Fight No More

by Lydia Millet

  “I once had a relationship with an older man myself,” said the lady. “Not wealthy like Rand, but . . . anyway, the age difference wasn’t the problem. It was the power dynamic.”

  When she felt calm she went to the bathroom again to fix herself up. She’d still look good when she left here. Walk out like she’d walked in. No puffy lids or eyeliner streaks.

  She had some under-eye cream in her bag. She applied it.

  She’d go to Rand’s and take every last item she cared about, down to her toothbrush. Down to the last shred of underwear. Mercedes would be in the kitchen, ready to make her lunch, but she wouldn’t eat any. She didn’t want lunch.

  They’d ended up almost the same, Mercedes and her. Servants. Except that Mercedes would still be there tomorrow and she would be gone.

  Mercedes barely spoke English, even though she’d been here for fifteen years. But maybe she had the right idea. Maybe it was better, dealing with Rand, not to speak his language. Then you could nod and smile and go about your business. All you had to say was “Sí, señor.” Or maybe “Yo no sé.”

  Well, she wouldn’t talk to him anymore either. Silence is golden. She would vanish like she’d never been. To him, she would never have been, that was the goal. He wouldn’t hear her again, he wouldn’t touch her again, he wouldn’t see her again. Not even for one second. Her superpower was invisibility. Away from him, she could let herself flicker back into sight.

  Would Mercedes judge her as she crammed suitcases into the car? But Mercedes wasn’t nosy and had no time to stand around watching. She actually minded her own business, did her job, stayed focused. Once during the flu Mercedes had made her soup and even sat at her bedside when Rand went out to a cocktail party . . . Leaving in such a hurry, she wouldn’t have enough bags to carry all her clothes. When she got there five months ago, it all fit in just two of them. Now she’d have to take them out in armloads right on the hangers. Chanel. Dior. Valli. A few Stellas. Hell, she’d use garbage bags.

  It wasn’t her car, technically. He could come for it, but would he? He’d write it off. He had other cars. She drove the cheapest, probably. She’d never checked. But she suspected. A Lexus, that was all.

  She exited the bathroom, putting her shoulders back. The real-estate lady wasn’t around—wait, there she was. Out on the terrace, on her phone.

  She passed the painting. Then stepped back in front of it. You weren’t supposed to touch paintings, she knew. You had oils on your fingers, or was it salt. She hated that monster with the head of a bird. It made her grind her teeth, how much she hated it.

  The rubies weren’t big—no 11.22 karats. But the settings were sharp, those little claws that held each stone. She slid the ring off and held it against the bird monster’s head. She pushed it in and dragged. At first, nothing, but after a bit she felt it sink in. A scratch achieved. Oh! But one of the small rubies had fallen out of her ring. She knelt and picked it up.

  When she stood up again she could see the agent’s back through the glass of the French doors. The agent was divided into rectangles; an arm was in two pieces, split by a white bar.

  Would the real-estate agent get in trouble? Would she get blamed for this?

  No, because what could Rand say? That his other girlfriend had done it?

  Anyway he wouldn’t notice for a while, that was her bet. Maybe a long while. He’d be too busy remodeling. Moving in. Paying some planner from the Valley to set up his wedding.

  She dug the ring into the canvas and dragged harder, scrubbed it up and down. It was tough at first soon but got easier. In the end there wasn’t much to it. It might be hard to make something in the first place, but it was easy to wreck it.

  She stood back and looked down at it.

  You could hardly tell the bird-head thing had ever had a beak, since the tip of it was gone. Because it was in profile, without the beak it had only one big, black eye. It sat in its highchair like a baby.

  Or not a baby—more like an ancient woman, a hag. A wrinkled witch with a barrel body and skinny chicken legs, dangling.

  Without the beak it had no weapons. It couldn’t defend itself. It was still ugly, but somehow she felt sorry for it.

  Stupid. You didn’t feel sorry for monsters.

  SELF-EXPRESSION AND LEADERSHIP

  Lynn took her to a taco stand on their first date, right near his house in East L.A. He picked her up at home and as they drove she tried to remember when she’d ever been east of the 5. In her car, sure. But had she gotten out before?

  They talked about his friend Lordy, who’d tried to drown himself in a swimming pool the day they met. Later Lordy had claimed he just wanted to take a swim. He wore a fake leopard-fur hat that looked just like the hat famously worn by Mobutu Sese Seko, deceased African tyrant.

  Mobutu, Lynn told her, had chosen his own name when he came to power. It meant “the All-Powerful Warrior Who Goes from One Conquest to the Next.”

  He’d also renamed his whole country.

  Lordy was an eccentric, besides being mentally ill—you could be both, Lynn said, two distinct categories. He always wore that style of hat: if not fake leopard fur, then fake cheetah. An orange-brown color with black spots or rings. He’d never wear real fur; he was a strict vegan. It was hell going out to eat with him because he’d ask the waitress if a dish was cooked with butter, say, and if she showed the slightest hesitation before answering he’d make her take him back to the kitchen.

  Lordy was the only one of Lynn’s musician friends with money. Some of it came from his records but some came from a lawsuit when he was just a kid: his parents had been killed in a collision with a semi, and there was a settlement from the trucking company. He lived with his uncle after that.

  “How did he get the name Lordy?” she asked.

  Lynn laughed. “Story he tells is, when he was born his mother was in so much pain giving birth all she would say was ‘Lordy! Lordy!’ And so that’s what they named him.”

  Lynn had worked all over the country. Once he’d been a cook in a logging camp up in Washington—worst job he’d ever had, he said. The loggers brawled a lot and when they weren’t getting into fights they spent their free time doing heroin. The upside of that was that they didn’t mind him playing the drums. “When they were nodding off,” he said, “I could have crashed cymbals right beside their heads. Wouldn’t have bothered them a bit.” He left that job to work on an industrial fishing boat, but the smell and the guts got to him. And the confined spaces. Plus he couldn’t play.

  Then he came back home to take care of his sick father, and after that he stayed. He’d gotten an education degree and worked as a high-school teacher until Lordy, whose uncle lived in Lynn’s neighborhood, heard him drumming and asked him to play on his new album. He still taught, but now he also had the band.

  He didn’t want her to have to wait in line for the tacos. He asked her what she wanted as they stood in front of the board, then found them a table, a nice, shady one beside a big hedge of bougainvillea. It was a plastic table but it had a homey checked cloth on it, and there were festive lights in the trees, Christmas lights in the shape of chili peppers. Corona signs and all the rest. Negra Modelo. It was mostly families eating.

  His home turf. She liked that he’d brought her here.

  It was so easy talking to him she had to remind herself they didn’t have much in common. His chest and shoulders bore a tattoo of a cherry tree, branches with white-petaled blossoms stretching over them. She’d seen it at the pool. He was practically a giant: he towered over her and had to weigh twice as much. She tried to picture it—was missionary out of the question, or could he hold himself up on his elbows? But that would be like weightlifting. On the other hand, men were used to it. Weren’t they?

  The tacos were good but greasy. You really needed the napkins. If she ate these things all the time, she’d look like the mamas one table over. Worse actually, since they looked good a little plump. And seemed happy. Most people seemed happy in rest
aurants. Or the right restaurants, anyway. Sitting around tables, eating and drinking under the twinkling strings of light. The women at the next table laughed and nodded as they ate, surrounded by children. Skinny was more of a white obsession, Lynn had said in a text. She hoped she wasn’t too skinny for him. She had the top shelf, anyway. She’d always had that. Maybe it worked in her favor. What was that song? In heavy rotation a while back. “I ain’t no size two / But I can shake it shake it like I’m supposed to do.”

  It was sung by a white girl. Kind of pretending to be black. She hadn’t been skinny to begin with. But she would be soon. Hell, probably already, since she had hits. When they got rich and famous they got skinny, if they weren’t already. Clock work. There were hardly any exceptions.

  After they finished eating Lynn drove her to his house, the one he’d grown up in. A modest stucco two-story, but attractive. There was a motorcycle parked in the driveway with a cover on it. It had been his father’s and he hardly ever drove it, he said. Just every now and then when he was restless. “You know those hazy days, when no branch is moving and the city feels airless?” he said. “I hate that airless feeling. I like to feel the wind.”

  His drums were set up in the basement. There was also a keyboard, a bunch of other equipment, records and speakers all around. An old couch was pushed against the wall—old but clean-looking. “The room is soundproofed now, but it didn’t used to be. I used to bug the shit out of the neighbors. But on the other hand, if I hadn’t gotten on their nerves, Lordy would never have found me.” She noticed the posters—Power to the People, one said, showing a raised fist.

  “Listen to this,” he said, and put on a song, kind of folksy. She was surprised, but she liked it. Then he took out a vinyl album. “Here’s an older version of it,” he said, and put the needle down. “It was originally written in the nineteenth century. A workers’ anthem.”

  She sat down on the couch and sank in: it must have broken springs. The song was like a hymn, or at least a choral thing, because it was lots of voices together. Arise, ye prisoners of starvation, / Arise, ye wretched of the earth.

  Lynn came over and sat next to her while they listened. His presence, like him, was huge. But gentle. Wouldn’t he do anything, touch her leg? Put an arm around her shoulders? Maybe he didn’t like her. The simplest explanation . . . what was that saying? The simplest explanation was usually the right one. She didn’t want to think about it, in that case, but the question was distracting. She let her eyes rest on the wall—that old fake-wood paneling made out of what, vinyl? She should know, but none of her houses ever had it. She only remembered it from the late seventies, from when she was a little kid. A framed gold record hung there with a brass plaque and some words beneath. She couldn’t read them from here.

  “That was my father’s,” said Lynn. “He was a singer. Soul music. The Motown sound. He had the one record. Never made much from it. Old story, the label ripped him off. Then—family to raise. That record was his moment of glory.”

  Behold them seated in their glory / The kings of mine and rail and soil . . .

  “Glory,” repeated Lynn. He’d said it, and then the song did.

  What was glory? She didn’t know. She didn’t know at all. It had to do with shining, she thought. Or living on in memory. Glory, glory hallelujah. Her mother had been religious, but only went to church when she was sad. It must not have helped, because after that was when she locked herself in her bedroom and they had to forage for food. Even, sometimes, go next door or across the street for it. A box of cereal or some bread. The neighbors had stepped up, the ones whose house she remembered because it had The Joy of Sex in the bathroom. And orange shag carpeting. She didn’t have their names anymore. But when her mother was locked in, sometimes she and her little sister had slept in the neighbors’ guest bedroom. Gotten warm meals, mac and cheese from a box.

  The neighbors didn’t call Child Protective Services, but always took care of them at those times and said their mother would pull through. It was too much for their mother. She tried, but she couldn’t handle it. The world was too much, their mother said. Can you not feel the pain of everyone? she once asked, very serious, holding Nina by the shoulders and looking into her eyes. Can you feel the pain that resides in all beings?

  Nina was only eight then. She tested by waiting for a minute to see if the pain came, but kept feeling the same as usual. So finally she said, Um, I don’t think I can.

  Her mother turned away, disappointed. Dropped her hands. Not disappointed, that was too mild. More like crushed.

  They’d had a rabbit that died because—she thought but didn’t know for sure—her mother had forgotten to feed it. When it died, shivering in the corner of the cage all skin and bones, she had sobbed. Her mother had too. Longer than her and Marnie by far.

  Her mother had sung, warbling: Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

  “Hey,” said Lynn. “Are you OK?”

  “Sorry,” she said. “Just thinking about my family.”

  He didn’t pry. Relief, since she wasn’t up for talking about it. Especially she wasn’t up for talking about the death. Bad thought; block it. You’re on a date. Don’t be such a Debbie Downer, Marnie used to say. Once Marnie had been the cheerful one, always capering and making faces to distract her, when they were kids. Maybe that was why she was so angry now—maybe, as the older sister, she should have been the one making faces.

  “You don’t have to do that,” said Lynn. “I can tell a real smile from a fake one. I know what we’ll do. We’ll dance.”

  “Oh. I’m a really bad dancer,” she said.

  “Hell, I know that. You’re white, aren’t you? Let’s do it anyway.”

  “But not to this,” she said. The last strains of the workers’ anthem were already fading.

  He got up and lifted the needle, switched to an MP3 player.

  Aaaaaow! Say it now! I’m back!

  “Everybody knows this,” he said.

  He reached out a hand and pulled her up.

  “Get up offa that thing,” he talked along with it. “And dance till you feel better.”

  So they did, and she did. He held her hand the whole time, which made it easier. He swung her around and twirled her until she stumbled and laughed. First she’d thought he was so forbidding, but now—it was kindness that emanated from him.

  They went upstairs, into the air-conditioning, when they were sweaty from dancing. He poured her a glass of wine. He wouldn’t have any himself because he had to drive her home. You couldn’t drive, drink and be black all at once, he added. It overloaded the system.

  She hoped he wouldn’t take her home too soon. The wine was warm in her mouth and she sipped it slowly; the glass gave her hand something to do.

  He toured her past a staircase of family pictures, showed her the faces and said who they were. His father, now deceased, his mother, deceased even before the father—Latina, she saw, explaining his lighter skin. If he were as dark as his father, the tattoo wouldn’t even show up on him. Would it? There were five brothers and sisters, a couple half-, he said. One full brother, one full sister. They mostly lived nearby. One had problems—his brother had been in and out of jail. Possession raps. They were still close. They helped each other when they could.

  “I have a sister, but she moved to Texas,” she told him. “I haven’t seen her in years. She always seems to get so mad at me. I can’t do anything right. It’s because, I guess, she doesn’t think I protected her enough. When we were young. I was the older one. Before the last time I saw her she went to this—I don’t know, self-empowerment-type lecture? Or motivational speaking? And after that she wasn’t as nice to me. Things are my fault, she thinks. And maybe they were. I can’t remember. I tried to say sorry.”

  She’d said sorry for everything. For whatever she’d ever done or not done, she was sorry. Being sorry was easy. She had no trouble believing things were her fault, at least partly. But no matter what she said, Marni
e didn’t want to hear it. She wanted something else. She wanted Nina to go to the same empowerment lecture series she attended. Some company offered them, a pyramid scheme maybe—you paid a bit at first, and later it was more.

  Until she took the course, Marnie had said, she wasn’t in the conversation.

  “But I’m right here,” she’d protested. “I’m in the conversation. Aren’t we having it?”

  “You’re not enrolled,” said Marnie. “You can’t speak to my listening.”

  Nina had offered to pay for lunch; she couldn’t stand to do the math over who’d ordered a seltzer and who drank tap. But Marnie had shaken her head, asked for the bill and painstakingly separated the items they’d both eaten, down to the last nickel. She said Nina couldn’t buy her off.

  It was as though, when Marnie looked at her, she was seeing a different person. She didn’t look often; she tended to avoid eye contact. But when she did, it was with suspicion, like Nina was covered in some version of the past she herself didn’t recognize. It made her feel trapped. She’d never been told the nature of her crimes, so she couldn’t defend herself. They used to be inseparable: when they were girls they were joined at the hip. Had to be, because most of the time it had been just the two of them. And somewhere in there, without wanting to, she must have hurt her sister.

  You didn’t know the harms you did.

  “You don’t need to say sorry so much,” said Lynn. Unlike Marnie he looked her right in the eyes. He did like her—didn’t he?

  But he didn’t take her upstairs. He turned and headed down to the kitchen again, and she followed. Her wineglass was empty.

  “You want one more, a nightcap before we go?” he asked. He’d noticed the empty glass. He paid attention. And yet he didn’t move toward her.

  Maybe she was supposed to make the first move. But she couldn’t stand to. She might have it all wrong.

  “You think I’m a lush, don’t you,” she said, as they went back into the kitchen. Half-joking. Half-insecure. More insecure.