by Jessica Pine
"Obviously. God, they're still trying to recycle the 1990's, aren't they?"
"Get over it, honey. It already happened."
"Ugh, I know, I know. I just don't think Courtney Love should be encouraged. Who's the model?"
"No idea. Generic. As. Fuck."
Anger flared like acid under my breastbone. I hated them. I hated that thing they made Courtney wear. I hated that they treated girls' bodies like meat. I wanted to leave, but I was here for support, to tell her she looked thin and looked beautiful, and that she didn't need to be any thinner. The bodies I saw backstage had shocked me.
The models tore off their clothes so fast between changes that sometimes they were walking about in nothing but their make-up, and yet there was nothing sexual about their nudity. I couldn't understand how they represented desire - they put the stark in stark naked, breastless, hipless, sexless. Some of them looked so close to starvation that I was reminded uncomfortably of the photos taken when the Allies had liberated Auschwitz - of human beings who stood denuded even of the simple cover of flesh, so that nothing but horror remained.
When it was over Courtney came out looking so much like herself that it all felt like a strange dream. Her face was scrubbed clean and her hair bundled up in a messy knot at the back of her head. She wore her usual skinny jeans and Converse and if it hadn't been for a stray fleck of gold leaf on the side of her neck I would never have believed she was up there at all. "No new messages," she said, phone in hand. "Great. So much for exposure."
"You can have some of mine," I said.
"Shit. Is he still calling you?"
I nodded. "Court, be honest - do you think I'm a bitch?"
She blinked at me. Even freshly scoured of mascara, her lashes were so long as to look unreal. "You," she said, slowly. "May be the least bitchy person in a city of so many bitches I can't even count. Did he say that?"
"No. He didn't. He just...I don't know. He makes me feel like one."
"Why? What did you do? Shoot his dog and stab his grandmother? Look, if the guy's guilt tripping you that hard over not wanting to see him any more, then all the more reason not to buy into his bullshit. Passive-aggression is the pits; you end up spending fifty years stewing in your own juices and then wind up on the news as a grisly murder/suicide."
She navigated the crowded sidewalk like she'd been born to it. I was still getting the hang of things. After the first day hoofing it around at a New Yorker's natural pace, my calves had ached as if I'd done ten sessions of step aerobics.
"It's just that I sometimes feel he has a legitimate grievance," I said. "You know me - I'm not exactly the most open person."
A cab stalled and kangarooed halfway across the crosswalk, almost knocking us down. The driver stuck his head out the window and yelled something unintelligible. "Go fuck yourself, asshole!" said Courtney.
"Rude," I said, laughing.
"What? We had right of way. What's so funny?"
"This from the girl who used to play whale-song all night." When I first met her, she'd had a dream-catcher hanging over her bed and a collection of rocks from Sedona, Arizona. Because of the vortexes, she'd said.
"I know," she said. "If the modeling thing doesn't work out I'm going back to California to sell the New York stress relief method to unwary rich hippies. Fifteen sessions of expensive therapy, just to teach them to tell people to go fuck themselves. Where do you want to get dinner?"
Dinner was a slice of pizza, folded over and washed down with a diet soda, as if the fake sugar somehow cancelled out the calories in the dough and the greasy, stretchy cheese. It was disgusting but irresistible, like the hotdogs that Courtney told me were made entirely of pig lips, assholes and nitrates. "You can't fucking eat those things," she'd said. "Seriously. Never." Except about five seconds later 'never' had turned to 'once' and 'once' turned to 'sometimes' just as soon as we were chowing down on a couple of dogs heaped high with onions and sauerkraut.
The fridge in her apartment was full of lean chicken and salad vegetables, and while she was thinner than she used to be I put that down to the hardcore cardio workout that was simply keeping pace with people. She was eyeing the pizzas with the kind of look usually reserved for shirtless pictures of Ryan Gosling.
"Back in California," she said, licking tomato sauce off her fingers. "There are people who would stage an intervention if they knew you thought of this stuff as actual food."
Her phone buzzed and she wrapped her hand in a napkin before fishing it out. "Art gallery," she said, reading the text. "Wanna go?"
"Which gallery?"
"Nothing fancy," she said. "I met this guy at a show last week. He said he was doing fashion photography to pay the rent, but he's really an artist and he's so creative and blah blah blah."
I took a long, icy slurp of my diet soda. "Right. How big is his dick, exactly?"
"I have no idea," she said, looking virtuous. "Why would you even think that?"
"Because if his art is best described as 'blah blah blah', then you are clearly not into him because he's the next Vincent Van Gogh."
"I'm not into him," she said. "Come on - it'll be fun. There'll probably be some free booze and we'll get to laugh at a bunch of bad Damien Hirst knockoffs."
The next evening I discovered that she was being economical with the truth. We were barely through the door when an intense looking young man kissed her full on the mouth and called her 'exquisite'. "You came," he said. "I'm so glad."
"This is Angelo," said Courtney, who at least had the decency to look slightly sheepish, if not in the Damien Hirst sense of the word.
"Just Angelo," said Angelo, taking my hand. "Welcome to my...experience."
As soon as his back was turned, I glanced at Courtney. She held her index fingers a distance apart and mouthed the word 'huge'; I nearly choked on a mouthful of sparkling wine.
Angelo's 'experience' consisted of several indeterminate tangles of assorted plumbing interspersed with bricks, an installation made up entirely of forks hanging from the ceiling and a rather disgusting collection of sculptures made of mannequin parts stuffed in various toilet bowls.
I found myself staring at the immaculately painted face and bald head of a store dummy, which was staring out of the bowl of a urinal. A girl in red came to stand beside me. She had scarlet hair and scarlet lips to match her dress. "Dadaist, don't you think?" she said.
"Oh, definitely," I said, wracking my brains for whatever scraps of Art History I could remember.
"It's a commentary on the disposable nature of objectified sexuality."
"Really," I said. "Subtle."
Miss Scarlet drifted off. I wasn't especially sad to see her go; she made me homesick for the first time in a week. I imagined Aunt Cassandra standing beside me and saying something like "Well, it's all very well, but do any of these so-called artists know anything about painting?"
I bit my lip. For some reason the next voice in my head was Clayton's. I could see the wry twist of his smile and the gleam in his eye as he looked at the art works and said "Seriously?"
Maybe I had been a bitch. I wished I were back at Courtney's, drinking rosé from giant, long-stemmed wineglasses that sang when we ran our wine-dipped fingers around their delicate rims. I could forgive her not telling me everything about Angelo, because I hadn't told her everything about Clayton. I'd given her only the edited version - the version where I was tired of him trying to pick me apart and find out all my secrets before I was ready to give them up. I so wanted us to be like we used to be back in college, when we had time to interrupt one another with our real feelings.
I turned away from the mannequin head. On the opposite wall was a huge canvas - a white background with black lines raying out from a central black dot. Just that. I stared at it for a good long while, long enough - I guess - for some people to think I was performing some kind of profound meditation over whatever it was that it was trying to say. In fact I was just trying to figure out if it was giving me a headache.
“It’s not his,” said a voice at my side.
"Hmm?"
"This. It's not Angelo."
I glanced round and saw a tall, dark-haired young man in gold-rimmed glasses. "Well, good," I said. "I think I like it more than the toilet pieces."
"Subtle, huh?"
"Funny - that's exactly what I said."
He laughed - a nice throaty laugh. His eyes were so dark they were almost black, fringed with spiky black lashes. He had soft, thick eyebrows that nearly met in the middle. "I'm Micah," he said, holding out a hand.
"Lacie," I said. "Nice to meet you. Is this your painting?"
He shook his head. "Nope. My sister's."
"Oh. It's...interesting," I said, trying desperately to sound sophisticated. I'd met and loved enough guys like Micah at college - intense, clever young men whose length of bone and tender hands spoke of privilege before they'd so much as opened their mouths. While I had always tried not to let myself be intimidated by such men, I was still haunted by that picture of myself I'd seen in the mirror the night I'd met Clayton. For an moment I was frightened than Micah would take me in at a glance - spot the band-aids I'd stuck on my heels to keep my shoes from rubbing - and peg me there and then for just a small town girl.
"It's kind of like the vanishing point," I said. "Only it doesn't exist. Not really."
"Everything is finite," said Micah.
I felt the blood rush to my face. I wished he'd just tell me what the damn thing meant; presumably he knew, since it was his sister who had painted it, if you could call getting busy with a giant ruler and a Sharpie 'painting'. "I mean the vanishing point," I said, remembering art classes from long ago. "There's no such thing as a vanishing point in real life - it's just a thing they tell you to draw to keep the lines of perspective straight."
"So it is," he said, in a kind of wondering tone, as if I'd said something really perceptive. "But therein lies the irony - because while the vanishing point is nothing more than a construction of art, our own finite smallness is very, very real."
"And very, very large." I stared into the black dot in the center of the picture and thought how apt it was that I would put myself - tiny little speck on a speck that I was - in the middle of the universe. Huh. How about that. Maybe I was getting the hang of this conceptual art thing.
"Kind of a David Foster-Wallace vibe," said Micah, as if thinking aloud.
"This is definitely better than the toilet things," I said. "This is what it's supposed to do, right? Make you think?"
With one mouthful of brain vomit I'd blown my own cover. Micah looked at me and laughed.
"Okay," I said. "You got me. I don't understand any of this."
"Where are you from?"
"Is it that obvious?"
He screwed up his nose. "It kind of is, yeah."
I took a swill of my now flat, warmish wine. "Bumfuck, Vermont," I said.
"And what do you do up there?"
I have reckless one-night stands, lie around on the roofs of junked cars, get high and spend way too much time picking out the fonts for price tags and rehearsing elaborate ways to tell my bossy-ass Aunt to fuck the hell off.
"I'm a...writer," I said. "I write. Things."
He laughed again. "Blocked, right?"
"You sound like you know the feeling."
"Oh, do I ever," he said. "You know that whole Bukowski thing about light and air and space?"
I nodded, a little too pleased to find myself in the company of a man who not only knew who Charles Bukowski was but had unerringly hit upon one of my favorite pieces.
"Yeah, well I was going to get that burned into my frontal lobes," he said. "In acid. Unfortunately my neurologist advised against it, so I just wound up picking out the perfect studio apartment."
"Ouch."
"Yeah. It's been a weird few years, hasn't it? Everything you thought you knew about the publishing industry - boom. No longer true."
"Yeah. I guess." Ha. Publishing? I never even finished a draft. Charles Bukowski would have had me for breakfast.
I slunk away as soon as I had the chance, feeling like a fraud. I went to find Courtney and discovered her, smoking and texting, by the doorway. "Oh my God, let's get out of here," she said.
"What happened to 'Huge'?"
She rolled her eyes. "Fuck him. He called me a moron."
"What the hell?"
"Apparently," she said, snapping her phone shut. "I'm not deep enough to understand his nasty works of art."
"They're awful. They're tasteless jokes at the expense of women."
"See?" She sighed. "I'm not that smart - that's exactly what I should have said to him, but I don't have your words."
I don't have your words. You have a clever way about you. Four years of college and still my highest praises were sung in the shortest words; you could take the girl out of her small town but you couldn't take the small town out of the girl.
"I'm not smart," I said. "I'm dumber than a third coat of paint."
"You're so not."
"I so am." I had unprotected sex with a man whose name I didn't even know at the time.
I wanted to say it. I really did. I wanted to confess everything so that she could tell me I was an idiot even as she held my hand at the clinic, but there was still some stupid part of me that wouldn't let me say it, wouldn't allow me to speak the words and make my predicament real. If I shut up and kept smiling then everything would carry on as normal and I wouldn't have to think about the calendar.
The next morning I woke up to a dozen red tulips in a ribbon-wrapped pot. "Looks like you were a hit with Micah," said Courtney.
There was a card stuck between the stems. It was plain white and on it was printed the Bukowski piece we had talked about last night. It was all in lowercase.
"e.e. cummings?" said Courtney.
"No. Bukowski. Someone didn't get the memo that if your name's not e.e. cummings you have to use the frigging shift key."
"Are you going to call him?"
I shook my head. "I don't know," I said, staring at the card. Light and air and space. Excuses. If he was trying to be cute then it didn't work; he just reminded me of Aunt Cassandra, breathing down my neck like a Fury. "What font would you say that was? Helvetica?"
Courtney gave me a strange look and opened the fridge. Inside the icebox were cups of frozen yoghurt. It was one of the few sweet things she allowed herself to keep in the apartment. She mixed low fat yoghurt with sugar substitute and stored them in carefully measured cups, so that she would never be tempted to eat more than one per day. When I'd arrived in New York the freezer had been full, the cups lined up in neat rows of five. Two of those rows were gone. Ten days.
"Have you been bingeing?" I asked.
She looked at me with such sudden gimlet sharpness that she looked like another person. "I never binge," she said, in someone else's voice.
For a moment I thought about taking the ball of her offence and running with it - anything to avoid facing my own catastrophic fuck-up. But no. The time had passed. "I'm sorry," I said. "It just seemed like there was less yoghurt in the freezer than I remembered. How long have I been here?"
"Ten days? Eleven?" Her eyes were still wary and I was furious with myself for implying she might be stupid enough to go down that road. I wanted to apologize again but I knew that would only make things worse.
"I'm late." Tiny words again. Shaking the foundation of my world.
The sweetness came rushing back to her eyes and lips so quickly that I wanted to cry. Her teeth caught her lower lip and for a moment we just hung there, breathless in the silence.
"Are you sure?" she said.
"I think so. Oh Court, I've been so fucking stupid."
"You were careful, right?" she said.
I pressed my lips together, but my mouth shaped the word anyway. "Once."
"All it takes."
"Oh stop. I feel like a walking PSA as it is."
I could see she was mortified b
y the laugh she was holding back, but I had never loved her quite as much as I did in that moment. Suddenly it didn't feel so huge, now that the secret was out. "Quit making me laugh," I said. "This is serious."
"It is," she said, covering her mouth with her hand. "Oh God - it really is. Have you told him?"
I shook my head frantically. "Fuck no. You don't even know the half of it."
She sat down next to me at the breakfast bar. "Lacie, why didn't you tell me?"
My eyes were streaming all over my face and hands. "I don't know. I told you - I'm an idiot. I just wanted to forget about him. I dug myself in so deep - made a total fool of myself."
"Time for the whole gory story," she said. "Get it out, then we can pick up the pieces."
"It's not much of a story. He told me all this stuff about how he didn't want to end up like his barfly of a dad, right? He takes me to meet his brother, and then there's this girl with his brother - Heather. Turns out Clayton had had a one night thing with Heather, and also with her Mom."
"Daddy issues and Mommy issues," said Courtney, making saucer eyes.
"I just flipped. I don't know what I expected - like I didn't expect him to be a virgin when we hooked up, but I was under the impression that he wasn't Mr. One Night Stand. I don't know if I can be with someone who's been around town in that way, especially in a town our size. I started looking at other women and wondering if he'd been there too - even Mrs. Nye, who's over sixty and has been with the same woman since the late seventies."
Courtney sighed. "Oh dear."
"I know. I guess I lashed out. I was so mad at myself for being stupid enough to get down and dirty without a condom. Maybe I took it out on him. I don't know."
"But do you like him?" she asked, as if that could solve everything.
"What difference does it make? I'm gonna have to get checked out for herpes all the same. And the rest."
"Well, let's deal with the rest," said Courtney. "Get thee to a pharmacy."
I exhaled. Oh God. This was real now. No takie backsies. "I don't think I can," I said. "I've probably just lost track of time. I might not even be late."
Courtney was not impressed. "When?" she said.
"Burlington."
