Cleopatra and Frankenstein(110)

“Where’s Frank?” she asked.

“Frank?” Anders refocused his attention on her. “He didn’t think it would be appropriate, since Danny was your schoolmate.”

He ran his hands through his hair. It was lighter now, streaked almost white in places by the sun.

“I see,” said Cleo. She focused on keeping her expression as neutral as possible. The disappointment, it was so physical, she was worried her face might actually drain of color. She felt desperate to go home, to be alone again, without all this pretense. But where? She was a long way from any home.

“He thought you’d be relieved,” said Anders.

“And you?” she asked, raising her head to meet his eye. “You didn’t think you should stay away too?”

“I wanted to see you. I wanted to make sure you were okay.”

“Now you care if I’m okay?”

“Come on, Cleo.” He pulled his phone from his pocket again, unable to hold her gaze. “We’re still friends, surely? I wanted to give you space, you know, to work out how you felt.”

“Space?” she hissed. “You call never speaking to me again space?”

She had often imagined what it would be like to see Anders again. In her fantasies she was like metal, shiny and cold and impenetrable. But all her feelings, her stupid hurt feelings, kept bubbling to the surface.

“What was I meant to do?” asked Anders, raising his hands as if to shield himself. “You said you would leave him. You didn’t leave him. So I … I guess I tried to move on.”

Cleo wanted to say that she could not leave Frank without the assurance that Anders would be there for her on the other side, an assurance he could not give her when she asked. She hated herself for asking for it. She had been too afraid. And she really had believed that she could love Anders, although now she saw that she had simply clung to him because she couldn’t see another way out. She hated to think about it.

She was the one in her twenties, she wanted to remind him. He and Frank were in their forties. They had the careers. They had the money. They had the citizenship, the stability, the power. In comparison, she had nothing but herself.

“I called you,” was what she did say.

“I made what I thought was the best decision,” said Anders. “Please try to understand my side of things. I’ve known Frank for twenty years.”

A chain of people making their way toward the bar broke between them, yelling excitedly over their shoulders to each other. Anders stepped away from her to let them pass.

“You didn’t even say goodbye,” she said.

“I’m sorry, Cleo. I don’t know what to say. I did what I thought was right.”

Anders looked at her, and his face was filled with pity. He must think she was pathetic. She wanted to reach up and pull his expression away like a sheet of drawing paper, crumple it between her hands. She crossed her arms and backed away from him. There was nothing more to say. He reached forward to lightly touch her elbow.

“Cleo,” he said softly.

In his mouth her name sounded like something falling, two bounces down a flight of stairs. Cle-o.

“What?”

He began to say something, appeared to think better of it.

“Don’t be a stranger?” he said instead.

“Some of my best friends are strangers,” she said, and walked back into the crowd.

She fought her way through the people surging toward the bars and walked into the first room of the warehouse. A coffin riddled with bullet holes spun in a slow orbit from a thick metal chain suspended above a mound of broken mirrors. She looked down and saw hundreds of fragments of her face reflected back, a sliver of cheek, of throat, of eye. Who was she? An artist who didn’t make art. A wife without a husband. A child with no mother.

“There you are!” Quentin grabbed her arm. His eyes were glossy black orbs. “Have you seen Alex?”

Cleo shook her head. Quentin’s grip was tight enough to bruise. She put her hand over his and pried his fingers away. “Are you okay?”

“Marvelous!” Quentin said in a British accent and threw his head back in a dramatic openmouthed laugh. He snapped his head forward, his face suddenly severe. His eyes reflected no light. “Need to find Alex.”

“What did you take?” Cleo asked, but Quentin was backing away from her into the crowd. She kept sight of the back of his head all the way into the warehouse’s main room before she blinked, and he disappeared into the swarm of bodies.

She passed a hallway where guests were delightedly ripping up the floorboards like scabs from skin. The dance floor was already packed, the crowd moving to a song Cleo didn’t know. She could feel the bass pulling at the hairs on her arms, vibrating against her skin. She saw Audrey and Marshall bouncing together by the wall.

“Over here!” called Audrey. She passed her a bottle of water. “Want some? We put a couple of hits in it.”

Yes, she wanted some. She wanted something that would roll through her like a flood, wash away whole years of her life. Those final hopeful months believing her mother was getting better. Gone. The night she met Frank, his smile, his compliments, his hand snaking its way under her dress to find a nest between her legs. Gone. Those weeks with Anders. Gone. Every man, in fact, who had burrowed his way inside her, kissed her and fucked her, come in her, on her. She wanted them out. She wanted a river heavy with men’s bodies sucked out of her. She wanted death by flood.