I don’t know what to say. It’s Caroline’s job to be the positive one. I say, helplessly, “You will.”
She sighs, wipes her nose and goes to the kitchen sink. I come and look out the window with her, wrapping my arms around her middle, leaning my head into the cushion of her arm. We watch the cold gray rain fall from the cold gray sky, the snow sluicing away. It seems impossible to imagine that there is a sun anywhere. Caro heaves a heavy sigh.
“Look at this world. How can I go out and find someone to love me in this?”
“You will. You’re smart, and amazing, and—you’re beautiful, Caro. You know that.” I gesture at the sticky notes lining the molding, YOU ARE A FIERCE WARRIOR QUEEN and LOVE YOURSELF. START THERE and a² + b² = c². “Your positive self-esteem is maybe actually the only thing holding this building together. It is literally the foundation of our house right now.”
She looks at the notes, and me. “You know, I get that. But Morgs, you’ve got to know, it’s easy to believe you’re beautiful when you see it written all over someone else’s face every day.”
Yeah. I do. Because that’s how, except for the last few weeks, Caro’s always treated me.
I say, “First of all, what am I, chopped liver? Second of all, just because Todd’s not looking at you doesn’t mean you aren’t beautiful. It’s like that saying: If a tree falls in the woods, does it still make a sound? And the answer is, Yes, duh, quit being so anthropocentric.”
Caro quirks a watery smile. “Yeah. But does it get back up again?”
Howie comes to visit the next day, bringing cheese sandwiches and pear slices in waxed paper. We climb through my window and eat lunch together on the damp roof of my building, far back from the edge and the view of any paparazzi who might be loitering in the parking lot below. We use the chill as an excuse to huddle close. My whole body is focused into those three places we’re touching: shoulders, elbows and knees. It seems unbearable not to be closer, but I don’t know how to close that gap, or whose job it is to do it.
The houses are small in this part of town, older and brightly painted. Up until a few years ago, it was poor families and empty doorways, but it’s turning slowly to gentrification: white hipster kids, then students, the first few young professionals. Grass still grows in cracks in the asphalt, the neighborhood clinging to some faint remnant of decay.
“I’m supposed to ask you to go on the Today Show,” Howie says at last.
“So ask,” I say.
“Morgan Stone,” he says, with a shy smile, “will you appear on a nationally syndicated talk show with me?”
I lean in and kiss him before he’s done asking. It is long and soft and tastes of pears. He twines his fingers into my hair. I think, Oh.
“Is that a yes?” he asks. His hand slides down my ear, to my chin. As if by touching me, he can memorize this moment.
“No,” I say, searching his face. “I just wanted to kiss you.”
“Oh good,” he says, drawing me in. “Me too.”
I open my mouth to him, and he responds, hand tightening in my hair with a sharp sweetness that surprises me. I never would have expected this passion from him, this skinny boy with the too-honest eyes who’s pulling me closer. And I’m pulling him back, and I think this tingling in my stomach is going to rise up and choke me. Then my hand brushes the Lump, and everything becomes very serious and still.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“Don’t be,” he says. “It’s okay.” He reaches for my hand, to place it back, and I draw away.
“I’m sorry,” I say again.
“For what?” he says.
I chew my lip. “Um, for casually putting my hand on the source of your years of otherness-related body trauma?”
“Who says I’m traumatized?” he asks. “Besides, I trust you.”
I say, slowly, “I trust you, too.” I don’t know when this became true. But it is.
His eyes are dark in this light, shaded with green. “So why not jump in with both feet?” he asks.
I try to conjure up dread and loathing. Chad’s fingers. The invasive shock of Dr. Morse. But it’s not that. All I feel is butterflies.
“I’ve waited for trust my whole life,” I say. “I want to let it be sacred for a few more days.”
He nods, but I can see he doesn’t really understand, and this quashes something in me.
I say, “I’ve spent a lot of my life thinking that once I found the right person, everything would be complete and perfect, and I’d never be lonely again. I think I’m kind of afraid of what will happen if we . . . you know.” Have sex? Bang? Have intercourse? “Get together and everything’s not magically complete.”
“It probably won’t be,” he says.
A laugh jumps from my throat.
“I’m just being honest,” he says.
“Is that the way you talk a girl into bed?”
“No,” he says quietly. “I wouldn’t talk anyone into bed if they didn’t want to go.”
I wonder in a flash about his past: how many other conversations he’s had like this, how many other girls’ hands he’s softly held with this promise in his pale face. But then he leans forward and kisses me, and I understand that it doesn’t matter, none of it; there is something between us unquestioning and living and true. I can’t imagine fitting with some other person better than this.
“I’m meeting my family for Mexican,” he says, rising to go. He pulls me to my feet. “Want to join us? Tyler’s totally got a crush on you. If you’re there, he’ll be too embarrassed to smear beans in Riley’s hair. Probably.”
I duck my head to hide the smile twisting at my lips. “Thanks, but I can’t,” I say. “I’m hanging out with Caro tonight.”
Concern lowers his voice. “How’s she doing?”
“Better,” I say. But I’m not sure. Her mood drops when the sun sets these days. Some new sticky notes appeared around the bathroom mirror this morning, containing the unconvincing words strong and moving on.
We cross the rooftop, fingers tangling.
“Think about the Today Show,” he says. “Parker would really love it.”
“Which is reason enough for me not to go.”
“I wish you two would make peace.”
“She hates me,” I say.
“Well, you are kind of a brat to her.”
I shove his chest lightly. “Asshole.”
He catches my fingertips and kisses them. My body is a shiver of wings.
“Hole-Hole,” he says.
I laugh. The sound catches and chokes out strange, but he doesn’t laugh at me, and I feel safe. He just kisses my fingers again until I break away, so full of tingling that I fear I’ll explode.
We climb back in through my window. We both look at the bed, the soft tangle of sheets.
“Let me know if you change your mind,” he says in a low voice.
We both pretend we are talking about the Today Show. I shake my head.
He ends up going on the Today Show without me, and does a few other appearances and interviews. I stream the videos through my laptop and let Howie’s voice wander through my mind as I paint, tickling the edges of my gallery pieces. They’re all in the finicky artistic hinterlands of near-completion: that tenuous space where a single brushstroke could just as easily ruin a piece as finish it. “Leave them alone,” Caro tells me, watching me wearily over her geometry flash cards. “You’re going to drive yourself nuts.”
But I feel with every stroke that I am painting myself into my own skin. I let the hours melt into one another. On the radio, Howie says, “Of course I think about my body a lot. Don’t you think about your own body all the time? Everyone does. Mine’s just more remarkable. In the literal sense. People remark on it.” I loop my signature into the bottom corner of the many-handed weaver painting, joy balanced in my chest like a
brimming cup of liquid.
At times, my happiness is so great that it feels claustrophobic. The universe has been so clear: Here You Are! Made For You! Completion in the Form of Another Person! Out of stubbornness, I begin to look at other men. I perch in the Java Jane window, staring at every man who comes down the street. Women, too. The manager keeps the press out with an iron fist, leaving me peaceful hours to study old men, pregnant women, women with strollers, scruffy students in busted-knee blue jeans, construction workers inhaling steaming thermoses of coffee before sunrise like oxygen. I imagine myself loving each of them: the dinner, the wedding, anniversaries, growing old. Holding wrinkled hands as we watch Masterpiece Theatre.
It is not a difficult or special thing to love somebody, I think. It is just a guard that we let down. My eyes are open to a new kind of logic: in the person you love, you find the most obscenely mundane things to be beautiful. There are obscenely mundane things in everybody. And so, everybody is lovable.
I understand I can love everybody because in the last few weeks, I’ve started to think I love Howie, and he has a lump the size of Oklahoma sticking out of his torso.
I haven’t said love to Howie yet. He hasn’t said it to me, either. We keep talking around it.
“I like you so much,” he’ll say, playing with my hair.
“I like you, too,” I’ll say, nuzzling his cheek. “So much.”
“You, too,” he’ll say. “So, so much.”
Or other synonyms: I adore you. I’m falling for you. I just feel so close to you.
Every time one of us says the word love, the other jumps. You can feel it beneath the skin, a bright flinching of desire. “I love this band!” Flinch! “I love that restaurant!” Flinch, flinch! Sometimes I feel like we sneak the word into conversations where it isn’t warranted, as though hoping that if we say it enough, the other will finally capitulate, take the plunge and say the thing we’re both too afraid to say: “I love potato chips.” “I love you, too!”
Some nights I stay awake late, staring at the ceiling and swimming with anxiousness. It’s peculiar. I never thought so much of myself could be invested in the specifics of how another person felt about me. Strange things can plunge me into misery: long gaps between his text messages, or that time he thought I was a vegetarian, and I explained that no, I wasn’t, and a puzzled expression flashed behind his eyes that I spent the rest of an afternoon analyzing (Who was he thinking of? An ex-girlfriend?).
But in the full light of day, I fear nothing, and my feelings for him become steady and sure. Not because love is a word I am comfortable using. But because it isn’t, and it still feels comfortable to use with Howie. Because he is the only person in the world who can step into the small and lonely room I’ve spent the last seventeen years peering out of and know, without looking, where to find the box of tissues, the chair, every last book on the shelf. Who I can trust when he pulls up the blinds and lets the light in, smiling, saying, See? Look at the view out there. Here, let me show you the door.
36
We return to the hospital weekly for our injections and overnight observations. Even though the shots are unpleasant, I find myself getting excited, counting down days. We haven’t made any more daring escapes in the last few weeks, but Dr. Morse stays in our room at all times anyway, nodding in her chair over endless cups of coffee. The message is clear: No More Nighttime Shenanigans. Nurses come in every hour on the hour, and Amanda is no longer among them.
We still begin our appointments with a Merge, carefully avoiding each other’s eyes, frightened by the excitement we might see there. Each time laughing a little less. Each time lingering a little longer when the doctors say, Okay, that’s it; we’re done. I wonder if Howie also thinks about forever. We have careful conversations over Dr. Morse’s head, and everything feels fraught with meaning in a way that fades away in the unchaperoned morning. Dr. Morse occasionally takes notes or pretends to watch TV. I spend 90 percent of these nights wishing she’d go away. I catch her glaring at me when she thinks I’m sleeping. Don’t worry, lady, I think. The feeling is completely mutual.
One night, Howie’s fallen asleep over The Great British Bake Off, and I wake to an aching bladder.
“Jesus,” I mutter. The clock on the wall shows a bleary 3:03 a.m. I trudge through the math. The nurses come in on the hour, giving me approximately fifty-seven minutes until—
My bladder lurches like a ship, and I groan. I lean toward the machines to unhook myself, and the plastic lining of my bed cracks like a bone. Dr. Morse blinks awake. Her face, soft and open in sleep, hardens.
“What are you doing?”
“I have to—”
“Have to what?”
My eyes flick to the bathroom.
She says, “Void?”
“Pee,” I say.
Her eyes check over my body, professionally. “You can hold it until the morning.”
“I promise that’s not true.”
“Well, you’ll just have to try.”
“Lady,” I say, “I am going to void all over this bed unless you let me get up.”
Howie stirs in his sleep. Dr. Morse and I both start. The TV is showing an infomercial for wrinkle cream.
Dr. Morse sighs. She reaches for my IV pole.
We scoot across the floor together. I’m dizzy from the hours in bed and stumble a little at the doorframe, but sink into the bathroom with a sigh, tugging at the hospital gown. I pull the door shut, and it pops back open with a merry clink.
I pull. The door clinks open.
“Um,” I say. “Dr. Morse?”
An exasperated whisper. “Morgan?”
“The door won’t stay closed.”
There’s a pause.
“I’ll hold it for you,” she says at last. “Knock when you want to come out.”
The door clicks closed. I stare at it for a brief, self-conscious eternity, then mercifully collapse on the seat. I’ve never had to pee this badly in my life, and for a moment, I’m certain that I won’t be able to stop: my entire body will dissolve into liquid and cascade down into the bowl below. A strange footnote in Dr. Morse’s medical career. Gene therapy has power to turn patients into human urine.
I stop at last, rise and wash my hands. I tap on the bathroom door. Dr. Morse’s face appears on the other side of it, pinker than normal. I am 95 percent certain she heard everything.
“Thanks,” I say, flushing.
“It’s the IV,” she says, not looking at me. “It’s an awful lot of fluid for someone your size. I’m going to have the nurses reduce the amount you receive.”
“If my bladder explodes, does that affect your funding?” I ask as she trundles me back across the floor.
She emits a noise that, from any other human, would be a laugh. Howie startles awake, his eyes crawling from one of us to the other.
“What’s going on?” he asks. “Is something wrong?”
Dr. Morse takes a moment, hand clamped tight over her mouth. When she removes it, she’s wiped all vestiges of humor from her face.
“No,” she says. “Morgan was having trouble sleeping.”
But she helps me into bed with surprising gentleness. When her gloved hands brush the Hole, I resist flinching.
She still regards me with hooded eyes, her face jumping between mine and Howie’s as we talk late into the nights, sometimes feverish with the strange genes flushing our systems. But she begins to permit us at sunset to drag our wired bodies as close to the windows as we can, to watch the sky falling down across the city like a baby’s blanket.
I load the paintings into the trunk of my car the next morning and meet Marcel at the gallery. The show’s opening in a little less than three weeks. The space isn’t quite what I imagined, but to his credit, Marcel has given it a try. The entryway leads into an empty room, with a spotlight on one wall, blank but for th
e stenciled words: what am i missing? Marcel leads me into a long, low-ceilinged hall, frigid and womb dark. He flicks a switch and the whole thing startles blindingly to fluorescent life.
Marcel’s lips wince into a perfect half-Windsor. “We’ll change that,” he murmurs.
We argue over small things: the order of the paintings, the location of the coat check, Garamond vs. Helvetica for the placards, “soft” versus “natural” lighting. Marcel handles these details, and me, with infuriating ease. There is a sense that the show is already out of my hands, and I want badly not to care. But I see Marcel setting aside the portrait of the many-handed weaver, and I blurt, too loudly, “Where’s that one going?”
The question strikes Marcel at an awkward angle. He grimaces slightly as he straightens.
“You’ve already got an extra-hand painting.” He lifts an unframed piece: an auditorium of people, delighted, clapping and clapping and clapping.
“So?”
“So,” he says, patiently, “this is doing the same aesthetic work as the other one.”
“So? I like the other one.” I sound like I’m five years old. It is mortifying.
“This is a better choice,” Marcel says simply.
“I want to hang both.”
“Miss Stone.” He sighs. “While I appreciate your opinion—”
“Do you?” I ask. “Or do you just pretend to listen to my opinion because my mother pays you to?”
“Mostly the latter,” he says.
A paper cut stings across my thumb. I ball my hand into a fist.
“You’re kind of an asshole,” I tell him. He pauses. I can see him assembling the air around him before he proceeds: making sure it hangs neat and straight as a well-pressed suit.
“What I am, Miss Stone, is a well-regarded professional being paid an exorbitant sum to produce a show for an impatient child with illusions of artistic grandeur,” he says. “If you want emotional validation, ask your mother to buy you a therapist. Although,” he adds mildly, turning back to the wall, “I’m surprised she hasn’t already.”
I’m not sure whether to slap him or call my mother, and I hate that these are the first two options that come to mind. Something hot and bright twists up in me, but I can’t think of a thing to say that’s both hurtful and true.
Hole in the Middle Page 23
