A House Is a Body

by Shruti Swamy

  It rained for weeks and weeks without stopping. My apartment got very hot and I had a dilemma about the windows: closed, the smell of my oils was too intense and made me dizzy, open, the water might blow in and spoil my paintings. I was sketching for a new piece that had to do with sound. I was interested in making something visual that mimicked the elemental experience of listening to music. I was interested in the affinities of light and noise, and felt very sure, for some reason, that I could create something new. Really what I was looking for was the moment that I met eyes with Krishna at that party, which was physical, and had weight and sound.

  One of those mornings I woke up with a sudden craving for art and rushed to the museum to sit in front of the Rothko they have there. The room that contains the painting had no windows, only a sourceless constant light that seemed to deny the existence of day, night, cloud. I sat for awhile—who knows how long. It had a way of getting into me, the painting. The room filled and emptied several times. There were moments I felt as though I was falling in. The red and blue jangled against each other. Then the bench bent with new weight, and I looked beside me and saw Krishna. He was sitting very neatly like a cat that has gathered up all his paws, and wore quiet clothes: a checked blue shirt, and worn jeans and soft, leather boots. His skin seemed muted. It was storm blue—almost gray. His hair was in a braid down his back, a complicated pattern I had once tried and failed to master.

  “What does it look like to you?” He had an ordinary, gentle voice, though once I’d heard it, I wondered what I had expected. The accent that shaded his vowels was unplaceable.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Just itself. Just colors.”

  “I thought it looked like a cupcake.”

  “You’re probably hungry.”

  That amused him. “Yes, probably.”

  The space between us had opened, but in the small silence that followed, I could feel it starting to close again.

  “Do you smoke?” I said.

  “No—can’t.”

  “Can’t?”

  “Shouldn’t.”

  “Shouldn’t. Well, who should?”

  He tapped his finger to his lips. “You don’t smoke either.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I can smell it. Were you going to offer me a cigarette?”

  “Yes.”

  “What would you have done if I accepted?”

  “Well, I would have gone outside and patted all my pockets and pretended like I had forgotten I finished my pack.”

  “And then?”

  “I didn’t think that far. I may have gone to the corner store and bought some.”

  “And smoked one?”

  “Yes. If we found a lighter.”

  I had been afraid to look at him. So close, I could smell sandalwood indistinctly, and something like juniper. I looked at the Rothko or his shoes. They were dark brown, worn, and had buckles instead of laces. But I could feel him quiet, smiling. It was easy. It was a dream of a friend.

  “You were at that party.”

  “You remember?”

  “I’m good with faces.”

  “Did you enjoy yourself?”

  “Well—those parties—no. I’m tired of those parties.”

  “Why do you go?”

  “People get so insulted. I don’t know. I shouldn’t.” Then he sighed, and got to his feet. “I’m going to get a cupcake, would you like to come?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Krishna never dated, at least, the tabloids were never able to catch him in the middle of a romance. Everyone had questions about his body. Lady Baby claimed in an interview once that they’d slept together, and Krishna never dignified this allegation with a response. But the majority of rumors clustered around the world’s most elite women, not tawdry pop stars: actresses and princesses, women who would never brag about their conquest or heartbreak. In my hot, tiny apartment, Krishna touched all my plants, and after his fingers left them their leaves seemed more green. Some water was caught in his hair from the rain outside, and my nose was running. We’d bought our cupcakes and eaten them wet on the street, in the rain. We took our wet shoes off, our wet socks. Krishna’s toenails were just as pink as my own.

  “Do you want something to drink? Some coffee?”

  “Filter coffee?”

  I smiled. “I can make it that way if you’d like.”

  I liked to watch him move around my apartment though it was messy, with clothes and books and shoes scattered across the floor. There were sketches everywhere, and many half-opened books, and plates that had the crusts of toast and tea bags sitting in a dirty circle of color.

  “You draw?”

  “I paint.”

  “Paint what?”

  “Nothing. Shapes.”

  “Can I see?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  Standing near the canvas, which I turned toward the wall when I was not working, I realized for the first time how small he really was, hardly any taller than me in bare feet. Up till now the glamour of his presence amplified him, but suddenly, for a single moment, the magic let up, and he seemed small and ordinary. Even the color of his skin, which seemed close to a human color, like brown.

  “You don’t show them at all?”

  “Only when they’re ready.”

  “Is this me?” He had picked up the newspaper where his face was drawn, which I hadn’t thrown away. It gave me pleasure to look at, his eyes, his lips, though also shame. I could close my eyes at night and superimpose his face on the face that I had drawn, moving of its own volition, as my mind moved, turning back to him.

  “Yes.”

  “Are you in love with me?”

  I was so startled I didn’t lie. “Yes.”

  “I can’t love you.”

  “Can’t—shouldn’t—won’t?”

  He shook his head, and took the coffee when I gave it to him, cooled it by pouring it between two glasses. Then he stood by the window, taking it in neat sips. The city, in the rain, seemed insubstantial, the half-hazy cityscape of a dream. But he seemed real enough. I kept measuring his realness against things, him against the plants, him against the glass, him against the poster on the wall.

  “I heard you painted too.”

  “From who?”

  “I read about it. In the tabloids.”

  “You shouldn’t read that garbage.”

  “Well, do you?”

  “I dabble in a lot of things. I wouldn’t call myself a painter.”

  “You studied with Keró.”

  “They said that in the tabloids?”

  “No. Somewhere else, maybe, maybe an art magazine. Maybe someone told me.”

  “What do you really want to ask me?”

  The question gave me permission to look at his face, right into his eyes. They were just eyes, brown eyes, like anyone could have, fringed with the heavy, curly lashes of a little boy. Yet, as I met them the sound passed through me again. And I whispered it, “Do you know me?” As soon as I said it, I felt frightened for the response. He touched my cheek with his fingers, cool and dry as leaves.

  “No,” he said. “How can I? We’ve just met.”

  That evening I sat with my glass in my hand in front of the mirror, and made myself cry. I had never seen myself cry and I was curious what I looked like. I had only seen the aftereffects—my red nose and eyes, the strange pinkness of my mouth—as I washed my face with cold water, trying to erase the signs of distress. When I normally cried, it was firmly into my pillow, with no sound, nearly breathless. What I wanted now was the whole thing: the formation of the tear, the heat building, the breath becoming ragged. I wanted the face covered in the gloss of tears and mucus, like a kind of oil. How to begin?

  I took a sip of my drink. It warmed my throat and then my belly. I took another sip. I thought about my father, distance, my mother, my childhood home. But very quickly I saw that to think of these things stuffed everything up, my tears and my thoughts. I didn’t feel sad so much as
blank in the face of the memories. Hermetically sealed, sealed from myself. I tried again.

  I thought of how one summer a girl my age had moved into a house down the street with her family. Corrie. She had warm, bright cheeks and a level gaze that trusted you; she was three months younger than me, born in winter. I encountered her one afternoon when my mother sent me to get the mail. She was standing in rubber boots down the street, so tiny I thought I’d imagined her. But she had seen me because she called out something, “Hey—” and in utter fright, I left the mail in the mailbox and ran back home. It was the same for three or four more days, and each day she came a little closer, until, by the fifth day, she was standing by my mailbox with an apple in her hand.

  I had seen children before, of course. Sometimes I went into town with my mother to buy groceries or go to the doctor’s or take tests. I was amazed by how they seemed to chatter on about nothing, how forcefully they asked for things, how easy they seemed in their surroundings, eating candy, talking to one another, so sure of the world and how it operated. It seemed absurd to me to ask for what I wanted, and I felt a kind of disdain for them, at least from a distance. But Corrie was real. She stood next to the mailbox, almost exactly as tall as it, and as tall as me, red-brown hair, and funny yellow eyes that could pass for brown in a certain light.

  “You live here?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We just moved there.” She pointed. Her house was set back from the road, its blue sides showing in little gaps between the trees. We had watched it being built for almost a year, with nervous curiosity, waiting for the day the moving trucks would come in. “How old are you?”

  “Nine.”

  “I’m eight and three-quarters. Do you want to know why I’m so small?”

  “Why?”

  “My mom said I was born premature. That means early. When I was a baby, they had to keep me in a little glass case like a princess in the hospital. When is your birthday?”

  “August 15.”

  “Aren’t you going to ask me what mine is?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. Who cares?”

  “It’s polite.”

  “Why do you talk so much?”

  She shrugged. “This is normal,” she said. “This is how people talk.”

  I can remember her tiny body, her not-breasts. I could see her ribs through her skin like a horse. We slept in the same bed, in my bed, which was a loft, and very close to the ceiling. For a while, not talking, breathing. Speaking through breath. She had a mole on each of her cheeks that made her look grown-up. In the light, her face was blue, her skin.

  “What color is your vagina?”

  “What?”

  “Your vagina?”

  “What is that?”

  She pointed. “What do you call it?”

  “Nothing.”

  “It’s probably a different color.”

  “I’ve never looked. What color is yours?”

  “Pink, I guess. I can’t see if I look myself.”

  “Should I look?”

  “Okay.”

  I had a sense we were moving into a secret place, and the thought both alarmed me and gave me comfort. I knew how to tongue a secret quietly for hours, pulling at its sweet-sourness like a hard candy. She sat up, her head nearly touching the ceiling, and switched on the flashlight we had brought into bed with us, to read under the covers with. She dangled her legs off the side of the bed as she pulled down her shorts, then her underpants, and lifted her shirt awkwardly, wrestling her head out of it, then sat, small and pale and naked on my bed, swinging her legs, just next to the beam of the flashlight, which made a cool yellow circle on the wall behind.

  “Lie down,” I said.

  She lay.

  “Pretend you’re dead.”

  “Okay.” She closed her eyes. I brought my face close to her belly and smelled her skin: like bread before it’s baked. And the smell I look for in lovers now, groping for it with only a half-sense that I’m looking for anything at all: the soft, human smell of skin, sweat, scalp, scent of the body’s work and movement through the day, that smell that is the scent of time accruing on the skin, that cannot be erased by a bath or a hot shower.

  Skin met skin and I pressed it open with my fingers. Under the light it was a pure, dull pink, like the inside of a shell. I felt a spike of feeling, which I thought was disgust, and withdrew my hand quickly. She had let out a sigh.

  “Your turn.”

  “You’re dead.”

  “Now you are. What color was it?”

  “Like you said. Pink.”

  I lay on my back to feel it, the coolness of death coming over me like cold air. She pulled a lip indelicately between her fingers, as though inspecting it for defects, and the feeling spiked up again, more secret. This time it was physical, the feeling. The weight of it made me gasp. I was as happy and frightened as a firework might be. Her fingers were cold.

  Her voice had shock, “Oh, it’s ugly,” she said, “It’s purple.”

  “Purple?”

  “Brown. Brown or purple.”

  I leaned up on my elbows and she shone the light in my face.

  “Like your lips.”

  “You’re lying,” I said.

  “No I’m not,” she said, keeping the light in my face, where it dazzled my eyes. I could see her through that film of light, just in outline. But her voice wasn’t cruel, only factual. “Your lips aren’t ugly, but your vagina is.”

  “Yours is too,” I spat, and bumped my head on the ceiling as I sat up, because I wasn’t being careful.

  Now, in the mirror, I examined myself. My eyes were dry, but my face looked slightly wild. I took a beautiful swallow of the drink, ending it, then poured myself another. Memory clearly wouldn’t help. But I remembered a scene that had passed outside my window three days ago, of a man in the crosswalk who had dropped a sheaf of papers and had to kneel to pick them back up, growing more desperate as the light turned from green to yellow, not knowing whether to stay in the crosswalk and keep gathering his papers or to retreat to the sidewalk and watch them scatter across the busy street in the wind, where they would be impossible to retrieve. I remembered the look on his face in the green to yellow moment. And finally at the very last second he picked himself up and walked to the curb, shaking his head.

  I felt the tears start seconds before they became apparent, pricking at the inside corners of my eyes. Then the whole rim of my eyes filled and brimmed over, like too much water pouring into a glass, but unevenly, my left eye filling more quickly than my right. I watched my eyes redden. My lips were curled up, almost snarling, showing teeth. The heat in my face. Drinking, I loved myself, this face I had never seen. Drinking, and crying into my drink, not with sadness. Not with sadness I was sure. Either I didn’t have the vocabulary to express what I felt, or the word did not exist: it was a color, blue. But say the word blue and everyone thinks something different. I went to the bathroom and blew my nose into a towel.

  “Mother, I’ve met Krishna!”

  But I never made that call. I thought of it all the time. I didn’t tell anyone.

  When I began painting the new canvas my days took on a particular and constant rhythm. I would wake in the morning with a bad headache and make a cup of filter coffee with lots of sugar. While I waited for it to cool I would eat a bowl of cereal, change into my work clothes and sit at the canvas for a while, mentally painting what I would physically paint during the day. I worked from an elaborate sketch I had made a few weeks before. I blocked out the canvas into fields of color; within these fields, I saw the lines as finely as ant-work, and before long I was reaching for my smallest brushes, squinting hard at the tiny movements of color. Around one or two I’d get very hungry, and eat the same cheese sandwich every day, and then work until dusk. Sometimes I would skip dinner for drinks, and turn the television on, not to be entertained, but rather to have something to ignore. I had only a few months mo
re before my fellowship ran out, and I spent my money on rent, paint, and liquor, leaving the house infrequently except to replenish my supply of the latter two.

  During this time I was asked to three parties and went to all of them. One was given by some people I had known in art school, and who had the most beautiful tattoos of anyone on earth, where I drank more than I had meant to and kissed more people than I remembered, and took one of them home and let him come inside me without a condom, because at that moment, helplessly, I had wanted it, more than anything I had wanted it. In the morning I went to the drugstore with a blinding headache to get the pill I needed to take, and then took it, swallowing with my own spit right there in the drugstore because I didn’t want to waste time. The second and third party were both given by friends of the friend of a friend, in impossibly beautiful houses, with carpets that felt, if you walked on them barefoot, as though you were walking through soft fine grass. At both of these parties I didn’t drink too much and looked at each person with desperate hope as they walked through the door, but they were never Krishna. He was nowhere. In the papers there was a sudden silence about him, even the tabloids.

  “You’re thin,” said Krishna, sitting on the exact middle step of the carpeted staircase that led up to my apartment. The seventh. I was so surprised to see him I nearly dropped the bag I was carrying, full of breakables. It was March, unseasonably cold, and I was wearing a hat over my neglected hair, and my coat was dirty and I smelled. The wind had slammed the lobby door shut behind me.

  “Thank you.”

  “I’m not encouraging you.” Blue as figs in a still life, in a T-shirt and jeans and sneakers like a twenty-year-old boy, and a big soft hat that hid all his hair. “Do you need help?”

  “No,” I said. I shifted the bags in my arms. “Come in.”

  Entering with him, I noticed the smell of my apartment, the dense harsh smell of color that comforted me but might choke him. It was clear out but cold: I opened the windows, and clicked on the stove without asking and started to make him coffee. He took off his shoes and sunglasses and inspected, as he had the first time, picking up the sketches I had left lying around. It was too late to try and gather up the dirty clothes that were everywhere, so I just let him look.