The Elizas: A Novel(71)
ELIZA
DESMOND LIKES EGGOS for breakfast. Blueberry, specifically, with Mrs. Butterworth’s syrup, and when he handles the bottle he speaks to Mrs. Butterworth with deference and is very careful not to touch her plastic breasts. He sleeps in his socks, and if even a day goes by without shaving he has dark stubble that makes a sandpaper sound when you rub it with your palm. I got him to shave off the Guy Fawkes facial hair, and already he looks much better. His lips are full and sensuous—I have no idea why he was hiding them. I catch him glancing at himself in the mirror, though, rubbing his smooth upper lip and chin in lament, but I choose to ignore it. I’m working on him getting a haircut next, but when I delicately mentioned that he could use a trim he looked horrified and backed away from me, pulling his hair into a hat, as though he thought I might set it on fire then and there.
He sleeps in a bedroom full of light in a big, well-made bed with a tufted headboard. I am told it’s his parents’ bedroom; they’re both ambassadors and rarely here. The apartment has a lot of leather chairs and fiddly French cabinets, courtesy of his parents, but some of the design elements are of his choosing. Like the bowls of potpourri on the high shelf. When I’m alone in the room with it, I take the strange dried fruit pieces out of the bowls one by one, trying to crush them between my fingers, but they won’t yield.
There is a jar of Sea Breeze on the vanity. His shower curtain has tiny printed sailboats, which were so incongruous to his being they made me laugh. “Oh, my brother, Stefan, hung that,” he says. I meet Stefan, his brother the dabbler, a portly guy with kinky hair to his waist and huge nostrils. He looks nothing like Desmond, though apparently they are biologically related. Stefan wears stained T-shirts and wrinkled khakis and carries around a jug full of whole milk that he slowly drains through the course of a day.
In the little hallway just outside the kitchen is a cabinet full of Desmond’s authentic absinthe collection and a bunch of vintage absinthe spoons. He keeps the cabinet locked because, he says, one time Stefan got in there and drank a whole bottle and almost died.
“You don’t cross wormwood,” he says spookily. “It has a majestic power over all of us.”
His windows look out onto a courtyard with a Roman fountain filled with pennies and dimes. He has an owl sculpture made out of tin on his mantel; if it were to fall, its beak would impale a toe. Over the couch is an afghan his aunt knitted for his parents when they got married. He tells me these things on days two and three, as we drink coffee, as we rub each other’s feet, as we kiss and kiss and kiss, his mouth so big and different, his movements surprisingly sure, his body engulfing mine in bed, despite its smallness everywhere else.
He admits he writes poetry. I tell him about Kiki’s awful sonnets. Together, we look through his high school yearbook—he looked like Guy Fawkes even then and was even skinnier.
We cook dinners together, weird gourmet things that involve cheesecloth and double boiling and cauldrons—one of the nice things about living in an apartment actually owned by fifty-year-olds is that they have nice cookware. On day two of our courtship, Desmond builds a special shelf for my vitamins, and I move them in. We read from a book of epigraphs from fifteenth-century tombstones. We put on Halloween masks (a gorilla and a pug, from Stefan’s closet) and sit on the balcony, waiting for people to notice us. The masks smell organic, like skin and dairy. The smell of sour milk leaks out of Stefan’s pores.
Desmond shows me a layout for the next comic-con and explains the new exhibits and the big draws; I pretend to be interested, but mostly I’m just disappointed nothing like The Addams Family will be there. I talk to him about my time in the hospital. Desmond listens. And he adores. I wake up some mornings and he’s just staring at me, starry-eyed. He stands close to me in the elevator. He sneaks his hand up my skirt whenever people’s backs are turned and sometimes even when they’re not. When we go out to dinner, I feel his fingers tickling my thigh, and I jokingly swat him away. I find his woolly eyebrows strangely sensuous to lick. He buys me an Addams Family cartoon book from the 1940s, and together we look through it, marveling over the artwork.
On our second Saturday together, I’m sitting on the couch, looking at my cell phone, daring myself to open a review of The Dots. More people have read the galleys, and the opinions were starting to trickle in.
“They’re good,” Posey told me. “You really should read one.” But I’m not sure I’m brave enough yet.
Desmond is in the shower, preparing for work, and while I’m staring at my phone, wondering if I can do it, Stefan lumbers into the living room with his JanSport backpack and his jug of milk. I have been told that this week he is working as a production assistant on a cable-channel zombie show, though other weeks he works in lighting or sound or even at the commissary, making tacos. Stefan doesn’t limit himself to Hollywood stuff, either, Desmond explained. Last year, he took a job as a trumpet player on a cruise ship and was gone for six months. Before that, he aided a veterinarian who specialized in giant, exotic, illegal Hollywood pets, like white Bengal tigers. Some big-time director had a rhinoceros in his backyard, and Stefan helped it give birth.
Stefan plops down on the couch opposite me and pushes his dirty water–colored hair behind his ear. “You’re nice,” he says, looking at me carefully.
I give him a guarded half smile and glance toward the shower door, hoping Desmond finishes up soon. “Thanks.”