“Did she?”
“I assume you’ve seen it.”
“Of course.” Sloane raises a litigious eyebrow and Al is filled with the childhood queasiness of having missed something important, of being the last to watch the latest Western or hear about a girl he liked dating someone else. He thinks back to the scenes that Susan showed him: would he describe them as shocking? She testified in a kidnapping case, manipulated a shopkeeper. But the smirk on Sloane’s face suggests something else. He is sick with unknowing, with needing and not wanting to know what the hell she is talking about.
“Well, it’s spicy stuff!”
Nightmare images: other men, her skin, her mouth, their promise (to have, to hold)—how, how is Susie being discussed like a thing for public consumption when he has only ever known her as his most private friend? A person of bedtimes and mornings, of soft conversations and furtive weekend escapades. A person who writes him bright postcards with pictures of beaches and bridges, who dwells in his most vivid imaginings of the future, a someday mother, someday grandmother. Capable of anything—this is the gift and the curse of her.Spicy stuff.It’s a good thing she isn’t here because God knows what he’s supposed to do with all this anger that’s keeping him from finding anything polite or funny to say, freezing up the whole charmed moment.
A gentle voice pipes up. “Well, I just think it’s great that you let your wife get along with her career. Some men can be so controlling.” Angelic, petite Tillie Summers shoots a silly look at Rod, who shakes a fist at her, and everyone laughs even though they all know she’s really referring to her own husband. Al laughs too, relieved for a break in the tension, and smiles at Tillie gratefully.
“Well, she’s very talented,” Al adds, a closing remark, because it’s the one thing he knows to be true.
By the time Susan arrives, most of the partygoers have left, and all that remains of the hors d’oeuvres are pastry flakes and drooling pots of dip. This is bad news. Susan is starving. The plane had been delayed by two hours and by the time she made her way through arrivals and into a cabback to the apartment, she was so tired that she sat down in the shower and nearly fell asleep. She might have forgone the whole engagement party had there not been a part of her that so missed Al, that needed his clean smell and warm arms, that would feel like it was still in permanent motion until she arrived at the stable point of him. Besides, he would worry if she didn’t show. So she covered her hands in sticky volumizing product and ran them through her hair and called another cab to take her to the club.
Scavenging for something worth eating in the apartment (no apples, only an overripe banana), she discovered in the cereal cupboard a small half-decapitated mouse, its tiny teeth poking over its lower lip. Her appetite vanished. Only now, alighting at the club, does she remember again her horrible hunger, her stomach disintegrating from the inside out.
“Fashionably late,” one of Al’s friends calls as she crosses the green to the vestigial party, the stragglers practicing their swings with invisible clubs, women trying to wrap up conversations. She is aware of their gaze, her trail of California stardust as she cuts across the rippling lawn wearing a pink dress with puff sleeves, a costume that is almost but not quite right, the slit in the thigh slightly higher than appropriate for a place like this, for people like these. They don’t see much of Al’s friends, for reasons that she can’t quite grasp.Most of them are snobs, Al says, which Susan thinks is funny because a lot of people would say the same about him, being an academic and all. Still, they all seem smart and good at what they do, so why shouldn’t they watch her with interest, a woman who has also proven to be good at what she does?
“Sorry,” she says, explaining how they sat on the runway for an hour and the pilot had joked that he was also trying to get home for dinner because his wife was making cream pie, which had been amusing at the time but was somehow hilarious when she retold it now to this crowd of boozed-up preps looking for anything to keep the party going. And all the while she is looking at Al, reaching for his hand, which he loans for a brief squeeze, the touch of his normalcy almost breaking her before he retracts, hardly making eye contact, hardly managing a smile at herstory. She is filled with guilt at leaving him here so long on his own with all of these couples, for the minutes she wasted in the shower and sitting on the edge of the bed in a towel and changing from one dress to another. How she resents all the people preventing her from collapsing into him, cajoling him into forgiveness.Fine, she thinks, steeling herself toward the only other means of winning him over: a charm offensive.
Susan suppresses her hunger and sets about being delightful, making everyone laugh as she points out Rod’s new tie and Dan’s new almost-married-man handshake. She compliments the blonde, Tillie, on the coordination of her dress and her shoes. She takes the baby off Sloane, who looks relieved, and she smiles and glitters while she talks to it. It reaches its pudgy hands up to claw her face and she meets them with kisses.
“Tick-tock,” someone says, and they all laugh knowingly, including Susan, even though having children is the last thing on her mind, not when life is just getting started. But still, the Blessed Madonna act is melting away Al’s sulk, so she keeps talking to the baby about everything it has yet to do in the world.
“Someday, you can ride in a hot-air balloon,” she says. “And drive a car really fast down the highway. And go swimming in the ocean and talk to cute boys.”
“And if you’re lucky, you can even be a hooker on TV.”
“Rod!” Sloane exclaims. “Sorry, Susan—”
“No, no, he’s right of course. I do consider myself lucky.”
She smiles at Rod like she’s in on it, like this is the kind of thing good friends tease each other about, not daring to look at Al, whose mortification is radiating dire waves. Remember when he defended her? His silence makes her feel as though she’s lost something.It would only make it worse if he agitates, she tells herself. She doesn’t need saving. Smiling, she hands back the baby and moves closer to him—close enough to feel the static between them without touching—until, at the first possible moment, they can agree it’s time to leave.
2008
Sebastian is trying to throw himself over a high metal bar, his body arching in the unnatural way he has been told to arch it, head back, legs swinging up high.You have to abandon your intuition, the coach said as he walked the high jumpers through the technique, though really Sebastian has already abandoned it, it was gone the moment he donned the mesh uniform for the Aldwych Midnight Riders—a team name which was meant to invoke Paul Revere, but has been reduced to the orgasmic humiliation of organized sport. So jump, though it makes no sense, contort yourself into someone you are not. Watch as Lola runs laps around you. And when the coach is distracted, you can lie on the thick red mats and flirt with girls.
“Bliss, let’s go.”
It’s almost the end of the practice. It has to be. His brain is leaking pointless information and his body has stretched beyond itself. It would be nice, wouldn’t it, to go roll up a lumpy joint, hotbox the car, forget all the bullshit everyone has tried to cram into his head today. The tangle of quadratic equations and neutrons andel subjuntivo.
But no—he promised his dad: he has to try.
Call it a lost bet. Having rejected all extracurriculars beyond “chillin’,” Sebastian explained to his father that none of it mattered; his plan was to become an artist.
And what does that look like?Al had asked.
Sebastian had gestured to himself. His long hair in a greasy bun, his chipped black nail polish. He didn’t have an answer beyond the feeling inside him. Being an artist is about living in a certain way. About seeing as much as making things. Often, Sebastian feels he is watching theworld through an alien camera, aware of a complacency that others hide behind.
His father sighed.Seb, you know, very few people get to make a living being an artist. The tough fact of life is that the winners play it safe. They don’t dick around in study hall, they don’t mess with drugs. They study hard and show up to extracurriculars, and gradually, through facts, they grow to understand the world.
Bullshit, he said.I understand the world.And with gusto, he threw himself at applications for summer programs, photographed his work from art class, mailed in forms to museums and universities.
Not a single yes. Ironically, what the artist had failed to see clearly was himself. Sebastian lacked technique. Maybe he lacked talent. But worst of all, he felt he had disappointed his mother. In his underwear drawer he collects her: strands of what might be her hair, old bottles of pills, a faded, woven key ring with her initials on it. A necklace with black stones, a silk scarf. It’s stupid, an effort to gain access to something: the worlds she was interested in, the way she liked to feel. His memories are a profusion of finger paintings, confetti cut with novelty scissors. She was always determined to make something, even if it was only a mess.
Maybe he had mistaken her for a star. Maybe Casey was wrong all those years ago, or humoring them. Maybe she never made it big after all. He began to feel ashamed, using his mother as an excuse for wanting more than the life on offer.
