Infandous (12 page)

But this year, standing by the window of my guest room, looking out on the glimmering pool where Naomi is laughing and splashing with Sarah while Evie practices her best bored-teen expression in a lounger, I feel especially poor. Because if I don’t have that—that thing with my mom, that thing we’ve always had—then I’m fucking broke.

Ten

“Well, we know you’re interested in art,” says Naomi the next morning at breakfast.

I look up from my pile of cheese grits and bacon (Evie’s having cereal, but Sarah avoids her mother’s disapproving gaze and follows my lead with the cheese grits) to see where Naomi is going with this. Her expression is benign.

“Yeah,” I answer after swallowing. “Art.”

“Well, I thought maybe after a swim, we could head over to my alma mater and visit the museum on campus,” she says. “We’ll want to be somewhere indoors, with good air-conditioning. It’s supposed to be over a hundred degrees by early afternoon, and with humidity, it will feel even hotter.” She smiles like this is a good thing.

“A museum,” I say. “Sure.”

It turns out good ole Bobby will be able to go with us. Apparently, 103 is too hot for golfing, even for a pro. Right now he sits across from me, flanked by his daughters. His plate is piled high like mine, lovingly filled by Naomi. She’s only a calorie Nazi when it comes to her girls.

He sips his coffee, sweetened and creamy. “Mama says you’ve got summer school,” he says.

Bobby calls Naomi “Mama,” and she calls him “Papa.” Swear to god.

“Uh-huh,” I answer, gesturing to Evie to pass the orange juice.

“Math?”

“Geometry.”

He nods. “Lots of geometry out on the golf course. Angles and such.”

For a minute I think maybe the conversation is over, but then he asks, “Did it give you trouble the first time through?”

“Not really,” I say. “I was just busy with other things. Didn’t do the homework.”

He nods again. He doesn’t say anything stupid, like how I could have saved myself a ton of time if I would have done it right the first time through, which I appreciate. I heard all that yesterday already from Naomi, who is queen of the obvious.

It isn’t that I don’t like geometry, that I don’t get it. I use it sometimes, the basics—in my workspace, in my art. It’s just that I hate homework and tests and the whole fake classroom structure. That and the repetition. It seems to me that if you figure something out the first time, you shouldn’t be forced to repeat it over and over again, in every variation on the theme, that you should be forced to show
how
you came up with a certain answer.

Because it’s the end result that matters, isn’t it? What you have at the end of the problem? It doesn’t matter what
method
you used or what your
intentions
were going into the thing. What matters is the outcome.

“Maybe we can fit in a round of golf while you’re here, if it cools off any,” Bobby says.

“Maybe,” I answer, but even though I know he’s got good intentions, a day on the green with Bobby LeBlanc is not my idea of a good time. Come on. Why would I want to open
that
potential can of worms?

You know that book by the Russian guy—that book
Lolita
? I’d never read it until last spring, but before I read it, I thought I knew what it was about. A sexy teen girl who seduces a hapless older man. Like that eighties song “Don’t Stand So Close to Me.” Not the teacher’s fault. Not the man’s fault. She’s the siren. She seduces him.

I think when I started the thing with Felix, I was playing around with that idea. It felt sexy. To be young and powerful, to have tight flesh and high breasts and know what it means when men look at you. I
wanted
to play. I wanted to see what it felt like to wield that power, to be that girl. The one in the music video. The one with the heart-shaped sunglasses.

It wasn’t until after I read the actual Nabokov book that I saw things more clearly. Have you read it? If you haven’t, you should. Because the whole point of the thing is that the guy—the one who is “seduced”—he’s a fucking asshole.

Probably Bobby LeBlanc isn’t a fucking asshole. But I can’t see any good reason to get close enough to find out.

***

The pool is pebble-bottomed. I dive in and swim to the bottom, pushing all the air out of my lungs, and I sink. Sarah dives in after me and tries to sink too, but she doesn’t have the knack for controlling her buoyancy, and she thrashes and floats back to the surface. I can stay down, my empty lungs content for a moment. My fingers brush across the stones and alight on one that is darker than the rest. Most are white and tan and brown, but this one is black. Like onyx. The tiny multicolored pebbles feel wonderful under my hands. They all feel the same.

***

Emory University is gorgeous. The buildings—tall and straight and white. Lots of marble. Lots of trees. The trees—they help, some, with the heat, their long shadows casting relief across the pathways, but they can’t do anything about the humidity. Naomi rattles off the names of the trees—oak, pine, bottlebrush buckeyes, tulip trees—as we meander up the path toward the Michael C. Carlos Museum. We can’t do much more than meander in this heat.

It’s summer, so the campus isn’t crowded. Some students hunch under the weight of backpacks, but most people aren’t carrying much. A couple of young women pass us, one with a bag slung over her shoulder, another with a straw handbag swinging from her bent arm. They both wear sandals, not flip-flops. The one with the straw bag wears a neatly pressed knee-length skirt and a seersucker shirt, tucked in, collar popped.

I’ve got my backpack with me, and I’m only a year off college age myself. People passing us could easily think we’re a family of five—that Naomi and Bobby are my parents and that they and my two younger sisters have brought me here to start my freshman year.

Evie and Sarah will go to a college, maybe this very one. Why wouldn’t they? Their parents did, and they come from money. I’ll bet they’ll have no problem mustering up the proper letters of recommendation when the time comes.

My backpack doesn’t hold schoolbooks. My wallet is in there, my sketchpad, a couple of charcoals and pencils, and my phone. My pepper spray was in there too until the security guy took it from me at check-in when I flew out here. I’d forgotten it was in there. I know better than to think I can travel with pepper spray. Now I’ll have to get a new can.

For a moment, I indulge in the fairy tale. I play pretend. What if I
did
move to Georgia for my senior year? And what if I did enroll at Emory the year after that? Maybe my backpack would hold different things, if I lived in a castle on a hill.

***

The Michael C. Carlos Museum is housed in yet another white marble building. Old, but well preserved. It looks a little like I imagine Naomi will in about twenty years. Lots of spackle, fresh paint. Kept up.

It’s free for Naomi and Bobby to get in because they are alumni. Isn’t that the way it is? They get in free because they had the resources to go to Emory in the first place. Some poor schmo who has to ride the bus and works a craptastic job just to scrape by? He’ll have to pay.

More doors open to those who have the keys. Simple logic, really.

I don’t complain about it, though, because they pay for my ticket, and I’ve caught sight of a sign that announces the arrival of a special collection, an addition to the Michael C. Carlos’s already-impressive hoard.

“May 13 through September 1,”
the sign announces, “
Visit
Gods and Lovers
!”

“I want to see that,” I say, nodding at the sign.

Naomi perks up right away, probably because this is the first time I’ve shown any real interest in anything since landing—other than fried food.

It’s in another wing, but we head straight there, Bobby leading the way. Apparently he used to bring girls here on dates back in the good ol’ days. Naomi points to an alcove with a tall window and leans into him conspiratorially, whispering. Bobby pats her ass.

Nice.

I sneak a glance at Evie and Sarah to gauge their reaction. Sarah genuinely seems not to have noticed, or not to care. She’s training her eyes on the paintings as we glide down the hallway toward the special exhibit, and she’s got earbuds in too, so she’s in her own little world. Evie, though, stiffens a little and tightens her mouth. Not a fan of her parents’ public display of affection.

I don’t remember ever minding that my mother was a sexual creature as well as a parent. Maybe it’s because her sexuality was almost always off-limits to others. Maybe it’s because we’re more like sisters, in some ways, than parent and child. Maybe it’s because she’s so obviously beautiful that of course she’s an object of desire, someone men would want to touch. I love to touch her too, though I haven’t much, lately.

I used to spend hours at the beach finding ways to touch her body—braiding her hair and winding seaweed into its strands; encasing her legs in a wet-sand tail, which I’d decorate with stones and shells; and rearranging the triangles of her bikini top to better display her breasts, which I loved and knew without her having to say were off-limits now, though she’d told me with pride that I’d nursed longer than any other baby she knew, until I was over three years old.

If I try really hard, I can almost remember it—lying in her arms, my head tipped back, my hands splayed across her chest, her heavy breast dipped into my mouth as I pulled at its nipple, the warm pulse of her milk jetting into my mouth.

When you are young, you can drink your fill of your mother.

When you are older, others drink their fill of you.

A framed poster outside the double-wide doorway to the special exhibit hall announces we’ve arrived—
Gods and Lovers
. I let the LeBlancs enter first; they follow the rest of the crowd, going to the left toward the nearest statue. I turn right and don’t look back.

The first statue I encounter is huge, made even larger by its subject—it’s
Leda and the Swan
. There she is—Leda—taller than I am and made taller by her pedestal. It’s hard to tell if the swan is attacking or embracing her. It’s as big as she is, its enormous wings too heavy to ever fly, one draping behind its body, the other wrapping around her shoulder. Its neck is curved into a C as one of her arms seems to push it away, but the serpentine loop of its neck is so long that its beak is just a whisper away from her mouth. Its webbed talon feet clutch her thighs, and Leda reaches down between her legs—to stop it from entering her? To help it find its way inside? Back when Ms. Kramer told us the story, I would have assumed the former—that her hand was blocking the bird’s bizarre swan penis. But now I don’t know. Her expression is ambiguous, with those flat, round eyes that give away nothing. Maybe she likes it. Maybe she wants it to stop. I can’t tell. The swan, though, is all forward energy, lustful, insistent. The swan knows what it wants, and I know, from the story Ms. Kramer told us, that it won the day. Nine months later, Leda laid an egg.

Then there’s
Apollo and Daphne
. Their statue is not far from
Leda and the Swan
. This time it’s the girl who transforms, and it’s not to mate but rather to escape. He was a god who lusted for a girl. She was a virgin who wanted to stay that way. So when he chased her through the forest, begging her, wooing her, and maybe even threatening her, she ran and ran. Finally, her strength began to fade, and, desperate and determined to escape, she called to the river god for help. And just as Apollo is about to grab her flesh, she transforms—her arms lengthening into branches, her fingertips flowering into leaves, and her legs spreading into roots. She becomes a laurel tree and preserves her virginity.

She’s kind of like a mermaid. Legs cleaved together into something impenetrable, made more nature than woman. There’s safety in that. But now she’s stuck and can’t ever run again.

This statue, by Bernini, shows Daphne at the moment of her transformation, with Apollo almost upon her. Leaves spring up around her, and the movement of her hair suggests it’s growing up into the sky, not weighed down by gravity anymore but rather supported by a series of limbs. Her mouth is open—in ecstasy? In fear? In triumph? I just don’t know anymore.

I feel Evie and Sarah trailing behind me. They are silent, but they are there. I can feel their weight and their breath, and they look at me looking at the statues. I know what I see in these statues—beauty and fear and ecstasy and pain all woven together. What I don’t know is what they see in me—which of my emotions are too buoyant to stay beneath the surface, what hidden parts of me demand to be acknowledged.

Then I find Persephone, entrapped in Hades’s arms. Her left hand pushes hard into his face, and the marble there is wrinkled like skin. His crown may fall if she pushes harder. His beard could tangle in her fingers. His arms wrap around her waist, one hand pressing into the flesh of her thigh, and I think that if he let go, we’d see bruises there in her white marble skin, so tightly does he hold her.

There’s no ambiguity here; Persephone is trying so hard to get free that I can almost hear a cry issue from her split lips. I can feel the vibrations of her effort to escape. He won’t let her go. He is bigger; he is stronger. He is older, and he is a god. With him at his feet is the three-headed Cerberus, jaws loose, teeth bared, ready to help bring her to submission if Hades needs assistance. But he won’t.

She is just a girl.

The sculptures are beautiful even though the subject matter is terrible. That book
Lolita
is like that too. And I wonder about that—about taking pleasure from these women’s pain. Of course they’re not real—they’re mythological—they’re pretend, but whatever. It’s only because real women were raped and real men raped that any of this makes a connection for people. All around me people look and point and discuss, faces neutral or lit up in delight. Their pain, our pleasure. I wonder—does that make us complicit? Guilty by association?