His hand on my hand on my thigh in the passenger’s seat of the Mazda, rented for the weekend, its tires thrashing through ice. His 2000s car wouldn’t have survived the journey. I look over at him and think of how I might blow him later, or if I want to. The hard stone of his Adam’s apple. The knots of his knuckles around the steering wheel.
I turn away and my head bobs against the window, so close that my eyelashes brush against the glass. Outside the night ripples past. Piles of snow like white pillows. Nicotine thrum from the Juul in the cupholder. I can tell we are ascending mountains but I can’t see them. Small houses, shuddering to life in the headlights, anchor my surroundings. Squat, wooden, ramshackle. Settled like nests. Mailboxes wilting, snow capping their little red flags.
When I was a child I used to press my forehead against the car window and imagine that the pavement was falling away behind us, that every vehicle on our tail was tumbling into an abyss, but as long as we didn’t stop, as long as we kept on driving, we’d survive it. My father told me this was true so I believed it.
Thirty minutes to midnight and we pull off the access road. Our condo is C4, free of charge thanks to a family friend. We enter the eleven digit code on the keypad and step inside. The bottom of my unsuitable sneakers shed snow on the doormat. The condo is mostly wood and orange stone, expensively rustic, but not so expensive that its cost can be hidden. He takes the duffel and suitcase from my hands and brings them upstairs. It takes me several minutes to locate the lightswitch for the kitchen. Pots and pans hang over the sink from a ceiling contraption. I unload the wine and the beer into the fridge, then put some water on to boil.
‘We should set our alarms for 8 tomorrow,’ he says, ‘to make the most of the day.’ I don’t hear him enter the room. He says I look cute and takes a picture of me at the stove. It happens too quick for me to smile but I manage to make a weird eyes-wide grimace. ‘Do you think it smells like gas?’ I say.
‘It never smells like gas when you ask that,’ he says, looking down at his phone, scrolling through something. ‘It’s just the burner turning on.’
Eventually the water boils and I make the pasta and heat up the Rao’s tomato-basil sauce we bought at a deli before leaving the city. We eat on the couch, me scarfing like I’m starved as he prioritizes the beer. When I’m done I haphazardly set the ceramic bowl down on the coffee table and it rolls around on its base for a second before falling into stagnation. I take three heavy gulps of wine. I slouch and hold the two bubbles of my stomach that fold into each other. He looks at my boobs through my see-through shirt. ‘You’re sexy.’
We drink a lot more and play half a round of Parcheesi before we start to fuck on the leather couch but we keep sliding off and the dick keeps slipping out so we move upstairs to the bed, where he has given me the good side with the lamp and the outlet. He puts his hand on the white of my throat and grunts as he makes his way inside of me. Immediately it hurts, this entrance. I let him come in me and this is my favorite part, because it’s over now. He holds me and plays with my nipples. Later he goes down on me and when I finish I think of cookie-cutter houses on a cul de sac, and how his tongue has knocked on the door of exactly the right one. I don’t know why this image manifests. Recently, odd things come to mind when I climax, like red velvet curtains opening in the theater, my middle school bully scoring a hockey goal, Christmas lights springing to life along a stone wall. This has not always been the case.
I perform a perfect orgasm for him, when it comes and when it doesn’t. Conforming to what I know he likes. Moaning in a higher octave. He views us as equals because he is fair and kind, which is why I almost cannot forgive myself.
Our daily life operates in a similar way. When I state an opinion I have formed about art or literature, there appears a thin, gauzy film over his eyes, clear that my words do not interest him. But he listens and nods and he contributes by asking me questions so that he does not have to add opinions of his own. I do the same for him. Conversation is more to entertain the other rather than build upon a topic together.
When I was twenty and he twenty-four, we met just after New Year’s at a sleazy dive off Myrtle-Broadway. I was still in college and using a fake ID. It’s been four years now and we talk of a future. We post pictures of each other online for anniversaries and birthdays. We have a shared Pinterest board concerning an eventual wedding. We have a cat, Puddles, who is currently staying in the city, equipped with an auto-feeder and two litter boxes.
In the backyard of that dive bar we shared a cigarette. It enlivened me to put my mouth where his mouth had just been, like a kiss passed between our fingers. I felt more adrenaline than I perhaps should’ve. He took a too-long pull and handed it to me slightly dampened by the soft inner ring of his lips. The winter freeze pinked the tip of his nose. Our breath kept churning out an apparition of smoke long after we finished the cigarette. His chin tucked into the collar of his parka endeared me. Neither of us made an effort to go inside, face the heat of bodies, shedding our coats to adapt to the sudden temperature change. He guessed my Zodiac sign on the second try, only because his sister was a Virgo. He asked me what I wrote about and I said, ‘The shameful things.’ He asked what that meant and I continued, ‘Of the feminine kind.’
I remember looking beautiful that night, a January just like this one. I had found my own gaze between the etchings of graffiti in the bathroom mirror only minutes before and assumed everyone else thought me beautiful too. He didn’t say so, not that first night and not so often anymore, but I knew he’d thought it. My stomach was taught then, pulled thin around my torso.
I am sexy now rather than beautiful, more plush in the chest, waist, and thighs. Arousing in a way only a once gorgeous woman could be. When he’s at work, I send him naked pictures in which the doughy rolls of my back are visible and he responds with sexual innuendos, things he wishes to do to me, never quite the simple appreciation of beauty for beauty’s sake there once was. My body and mind have gone malleable from the tolerable comfort. Of him, of living in the plush.
This, in essence, is my thesis: He loves me because I give him what he wants. He loves me though I have made myself ugly and undesirable, loves me through the lack of beauty, as long as I keep giving and as long as I keep wanting. The wanting requires an immense amount of theater.
That first night, he took me home to his ragtag apartment where I watched him ejaculate on my stomach. Afterwards I lay on his chest as dawn broke and he asked me to tell him something I’d never told anyone before. It was a strange question, somewhat desperate.
‘How many women have you slept with? Eight for me,’ I said.
‘Women?’ He said.
I laughed softly into the shallow of his armpit and said, ‘No, men. I kissed my friend in high school though. A friend that was a girl.’
‘Why?’
‘Do you think that’s hot?’
‘I guess.’ He paused for a moment and said, ‘Around the same for me.’
I went home late that night and opened a blank document.
****
When I was fourteen a boy at school touched me in the locker room for no perceptible reason other than I was there bending over a toilet with a sponge in hand, which I was cleaning for the detention I’d received for telling the whole lunch table Louisa Smith had given her cousin Barney Smith a blowjob in the girls’ bathroom. I had braces and acne and was in the higher weight percentile for my age. When I told my homeroom teacher what had happened, he said surely it was another of my wild stories. When my father picked me up from school, he said it didn’t matter whether or not I was telling the truth because no one would believe me anyway. Because that’s who I was. I was the liar.
When I met the man with whom I spent my early twenties, I was an undergrad in Creative Writing, spinning lies for homework and good grades, looking for something to do with my life. I took him on as a project. I didn’t have the capacity for real love anyway.
I learned over the years that he has a propensity for vagueness, and I do not counter it. In fact, it is conducive to my work. He is not sharp enough to catch on. Would not be heartbroken when it was over. Would move on and find what he needed elsewhere.
We exist in indifferent silence sometimes, such as when seated across from each other at a dinner listening to the symphony of forks scraping plates. On walks home, we might discuss what the strangers around us had been talking about, their mundane work problems, their more consuming relationship troubles or financial situations. We go to museums and wander in different directions, then meet again on a staircase or elevator.
We moved in together after two years, a prewar building in Upper Manhattan, as all of our friends were leaving Brooklyn. We acquired Puddles from a local shelter and he adapted as we did. Certain areas of the ceiling, particularly over our cramped full bed, bloated with water damage. I bought grocery store flowers to adorn our bare Ikea tables—now swapped for flea market oaks and maples—but never replaced them quick enough so that they molded where the mouth of the vase met the stems.
He worked downtown in an office doing something with insurance as I applied for a Creative Writing Masters at various New York institutions. I ended up at Bard, stacking my classes on Mondays and Thursdays, borrowing his car to drive the two hours each way. I do this still. The days are long but my novel is progressing. I am nearing the end.
His job is now hybrid, only requiring him to be in the office three days a week. We live half off the money my father sends by check, half off his modest salary. In the winters when I go to class, I leave the city before sunrise and drive back in the night. Sometimes he accompanies me to classes and works in the library for the day. He almost always brings with him a small snack, usually of the gelatinous kind, Mott's apple gummies or Welch's assorted fruits. He sticks his large, veined hand into the crinkling bag and then retreats, opting instead for two fingers with which to grab tong-like a singular gummy, the size of his fingernail. I would often note the gynecological nature of this action in my open document.
When I drive home from campus alone, I rarely play music because the radio in his old car is static, and we share a streaming service which I know he is probably using at that moment and wouldn’t like to interrupt. I do not need him knowing the inconveniences I have the ability to cause him. I have written a large portion of my book while driving, saying the words out loud to a recording app on my phone, which sits lazily on the center console and threatens to fall at any moment.
On the days I am not at class, I lay in bed until the afternoon stroking Puddles, looking at Twitter, and inhaling nicotine at an alarming rate. Sometimes there are videos of self-immolation, emaciated girls, graphic injuries, sliced wrists. A warning pops up before the videos play and I always press ‘watch anyway.’ When I get up, I order delivery sometimes twice with the debit card he doesn’t know I have. By the time he comes home, I have taken out the trash and prepared a dinner with proteins and vegetables. He has never commented on the thickening of my thighs and arms, or the puffiness that seems to newly linger beneath my risen cheekbones. I note this in my document.
It is not an unhappy life. We travel occasionally. We visit my father and have biweekly dinners with his sister in the West Village. This trip is no different. A getaway weekend in Vermont was just what he needed, he’d said, a break from the mundanity of the city. I didn’t debate the idea; I like to be agreeable when I can.
Now in this bed that isn’t our own, he has fallen asleep with his hand under my t-shirt, breathing deep into my shoulder blade. It takes me a full minute to gently slip his arm away without waking him. I get up and the mattress, harder than we’re used to, creaks. I crouch and use my phone flashlight to find my laptop. When I close the bedroom door, I wait a moment outside it, and after ten beats, I hear him grunt and turn over in the papery sheets.
Downstairs I rearrange the throw pillows and melt into the unfamiliar couch, legs draped in a fleece blanket spotted with pine cones. The snow that falls on the skylight is cool and white as lamplight. I slide from the leather couch down to the floor where I pick up the abandoned Parcheesi pawns and move them around the board. I let them glide through the spaces rather than meticulously counting each one like I do in the game. I guide them all towards Home. Then I flick them over one at a time until they start to topple each other down on their own. For a while I stay there, looking at the wooden pawns, their fingernail-fat bases curving into thin necks and out again into a pearl of a head. The condo is silent as the last pawn rolls into stillness, settling in the dipped spine of the playing board.
I pick up my laptop and open my document. It takes awhile to load. Almost two-thousand pages of notes followed by an eighty-thousand word manuscript. He had been a good subject, devout enough to his own life outside of our relationship that I’ve been able to craft the novel without his noticing. He makes me laugh, sometimes honestly. I write down the jokes that work and alter the ones that don’t. Sometimes he questions why I don’t have many friends, but my novel is not about friendship. It is about relationships between men and women and the power that exists within them. I often think I am more an actress than a writer.
I write for an hour or so, then decide to go back to bed. The book is almost finished, and I should sleep.
The stairs wince under my heavy footfall. In the bedroom, he breathes. I look at him and I suddenly wish it could be me inside of his body pulling oxygen into the pink of his lungs and back out again. A handywoman perpetually tasked with climbing the scaffolding of his ribcage, maintaining, mending, untangling the threads of his heart. I wonder if it has been real, this whole time. I kiss him, from the corner of his mouth to the groove of his cupid’s bow, where I feel my own spit gather. I kiss him in his sleep, perhaps violating an invisible threshold, but soon he has woken and is kissing me back, his bottom lip biting down desperately on my top. My body fits his body. Is this how to do this, how to want this? It’s sad I must abandon it all so soon.
He whispers my name. ‘Beautiful,’ he mumbles, his head in my neck. We do not have sex. It’s like a thought hitched in my throat. A vision of beauty through what I have made of myself.
I had thought that what made love was knowing someone all the way through. Now I think maybe it is more special to love around the secrets, the private life. What is unknown is accepted. A familiar throb.
****
Saturday he skis for most of the day while I write in a local diner with cracked plastic booths and sticky vinyl tabletops. Out the window I see spiderwebs of ski lifts entangled within mountains. I have to squint through the afternoon daylight to make them out. I find the sun is sharper in the cold.
Sunday we return home and I leave him within the week. My book is bought a few months later and I receive an okay advance, which I use a portion of to pay the remaining half of our rent for the place I have since vacated. He did not cry or protest or even speak very much as I packed my things.
I now walk around my block six times every morning with black coffee in a ceramic mug and an apple that I throw in the subway grate when I’ve chewed it down to the core. I eat two meals a day, no snacks, and drop weight quickly. I delete Twitter. I live downtown and dodge his sister when I’m in the West Village. I discover this geographical conflict when she accosts me on Bleeker, saying that I could be sued for emotional distress, that I am pathologically insane, that I belong in an institution, and what kind of monster am I, and how heartless could a person be. I tell her if I am sued the book will still be published, so what’s the use anyway.
I do miss him sometimes and our tolerable comfort. It is a hassle to take several trains and an Uber to reach Bard.
I remember the hard stone of his Adam’s apple. And the knots of his knuckles. The bed that was ours. Puddles the cat, who misses me I’m sure.
****
Two years later, my book is set as a summertime release and the publishing house, known in the sphere for their subversive and ethically challenged autofiction, has organized a launch party for me in Brooklyn. It is unseasonably cool for July. As I walk to the venue click-clacking in my kitten heels, my sheer tank top flaps in the breeze brushing the pointed mounds of my breasts with uncomfortable sensuality. My new legs—or rather old—are swift and smooth over cracked, hilly sidewalks.
The party takes place on the second floor of a warehouse, holding a sweaty crowd of around one hundred septum-pierced, micro-banged peers. My editor and agent are in the corner, both clearly inebriated. I am quickly approached by swarms of people I recognize from Instagram but cannot name. Amidst their attempts at hugging me, I look around for any person I might actually want to see. The duskish tangerine sky slowly fades to blue through the sole window.
After an hour of unwilling socialization and four vodka lemonades, my agent tells me, slurring and spitting slightly, that it’s time to read a little excerpt. I consent, gladly, and totter up to the podium where sits a copy of my book, three-hundred-thirty pages of the life and work I have curated with such exacting precision. Three-hundred-thirty pages of lies that are, really, truths. I crack its fresh spine and it opens with a breath. Then when I look up to address my audience, I see him standing there by the doorway. He is not frowning or scowling or making a face of any kind. He’s placid and blank as if he doesn’t really see me at all. He speaks to no one and party goers seem to walk right through him. On his shoulder sits Puddles, whose teeth are bared, who looks skeletal and nearly dead.
I clear my throat and the room goes quiet. I look down at the book in my hands, this thing I have created, and begin to read.
