by Lucy Ives
Then, later,
But perhaps I should say I did see F. and S. today. I’ve come to view them as an emblem. They are a possible emblem for what has gone wrong. It is almost beautiful. And, in fact, it is beautiful and if I weren’t in pain half the time I would tell them so. I can imagine their faces! But I am not merely miserable. I am brilliant at it. I stood at some distance and observed them near the pond a little after lunch. She listens. And I know he is not insensitive to that. But he will never leave his world in order to enter hers. Too much is left up to chance there. If only Stella really were a historian. I imagine I could write about everything by way of her. But enough. Elsewhere, the day has been sunny and cold.
There was something about the way Paul wrote that made it easy to read on and on. I wanted to read all of what he had written. It was like ice cream. I grew sated as I went. I liked, too, that he had seen me, that he had the decency to notice my errors. Paul was probably not the world’s greatest novelist, but he was pretty good at confessing, as poets tend to be.
What did he mean by “There is a playing card for Ella, the painting for myself. A print for Stella and a mirror for Lorelei”? If the “print for Stella” was one of his counterfeits—perhaps, to keep things neat, the Étoile possessed by my parents—that would suggest that the other items noted were a counterfeit playing card, a counterfeit painting, and a counterfeit mirror. Did Paul’s counterfeiting experience extend beyond what Caro was aware of? Could he also have been working with antiques dealers up and down Madison? Not to mention, was what he had told Caro about his education in printmaking even true?
“Work.txt” and “morework.txt” were at once revealing and confusing files. Each was an ambient autobiography, notes toward a narrative that was always just about to coalesce but never quite did. The documents were written mostly in present tense. Sometimes asides, reflections on identifiable works from the American Objects collection, were thrown in. I couldn’t tell if I was biased because of my preexisting connection to this material, but I thought, in spite of its significant shortcomings in relation to plot, that a lot of the writing here was pretty intriguing, though, again, not much like a novel. It was an uncanny catalog. There were lists of materials and forms:
softwood
banister-back chair
easy chair
gate-leg table
century vase
girandole
verre églomisé
mahogany
mahogany veneer
tulip poplar
yellow pine
gessoed and gilded
white cedar
The lists went on and on. Objects were considered from multiple angles, and I felt as if I could see them here in writing more clearly than I could in life. “Morework.txt” closed with an incomplete sentence involving a directive: “Rooms 734, 737, 740, 743 [here insert lavish, empirical description goes on for pages].” In spite of the final unfinished line, the writing seemed important, already a book of a kind in its own right.
I took the liberty of combining the two work-related .txt files with “PLAN.txt” and retitling them “american_objects.txt.” I removed all save this new document from the flash drive and ejected it.
I needed to get ready to go out.
—
AS FAR AS MY SOCIAL life was concerned, we have already seen that it was basically nil. Until fairly recently, I had made up for this lack by nightly entangling myself on the couch with my husband. (I watched something; he slept.) Now I compensated with daytime dates with Cate and anodyne research.
On this particular evening Cate invited me to her beautiful Brooklyn Heights home where, presumably, I would discover beautiful people. I was, and let me put this in the form of an understatement, a mess. I did not know what I was going to say to anyone about my present condition. I wasn’t even unmarried, for crying out loud! And I also did not have anything to wear that was likely to produce in these people’s minds an effect of anything other than sloppy neglect or an academically aggressive attempt to be hip that went way, way in the wrong direction.
I considered for a moment reprising Monday night’s tenue de soirée but determined upon reflection that this outfit was now permanently cursed and would probably need to be the subject of some sort of exorcism ritual. I emptied the closet out onto the floor and stood at the center of what felt like a roiling pile of boot-cut pants that had never looked reasonable on a short person, as well as ill-advised maxidresses, corduroy skirts, and tops embellished with strategically placed pieces of lace. I dressed, I realized, like it was 2003, and it had been a long time since I looked anything like good doing it. Part of me wanted to shed a little tear for this pile of idiosyncrasies lying at my feet, the sartorial wages of unchecked desire and extremely poor taste. But standing here I could see, all in one place but also in terms that were somewhat acceptable to my tender self-esteem, how many things I had been doing wrong. I mean, I wasn’t transgressing against other people, except I guess visually, which was sort of a nice thing. But this wasn’t a way that I needed to be anymore.
I kicked the clothes, dumb signifiers that they were, to the corner of my room. Maybe tomorrow I would see about pulling out a few basic items and donating the rest to Housing Works. What was left in my closet were the navy blue pants suit I had worn to my interview for my current job, my wedding dress, and a gray T-shirt dangling forlornly from a hook on the back of the wall. I selected this last item, put on my interview pants. Most of my shoes were for work and, when I added them to the present outfit, made me look like an off-duty CIA agent who was trying to play a quick pickup game with her kids in the driveway after a long day of devising new strains of fascism at Langley. I also looked like I was trying not to look short. The only other shoes in my closet were a pair of white Keds I had not worn since discovering that hipsters liked them, but tonight such an association was really going to be the least of my problems. I tried them on. I stood in front of the mirror.
At first I could not tell how I looked. Maybe nondescript? I picked up a book and tried holding that over my face to see if that helped with the project of assessment. The body looked, well, normal. Small, but normal. I appeared to be to scale. I removed the book from my face. I considered how the body looked with the addition of its face. I looked, I reflected, fine. I looked, by luck and by accident, like someone who wasn’t trying that hard to put herself together, because really I was trying, and with a great deal of exertion.
I went into the bathroom and scrubbed my face. I put on a little makeup. For the most part, I put on mascara. I combed my hair and added some water to it so that the wave would come out, thinking of Alice’s interwar style. I spent a little while looking at the gold wedding ring sitting alone on a side shelf in the cabinet. I closed the cabinet door. When I felt that I was assured of being sufficiently late, I left the house.
[ 27 ]
Cate’s partner, Reihan, met me at the door. He and I are afraid of each other. For years we have been trying to avoid finding out how exactly much it is that we do not get along. He went to the same college as Cate and I did, but he is five years younger than we are, and Cate met him only upon her return to the university campus as a graduate student. She “snapped him up,” as she says.
As luck would have it, Reihan and I were wearing the exact same outfit. I mean, he wasn’t wearing Keds, but pretty much everything else was the same. He managed to let me into the house so that we could deliberate about this matter in the vestibule. “Should I go upstairs and change?” he wanted to know.
I really did not want to offend him. “Well,” I began.
Reihan turned his face to the side a bit and his eyes shifted. He softly engaged my gaze.
It was only at this somewhat belated juncture that I realized he was kidding.
Reihan smiled.
“Oh, hahaha!” I exclaimed, because I imagined that this was how people were laughing these days.
Reihan was like, “I had to offer.”
“Thank you so much,” I said. Then I tried a compliment. “I like those pants.” But this exchange was evidently going on too long now and had lost its charm, because Reihan was already crossing the threshold into his home and I am not sure if he heard me.
What was happening was something between a party and a dinner party. Reihan and Cate were causing people to stand around with plates. Cate appeared in a long skirt with a big belt and a white blouse. She seemed to be in a movie about life on a modernist ranch. I wasn’t sure what I was going to be able to contribute to these goings-on.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m here.” I handed Cate a bottle of wine I had found on the top shelf in a supermarket. It was a Rioja and on the label there was an image of a dove carrying a bottle of wine in its beak.
“Wow,” she said, taking this specimen from me. “Thank you.” She looked me up and down. She nodded. “You’ve done it,” she pronounced.
I wasn’t sure if she meant that I had committed some sort of grave error that might not be reversible, or if she simply meant that I had managed to dissimulate my nakedness with clothes one more time and she was proud of me for this act. But we were basically in public, which is always a confusing environment for me, and so I decided that I wasn’t going to follow up on this one.
“Sorry I am late,” I said.
“I know!” Cate told me, giving me a look. “I expected you to be the first one here!”
“Really?”
“No, of course not!”
“Oh,” I said.
“You are the last one here, but that is also great, and I am glad to see you.” Cate gave me a small, dry kiss. She smelled like oranges and the beach and some kind of food.
—
I HAD BEEN GIVEN a clear drink containing alcohol and now I was standing alone in Cate and Reihan’s kitchen. I was trying to stave off terror by pretending that each succeeding moment was always only arriving and not actually present to me. It wasn’t that I was not there at the dinner party, but it wasn’t that I was there, either, which I felt was a pretty good compromise. I was awaiting the inevitable moment when Cate would come to rescue me, and we would share a few precious minutes alone, sometimes sneakily imbibing directly from the bottle, before Cate would be called back to the rest of her guests and everyone would look up and see that I was the one diverting Cate from the better part of her life.
Tonight, Cate was not separating herself from her party. I could feel the juncture at which I would normally be joined by my savior arrive and then pass away again. I contemplated the elegance of Cate and Reihan’s brushed-aluminum refrigerator, which was not really elegance so much as expense. I picked at my mushroom tartlet. I knew that I probably appeared strange.
But what my painstaking control over the situation could not account for was the appearance of a short man I had never seen before in the kitchen. And by “short,” I mean that he was my height. “Victor,” he said, offering his hand. “I’m Catherine’s cousin.”
This felt a little ridiculous. I really didn’t see what the point of this was.
Victor politely ignored the fact that I seemed to have forgotten how to speak, if ever I knew. “I think you’re a little bit famous,” he said. There was a minor accent here. He was not from the northern side of the family.
“I’m not famous,” I muttered.
“No, I think you really are. I think I maybe saw you on Reddit the other day!”
I was assuming that this person was mildly insane. I mean, I would probably need to talk about it with Cate later on, but for now I would attempt to exercise kindness and withhold judgment.
“I am not,” I said, “on the Internet.” With this point clarified for his benefit, I waited patiently for Victor to continue.
Victor smiled. “You’re extremely modest.”
“There is no way for you to know that.”
“You’re really a person of great ability, you know. Other people would like to learn from you.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“If you like.”
I drank some more of my clear alcoholic beverage. It was hard not to continue in this vein with this person. It didn’t really seem to matter what we were talking about. It sort of enraged me to be having a conversation with no subject, but I also really did not want it to stop. “So you’re saying that I should just drop everything and become some sort of guru?” I had no idea what this meant, but it seemed like Victor had already demonstrated that he did not require sense on this particular evening, or perhaps ever.
“Sure. I think you should do that.”
“OK.”
“Yes, I think it’s a pretty good idea. You’ll have maybe something like a dojo, where people of all ages and even genders will come to receive your teachings, and I think very probably the world will change.”
Now I knew exactly what Victor was talking about. I took a moment to progress through the interconnected stages of disbelief, anger, mourning, and acceptance. Cate and I, I decided, would be having words.
Victor was, weirdly, only watching this occur. He was probably a person who liked cats. He waited patiently, knowingly, for the emotional shit storm to subside. His face was generating this bizarrely sympathetic expression.
I drank a lot more of my drink.
“Your fame is great,” Victor continued, “but of course it’s anonymous fame, so you haven’t really had a chance to enjoy it. Let me ask you something, do you know everyone at this party?”
“I know Cate and Reihan,” I said.
“But you don’t know anyone else here?”
“No.”
“Recognize anyone? Anyone you think recognizes you?”
It was true, I reflected, and maybe even a little strange, that among the ten or so people currently gathered at Cate and Reihan’s house, I didn’t know a soul, not even tangentially. Either I had been relegated to their D-list, or, seeing as it was a Saturday night, perhaps they were attempting, kindly and subtly, to push me out into lesser-known waters.
I shrugged. “No. I don’t know anyone. And no one knows me.” It almost felt good to say it.
Victor said, “In that case, famous person, allow me.”
What happened next was that Victor introduced me to the present company as a woman named Sylvia and everyone in the room was like, “Hello, Sylvia.” And Victor told everyone that probably they didn’t realize it but they were standing in the presence of greatness. But he did this in such a way that no one felt like they were being told something insane or otherwise maniacal. They just sat there quietly as amused awe bent their brains a bit and relaxed them. Victor knew what he was doing.
Victor spoke in Spanish, like, Cate, can you make it possible for us to gaze into the Internet?
Cate’s game face at this moment was inspired, because she had a pretty good idea of what was coming, having already been so impolitic as to share with her relative my secret identity. But she could also see that I was going along with Victor and even looked somewhat at ease, which, for me, at a party was an event like the appearance of a narwhal riding a unicorn. In Spanish, Cate said something like, Yes, Victor, I am not a millennial but my husband very nearly is, and so one can indeed look at a projection of the Internet in our living room. And Cate went away and brought back a laptop that Victor was permitted to manipulate. And Victor manipulated the laptop a bit before introducing me to the crowd as a mathematician from Stanford who was just in town for a short visit and who had had an unusual afternoon one day while she was here and then had also had the uncanny experience of this unusual afternoon going viral, but such was our age. “Isn’t that true, Sylvia?” Victor said.
“Yes,” I told everyone. “A strange man approached me and, I’m really not kidding, he told me that women are bad”—I paused for effect—“at math.”
“Really?” murmured a lean woman reclining on the sofa. “He knew that you were a, um”—and here she was not sure what word to use—“math expert?”
“Yes.”
I was nodding. “He is a philosopher. I mean, a professor of philosophy. Actually”—I began embroidering—“he works at Princeton? Anyway, he recognized me, as I am a quite well-known math expert, an international expert of math, and he just came up to me, here on my vacation, and he said this. And then—”
Victor interrupted, not unkindly. It was possible that my embroidery was going a little too far outside the lines. “Yes, and then what you are about to see occurred!”
Reihan, as if on cue, made the lights go down. Victor caused the now apparently somewhat renowned video to play. “Oh, I’ve seen this!” the lean woman began to offer, but was shushed by the rest of the audience. At the moment of contact and then response there were howls of delight. The room burst into applause. Then the lights went up and I spent the rest of the evening being congratulated on my fabulous timing and aim as well as being asked to explain the topic of my current research at Stanford, which was something I appropriated from a recent but not too recent New York Times feature on an actual mathematician, intimating that I was doing a lot of important thinking around the fact that water does not spontaneously explode.
—
THIS WAS ALMOST ALL OF the rest of the evening. Some of the rest of the evening had to be taken up, once everyone else had left, with figuring out how Victor had managed to do this, and Cate, Reihan, and Victor were finally forced to confess that they had planned to orchestrate this bizarre scenario starting at around six P.M. when Cate had had an early drink and gotten loose and couldn’t resist sharing my recent exploits.
Cate was languidly stroking my hair. We were eating a secret cake made of some kind of artisanal ice cream that Reihan had forgotten to serve to the guests earlier in the excitement of the sharing of the video on how to punish a testicle. Cate said, “Can I make a confession?”
