They’d been discussing Elliot’s own Apricity test, which was blank. Blank when he’d first sat for the Apricity years ago and blank again now. A little under 2 percent of the population produced blank results, Pearl had explained to him in an apologetic rush, like she was worried the non-result would bother him. It didn’t. In fact, Elliot felt it suited him. He liked being the blank slate. The page unwritten. The vampire gazing in the mirror.
“Maybe you’re already as happy as you possibly can be?” Val said, swirling her glass so that the ice cubes chased one another round its base.
“You make me happy,” he replied automatically. When she didn’t answer in kind, he looked up to find her eyes full of tears.
“What? Val? What is it?”
“I did something bad,” she said.
And she refused to say any more. When he tried to reassure her that it couldn’t be that bad, she started crying again. When he said that he loved her no matter what, she cried even harder. Still she wouldn’t say what it was she’d done. He asked her of course; over and over he asked, and over and over she shook her head. When that didn’t work, he guessed, then he acted like he didn’t care, and finally he pleaded for her to tell him. What began as concern for Val’s tears became disbelief that she wouldn’t confide in him, became a game to get her to confess, became an unexpectedly deep well of bitterness. Whiskey and bitterness. He’d left his wife for her. His son. He’d carved her face into metal, marble, wood, and displayed it to the world. What couldn’t she tell him? What confidence didn’t he deserve to have shared? In the end, Elliot had gone to bed in a huff. When he’d woken in the morning, Val had already left for work. But then, she’d had an early meeting on her schedule.
During his time on the platform that day, Elliot had decided that he would not ask Val to tell him her secret, and in this way, eventually, she would confess it to him. It was like how he stood very still in the alley to coax the cat back after it darted out the kitchen door. But here he was asking again, and here Val was not answering, eating her noodles, and seeming entirely unperturbed.
The moment felt somehow familiar, and Elliot realized with a pang that he’d experienced it before, only from the other side. He recognized in his own voice the desperate lilt of girlfriends past, of Pearl even, when they finally sensed he was breaking things off. At which point a stillness would settle over Elliot as he watched them grapple to retrieve what he knew was already done and gone.
“Are you really never going to tell me?” Elliot asked Val, taking care to hold his tone steady.
She clicked her chopsticks together. “What if I didn’t?”
“Well.” He considered this: what would it be like never to know? “I would be forced to think the worst.”
She pursed her lips. “Or you could choose to think the best.”
“Did you have an affair?” And it felt, at first, preposterous to say this; then suddenly it felt like this must be what she’d done. “That’s it, isn’t it?”
She laughed, but not an actual laugh. She just said, “Ha!”
The Ha! meant that Elliot was the cheater and Val knew it. Val knew it because he’d cheated with her while he was still married to Pearl. Thus, it would serve Elliot right if Val turned around and did the same thing to him. Elliot’s stomach stirred its sickly brew of honey. Oh, but this was miserable!
“I feel,” Val said carefully, “that if I say no to one of your guesses, you’ll be motivated to keep guessing. Then eventually you may guess correctly, and I won’t be able to say no anymore.”
“Answer just this once. I won’t ask anything else. If you did cheat, I forgive you,” he added impulsively before even stopping to think if this was true.
“That’s very generous of you, hon, but I didn’t cheat. In fact, it has nothing to do with you.”
“So it was something you did before we met?”
“See!” She pointed at him. “What did I say? You’re still guessing!”
“You should never have told me there was something if you weren’t going to tell me what it was!”
Elliot stood and began unwrapping the strips of fabric from his limbs, casting them off and wishing for them to crash against the floor instead of landing how they did, silently, limply. All day he had been consumed with curiosity and anxiety and insecurity and regret, but that—all of that!—was wrong. Anger. Anger was the appropriate response. Anger poured into Elliot, crackling and righteous, until he looked up and saw Val with her knees pulled up to her chest and her face sunk down between them, a little girl hiding from the world. His anger sloughed away.
“I wasn’t going to tell you,” she said, her voice muffled. “Not ever. I knew I shouldn’t. But.” She lifted her head, her forehead marked from the press of her kneecaps. “I wanted you to know—”
“Then tell me! You can tell me.”
“—a little,” she interrupted. “I wanted you to know a little. Can you be content with knowing only a little?”
They went to bed together, at least. Elliot knew Val was making a point of staying up with him. Usually she turned in first, and he sailed on into the night with his screen, stumbling into the bedroom after waking at some blue hour, having fallen asleep on the couch. Tonight they lay on their respective sides of the bed, the cat an oblivious lump at their feet. The light from the street lamps pressed into the room with a yellow glow and a low buzz. Sometimes to help himself fall asleep, Elliot would close his eyes and imagine that he was in a giant incubator, a robotic womb that was composing him into being, building one more layer of him each night.
“Maybe it’d be easier to tell me in the dark,” he said.
For a second, he thought she might answer him. For another second, he thought she was already asleep. Then, in one large motion, Val turned and curled around him, hooking a leg and arm over him and burying her face in his shoulder. She squeezed herself against him so tightly that it began to hurt in the places where her nose and knee pressed.
“Maybe you stole some money,” he said, adding, “Maybe not even because you really needed it, but just because you wanted to.”
She neither answered nor slackened her hold.
“Maybe you hit someone with your car.”
The buzz of the street lamps seemed to grow louder.
“Maybe you’d been drinking. Maybe that’s why you didn’t stop to see how hurt they were. Or maybe you did, and he was dead.”
“He?” she murmured.
“Maybe he wasn’t dead, but you left anyway. Maybe he died later because help came too late. Maybe you didn’t even call because you knew they’d trace your number. Maybe you saw his face in the obituaries. Maybe he was young. Rhett’s age. Maybe you tracked down his mother and followed her around the grocery store, always keeping an aisle away.”
She said Elliot’s name into his shoulder, but when he paused to give her the chance to say more, she didn’t.
“Maybe you dropped a twenty-dollar bill on the floor of the grocery store so that his mother would find it. But that made you feel worse because why not a hundred-dollar bill? Then again, what would a hundred dollars matter? It’s an insult to even think of a dollar amount. What could ever be enough?”
He paused. In a small voice, she said, “What else?”
“What?”
“What else could it be?”
So he went on into the night, listing different acts of violence and betrayal until he realized that her limbs had become dead weight and her breath even. At some point during his litany, she’d fallen asleep. He examined her face, sweet in repose, then arranged the covers around her chin.
In the morning they moved through their routines without mention of the night before or the night before that. And after lunch, Val accompanied Elliot to the gallery, helping him fold the strips of fabric in an old suitcase so that he could pull them out in the right order when he was on th
e platform.
Today was easier than yesterday. The wrapping procedure went as Elliot had practiced it, and the only physical discomfort was a bit of sweat. I’m doing it, he thought woodenly as he wrapped himself up. I’m doing it. Val and Nita came in and out of the room at intervals, picking a vantage point in an unobtrusive corner. While the gallery-goers watched Elliot with a range of interest and bafflement, no one looked at him with disgust, as they had the day before. And after Elliot had wrapped his face, he wouldn’t be able to see their expressions at all.
Just before he laid the first strip of fabric over his eyes, Elliot noticed a man at the edge of a cluster of people but seemingly not with them. He was tapping something into his screen. An art critic? It was possible. Nita had sent out invitations to the local papers and blogs. This was how it had begun with the Valeria series; positive reviews in a few estimable blogs had led to gallery invitations had led to museum installations had led to a sizable grant. And his next piece would be even better, people had assured him. Or had it been he who’d assured them? He had never been a starving artist or even a slightly peckish one. Of course, his mother had wired a monthly amount to his account, finally gifting him with a big lump on his twenty-fifth birthday. Beyond that, he’d bobbed along from commission to fellowship to funded retreat with few pauses between. Of course, his friends would say when the next thing came through for him. Of course Elliot got that. The most difficult part of the last few years had not even been the rejections; it had been not knowing where to place blame. Was it Elliot’s own fault for not making good art? Was it the gallery bookers’ fault for not recognizing that his art was indeed good? Was it (somehow) Valeria’s fault for being the only good art he could make?
Through the fabric, the people appeared as shadows passing before Elliot, sometimes pausing and peering so that the blot of them grew larger in his field of vision. “Midas,” they read off the card, adding, “That’s the king. The one with the touch.” At one point, a figure came and stood before Elliot, unmoving for many minutes. Val? he wanted to call through the muffle of his bandages, but he kept himself from saying her name.
* * *
—
APRICITY CONTENTMENT PLAN: Wrap yourself in softest fabric.
“It sounds like a fortune cookie,” I told the guy. Elliot. The guy with the machine. “‘In softest fabric.’ Sounds fake. This isn’t a real Apricity, is it? It’s a random generator. You set us up, and you see our reactions. That’s the art project, isn’t it? You can’t trick me. I read about these things.”
“No, no, it’s real. It’ll be in a gallery,” the guy with the machine assured me, and showed me where the company name was embossed on the thing, like that couldn’t be faked.
He looked slippery to begin with. The machine guy did. Too tall. That stoop. Like he was deigning to bend down and talk to me. He’d come from money, obviously. Of course he had if he could fritter his days away pretending that this was an actual job. A grown man!
“If you don’t believe me, come see the show when it’s up,” he said. He held up the “machine” with my “result” displayed on the screen. “Yours is interesting. I might use it.”
“So let me get this straight,” I said. “You’re going to wrap yourself in fabric and call it art.”
“Pretty much. But I’m going to do it to the nth.”
“The nth?”
“Overdo it.”
“I know what ‘the nth’ means.”
“Like with yours, I’d mummify myself in soft fabric until I can barely breathe. The idea is to make myself sick on happiness.”
“And call it art.”
“And call it art,” he repeated. “I’ll order special fabric for it. Cashmere. Or something softer than cashmere if that exists. Whatever’s most expensive.”
“Whatever’s most expensive. Huh. I’m sure you will.”
“I could send you the fabric after the show is over. Would you like that?”
“Why would I like that?”
“Because the machine says you would.”
“Let’s all do what the machine says and see where we end up!” I told him, and then I went home and pricked each of my fingers with a pin until it bled, one after the next, because I damn well could.
* * *
—
ELLIOT LEFT VAL ALONE for the next few days, and this seemed to suit her just fine. If he was hoping that she’d confess her secret, she didn’t. She didn’t cast him looks of any sort either, not guilty, longing, or grateful. She merely went back to being Val, and any strain in their interactions, Elliot knew, came from him alone. At home, he’d watch her out of the corner of his eye, fixing on the articulation of her foot or a lock of hair the dye had frizzed or that little tab of flesh that marked the opening of her ear. Often enough Val would catch him watching her and smile at him. And how was it that as she became more unknowable, more remote, she also became more beautiful, more precious to him?
In the grip of Elliot-didn’t-know-what, he hired a private investigator, not to follow Val but to look into her past. He expected a grizzled ex-cop like in the movies, but the PI ended up being an elfin young woman in a sweater knit with blobby shapes that Elliot finally deciphered as rabbits and carrots. When Elliot asked the girl if she had “experience in the field” (a phrase borrowed from the same movies that the grizzled ex-cops populated), she explained that there was no “field”; the investigation would be conducted wholly on the Internet. Of course, she clearly wanted to add.
Elliot felt foolish as he answered the young woman’s questions. How had he and Val met? Through a mutual friend. No, Elliot didn’t think Val was having an affair. No, she wasn’t after his money; she’d signed a prenup. No, he didn’t know what he was looking for exactly, whether an event or a person, a place or a thing. The girl looked without comment at the picture of Val he sent to her screen, but she didn’t need to say it; Elliot knew what she was thinking: Middle-aged man, pretty young wife. Typical. He wished he could explain that it wasn’t like that.
“So what am I looking for?” she asked again.
“You’ll know it when you see it,” Elliot said, and now he was the character in the movie.
That afternoon Elliot took the stage of Nita’s gallery. He sat in his chair, face forward, wearing headphones with the volume so loud that even in the far corners of the gallery people kept looking around to locate the tiny, tinny orchestra. A man stepped up onto the platform and lifted an ear of Elliot’s headphones to verify the source of the music they were hearing.
Val did not come to the gallery. Elliot had told her not to bother, but he had hoped she would show up even so. He let the sound surround him, enclose him, swallow him up. At the end of the day, when he removed the headphones, ghost sounds rang and whooshed within his ears. He wondered if he’d done permanent damage to his hearing and found that he did not care if he had. Chris Burden had famously shot himself in the arm for a performance piece, after all. If Elliot went deaf, he could just call it art.
* * *
—
PEARL KEPT THE SURPRISE off of her face when she answered Elliot’s knock. But then the HMS would have announced him from the lobby. He held up the borrowed Apricity. “See? I didn’t break it.”
She took it from him. “Rhett’s out with friends.”
“But you’re here.” He smiled at her.
After a beat, she stepped aside and he came into the apartment. Pearl’s latest biological model was laid out on the table, a moth the span of Elliot’s hand. Its wings were made of thousands of tiny luminous filaments. Pearl had started making these models after their divorce. The hobby had surprised Elliot when he first learned of it. As far as he was concerned, Pearl didn’t make things; she managed them. But then maybe it was just him she’d managed. Maybe he hadn’t known her either.
As part of the Valeria series, Elliot had made a replica of Val�
��s face out of real butterfly wings, which had necessitated pulling the wings free from the insects’ bodies with tweezers until he’d had an array of vivid colors on one side and a small pile of black twigs on the other.
Elliot reached to touch Pearl’s model of the moth.
“Careful,” she said. “It’s still drying.”
He lifted his hands in the air like a criminal in the flashlight beam. Slowly he turned around. “Hey. Pearl. What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”
She was still standing at the front door, the Apricity in her hand. She was barefoot, in her pajamas, her hair feathered around her face, her dark eyes wide. She was as pretty as ever, especially when she gave him that weary look and sighed. “What’d you do?”
“Me? Nothing! It’s just a mental exercise.”
She left the doorway and stepped smartly between him and the moth as if she thought he might ignore her warning and touch it anyway. “A mental exercise for some piece you’re working on?”
“No, no. Just for me. For my curiosity.”
She smiled, not so nicely.
He lowered his hands and shoved them into his pockets, stooping a bit and smiling in a way he knew was charming. He’d cultivated the look in high school and cleaned up with it at college, Pearl included.
“Come on, dove. You can tell me.”
“What’s the worst thing I’ve ever done?”
“Yeah.”
Her smile deepened like the joke only got better from here. “Married you.”
“Really?”
Her smile disappeared. “No.”
Elliot knew then that he loved her still. It wasn’t like the love he felt for Val. This was a safe love, polished and put away somewhere, like a stone wrapped in cotton.
He took a step toward her and reached down to touch her cheek.
Pearl flicked a bit of wing at him, the speck landing on his sleeve.
“Get out of here, El, before you get yourself in trouble.”
Tell the Machine Goodnight Page 11
