Luster(56)

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While I am waiting for the paperwork to come through, Rebecca and I take even more incremental steps toward each other until we are basically moving through these last days with our fingers linked, as stiffly as this can possibly be done, our adjacency embarrassing but somehow necessary, even as I am certain she is relieved the child didn’t live. Because in the moments we are closest, there is always a caveat, always a clock running out, and nothing can be purely sweet. I wake up in the morning and think for a moment that I am someone happier and then I remember where I am.



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Then we move through the day side by side, and I feel like the exception, like there is some vestigial organ we share that is essentially a second tongue, our language furtive and crude and articulated only in private, this feeling in both of us, that we are building something out of glass. At times, it feels awful, like it is only this way because there is an expiration date. I go into the city and I watch a broker in a tracksuit flush a newly installed toilet. I get stuck underground while another broker is waiting for me in Forest Hills. On the F, a rat scurries over my feet. And of course, there are babies everywhere. Haggard parents hefting carriages up and down the subway stairs. When I get back to New Jersey, there is an ache between my legs.



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I unpack my paints and I stretch a canvas. I take my time with the gesso, thin it with water to make sure there are no lumps. I lay down a cool background color, and while it dries, I feel myself becoming anxious, too particular about the state of my brushes, which, during the length of my short but generative pregnancy, became stiff with old paint. I sit in the dark and think of the doctors who performed the procedure, and I imagine them at home, spanking their children and smoking cigarettes. I wonder if it is common to ask a patient what she does as the twilight sleep begins, if it functions as a truth serum, or a moment in which patients think of what they would like to be doing with their lives and lie. I want to feel that when I said I was an artist, it wasn’t a lie. But when I try to paint, I am out of sync, still used to the rhythm I kept in my pregnancy-induced insomnia, when I stowed jars of oily artichoke hearts under my bed for delirious painting jags that went on until dawn, which I described, in great detail, to a child who did not yet have ears. Orange, yellow, pink. I do it now almost automatically, and when I catch myself, I feel angry.



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I go down into the kitchen at dawn and fill a bowl with artichoke hearts, and I move through the house and select a few things I would like to take with me: Akila’s Captain Planet mug, Eric’s Bumblebee Unlimited vinyl, and a half-used bottle of Rebecca’s ginger and bergamot perfume. I wrap the breakables in a pair of jeans, and at nine, I haul my bags to Rebecca’s truck. The morning is blank and sullen, and the AC is dead. We stop for coffee, and the back of Rebecca’s shirt is dark with sweat. I try to make small talk and she puts on her sunglasses and says Yeah, yeah, though I did not ask a question and there is no sun. On the radio, every station is muddied by the echo of an approximate frequency, and it is only when we reach Crown Heights and Rebecca kills the engine that I hear a voice say, Tonight only, before we climb the stairs to my apartment, a sixth-floor walk-up with a brand-new toilet and too-friendly cat. I am happy to find that my roommate, who has texted only to ask if I am allergic to nuts, is not home. Rebecca goes through the apartment and turns all the faucets on, and after I am done spraying the perimeter of my room with Raid, I come out and find she has disassembled them all, the chrome, rubber, and silicone coils laid out neatly on damp paper towels. Your water pressure is terrible, she says, and I am tempted to say that she should’ve paid me more. I am tempted to ask why her sporadic payments included so many coins. After, the water pressure is better, but I cannot help feeling that any attempt to improve this situation, the indelible ruin of New York real estate, is absurd. My new full bed, which has been waiting at the bottom of the stairs for two days, already has something of a smell. It takes us a while to get it up the stairs, and a couple of times Rebecca falls. We don’t bicker, but after, we wash our faces violently, and then we share a cigarette outside. She touches the inside of my wrist, and immediately I feel like I might cry. Don’t tell him, I say, and when we are back in the apartment, we share a small bottle of vodka I stole from the Marriott minibar and I use my roommate’s record player to listen to the vinyl, which, despite Eric’s preservation method, has been warped by heat. And so as we drink, we are constantly adjusting the needle, though when it is dark, we give up and let it skip, the interval long enough to justify the return and render it almost invisible, though on some level we are aware of the drone and how we have begun to mirror its signature as we talk, the content of our words increasingly illegible as we move around each other like two magnets of identical charge. I hold this frustration inside myself until we are once again on opposite sides of the room, and I say Don’t move, too loudly. When she obeys, I think we are both surprised. But immediately after, there is an expectation in the air, the language that we share now whittled down to the essential vocabulary, to soft, yearning words, conjugations that are ardent and hard. I tell her to get undressed, to take her time, partly because I am getting my oils together and partly because I want to spend time with the body that has been showing itself to me, for months, in small, insolent degrees. When she is undressed, I still feel the old impulse to compare, but otherwise her body is like a dagger, like the body of a woman who is in the business of sending off the dead. And this is how she holds herself, like a person uninterested by her own anatomical drama, her bearing unselfconscious, indifferent. It feels like a challenge. I mix my paints, deep, quaternary colors, rust, ash, dirty turquoise, and then I take her face into my hands and pull her mouth back with my fingers so that I can see her teeth.