We finished the opera, and then the wine. In the flickering yellow light we sat, saying we would like to take an astronomy class one day; jokingly, we made plans to do it together. There came a whisper of wings, a beating, and a bat—a tiny black ball of fury—flapped into the living room. Shakily it circled, nearly like a baby bird, and then flapped over the stables.
We raised eyebrows at each other. “That,” he said, “means time for bed. Let the bats take over.” I sent him a long despairing glance, all panic and pleading. For me the air held not bats but the golden thread of what might happen next. Yet seeing the embarrassed half-smile on his face, I understood that my expectations were both obvious and unwelcome.
“Yeah, time for bed,” I said briskly, and we parted abruptly, in the hallway, without even saying good night.
* * *
—
After that night, we tumbled into an easy intimacy built from the cloudless September days, the butcher block in the center of the kitchen, and the bottles of wine we biked up the hill from the liquor store. By unspoken agreement every evening at the golden hour we would make our way to the beach. Now when I swam he sat on the shore and watched me. I would bob in the water, and sometimes, if the ocean was calm, I would turn my back on the waves, and he would point at the wonders happening in the west—great purple pillars of clouds, yellow rays, darkening pink toward the horizon—and I would wave and nod, as if he could see my tiny head in the dark sea nodding. But I didn’t care about the sunsets. I liked to see him, his long thick legs sprawled before him, resting back on his hands, watching me, making sure the sea did not swallow me. I imagined what he saw: my white limbs, my blond hair made dark by seawater, the ocean lifting and dropping me like a paper doll.
We took turns showering in the outdoor shower, and gathered in the kitchen after dark, where we cooked in the messy, careless way I loved, chopping vegetables, scalding them with oil, putting everything we had—pasta sauce, eggs, broccoli florets—in a single bowl, all the while talking.
He told me he had slept with a man. He told me that his ex-girlfriend had screamed like she had been stabbed when he told her, and ran to the shower and turned on the hot water as high as it would go, and shrieked while it scalded her. Wet from the sea and my own shower, I imagined this woman, naked, screaming, slapping her own face. Her pink skin darkening to red.
We talked about monogamy. We talked about desire. We talked the way men and women talk when they’ve decided that they won’t fuck: we talked how men and women talk when they’re using each other for research. Slowly there built a kind of tension, but not the usual kind. As the night got later and the kitchen smaller and brighter, the long summer twilight finally blackening, night pushing against the glass, we talked on and on. But never again did we wait for the bats.
Sidewalk glittering with glass. Ocean glittering with sun. It hurt my eyes to be in Red Hook. I walked the cobblestoned streets. The sky was bright, and it was hot, too hot for October. Past the projects I went, past the bars and lobster shacks. In a park I hung my arms over the railing and looked out at the pale green doll on oily waves. Then, feeling stupid, I biked home.
* * *
—
On Sunday I had texted Isabel to arrange the week’s lessons. She answered:
Isabel: in la
Me: What?
Isabel: LA
Me: Cool. When are you coming back?
Isabel: for auditions
Me: Nice. When are you coming back?
No reply. I went to bed calculating weekly totals and woke up to a blank phone. In the afternoon I tried her again:
Me: Isabel, do you know when you’re coming back to NY?
Isabel: depends
* * *
—
On Wednesday I was slow to get out of bed. What did it matter, when there were so many empty hours in the endless day? I did my diligent four at the desk, then ran the Prospect Park loop, my legs lead and the air thick. I couldn’t remember October ever being so hot. The leaves weren’t turning. I was back to sundresses. Every night a box fan cooled me down.
Obviously the planet was sick. When I really thought about it I felt ill too. I thought about how the PhD students of the future (if they still existed) would read today’s novels hungry for any mention of climate change, the same way today there were full-length books on the nineteenth-century novels’ “veiled critiques” of colonialism. How desperately we wanted to believe that Austen had comprehended the colossal crime of her motherland, even though for her the sugar trade was probably just a plot device to get the second son out of England. Not that I was better. I was worse. Climate change wasn’t even a plot device to me. It was just some lousy way to express my mood.
That is to say, I was human. My thoughts always boomeranged back to myself. By the time I had stretched and showered and picked through the kitchen for lunch, I was back on the self-pity truck. It was so hot, and there were so many hours in the day, and though I could hear Church Avenue—horns honking, delivery trucks beeping, a construction crew jackhammering—I had fallen out of the city’s daily life. I had nowhere to be. I kept taking Lacie’s books off the shelves, touching them, wanting to have read them, but unable to sit through a single sentence.
The fridge, too, I kept returning to, looking at all the Christmas cards and gallery announcements, all the engagement photos and save-the-dates. Sophie’s wedding invitation, a year old and faded by the sun, particularly bewitched me. Tasteful and discreet, a tiny gray square of paper printed in Garamond, it was, I decided, almost ostentatious in its subdued announcement of impending matrimony, its implicit rebuttal of all the gushing photo-saturated cardstock around it. A dozen times I had taken it down and examined it, but on my third or fourth perusal that restless day, I noticed something new. Rather than some obnoxiously cute joint email account, Sophie had simply included her own personal address for RSVPs.
Sophie. Tiny, forthright, laughing Sophie. Sophie who had wanted to know what Lacie was like in high school, Sophie who sensed the dysfunction between her husband and his mother, and called that dysfunction a haunting. Who worked at The New Yorker. Who had said she was delighted to meet me.
To write the email I wore one of Lacie’s old T-shirts with the neck cut out. Curled on the couch, in her usual spot, with my laptop on my knees, I composed the perfect missive—offhand, casual, charming. I didn’t think it was too weird. I was new in town. We had a mutual friend. But I still felt nervous. When Sophie wrote back a few hours later suggesting the following afternoon—adding that it would have to be lunch, it would have to be Midtown, did I mind the schlep, any chance I’d be in that neighborhood anyway?—I did a little dance around the room.
* * *
—
Watery indigo. Cream. Black loops floating in pools of red, a ribbon of emerald green. Silky, fluttery, the dress clung to me, elegant, but vibrating with patterns: oscillating dots on the sleeve, mustard yellow V’s edged in cobalt and ore.
Last week, getting ready for dinner with Ian and his gallerist, Lacie had sauntered into the living room wearing this dress. Trailing the clean, bright scent of shampoo, twirling a little and laughing, she had asked, “What do you think? Good enough?”
This was not like her. Usually when I said I liked her outfit, she blinked at me. But now she wanted reassurance. “Gorgeous,” I said, putting aside my book, which was really her book: Excellent Women. “Wow. That dress is really wild, actually. It’s crazy.”
She held out the hem. “Yeah, isn’t it? This pattern is called Dutch Wax, but it’s actually from Southeast Asia.”
I considered. “Yeah, it looks kind of batiky.”
“Yes.” Her eyes shone. “Wait, do you know this story? It’s kind of fascinating.”
I did not know the story, and I did not particularly care, but I was interested in how her eyes were shining. “Tell me.”<
br />
“These Dutch traders copied batik patterns from Indonesia, and took them home and started to mass-produce them, thinking they would be a big hit in Europe, but they never really took off. So then they started shipping the clothes to West Africa, and the merchants there loved them; they started making their own, with local colors and symbols, and all these allusions to history. So now some people call it African Wax. It’s funny because it’s totally wrapped up in the story of colonialism, but it’s also become this symbol of colonial resistance.”
She nodded meaningfully when she said colonial resistance, and I thought of her work with Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, and I felt vaguely guilty, because I was basically a political sloth, and then I mirrored her emphatic nodding and hummed, “That is so cool.”
“Yeah, and then these high-end designers got into it. I sort of love it because you really can say that it is ‘authentically’ Asian and European and African. I mean, it looks African, whatever that means, but when you trace it back, and back, you end up in Indonesia. It’s this endless loop of copying and borrowing.”
I thought of the costumes she had made for my play back in high school. That beautiful dress. Leo’s suit. Since then her delight in textiles had only grown. She had grown. A sort of fierce, squirmy tenderness shot into my heart.
“That’s so cool,” I told her, but really I was talking about us, us together, the myth of us, Lacie with her costumes, me with my writing. “That’s awesome.”
Now, a week later, I knew what I was going to wear to lunch. I had known it ever since I wrote that email, though I did go through the motions of trying my own clothes on first. But it was always going to be the Dutch Wax. When I saw myself in the mirror I grinned, and took from Lacie’s dresser a little gold chain to fasten around my neck.
* * *
—
Returning later that day, I rounded the corner and saw Ian waiting on our building’s front steps.
I froze. Lacie had worn this outfit with him just last week. Could I slip up to Church Avenue? Dash to a coffee shop, wander a grocery store, pace through—
He saw me. He stood, waving. The dress was bold. Even from a distance, recognizable. He squinted, and then a light in his face dimmed.
* * *
—
Lunch with Sophie had been a bust. She had chosen a damp, loud, overbright Indian place on West Forty-Ninth frequented by taxi drivers, and her pose of beleaguered patience told me everything I needed to know. This was a favor. A favor, because she liked Lacie, and because she believed in being nice to strangers. But it was easy to imagine the curl of her lip, the roll of her eye, as she explained to her co-workers her lunch plans. This was a chore.
In a spirit of tentative experimentation we picked our way through a handful of topics—writing, literature, Lacie, Brooklyn, New York—but each was like a rocket flare that shot up energetically before falling inert back to earth. At one point her eyes narrowed. “Isn’t that Lacie’s dress?”
I flushed, looking down at my chest, as if I’d forgotten exactly what I was wearing. “She let me borrow it.” I felt like a toddler clomping around in her mother’s heels. And then, gaining confidence: “It’s Dutch Wax.”
I would have launched into all of it—about Asia and Europe and Africa, about borrowing, for God’s sake, and global trade—but Sophie only shrugged and said it looked good on me. From her face I knew she didn’t mean it at all.
There were other problems too. Her lips were too much. Not in the way Isabel’s lips were too much—the warm openness of Sophie’s face did something to mitigate the artifice—but her beauty was too direct. Looking at her was like looking at the sun, not in some clichéd pop-song way, but simply because her beauty was too fully and frankly and unapologetically itself. It made me miss Lacie’s beauty, the wavering, inconstant shimmer of it.
From the subway I walked home slowly, full of odd recriminations. Sophie and her performative busyness bored me. She interested me only when I thought of her as Lacie’s friend, but even that did not give me a feeling of being inside it. What was it, I wondered. New York? A life? Lacie?
No, it was something simpler, stupider: it was just a sense that life was large, that it was exciting, that it mattered. I was hooked on this feeling. I could find it after two glasses of wine, or with a new man, or among the clever ones at the Workshop, late at night in the timeless dark of the Foxhead, where everything was silky black or harshly lit, and everyone was hilariously cruel and nothing ever hurt.
It was why people moved to New York, I supposed, to live inside this feeling, to live as if the movie camera was always upon you and even the most banal frustrations of everyday life achieved elevation because they happened “in New York.” And though I was not immune to that romanticism, I was also thirty, old enough to be suspicious of it, to dimly suspect that feeling like your life mattered merely because you were living in an economically punishing fantasia of a place was dumb, even dangerous: it might stop you from noticing that you were stuck, your life was stuck, you were just a cog in capitalism’s machine—
But then again, I could afford to be suspicious of New York. I didn’t need it to make me feel like I mattered. Lacie did that for me. She always had. The wine and the boys and the cynical writers were only attempts to recapture that first blush, the hot excitement of those afternoons when we were ten and the hours stretched out before us, infinite. I was seeking something, I thought, some sense that I mattered, that we mattered, chasing it in my writing, in the apartment, with Lacie, but not, apparently, with Lacie’s friends.
So, Ian.
I waved bravely back. “Don’t you ever check your phone?” he called, standing and stretching. “Nice dress,” he added, and hit me like a big blond wave with a kiss on the cheek.
I swirled around. “What do you think?”
“It looks good on you.”
The whole length of the elevator ride I couldn’t stop pushing at my hair. My arms felt too long and my cheeks too hot. I rocked back on my heels, I hit him with my shoulder and smiled in what I hoped was a mysterious way. “Lacie usually works until at least six,” I explained, and he grinned wolfishly.
That rattled me, that and the dress. Once inside I stupidly invited him to “have a seat,” even though he already had sunk onto the daybed and started removing from his backpack silver cans of beer. “Do you want to put those in the fridge? Those must have been hard to bike with. Where do you live again? Is it far? I feel like it’s uphill to here from everywhere.”
“I was coming from the studio.” He held a beer out to me and took one for himself. “Yeah, that would be great.”
When I came back from the kitchen he had put his feet up and balanced his beer on his stomach. He seemed rather proud of his belly. Self-consciously, I sank into an armchair with busted springs and cracked my can. I wanted nothing more than to go change, but what would be my excuse? Going into her room, replacing the dress—it would be an admission of guilt. Fishy. I stayed put.
For a while we didn’t talk. Once I tried, “Are you in touch with anyone from the Barn?” and he just shook his head. The air shimmered like oil in a puddle, and Lacie’s two fans blew the same stale air around, trembling the chiffon curtains.
“Rose, Rose, what’s in a rose?” Ian sang to himself in a high, funny voice, and then lapsed into quiet. I looked desperately at the frozen dancer mid-plié on the mantel.
Finally I broke. “So. You just wanted to stop by? You never come over.”
“Yeah, sure.” He looked at me. “I wanted to see you.”
“You’ve been, like, MIA since I moved here.” A barb of bitterness in my voice.
“This fall is nuts. I’m losing my mind getting ready for this show.”
I held his gaze.
“Sorry. I just—” It seemed he was about to say something more. Then, quietly, he added, “I thoug
ht it would be good for us to have some space.”
What did he mean? Good for us to have some space? Was there an us? Nothing had ever—but what else could he—“It’s fine,” I told him. “It’s just weird to see you again.”
“Is it nice?”
“Of course it’s nice. It’s just weird. We were close, and then you were gone, and then I find out you’re dating my childhood best friend. It’s weird.”
There came over his face a look that made me think it wasn’t the desire to “reconnect” that had led him to wait for me on the crumbly brick steps outside. It didn’t have anything to do with me. Why was I flattering myself with these thoughts of us? It was Lacie, always Lacie.
Cautiously, deliberately, he said, “I heard you guys were out of touch for a long time.”
“Yeah. When I saw her in Bryant Park it was the first time in over a decade.”
“Wow. But you guys were besties in high school, right? What happened? You just…fell out of touch?”
“Yeah.” My voice was wood. High school all over again: boys by the water fountain, boys at the lunch table, sweet-talking me, but eyes darting and jittery as they looked for Lacie.
“You didn’t even try to stay in touch? Like on Facebook or something?”
“I’m not on Facebook,” I reminded him.
Ian put down his can. “But did you have a fight?”
“Why do you ask that? Did Lacie say something?”
“Lacie never says anything. She’s not exactly the most forthcoming person in the world.”
I laughed, more out of relief than anything.
“I mean”—he was encouraged—“she doesn’t relate to her emotions the way most people do.”
“Women. You mean most women.”
He winced. “Maybe. But do you know what I mean? She’s very—”
Everyone Knows How Much I Love You Page 11
