Subtle mistakes proliferated, though it was impossible to say whether they were actually proliferating or whether I was simply paying more attention. For instance, usually when I arrived in the snowy vestibule of the West manse, no one was there to greet me. I would step tentatively into the front hall, calling out “Hello?,” my thin voice sounding especially weak and watery in the artificial hush of the house: the silence of the Wests’ condo, of every new-construction condo, was the space-signal purr of the computerized home. There might be no one home or a dozen family members secreted away in their own wings or the whole clan lying bloodily murdered behind the kitchen door. In that indifferent hum, who could tell?
But today, when the elevators disgorged me into the lap of that white credenza, Isabel was waiting for me, arms crossed. “It’s good you’re here,” she announced ominously, and turned on her heel.
Rather than athletic apparel, she wore a blue Oxford shirt and dark stonewashed jeans. Her hair was pulled up in a messy bun, and a tiny gold necklace winked from her narrow neck. As she padded along the shadowy hall, past the recessed spotlights that lit up formal portraits of the family—I caught a glimpse of Rachel West’s lunar baby bump, cupped by her ringed hand—I decided tonight Isabel looked like an academic or an architect, the lead in a romantic comedy before she lets down her ponytail.
The housekeeper—I still hadn’t learned her name, because Isabel called her something like Ooma, which I was 97 percent sure was a pet name, and yet no one had thought to tell me her real name—brought me a dinner plate of three ravioli with a side of grilled asparagus. This had never happened before: the second mistake. When I stammered out a polite protest, Isabel said, “You’re always eyeing my food, and it makes me feel weird.”
Oh. Isabel was more observant than I thought. Or maybe she was simply being pragmatic. She wanted me fueled up: we were obviously in for a long one. The word from the top—Ervin—was that the current draft had to go. Complete gutting. Apparently Isabel had shown him the same draft she had sent me, and he had announced that he didn’t like any of it—not Du Bois, not the line of swimwear, and especially not the “personal stuff.”
“He told me family stuff is private,” Isabel said dolefully, and I flashed on the time I had seen Rachel West, she of the high grades in business school, trailing sadly down the long hall, looking pensively at her portraits.
“And what do you think about that? Do you agree?”
“It’ll just be easier to start over.” With her fork Isabel sliced a ravioli open and smashed out a puree of pumpkin. “But the thing is, we don’t have much time. So I thought you could type”—she nudged her laptop toward me—“and I’ll talk.”
During training someone had asked “where the line was” between helping and cheating, editing and writing, and rather than address the rich literary tradition of this question, Griffin had nodded sagely. “Personally, I never type anything for them. My hands never touch their keyboard. But you’ll have to find what’s right for you.”
I had vowed, then and there, that I, too, would never type a single word for my students, but when I broke this news to Isabel she argued, “No, I’d still be the one writing it, you’re just typing,” and when I said, “I’m not going to be your scribe,” she said, “But we have so much to do!” and so I said, “You have so much to do. Not me, you. I already wrote my college essay, a long time ago,” and then she banged her fist so ferociously that I immediately relented, saying, as if I had simply misunderstood her before, “Oh! You want me to type for you? Sure, I’d be happy to type.”
It did feel wrong, I’ll grant Griffin that. “Umm.” Isabel peered expectantly at me, perhaps a mite disappointed that my fingers were not already flying over the keys. “So what do you think I should write about?”
“Do you still want to write about feminism?”
A shy, baffled nod. “It’s just like, I know what I want to say, but I just can’t, like, say it.”
“What do you want to say?”
“Just like…” She looked at me blankly. “I don’t know! Just like, how I’m a feminist, why I’m a feminist. That kind of stuff.”
“So why are you a feminist?”
“Because it’s not fair!” She screwed up her face in exasperation. “It’s not fair! Girls are equal to boys!” Then she gave a wolfish grin. “We’re actually so much better.”
I felt bad for her, I really did. Who could say you were having an experience, a life experience, if all that came out of your mouth were the same things showing up on the internet?
“Right, but that’s not an essay topic. You need to think about what you want to say about yourself.”
“I don’t have anything to say about myself,” she admitted in a small voice.
We looked at each other then in a kind of mute panic, the same look I caught in my own eyes when, having done absolutely nothing at the desk for an hour, I got up to brush my teeth a third or tenth time.
“God, what is the point of a college essay anyway? Why do they even care? Why can’t they just like look at my grades and know I’m a good person?”
I didn’t laugh. “Well, you know, they want to get a sense of who you are. You just need to tell them something about yourself. It almost doesn’t matter what, as long as it’s honest. Authentic. Who you really are.”
But we were past all that. She looked sickened by my platitudes; she knew that her situation was impossible, that the most slick piece of writing she would ever produce would be judged on how genuine it was. She had mastered all kinds of gloss, but this was eluding her. Glumly she watched me saw off a piece of asparagus. “Do you actually like that stuff?”
“Asparagus?” I considered the feathery purple-green stalk on my fork. What did asparagus cost in late November? Certainly at my uncle’s Thanksgiving feast the week before there had been no asparagus. “Yeah. Even though it makes your pee smell weird.”
She shrieked. “Your pee?”
“Yeah. You haven’t noticed that? Maybe you don’t have the gene.”
“The pee smelling gene?” She giggled. “That’s disgusting.” Then suddenly she looked pensive. “Does everyone have a hard time writing their college essay, or is it just me?”
I thought of teenagers in Iowa and California, Seattle and El Paso, squinting at their computer screens, softly moaning. “No, I think everyone hates it.”
“But as much as me? I mean, my English teacher is, like, really tough.”
“Maybe not as much as you,” I granted.
She blew out her fat lips. Her gaze wandered to the corkboard. I watched her look at all the photographs of herself in tight, shimmery dresses, with lushly cascading hair, studying the images as if seeking some key back to herself. In a slow, speculative voice she said, “I mean, real high schools aren’t like this, are they?”
“What do you mean, ‘real’?”
At the edge in my voice she turned back to me. “Like, normal. Public? The kind you went to. Aren’t they really easy?”
Given my obsession with high school, it was strange how little I remembered. Lockers and halls. That’s what I remembered: locker-lined halls. The ghostly feeling of never knowing who you might meet. A crush. The clock. I remember the round analog clock on the door, the black digits, the tick marks, the smooth sweep that the second hand made, as soothing as a mother’s hand saying There, there. Time going by. The sound of the marching band carried on the wind. The old-carpet smell of the auditorium. In Spanish class, in the basement, with the laminated posters conjugating ser and estar, the clock went tick-tick, rude judders like the judders of my heart. I hated Spanish.
“I don’t know if it was easy,” I finally said. “I did hang out a lot.”
“I hang out.” She sounded morose.
No, no, I wanted to say: it was different. But how to convey the capacious sails of our days, the restlessness
and ennui and music, the boredom and what came out of that boredom? “I had this friend named Lacie,” I said tentatively. “I think I mentioned her before. We hung out all the time. We did everything together.”
“What was she like?”
“I don’t know. She was really funny. She was my best friend.” The past tense in my mouth horrified me.
“Yeah, but what was she like?” Isabel sounded impatient. “Was she popular?”
A memory: walking home from school. So many memories of walking home from school, but in a way they were all one long memory, and that was what I suspected Isabel, with her appointments and tennis lessons and flights to L.A., lacked: the sense of childhood as an unbroken dream.
In this particular memory we were fifteen, and I remember I was upset about something, though I can no longer remember what, only that Lacie was loyally, appropriately sympathetic; as we walked home she let me wear her headphones while Little Plastic Castle strobed bluely in her Discman.
Isabel was looking at me expectantly. “What did you like about her?”
I liked singing along to “Gravel” with her. I liked buying every single Ani DiFranco CD with her. I liked making mixtapes; I liked finding live bootlegs with her. I liked singing all the words aloud, knowing that my voice was thin and flat, but trusting her not to care. That was what I wanted to tell Isabel, something about that trust; something about what Lacie gave me.
She gave me Ani. And Ani, with her leather bras, motorcycles, and syringes, made me think that my world of cotton underwear, minivans, and milk was seething with strange forces. Listening, I learned that I must be brilliant and punk and bold. I learned that the best love was demented and doomed. It happened with married men, or nineteen-year-old girls, or heroin addicts from rural Indiana. Really, it was best that Leo didn’t love me back. It made our romance more real.
If this doesn’t make any sense to you, relax: either you were a suburban white girl in 1998 with all your incipient feminism and loneliness and lust, or you were not. You were some other child, in some other land, with some other piece of vinyl or plastic that set your heart on fire. Think of that album now, the album you endlessly played, whose art is etched into your brain, the lyrics into your DNA. Not the first album you loved, but the one that suggested a pose.
“She was just one of those people,” I finally said. “When I was with her, I liked myself so much more.”
There was on Isabel’s face a sudden intensity, a vulnerability I hadn’t seen before. Quietly she said, “I think I know what you mean.”
“You do?”
A faint pink blush crept into her cheeks. “Yeah, there’s this girl at my high school, and when I’m with her, everything is just more fun. It’s hard to explain. But I just always want to be around her.”
“Is she your friend?” For some reason I held my breath.
Isabel nodded shyly. “Yeah, I think she’s my best friend.”
When I got home that night and found the table set for two, gingham napkins folded into soft-eared triangles, the whole apartment pleasantly steamy and smelling of fried garlic and cumin, I was surprised, and obscurely unsettled. More mistakes.
Around the corner came Sophie, cupping two bowls of basmati rice. “Rose!” Her displeasure slipped behind a mask of warmth. “Lacie wasn’t sure if you’d be home. Have you eaten?”
“Oh, I don’t want to crash your—”
“You’re not crashing!” Sophie slipped the bowls onto the table and returned to the kitchen. I watched her go, as amazed as if she’d just pulled a rabbit from her hat. For years she had betrayed her husband. How could she do a thing like casually put rice on the table? Why was she not bent over with guilt, why were her clothes not rent, her feet not bare and bleeding?
And then: Right. Betrayal didn’t stop your life. You could do something that rearranged your sense of yourself, and then simply continue on. Life continued on. Long ago God had gotten out of the habit of striking people dead. Even when you wished for it, for volcanoes and brimstone, all you got were crisp fall days, bright sunshine, a disconcertingly robust sense of well-being. You still enjoyed your food. Even liars like dinner.
Lacie, flushed, with tendrils wild, came zooming around the corner with a platter of roasted chicken. “You’re back!” she exclaimed. “Perfect!” As if this had been the plan all along.
We sat, and for the first twenty minutes or so everything was fine. Sure, I had crashed their date, but they were both too polite to say that they minded. We chatted and chewed our food. I didn’t mind eating dinner twice; in those days I was always hungry.
At one point Sophie said, “I think the critics put more on Jenny Holzer’s work than what’s actually there. Her work is really catchy, for sure, but there’s not a lot of substance to it,” and wild jealousy stabbed me. I didn’t even know who this person was, though I knew I should know. Probably even Isabel knew. It had something to do with growing up in New York, I thought. Artists and opera stars were household names; you accumulated from birth the cultural capital you used to slay at cocktail parties until you were ninety.
And the affair, and the sexless husband? Did Sophie privately feel her life was a disaster, even as we all envied the proper nouns—Princeton, New York Review, New Yorker—she had managed to attract? As she spoke in her precise, careful way, I kept staring.
Then the conversation turned to Ian.
“But I’m not even being controlling. It’s not even like I’m angry. I’m just confused. It’s like, What is actually going on in your brain? Who are you?” From the ferocity in Lacie’s voice I could tell he had been the topic of conversation before I had arrived.
“Wait, so, what’s he doing?” My voice was twitchy.
“The same old shit.” Lacie ripped some meat off the bone.
“He’s acting very distant,” Sophie explained.
I stared at the roasted and dissected bird, imagining Lacie removing its bloody neck and bagged guts, then washing its pale, slick skin. Tenderly tucking thyme and parsley into its ass.
“It does sound like he’s been really busy,” I offered tentatively.
Sophie glared at me. “He’s perpetually unavailable.”
Lacie pinched the bridge of her nose, as if just remembering this incident overwhelmed her. “Yeah, it’s just like, I get it. He’s got this big show, he’s totally slammed. I get it. But it’s just, like…common courtesy, if you have plans with somebody, to tell them that you can’t make it.”
“Totally, totally.” I bobbed my head.
“I mean, on Wednesday night, we’d said we’d hang out, and I waited and waited for him to call, ’cause I’m, like, trying not to crowd him, but then when I finally do text at nine thirty, he says, sorry, still at the studio, think I’m going to work l-l-late tonight.” She swallowed a rising sob.
“It’s fucked up,” Sophie said quietly, rubbing her manicured nails over Lacie’s hand, trying to calm her down while her eyes sought mine, as if to say, Can you believe this? Have you ever seen her this upset?
I hadn’t. A black cloud of truth rose up. He had been at the studio that night; he had been at the studio pushing his cock into me. No. I was sucking it into my body with my cunt, feeling like my cunt could consume the world, consume him with its hunger, and then his phone dinged. Without taking his eyes from my face he fumbled on the floor and held it up to the light and then looked and muttered Oh, fuck and typed some things with his thumb and I didn’t ask because I told myself he deserved his privacy, but it didn’t feel good to be lying to myself about why I wasn’t asking, which was that I already knew.
“Do you think he’s having an affair?” I asked.
They both turned to stare at me.
“I mean, is that it? You’re worried he’s cheating on you?”
They both started to talk at once. “No—” Sophie began, and then Lacie chimed in
with, “Cheating is not—I mean, to me affair implies marriage.”
I couldn’t help it, I looked right at Sophie. Then I forced myself to look away. “You know what I mean. Do you think he’s seeing someone else?”
There was a real four seconds of silence. Sophie looked in actual physical pain. I had upset her by barging in like this; I could practically see her thinking Why does she have to make the subtext text?
“That’s not Ian’s way,” Lacie finally announced. “That’s not—I mean, it’s like I was saying the other night. That’s just not the vibe I’m getting. I think he’s actually just really stressed about the show.” She brightened. “Are you going to come?”
“When is it?” I pretended to need to know.
“Umm…two Wednesdays from now? Something like that. Oh, come! It’s going to be really fun. There’s going to be a swing band and everything.”
I couldn’t imagine anything worse than seeing Ian with his arm around Lacie, but I muttered something about trying to make it. So far I had avoided seeing them together. He hadn’t been over recently, which I liked to think was a sign of fraying relations between him and Lacie, even though I knew this kind of thinking was a dangerous self-indulgence. Probably he was just avoiding me. But—a tiny part of me protested—maybe he was trying to distance himself from her. Maybe he was working up the nerve to break her heart.
Or maybe it really was this damn show. Maybe when a man—this man—said he had work to do, that’s all he meant. For me, the work excuse was never just a work excuse; it was also a way of saying: I’m busy, I’m important, I care about my work, I care about my work more than you, maybe I don’t care about you at all, hey, doesn’t my choice make you feel a little insecure and thus intrigued by me? But I was willing to accept that not everyone operated this way. That sometimes a work night was just a work night.
Although honestly I doubted it.
“I’m going to be there,” Sophie offered.
Everyone Knows How Much I Love You Page 18
