Infandous (9 page)

Not complicated and generally not really my thing, but after I’ve polished off the second vodka, it’s starting to look like fun. I shove my way in between Marissa and Darrin.

It’s Darrin’s turn to shoot, and he misses. Then it’s my turn. I miss too, but Marissa’s killer at this game, so she makes it. She points to me the first time, then Lolly when she makes it again, and drinks the damn thing herself on the third one, just to impress the rest of us, I think, and it works.

“New rule!” she declares after slamming the cup onto the table. “If you miss, you have to drink.”

So pretty quickly most of us go from buzzed to blitzed, because no one except Darrin is as good at Quarters as Marissa.

No one is paying attention to me now, not like before with Marissa when the room’s eyes focused in my direction, and that’s okay. It’s more what I’m used to, and I get to be the observer again rather than the show.

Everyone around me has the lidded eyes of the inebriated and the stoned. They’re staring into their cups or at the TV screen or at each other, the same basic expression on everyone’s face. It’s been long enough now that dinner at the Chinese restaurant must be over. Even if they stayed for green tea ice cream, even if they had another beer, they must be home by now. They must be together, probably downstairs in Jordan’s place, and I see him in my mind, pressing into my mother, his knee wedged between her legs. I see him winding himself around and between and inside of her.

We are all getting drunker. Someone should stop this, and it occurs to me that if I ever sink three shots in a row, I could reverse Marissa’s rule, but by the time I finally do, my quarter plinking as it lands inside the glass, I’ve lost that train of thought. Instead, I call out, “New rule!”

The others look at me: Marissa expectantly, Sal cynically, Darrin hopefully, and Lolly drunkenly. Her blonde braids are askew, tumbledown. I think she’s had enough to drink, but that’s her call.

“Here’s the rule: if you drink with your right hand and someone busts you, you have to tell that person a secret you’ve never told them.”

“I’m left-handed already,” says Lolly. “What about me?”

“The rest of you are righties, aren’t you?” I ask.

They nod. I turn to Lolly. “That’s okay. You’re pretty wasted anyway. Just remember to use the hand you always use.”

Next, it’s Sal’s turn to shoot. He sinks it and looks at Darrin. “Drink, bitch,” he says.

Darrin looks at me full of intention and picks up the cup with his right hand. Now I feel kind of stupid because it’s obvious he’s screwing with my rule, but I say, “Darrin, you have the memory of a goldfish. You’re supposed to use your other hand.”

“Now I have to tell you a secret, right?”

I shrug. “That’s the rule.”

“I’m freaking in love with you, Sephora.”

Okay. Darrin’s drunk, of course, and he’s the kind of guy who’s in love with the idea of love, if you know what I mean. He likes all of it, I think—the anticipation, the buildup, the first kiss, the relationship drama, and even the breakup. The cycle.

So I don’t take him too seriously. I smile and say, “Thanks, Darrin, that’s sweet.”

He looks kind of pissed, but he shrugs.

It goes like that for a while. Most everyone remembers my rule and the new ones too—Marissa rescinds her rule on her next turn, since everyone is obviously getting way too shit-faced. Lolly adds, before she gets too drunk to play anymore, that anyone who drinks gets to choose someone else who has to drink too; and then Darrin says anyone who sinks a shot gets to make out with anyone until someone else sinks a shot.

That’s about when Lolly drops out of the game, probably because she doesn’t want Sal to kiss her when it’s his turn. He gives her
that look
, and she heads into the kitchen to scrounge for some bread to soak up the alcohol in her stomach.

Darrin is the next person to sink a quarter, and it’s no surprise when he crooks his finger at me. So okay, we kiss, and it’s not terrible, not great but not terrible either. It’s nothing like the kiss with Marissa—I let Darrin lead and I follow, and his sweet mushy mouth doesn’t ask for much. It’s nothing like how I imagine Jordan is kissing my mother, full of passion and depth of meaning. It’s nothing like how it had been with Felix. Darrin’s kiss doesn’t melt me at all, which is a relief.

Darrin, I realize as he breaks away and grins at me, all happy and dopey, is the first guy to kiss me since Felix last winter.

“Why’d you stop, faggot?” Sal slurs. I hear a quarter bounce off the table and roll onto the floor. Darrin kisses me again.

I wonder if maybe kissing Darrin can overwrite what I did with Felix, you know, like when you reuse a canvas, painting something new over something else. Except of course whatever you painted before isn’t erased; it’s just buried. It’s still there under the new layer of color and texture. It doesn’t go away. And whatever you’ve done before doesn’t go away either, no matter how purposefully you ignore it, how many new experiences you try to layer over it. Fairy tales are like this too. Disney makes them prettier and cleans them up, glossing over the gory parts and playing up the princess angle. But like with art, the original stories are underneath. They bleed through. With paintings that have been colored over, sometimes restorers strip away what’s on top to reveal the canvas’s first picture.

I guess that’s like what people do in therapy. Right? They try to peel away the layers of action, of reaction, of feelings to get at the original source. The moment that precipitates everything that comes after.

The girl on the screen sounds like she’s crying now, but that can’t be right because this isn’t that kind of porno. It’s just that it can all bleed together, one thing can look like something else.

My workspace has a concrete floor webbed with scratch marks I’ve made cutting apart boxes with my X-Acto blade. Layers and layers of shapes cut into the floor until there is no way to untangle them, no way to say that this came before that but after this. No way to separate one image from the next. And layered together like that, intractably enmeshed, they form their own picture, different from anything I intended, but all me nonetheless.

No one is sinking quarters—it’s like they’ve all agreed to let Darrin have his fill of me—and Darrin is showing no signs of satiety. He runs his fingers through my hair in a move I’d bet he got from some chick flick, and his kiss goes on and on. I let him. What’s the harm? He wants so little from me, just this, my lips, my breath. His mouth is too wet, too soft, more like puppy licks than anything else. One hand drops from my hair and paws at my side, coming as close as he dares to my breast.

Finally, Sal sinks a shot and tells me to drink and, thinking about my studio floor, about lines cut into concrete, about layers of paint and art and painful mistakes, I forget to lift the cup with my left hand.

“Caught you,” says Marissa. “Cough up a secret.”

Maybe this is what I wanted all along.

I finish my drink and set down the cup with an unsteady hand. Then I look deep into her eyes, their dark cobalt waiting with a mix of expectation and humor. The humor fades as she recognizes the weight in my expression.

“Secret,” I say. “I am a horrible person.”

A moment passes, and then her face cracks into a grin. “No secret,” she says. “I already knew that.”

And of course she’s joking, but she’s wrong. I am horrible. I have become a beast, an abomination. A cautionary tale.

It’s only in the absence of sound that I realize the porno isn’t on anymore. I look at the screen, expecting it to be blank, but it’s not; it’s paused. Someone must be sitting on the remote or something, but everyone’s too stoned to notice. The movie is stuck on a shot of the girl’s face, close up, and I think the expression is supposed to be ecstasy, but it could also be pain or some kind of horrible recognition. A word comes to me—
anagnorisis
—a term I managed to retain from the stupid vocab list in the Greek unit last year. I can see the flash card: “The awareness of the way things really are.”

But then the moment has passed. Someone’s ass unpauses the movie and the others are back to their game and I push back out of my chair.

“You leaving, Seph?” asks Marissa.

Sal smiles at me and rubs his hand up Marissa’s thigh, and he says, “You don’t gotta leave, do you, Seph?” and I don’t think I’m imagining the intention in his eyes.

This party is over, at least for me. “Crandall at eight,” I say. So I leave and they stay and I’ve spoken my truth, but no one cares, not really.

***

And at home, even before I push open the bedroom door to see the still-made bed, I know I am alone. If I stand very still and listen, I can hear them downstairs. The rhythm of their bodies, the rocking of her hips, the cleaving of her tail into legs and sea-deep wetness and warmth.

The shadow on the wall is mine. It must be, because no one else is here.

Eight

The next day I leave early for summer school, before my mother comes back upstairs. I don’t leave a note. And that night when she gets home from work, she texts me rather than knocking on the door of the storage room—where I’ve been from the moment Crandall released us. I text back that I’m not hungry.

R u mad?

I stare at her words on the screen, sifting through my emotions to see if the word
mad
matches any of them.

No
.

A moment later she writes,
I love u.

U 2.

It’s so
upside down
, isn’t it? That’s how it feels to me. I mess with that image awhile, a mermaid floating tail-up in the sky, like a constellation, her hair a ribbon of gold reaching almost down to the top of a cityscape, her long copper tail too big to even fit entirely in the picture, disappearing into the uppermost edge of my notebook. I smear pastels to make the dreamlike sky, the wave of hair. The silhouette of the city is rough in charcoal.

The problem with mermaids—one of them, anyway—is that they can’t have sex. Not
human
sex, anyway—a mermaid doesn’t have a vagina. What
does
she have? One tail, not two legs, no cleft, no hidden female potential. I imagine what a mermaid would have to go through to have sex—ripping her tail in two to create a space between, the act more violent than any hymen tearing. And self-inflicted. A choice. Irrevocable.

My phone makes a little sound that alerts me when someone had posted something new to my web page. The screen on my shitty phone is too shitty to really see anything, so I flip open my computer and log on. It is a message from that new follower, Joaquin.
Is this you?
he has written. And he’s attached a photo. I click it open; there is my baby pie, my
INFANDOUS
, framed by the coffee shop window.

An artist’s work is like her fingerprint.

Joaquin knows my art. Does that mean he knows
me?

It must mean that he’s a local too. I imagine him wandering the streets of Venice, coming upon my baby pie. The composition of the photo is actually really interesting—the way the front half of the pie is washed out, overexposed, and the back half, with one of the jutting legs, recedes into shadow.

Who’s asking?
I respond to his post.

His answer comes back right away, as if he has been waiting.
Just me.

Of course this doesn’t help at all because I don’t know who “me” is. And what is he asking? If the art is mine? Or if I am the baby inside?

I write back,
Yes.

I would know you anywhere
, he writes back, and honestly this guy is starting to creep me out.

What are you, some kind of stalker?

No, just a lover of art.

I type
Thanks
and close the tab.

***

Upstairs I find that my mom has made a salad and mac and cheese—the real stuff, not from a box. There’s even half a bottle of wine and two glasses on the table. Screw top—nothing she’d ever buy. But after a day so long and hot and shitty, it’s not very hard for me to avoid thinking about who did. Or to avoid dwelling on how things must have gone if they didn’t even manage to finish it. The meal feels like an apology dinner even though she hasn’t done anything wrong. Still, she feels sheepish, I can tell, which makes me feel bad because I hate it when she feels bad.

I take an extra big helping of the pasta even though I’m not really hungry and make a big deal about how good it is. We eat for a while in silence. She’s lit a candle, a squat yellow one, and it flickers between us. I hold up my glass and watch the candle flicker through the candy-pink wine. Through the liquid the flame looks grotesque, hellish. Or maybe that’s just me, reflected back.

The door’s propped open because it’s hot in here. Every now and then we hear movement, either out on our landing or from downstairs, and I feel myself tensing each time, wondering if Jordan is going to pop in.

Finally, my mom says, “Sephora, honey, would you like to talk about it?”

I know what she thinks the “it” is.

And that’s something, and probably we should talk about it. So I take another drink and say sure. And she tells me how it’s just fun, for a change, and maybe that makes her not the best role model and she’s sorry, but sometimes it’s fun to have fun, and of course if it really bothers me or makes me uncomfortable, then she’ll stop because it’s nothing—
he’s
nothing—compared to the two of us.

“It’s you and me, Sephora,” she says, and I know from the earnestness in her voice and the touch of her hand on mine across the table, our fingers woven together, and from the fact that she’s said this so many times before—
you and me, Sephora
—that she means it. That I am enough for her.

But she can mean it all she wants. It’s not the whole truth, even if she thinks it is. Because no one person can be that—everything—for anyone else. Not really. Her hands do more than hold mine.

Still, I smile as I unwind my fingers from hers. Her nails, like always, are perfect, each a lacquered pink shell, and I run my fingers across them in the way I always have. I let go and smile again, this time into her eyes.