Luster Page 14
* * *
At home, we disperse to our separate rooms. Akila’s gifts, which were hauled out of the party room and back into the truck, sit unopened in the dining room. At midnight, Akila knocks on my door. She says she has reason to believe that the woman who is trying to put out the fire is the mail clerk’s mother. Since the mail clerk doesn’t engage in direct combat, his HP depends entirely on the successful management of his mood. To keep it stable, we visit the mess tent and talk the NPCs to the end of their script, though bad selections can be more damaging than doing nothing at all. If we have coffee instead of tea. If we engage the lieutenant and he shows us a photo of his dog. I suggest that we try opening the mail, but his mood is not high enough to absorb the illegality and it kills him instantly. I get up to leave, but Akila calls my name. She considers me and then removes her wig. She puts it down on the floor inside out, and there is a tag sewn between the weft that says Party Supply. Then I look at her, and for a moment, I assume she is wearing a wig cap, but it is her scalp, exposed and covered in chemical scars.
“You let it stay in too long,” I say.
“I thought it was supposed to burn,” she answers, and this too is part of that common tongue. Sodium hydroxide and the real estate of the scalp. The first time I lost my hair, I was ten and no one was home. My hands were too small for the gloves that came in the box, and the relaxer, bought in secret at a sparse, upstate Beauty Supply, singed the back of my neck. I hid the hair I’d lost in a bin near the community pool, and once my mother realized what had generated my new interest in scarves, she didn’t talk to me for a week. I go to my room and find my shea butter, jojoba oil, and silk scarf. When I return, I have her sit between my knees so that I can have a closer look, and I notice that in the hair she still has, her curls are still intact. She says that she panicked. That she wanted to be different for the party. As I wrap the scarf, I am too aware of her head. I am aware of her skull, of the vulnerability of her thirteen-year-old bones. I leave the oil and shea on her dresser, and for a while I am unable to sleep. Because she is thirteen, and I remember how it felt from the inside. I remember what I thought I knew about people, and the pride I took in being alone. But from the outside, the loneliness is palpable, and I think, She is too young.
* * *
The silence persists. Eric pays me another visit while I’m in the shower, and this time I don’t hear him until the lights are off. I can’t tell how close he is to the curtain, or if he is even still there, but I act as if he is. I touch myself and wonder if he is listening. For a few weeks I continue my series of “self-portraits.” I only take things they are unlikely to miss. A lightbulb, a dinner plate, a single winter glove. Things I can crush or hang over a flame, though these portraits of shards and ash ultimately feel less truthful than when I render areas of the house I have thoroughly cleaned. I try to be inconspicuous, but on the night I get into the HVAC unit with a toothbrush, Rebecca comes down the stairs in scrubs and tells me there is a unit on the other side of the house. I can’t tell if she is serious, or if this acknowledgment is meant to make me stop. And as a matter of principle, I stop for a few days. When we cross paths I try to discern from her face whether this is the intended result. But eventually I find myself on the other side of the house, brushing dust out of the vents.
* * *
The next morning, there is money on my dresser. I close the door and count it. I pocket it and buy more art supplies—raw canvas, stretcher bars, Lascaux gesso—and some tea tree oil for Akila. I take the bus to the library, and I sit in the stacks and count the change. Like bone, the money—the paper and nickel and zinc—feels more mutable when held inside the hand. It feels finite, tethered to the source in a way that makes it explicitly transactional, and so of course it is demeaning. But it is also demeaning to be broke. I go down to Special Collections and watch the archivists through the glass. They are capturing a three-dimensional image of a gilded urn. Between the softboxes and umbrellas, they place the urn on a polyester wheel. One archivist turns the wheel, and another captures the image. However, the archivist at the wheel is older and has a tremor in her hand. As they are reaching the last sixty degrees, she loses her place. Eric comes out from his office, smiles, and picks up where she left off. He looks through the glass and holds my eye for a long moment, and then he turns and disappears into his office. Upstairs, I look through the death certificates. I find a certificate for a man who fell out of a window while trying to prove to a tour group that it was made of unbreakable glass, for a man who fell into a machine in a textile mill and suffocated in eight hundred yards of wool, for a man who was crushed by a trash compactor while looking through a dumpster for his phone, and the usual, the strokes, the cancers, the suicides. I look for my father’s certificate, and though I don’t find it, I find four Ivan Darbonnes who died in New York between 1975 and 2018. All of them died in Brooklyn. My father died in Syracuse, five years after my mother. We hadn’t talked in six months, partly because we were (comfortably) estranged, and partly because his new wife was screening my calls. The last time I saw him, two years before his death, he took the Metro-North into the city and we saw a matinee of the newest Aronofsky. After, we went for dinner and he kept saying things were expensive, but occasionally he would pause and tell me what he thought the movie meant. He’d stopped eating sugar and carried around a gallon of his own “chemically altered” water, and before we saw the movie I had to stuff it in my purse. He’d grown skinny and gullible. I lost my patience with him while we were waiting for the downtown A. I yelled at him about electrolytes and we were silent on the train. And then a few years later, I was checking Facebook and I noticed all the condolences on his page.
* * *
I stop cleaning altogether for a couple of weeks, but the money still comes. It comes in a sealed white envelope and the amount is different every time. One hundred dollars. Forty-eight dollars and fifteen cents. Three hundred dollars during a week I don’t do anything at all. I deposit the money quietly, spend some of it on an expensive bottle of polyethylene glycol. I take Akila to get her first protective style. We take the train into the city and find an African braiding parlor on 125th. It smells right, like yaki and hibiscus and lavender oil. Above the Malaysian bundles, a Trinidadian soap opera is on. When the actors speak, you can hear the air in the room. Three women work on Akila at once. They hook in the yaki and speak softly to each other in Queen’s English. Every thirty minutes a man comes in and asks for cash. When he is gone, one of the hairdressers asks me to pay before he comes back. She says he is her boyfriend. Four hours later, a woman comes out with a pot of boiling water to seal the ends of the Senegalese twists. They soak Akila’s shirt on the train back, and at home she changes into something dry.
“A new do! Very nice!” Eric says to Akila when he passes by her room. He lingers in the doorway and asks how much time it took and makes a joke about how heavy her head must feel. He mentions a black woman at work who always changes her hair, and he asks a slew of slightly invasive questions with this bright, apologetic look on his face. I have had this exact exchange more times than I can count, but I can’t tell if Eric is trying so hard because he is white, or if it is because he is a dad. When he leaves, Akila looks at me and laughs.
* * *
I look through my self-portraits, and I can’t see myself, but I am well acquainted with every corner of the house. A habit has been built. I clean all the windows in the house, polish the silver, smoke a few cigarettes. I lie around in the dark and indulge all the bright half-dreams, the speed and pavement, the staggered lips of cliffs and yawning desert. I wander around the house after midnight and find the door to Rebecca and Eric’s bedroom slightly ajar, and they are having what is, in their case, aptly called sexual intercourse. It does not look like porn but still defies description, Eric enormous and rectangular, Rebecca feral and smooth. Regrettably, they are beautiful, and per their soft chatter and tender readjustment, at least a little bit in love. I take a few photos w
ith my phone, and I check the time. I want to go to bed, but I feel obligated to stay until they finish, and when they do, Rebecca rolls over and turns up the TV.
I return to my room, scroll through the pictures, and do three preliminary sketches. I touch myself and try to imagine what it is like to have comfortable, familiar sex, to be pounded sweetly as James Corden does his monologue. I wake up in the afternoon, walk two miles to the rink and get some soft-serve ice cream, feed a pretzel to a pigeon with an atrophied leg. I go to the mall and play the arcade games they keep in the food court, and, after talking to a Sears associate about all-terrain tires, I buy a blue dress.
* * *
At home, I put on the dress and for the first time in a while, I feel like a person someone might want to kiss. I sit in front of the mirror and apply makeup, my hand unsteady and the kohl too heavy around my eyes. I put on lipstick, scrub it off, and then put it on again. I watch Rebecca drive away and I go down to the basement, where Eric is looking through the largest collection of vinyl I have ever seen. When I see him, I feel short of breath, and I pause on the stairs and consider turning back. He glances at me and pulls a record from a thick, plastic sleeve. All of it is coordinated and strategically filed, shrink-wrapped and, in some cases, refrigerated, all the dials set to fifty-five, all of twelve-inch Philadelphia funneling into the derivative and French, into the 4/4 and South Bronx, the minimalist German records most apparently handled, the entire room kind of hairy and out of time with the dirty shag and wood paneling and green La-Z-Boy. He lets the needle down, and I continue my silent tour as something is made of the polymer and spiral groove, something preserved but ultimately Jurassic, the sound opaque and full of grain, which I understand as a function of authenticity and also as a condemnation of my ears, which find this cool but mostly just okay. He hands me a glass of gin and wipes the lipstick off my face with the back of his hand. The gin is warm, and the record is Brazilian and very reliant on the theremin. He pours himself a drink and circles the room, pausing only to fuss with the player, which is a beautiful machine but within this context a stark digression with its digital numbers and sleek, aluminum deck. No record is right. At the two-minute mark, Eric swaps one out for another, and then again, the interval between records smaller each time, so that by the fifth it is an erasure, the business of replacing the vinyl bracketing the lyric and unresolved brass. When he finds a record that is satisfactory, he crosses the room and pushes me into the wall. He rolls up his sleeve and wraps his hand around my throat, a thoughtful, preliminary squeeze, as if the hand is not his own. He tries the other hand, and this one, the left one, seems to be the one he prefers. He says, You want this, like it is a question and then like it is a statement, and the most immediate cost of our two-week silence is that I have forgotten his voice, which now seems too soft and too high. Up close, every detail is slightly diminished. The assessment is mutual. His hand slackens as he searches my face for where the memory became corrupt, and then his hand tightens, becomes deliberate, each one of his fingers jointed and distinct, everything reduced and anatomical, my cartilage and salivary glands explicit, my breath half-drawn and made into something sharp and unexpressed in my chest. That I can’t breathe does not immediately feel like a problem. There are things happening in the interim, a door opening upstairs, an eyelash on his cheek, and before he fully commits to the grip, he lifts the glass of gin from my hand. Thank you, I almost say. But my voice is gone, and the room is gone, though on my way out I notice that the record has begun to skip.
7
In the weeks that follow, we are new. There is some attempt at an apology he doesn’t mean and that I don’t want, and then we stand at different windows and wait for Rebecca to drive away. He lets himself into my room and we trip over ourselves while we undress, the contact tenuous and inexact, kisses spoiled by fervor, full of air and teeth and always off the intended mark, though I am just happy to be touched. We wait for the moments Akila and Rebecca are not home, but ardor is a kind of negligence. Rooms are chosen indiscriminately and sometimes doors are not properly closed. The days are shorter in October, and we take full advantage of the nights.
* * *
We don’t talk about what brought us here, the spontaneous asphyxiation hanging between us like a silent, low-gravity dream. Instead we meet in the dark, and all the wholly unoriginal, too generous things men are prone to saying before they come sound startling and true. Tender, silly words. Vocabulary you receive as a good sport and volley back with your eyes closed. Because when it is over, when he is bending over to collect his pants, there is a world beyond the door with traffic and measles and no room for these heady, optimistic words.
* * *
We have abbreviated dinners in Princeton and Hoboken. I draw an anchor on his forearm and the rest of the night we pretend that he will soon be at sea. We go to Paulus Hook in Jersey City and watch party boats cut slick circles around flat, brown barges, and when the water stills, he tells me that he will write me a letter every day. We always arrive home separately. When Rebecca is home, our conversations are curt and about insignificant things, about weather and whether the coffeepot should be cleaned, but as we develop this careful, mundane language, it becomes its own intimacy, the laundry and the miscellany beneath the silverware an irony that softens his face as he pulls my dress over my head. Of course, I am waiting for the other shoe to drop. Bobby pins are left behind, and a crystal centerpiece is destroyed. We crawl around in our underwear and try to find all the broken glass. Eric says he will come up with an explanation, but Rebecca does not seem appeased. She says there is a shard in her foot, and she talks about it for a week. She says she can’t remove it, and sends me to the store for peroxide and gauze. When I look at her foot, nothing is there. Look closer, she says, and the next time Eric and I go out, I suggest we get a room.
* * *
I feel Rebecca reassessing my presence in their house. While I have learned how to use a mop and maintained the appearance of tutoring their daughter in the Pineapple Method and everything else African American 101, my résumé has been revised so frequently that my career in publishing and soft cheese has become a career in scientific journalism, the zebrafish trials at Sloan Kettering surprisingly easy to riff about over the phone, though not as easy in person when the interviewer, a distant relation of Jonas Salk, wants to talk about the moral implications of giving mice cocaine. During my interview with CVS, I try to be convincing in my assurance that pointing young adults in the direction of Plan B has always been a part of my five-year plan, but after the interview I go to the parking lot to drink some cough syrup and notice one of the managers watching me from his car.
* * *
And the money is still coming. It appears on my dresser with no indication of who it is from. I spend the money on paint and deposit the rest. I am tempted to ask Eric during the times we are together if it is him. If it is, I worry our relationship will become transactional, not in the way it already is, re: my twenty-something pussy and his fraying telomeres, but in the way I might have to parse the irregularity of the payments, the four hundred dollars one week, and the measly five the next, and confront the inconsistencies in my performance.
* * *
Eric takes off from work so we can have a picnic. I see him before he sees me. He is on his hands and knees smoothing the wrinkles from the picnic blanket, and there is something so undignified about this that I return to the bus stop and come back in ten minutes when he is waiting with a bottle of wine. When I sit down, he takes my face into his hands and I can feel the salary in them, the forty-plus years of relative ease. He arranges the crudo and the cheese and I roll a loose, dry joint. When we light it, the cherry tears through the paper and we pass it back and forth like an emergency. Just as it begins to rain, a 747 slants toward Newark. He pulls me into his lap, and it is all a little weirder in the afternoon when he can see my face. I fall back onto the blanket and feel the sun on my arms. I think to ask him about the money, but he is kis
sing my palms, telling me about a family picnic when he found out he was allergic to silver. We drain the bottle, and he tells me that his parents are alive and still together, that in his old suburb outside Milwaukee, there was a genuine neighborhood witch, who in Norse tradition is called a völva, and that she gave him his first guitar. I tell him about the last birthday gift I received from my mother, a Polaroid camera, and I slide the ring from his hand and put it into my mouth. For a moment he watches, flushed and happy as I taste the alloy and the sweat, but then he straightens and tells me that I always go too far. We leave separately and at home we don’t talk. I haven’t forgotten to ask him where the money is coming from, it’s just that I realize I hope it’s coming from Rebecca.
* * *
She is mostly inaccessible. Up in the morning crushing Ambien into her coffee and complaining about the neighbor’s dog, out at night when a new veteran comes into the morgue. There are moments our contact feels thoughtful, the organic tampons that appear in my bathroom bound in twine, the want ads that appear on my vanity along with a red pen. There are also moments when I am reminded that her generosity comes with an asterisk. The way all her questions are instructions, texts asking if I can stay in my room while she meditates, queries about whether or not I know how to use a lawn mower and the cotton mask she gives me when I say the smell of fresh-cut grass makes me sick. It’s a death rattle, she says, directing me to the lawn mower and adjusting the string on the mask, the grass communicating its distress, and for the rest of the day I think of that, sick to my stomach, the lawn buzzed and alkaline, the vinegar in the wine and carnage in the dew, everywhere the perfume of things that want to live.