Viral

by Emily Mitchell

  RECIPES

  For a long time, I thought of her as someone who had let me down. Some years ago, I had been seeing a man to whom she had introduced me and the affair went badly wrong. He drank too much and didn’t really want to stop, and in the end I got tired of dealing with the Jekyll-and-Hyde roller coaster of dating a drunk and I broke it off. I was very sad after that because I was in love with the man in spite of his bad qualities. I felt that this was a case where one person, him, was clearly at fault in our breakup, and that as a result he ought to be shunned by our mutual friends.

  When she kept in touch with him and continued to see him, I was angry with her. When she continued to go out drinking with him, in spite of openly agreeing with me that he had a problem with alcohol, I felt it showed callousness and a lack of caring on her part. I was so much more upset than he was and so much more deserving of companionship, yet I was the one home by myself while she and he and others of our circle went out on the weekends. It didn’t occur to me at that time that she might be struggling with her own desire for various kinds of oblivion and with the problems in her marriage, which wouldn’t last beyond the following winter.

  That was years ago. We’ve been in touch from time to time since then, but not often and not for long and always on my side with a feeling of resentment that I could banish for a while but that would inevitably come back when other things in my life were difficult or felt unfair. Then, the other day, I was looking through a box of books that I hadn’t unpacked the last time I moved and I found something she had made for me when we used to live in the same city. It was a book of recipes she’d compiled, chosen by her and handwritten into a hardbound notebook complete with pasted-in pictures and hand-drawn designs to make them look nice. The notebook was full from end to end and divided like a real cookbook into sections: soups, main courses, desserts, drinks. I looked through the book and thought how I had not yet made any of the recipes it contained. I took it out of the box and put it on the shelf with my other cookbooks. I thought how much trouble had gone into making it and how I couldn’t think of any time I’d taken that much trouble over something that was meant for just one other person to enjoy. I thought: I should really, really call her and tell her that I found this. So I searched until I found her most recent number, took the phone to a comfortable armchair in one corner of my living room, dialed the number and listened to the phone at the other end start to ring.

  COMPANY

  My oldest friend and her husband had their first baby last year. I’ve never been that interested in babies, really. I perceive that they are very beautiful, so beautiful it’s sometimes hard to bear. But I don’t want one of my own and I’m not sure why other people do. They are adorable when they smile, but when they cry it feels like having your heart removed with a pair of knitting needles and no anesthetic: you’d do anything to make it stop. And then, as well, you can’t go out at night, you have no privacy, you have to be an example for someone all the time, etc.

  This friend is someone I’ve known since we were teenagers. In high school, we were always together; we used to have private, extended jokes, some of them not very nice, about the kids at our high school who were more popular than us—which was almost everyone—and this helped us get through those difficult years and feel less miserable and insane. When we went to college, unlike many high school friends, we kept in touch and visited each other.

  I’ve known her husband for many years as well. When we were in our twenties, there was a period where we all three shared an apartment together and we were like people who share an apartment on a television program, always talking and very involved in each other’s lives.

  So when my friend flew up to visit her parents in Virginia recently, I decided to drive down from Pennsylvania, where I was teaching at the time, to see her and meet her baby.

  I was looking forward to the visit, but not without some reservations. I’ve had other friends who’ve had young children, though never such old, close friends, and particularly when the kids are very young you can’t really sustain a conversation with the parents. There is always something that the baby needs: his diaper must be changed, or he must be fed, or he must go down for a nap, or he needs to be walked around to prevent him crying. I was thinking: okay, so we’ll have a few minutes to catch up between his crying fits; that will have to do.

  Actually, if I’m honest, in the past few years I’d started to feel a distance grow between my friend and me. She now has a real, grown-up job in public administration, and she and her husband have bought a beautiful, old, wood-frame house in Atlanta where they live. I am still moving around every couple of years, bouncing from job to job, still working on my stupid novel. Sometimes I feel like she’s become one of those kids we used to be snarky about in high school. She’s managed to make the transition into being normal and I’m still out here looking in, but now there isn’t even anyone to keep me company.

  Anyway, when I arrived at her parents’ house, where my friend was staying, I rang the doorbell and she answered it. On her hip was her baby: a little boy with a thick silky head of black hair like hers and her husband’s bright blue eyes. I looked at my friend and at her baby. There they were—my friend and her husband—mixed together into one person. Of course, in one sense, this was just what I’d been expecting; the genes of parents combine to make a child. But on another level it was a total surprise. How is that possible? It’s like magic, really. The baby is both of them and neither of them. When this little boy looks serious and thoughtful, there is my friend’s contemplativeness; and when he grins or laughs out loud, there is her husband’s good humor.

  My friend leaned around her baby to hug me with one arm.

  “Come in,” she said. “It’s so nice to see you.”

  I stepped into the front hall, took off my coat and hung it up. My friend’s baby watched me do these very ordinary things as if they were the most fascinating spectacle he’d ever seen. He didn’t even seem to blink: just looked at me in absolute amazement. And without really meaning to I stared right back at him.

  My friend said: “Would you like to hold him?”

  “All right,” I said, uncertainly.

  I stood in the hall and she passed me her baby. He was somehow heavier than I’d anticipated and he seemed to have one too many limbs so that whatever way I held him there was always an arm or leg either dangling out or squashed. After a few moments of awkward shifting around, trying to find a comfortable position for him, his face crinkled up and he started to cry.

  “I don’t think he likes me,” I said, trying to give him back.

  “Oh, no,” my friend said. “Don’t worry. Just try walking him around.”

  I walked around the entire ground floor of the house bouncing him until eventually he stopped crying. Then I sat down on the living room sofa with him on my knee. He looked at me again with that same solemn expression on his face he’d had at first. He was watching me like he had all the time in the world to do it.

  My friend came and sat down on the couch beside me. “Look who’s made a new friend,” she said. I wasn’t sure if she was talking to her baby or to me or to both of us, but I didn’t answer. I just kept watching the baby, waiting to see what he’d do next.

  Lucille’s House

  Her mania for wallpaper reaches its apotheosis inside the walk-in closet off the bedroom. Silver, with giant white outlines of magnolia flowers sketched across it. Its surface reflects, so she can see her own movements, the warmth of her arms, as she reaches up to shuffle through the racks of dresses and shirts. But it’s not so smooth that the image is clear. Looking at it, she can see just enough of herself to be certain she is really there. And then for the interior of the bureau: a textured foil, also silver.

  Charming, the designer says. Not many people make such bold choices, Mrs. Armstrong. But then not many people possess your impeccable, inimitable style. Lucille just looks blankly at the woman; she is pale, with a weak chin and thin blonde hair that falls
lank around her face. This is not the first time the designer has embarrassed them both with her overly lavish compliments.

  When the room is finished, the flowers on the interior doors don’t match up with the flowers on the rest of the wall. You’ll have to redo this, she tells the designer. I want the pattern to be continuous across all the surfaces.

  She met Louis when she was dancing at the Cotton Club. “The Ebony Rose,” she was called, the only dancer on stage whose skin was so dark that she had to wear it all the time, couldn’t slip out of it to pass for Italian or Greek when that suited her better. He was there, fronting the Hot Seven with his photographer’s flash smile and that voice that seemed to come from the soles of his feet, from some other, richer world. She finished her last number and came off the stage, and he was there in the wing, grinning and looking at her like he could have eaten her up in one bite if he were inclined, but, as a gentleman, he’d refrain and instead consume her slowly, piece by marvelous piece.

  “Glad to see they’re finally letting real women dance here,” he said.

  “What do you know about women that you can tell the real ones from the rest?”

  “A few things.” He hadn’t left off smiling. “I married three just to make sure.” And then he reached up and cupped her chin in his hand and ran his thumb along the arc of her cheekbone and down to her lips. She thought it was the gentlest touch she had ever felt. She shook her face free of his grasp.

  “What would I want with a man who’s already gone and got himself married to three other women?” she asked him. He laughed.

  “Oh, no. Don’t worry. At the present time, I’m only married to one of them.”

  He is in Chicago the following winter to play a gig, and he figures he might as well get his divorce while he is in town. He is making his statement before the judge when he glimpses Lucille sitting in the back of the courtroom. He had not expected her to be there. She is wearing a dark blue coat with a high collar and a hat of the same shade with a small feather on the side. She is trying to be inconspicuous and failing. The eyes of the men in the room swing toward her like the hand of a compass to north.

  After the proceedings are finished, he comes to where she is sitting.

  “What are you doing here?” he asks her.

  “I’m making sure you are really getting a divorce.”

  “Well, I did it,” he says. “You saw me.” He looks at her hard. Then he offers her his arm and together they walk from the courtroom. As they are going down the steps, he glances over the balustrade and sees a line of people waiting outside an office on the ground floor. They are chattering happily—a marked contrast to everyone else in the building. It is the office that issues marriage licenses.

  “Lucy,” he says. “Honey.” He indicates the line of waiting couples with a soft movement of his head. “Want to get married? I mean, since we are already here.”

  • • •

  “Buy us a house,” he tells her on the telephone from San Francisco.

  “What kind of a house?”

  “I don’t know what kinds there are to choose from. Just find one you like.”

  The house on 107th Street in Queens is a three-story clapboard affair on a small lot. The street is quiet. Most of the residents are Irish or Italian. Their children are playing kickball in the road when the realtor ushers her up the front steps and opens the door. She follows him around the three floors inside: the bedrooms; the study, which lets out onto a balcony overlooking the street; the big basement. She likes it at once.

  She looks out the backdoor into the yard. There is a single broad-trunked plain tree shedding its spiky globes of seed onto the thin winter lawn. She remembers a tree like that from the end of the street where she lived as a child. She remembers crushing the pods under her shoes . . .

  “I’ll take it.”

  “Mrs. Armstrong, are you sure you don’t want to see a few more properties before you make up your mind?”

  “Yes, I’m sure. This is the one I want.” She doesn’t tell him that she has never lived in a house of her own. Throughout her childhood, her family moved from one rented room to another to another after that. If they left before the rent was due, they called it “Beat the Rent,” It was a game, like Catch the Hat or Go Fish, where winning meant you were gone before the landlord came around on the first of the month to collect. Then in New York, she lived in a ladies’ rooming house: one small room, clean, easy to understand.

  Looking at more houses, she thinks, would only clutter her head with too many kitchens, too many front porches and backyards and basements and staircases. She doesn’t like confusion.

  Louis arrives at his new house in the middle of the night. He has just come from the station, and before that from engagements in Cleveland, St. Louis, and Detroit. Lucille sends a driver to meet him because he doesn’t even know the address yet. She sees the car pull up by the curb outside, sees him in the back, his trumpet case on the seat beside him within arm’s reach. The rest of his luggage is in the trunk, but his trumpet he always keeps close by him when he travels. She says, you act like it’s your pocketbook, the way you clutch that thing. He says, it is my pocketbook. You get money out of your pocketbook, right? Well, I get money out of this . . .

  He leans forward and says something to the driver and then sits back against the seat. He doesn’t get out. He remains seated where he is in the back of the car. Occasionally he shades his eyes with his hand and peers up at the house through the car’s side window. What is he doing? The car is still sitting at the curb, its engine running, but he shows no sign of moving.

  After a couple of minutes, she puts on the porch light and opens the door. She waves down at the car. He waves back and then climbs out and goes around to pull his cases from the trunk. The driver goes to help him, but Louis tips him and then waves him away. He comes up the steps.

  “What were you waiting for?” Lucille asks when he gets to the top.

  “Well, I wasn’t sure this was the right address,” he says. “I didn’t want to go knocking on someone else’s front door in the middle of the night. What would you think if some strange black man came to your door in the middle of the night in this neighborhood?”

  “I would think he probably needed a cup of coffee.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Sure, but I gave you the correct address, baby. I can see you’ve got it right there.” And indeed, he is holding the piece of paper she gave to the driver. It has the address written on it in her own handwriting.

  “I know. But, honestly . . .” he is looking past her now into the front hall. His eyes look like a child’s at Christmas before the presents are opened. “I didn’t believe that a house this nice was mine. Is it?” She sees that he is crying. He has never had a house of his own before, either.

  “It is,” she says. “It’s yours. I promise.”

  When they are in Paris during his European tour, a man they meet at a party insists that he wants to paint Lucille’s portrait. He trails Louis around the room, conversation to conversation, explaining that his wife’s is the most marvelous face he’s seen in years and he must be allowed to render her likeness. Such perfect lines. Such wonderful tones. They can have the painting as a gift when it is finished.

  She isn’t sure she wants a big picture of herself hanging in her house; there is something that unnerves her about the idea of her own face preserved in paint while she grows older watching it. But Louis loves the idea, and before she knows what has happened, he has arranged for the man to accompany them around Europe so she can sit for him every day. She shrugs. It will give her something to do during the long hours when he is rehearsing and performing. And when the picture is done, it can go in his study, she thinks, somewhere she won’t have to see it all the time.

  In Morocco, she sees a carved wooden screen in the bazaar, which she realizes would look perfect by the front windows of the living room. In Berlin, there is a vase glazed blue and gray, all hard angles and g
eometry, which she finds in an antique shop on Keithstrasse.

  “For the shelves in the breakfast nook,” she tells him, when she unwraps it on the coffee table in their hotel suite.

  “Looks like you should put square flowers in that, flowers with sharp edges.” He turns it around in his hands.

  “Well, you find me some flowers like that to go in it,” she says to him. “But in case you can’t, I think ordinary round flowers would do fine.”

  In London, in the window of a shop on Kensington High Street, she sees a child’s mobile made of wood and painted in bright primary colors. It plays a tune when it turns. She watches it through the glass for a while. He comes up beside her quietly and puts an arm around her waist.

  “You want that?”

  “Not for me,” she says. “No, I don’t want it.”

  “If you want it, get it. I’ll go in and get it for you.”

  “I told you I don’t want it. What on earth is the point of having something like that . . .” She trails off, annoyed at herself for having been caught staring, annoyed with him for pressing the point. He has no children. None of his other wives ever conceived as far as she knows.

  “Let’s go,” she says, turning away from the window full of toys. “I think I’m ready for some lunch.”

  That evening he brings her a dozen roses in all different colors—red, pink, white, yellow.

  “Flowers with sharp edges,” he says, pointing to the thorns. She smiles and puts them in the blue vase.

  In Ethiopia, they are given a painting done on leather stretched over a wooden frame, of Moses receiving the commandments on Sinai. The sepia-colored figures have huge deer eyes and muscular-looking halos. They look content.