by Idra Novey
It was outright lunacy.
Victor watched in horror as the father figure on the stage danced alone with a purple feather boa.
Along the back of Victor’s neck he felt a scalding, spreading heat.
His brother had crossed the line this time. Their father hadn’t broken into rages all the time because he wanted to stick it into a man. He’d been in a rage because his brother hadn’t been released, and they didn’t have the money or contacts to find out what had been done to him. Their father had brooded in the same bars all the other bitter men in their neighborhood brooded in, their bodies tense and agitated from having to constantly listen for police cars and watch over their shoulders, knowing they might be picked up for anything at all, and the same could happen to their sons. Their father hadn’t snuck off to some bar to dance with transvestites.
Victor swore under his breath and turned his head. Two seats away, Freddy was staring at his blasphemous creation with a pleased little smile. Freddy, who hadn’t even had the balls to warn him beforehand, although he had told Victor about the interview in the paper. When Freddy asked on the phone if he’d read it, Victor had lied and said congratulations. What was he going to do, admit he’d felt such revulsion at the photo of his brother in that ridiculous velvet scarf that he couldn’t get through even the first paragraph of the interview? And there was no pressuring Freddy to change anything now. All he could do was go on sitting there in the dark theater, expressionless in his seat, as if he were some cutout of a man fashioned from cardboard.
Beside him, his fiancée pulled her cell phone out of her purse again to check the time. But somewhere behind him, Lena was undoubtedly grasping it all, relishing how he must be loathing every second of this scene. But he didn’t have to give Lena that power. No one else had ever taken her seriously. She had gone nowhere. She was nothing.
* * *
From the meager contents of Lena’s fridge, all Oscar could think to make was an omelet. Besides eggs and cheese, the fridge didn’t contain much beyond a bowl of shriveled-up grapes and a few condiments. He hadn’t expected Lena to accept his offer to come inside and throw together some food for them. But when he asked if she was hungry and wanted him to make something, she’d replied with an emphatic yes and held open the door.
He’d hoped to conjure up something more impressive but there had been so little to work with and the effort to understand the dialogue in the play had fatigued his brain. It had taken him two scenes to realize the play was about a closeted gay father during the Cato regime. He hadn’t expected the staging to be so subtle either, with the actors abruptly swaying and tilting their heads midline, as if being pulled into a dance with an invisible partner. Every minute of it had been exquisite, even the title—Where He Danced While We Lay Dreaming.
Even the intermission had been unlike anything he’d ever experienced in a theater. A couple had announced their engagement, and everyone had raised their plastic cups of wine and cheered. Lena hadn’t joined the cheering, though he was fairly certain it was the same couple she had approached before the show. Still, Oscar hadn’t felt certain enough of this to ask. He felt ashamed of how similar the men on the island still looked to him. Afraid to risk revealing this inadequacy to Lena, he hadn’t inquired if it was the same man she’d approached earlier. Despite his deliberate effort to tell them apart, he still kept confusing the two brothers who worked at his hostel, who had the same buzzed hair and compact build.
And now, as he cracked the eggs and glanced outside her kitchen window, he saw a man of similar height and build leaning against a car, smoking, and staring back at him with an eerie steadiness. Is that guy your neighbor? he asked.
What guy? Lena drew up next to him, her arm knocking the bowl of eggs, causing the contents to splash over her shirt and drip in rivulets onto the floor. Ugh, I’m sorry, she said as Oscar bent to scoop the yolks off the edge of the counter as best he could, insisting it was his fault for leaving the bowl there.
But Lena’s focus was solely on the man outside. Where is he? Where did you see him standing? she asked.
Oscar stood up with the yolky rag to show her but the man was no longer at the curb. He craned his neck to look up and down the street but couldn’t see the man anywhere.
Lena insisted she needed to know what the man looked like in detail, and he apologized. Between the dark and the distance all he could think to describe for her was the two brothers who managed his hostel.
He hoped it wouldn’t matter. The man had gone.
* * *
The man had gone, Lena reassured herself.
He’d gone because he was meaningless—just some drunk lingering for a moment on his way up from the bars at the bottom of the hill. But what if he wasn’t? She’d seen the fury on Victor’s face when he crushed her wrist, the tendons bulging in his neck when she said the name Maria.
But he couldn’t have abandoned his fiancée so soon after the play, and there must have been some kind of feud between him and Freddy for portraying a character obviously meant to evoke their father. Lena had found the play moving and tender, and clearly intended as no more than conjecture, an attempt to understand why their father had been either absent or explosive. But she knew Victor wouldn’t be able to see it on those terms. When Freddy spoke about his lovers, Victor always tensed and got up from the table. She could only imagine Victor’s reaction to seeing a version of his father dance with another man on a stage.
With all of that happening, she decided, Victor couldn’t possibly have extracted himself to come lurk for a few threatening minutes outside her house. But maybe, as a senator, he could have come up with an excuse to send some menacing emissary to do it for him. She’d never seen any drunks pause at night in front of her house and stare in her kitchen window, but perhaps they had and she hadn’t noticed, as she had failed to notice the large stain on the jean jacket she’d left lying on her bed. While Oscar cracked a new batch of eggs in the kitchen, she’d retreated to her room to change shirts.
But for now, she just stood at the end of the bed, startled to see such a large stain on her jacket. It extended across the entire back and down one of its sleeves. Before Freddy’s show, she’d pulled the jacket out of the closet but had decided to wear her warmer wool coat instead. Even distracted and nervous, she was certain that she would have noticed a stain that large when she dropped the jacket on her bed. The stain looked dark enough to be wine, though she couldn’t recall any spilled wine the last time she wore the jacket. When she entered the room, she’d only flicked on the small light by her dresser and wondered if maybe it was just a strangely shaped shadow. But of what?
She felt too disturbed to move toward the closet to flick on the other lamp by the window. The stain looked definitively reddish to her now, the muddy color of a period stain, and copious, saturating the cotton of her jacket as if someone had slowly died in it.
She felt a coldness shudder up through her body. Sucking in her breath, she wondered if she was having a breakdown. Wasn’t this one of the ways women unraveled? They failed to marry at the expected age, they got lonelier, stuck on some ex-lover’s success while they remained trapped in one demoralizing position after another, their thoughts growing increasingly erratic and unhinged.
She wondered if she should ask Oscar to leave or to stay. Whether the stain was connected to Maria or not, a man had just been lurking outside her house. Oscar had seen him. And there would be other nights to come when she’d be alone here. Her murder would be written off as the sort of random crime that happened to rich girls who became heedless bohemians instead of sticking to their own, who thought they could live on some dark street in the most dilapidated part of the port and get away with it. A consequence of her own poor judgment. Her arrogance.
She crawled onto the bed and lowered her face to smell the stain. At the thought of the man outside, of Victor seizing her wrist in the lobby, she could not br
ing herself to lift the jacket, to find out what might pass onto her hands if she held it. The only smells she could detect on the fabric were the ones on all her clothes: the powdery scent of her deodorant, marijuana from Olga’s, and something else slightly musty and female—her body itself, perhaps, the faint odor of a woman trying to live with a degree of resignation that was at odds with her nature.
Your omelet, Oscar called from the kitchen, is now flipped and ready!
* * *
It was not quite dawn when Victor rose from Cristina’s bed. Outside her magnificent windows, the horizon was empty of ships, the only movement the searching dots of gulls circling over the water. He didn’t realize Cristina had risen as well until her hands came around his bare waist and she sank her fingers into his pubic hair. I hope it’s me you’re standing here thinking about, she said.
I’m thinking about the play, Victor said. I can’t go after my own brother for defamation, and that kind of attention would only backfire.
He waited for Cristina to commiserate or at least withdraw her hands and leave him to his thoughts. But he was beginning to learn she had no reverence for introspection. She never read, not even magazines, and instead of leaving him alone she began to stroke him.
She had been right, though, that her body was not the one he’d woken up thinking about. And Freddy hadn’t really been the reason he’d bolted from the bed. He’d gone to the windows to stop repeatedly seizing Lena’s wrist in his mind, convincing himself the way she sucked in her breath hadn’t been alarm—or not only alarm. It had been arousal, too. He hadn’t lost control. He’d been responding to her face. She’d wanted him to grab hold of her somehow. She’d marched over looking for it.
He brushed his hand over Cristina’s so she would continue her maneuvers, go about them even faster. Just as he’d relaxed enough to close his eyes, Cristina started nattering in a nervous, nasal way about a pig farm, of all things, in the interior. Some farmer who was a friend of her father’s who’d run into some bad luck with an inspector acting like a fascist. Her father was hoping Victor wouldn’t mind making a call to the cousin of his who worked in the Agricultural Department.
I didn’t want to bring it up last night at the play, Cristina said, continuing with her rubbing, but I think it’s my father’s way of reaching out, you know, between men. You don’t mind calling, do you?
Transaction Log for Olga’s
SEEK THE SUBLIME OR DIE
September 9th
Yet another Saturday begun, S, with a joint in bed.
And not a single book sale to report yet for the morning.
And nothing sublime about doing the side business, though it keeps the lights on, which have never been cheap on this beleaguered island your family has probably all left by now. I think of them, S, the regrets that must accompany your brother, and your quiet mother if she’s still around, somewhere.
Reluctant Nonliterary Income
Buyers: two students gushing about Victor taking the free tuition bill to the Senate as if he were the second coming of Che Guevara.
I’ll never say it to Lena, but if Victor did push that girl, he’s going to get away with it. The road was empty. There were no witnesses. Maybe Che Guevara disposed of some inconvenient girl like a soda can as well. Maybe he disposed of several.
Who wants to hear it? People are too desperate for a hero.
If you were alive, S, if you were here now, sitting on the couch in Conspiracy, you would likely identify this thought as a sign of my descent into an ever more self-defeating cynicism, and you would be correct.
I go on selling pot to students who smoke far too much of it. But if I didn’t, someone else would, and at least they’re coming into a bookstore for their joints, right? At least a bookstore exists on this hill and they have to pass a table of paperbacks to get their weed. Oh, the compromises and justifications one comes to make by late middle age, S, they are humiliating.
9:26, The Question
How did Joan of Arc do it, S? How did she stay true to the voices in her head as they led her into the fire?
From The Weekender Profile
The Weekender: Many students and parents find the campus takeovers happening all over the island too disruptive. If students care so much about their education, why don’t they find some other way to protest, some strategy that doesn’t postpone half a semester’s worth of learning?
Senator Victor MG: Because protests have to be disruptive. If this protest weren’t disruptive, you wouldn’t be interviewing me about the outrageous debt even middle-class families have to take on to educate their children. And what other nonviolent form of dissent is there?
We have a long history of importing the worst aspects of the foreign government that so ruinously intervened in this one—their tolerance for police brutality as long as it’s reserved for the poor, their dismantling of unions. We don’t need their exclusive vacation resort approach toward higher education any more than we need their fast-food chains or their disgusting Galaxy bars replacing our own chocolate.
The Weekender: You don’t eat Galaxy bars?
Senator Victor MG: Absolutely not. My brother let himself get addicted to them but I’ve never eaten one. And I never will.
SCENES FROM THE PRUNING OF A FUTURE PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE
(WORK IN PROGRESS OF FMG)
Late childhood in the Cato years
SET
Stage is bare except for a large cardboard Galaxy chocolate bar.
The chocolate bar should hang from ropes that allow it to swing easily.
It should be taller and larger than the child actors.
Two brothers, ages eight and five, emerge from opposite sides of the stage.
They stop on either side of the Galaxy bar.
YOUNGER BROTHER
I want to know what it tastes like.
OLDER BROTHER
We’re not opening it.
YOUNGER BROTHER
But Dad’s cousin brought it all this way for us.
OLDER BROTHER
But you heard what he told her. Our uncle died because people here don’t care about anything but getting TV sets from the fucking north.
YOUNGER BROTHER
What’s the fucking north?
OLDER BROTHER
You know what it is. Where all the blond people in the movies live. Dad says they—
With animal ferocity, the younger brother bites into the Galaxy bar.
The older brother yanks it from him.
The younger one pulls it back.
The Galaxy bar swings wildly between them.
Abruptly, the older brother changes his strategy.
He shoves the chocolate toward his brother instead of away.
The surprise knocks the younger boy down and he begins to cry.
OLDER BROTHER
Stop it, don’t act like a baby.
If you cry every time you want to know
what some plastic-wrapped candy tastes like,
you’ll cry the rest of your life.
You have to control yourself.
Pick a spot on the wall
and stare at it like a senator.
Like this.
The older brother turns, fixes his gaze on the audience.
He remains this way,
grim-faced as a military statue.
The younger brother, still on his knees,
bites into the chocolate.
He releases a groan of pleasure.
The lights dim.
The Galaxy bar collapses on top of him.
Beneath it, he goes on munching.
His groans of pleasure blast from the speakers.
The groans turn into the contented purr of cats,
then the happy nicker of horses,
while the stage goes dark.
* * *
She no longer braced for questions about her role in the marches. No one in the family bothered to try to persuade her anymore with their justifications for the regime. When she’d taught in the island’s municipal schools, her aunts had occasionally asked if the children in them were as out of control as they imagined. Lena had tried to explain that the problem with the municipal system was the number of children packed into the classrooms, not the children themselves, but she knew it didn’t matter. Her aunts drew the unflattering conclusions about the island’s children that they wanted to draw anyway.
Lena had wanted to stick it out teaching in the municipal system just to defy her family. But the truth was, keeping children in their chairs and focused had not been the right fit for her. She’d gotten impatient and missed hearing the ideas of adults, of discussing education in the philosophical way she had in college. Now that she had a position more acceptable to her family, her aunts and sisters-in-law were single-mindedly focused on her potential for procreation. Every week they would descend upon her like vultures to peck at her with estimates of how many years she had left to bear a child.
Yet the subtext of these warnings, Lena suspected, was not really their desire for her to be a mother. It was their collective hope that in motherhood she might become one of them again, which made Lena only more leery of marrying, of falling into any pattern her mother and aunts might perceive as proof that she would eventually rejoin their ranks.
