Luster(18)

* * *



I feel everyone in the room can see these two versions of me, like a before and after. In the after, I am even fatter. I want to say something before I leave, but I’ve never been good at parting words and the pressure makes me nervous, so I say Please invite me to lunch sometime to the one assistant I like best. As I leave, I really wish I could take it back.



* * *



I go back to the bathroom and try to cry again. When nothing happens I listen to Rebecca’s voicemail and press the bruise on my face. I think of Eric’s slack, hungry face, the thrill of pulling my body from his and shutting the car door, which is maybe what it feels like to have the last word. I want to believe this is intolerable to him, but he hasn’t been in contact. I text him and say miss you, and when I see the ellipses on my phone, I can tell that he has opened the message and is beginning to reply. But then he doesn’t, and so I take a slug of gin and head to Mark’s office.



* * *



Even with the necessary lubrication, I find myself paralyzed in the stairwell, thinking of reasons not to go up to his floor. I find myself becoming sentimental about what I will leave behind, the whiff of Lysol and ink, the stack of someone’s homemade zines on the sink, and this very stairwell, in which I have regularly pleaded for student loan deferrals and set up pelvic exams. I have said goodbye enough times to know that departure has a way of gilding what are, at best, slow quotidian deaths, but still each time I think of everything I will lose.



* * *



When I walk into his office, for a while he proceeds as if I’m not there. He leafs through a fat folder of proofs, jots down something on his Wacom, and leans back in his chair with a lukewarm smile. He is cool, which is very out of the ordinary. A departure from his usual frequency—a distinctly uncool vibration that once engaged is effusive to the point of violence, a nerd’s nerd so smitten with the niche corners of eighties ephemera and pan-Asian iconography that his office, like his apartment, is a precarious collection of teacups, toys, and squat fertility figurines. The effort behind his demeanor should put me at ease, but actually it hurts. And this is not how I expected to feel. I close the door and take his katana off the wall.

“Do you remember when we went to Brighton Beach? It was maybe the only time you and I went outside together.”

“Please put that back. It’s ceremonial.”

“There was a used condom in the sand. And it rained. I slipped on the boardwalk and I was embarrassed. You don’t know this, but I had done a great deal of preparation the night before. Because you had only ever seen me in the dark.”

“Muromachi era,” he says, and behind him is a large print of The Great Wave off Kanagawa, the tallest wave cradling the shiny crown of his head. When I unsheathe the blade, it makes such a satisfying sound that I do it again.

“I got fired today.”

“What?”

“Don’t do that. Act like it wasn’t you.”

“You think I got you fired? Edie, baby.”

“I never said no to you. Not to anything. That documentary about Norwegian puppetry was three hours long.”

“Listen, I have been on probation since the late aughts, okay? I have nothing to gain in telling anyone about what happened with us,” he says, and I turn the katana over in my hands. The weight is concentrated toward the hilt, which briefly destabilizes me. All at once the color and grain of the room distill into high focus, and I note the old shaving scar beneath his lip at the same time I note the seriousness of the blade, which I assumed would be dulled.

“I did everything you asked. Even that thing with the tengu mask.”

“My love, this is the problem with your generation. Instant gratification,” he says, and because it took him, on average, forty-three minutes to come, because I put on the ears and the tail and learned the lyrics to “Painting the Roses Red” backward and forward, because I drank approximately five gallons of cranberry juice over the course of our relationship, and for a day or two required the use of a cane, I take issue with his definition of instant. Though there is still a part of me that is vulnerable to his casual use of my love, which, when we were together, appeared without warning at the end of his requests for me to get the door and pass the remote. “You think you should get what you want, when you want it, and life doesn’t work that way. Art doesn’t work that way, and that’s why you’re not as good as you could be,” he says, and the fact that he doesn’t appear to have said this in anger, the fact of him offering this insult as practical advice, is something I feel in the most inaccessible parts of my bowels. So he may not be the reason for my sudden unemployment. In the wake of this possibility are dozens of new culprits, minor office affairs all about the building, but there are too many to parse, and so I take the katana, maneuver the blade between my fingers, and press it down into the flesh. Directly after the act comes a clarity so sharp it feels enhanced, the room ballooning such that his shout reaches me belatedly as I squeeze my hand into a fist and watch the blood well between my fingers. And even then, I feel nothing. But when I look at the carpet, the spot there is excellent, is proof, spreading into the shape of a smile.



* * *



I take the elevator down with two publicists, my hand pressed into a work slipper. They are craned over a list of pub dates, talking about a galley at the center of the third scandal of the year. It is a highly designed editorial nightmare from a boutique imprint experimenting with pomo cookbooks, formerly an imprint that specialized in Crock-Pot tips and a series on pies that employed the authority of a titular Presbyterian Grandma. To sex up the brand, they invited a popular chef, known for his radical liquid nitrogen ice cream, to write a cookbook. Except then his wife went missing and someone found her frozen foot.