by Lucy Ives
Whenever Cate encounters me, she always begins by noting how cute I look. “Oh my God, you look so sweet!” she bellowed today. The nearly comic difference in our respective heights may have something to do with this feeling on her part.
“Hi there,” I said.
We embraced awkwardly for a moment.
Cate was wearing a pair of sweatpant-shaped pants that were made out of gray suede and what appeared to be a black cashmere sweater under a jacket that had been cut to look like a bomber but was made of embroidered silk. Sartorially, she had been on a sort of trompe l’oeil kick for a while. Her sneakers were pristine and free of logo. She appeared to have stepped out of a music video and/or progressive skin-care commercial. She was radiant.
We sat down. In what seemed a miraculous single continuous gesture, Cate flipped through the menu, raised her hand for the server, and ordered each of us a set of matzo ball soup and salad and side of fries. With this out of the way, she arranged herself facing me and wanted to know, “So, how’s my girl?”
“Yeah, I’m OK.” I recounted the story of Whit’s appearance at the “Land of the Limner” reception on Monday.
“What?!” Cate was laughing. “I’m so sorry. It’s not funny. I really know that!” She did not stop laughing. She also began crying. “I think in the past I really could not see this side of him, but now it’s pretty hard to conceive of him as a bigger fool! Oh my God, you poor thing, you must have been in a fury.”
I shrugged.
“Who else was there? Did everyone see? I feel like you should be able to sue him! He must be totally out of his mind.”
I reminded Cate that I was, sadly, already in the midst of suing him for something else.
Cate sighed. “I’m so sorry. That’s very true. You are of course already suing him!”
It takes a lot to cause Cate to abandon one of her riffs of spontaneous joy. While things lasted, others had been, at the very least, amused by my relationship with Whit. Some individuals had even taken a kind of comfort in the idea that something as improbable as our love for one another could endure. It was problematic, and not just for me, to come up against the disastrous conclusion of our affection.
“Oh, look!”
This was Cate. She was pointing at the window. I mean, she was pointing out the window, but it took me a moment to see where her finger wanted my eyes to go.
“That’s your colleague,” said Cate, in a conspiratorial tone.
It was Fred. He was going down the street, deep in conversation with a young blond woman in her early twenties who was wearing, bizarrely but not entirely unattractively, a short mink cape. The young woman was somehow familiar, even if I had never seen her face. I realized, with growing alarm, that it was she whom Fred had approached after his latest WANSEE-related homily the previous night. She had been his primary audience then, and now here they were. Together. Again.
“Wow.” Cate’s eyes were very big, her mouth very small.
My face was frozen so I suppose I gave her a blank look.
“Big fish. Big, big fish.”
“What do you mean?” I said. I already knew I was about to have zero interest in the arriving food.
“The younger win,” Cate told me.
“What?”
“Win, of course.”
“Win what?” I hoarsely repeated.
“Her name!”
I shook my head.
“W-Y-N-N-E. Electra. You must know her. Electra Wynne? She dates, um, oh God, what is his name?”
I stared.
“Shit. I think it’s Bam-something? Bamberg? Swiss or something. Father’s a very big man.”
I was having difficulty breathing. “I don’t know that man,” I managed to whisper.
“Oh, yes, you do! He loves the arts. But anyway. What a feather!”
I reiterated my inability to comprehend.
“For his dunce cap, silly. Whatever, fuck him, I’m hungry.”
[ 18 ]
I didn’t go directly back to the office. I went a couple of blocks out of my way to a bookseller who did a combination of trade in rarities and literary works of the present. She had Paul’s two books, with their historical cover art, which I bought along with Ella Voss’s recent tale of midcentury horror. The bookshelf was thickening.
I strolled, smoking.
The Wynnes. Had they won?
Alice Gaypoole Wynne had furnished the museum with her great-grandmother’s scrapbook shortly after the affair with a man named Boy had reached its disastrous end. Perhaps she was hoping that her sacrifice of a familial treasure to a major NYC institution would somehow redeem her after that ill-conceived alliance. As for the scrapbook, the commonplace book, it was kept by a very serious woman, a woman who had worked to change society, yet it gathered together rather unserious items, like the picture of Étoile, the pretty lady who came from “Paradise.” Brunhilda had collected images from magazines and other ephemeral sources. Her book contained illustrations associated with entertainments of her time and played with the spectator’s ability to differentiate artifice from reality. Barnum’s lighthouse lamp was real, but it called attention to a space that housed humbugs, everyday objects falsely described as historical treasures and wonders of the world. Mumler’s spirit photograph, showing the ghostly hand, was a similar ploy for the spectator’s fascination and trust. It was both real and not. You could believe these things and feel awe at what there was in the visible world, or you could mistrust these things and smile at the entertainer’s ingenuity. This contradiction or option was likely a major cultural aspect of the social world in which Brunhilda did her work. One wonders if she viewed these tricks and sleights as mere entertainments or if she saw them instead as a tool for teaching skepticism among more recently arrived sectors of the American population. And then there was the map she had included, depicting Elysia, a place hearsay claimed did not exist. I wondered, for one enticing instant, if she were not herself the author of Lorelei of Millbury, itself so full of illusions that appeared real, as well as illusory realities. And yet I could not quite understand what the map had to do with the novel.
This commonplace book had at some point come into the possession of Alice Gaypoole, the first of the family to marry into the Wynne line, who, I felt I could say with some certainty, must have looked through it and appropriated the name “Elysia” for the arts club she was starting downtown. There was something likable about this, particularly at a time of ubiquitous patronymics. Alice, a more modern heiress, had created the arts club as a space of fraternization, perhaps sororization as well, in which she could freely experience not just culture but romantic love, particularly with Otto “Boy” Pastt. Then paradise had gone awry, and she and her team had closed up shop.
I would need to examine the intake books for roughly 1929 to let’s say 1932, which I planned to do as soon as I got back to the museum, to see what the deal was, but I wondered about other parts of the Elysia Club’s collection. It must have been substantial, purchased from its own artist-members. Off the top of my head, I didn’t think the department had received any of them. Something of an interesting twist in itself.
I was fairly well sunk in these thoughts, depending on my legs and some basic sense of direction plus habit to just carry me back to the museum without the direct participation of consciousness. This was why I did not notice at first when Whit walked right up to me.
“Missed you the other night!”
I almost screamed. I did not scream, because it was broad daylight in one of the most expensive zip codes in the city, and this would have caused some consternation among the locals. However, I wanted very much to scream, among other, more vivid expressions of dismay.
“Sorry, I seem to have startled you.” Whit was nearly blushing. He gave the astonishing impression of sobriety. “I really didn’t mean to do that.”
“Hi, Whitaker,” I said. “Are you here to tell me that you’ve signed?”
“I,” said Whit, but he couldn�
�t figure out the rest of his sentence. He left the pronoun there. He was wearing some sort of pale trench over a gray spring suit.
“OK, well, I’m going to leave now. Don’t come to the museum again. Don’t try to accost me on the street. Don’t try to contact me or see me. Don’t do any of these things. Forget that you ever knew me. You are a lying, cheating bastard, plus I think you are mentally ill, and I want you out of my life.” Here I noticed that we were standing at the base of the steps of the museum. “Now kindly fuck off while I go indoors and continue to support myself by means of my current profession.” I began moving up the steps. My heart was hammering. I was surprised that my body wasn’t being thrown from side to side by this organ’s exertions.
“Wait!” This was Whit.
I kept going.
“You won’t even listen to me say that I’m sorry!” Whit had yelled this after me, a new accusation to add to the collection.
A couple taking a selfie with their aluminum stick looked over at me. “Give him a chance,” one well-meaning half of them advised me.
I’m not one for recriminations masquerading as apologies, but under the circumstances I did feel that Whit’s request was owed a reply. I paused where I was, turned, and marched back down to the bottom step where Whit was heroically awaiting me.
“I knew you’d come back,” he breathed.
I looked Whit squarely in his face. I considered the too close arrangement of his eyes, crowded up on either side of his small, straight nose, probably some sort of birth defect. I contemplated the look of relief and triumph that seemed to be washing over him. I said, “You will sign the papers and this will have a result. We will be divorced, and we will be divorced forever, and that is too bad, because I loved you and wanted to spend the rest of my life with you. I don’t want to see or speak to you again until you sign. And then, after we are divorced, I also don’t want to see you or speak to you again, ever. I never, ever, ever want to see you or speak to you again.” I sighed. “Now, before I go, I’m going to leave you with a little something to remember me by.” I began to squat down.
I wasn’t, by the way, conscious of what I was doing, precisely. It was as if some outside force were gently guiding my body, arranging my muscles. It was effortless. Whit, meanwhile, appeared to be so overwhelmed by the fact that I had walked back down the steps and deigned to speak to him again that he, too, was in a kind of dream state, though, I might add, his was of a slightly different nature than mine.
I could hear him murmuring above me, “Do it, Stella. Do it,” which exhortation allowed me to comprehend that he imagined that I was about to give him a blow job in public.
I was at a good height now and pulled my right arm down, making a fist, so that I would be aiming upward, for optimal damage, and I punched Whit as hard as I possibly could in the testicles.
Whit was instantly down and writhing on the sidewalk.
I made a speedy but calm exit. A few people seemed to have taken notice but were inclined to give Whit a wide berth. It was true, I reflected with satisfaction, that he had also given me verbal permission to do what I had just done.
The selfie-stick couple was staring at me with a disturbing combination of repulsion and glee. “That was perfect,” one of them told me, nodding.
“Thank you,” I said.
“What happened, if I may ask?” the other wanted to know.
“Oh,” I said, “he actually asked me to do that.”
“Really?”
“Yes. He’s crazy.” And with that, I went indoors.
[ 19 ]
I really felt, though, as if some outside force had entered my body and given me the strength and timing to do what I had just accomplished. It was as if another hand had closed over my hand, wrapped it into a fist, instructed it as to the best route upward into Whit’s testes. The intent was all mine, but I couldn’t get much of a grip on the sensorial miasma of simultaneous knowing and not-knowing through which I’d just instinctively glided in order to supply Whit some well-deserved pain. Maybe this would call my former partner’s ambient attentions to what had—very factually and genuinely—transpired between us, i.e., that for the final two years of our marriage he and a woman who was not me had been surreptitiously enjoying condom-free sex on the regular. Though I wasn’t holding out particular hope for Whit to realize the absurd magnitude of his infidelity, that he had for all intents and purposes been engaging in nonconsensual bigamy, it was possible that he might take a few moments to reflect on the upshot of our relationship’s actually ending. I felt that perhaps he had not quite grasped this finer point, i.e., that this was for the duration, and one almost had to feel sorry for him, traipsing mournfully around as if there were something left to reclaim. Generally, it was sad, and not even because he was so pathetic and sad.
If I hadn’t been as angry as I was, I might have shed a tear. I was grateful for the inspired will-to-nut-shot because this act was allowing me to do something I had not done for a very long time, which was to be disappointed and to be, very simply, hurt. So much aggression had been visited upon me—I mean, so much obfuscation and anger and then my own pursuant flailing, during the course of which I seem to have managed mainly to hit myself in the face rather than disengage from the marriage—that I hadn’t had time to exist as a person who had been harmed by another person. I had been very busy keeping up the pretense of being a person whom someone had attempted but then failed to harm. This was not who I really was and the pretense had become exhausting.
I pondered this for a moment. It was a different kind of narrative, the one I was producing, than the one you usually think of in relation to revenge. Because with revenge the express goal is to enjoy, or at the very least be certain of, the other’s suffering. I suddenly felt that all I wanted was merely to be certain of my own suffering. It made no difference to me how Whit felt, and in a sense the low blow was kind of an arbitrary signifier. It could have been any number of gestures, as long as the end result was Whit’s momentary nullification. On the one hand, Whit had been left struggling, sack throbbing and stomach full of knives, which was unfortunate and not very nice, but on the other he also wasn’t upright, towering over me, in the early stages of sexually assaulting me, or, what could have been even worse, capable of speech.
I was walking slowly into the back of the museum.
The security staff must have come to an agreement with the powers that be, because I saw Gary, a Trinidadian expat in his early thirties, at his normal post. I tried waving, but a crowd of gangly Scandinavian tweens in matching backpacks surged through the hall, and he had to turn his attention to preventing one of them from ripping the arm off of a wooden cherub.
It was funny, because I abruptly had the impression that the whole phenomenon of personal revenge, the legendary human appetite for it, could mostly be explained in terms of what I had just experienced. Here I am not talking about blood feuds or genocide, just events scaled to fit within a single human life, events that do not expand to affect an entire population or culture or historical age (though perhaps everything that happens is always affecting everyone, I really don’t know!). What I mean is, I had not known that this would be what I wanted. I did not wish to be revenged against Whit. I didn’t wish to know that Whit felt pain. I really did not wish anything in relation to him at all! I just wanted to see him incapacitated and separate from me. Or: I wanted to see my own agency, as divorced from his. And I wanted to know the exact extent to which I had suffered. And I wanted to be able to feel the pain, rather than merely comprehending, intellectually, that events that were designed to make me suffer had taken place.
It was a tease. I was still entirely too capable of looking at my own situation from a disquieting variety of dispassionate angles. I still saw it as “someone’s” interesting story. It was easy to have the sense that I had been robbed, not even of love or property, but of the ability to care about my own life. It wasn’t just, how was I going to get back there, get back into those scenes
in which Whit was dishonest and I did not comprehend the terms of my own existence, but rather: How was I going to get back into living anything?
I wasn’t entirely sure that I had ever done much living. If you had asked me about this twelve months ago I would have told you that I was in the thick of things, that I had so much real life going on, I didn’t know what to do with it. I would have talked about how very much I was leaning into my career, and how very much I was married to a man I cherished, how very much I loved the city where we lived, how very much the arts were approaching a late-republican golden age. I would have been lying, but I would have believed that what I was saying was true, and I would have believed this because although I could feel the difference between truth and a lie, I had become accustomed to ignoring this perception. For this genre of perception had grown inconvenient, most of all, as it turns out, in my own home. (Take it from me that lying to someone you love really fucks with that person! If you do this, you are no longer loving them and should abandon them pronto. Do not convince yourself that they are the one at fault. You are at fault. But the damage you do can be minimized by a speedy exit. Dear cheaters of the world, I have but one word for you: leave.)
Anyway, I was going down to the archives. I mean, I was going down to the archives, and I felt really fucking bad, but it was good, because this was feeling something.
These archives were, in case this was not clear, of the museum’s own internal activities. Though the museum houses several other libraries and archives, it stores the records of its operations outside—or, rather, below—these more bookish spaces, with their reading rooms and vaulted ceilings and semiopen stacks. The rows of filing cabinets we on staff refer to as the museum’s “archive” are actually materials that have been rendered obsolete by digital memory, but which are crucial enough that they are grudgingly maintained in real space and on the premises, rather than being burned or shipped out to North Dakota. These are the records of the museum’s catalog when it was an actual catalog of paper cards, as well as the original longhand and later typed versions of the museum’s acquisitions records. This paperwork is maintained in a storage area that is also home to a variety of pallet-lifting devices, platforms and plinths, various promotional discards including a series of giant foam-board cutouts celebrating the fauna of medieval Japan, a broken plaster cast of a discus thrower everyone has agreed is actually alive and who is named Lefty because of his missing crucial arm, as well as other miscellany. The area is guarded by a man named Rainer, a Czech with a strange whistling voice who seems to be about three hundred years old.
