Luster Read online

  The sex is okay but sort of beside the point, because in his drawing room there are buckets of Prismacolors, Copic markers, and oils. Rolls of raw canvas, cans of lumpy gesso and turpentine. Filberts, brights, and flats bound with soft camel hair. And while he has a light taste for libertarianism, he doesn’t ask me to do outdoor activities, so it kind of squares. We spend weekends in bed, moving quickly out of the first nervous touches into the realm where we are undeterred by the odd turns of the id. But of course, my failure is hanging between us. He is infinitely more talented in the thing I most want to do, and he seems to prefer it that way. It is silly how late this occurs to me, the carrots he dangles in his boredom, how casually he reaches for the stick. I see myself in the women who trail him, the moony typographers, the perky-breasted RISD grads. Still, eventually I go over to his house and beg him to look at my work. I get on my knees, offer up my sketchbook, and say goodbye to his apartment and the sinewy watercolors he sometimes shows me at 3:00 a.m.

  There is a painting that I love by Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Slaying Holofernes. In it, two women are decapitating a man. They hold him down as he struggles to push away the blade. It is a brutal, tenebrist masterpiece, drenched in carotid blood. Gentileschi painted it after her mentor, Agostino Tassi, was convicted of her rape. As I am working on a piece inspired by this painting, my father dies. I bury him next to my mother, and for weeks I don’t sleep and the mice eat all my fruit. Mark sends his condolences in a card, but then he stops returning my calls. He sends the drawings I left at his house in an envelope simply labelled stuff, and I leave him some voicemails that mostly boil down to him being a hack who only draws four-fingered hands, to how he is an impossible dweeb who needs to be kept away from women and shot into space, and a few times, yes, I stand in front of his house in the middle of the night. I draft some emails I don’t send and wander the halls of the office with all the things I want to say to his face. But when I see him now, when I go back into the stairwell next to Kevin’s office and see how Mark has remained unchanged, how he is flanked by two women and proceeding gaily about his life, I lose my nerve.

  * * *

  That night I meet Eric at a wine bar in the Village, and the man I find waiting in the back of the bar does not seem to be the man I met two days before. He is wearing the same skin, but more tightly, as if something immaterial and supermassive spit him out at the mouth of the bar and he is just going with it, waiting for me to call his bluff.

  “You’re late,” he says after he orders a glass of Côtes du Rhône for himself and a gin and tonic for me. His tone is so cold, I can’t tell if he wants an explanation, or if this stern incarnation of him is a joke. He looks different, even older now, his suit jacket slung around the back of his chair. By contrast, the dress I’m wearing is 80 percent spandex.

  “Sorry.”

  “I just like to be on time.”

  “There was train traffic,” I say, and he laughs.

  “I don’t miss those days.”

  “You don’t take the train?”

  “No, I don’t,” he says, and I like him less and more. Less because he appears now to be soft and impractical, and more because this is something he can afford to be. “You look good,” he says, making a show of taking me in, and it feels good to be consumed like this, to have decorated myself specifically for him, and for him to sit on the other side of the table and unravel all the crepe.

  “So do you. How was work?”

  “I don’t want to talk about work. Do you want to talk about work?”

  “I mean, I guess not.”

  “Where is that wine?” he asks, and then a waitress is leaning between us to pour a thimbleful of wine into his glass, which he circles and then sucks impatiently through his teeth.

  “Fine,” he says, watching closely as she pours the rest. He waves her away and takes a long, indulgent drink. “I’m a little nervous, so I’m sorry if I seem—” He takes another drink, directs all his attention to the middle of my face.

  “It’s all right,” I say, but it comes out a little patronizing. He gives me a hard look and finishes his drink, which is something of a feat, as it was a very generous pour. The waitress comes back around and looks at Eric with big, admiring eyes. “Can I have a little more?” I ask when I see that my gin and tonic is mostly ice.

  “Good idea,” Eric says, and we start in earnest on a few G&Ts. It gets us loose enough to talk about politics, but as he talks, I hold my breath. I know we are in agreement on the most general, least controversial ideological points—women are people, racism is bad, Florida will be underwater in fifty years—but there is still ample time for him to bring up how much he enjoyed Atlas Shrugged. Even with good men, you are always waiting for the surprise. I ask for another drink and he pauses and laughs.

  “Do you maybe want to talk about something else?”

  “Why?”

  “You seem a little tense,” he says, reaching under the table to touch my knee.

  “Have you noticed how the waitress is looking at you?”

  “Not really,” he says, and slides his hand under my dress. Our table is not particularly private, but I don’t want him to stop. I take another drink as he rests the back of his hand on the inside of my thigh. “So we have arrived at the second date.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you want to keep doing this?”

  “Yes,” I say, even though I don’t quite know what he means.

  “I’d like to lay my cards on the table,” he says, withdrawing his hand. “My life is established. I have been married to the same woman for thirteen years and our graves are right next to each other.”

  “Sure.” It occurs to me that we are now having a serious conversation, but I have not even had a moment to pull my dress back down. He pulls out a piece of paper and flattens it out with his hand.

  “And so to introduce something new into my life, into this whole”—he glances at the paper—“marital framework, there have to be boundaries.”

  “Of course.”

  “And those boundaries have to be established early. Because”—he grabs my hand, which feels like something he has practiced—“I think we should keep doing this. What do you think?” I think that thirteen years off the market has made him vulnerable in a way that feels unethical to exploit. And yet.

  “Yes, definitely.”

  “So, the rules,” he says, looking down at the paper. I steal a look, slide it out from under his hand, and this is the first time I make contact with his wife.

  “Your wife wrote this,” I say, scanning what seem to be bullet points before what seem to be words. The paper is soft and deeply creased, as if it has been folded and unfolded frequently.

  “She has terrible handwriting, doesn’t she?” he says, and when I lower the paper and look at him, I see him, the man who took me to the park. He smiles, this small cruelty hanging in the air between us. And though I can tell he feels a little bad about having said it, he seems relieved when I join in.

  “It doesn’t even look like English,” I say, and here is a brief account of the month we spent adhering to the rules: First, to my great disappointment, the second date does not yield any sex. I starve through the whole night on gin and little bits of bread, and we stumble through the dark and fool around in the park. The fact of us both being shadows facilitates a compulsive honesty between us, and I tell him that during the weekends, sometimes I lie in one spot and don’t move until I have to go to the bathroom or to work, and he tells me that he is sterile, and we laugh because rule number one is that we cannot have unprotected sex. But after we laugh, he is sunken in the middle, withdrawn in a way that is cemented by drink, and we watch a bride float through Washington Square at midnight, the tulle and taffeta blue in the gauzy light, and I think about his wife and wonder if she is right-handed, if she is self-conscious about her handwriting or beautiful enough that she doesn’t have to be. And when Eric turns to look at me, whatever connective tissue is responsible for securing
his eyeballs has been boozed to a mere suggestion, and because of the wind I can sort of see where he is beginning to lose his hair, and someone across the way is playing “Mary Had a Little Lamb” on the guitar in a minor key when he seems to find one complete moment of sobriety and focus this violence on my mouth, which fits into his unevenly in a way that makes our kiss asynchronous and wet, even as we are chapped from all the gin.

  * * *

  On the third date, I am sure we are going to have sex. I shave everywhere, take a straight razor to my arms and legs, hold the blade at thirty degrees as a brownout courses through my neighborhood, and when I arrive at the clinic, he kisses my neck and whispers in my ear and we both get tested for STDs. The fluorescents wash him out, but on this occasion his neurosis is full bleed, and he tells me he does not like hospitals, because they smell like urine and synthetic gardenias, and also he is terrified of dying, and theoretically so am I, but theoretically, what if I’m not, though saying this out loud is ungenerous, and so I tell him, yes, living is definitely what I want to keep on doing, it has been great so far. But mostly I’m hoping I don’t have chlamydia, and so I miss a great deal of what he tells me about his fear of death, and I notice a pamphlet with a white baby on it, and after our tests come back clean and we go for burgers, I don’t eat anything because I still want to have sex, but I’m still thinking about the baby, about the potential softness of its head, and as I’m thinking about this abortion I had at sixteen, his wife calls him and he leaves, because it is July 3, barbeque prep needs to be done, and one of the rules is that if she calls, he has to go. During this exchange he has over the phone, a tendril of her voice peals through the air, wireless and sweet, and he says, Rebecca, come on, Rebecca. And between dates four and six I am feverishly looking her up, but Rebecca Walker is too common a name and Eric, while committed to the digitization of flaked glass plate negatives in his professional life, refuses to submit to the inevitability of the digitization of his own thoughts, meals, and whereabouts out of self-righteous Luddism or general oldness, meaning I cannot find her through him, and I lie awake at night and ponder the Twitters of a dozen generic white women, looking for clues and only finding interchangeable results. By date seven there is still no sex, which is getting insulting, but I will debase myself entirely to get the things that I want and so on all the way through our ninth date, after we have been seeing each other in person for a month, I am doing what I will with Popsicles and bananas and yanking him into the bathroom by his lapels, this close to threatening him, and he laughs at me and tells me softly, stop, because he is a little old-fashioned and finds my behavior embarrassing, and because my embarrassment typically inverts into anger, I shove him away and am surprised and pleased when he shoves me back. His contrition is immediate and effusive, but I have already archived the look on his face, the glimmer of teeth, the glee with which he exercises his strength. And when he helps me up from the ground the heft in his hand is the contact that will sustain me for five days because one of the rules is that his wife can change the rules and one of the new rules is that we can only see each other on the weekends. And so, regrettably, on Sunday he is climbing the stairs to my apartment because it is the only private place I know where I might coerce him out of his clothes. The salmon smell is gone, but my roommate is on the couch clipping her toenails in her terrifying vitamin C sheet mask and up until this point I have sufficiently hidden the extent of my poverty. But now he is going to see the puckered linoleum and the casserole dishes collecting water in our bathroom. He’s going to know that he hasn’t been taking me out to restaurants so much as providing much-needed calories, and when he comes up the stairs, his face is shiny and incredulous, like what has happened to him is terrible but he is impressed enough by the novelty to persevere. He closes the door behind him, and my roommate is raising her eyebrows behind her mask, because not even in my own home am I safe from this look, this acknowledgment of our asymmetry, which even in New York is a stumbling block for waitresses and cabbies and which Eric is totally oblivious to, even as I am routinely making assurances that yes, we are going to the same place, and yes, it is a single check. Because you have to go through the bathroom to get to the kitchen, and through the kitchen to get to my bedroom, he basically gets a complete tour and is so kind about the whole thing he doesn’t even mention the Rice-A-Roni my roommate has left on the back of the toilet. In fact, as I lock the bedroom door behind me, he seems to find the whole thing very adventurous, though when he thinks I’m not looking I can tell he is concerned. I can tell he is revising me in his head, trying to square the concept of my adulthood with the sixth-floor walk-up and the parameters of my room, which allow for only a futon and a poster of MF Doom. As I am standing with my back to the door and he settles down on my futon, gingerly, like he’s afraid the frame will not support his weight, I know that the dissonance is finally dawning on him in a serious way. And while I never enter a room without wondering what personal adjustments need to be made, it is strange to see something similar happen to this friendly, white, midwestern man. It is strange to see him noticing about himself what I always notice—the optimism, the presumption, this rarefied alternate reality in which there is nowhere he does not belong. He looks around with this gentle horror in his eyes, as if it has just occurred to him—upon the introduction of this economic dimension—the mutual desperation involved in merging two people at opposite ends of life. And then he spots my paint and a blank canvas and I run over to close the closet door but it is too late. He wants to know why I’ve never mentioned it and if I’m any good. And I don’t know if it’s because the whole night has been humiliating, but I tell him yes, I’m pretty good, which is another mistake because of course he wants me to commit him to paint. So I pull some Stoli from underneath my bed and pour it into the one clean mug I have and we take turns drinking from it, wilting in the heat and forgiving the gulf between us long enough to halfway undress, and he is not a great model, slouching and always changing the direction of his head, but as he reclines, half out of his clothes with his long arms and faint freckles and chaos of curly graying hair, I remember my body and become sensitive to his, to the dwindling proportion of air in the room, to the way he looks at me as I establish my palette, like he isn’t just humoring me. Like he is taking me seriously. And while I appreciate his seriousness, it makes me sick to my stomach. It spoils his beauty into a series of halftones between creases of flesh. The lilac and bice blue, the potency of a little titanium white, and the vodka fattening his tongue when he says he’s sorry he pushed me, and I say how sorry are you and he says very sorry and I say then beg for my forgiveness, which he does adequately while I give him head, finally, for the first time, my bedroom deadly silent except for his soft, breathless apologies, which I think he actually means as he carefully moves my hair out of the way, though later I clean the acrylic from his thighs and tell him actually, I’d like it if he pushed me again. He thinks I’m joking, and when he realizes I’m not, his face darkens and he says he doesn’t feel comfortable with that. This is the last time he comes to my apartment. When we go out to eat a few days later, I see that he is aware that he is feeding me, as much as I’m aware that there is a large part of his life I cannot see, a place in Jersey with a driveway and a mailbox and extra towels, sustained on imagination alone because one of the rules is that I am not allowed inside his house. And things come up. One of us gets sick, I can’t muster enough will to open my mail or wash my hair, he has a business trip or a dinner party with Rebecca, and by the time we meet again, we have forgotten how we fit. We are in a state of constant regression, distance rendering the details too slippery to grasp. And then on a Thursday night, day fifty-two of our excruciatingly chaste courtship, he calls me and tells me to meet him at this club in SoHo and to wear something short.

  I do what he says, even though I have given up on the prospect of sex, because it turns out maybe he is the only friend I have. So I eat half a chocolate cake and arrive at the club in cutoffs and s
neakers, so ready to fuck that when someone brushes up against me on the train I make a scary, involuntary noise. Eric emerges from the club through a wall of smoke and pulls me inside with his large, clammy hand, and all around me are the campy trappings of 1975. He leads me to the center of the pit by the tips of my fingers and the air is thick with mist and sweat and plumes of artificial fog, the strobe and smoke machine’s combined effort churning out these puffy, orange convex knives and I sneeze into my elbow and make eye contact with a dog who is sitting in the corner chewing someone’s silk slipper, which bums me out, as it always does when animals look to be in places they don’t want to be. A parade of synthetic fabrics move in unison under the liquid clip of light like a school of silver herring as some bunting near the stage that says Fever! pulls away from the ceiling and it occurs to me that this is one of those places in the business of reproducing a decade for a night because the bulletin by the door indicates that in a few weeks it will be the nineties. But for now a workable hologram of Chaka Khan overtakes Gloria Gaynor and her bouncy curls and Chaka is cooing in her famed shredded panties, squatting and saluting at the end of the stage, flexing her brown thighs and smirking into the crowd, though the music that is actually playing is KC and the Sunshine Band’s “That’s the Way,” which makes it feel a little spectral, which is how nights like these always feel once the strobes lift for a moment and you see the beer and glitter on the floor, the reanimation of what is dead repackaged and called nostalgia and all that earnest time travel tempered with irony because as I look around almost everyone is dancing but with the sort of shrugging participation that conveys this whole thing as joke, like, how lame, like, I dig this, but not too much. But the beauty of disco is the too much, is the horn section and the cheese, and so Eric and I convene in the bathroom over a spoon and someone is in the stall next to us with bare feet weeping and we go out into the middle and Eric is a very coordinated white man but given to fall back on the cabbage patch and the diddy bop, which is fine, and then we’re in his car with the AC all the way up, on a reasonable clip through the Holland Tunnel, and he’s handing me his phone and asking me to decline a call from his wife, which makes me feel terrible, not out of any fealty to Rebecca but because this night appears to have generated from some greater marital drama, though of course I relish denying the call, just as I relish the wave of cicadas rippling the air as we pull up to his house, which does indeed have a mailbox with a flag and Walker on the side in a jaunty yellow font, and up the stairs and inside his bedroom all the pictures are facedown, which is a level of premeditation that gives me pause, but that ultimately eases me out of my clothes because to do all this he would have to know I would say yes, he would have to believe himself capable of finessing the initial yes into the terminal yes in such perfect order that I would even go to Jersey and the idea that he understands this, his total control of the situation, is what does me in. There is no foreplay. I am still in my socks trying to discern from the wallpaper a conclusion about the marriage that results in this, this man peeling off his Disco Sucks shirt and pulling me into his lap and apologizing about the delay because it has been thirteen years with the same woman, he says, thirteen years, and all the rules have changed, and so I try to help him out of his pants but his shoes are still on, shoes with laces that we both consider for a moment before we opt out and get his pants down only as far as they need to go, his face dark and urgent, his body taut and smattered with coarse, curly hair. Slowly, he eases me down onto his grand, slightly left-leaning cock, and for a moment I do rethink my atheism, for a moment I consider the possibility of God as a chaotic, amorphous evil who made autoimmune disease but gave us miraculous genitals to cope, and so I fuck him desperately with the force of this epiphany and Eric is talkative and filthy but there is some derangement about his face, this pink contortion that introduces the whites of his eyes in a way that makes me afraid he might say something we cannot recover from just yet, so I cover his mouth and say shut up, shut the fuck up, which is more aggressive than I would normally be at this point but it gets the job done and in general if you need a pick-me-up I welcome you to make a white man your bitch though I feel panicked all of a sudden to have not used a condom and I’m looking around the room and there is a bathroom attached, and in the bathroom are what look to be extra towels and that makes me so emotional that he pauses and in one instant a concerned host rises out of his violent sexual mania, slowing the proceedings into the dangerous territory of eye contact and lips and tongue where mistakes get made and you forget that everything eventually dies, so it is not my fault that during this juncture I call him daddy and it is definitely not my fault that this gets him off so swiftly that he says he loves me and we are collapsing back in satiation and horror, not speaking until he gets me a car home and says take care of yourself like, please go, and as the car is pulling away he is standing there on the porch in a floral silk robe that is clearly his wife’s, looking like he has not so much had an orgasm as experienced an arduous exorcism, and a cat is sitting at his feet, utterly bemused by the white clapboard and verdant lawn, which makes me hate this cat as the city rises around me in a bouquet of dust, industrial soot, and overripe squash, insisting upon its own enormity like some big-dick postmodernist fiction and still beautiful despite its knowledge of itself, even as the last merciless days of July leave large swaths of the city wilted and blank.