Luster(27)
* * *
I take the train to my storage locker and grab a couple of paintbrushes, an osmotic suppository, an assorted collection of old Forever 21 basics, and an old tube of cyan. On the trip back, it occurs to me that I might not be able to get inside the house. I wonder if it was presumptuous to leave a note, if I was meant to attend dinner and am now late. For most of my life, I have not had to tell anyone where I planned to be. I could walk the length of Broadway without a face. I could perish in a fire and have no one realize until a firefighter came across my teeth in the ash. I walk from the station, and when I get to the house, I stand on the porch and enjoy the dense, late August air. It feels strange that only three months earlier, Eric pointed out my comma splice. I knock on the door and when no one answers, I go ahead and just walk inside. I pass by Akila’s room and she is sitting at her vanity, struggling to pull a comb through her hair.
“Start from the ends,” I say, and she gets up and closes her door. I retreat to the guest room and extract an eggshell from my sock. I delete the delivery app, retrieve the cyan, and start laying the foundation for a self-portrait, but every time something is wrong. Rebecca materializes in the doorway wearing a robe, long in the neck and the legs and indivisible from the silk.
“That dog has been at it all day,” she says softly, and it feels like she means to be speaking to someone else. The way she is inclined toward me, waiting for a response, is what you do when there is already an established conversation, one that is developed enough to be open-ended. I was more comfortable when she was ignoring me. When I thought she regretted inviting me to stay.
“I don’t hear anything,” I say, and she frowns.
“I need your help with something,” she says, and I follow her down the hallway into their bedroom. I try to appear less acquainted than I am, but I know she is watching me. I feel the recognition open on my face, though the lights are low, and there is newspaper all over the floor. She gives me one end of a fitted sheet. “Would you believe I’ve been trying to do this for half an hour?” she says, and no, I don’t believe her. I look down at their bed and I think about them together, and it is not terrible because I want him to myself, but because all my thoughts of them in bed are mundane, of the late-night TV and morning breath and the sleepy, automatic spoon. After an initial struggle, we synchronize and decide the best course of action is to stuff the mattress upward into the sheet.
“You haven’t told him I’m here,” I say, and she lies down in the middle of the bed, spreads her arms and legs like a starfish.
“It hasn’t really come up.”
* * *
The next morning Eric texts me, three days. not even going to guess what it is? I don’t respond because I would like to avoid the awkwardness of upstaging whatever the surprise actually is, and because the tenor of this question, his unsubtle displeasure at my lack of response, is a moment I want to savor. In my few years of dating, I have received a number of gifts from men. Gifts that were bought in haste at duty-free, that were fattening or detrimental to vaginal pH, that overestimated my interest in Lyndon B. Johnson and the New York Mets. I don’t ever take it personally, but with Eric it’s different. He knows what I used to do to my dolls. He knows that I let my second-grade crush pull three of my baby teeth. And so even if he gifted me airport whiskey, I would have to take it personally.
“I have an interview,” I say to Rebecca after I get an email from the clown academy. I haven’t prepared, but their “about us” page is informative and carefully laid-back, full of words like moxie and disruption and Anakin, the office dog. Rebecca is hunched over an orchid in the kitchen with a pair of silver shears. When she looks over at me I’m surprised to find she’s wearing glasses.
“Is that what you’re wearing?” she says, turning back to the orchid, the lenses of her glasses opaque with sun. She looks like a mad scientist, craned and tentative, the curved blades of the shears monstrous against the orchid’s long, willowy stem.
“I just wanted you to know I’ll be out of your hair soon,” I say as she lops one of the bigger flowers off the stem.
“Goddamnit,” she says, putting down the shears. “What are you talking to me about?”
“I have a job interview,” I say, and now that she’s looking directly at me, I know there’s no reason I needed to share this with her, even though, weirdly, I was hoping she would be excited, that she would see how temporary this is and maybe never tell Eric I was here. Because there is no scenario in which telling him about this goes well. I have used her soap and left skin cells on her guest sheets, so it is maybe uncharitable to call Rebecca’s hospitality a trap, and yet now we have a secret. Now I have also seen his wife and daughter in different stages of undress, screwed with the division of church and state, making any credible alternate reality impossible. To confess terrible things to each other online is easy, almost hypothetical. To be unemployed and wearing his wife’s jeans is concrete. When the doorbell rings, Rebecca slips off her glasses and goes to answer the door. She returns with a boy who is holding a stack of books.
“This is Pradeep,” she says, as he smoothes his polo, sits down at the kitchen table. She doesn’t introduce us. She calls for Akila, once, twice. When Akila doesn’t come down, Rebecca runs upstairs and leaves us alone together. He doesn’t look at me. He sets down an iced coffee, opens up three dog-eared books, and arranges them in a row. I didn’t like teenage boys even when I was a teenager myself, but I am desperate for him to like me, even as his belted khakis are bumming me out. He finishes his coffee and then extends the empty cup.