It was always the heaviest in the mornings. By “mornings,” I mean more like eleven-thirty, if I’m being honest, and by “it” I mean, obviously, the weight of being alive and of consequence to other people—the latter of which I usually tried to avoid. This particular morning, however, I had to make an exception. It was a Saturday, four days before my birthday, and I was out shopping with my best friend Mischa. We were at a thrift boutique, a highly-curated one, so much so that its selection and therefore its prices belied the very distinction of “thrift,” but it was secondhand nonetheless, so we were morally absolved in our search for something to wear for the party we were hosting together that night.
Mischa was my coworker, the first friend I’d made since moving here after graduating college, and we were having a joint birthday, reasoning that we were born eight days apart, the same year. She was first, having aged up four days earlier, and now we’d hit the day that split our difference. We’d spent the afternoon accumulating alcohol and outfits in the high-femme spirit of hunting and gathering, feeding each other life updates and aperçus along the way like they were sustenance. Weren’t they? I’d told her about my morning dread, though nothing about its causes, and now she was telling me about the new guy she was fucking, though nothing, yet, that alluded to how much, if at all, she liked him.
His name was Greg. Apparently he had dated, just before Mischa, a woman who was prominent in a niche online microculture, as in, she wrote on a certain website a lot of little sentences that were provocative, pithy—I hesitate to say funny, that’s sort of a sacred word that I don’t give out freely—but provocative above all else, and a lot of people liked them, in the old-fashioned, figurative way and in the new, literal way, too. I don’t want to say she was famous, that’s both as serious and slippery a concept as funny, but—she was known. Mischa was not really allowed to talk about this girl in front of Greg, either in terms of being impressed or intimidated, because for her to have admitted that she was even aware of such a hierarchy would be to admit not just that she stood staunchly, involuntarily outside of it, but that she cared about its existence at all. Greg, however, was exempt from this rule. Almost as if he had created the rule himself, which of course he hadn’t. Who had? We didn’t know, which was why it worked. The most effective inherited social scripts always seemed to be borne out of the murkiest provenance. All that mattered was that Greg could talk about his ex as much as he wanted. In fact, according to Mischa, he talked about her all the time.
“You know the most recent guy I dated,” I said, alluding namelessly to somebody Mischa already knew everything about, except, of course, for this one thing I was about to tell her now. “His new girlfriend, she has a Kill-Yourself Instagram.”
“What,” Mischa said, “is a Kill-Yourself Instagram?”
“Um?” I said. “It’s an Instagram that makes you want to kill yourself.”
“Annie,” Mischa said. “Jesus.”
“Sorry,” I said. I’d thought it was funny. It wasn’t funny. But it was, unfortunately, true. I returned the shirt I’d been looking at to the rack, swallowing shame like a horse pill. That was the biggest lie I think I’d ever encountered, that the only antidote to shame is voicing it, i.e., sharing it with your trusted friends. All admitting to shame had ever done for me was make it balloon and explode into a different kind of itself, a worse kind, actually—a public kind. Shame only ever begat more shame. I watched Mischa hold a dress up to her body, indenting its metal hanger tip into the soft bend of her neck, and I realized that more than ashamed of myself I felt jealous of her. How her sound and healthily sexual mind could so easily recognize, in sharp relief, the derangement of mine. To be honest, I hadn’t had sex in about eight months. It started out unintentionally, then it became intentional, then it went back to being unintentional. As for what it was on that very day, that is, the day of our joint birthday party, and that is, intentional or unintentional, I couldn’t say for sure.
We left the store with our spoils and not much time to spare. Mischa got a yellow wrap dress patterned with little roses, and I bought a tiny white top to go with some big white pants I already owned. I felt the most powerful when I wore all white, as if I were perpetually threatening either matrimony or cult membership—though, really, what was the difference?—and I tended to slot most comfortably into the sartorial paradigm that Mischa and I had named “big pants/tiny shirt.” Think utility pants with halter tops, long skirts under cropped sweaters. Mischa preferred the opposite, that is, big shirt/tiny pants, which in a bygone era would’ve meant something like cigarette pants and an oversized Oxford, but these days mostly manifested, ever dutifully, as bike shorts with an enormous t-shirt. Actually, maybe the bike shorts would still go with an Oxford. Bike shorts would go with anything, really. Bike shorts, bike shorts, bike shorts. Mischa had a great ass, it might be relevant to mention. I did not. I did have pretty full breasts, which I’d never had as a teenager, I’d only seemed to grow them the very year it stopped being fashionable to have sort-of-big breasts (2015), and by now, it wasn’t fashionable to have any breasts at all. Do with this information whatever you will.
On our walk back to Mischa’s apartment, I got a text from Camille, my best friend from college, saying that she would, in fact, make it to the party. I’d invited her not knowing if she’d be in town—she’d been away in California for the past two and a half months working as an assistant to one of our old film professors on a documentary shoot, her return date perpetually unclear. We hadn’t been texting much lately. But apparently, here she was, and there she would be, at Mischa’s place. i’d love to !! Camille wrote. No capitalization, of course. A space between the words and the punctuation, of course, of course. I would have done it the exact same way.
“Camille’s coming,” I told Mischa, as she slid a gilded key into her front door.
“Finally,” Mischa said. The door was sticking, so she kicked it open. It was paneled with a milky, aqua-colored glass. I’d been wanting the two of them to meet for a while now, Mischa and Camille. But even before she left town, Camille had been hard to get a hold of. Then again, I had been too. I’d sort of been retreating from the world and letting Mischa take the reins. I hung out with her and some of our other coworkers and every now and then a new person would drift into my orbit, but none of them really stayed there. Maybe I wasn’t decisive enough in terms of who I wanted to aspire to align with most, too overwhelmed by all the things they seemed to have that I did not. Or maybe I was hungrier than everybody I ever met, and they could see it in me, which only made them less likely to want to try and fit me in. If only I’d arrived earlier, or moved more quickly once I got there. Even though I’d technically arrived at the same time as they had, and I’d been going as fast as I could.
We walked up the stairs, slow beneath all our bags. Mischa’s apartment was a marvel, which was why we were having the party there, instead of in my cave-dark, 200-square foot studio, or even just a bar patio. She had chandeliers and parquet floors, creamy walls with prewar box-molding, and Venetian blinds that slanted every hour of sunlight at a newly serendipitous angle through each impeccable room. What accounted for the discrepancy between our living situations despite us having the same salary was the fact that, of course, her great-aunt owned the building. That was just the way it had to be. Otherwise the math could never add up right: the money we made, which always seemed to cannibalize itself instantly, versus the costs we paid to live, which never seemed to stop performing mitosis. Everybody had to have some kind of Secret Thing that quietly, magically, made the numbers work. The most common Secret Thing was probably that people’s parents helped them with their rent, though I wasn’t entirely sure, because I did not have this resource, and nobody who did ever talked about it. Were they silent about it because it was humiliating, or because it was self-evident? I didn’t know which reason I would have envied more. For me, once, the Secret Thing had been falling in love, splitting the rent. Now, I had no Secret Thing, which was why I lived in a cave, alone, with a much-happier Craigslist couple subletting my former home.
Still, the sheer glory of Mischa’s apartment was not only an effect of her Secret Thing, arguably the greatest Secret Thing of all Secret Things, in that she got to bypass the circus of finding and securing a place to live altogether—she was also a genius at sourcing objects of beauty from the wider world. The raspberry-gingham kitchen tablecloth, the dried flowers in vintage bud vases, the amber glassware, the filigree plates. All were the results of Mischa’s dogged hunts through charity shops and estate sales and antique barns, all things that other people paid lots of money to have immediately, without having to search or try, that Mischa could get for twenty-five cents because she knew where to look, and she put in the work.
We cleared the kitchen table and the countertops and started laying everything out. As far as drinks were concerned, we’d only serve that which was technically rotten; hard kombucha, natural wine. The food, by contrast, was borne from immaculate preservation. Not in the bad way, just in the incidental way, as in cured meats and pickled vegetables, as if we intended all of this to last forever. Weeks ago, Mischa got the tiny cucumbers and turnips and radishes from the farmers’ market, chopped them methodically, stuffed them into repurposed jam jars and anointed them with the hot sugar and peppercorn brine that she boiled herself.
“Did I tell you what happened when I tried to give one of these to Greg?” Mischa said, opening a jar of turnips for us to sample.
I said, “No,” taking a slice out with my fingers and holding it to my nose. I said, “Tell me.”
The other night, Mischa and Greg had soft plans to hang out, and she’d just finished brining these turnips, so she was going to bring him a jar with a silky red bow tied around its lid. This was Mischa’s thing, this sort of reenactment of a bygone seduction ritual: any gesture that was archaic enough as to evoke something of a dowry, but with enough of a contemporary twist to ultimately come off as ingenuous, as if she’d created the object by accident, and barely intended for anyone to receive it at all. Though, the harder I thought about it, the less I was convinced of the effortlessness with which Mischa seemed to pass it off—how could something so intricate not involve at least some degree of sheer will? Nonetheless, the evening rolled around, and Mischa still hadn’t heard from Greg about any firmer plans for the night. The hours went by, and she just kept waiting. It didn’t seem like she had texted him asking what was up, either, but that was probably because she already knew exactly what this was, and I did too, and so she didn’t have to even mention it. Apparently she waited until around one, he not having reached out to her, she not having reached out to him or even just gone to bed, then decided to go over to his apartment anyway, with the jar, the bow, the pickles. She buzzed, but he didn’t seem to be home, so she waited there, on his stoop, until about two, when she saw him coming down the block, drunk, having been out. Mischa stood up as he approached and said, Forget something? She brandished the pickles, with disarming intention, but it wasn’t working, not on him. Greg rolled his eyes at Mischa and told her that he found this sort of behavior to be mildly psychotic, which, look, I know how that sounds, but listen—it’s become okay again for a guy to call a girl psychotic if he now says mildly before it, because that’s kind of smart, and it’s kind of sonically perfect, and also, let’s be honest, it actually never stopped being okay for a guy to call a girl psychotic, because they never stopped doing it, we just stopped telling each other about it. We just stopped making our shame public. And why did we let them speak to us this way? Because it was too hard to predict, upon meeting somebody, if they would or wouldn’t end up doing it, and by the time we’d reach the point where they’d do it, it was too late for us to simply give up on them and start the process over with somebody else, somebody who could easily turn out just the same anyway. It was exhausting. We were exhausted. Greg and Mischa, not yet exhausted that night, started yelling and yelling at each other on the street, until Greg took Mischa by her hair and led her up the stairs and fucked her on his kitchen table. She came in a matter of seconds. All of his roommates, she’d discovered later, had been home.
Mischa didn’t have to explain any of this to me, why she did what she did or why he did what he did or why she did what she did in response to that. Because I remembered it, my own version of it—being outside in the dark when you weren’t supposed to be, screaming with absolute abandon at somebody you don’t really know at all and probably never will but are pretending to know better than anyone. I remembered it so well I could taste it. Sugar and acid, preserved to the nines.
◆
People were arriving. They were all Mischa’s friends. They said, “Happy birthday!” and Mischa said, “Omigod thank you!” and pressed her face against each of their faces so firmly that she turned red. Then they’d look at me with placid confusion in their eyes before remembering or realizing who I was, and give me a canned, or rather recycled, “Happy birthday!” But I didn’t put my face on their faces. I didn’t touch them at all. I tried to trace where each of them came from, to figure out how to find some version of them for myself. There were some of Mischa’s old college friends. There were people from her yoga class and one of their boyfriends. Even the upstairs neighbor was here, availing herself of our Lambrusco, hugging Mischa the way Mischa hugged me. Were people really supposed to be this close with their upstairs neighbor? Was I?
A few of our coworkers arrived after that, but they felt different in Mischa’s apartment, like they didn’t belong to me as much as they belonged to her, wearing things they would never and could never wear in the office of a housing justice nonprofit. Everyone was braless under tissue paper dresses. I felt very not-pretty in my big white pants, in my not-that-big but bigger-than-you’d-expect breasts. We drank the wine and ate the food. The girls talked very fast and the one boyfriend talked not at all. I could have engaged him, in fact I had ideas for some topics with which to do it, but I discovered that I didn’t actually want to. So I didn’t. I talked with the girls to prove that I could keep up, and it made me feel so much prettier.
At some point, my phone started ringing. I was hoping it had been one of the people I’d invited myself, asking for directions or standing outside the front door unsure about using the buzzer. But it wasn’t. It was the woman of the Craigslist couple who were currently subletting my old apartment throughout the remainder of the lease. When I answered the call, I pressed a finger to mute my unoccupied ear and better gauge the timbre of her opening line, “Can you talk?” against the modest din of the party, a party classy enough to be characterized by a modest din. I said, “Sure,” as I slid, unnoticed, into Mischa’s bedroom. I shut the door behind me and my Craigslist bestie started apologizing for bothering me on a Saturday night. I didn’t say that she was not what was bothering me about my Saturday night, that the architectural foundation of a Saturday night is, actually, built upon bothers of all sorts, big and small, consequential and not, and yet we continue, every week, to sacrifice our comfort to the greater purpose, that insatiable altar of Saturday night. I hated the way people even said the words, Saturday night, always with an implied disdain at unmet expectations. As if to merely exist in the world on a Saturday night would be to have automatically chosen wrong, because there would always be an infinite number of unattained somethings-better that you could have been, should have been, doing instead.
“The pipe under the sink is leaking,” the woman in my phone was telling me. “We’ve been trying to tighten it with a wrench but it’s not stopping. I think there’s a hole or something.”
“Shit,” I said. I told her I’d text the landlord. That they’d probably be able to send over a plumber in the morning. But I didn’t know that for sure. I didn’t know anything. Yet I was the one who assumed responsibility for the fate of the old apartment, since I was the one who left.
When I went back out, the party had loosened its iron-grip around the kitchen table as the focal point of conversation, so it took me a minute to notice the new body in the room. Mischa must’ve assumed that Greg didn’t even need an introduction, because she didn’t give one, she just intercepted me as I came out of the bedroom and said, beaming, “Was that a woodwork?”
“Woodworks” were how Mischa and I referred to exes or former lovers of any creed who reached out to us on our birthdays, and only on our birthdays. They lived silently in the walls all year, and then, on this cue, they crawled out of the woodwork.
“Yes,” I lied. “It was Ivan.” His name tasted sour. Not good-sour, like pickled turnip. Bad-sour, like bile. Like shame.
Mischa squealed. “What an imp!”
It didn’t even make sense, since my birthday was still four days away, but Mischa must’ve been too drunk to consider this. I’d also had Ivan’s number blocked for the past eight months, but Mischa didn’t know this, because I didn’t tell her. She always got tons of woodworks on her birthday. Gracious men with whom she was still on excellent terms, wanting to continually wish her all the best, because Mischa was sweet and chill and easy, and so all her relationships had been, too.
Greg stood quietly by Mischa this whole time. He was tall and high-cheekboned and blonde. He thrust a few strings of hair away from his face with a hands-free jerk of the neck. I stared at him until Mischa noticed. “I mentioned he might swing by at some point,” she said to me, to us.
“Right,” I said, even though she definitely hadn’t, even though I knew exactly what this was. It wasn’t just Greg “swinging by at some point,” it was Greg’s audition, and anything less than him not only “swinging by” but staying the duration and thoroughly charming everyone in attendance, and not just “at some point” but at the exact right point—early enough in the night as to prove loyalty but not so early as to suggest zealotry—would have been construed by Mischa as an abject failure of that audition. Well. Who am I kidding—it would have been construed as a failure by me. But Greg didn’t have to worry—he’d arrived at the perfect time, because he was good at this. I could see it in him. He was sweating a bit through a tattered white t-shirt, which he’d mismatched with unseasonable brown wingtips. When I looked at his shoes, he looked down at mine, at mine and Mischa’s, actually, because she and I were wearing the same shoes.
“Wow,” Greg said, not specifying the twin pairs of black clogs as the source of his awe.
“I know,” Mischa said. “But mine are oiled leather. See how Annie’s are shinier?”
I extended my ankle and twisted it around. Greg nodded and said, “I like the shiny better.”
There was a pause then, in which Mischa looked at Greg and I looked away. Greg became aware of Mischa’s gaze without even having to meet it, and he corrected course. “Actually. No, yeah. I like the matte.”
“Oh,” I said, smiling. “Damn.” I felt strange, like I’d accidentally started flirting with Greg and Mischa was maybe going to kill me for it. His presence made me feel like I hadn’t spoken to a man, outside of a store or restaurant or bar transaction, in a very long time. I supposed I hadn’t. I didn’t really care about the strangeness, though, because within the first thirty seconds of meeting him I could somehow tell that I was never going to see him again.
I turned toward the table to see what remained of the food, and realized that Greg was, once again, confronting the pickled turnips, and he hadn’t even noticed. Or if he had, he betrayed no recognition of Mischa’s ritual, her expert curation of objects and adornments meant to present to Greg a cohesive self-display and wordlessly ask him if he wanted her too, an audition right back at the auditioner. I missed it, honestly, the much-less-expert version of this that I used to participate in myself. The urgency of proving, at least to yourself and maybe also to your best friend, that something so new and tenuous wasn’t actually that, was actually or soon would be very deep, and maybe one day very old. The giddy fear of whether or not you would pass the silent, public referendum that would even allow that growth to happen. It never felt necessarily good, as far as I could remember, but it radiated heat, and sometimes that heat was enough to live on, at least for a few hours at a time.
As Greg reached for a turnip slice and prepared to scarf it down, I noticed, unfortunately, that he had a very nice mouth, and I thought about the thing that Greg had done to Mischa that must have really made her fall for him. She hadn’t necessarily said as much when she told me about it, but I figured, reflecting on it now, that this was probably the case. They were in the back of a car heading home after one of their first times out together, and Greg had taken Mischa’s hand, brushed it against the side of his own face, and then serenely slid her index finger into his mouth. He started sucking it, dutifully, tip to base, then back up to tip. Then her middle finger. Then her ring, pinky, and finally thumb. Every single finger. I could see it so well. The strange, shadowy backseat. Cool moonlight on her knuckles. Warm streetlight on his lips. That must have been the moment of inspiration for Mischa, seeing Greg’s salivation over something spindled and white, where she realized, yes. Turnips.
I broke away from the conversation. I couldn’t look at Greg’s mouth anymore. I went over to Mischa’s bar cart and slugged a shot of expensive bourbon, which you weren’t supposed to do, not with bourbon like that, and not at a party like this, but nobody was doing what they were supposed to be doing. I wasn’t even supposed to be here, I felt, despite half of this party being ostensibly for me. While readying myself to return to the table of briny food and turbid drink and willowy human, my phone buzzed in my pocket again. I could say I was expecting it to be my subletter following up with something, but I wasn’t, and it wasn’t. It was, blessedly, Camille, saying she was rounding the corner. I told her which apartment to buzz.
I moved toward the front door and thought about how Camille was the closest thing, compared to anybody else I’ve ever met, to an actual cowgirl. The way she had just packed up and gone out to California, unhindered, despite not knowing anybody and having nothing out there except her film job, except the things that she would build for herself, all by herself. The rest of us were so unjustified, really, in wearing the boots. The buzzer rang, and I pressed the button immediately to open the door downstairs. I waited until I heard footsteps in the hallway and then I opened the door to watch her approach. There she was, a new tattoo on the outside of her left shoulder, the front strands of her hair bleached where they hadn’t been bleached before. I said, “Gah!” and Camille said, “Baby!” and I moved a step closer to hug her, but during the split-second in which Camille had surveyed the party beyond my shoulder through the open door, her attention had shifted away from me. I turned around and followed her gaze.
I saw it, what she was seeing. Then I stepped aside, sadistically, not so much to grant Camille a fuller path to the object of her staring, but to subject the object of her staring to a fuller sight of Camille. The object stared back, and that object was Greg.
“Hey,” Camille said, to him and not to me.
Greg smiled, a bit pained. “Oh,” he said.
Mischa stood next to Greg, watching it all. I turned back to Camille and placed my hand from the doorframe, blocking the room from her and her from the room, as if to shove back into its box the thing I had just unleashed.
“Hey,” I said to Camille. “Let’s go smoke a cigarette?”
Camille, who did not smoke cigarettes, said, “Yes,” and turned away from the party that she’d never set foot in. I looked back at Mischa and said, “We’ll just be a second,” which we all knew was a lie, and Mischa looked back at me and said nothing.
“So,” I said to Camille on our way down the stairs. “You know him?”
“Yes,” Camille said calmly.
She didn’t say anything else. I waited until we were down the stairs and out the front door, onto the dark sidewalk, and said, just to make sure, “Was it—like. What was it?”
Without verbally agreeing to it, we’d begun walking down the block together, abreast, toward nowhere. “We were seeing each other,” Camille said, as if some specificity-twinged emphasis on a word as nonspecific as seeing would have led to any sort of clarity on my part.
“When was this?” I asked. At the very least, Camille having been out of town for months meant that there couldn’t have been any direct overlap with Mischa.
“Just before I left.”
I wondered if this was before or after Greg had dated the girl who was prominent in a niche online microculture, or maybe at the same time, but because of the rules, I didn’t ask. Instead, I said, “Did you leave town, like—because of him?”
“Um,” Camille said. “You aren’t really supposed to leave town because of boys anymore. Or if you do, you aren’t supposed to admit to it.”
“Um,” I said. “That’s not really an answer to the question.”
Camille didn’t say anything to that. We walked in silence for a bit longer until I ventured to speak again, ventured to guess aloud, “It was Bad. Wasn’t it?”
“Yeah. It was.”
I said, “Can you tell me—obviously, only if you want to—how Bad it was?”
Camille said, “He threw cereal at me.”
“He—” I stopped. I laughed. I couldn’t help it. “He what?”
“Annie,” Camille said. “It’s not funny.”
I recovered from the novelty of the utterance quickly enough to realize that it was maybe the most degrading thing I’d ever heard about someone doing to another person. Or maybe second-most. I’m not quite sure. But that wasn’t because it was the most violent thing somebody could possibly do—of course it wasn’t, not by a long shot—it was that it was probably the silliest thing somebody could possibly do that also happened to be a bit violent, and so it condemned Camille, every time she disclosed it to somebody, to be met not with sympathy or commiseration, not at first, but with laughter. Greg was a genius, maybe, in enacting this double-transgression upon Camille. One that had lasted ten seconds, between the two of them in private, and this one, hidden just underneath it, that she’d have to bear to everyone else in her life, over and over again. It made her into a joke, that everyone got to be in on, except for her.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “You just—surprised me. Why—why did he—do that?”
“We got in some fight about nothing one morning and he was getting frustrated and wanted me to stop talking, I guess, so he reached into the box that was next to him on the counter and, just, yeah, threw the cereal right in my fucking face.”
I swallowed, nauseous. Ashamed of myself for playing out the very thing—the laughter, that is—that Greg must’ve unconsciously figured would keep Camille silent and keep him safe. I said, again, that I was sorry. I asked if it would be okay to tell Mischa about this. Even though I didn’t know if telling Mischa would lead to solidarity, or simply, as ever, more shame.
Camille said, “Look,” and stopped walking. I stopped too. “I know that like, everyone is a completely different person to everybody else than they are to you. It’s pretty fucked up but that’s the way it is. So maybe, to Mischa, he will be kind, and they’ll have a nice time. That’s fine, whatever. But to me, he was not that. And it really didn’t go on for very long, but sometimes even things that don’t go on for very long can still serve as these, like, totems in your life. And he, for me, will always represent learning what it feels like for someone to be decidedly not-kind to me. And then learning to never, ever accept being treated like that again. And even if he said he was sorry, which he didn’t, and even if I say it’s okay, which I don’t know if I’d do, because he didn’t say sorry, that still wouldn’t change what he was for me. What he will continue to be for me, forever.”
“I know,” I said. I was crying a little now. “I know.” And I did. I knew.
“And by the way,” Camille said, as if to calm me down—how had I become the one who needed calming down?—“there really was a job in California, and I did leave to do that, first and foremost. But, yeah, it was also a huge relief to not have to run into Greg in the park for a few months. Some things just happen at the correct times.”
I said, “Okay,” and we started walking again. We caught each other up on the rest of the past few months, until we finished our multi-block loop and returned to Mischa’s apartment. I asked Camille if there was any chance of her actually coming back upstairs and celebrating my birthday with me, like maybe if I could very covertly pull Greg aside and very politely get him to leave, but Camille smiled and said no. I felt in my chest an obliteration of the hope that I’d held for establishing platonic harmony between the hemispheres of my life. That old, crushing sensation that I’d somehow arrived late to a party that I’d thrown myself. What had I been thinking, trying to bring Mischa and Camille together? A curator and a cowgirl; it would never work. Camille would never let Mischa corral her into pristineness the way I wanted to be corralled; Mischa would never unravel in front of Camille because the only one who got to see Mischa unravel was me. The only thing they had in common was Greg. Did I really think that uniting these two poles of my admiration-incarnate would somehow give birth to a better, more whole version of me?
I called Camille a car to take her back to her sublet. We waited together on the sidewalk until it pulled up and she got in and left. When I turned back toward Mischa’s building, I saw Greg coming out the front door. Was he really leaving so soon? I hung back in the shadow of the garden apartment’s vestibule so that he wouldn’t see me. He was buoyant going down the steps, confident in his stupid shoes and his fast, wily gait. As he turned and started down the sidewalk, I considered stopping him to talk for a second. Not about Camille, actually, and not about Mischa, either. There was something else that I had been wanting to ask somebody, a question that I now figured somebody like Greg might be able to answer. I had been wondering, for the past eight months, when a man fucks a woman from behind, how easy is it for him to just slip it into her asshole? I mean with no preparation, no warning. And not just a little bit, and not slowly, but all the way in, immediately. How likely is that to happen by accident? Because, when you yell out in pain and beg him to stop and he pulls out and you ask him if he’d done that on purpose, of course he’s going to say it was an accident. But what if he was really, really in there? Like, further than it would seem possible to go without really, really trying? And what if he gets angry at you for ever thinking he would do something like that on purpose, and instead of saying sorry for hurting you or upsetting you, however intentionally, he just starts yelling at you for “ruining what could have been a beautiful moment,” because, like—what? Where in this situation was the beauty? And since you now know, from the slippery, backwards damnation of this response, to not trust a word out of his mouth that had come before this or ever again, how could you really know if it had been an accident or not? Was this a thing that people did, and was there anyone who thought something about it might be beautiful?
“Hey Greg,” I called.
Greg stopped and turned around. “Sup?”
We each took a few steps toward each other. It was too cold outside now for me to be as sweaterless as I was, but just cold enough as to encourage the drunken shouting tradition that I so fondly missed. “That famous chick you dated,” I said. “What happened there?”
He stared at me, through the film that was supposed to exist between us, in which I had now punctured this off-limits hole.
“Like, why did you break up?” I said.
I stared at him, waiting, reveling in this sweet, horrid wash of shame I’d unleashed upon myself, the humiliation of wanting to know more. Wanting to have more. Wanting anything at all. Because wasn’t desire itself inherently humiliating? Because wasn’t to want something effectively to admit that you didn’t already have it?
“Uh,” Greg said. “That’s kind of private, actually. And I don’t really know you, so.”
I smiled. What a coward. I said, “Right. Well. Get home safe.” It came out before I realized that that’s only for girls, that guys don’t understand what you even mean when you say “get home safe,” that Greg himself was actually the guy that people needed to get themselves home safe from. And if I’d even been brave enough to ask him the thing I’d truly wanted to ask him, I knew what he’d say. That I couldn’t just go around as paranoid as I was, painting guileless men like predators. That of course Ivan hadn’t meant to do it. That I just scared too easily, that I was ungenerous, that I was uncool.
All the other guests were gone when I went back upstairs. I couldn’t imagine them all having left within the span of mine and Camille’s walk, but I supposed the power of one departure to impel an exodus was not to be underestimated, especially when everyone had really only been there for one person. However it had happened, Mischa was now alone at her kitchen table, her chin resting in her hand, gazing into the candlelight. In this posture, with her little dress and her long braid, she sort of looked like a housewife waiting for her husband to return from the merchant marine. Since Greg was gone, I figured I was the husband now.
“He wasn’t even going to stay that long,” Mischa said. “I didn’t want to make it all about him. I just wanted you two to meet for a sec. We were just waiting for you to get off the phone.”
“What?” I said.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” Mischa said. “I know it pissed you off.”
“I’m not pissed off,” I said, even though I was.
She looked at me, her brown eyes tinted orange in the light, and said, “Is he Bad?”
I smiled, almost, at this shorthand of ours. We hadn’t wanted to do any of this: speaking in code, devising split-second, silent methods of extricating one another from situations before any outsider looking in could ascertain what was happening. Because how uncool was that, us not being cool with it, with the near-constant confrontation with the personal generators of our deepest shames? Us being scared by it? Us not being able to get over it all by ourselves, us needing to protect each other from it? But of course we needed to. Other people made it so.
I sat down beside Mischa in one of her gorgeous, impractical dining chairs. Their backs were too deep-set, and I always fell into them, even after I’d come to expect the drop. My rib cage rattled. I caught my breath. “He was Bad to Camille,” I said. “But. I don’t know. He might not be Bad to you.” This sounded so stupid when I said it, and I could tell that Mischa was either unconvinced or just confused about its emptiness. How did Camille make it thrum with meaning in so few words?
“Okay,” Mischa said. “Okay.” And for a second, I swear, it looked like Mischa was going to be very much okay. Like the possibility of Greg had never been a big deal to her. But then she tilted her face down, forehead upon fingertips, and said, “I am so tired.”
I leaned toward her. I held her. Her face went into my chest and it was wet. It was shaking. It was getting wetter and shakier as her arms found their way around my back and I kept holding her. I looked around the kitchen at the remnants of the party, her party. There they all were, the sloughed layers of outer beauty that she and I went to painstaking lengths to maintain, if only to shell ourselves compellingly enough from the world, if only to buy some time before somebody peeled them away and got to the ugliness at the core. But, no, I didn’t really mean that. It wasn’t ugliness at our cores that we needed to protect the world from seeing—it was beauty at our cores that we needed to protect from the ugliness of the world. The things that I found most disgusting about my life weren’t things about myself, who I really was, but were things that other people had done to me. The residue of those things, involuntarily leaking out of me, was the real thing to hide. But then, didn’t there have to be something ugly about me begetting that ugliness?
Mischa was truly tired now, in a regular, bodily way, so we went into her bedroom. She untied her dress and got under the duvet. I turned out the light for her and sat down on the other side, the side that was always my side when we had sleepovers, which happened most nights we drank together, though most nights weren’t quite like this. Most nights we could get so cavalier about everything, especially when the party was someplace apart from the private spaces where we also spent time alone. We could post up together in any bar and let ourselves get enormous and powerful, laughing away our failures like we’d seen them coming a mile away, like maybe we’d even planned them that way all along, because there we would be, anointed in thick Campari-colored light, faces flushed fresco-pink like high-Renaissance angels. But when I was alone, when I first woke up in the morning, it would return to me—the weight of my disappointment in myself pressing down like a boulder on my chest. I would remember that the washed-out, indiscriminate stew of myself from the night before, the one that talked fast and loud and gesticulated as if on fire, was not who I really was, and I was instead convinced that the boulder was the only honest thing in my entire life.
After Mischa closed her eyes and turned her body away from mine, I took out my phone and went on Instagram and pulled up you-know-who’s you-know-what. I wondered if Camille and now Mischa felt about Greg’s ex the way I felt about this lady who only lived in my phone yet haunted me like a waking nightmare. She was, obviously, beautiful—not just in her face and her clothes but somehow in everything she did and everything that happened to her. And here was proof of it, and I mean stuff you can’t fake—blistering, expensive sunlight. Travel, everywhere. The tiniest shoulder bones I’ve ever seen. She made even Mischa look like a tourist in the land of beauty. She did everything that we tried to do, but she did it more. She did it easier, it seemed. She did it better. And if Camille was right, about everybody being a different person to everybody else, and if I was right, about some people just being inherently deserving of more beauty, better beauty, then there was no way that Ivan was doing to this girl what he’d done to me. She’d gotten him better, because she was better.
I turned off my phone and closed my eyes but I knew that sleep wouldn’t come any time soon. I wondered if the boulder would find me, as punishment, when I woke up—sometimes I could avoid it if I wasn’t waking up alone. I wondered if it was something Mischa ever felt too, because it had to happen to everybody, at least sometimes, didn’t it? It was too powerful to not be ubiquitous, too powerful to be something that I’d come up with on my own. But I couldn’t ask her about it now. She was asleep, and she was so still. Her mouth soft and slightly open, her breathing slow. I would have to wait until morning.