The Vanishing Point

by Elizabeth Brundage

  In high school he hung out with the music and theater people, and he took up the saxophone and he was pretty good at it, and the girls liked him because they said he had good lips and he was a good kisser. He was pretty happy about that. He started running and lifting and had a growth spurt, and suddenly he wasn’t fat anymore, but he still felt fat and worried about the fat coming back, even though his mother was continually telling him he wasn’t fat, and he looked great and he knew some of the girls liked him and thought he was good-looking, and yet every time he looked in the mirror, he saw his old chubby self, who he kind of hated but felt sorry for, which was almost worse, and that’s when he started writing on a stack of yellow pads he found in a closet, and he liked the feeling he got when he wrote, because he was in his own little world where he felt safe and nobody could bother him. Meanwhile, his English teacher, Mr. Rosendale, made them write poems, and Theo’s were pretty intense, and he knew there was, like, this pit of bones deep inside him, and he couldn’t get to the bottom of it no matter how hard he tried. Mostly he wrote about what it felt like to be fatter than other people and not great at sports and have bad skin and have to go on Accutane and the problem of being hungry all the time and there never being enough good food in the house because his mother had started drinking a lot and was forgetting to shop and he usually ended up eating a peanut-butter sandwich or something bad for him instead of having a regular meal like most of his friends, where they sat around the table with their parents and talked about their day and stuff, and it made him feel really lonely and abnormal. His mother would sit at the table, drinking her wine and reading the newspaper or watching Chris Matthews, and his father would call at some point and say he was staying in the city because he had too much work, when they both knew he was seeing his girlfriend instead of coming home to them.

  And then, in his senior year, he met this girl India. And, like, bells went off in his head. It was classic; she was the new girl at school, like in those Disney movies. And she had long blond hair and kind of a soft, tubular shape, and she looked like somebody’s cool favorite sister, only she didn’t have any siblings, it was something they had in common, being Only Children. And how fucked-up was that expression, only child? Like, how sad for him, you know? Like, it was just a really sad situation for everyone involved, his parents, who didn’t want to have more kids, and him, being the only one they got. India’s family had moved out of the city, and her mother was in a hair commercial, and her stepfather was some kind of banker and had a fund that literally festered with money, and she was always rolling her eyes behind her stepfather’s back because she thought he was an idiot, and she said her life was incredibly boring, when in fact they had an exotic sort of lifestyle, like the people in magazines. They lived in a ten-thousand-square-foot house that had been built by the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, and it jutted out over a creek like a fist punching the air, and he always imagined when he stood at the floor-to-ceiling windows in the living room that he was inside a terrarium. She called it the terminal, as in airport, and said her life was terminally boring and she hated everybody in the school except for him. At the end of the day, they’d go into town and get a slice and sit on the bridge in the park, eating it and talking, or they’d walk down to the library and hang out in one of the tutoring rooms and eventually get around to doing their homework. They were in the same AP classes, but India was noncommittal about academics and said she didn’t really care how she did. I deliberately don’t apply myself, she told him once, taking off her shirt, letting him touch her breasts, which were fairly nonexistent. It’s not like I’m stupid or anything.

  She did ballet. One time, when he was walking through the village, he saw her through the storefront of the ballet studio in her pink tights and black leotard and ballet slippers, and this guy who was apparently pretty famous and danced in the city with some offbeat company had come to teach there, and she was all excited about it and said she thought her teacher was sexy, this tall black dude in gray tights and a white T-shirt, and at one point, this so-called famous dancer was holding her from behind, his two hands around her waist, and it was hard to discount the sort of obvious triangular proximity of his dick, and then he lifted her in the air and carried her around in a circle. Anyway, that was her. India. Tough. Spoiled. She had ADD. She loved to curse. In India’s world, everything fucking sucked. She’d get depressed and they’d up her meds.

  She let him try her Adderall. It made him feel driven and crazy, and he liked the feeling, and they kissed so hard for so long, his jaws ached. He still thinks about the first time he put his tongue inside her. She was so soft and sweet and smelled a little sweaty, like when he used to go camping and he’d wake up at dawn all sweaty in his sleeping bag and it was really cold out and the air sort of stung your nose and the whole sky stretched out and he felt really alive.

  It was around this time they started looking at colleges, trying to narrow things down. On the weekends, his parents would drive him here and there, all throughout New England. It aggravated him that they assumed he was smarter than he was. Like they had all these handy excuses for why he wasn’t getting better grades or why he’d gone down on a test: he was tired, he had bad sleep habits, he didn’t study enough, and if only he had, he would have aced it, which wasn’t necessarily true. Plus, his parents were always covering for him, always stepping in to pick up the mess, to take a crisis and turn it into something potentially workable, like he was better, smarter, like basically a genius, when in truth he had no clue and couldn’t really talk about anything of real importance, and thank God he had his phone, it was especially convenient when the chime interrupted the awkward bloom of nothingness at the dinner table and he could get up and leave the room for a minute.

  But he couldn’t really fault his mother, because all the mothers were like this. It was like some kind of contagious disease they all picked up when their kids were juniors. Like this savage competitiveness. And the bottom line was, you had to be really fucking spectacular to get ahead in life or forget about it. It was ALL OR NOTHING, because nobody wanted a mediocre kid. No one wanted a kid who took their time, trying to figure out his options. Not really, they didn’t. Because that was boring. You had to know, like, right the fuck now what you were doing with your life. You had to, like, excel at calculus or speak Mandarin or fucking Aramaic, and you needed some offbeat hobby, like stamp collecting or sorcery. Your essay had to be fucking eloquent, and what did that really mean, anyway? They wanted to hear you were a good fucking soul. That you were willing to go to fucking Honduras or Vietnam or pick up trash along the highway or hand out plates of turkey dinner at a soup kitchen, because that meant you were a good fucking person, even if it was all just a lie and you weren’t in fact so good and you did things you didn’t tell anyone about, the fucking real things that defined you. The real things. Like how he preferred being alone to being with people, but if he admitted to this, they’d call him antisocial and put him on more drugs, or how parties actually annoyed him, the games the girls played, and how they’d fuck you over if you neglected them, or how friendship with guys was based on a couple unspoken parameters, like how much you could bench or what sports you played or how far you got with somebody when you did Ecstasy. It was all just trickery, and you were doomed from the start because everybody knew you just didn’t have the goods. You were nothing special.

  In his own defense, he believed he was smart, but not the kind of smart you saw in movies, like the Matt Damon character in Good Will Hunting, who was so fucking smart and sat around in his shitty apartment reading all these esoteric books but chose to reject his brilliance because most of the kids with real brains were assholes like the ones Theo had grown up with.

  Truthfully, by the time he’d sent in his college applications, he didn’t even want to go anymore, and when he got rejected from his first choice, Julian nodded diplomatically like he’d expected it. Rejection is a fact of life, he told Theo. Get used to it.

  That summer he w
orked at J. Crew, which was a slow form of torture mostly because they played this pounding shitty music at an incredibly deafening volume, like, all day long. There was no escape from it. Kids would come in with their mothers and try stuff on and leave everything heaped on the floor, and he’d have to fold it all up and put it back on the shelves. There were these gigantic pictures on the walls of really good-looking people, and the customers would want to look just like them, but obviously nobody did, so, like, at the end of the day, it kind of reinforced how inferior people felt, how imperfect. Other than that, he didn’t mind getting a paycheck, driving home in his mother’s old Passat through rush-hour traffic with all the other working people. He liked having a purpose, making his own money instead of grubbing off his parents.

  His father was apparently extremely busy doing this commercial for some miracle constipation drug that was all of a sudden big news, and the company had gone public and the stock had split or something, and it was like this big deal. He would call and leave messages in a weary, pedantic tone, explaining why he wasn’t coming home. Theo thought it was seriously anticlimactic, selling a product whose claim to fame was that it made people shit. The whole situation basically embarrassed him, and he didn’t tell any of his friends what his father was doing.

  They didn’t see much of Julian that summer. On the rare occasion that they were together, his father never looked him in the eye. Never. He found it confusing, as if Julian didn’t trust him, or assumed he was doing bad things, which he wasn’t, like he had some exclusive inside knowledge about Theo. It was sort of like being accused of a crime you didn’t commit. That same frustration, and Theo found it unsettling. Like this shame he felt. Deep inside. For what exactly, he didn’t know. That was the only word he could think of that seemed to fit. And he knew he didn’t deserve it. It made him sort of hate his father. And that made him feel really bad.

  All that August, his mother seemed really distracted. Like if he asked her a question, he could see her deliberating all the possible answers for the one that would worry him the least. They did a lot of school shopping. She took him to Target, where they roamed the aisles, pushing the big red cart. They bought extra-long sheets and a new comforter and a wastebasket and a little gray bathmat and a toilet brush and an alarm clock just in case his phone died and a light for his desk. He’d gotten into the honors college at the state university, and even though his father could easily afford the tuition, they were giving him a scholarship, and he could tell how relieved his parents were that he’d actually gotten in because even if you were, like, Einstein, there were no guarantees.

  Then, like a week before school started, India came home from Florence, where she’d spent the summer studying art, and told him it was basically over between them. They were standing in her kitchen, and he felt something lurch in his stomach, and it was almost like being punched, and he stood there a minute, getting his bearings, hearing the annoying sound of her mother’s high heels clacking back and forth, back and forth, from the hall to the mudroom to the living room, clacking, clacking, in her little blue suit.

  India had changed those few months in Italy. Her hair had gotten longer, and it was really blond, and her chin wasn’t puffy and babyish anymore, it was square and important and sexy, and her pimples had pretty much gone away. She said she’d met somebody over there, and he was older and, like, studying economics, and they’d been together, a phrase he found annoyingly shallow, and, well, she’d gotten HPV and vaginal warts, and it was very upsetting, and anyway, it was over with him, over, the word like a bad taste, like she wanted to spit it out, and now she sort of hated men and was, like, really confused, maybe even queer or pansexual, she didn’t know, she was still trying to figure it out, and she was really sorry, like, really, really sorry to be breaking up with him.

  They stood there, looking at each other, and she lit a joint and sucked on it and smoke came out through her nostrils. She said her pediatrician had given her the shot when she was, like, thirteen, and it wasn’t fair because she still got it and apparently everybody had it, and she was really pissed because she’d made every guy she’d ever been with wear a condom. And to be brutally honest, she didn’t even like sex, and as much as she tried to come, she never did except when she was alone, having these weird and scary fantasies, and there was obviously something wrong with her, and every time she watched a couple having sex on film with all the noise and theatrics, it annoyed her because it didn’t happen like that in real life, at least not for her.

  Life is a big fat betrayal, she said.

  I don’t think that’s true, he lied; of course it was true.

  You don’t know anything, she said in a gently patronizing tone, and her solemn, beautiful face turned ugly, like melting wax. You can go now.

  But—

  I have nothing more to say to you.

  It was like a line from a movie, he thought.

  He left her house and walked home, and there was the cat-piss smell of the rain and the sky was almost yellow, and then it started, first a pitter-patter on the leaves, and then this amazing deluge, and steam hovered over the pavement like smoke. He started running with this pressure in his chest, like he couldn’t breathe, and tears streaming down his face, and he was alone in his misery and he hated India and he never wanted to see her again. He kept running, and when he finally made it home, his mother was on the phone, and there was some big-deal terrorist event playing out on TV, and they ate dinner together, watching all these dead bodies getting lifted into an army plane, and she asked him about India, and he said she was fine, she wanted to be a curator, and they’d had a really good time.

  Julian

  Brodsky was particular; he favored Magda. When her pictures were up for critique, he’d stroke his beard, thoughtfully, parsing the various comments, the shards of passive aggression, and proceed to defend her, emphasizing the brilliance of a photograph that the others had failed to see. As a result, they were all a little afraid of her. Because she was good, and she was beautiful, and she had a power he envied and wanted to crush. You couldn’t describe exactly what it was that made someone’s work better than another’s, except to say that, like the weather, the consequence of viewing it shifted your sense of well-being.

  It was around this time he started seeing a therapist and admitted to her that he was obsessed with Magda and sometimes thought about hurting Adler, or at least doing something to screw him. Sometimes he’d lie in bed at night, dreaming up eloquent scenes of sabotage. When Julian saw them together, he explained, it was a physical response. The only word for it was animal. Like he could kill for her.

  This last thing, he kept to himself.

  Sometimes he followed her. After class, when she was going home. She would walk for a while and then catch the bus. She never saw him. He was good at it. The buses were crowded, people standing in the aisle. He’d lurk in the rear and watch her. He was content to just gaze at her, swaying a little with the movement of the bus. She’d grip the strap, staring out the window. Always so curious. Drinking in the streets. Scavenging for images. Her stop was Allegheny Avenue. From there it was a few blocks to Salmon Street. He’d watch her hips, the little gully where her back got small. The sway of her long brown hair. The wooden shoes she wore, clomping along. She would vanish through a rusty metal gate with a NO TRESPASSING sign.

  He would linger a moment on the sidewalk, waiting for her to turn on the light in the second-floor apartment.

  It wasn’t love that drove him. It was something far baser, something he couldn’t control. It occurred to him that she was his connection to Rye, for whom he’d developed disturbing feelings, a compulsive envy that wouldn’t go away.

  About a month after the workshop ended, he ran into her in the city. She was stepping out of the elevator of the building where he worked. He’d been so dazzled by the surprise that he hadn’t noticed the few pounds she’d put on, or the radiant flush in her cheeks. He took her to Harry’s, his go-to place with women. Unlike m
ost of the girls he dated, who were neurotic about food and perennially dieting, Magda ordered a steak dinner and cleaned her plate, using her bread as a sponge to sop everything up. When she finished, she looked across the table at him, glassy-eyed, and grinned. I guess I was hungry, she said.

  How about some dessert?

  Should we look at the menu?

  He convinced her to come home with him, and they walked uptown arm in arm. He casually asked if she’d seen Adler, and she said no, they’d lost touch. In fact, she never wanted to see him again. That’s when he kissed her. They had a few drinks in his apartment, and though he’d anticipated a certain degree of hesitation from her in the bedroom, she was in fact more than willing to oblige. A month or so later, when she told him she was pregnant, the thought occurred to him, vaguely, quietly, that maybe it wasn’t his. He never said as much; he never asked. But he couldn’t help thinking: if it’s not mine, whose is it?

  There was only one answer to that.

  Julian wasn’t, as the saying goes, the marrying kind. It was his mother who had told him that. He would never forget the look on her face when he and Magda told her they were getting married. They sat there in her living room on the fancy, uncomfortable couch, drinking a toast out of crystal glasses that hadn’t been used in years and tasted like the inside of the china cabinet where she stored them. She’d put out a dish of herring with sour cream and some Ritz crackers with toothpicks that looked like swords. It was the sort of thing his father used to eat. Magda was out on the front walk when his mother grabbed his arm and pulled him aside. Are you sure about this?