The Island Dwellers

by Jen Silverman

  3B turned around. “1B?” she asked, cautiously.

  “Yeah, Elias lives in 1B. I’m his girlfriend, so. This mail is for him.”

  “Okay,” said 3B. “Well.” She turned to climb the stairs again. It occurred to me that she might be wondering why I was in a bathrobe, why I wasn’t at work already, if Elias was dating some white trust-fund baby who didn’t even need to work. I studied the lines of 3B’s shoulders as she climbed the stairs, wondering if there was an angle of judgment in them.

  “I’m a writer,” I called after her.

  “Huh?” She turned around on the top stair, her face scrunched into confusion.

  “I said, I’m a writer. I write. In the mornings. From home?”

  “Okay…?”

  We stared at each other. I guess she hadn’t been wondering.

  “Thanks,” I said again. “I’ll give these to my boyfriend when he gets home.” I ducked back inside and closed the door. I said it again, quietly, to myself: “My boyfriend.” It sounded a little juvenile. Like we were still in high school. “Mi novio,” I said, choosing the Spanish, and that sounded much more sophisticated.

  * * *

  —

  IT HADN’T BEEN MY INTENTION to read his mail, I need to say that right away. There were only three pieces, and I put them down on the counter by the orange bowl, but then I got worried that there might be something important that he wouldn’t see. And it occurred to me that if there was something important, he might want me to tell him about it when he came back from his run. He might want me to say, “Elias, you have a summons for jury duty.” Or if there was good news, maybe I would want to go out before he got back and get us coffee, pastries, something to celebrate. And then I could say, “Elias, there’s good news!” and the pastries would be sitting spread out, flaky and buttery and sweet, on his little wood table between the bleached seashells and my journal.

  The first envelope was a Time Warner bill, and the second was a tax form of some kind, and the third one was a postcard. I just flipped it over and there it was: all of this writing, spilling out, spidery and open and uncontained. In English, even. I read it without intending to read it. It was from someone named Cici, and she spoke to him the way one speaks to a recalcitrant child, so she must have been family of some kind. She told him to “call Mom,” and she asked if he was looking for any kind of job, and she said that she and Frank were on a trip for Frank’s job (hence the postcard), that they hoped he was “adjusting,” although she didn’t say to what. As soon as I read the postcard, I could see it so clearly: Cici, eldest sister, maternal stand-in. Mom is in America, cleaning people’s houses. Cici is with the grandmother, wiping noses and making sandwiches. Where’s Mom? young Elias asks, because he doesn’t yet understand. Cici tells him to be strong. Someday you’ll understand, she tells him. Everything Mamá does, she does for us. And later she will grow up, she will marry a man named Frank, which is a white name, which implies a level of privilege and education, both of which might feel comforting for Cici, but also ultimately alienating. Frank’s childhood was middle-class, untroubled by issues of abandonment, his mother may have been over-involved (as was Seth’s, and believe me, that creates issues of its own), but she was not in a foreign country mailing checks home. And so Frank does not understand why sometimes Cici stares out the window. Why sometimes her eyes are so sad, and why she writes postcards to her little brother, remonstrating him. “Leave that to your mother,” says Frank. “Let the kid be a kid, he’s only twenty-seven!” And Cici looks at Frank and loves him, but knows that he can never grasp the bond between her and Elias.

  When Elias got home, I couldn’t take my eyes off him. I watched him toe off his sneakers, ball up his socks, throw them at the laundry basket and miss, make and devour a peanut butter sandwich. I couldn’t stop seeing him through the eyes of the devoted older sister who had to raise him. I wondered what he’d do, when he saw her handwriting. If a misty distance might come into his eyes. If, like Cici with Frank, he would imagine that I could never understand. But I do, I wanted to cry, I do understand!

  Finally Elias asked, “What’s up?” He meant: you’re staring.

  “You have some mail,” I said, weirdly nervous. “Your neighbor upstairs dropped it off, I guess she’s been getting it…?”

  Elias flipped through, put it back. He didn’t bother to read the postcard, and his face didn’t change. “Cool,” he said. “I’m gonna shower.”

  “You got a postcard,” I said, because I couldn’t help myself. I wanted to say: It’s okay. I wanted to say: Tell me what it was like—the hard earth and the hot sun and all those baby goats, bleating and chewing.

  “Yeah,” Elias said. “I know.” He headed up the stairs.

  “Do you want me to shower with you?” I asked, instead of all the things I wanted to say.

  “It’s okay,” said Elias. “I’m gonna be quick.” But maybe he wanted to put his face against the tile wall. Maybe he wanted, under the self-erasing rush of hot water, to remember the small boy he once was. To mourn that boy, and his lost mother.

  I almost said, “You can tell me, I already know.” But the bathroom door closed and the sound of the shower drowned me out.

  * * *

  —

  I DECIDED TO WRITE ABOUT Elias. They say “write what you know,” and two weeks into my new life with Elias, the knowledge that I had of him was one of detectives and conjurers, archaeologists and poets. It began as a story, my first stab at short fiction. But I also thought of it as a love letter to him, to the time and place of his lost childhood, and also to my new life, and also to the beginning of our shared artistic practices.

  At first I wrote it in my voice, but then I found myself slipping into his. The ground is baked hard underneath my feet, my sister watches me from the window of grandmother’s shack. I found myself knowing things I didn’t know I knew. I’d never touched a goat, but the me-that-is-Elias, the Elias-that-is-me, we described in the first person the coarseness of goat hair under our boy-fingers, how we hugged the goat to our chest when we realized that our mother was truly gone. America, we whispered into the goat’s curved ear, and it twitched under our breath. America.

  I asked Elias, one night in bed, if he believed in telepathy. He looked at me, one of his long unblinking looks. I began to wonder if he was communicating something to me telepathically—Yes I do, perhaps—but then he said, “Like, seeing the future?”

  “No, like people sharing thoughts. Speaking to each other in their thoughts.”

  Elias considered this. Then: “No,” he said, and pulled his shirt off. He reached for me. Normally I waited for this moment, the moment where his heavily muscled brown arm encircled me, yanked me close. (Seth never yanked. Sometimes he apologized.) But this time, I asked, “You don’t think that two people can share things sort of…beyond language? Without language?”

  “Yeah,” Elias said, already hard against my hip. “Fucking.”

  I laughed. The word always sent a jolt up my spine when he said it. Seth had never used the word for what it was, for what Elias had shown me it could be: a description, an invitation.

  “No,” I said, “like, for example, do you think it’s possible that I could know things—about you—that maybe you didn’t tell me? But like…you maybe did tell me, in your mind?”

  “Things about me?” Elias’s mouth was on my ribs working upward.

  “Your childhood, for example.” I was going to say more, but Elias’s mouth covered mine. So he never said if he thought it was possible. So maybe he still did.

  * * *

  —

  SETH AND I MET AT Il Buco for a Divorce Dinner. We hadn’t had one in a little while, and he looked good when he walked in—in a pale blue button-down, dark jeans that must have been new, Fluevogs that were definitely new. I was wearing distressed jeans (Rag & Bone, new) and a low-cut black T-shirt (An
thropologie, new), and I’d gotten three inches cut off my hair (Alibi, SoHo). I’d hoped to get a tattoo sleeve before the Divorce Dinner, but according to Elias the only good tattoo artists live in Brooklyn, and so far it seemed that tattoo artists in Brooklyn all have waiting lists.

  “You look good,” Seth said, appreciatively.

  “Thanks,” I said, casually. I positioned my face when we cheek-kissed so that he could see how prominent my cheekbones were, now that the hair was off my face. (“Your cheekbones will be so prominent, once we get this hair off your face,” said the lady at Alibi.)

  We sat down. The server tried to put us at a table in the center. “We’ll have the one by the window,” I said, warmly but confidently. She led us to the window instead.

  “I love people-watching,” I said. “Sometimes I sketch them.” I don’t know where this came from.

  “You draw now?” Seth asked. He sounded impressed and like he didn’t want to sound impressed.

  “As a hobby,” I said, coolly. “Anyway, how are you?”

  Seth told me that he was really good, that he’d started jogging. That he felt really relaxed and refreshed, that he’d started meditating—“just sort of casually, no big deal.” That he went to a lecture on Judith Butler the other evening, with Barnard, and they had a great discussion about gender parity and queerness in the Lyft back to her building on the Upper West.

  “I thought she lived in a dorm,” I couldn’t help but say.

  “Oh,” Seth said, “no. No no.” And then he put the nail in the coffin: “The dorms are essentially a paternalistic metaphor. As a queer woman, she couldn’t live in the dorms.”

  As Barnard’s level of sophistication soared past mine, I heard myself asking faintly, “Oh…she’s queer?”

  “On the spectrum, yeah,” Seth said, and then ordered a martini, stirred not shaken, hold the vermouth, up with a twist.

  I ordered a Bulleit, neat. Seth lifted an eyebrow. “Elias got me into it,” I said, with a self-deprecating chuckle. “Declassé, I know, but some nights, we just drink Jameson.”

  “Jameson,” Seth repeated, the other eyebrow lifting.

  “Elias grew up on the streets,” I said. “A rough neighborhood in Venezuela. He doesn’t have much use for”—I indicated our surroundings, Seth himself, with a wave of a languid hand—“all of this.”

  We eyed each other. A childhood on the streets versus eating some pussy. Who won? We were unclear.

  “I’d love the Seared Spanish Octopus,” Seth said to the waitress, when she came by.

  “I was going to order the same thing,” I admitted.

  Seth grinned at me. I noticed all over again how blue his eyes can be. “So, do.”

  “I’ll have the Seared Spanish Octopus too,” I said to the waitress, and Seth and I smiled at each other, like we were in on a joke that only the two of us could share.

  * * *

  —

  ELIAS OCCASIONALLY WANTED NIGHTS ALONE—“some space,” he would say—and I didn’t mind giving him his space. In fact, as I sat typing in my apartment, it felt like Elias was right there beside me. Only this Elias was a younger one, more communicative, more vulnerable, more pliable. This Elias had just arrived in Los Angeles, where his mother (I called her “Mamá” since I didn’t know her name) was working three jobs. This Elias marveled at the urban jungle sprawling before him, not yet knowing that someday, say fifteen years in his future, he would live in Brooklyn and travel everywhere by bike, and meet a sophisticated older woman whose life he would transform.

  Those were good nights, the writing nights. I knew that in his apartment in Brooklyn Elias must be stretching, coming up with new gestures, maybe thinking of me. Maybe coming up with a gesture somehow intended for me, for my specific viewing experience. Maybe lying down to sleep alone on the large futon that held my scent now too, maybe putting his face against the pillow I had come to think of as my pillow. I liked to think of all the other great artist couples who had fed each other’s work with their passion. Frida and Diego. Ted and Sylvia. Marina and Ulay. Cynthia and Elias.

  It was getting harder and harder not to tell Elias about what I was writing, but I wanted to be able to say, “Look what I did for you,” and hand him the finished thing. A novella—published, bound, with an inscription in the front. Maybe it would say: To Elias, whose story is all of our stories. Or: For Elias, my inspiration, who exemplifies the American dream. Or: For Elias, who is my American dream. I liked this last one the most, because it was romantic and also political. It was the image of handing Elias a finished object that was romantic and political, that kept me from blurting it all out. But sometimes in his bed I’d smile to myself, in a beautiful and mysterious way, in case Elias asked, “What?” Elias never asked “What?” but it didn’t matter. I understood his relationship to privacy, to secrecy, to a difficult past. I understood why he didn’t ask.

  And then one morning, I was writing while Elias was out on his jog, and my phone rang. Seth. This was unexpected enough to be alarming—we were four days out from our last Divorce Dinner, and already had reservations at Eleven Madison Park for next Tuesday. So I picked up the phone, stepping outside into the little garden behind the house so that if Seth asked where I was, I could say, “Oh I’m just in Elias’s garden, having a coffee in my bathrobe. The hours one keeps with an artist!”

  Seth didn’t ask me where I was, though. He didn’t ask how I was, either. He sounded very dejected and sad, and he asked me if I knew what mansplaining was.

  “What what is?”

  “Mansplaining,” Seth said. “Have you ever…like ever heard that term?”

  “No,” I said, “what’s it mean?” And Seth told me that he’d just had a fight with Barnard, in which she had accused him of mansplaining everything to her all the time.

  “She said that I was mansplaining feminism,” Seth told me. He sounded like a kicked dog. “And she said that I had mansplained her period to her. And I told her that I don’t know what mansplaining is, but a conversation is when two people exchange information about a thing, and those two people don’t always have the same amounts of information, and then she said that I was mansplaining conversations to her and then she asked me to leave.”

  “Oh wow,” I said. I felt an unexpected pang of empathy for Seth. “And then what happened?”

  “And then she told me that I have hairy wrists,” Seth followed up, glumly.

  “You do, sort of,” I said.

  Seth was startled into laughing. “Cynthia!”

  “I mean you do. They’re hairy. That’s okay.”

  “Stop mansplaining my wrists to me,” Seth muttered, but he sounded better.

  “Where are you right now?” I asked.

  “Just got off the subway, I’m right by our—your—place.” Seth hesitated, and then: “I was thinking I might go there? Are you there?”

  “No,” I said, and surprised myself by not mentioning the garden and the bathrobe and the hours that Brooklyn artists keep. “I’m out right now, but you can go there. You still have the keys, yeah?”

  “Yeah,” Seth said, and he didn’t even try to keep the relief out of his voice. “I have the keys.” A beat, then: “Thanks, Cyn.”

  “No problem,” I said. We both waited a beat, and then hung up at the same time. That beat was the place where we used to say “I love you.”

  * * *

  —

  I WENT BACK INTO THE kitchen, gathering Elias’s bathrobe tighter. I’d write another chapter, wait for Elias to get back and shower, maybe shower with him. If he was going to Judson Church to practice gestures, I might go back to the Upper West. See if Seth was okay. See if he wanted to get some lunch.

  “Cynthia.” Elias’s voice jolted me out of my thoughts. “What is this?”

  Startled, I looked up. Elias was standing in the kitchen, sweat-damp, hai
r in his face, running shoes still on. My laptop open. Oh. My laptop.

  “What the hell is this?”

  “Oh,” I said. Time slowed down and also time speeded up. I had thought of this moment in so many ways, and this was not a way I had thought of it. Language deserted me.

  “Are you writing about me?”

  I couldn’t tell if Elias was mad, or glad, or if he was about to laugh, or if he was shocked. All I could tell is that he was very much feeling something, but that something was as unreadable to me as always.

  “Yes,” I said, searching for and finding the simplicity of truth. “It’s for you. And it’s about you! And it’s for me but it’s also for you.”

  “Cynthia,” Elias started to say, but now the words were pouring out of me.

  “I know that you’ve had it rough, you never talk about it, but—and I wanted to acknowledge that, to make it beautiful somehow, to sort of—I mean I can’t know what Venezuela is like, but also there’s a poetic truth to Venezuela that maybe I do know because I saw it in you. You changed my life, Elias, and I’m writing a story, a novella, but also it’s a love letter, about you and to you and so that America can understand how so many people like you got here and made us a stronger, braver, more beautiful place to be.”

  I stopped, out of breath. There was so much more I wanted to say, but I couldn’t remember what it was. Into the silence, Elias said, almost gently, “This is crazy.”

  “I know it might seem a little—”

  “Cynthia. I’m not from Venezuela.”

  I blinked at him. “What?”

  “I’m Jewish. I was born in Queens. I studied abroad in Venezuela for a semester. I don’t speak Spanish.”

  I thought he was joking. “Elias, come on.”

  “No you come on. ‘Elias’—what the fuck kind of Venezuelan name is that?” Now his voice had raised a little, he was on the balls of his toes as if sheer outrage had lifted him by the scruff. “I mean did you ever ask where I was from? Did you ever ask anything about me? I woulda fuckin’ told you I was Jewish. I mean where’s my accent? Where’s my fuckin’ Venezuelan accent? You know?”