Luster(10)

And then for a week Eric doesn’t answer my texts, or my emails, or my calls, and I am maintaining my smile in the middle of my open office plan, leafing through this new book we’re putting out on the virtues of sharing. And now I know where he lives so ten days after having fucked him in the bed he shares with his wife I go right up to the door and find it unlocked, and no one is home, so I walk around the house and pick up these cold lemons on the counter and roll them around in my hands, and I open the fridge and take a drink of milk and carry the carton up to the bedroom where a door opens to a closet with a collection of women’s clothes and I gather the silk and wool and cashmere in my hands and then there is a voice, and I turn and standing in the doorway of the attached bathroom in yellow rubber gloves and a T-shirt that says Yale is his wife.





3


I got the abortion in my junior year of high school. There was a brief moment when I considered the pregnancy, when I tried to halve a grain of sand and accommodate its ambition to yield a pair of lungs. At the time, I worked retail at a dying mall. Eighteen hours a week smoothing chinos and shadowing aggressive Quebecois customers who came to upstate New York to exploit our low-priced bids to stay in business. There were only four stores open in the mall. A CVS that kept the animal crackers next to the douches, a Deb with five-dollar packs of high-waisted panties, a gun shop, and my store, a scrappy little boutique for the professional woman. I was a miserable sales associate, prone to confessional spirals during my attempts to move the store loyalty card, but an asset as long as I did enough work to afford the veteran associates more time to socialize. During lunchtime, I manned the store alone, and the two other associates suspended their concerns about my awkwardness with customers to go have lunch at Boston Market. That I was not invited to these lunches felt more like a kindness than a slight. They were good to me, inclined to bring back some creamed spinach and runny macaroni, which I ate by a defunct Key Bank whose ATMs were filled with honeycomb. During this time, I couldn’t tell if I liked being alone, or if I only endured it because I knew I had no choice.



* * *



I was not popular and I was not unpopular. To invite admiration or ridicule, you first have to be seen. So the story of the cell that once divided inside me and its subsequent obliteration is also the story of the first man who saw me. The man who owned the gun shop, Clay, a metalhead who was pathological in the maintenance of his teeth. He was the seventh black person I’d met in Latham. Mixed-race, a riotous Punnett square of dominant Korean and Nigerian genes, so ethnically ambiguous that under different kinds of light he appeared to be different men. The first day we met, he was smoking a cigarette on the DDR machine outside the shuttered movie theater. He told me that he was in debt and that he and his brother were no longer speaking and there was something so easy about his immediate familiarity that I told him how my mother died. How I found her with one shoe still on. How I kept painting this moment and found no format suitable. How it had only been five months since her death and my father was already seeing someone. This was the contradiction that would define me for years, my attempt to secure undiluted solitude and my swift betrayal of this effort once in the spotlight of an interested man. I was pretending not to worry about the consequences of my isolation. But whenever I talked to anyone, I found myself overcompensating for the atrophy of my social muscles.



* * *



I was happy to be included in something, even if it was a mostly one-sided conversation with a man twice my age. We met on my lunch breaks and he bought me ice cream. I sat in his station wagon and watched him load and unload his gun. I leaned over the display case with the tanto-point knives and let him run his fingers through my hair. When he asked me how old I was, I lied. When I told him my father had not been home for weeks, he made sure I had money for food, and sometimes he would call and make me tell him what I had to eat. But still there were moments I felt his caution, a surprising squareness about his use of profanity, unsubtle inquiries about the ages of the imaginary boyfriends I supplied.



* * *



On our fifth lunch date, he plucked a caping knife from the display and pressed it into my hands, the shop’s familiar rotation of Swedish death metal a murmur against the weight of the oak and steel. Even as he tried to preserve the part of me that was apparently untouched, sometimes I felt he was trying to scare me. As kids are, I was especially responsive to this challenge, determined to be stoic and game. So we got Red Bulls at the CVS, and he pierced my ears using a Zippo and a self-threading needle. We drove to his house, a squat double-wide in Troy, and he made me steak and showed me his antique guns. There was something automated about him, an offhanded perpetual motion, the inevitability of a weapon in his hands and the unconscious priming of the weapon to do what it was made to do, his attention elsewhere as he seated rounds in the magazine and tugged the slide. The way he would talk without prompting or encouragement, as if all this time, he had been waiting, desperately, for a captive audience. But there were moments that neutralized my fear, moments he passed the store as I was firming up the sale rack, and in the air was a mutual understanding that we were both looking for something to destroy, that we were people of color in a town that was colorless, a language developing between us that wasn’t so much romantic as it was breathless with shared conspiracy. So when he pressed the caping knife into my hand, I took this to mean that to him, I had become a person. He had considered me and noted my deliberation, my central nervous system, the possibility that even within my small, teenage universe, I might have a reason to kill.