Yes, he wrote back immediately. Great.
If a man describes his girlfriend as “totally psycho,” he cheated on her, but he still loves her. Listen for the admiration in his voice, the awe that means I didn’t think she’d print out every email I had ever sent her, collate all the text messages, and leave them in a shredded heap on my front stoop, but when I saw the pages burning, that’s when I knew this was real. Do not think, even for a moment, that this man might love you instead. Do not be fooled by I need to talk to you or I thought I could trust you. A man who is involved with a woman who burns is not interested in nice or trust, no matter what he says, no matter if he writes I don’t understand. Usually you’re so good.
I was not good. But I didn’t believe in good anymore. I believed in beauty. Ian was a beautiful man, but—even though I had been waiting and waiting for his text—when the time came I didn’t want to go. Ian said please. He was freaking out: please its like I dont understand he wrote, and that’s when I took pity, which is the problem with people like me, the whole reason we don’t become queen: we take pity.
Really, it was the lack of apostrophes that did it for me. Ian was a fastidious texter, in the way of our generation: no abbreviations or emojis, no punctuation omissions, and certainly no typos. He must be upset.
If sunshine in September is always of the piercing, pristine kind, then December clouds are always dull, wrapping the world in dirty cotton. “You’re making that up,” I told him after he had described the Gmail flambé. “I don’t believe you.”
He bit his thumb. “I’m terrified of her. Do you know how much time that must have taken? God!” He swung his arm out toward the duck pond.
Cyclists in Spandex buzzed past like neon centaurs.
“I just—what the fuck? Why the fuck would you tell her? Why would you do something like that?”
“I didn’t do something like that,” I observed. “I did exactly that.”
Two Orthodox families went by, the men talking with their heads close, the women behind, pushing baby strollers and leading children by the hand. A parade of dark human shapes against the pale shimmering lake, the women in wigs, impossibly young, the men ahead, talking Talmud. Women with children, men with ideas. I had wanted to live a life of ideas. I had never wanted to worship a man, hoist his flag, join his parade. Years ago, women had helped Ian make a giant flag and carry it through the park. An “art project.” I had seen the pictures, and thought: At least I’m not one of them. But maybe I was worse.
“I just don’t get why you did that,” he spat out, and I realized he had been seething during my silence. “I thought we were friends.”
He had lines on his face, soft etchings by his eyes, deeper curves by his mouth. When I had first noticed them, we had been fucking, and they had seemed evil, but now they just made me tender. “I was drunk,” I told him gently.
“Drunk is not an answer.”
I tried again: “I was trying to be honest.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“Okay, yeah. It’s bullshit. But isn’t it better to have told her? Shouldn’t she know?”
“We could have told her together. We should have told her together. If we were going to tell her, it should have been together.”
“That sounds like a nightmare.”
“It can’t be worse than this. I woke up to the fire department on my front stoop.”
I laughed. Lacie’s gesture seemed funny to me, something her devilish ten-year-old self might have done. Where Ian saw an inferno, a blaze of desperation, I sensed something more mocking. An imitation of heartbreak.
“It’s not funny,” Ian snapped. I had never heard him snap before. “It’s scary. She’s not like that. She’s not the kind of person to do something like that.”
I tried to keep a straight face. “Is she going to get in trouble?”
“No,” he said simply, and something in the sobriety of his tone made me not ask more questions.
“Do you think I should call her?”
“No,” he said, and now it was his lips curling with irony. “I don’t think you should call her. I don’t think she wants to talk to you right now.”
Once I had watched the sea lions sunbathe on the Monterey pier. From a distance they seemed cute, those piles of squeaking mammals waddling on flipper feet, but when I got closer I saw they had jagged wounds ribboned with blood and yellow pus. “Sometimes they fight,” the man I was with had said, and I knew he meant “over mates.” The heaps of sunbathing sea lions didn’t look so sweet anymore: they paid for their terrible desire to live close with chunks of flesh.
My friendship with Lacie was like the body of these sea lions, infected and weak. It occurred to me, strangely for the first time, that this could be the end. It would not be remarkable for Lacie and me never to speak again. It was in fact the expected thing.
The grass where we were walking was frostbitten, the color of chalk. On the horse trail there were mounds of shit, but in the cold, dry air I couldn’t smell them. I couldn’t hide anything from him. He looked directly into my brain as he said, “Lacie told me about the accident.”
I cut a quick glance over but kept walking.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked.
I thought how I had been smirking, cavalier with whiskey as I’d said, But then I slept with him, so I guess I kind of won. I had been lying, even if everything I had said was literally true.
“She said you crashed into the side of the road. There was no one else around.” He looked at me. “I don’t get it. You just—crashed?”
“I was a new driver,” I finally said.
“Had you been drinking?”
“No. It just happened. No one was hurt. It wasn’t a big deal.”
He shook his head. “I can’t believe you guys never talked about this. Didn’t you ever talk about high school?”
We were by the boarded-up bandshell, shut tight with plywood. “What was the point? It was a long time ago. We were children.”
I flinched as he studied me. “Rose. You scare people, you know that?”
I didn’t answer him.
“Nobody knows what to make of you. Rose? You scare me.”
Morning. Sunlight drifting in pale, watery squares along powder-blue walls. Beyond a black-boxed window, the looping grandeur of the GW, tiny silver cars winking as they slid cityward.
Alyssa and Marcus had an apartment of clean lines. Glossy floors. An Eames chair, a modern sofa of blue-gray, punishingly hard. A sheepskin rug. A brass circle serving as a coffee table. One of those vertical bookshelves, like a scraggly tree, blooming here and there with big art books, some still shrink-wrapped.
When I had gotten in the night before, I had wandered aimlessly through the place, and now I did so again, opening drawers, studying the bookshelves, perusing the refrigerator, Ian’s verdict (You scare me) ringing like a bell in my head.
In the library I learned that Marcus was the author of several serious tomes on diet; it was his measured opinion, I gathered from the jacket copy, that three bloody steaks a day were ideal for human flourishing. Alyssa was an artist: she posed little baby chickens doing New Yorky things in elaborate dioramas, photographs of which decorated the walls. Here yellow chicks in downward dog; there yellow chicks swilling Cosmos; and, in a rather heartbreaking series, at the fertility clinic, draped in blue-and-white checked gowns, and then beneath the sheets with their chickie husbands, clucking about ovulation.
The chicks made me mad. They were so dumb. They were little more than an elaborate diary, apparently: fertility books lay around the apartment, too, and printouts from trips to a Dr. Kaplan-Finke, and a calendar with circled and starred days.
Why did every stupid successful New York woman brood and squawk with the need for a baby, as if that would fulfill her? Why was a baby the final accessory, the thing you
needed to go with the big apartment and big career and shiny gift books of your chicks, which apparently sold at Urban Outfitters for $17.99? I didn’t want a baby. Not even an inch of me. I wanted Ian. I wanted a handsome artistic man to be hopelessly devoted to me and listen to me narrate every moment of my every day before making sweet and hot and mildly kinky love to me. For this, I was willing to skip the big ego trip of a mini me.
Now I rifled through Alyssa’s dresses before flopping down on the sofa to eat some of her yogurt. It was thick, tangy, delightfully sour; I let it dissolve on my tongue while I lay propped up on the midcentury couch, then got up and paced the room once more. The chicks! I couldn’t stop looking at the chicks.
Suddenly I thought I’d go to the Met. See some real art. In the past months I’d spent hours and hours on the Upper East Side without ever gracing its doorway, trudging up and down Park and Lex, always thinking I’d fit in a trip soon, but never quite making it. But now I was free. True, I had to get to Albemarle Road before Lacie got home from work, but I had hours and hours before that.
* * *
—
From the wide gray benches surrounding the Temple of Dendur, I watched school kids in uniforms of pressed slacks and navy sweaters spread like liquid through the temple, squealing at the hieroglyphics. They bunched at the entrance, thrilling at its etched codes, but trepidatious of the depths. They had crayons and worksheets to fill out; eventually, their teacher, a mild-looking man in his own navy sweater, got them to sit cross-legged before the ancient rock and draw. A woman in a long calico skirt hovered off to the left, talking to herself, as if reading the flat gesticulating figures.
Most of us were sitting here, in this luminous gray room, lit by glass windows that curved into the ceiling and overlooked the park. Listening to echoing footsteps, and the shouts of kids bouncing off glass and old rock, I waited for magic, for my soul to re-form around beauty. I wanted art to be a private well of meaning, something so incredible that my soul would ignite—for what else are these public institutions for?—but I just kept talking to Lacie in my head.
I composed missives, I explained myself, I saw her slowly nodding and saying she understood. I promised her that what had happened would never happen again. Some fierce knot in me protested: I wanted it to happen again.
A few people walked the length of the hall, studying the grainy black-and-white reproductions of the temple in Egypt, and I joined them. The photographs told the story of how in Egypt there was a canal planned, a valley to be flooded, a holy site in its path. How a Rockefeller stepped in, paid for the temple to be dismantled and shipped, block by block, to this northern island.
Funny how stealing and salvaging can look the same, I thought. How you can call one by the other’s name.
When I looked at my phone again, it was already five thirty. I had spaced, and now Lacie would be home in an hour.
It was still in those halcyon early days of my time in New York, when I was actually surprised that the 4/5/6 was delayed, surprised and then annoyed—yes, in those days I still managed indignation at the MTA. The time clocks predicted trains in 17, 21, 27 minutes, but minutes passed and the numbers did not drop.
When a train finally did arrive it was as if a giant malicious alien had packed a silver tube with a hive of buzzing humans. The windows were steamed. Limbs, suit jackets, babies were pressed up against the glass. The door slid open, and the hostile riders looked out at the pack on the platform with murder eyes. One younger woman wielding a yoga mat stumbled out. Several nannies barreled on. The rest of us were left with our hair fluttering softly in the tailwind of a tardy, unrepentant 4 train.
All this is to say that by the time I transferred at Union Square—the transfer not an indescribable horror like a genocide but an indescribable horror nonetheless—and another cheery silver can had chugged over the Manhattan Bridge and stalled in the tunnel right before DeKalb, I was very late. Saving some train disaster on Lacie’s part, she had definitely beat me home.
* * *
—
They must have heard me turning the lock, for when I came into the living room Lacie was already standing, and Anna and Dylan were furiously studying their plates. On the table, amid goblets of wine and platters of root vegetables, tiny tea lights flickered.
“Oh my God.” I stopped mid-room. “It’s Shabbat. I forgot.”
“Shoes,” said Lacie.
Mechanically I returned to the foyer. Of course these nights would go on without me. Lacie had already moved on, apparently excised Sophie, and cooked up a storm without my help. God, it was hard to untie my shoes. The laces kept knotting up.
When I returned, Dylan was thoughtfully sawing at a hunk of rutabaga, and Anna was breaking off a piece of bread with the kind of concentration usually reserved for heart surgery. Lacie had her arms crossed.
“I’m not, like, here,” I explained. “I’m just going to get some things real quick.”
Spine prickling, I swiveled and strode away, imagining their glances meeting over the lamb, Anna mouthing cunt, Dylan patting Lacie’s hand.
In my room, I sensed it right away. Nothing was out of place, but there was some subtle rearrangement, the smoke trail of her presence. She had snooped.
From the back of my closet I pulled the old green duffel that had been my home, a long floppy, shapeless tube in which I would yet again stuff the small props of my thin life. When I opened my drawers, my clothing looked obscene, like the discarded skin of corpses. Cast-offs from a dead girl, disgustingly suggestive of armpits, breasts, and legs.
I sat back on my heels and looked around the room. What had she moved? What had she taken? Weariness washed over me. Did it matter? This was my old life. My one poster I would leave. The succulent I had bought in a burst of optimism, the copy of As a Friend I had found in a used bookshop, the few other paperbacks bought these past months. My old novel drafts. Let her read them. Recycle them. We were done.
The women were murmuring, but when I darkened the doorway—never has the phrase felt more apt; I was practically a killer with a knife—they fell silent.
“Um, okay.” I lifted up a wobbly hand. “I think that’s it. Have a good dinner.”
For about five seconds I really thought it was going to be that easy. I dropped my duffel to pull on my shoes. There was silence from the table, but not super hostile silence. Maybe they’d just lapse into conversation when I left. Hurl a few insults, then move on to discussing holiday plans.
Then, just as I was pulling on my coat, Lacie slipped across the room, quick and quiet as her cat. “One thing.” Her breath was hot with garlic. “I need the rent.”
I straightened. She wasn’t a very good angry person. Her fluttery hands and high, agitated voice belonged to a bad actor from a community theater troupe. “Oh, yeah. Okay, sure.” I kept my voice casual.
“All of it. From September too.”
September had sort of floated from my mind. Lacie had been so cavalier this fall, so quick to forgive my debt when I had lost my SAT students. Though I had never paid her back, I had forgotten to think about it as a gift; it just seemed like we were both enjoying the pile of gold her grandmother had left behind.
Also, my credit cards were maxed out. I didn’t have eighteen hundred dollars lying around; I didn’t even have a job. “Okay, yeah, for sure.” I bobbed my head. “I can totally get that to you. It just might take me a minute, but I totally can. It’s just that, um, I lost my job.”
“What?”
“I lost my job. I got fired, actually.”
“You got fired?” Lacie began to laugh hysterically.
“Yeah, I got fired.” Every time I said it aloud it hurt more.
Still laughing, Lacie staggered back to the couch and collapsed. Head on hands, shoulders shaking, she moaned, “Oh my God, oh my God.” From the table, Anna and Dylan swiveled their legs to me, their eyes
lasering Now what did you do?
“Lace?” I stood over her. “Are you laughing or crying? I can’t tell.” She continued to convulse. “Oh God. I’m really sorry.”
Anna coughed.
“How could you,” Lacie sobbed. “How could you.”
Dylan stood. “We can go. We can totally go.”
“You’re fine,” I told her. “I’m about to go.”
“Yeah, but”—Dylan cast a glance back at Anna—“maybe we shouldn’t be here.”
“You’re fine,” I snapped, and they stepped back. “Lace?” Again I reached out my hand, but she was projecting a force field I couldn’t penetrate. “I’m really sorry. It was really stupid.” Now I sounded like the bad actor, tinny and hysterical. I fought a terrible urge to smile. The women were watching. My almost-friends, my near New York life: even now they were receding. It was okay. I’d move back home. Home was nice. “I think, ever since moving here, I’ve just been—I mean. All our history. I haven’t been dealing with—”
“You were living in my house,” she exploded, and the women rose and drifted toward the door.
“We’re going out for a walk,” Anna said.
“We’ll be nearby,” Dylan said.
“We love you, Lacie,” Anna added, and as one, they slid on their coats and slipped out the door.
With her friends gone, the apartment seemed darker. Smaller. Lacie straightened up. “I never want to see you again.”
“Okay.”
“If you come by the house again, for any reason, I will take out a restraining order.”
“Totally,” I agreed.
“I read your stupid fucking novel. I feel bad for you, I really do. You’re actually just a pathetic, small person.”
So it had been an old draft. Somewhere deep inside me, a small nub of confidence budded. To read my stuff, to talk like that, she must still want to wound me. We weren’t done yet. And the inferno she had built on Ian’s stoop, what was that but a way, too, of keeping the story going?
Everyone Knows How Much I Love You Page 23
