by Alina Simone
“You won’t believe—”
“I won’t,” Taj interjected. “Let’s swim.”
He slid into the water and Anna watched his back muscles flex as he reached the opposite end of the pool in five quick strokes. She was wearing an oversize red-and-white T-shirt over her one-piece bathing suit. Looming above Taj at the lip of the pool, she feared she might look a bit like a milk carton. Quickly, she slid into the water after him.
“Oh! It’s cold—”
“I know.”
“What are we paying all this money for?”
“Not heat,” Taj said. “Or goldfish. Come here.”
“Look,” she said, pointing to a quavering black spot on the pool floor. “Someone dropped a something. Should we get it?”
“So we’re supposed to clean their pool now, too?”
Anna laughed and floated over to Taj. He offered his back to her.
“Hop on.”
Anna hesitated—yes, he was taller, but she definitely weighed more.
“C’mon!”
Anna hopped, or rather clambered, onto Taj’s back and he hooked his elbows behind the backs of her knees. She slipped her arms around his neck.
“See? You’re light.”
She was light! They bobbed through the deep end together, weightless and silent. Pressed against Taj, Anna felt herself warming up.
“This is nice,” she ventured, bringing her face close to Taj’s ear. She wanted to bite his earlobe, or lick the droplet of water that dangled from it. She could imagine sucking on it, the tiny ear hairs tickling her tongue like sea anemones. She opened her mouth, thinking it would be a good idea to breathe on his neck first, but at that moment Taj’s knees buckled and she pitched forward. He had wandered a bit too far into the shallow end and let gravity take hold. But before she could even try to squirm out of his grasp, he swiveled back to the deep end, back to that special planet where Anna weighed nothing. And she leaned her head against his shoulder and closed her eyes, trying not to think, not to hope, not to wonder what Taj was thinking, just being in the now, with Taj’s bare skin pressed against her cheek and the sound of water lapping against the stone tile.
Of course, after five more minutes of trawling back and forth from one side of the deep end to the other, the pool was about as interesting as the stone lining it. Three minutes after that, if they ever encountered another pool in their lives, even a biggish bathtub, it would be too soon. Anna figured they could have lasted longer if they were drunk, but the Singha had worn off long ago, the pool was too small, and they’d both been up since six in the morning. She slid off Taj’s back, her T-shirt tenting up around her, and the chilly water immediately rushed in to fill the gulf between them. Smelling strongly of chlorine, they headed back to the changing rooms, where Taj put on the same clothes he’d worn to JFK and Anna struggled not to let the plushness of her bath towel or the powerful rubber grip of the professional-grade hair dryer send her into another downward spiral of guilt. When they reconvened by the elevators, it was clear that whatever gauzy spell the water had cast over them had dissipated into bone-deep exhaustion. They both leaned against the wall and closed their eyes as they waited for the elevator. Anna didn’t yet feel so tired that she didn’t care what happened after they undressed and climbed into bed, but she was quickly approaching that point; the itch behind her eyes was enormous. The elevator pinged, and, following Taj inside, she watched as he suddenly made a familiar grab for his ass cheek. He pulled out his cell phone and stared at the screen for a long moment, scrolling and reading. They both forgot to hit the button for their floor. The doors closed behind them and the elevator sat there, not moving.
“Holy shit!”
“What?” said Anna.
“‘… late-submission waiver … very excited to receive your rough cut…,’” Taj read.
“What submission—?”
“‘… already shared it with the narrative shorts committee and we are delighted—’”
“You applied somewhere?”
“It’s on,” Taj yelled. “It’s fucking on like Donkey Kong!”
“Yay!” Anna said. Then, after a reasonable pause, “What’s on?”
“That festival I told you about. I’m in.”
“But I thought—”
“I thought, too.” Taj smiled. “I found a work-around.”
“Wow,” Anna said, hitting the button for their floor. “Looks like everyone’s dream’s coming true this week. When is it?”
But Taj didn’t reply, he simply continued staring down at his phone as though he might deep-throat it or stuff it down the front of his pants or fling it joyously at the stupid, poverty-chic bare bulb hanging from a wire above them, engulfing them both in sparks. He looked so happy that Anna decided her gift to him would be silence. Just like the fifty bucks, she wouldn’t mention what he’d said about never applying to a festival again and the jumped-up arrivistes and cockroaches. She would swallow all of these things and a lot of other things besides—ultimately they weren’t important. Not important like kissing on the airplane was important, or the gentleness with which he ferried her through the water on his back. Nowhere near as important as including her in “all stages of production.” Taj was thrumming like an electric wire. From the faraway look in his eyes, she could tell the events of the past day had already been left far behind. Her stomach lurched as the elevator swung upward, carrying them to their room.
* * *
Taj reached for her, not after they closed the door or climbed into bed and turned off the lights, but in the middle of the night, when Anna woke to realize she could not check her e-mail. Yet that does not explain how they ended up having sex in back of an ATM lobby on Del Mar Avenue at three a.m. They had both exhausted their usual scripts, pressed on into the virgin tundra beyond, until what began as a casual game of sexual onedownsmanship had landed them here, far from the hotel, in this miniature citadel of commerce. Still, no obvious methodology presented itself as they confronted the cold banks of molded plastic. Anna realized they would have to improvise. Worse, she discovered the word cash reminded her the electric bill was due and served only as a brake on the engines of desire. Lucky for her, there was no time for desire; neither the ATM lobby’s architecture or ambience inspired lingering.
Taj placed his keys and cell phone on the ledge of a cash machine and Anna grabbed him from behind, working to get her hands past the crucial demarcation zone of his jeans zipper.
“Wait.” He pushed her toward the opposite wall. “Here.”
Anna shuffled back with him, an awkward two-step.
“No, better here,” he said, glancing back at the ATM and shifting her rightward. “We wouldn’t want…” He gestured to the mute eye of the security camera over the door.
The unexpected courtesy engendered a gush of warmth and wetness from Anna. He didn’t want her dignity compromised, even by some unseen security guard. She pulled up his T-shirt and grabbed the hem of his boxers. Guiding him toward her, she couldn’t help but think what kind of pinwheel they would form if filmed from above. He slipped a hand into her underwear and fiddled around in there for a moment as if searching for a light switch. Then, propping her up against the deposit-slip dispenser, he slid his jeans down halfway and made his deposit.
“Your transaction is complete,” he whispered.
Anna laughed.
“I felt that,” he said. They parted, though not as reluctantly as Anna had hoped, and he turned around to fetch the things he’d left on the ledge of the cash machine.
21
The hipsters didn’t care. If anything, they thought it was funny. The door had beeped open while they were still fumbling with their clothes. The girl with the dreadlocks had a little dog that started barking. The guy wearing the Stetson said, “Whoa.” Not even “Whoa!” Just “Whoa.” And that was it. Anna and Taj had gone back to the hotel and slept an epic sleep, only rising at one p.m. to shamble into the cavernous elevator and descend to the hotel café
.
“Coffee,” Anna said to the waiter.
“Coffee,” Taj seconded. “And where’s the breakfast menu? This says ‘lunch.’”
“We stopped serving breakfast at twelve-thirty, brah.” The waiter looked so apologetic that for a second Anna thought he might offer them some pot instead.
“What happened to the customer being right?” Taj said. “Always.”
“True that, true that,” said the waiter with a game smile. “But, you know, the kitchen rotates its stuff so, all that breakfast stuff’s—phft!—outta there. You should try the spesh, though. Seitan sunflower veggie burger. It comes with some wicked sauce.”
But Taj was too gung ho for breakfast to go for the spesh. What was so hard about eggs cracked over a frying pan? It would take two seconds! He could go back there and do it himself! Later Anna would wonder whether this was the moment that things had truly started to suck. All she could remember was the feeling of wanting Taj to stop talking, only without her telling him so. Please stop, she thought at him, while pretending to examine the drinks menu. But it wasn’t the waiter—who looked as though he could smilingly debate the impossibility of eggs all day—that cut off Taj’s tirade. It was a woman’s voice behind Anna’s shoulder, accented in faint German.
“Zero?”
At the sound of this word, Anna found herself witnessing a total eclipse of Taj’s ethnicity as his normally latte-colored skin turned white.
“I’ll get you folks another chair,” the waiter said, extricating himself smoothly as Taj rose and the woman Anna recognized as Simone Weil stepped forward to give him a hug. A real hug, Anna noted. Not a perfunctory squeeze-and-pat.
The waiter delivered Simone’s chair, and Taj and Anna both reflexively ordered the Seitan sunflower burger.
“I’ll have a Bloody,” Simone said, omitting the Mary. Then, turning back to Taj, “You’re in the festival?”
He gave her a why-else-would-I-be-here shrug as Anna struggled to absorb the news: that festival Taj was talking about must be this festival. And did he think his ravenous head-to-toe scan of Simone would go unnoticed?
Simone nodded approvingly. “Letting bygones be bygones. Very good. Well, tell me then, how did you get out of wearing their horrible fucking hipster shackle?” Simone laughed, fingering a green plastic wristband that Anna had just assumed was couture debris.
“It was a last-minute thing,” Taj replied with studied nonchalance. “So, you’re showing?”
“They’re giving me an award,” Simone said, as though they were giving her a schnitzel.
“Congrats. Where are you living now? Berlin?”
“London. I got a council flat.” She said this in a way that was meant to explain a lot, and all Anna could do was nod. She kept thinking about how strange it was to sit across the table from someone she didn’t know, but whose labia she could trace from memory on the napkin in front of her. Anna had read only as far as (what Gawker termed) Simone’s “next stunt” on her Wikipedia page. After the furor over her video sex diaries, Weil had declared herself a “microprostitute” and set up camp at the Blum & Poe gallery for a three-week installation. For a nominal fee, Simone would hold her “clients’” hands, kiss them, stroke their hair, rub their back or tummy, or place a candy heart on their tongue. (Only these candy hearts said things like “Slave” and “I Suck” and now sold for $500 a bag on ArtAuction.com.) Clients were also allowed to rub or kiss certain parts of her own body that she had outlined in black Sharpie, Riot Grrrl–style, and labeled with things like “Shank,” “Rib,” and “Bottom Sirloin,” intentionally giving her the appearance of raw meat ready for butchering. At night, when the gallery was closed but Simone remained, her act grew more risqué. Clients could pay via PayPal, collect their services via Skype. Here Simone might flash a boob, felate a fruit, sit on one of the objects arranged in the Bedouin tent that served as her boudoir. She would kiss and lick the screen or herself. Then, finally, in a scene memorialized by countless screenshots, she went all the way with herself for a payment of $2.87. The following morning, her first clients were the cops, who came to arrest her. Blum & Poe was charged with a class-D felony, for running a “prostitution tourism business,” which everyone agreed was great for business. At that point, the art world collectively placed an “et cetera” at the end of Simone’s résumé and she became an international art star. She was only twenty at the time, having ditched college as soon as the Gilman video debuted. And she was still young now, Anna saw.
It occurred to her that the new Simone Weil actually had a lot in common with the original. They were both hard workers, both grounded their work in untenable philosophies, both were self-obsessed. And now that she was meeting Simone 2.0 face-to-face, Anna saw another similarity: neither of them ate food. Simone was at least a head taller than Anna but still weighed less than a bicycle. She was draped in a knee-length gray shift with ragged seams that might have been sown by Inuit nomads or Sudanese refugees or the Rodarte sisters themselves, but would have looked good in anything; she had that kind of face, that lack of body. Her black hair was impossibly straight, guillotined at the shoulders, her eyes hazel and luminous in the way of Japanese anime dolls.
“And your friend…?” Simone was saying. Her accent was barely there, a mere toss of confectioner’s sugar on her otherwise perfect English.
“Anna,” said Anna.
“Anna. You are showing in the festival?”
“Anna’s here to work,” Taj said, decisive by proxy. “She’s making a video diary.”
“How original!” Simone exclaimed. And after a brief shock Anna realized Simone wasn’t trying to be mean—that’s just how everything she said came out sounding.
“Well, as they say out here,” Taj said, raising his glass, “it’s ‘execution dependent.’”
“Agreed,” said Simone, and they shared a laugh that had obviously once served as currency in some long-forgotten country.
The waiter arrived with their order just as one of two identical iPhones lying on the table began to ring. Taj and Simone both reached for it at the same time.
“Hello?” Taj said, snagging it first. He handed Simone the phone. “Yours. We have the same ringtone!” He spoke with such wonder one would think it was an umbilical cord they’d shared. Anna might even have been jealous if Simone’s lack of interest wasn’t so apparent. Instead, she found herself wondering why, aside from that first meeting, Taj had never mentioned her.
“Well, it’s the least offensive one, isn’t it?” Simone said, sweeping up the phone and rising from the table in one smooth motion. “Allo…?”
Anna turned back to Taj, who was busy ignoring the special sauce and squeezing mustard on his puck of seitan.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were coming here for the festival?” Anna said, batting his shoulder in a wan attempt at playfulness.
“I told you I had work stuff to take care of in LA,” Taj said, taking a bite of his burger. “Jesus, this tastes like a loofah.”
“When were you going to tell me? What are you showing?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t know what?”
“Both, OK? It doesn’t matter. I don’t want you to get distracted by this festival bullshit. Focus on your recovery. Have you started the video diary?”
“You know I haven’t.” They’d been together the whole time, hadn’t they? “But when’s your screening?”
“Never mind that,” he said, spearing a truffle fry. “It’s nothing that you haven’t seen already. What you need is to get to work.”
And as Anna considered which of these statements to pin her resentment on, Simone slid back into her seat, her arrival presaged by a whiff of mysterious perfume that smelled like fresh snow or old books or burning leaves. Anna took a swig of zero-calorie water. The glass was so thin she fought the sudden urge to bite down and crush it between her teeth.
“I have to go see about my installation. The projectionist says it’s ready.”
“I have dinner with Deitch,” Simone said, wistful and squinty. “I wish I wasn’t so squeezed. But the festival … You know, we’ll bump into each other a million times. It will get embarrassing, I promise.”
“Drinks after?” said Taj, as if he hadn’t noticed her artful evasion.
“Why don’t you both come with me now?” Simone said. She took a tiny bite of the celery staked in her drink. “The gallery is only three blocks from here.”
“Great,” said Taj. “Let me just change first.” He rose abruptly from the table and Anna found herself suddenly alone with Simone and her untouched drink. Simone jiggled her foot. She flashed Anna a thin-lipped smile, but her eyes were elsewhere. Anna knew that look; it was the look of a woman who wanted to check her e-mail.
“I like your sneakers,” Anna said.
“Spanish,” said Simone, still jiggling.
“I was wondering, I’ve never heard that nickname you have for Taj…”
“Zero? He got that the first week in Herzog’s workshop. You know about the workshop?”
“I didn’t know Taj was—”
“It’s how we found Zero. Me and Paul,” Simone added.
“Really?” Anna said. Then, wondering whether these were things she was meant to keep to herself, “Taj told me he met Gilman jailbreaking his iPhone.”
“Ha! Well, that’s partly true.” Simone laughed. “The film that got Zero into the workshop was about Foxconn, the factory in China where they make iPhones. They wouldn’t let him film in there so he broke in and got arrested. He gave Gilman an iPhone 3G he’d brought back.”
“Taj?” Anna said, unable to keep the incredulity from her voice. The closest she’d seen him get to politics was examining some Che Guevara drink coasters in a gift shop yesterday.
“I know, but that’s how Zero was back then. Always in solidarity with the poor and trampled, blah, blah, blah. He was very intent on x-ing himself out of his films. Any whiff of that evil bourgeois entitlement. Goes back to college, I guess. He studied econ with some real lefties. And so, Zero, yes.” She laughed again—a high trill with trace deposits of Arnold Schwarzenegger. “He’s a different kind of artist now. You can say we brought him around.”
