from campus but could already hear the drums and shouting of the students. At the corner before the main entrance of the university, she shifted the underwire of the bra one more time though it went on digging into her skin anyway. Outside the front gates, she surveyed the new damage. The protests had begun over the spiraling cost of tuition but had now expanded to the recent release of literacy rates in the interior, which were still as shockingly low as they had been under Cato. In the days since Lena had come by the week before, the students had torn down a stop sign and a pair of streetlights. The mangy stray dogs that lived around the gates were running back and forth, barking at the drums.

  Hey, Professor! One of her favorite, feral-haired students called to her from the roof of a rusted Subaru. We just heard the senator’s going to do it, he’s going to present a free tuition bill to the Senate! Isn’t that incredible? He’s fucking incredible.

  Incredible, Lena repeated before turning her face to the drums.

  * * *

  Victor rubbed his thumb over Cristina’s manicured nails, glad he had brought her to the opening, even if the jeans she’d put on were far too new and pressed for the Zodiac crowd. The theater sat at the end of a courtyard. On laundry lines strung between the buildings on either side of the theater, Freddy had suspended several old sheets painted with yet another excessive name for a play. His brother had titled this one Where He Danced While We Lay Dreaming, the letters extending across three blue sheets that moved with the breeze as Victor passed beneath them with Cristina.

  Inside the Zodiac, the lobby looked even more pitiable and close to collapse than it had at the last show of Fre
ddy’s he’d attended. A section of the ceiling tiles was now patched with masking tape. Even scrappier were the now-absent benches in the lobby that had been replaced with two wobbly backseats ripped out of cars. As they turned toward the ticket booth, Cristina pointed at a tall blond northerner. Since when do tourists come to the Zodiac?

  Victor saw immediately whom she meant. At the front of the line, the man was fumbling with his money in the slow, exasperating way tourists on the island always seemed to when people were waiting behind them. The small, dark-haired woman beside him turned her head, and Victor felt as if sand had suddenly encrusted his face.

  Who is that woman? Cristina asked. She’s staring like she knows you.

  * * *

  Just as Oscar bent to retrieve the ticket he’d dropped, the woman behind him stepped on it, pinning the ticket to the ground with the heel of her motorcycle boot. Excuse me, Oscar said from his crouch, but the woman in the boots didn’t hear. When he pulled on Lena’s sleeve beside him, she didn’t react either.

  What’s going on with the northerner on the floor? he heard someone say off to the left.

  Oscar closed his eyes, unsure whether it would be more humiliating to stand up in response or remain crouching a moment longer where he was, waiting for the girl in the motorcycle boot to move her foot. Ashamed at the situation he’d created for himself, he tried to picture his best éclair. A therapist his mother paid for after he quit his vegan bakery job had suggested this strategy for situations that filled him with such a sense of inadequacy he wanted to give up and leave. He’d replayed that éclair so many times in his mind the ingredients now assembled instantaneously: the vanilla bean pods he’d split, the drops of almond extract he’d added to the cream, how capably he’d blended it all into perfection.

  And it worked. He opened his eyes and the girl had moved slightly, her boot now only pinning the tip of his ticket. Leaning forward, he managed to retrieve it whole. With a sense of triumph, he rose slowly from the floor, determined to put this minor humiliation behind him. Only Lena was no longer next to him, or anywhere he could spot her nearby. He scanned the crowded lobby. More people kept squeezing inside, none of them as obviously a foreigner as he was. Even upright again like everyone else, he felt conspicuous. Without Lena beside him, he was an intruder here.

  A commotion broke out by the far wall and Oscar turned toward the noise. One of the torn-out backseats of a car serving as a bench had tipped over, spilling several people, laughing, onto the floor, but Lena wasn’t among them. Oscar had never been in a theater that felt this genuinely precarious and renegade, existing on little more than determination. If he could just find Lena and join her, he could stop feeling so out of place here and savor it. He was still ignoring his mother’s questions in her emails, asking what the point of this much wandering at his age could possibly be, why he couldn’t at least promise to return by the holidays and start figuring out his life.

  At last, he spotted Lena. She was midway through the crowd, slipping ribbon-like between the people continuing to push inside. He realized she must be headed for the bathrooms, had probably tried to tell him but he hadn’t heard. But then she stopped and he watched her give a long embrace to a man in an eccentric velvet scarf. It was an embrace that spoke of history, of deep affection, the kind of genuine embrace he’d missed in this year of wandering, and before it in the small city where he’d been living and knew almost no one. Wasn’t that the cost, above all, of his habitual dissatisfaction—of having no deeper continuous history with anyone beyond his bitterly divorced parents, and one culinary school friend who’d kept him on her group emails?

  With envy, he watched Lena stop again to speak to a couple by the door.

  * * *

  The overhead lights began to blink but Lena ignored them. She ignored whatever Freddy was saying as he trailed behind her toward his brother. Determined not to lose her nerve before she reached Victor, she pushed harder through the crowd. She didn’t let herself look away from his stare as she drew closer. His left eye started twitching exactly as it had at meetings for the marches when anyone questioned what he proposed.

  Beside him, the smug, heavily made-up plastic decoy of a woman he’d brought along was leaning obliviously against his arm as if he were harmless. And he did look eerily harmless in his gray sweater and jeans. His jawline was not quite as sharp as it had been in college. The skin under his chin was looser, intimations of his mother’s second chin beginning to emerge. His posture was still as erect and intimidating, but his stomach wasn’t as firm under his sweater. He had a small gut now, the slack body of a bureaucrat who spent his days in an office, and she felt emboldened. Olga had been wrong, or at least about coming here tonight. As a senator, Victor wouldn’t dare do anything to her in such a crowded public place. All she would do was say Maria’s name and see what came over his face. Or no, she wouldn’t say Maria’s name. She’d shout it, and loud enough to be certain Freddy and the oblivious woman at Victor’s side would have no choice but to hear.

  SCENES FROM THE PRUNING OF A FUTURE PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE

  (WORK IN PROGRESS BY FMG)

  The present

  SET

  A crooked poster with the name of a theater.

  A few photos from old shows.

  Frames can be crooked and hung at random intervals.

  CHARACTERS

  The ex-girlfriend: flame-like, flickers often, dressed in red.

  The fiancée: stiff and icy, dressed in white.

  The Future Candidate: muscular, dressed in ridiculous plaids.

  The chubby brother: plays accordion, stays out of the way, dressed in velvet.

  The lights should come on like an explosion, harsh and all at once.

  The chubby brother’s first notes of tango should coincide with this explosion.

  The characters should shout over it.

  EX-GIRLFRIEND

  What? You’re engaged?

  FIANCÉE

  Yes, as of yesterday.

  We’re over the moon.

  And you?

  How do you know Victor?

  EX-GIRLFRIEND

  Did you say yesterday?

  I guess Maria won’t be able to make the wedding, will she?

  FIANCÉE

  Who?

  I’m sorry.

  It’s so loud in here.

  Ex-girlfriend gets up in her face.

  EX-GIRLFRIEND

  I’m asking about Maria, the stu—

  The Future Candidate cuts knifelike between the women.

  He makes a violent grab for the ex-girlfriend’s wrist.

  With cold determination, he twirls her.

  His brother, off to the side, spins simultaneously with his accordion.

  After the twirl, the notes of the tango are more drawn out.

  The Future Presidential Candidate dips the ex-girlfriend.

  Mid-dip, she shouts again but no sound comes out.

  The onstage lights begin to blink for everyone to take their seats.

  The ex-girlfriend gazes ferociously into the face of the Future Candidate.

  There may be some longing here.

  There may be loathing.

  The ex-girlfriend leads the next move.

  It is professional, an expert flick of her leg over his calf.

  A swift trabada.

  Rapturously in sync now,

  the Future Candidate dips the ex-girlfriend again, lower.

  As the music ends,

  he brings his lips to her throat.

  * * *

  During the first scene of his brother’s play, all Victor could think about were the bones in Lena’s wrist, the tension of them under his grip.

  He was certain no one had seen him grab hold of her that hard. With everyone pushed up against each other in the lobby, who could’ve seen?r />
  Certainly not Cristina. He’d cut between them, and grabbing a woman’s wrist for a second couldn’t implicate a man. It was the sort of transgression that, if mentioned as proof of anything, would sound exaggerated, oversensitive. All he’d done was startle Lena enough to prevent her from saying Maria’s name again, to make Lena gasp instead, and hadn’t she asked for it, marching so righteously across the lobby with that dilettante bitterness of hers, with her deceptively delicate-looking mouth?

  It was possible Freddy had seen. But what his brother saw didn’t matter. Freddy would understand why he’d lost control for a second. Seeing Lena after so long—all the Molotovs he’d made and thrown with her, the adrenaline-fueled twenty-year-old sex they’d had after setting two police cars aflame and fleeing up that interminable stairwell into the hills. Sitting in the dark theater, Victor pressed his tongue against the roof of his mouth, recalling how triumphantly he’d submerged his very same tongue between Lena’s legs that night, had pressed his whole mouth and teeth into her until she opened her thighs, wider.

  It wasn’t until the second scene of Freddy’s play that he brought his mind to bear on what was happening in front of him, on the stage. The play was set in a gay bar but the leading actor wasn’t another version of Freddy this time. The lead was a closeted married man, a father who loathed himself for being unable to resist the lure of the bar and the men inside it. A father whose sister had been killed in the roundups, but who otherwise was more or less their father, which was ludicrous. It was libelous.