Cleopatra and Frankenstein(10)

“You sit here, my bride,” said Frank and pulled Cleo onto his lap.

“Okay, I start from the beginning,” said Anders.

Zoe, for whom there was no available seat, hovered over Anders’s shoulder. Anders was from Denmark and had worked for many years as Frank’s art director before leaving to head the art department of a women’s fashion magazine. Like Zoe, he was almost unfairly attractive, a former model in fact, but whereas Zoe seemed to radiate her own heat, Anders emanated a Nordic cool.

“So,” said Anders, “I hurt my knee quite badly playing tennis.”

“In a game I won, if I recall,” said Frank.

“You only ‘recall’ the games you win,” said Anders. “And it is not such a victory if your opponent is injured, is it? Anyway, I go home and the pain is really bad, quite unbearable. I remember that I have some leftover muscle relaxants from an injury years ago. They are expired, but I think, okay, I’ll just try one. I take it, forget all about it, spend the afternoon on the roof with friends drinking beers, maybe a bottle of rosé. I realize I need to go the bathroom, so I get in the elevator and press my floor. At that time, I lived in an apartment where the elevator opened right into—”

“Great apartment,” said Frank.

“Yes, it was very nice,” said Anders. “Now suddenly I realize—”

“What happened to it again?” asked Frank.

Anders gave a distracted wave of his hands.

“Christine kept it after we called it quits, you know this. She still lives there with her son.”

“That bitch,” said Frank.

“Frank,” said Cleo.

“Cleo,” said Frank. “You didn’t know this woman. Cut her open, and instead of a heart you’d find an abacus.”

“You still shouldn’t call—,” said Cleo.

“Would you rather I call her a cunt?”

“I’d rather you didn’t call her anything.”

“What’s the plural of abacus, anyway?” said Frank. “Abaci?”

“It’s not,” said Zoe confidently.

Cleo doubted that Zoe had ever seen an abacus.

“The elevator goes down,” continued Anders. “The doors open, and I realize I cannot move. I am fucking paralyzed. If I let go of the rail, I will topple over like a tree.”

“Been there.” Frank nodded. “Two tabs of acid on a farm upstate when I was sixteen. Ended up lying in a pig trough the whole night.”

“What did you do?” asked Zoe.

“Nothing,” Frank said. “I couldn’t get out of the trough.”

“Not you,” said Zoe.

“I could do nothing either!” said Anders. “I waited, hoping to regain movement soon, and eventually the elevator was called to another floor. The doors open, and a young family is standing in their apartment looking at me. I forgot to mention I am wearing only my tennis shorts, no shirt, no shoes, and cannot even open my mouth to beg an apology.”

“Hot,” said Zoe.

“Don’t even think about it,” said Frank.

“I’m standing there staring like a big slobbering Viking as they hide in the corner of the elevator,” said Anders. “They are terrified of me!”

Frank laughed and reached behind Cleo to grab one of the profiteroles Santiago was parading around the room while singing “That’s Amore.”

“Eventually I make it back to the roof, and everyone is asking where I’ve been,” Anders continued. “I explain the situation to them, how at last I crawled on my belly from the elevator to the bathroom, propped myself up on the towel rack to pee, which, as you can imagine, was not so successful. And do you know what they say? ‘Hey man, that sounds amazing! Do you have more?’ I’m telling you, in this moment I realize I will never understand Americans.”

Zoe, tired of standing, or perhaps of not being the center of attention, squeezed beside Anders on the narrow set of apple boxes he was perched on, an act that would have been difficult had Zoe not been slight as a fawn. Anders smiled, revealing a mouth of gappy, uneven teeth, and the perfect symmetry of his face was momentarily shattered.

“Ah yes, Americans are all addicted to pills,” said Frank. “I’ve heard this one before.”

Zoe ruffled Anders’s blond hair. Cleo wondered if they were going to sleep together, or possibly already had. This wasn’t hard to imagine, since Anders had slept with everyone—including Cleo.

“I am not saying they are all drug addicts,” Anders said. “I am merely pointing out that there is a cultural difference in terms of attitudes toward self-medication. Back me up here, Cleo.”

It happened right after she met Frank, when she still thought she’d be leaving the country in a few months, following a party with an open, and subsequently lethal, bar. After a brief, unsatisfying fuck on his Chesterfield sofa, Anders had casually dismissed her. I’m sure you’d rather go sleep in your own bed?

“Anders thinks everyone in America is taking something,” said Frank.

“The booming pharmaceutical industry here speaks for itself,” said Anders.

Everything Cleo needed to know about lust and its humiliation, she learned in the moment she found herself lurching home from Anders’s apartment with his semen still coating her stomach. Neither of them had ever told Frank.