Lord Fear (16 page)

“Jesus Christ, Lena,” he begins on cue. “That is so fattening. There are five
hundred
calories there. And none of them are productive.”

His lips are pursed. His head is angled down in disappointment.
One clump of wet hair has curved over his forehead like a parenthesis. Lena almost slides it off with her finger, then doesn't. He looks right at her, posture rigid, only enhancing the superiority, dark and lucid irises like ink. He tries to snatch her food, but she's expecting this and pulls away too fast, hides her daily corn-syrup doses behind her back.

She sticks her tongue out at him. He marvels aloud at his own patience, says that when he stands over the premature grave where Lena's total lack of willpower will take her, he will not feel responsible or even sorry, not even a little.

“Bury me with my Twinkies,” she yells, and he laughs and that feels good.

A pigeon dive-bombs them, streaking toward Lena's unkempt hair. She flails at it with her Twinkies, her can. Josh shrieks in spite of himself, a noise so preposterous coming from him. Their eyes meet and now they're both laughing, until the laughing runs out and they're just breathing.

In the pause, Lena wants to ask why he wasn't waiting for her yesterday, why he does that sometimes, and does he know what it feels like to stand and wait, how small she is on wide sidewalks, the way doormen look at her with pity? She wants to grab him by the elbow and say, Jesus, of course she knows it's hard for him some days. She sees the frail parts of him, and if anybody can understand when he doesn't want to go outside and see all the faces moving past, closing in, it's her. She notices on the mornings when he comes down with drawn eyes, without having bothered to wash his face or brush his teeth, when mushed cereal and chewed fingernails are sticking to his gums. It's a small thing, but she notices. He can try to explain if he wants to. She'll listen.

Josh reenters his monologue, undeterred. “If there's any time you shouldn't be eating junk, it's the fucking morning. It sets a
bad precedent. Your day is ruined. Right now, you are actively ruining your day.”

She nods. He continues.

“Your hair's all dirty, you could fit five people in that shirt, you're drinking a Coke at eight in the morning. And then the Twinkie. Like a fucking hobo.”

Does he realize that she baits these moments for him?

“Seriously, tell me what you'd think of yourself if you saw you on the street.”

He speaks loud enough for any stranger around to hear, and fellow commuters grin at the back-and-forth as they shuffle to the tram. Young people caring, what a thing to look at. She feels the rain angling in, wetting the bottom of her jeans. She sees him notice this, mid-rant, and pull closer, wrapping them tighter under his trench coat, dry.

—

At the bus stop, she paints his face. She moves slowly, as tender as she can, trying to get his every detail right. It smells like piss in the bus stop, but Lena breathes through her mouth and concentrates. They're never closer than this. He has relinquished control. His eyes are closed for her. She watches their involuntary flutters as she rakes mascara along his lashes, and thinks of how thin a layer it is that keeps our eyeballs from anything that might hurt them. His lashes are long and cresting.
You could be a pretty girl
, she thinks, though she would never tell him.

He is ashamed of his acne, which really isn't that bad. He is ashamed, too, Lena thinks, of his need to cover it up, his inability to tolerate flaws that are so common. It would be impossible for him to allow the general public to see a pimple. But he's no good at the makeup and so he trusts Lena, only Lena, to do this. She feels her hands tremble still, always, as she decorates him, hiding the ritual as best she can with her narrow body.

With practiced, careful hands, she runs concealer in generous swaths across his face. She paints his eyelids, tries to contrast that blackness with a nice, subtle rouge on his cheeks.

“Almost done,” she says.

He opens his eyes, and right away they're moving in darts, finding strangers that might be looking at him in judgment.

“Nobody's looking,” she tells him. “Hold still.”

She finishes and he turns away from her.

He doesn't say thank you. He never does. He reaches for his hair, sculpting it with the rainwater, making it match his clothes, his body, his face. When he turns back, Lena gives him a thumbs-up and he snorts, and she wonders if there is any lamer gesture in the pantheon of human gestures than a thumbs-up.

On the bus, dancer girls look at Josh, and middle-aged women, and businessmen, too, feigning casual scorn when Lena knows that they feel envy, maybe lust. He is happy, undeniably, for these moments. She likes thinking that she has helped make him happy. He relaxes a little into his seat. He takes his headphones off and surprises her by placing them gently over her ears. He leans in and says, “I love this song more than anything. Listen.”

She thinks it's the most haunting song she's ever heard. It's Roxy Music's “More Than This.” It's slow and mournful, and they're both high school art students who believe that all mournful things are genius, have consequence. More than this, the singer tells her, you know there's nothing more than this. And it doesn't feel overblown to think, Hey, yeah, he's right.

“I love it,” she tells Josh.

He grins and takes his headphones back.

When they get to school, he messes her already messed hair with his fingers and walks through the front door ahead of her, doesn't turn around. She finds her people, underclass wind instrumentalists—shy trombonists, overcompensating piccolo
masters. She stands with them, clumped against a remote section of lockers. Josh, armored in her makeup job, strides through the hallways, greeting, getting greeted. He stops at no group, offers nothing more to anyone than a quick grin, a few words or maybe a two-fingered salute. Lena watches him greet Youngblood Haskell, the prettiest and broodingest of the school's pretty, brooding skinhead painters. The hallway seems to part for them as Josh leans into Youngblood, says something funny enough to make this boy with so much invested in his own seriousness laugh.

Lena wants very badly to someday speak to Youngblood Haskell and is very certain that she never will. Josh won't introduce them. She won't exist, not in any visible way. But she's included by association, and she's proud as she watches Josh, swaggering and fragile, earning laughter. How terrifying it must feel for him in the second before he gets a response, how blissful when the laughter comes.

Lena will never tell anybody about those mornings when his teeth are unbrushed, his eyes red and darting. She won't tell about the flecks of Cheerios stuck on his gums, the smell coming off him when he's been thrashing in a panicked lather all night and hasn't bothered to wash. She won't tell how she breathes through her mouth to tolerate closeness, refusing to slide farther away in her seat because of how awful it would feel to shame him like that when he is already so shamed. How they can be silent together on the walk, then the tram, then the bus, and she won't push him to talk because to open his mouth might reveal something grotesquely weak, something that he can't take back. Those moments are hers.

Homeroom bell rings. He is gone. She will see him tomorrow.

—

It's over too quickly. The last journeys of Josh's high school tenure are tied to that feeling, an internal countdown for Lena. How many times have they done the same thing, developing toward nothing but an end?

“At least three hundred times,” she tells him on the bus. “We've gone to school together exactly the same way at least three hundred times. And now it's just going to stop.”

This is a sad thing. She wants him to confirm it. He won't. He starts poking her cushionless ribs.
Look, look, look
. She slaps his hand away. C'mon, he says. He puts his arm in her face and flexes.

He wants her to touch his biceps. He's been doing something different with his weight routine. More reps or more weight, one or the other. It doesn't make complete sense to her, but it means that he's no longer defining muscle and is instead adding bulk. For college women. Because older women like bulk. He flexes harder, reddening from all the flexing.
Touch it
. People are watching.
Touch it
. She relents. She pokes his biceps. It doesn't move. It's like overcooked steak, she thinks.

“Feel that?”

“What am I supposed to be feeling?”

“Come on.”

She sighs and says—God, she can't even believe it as she says it—“It's big,” and he gives a full trapezoid smile, head swiveling around the bus looking for eye contact, confirming for all commuters that, yes, she touched it and, yes, it's big. He throws his fists up over his head, simulates a crowd roar in the back of his throat.

They won't see each other again once there isn't a scheduled reason to. She knows that, and she is even a little proud of her lack of delusion. There won't be a place for this anymore. Oddly, Lena feels less like she's being abandoned and more like she is abandoning him. Who will armor him for a day of other people's
eyes when he's in a freshman lecture or a crowded dorm room and she isn't there to help? How can she let him do his own costuming?

Lena, touch it again. Come on, Lena. Lena, do it, come on
.

This time she tries two fingers, jabs her middle and index hard into his biceps, determined to make skin dent. She feels her face scrunching up with the effort. She is not this girl by nature. She will never be this girl again. She wants to ask him what they'll do when he's on college break. She has vague ideas of taking the tram over the river on Christmas Eve, lights on the water below them, Empire State Building in front of them, red and green. But that's not the kind of thing they do.

She wants to ask if he'll be okay, but she wouldn't be able to get more specific.

“We'll still see each other,” she says instead, stuck between an assertion and a question. He says nothing in response. He cares. She knows he does, even if he doesn't want her to. Care is in every movement he makes, in the way his eyes glance at her, then away, then back again. Still, she'd have loved it if he said something.

—

She hears his voice once more after high school, through a phone. It's six, maybe seven years since the bus and the makeup and the muscles. Lena is out of college, working her first real job, occupying one half of a cubicle, an assistant at a publishing company on Madison Avenue. She's just a mile or so from the auditorium where they both had their graduations, Josh first, Lena watching in the back with her flutist friends. That was the last time she saw him. She has thought of him, yes. She tried to explain him once to her college roommate, stoned—
We never even kissed
.

Her desk phone rings and she jumps. It's still a surprise when a stranger in another office somewhere is directed intentionally to her. She lets it ring three times and then picks up.

“Hi, this is Josh from Pinnacle Paper,” says the person on the other end of the line.

His voice is the same. She doesn't need a last name to be sure. She can't speak, and she hears her breath, loud, crackling through the line.

“Hello?” A sigh.

There is no indication that he's called for her specifically, no excitement in his voice. This is a price-per-volume call, a pitch. His job is worse than hers, lower, more mundane. She realizes that. It stings. She imagines him at a desk in a warehouse, cold-calling from a fat binder, trying to convince bored publishing underlings to tell their bosses to turn his blank reams into units of someone else's art.

She feels her palm sticking to plastic.

“Oh, oh hi, it's me,” she says, finally. “It's Lena.”

“Oh,” he says.

She'd heard from Roosevelt Island friends that he had a band, that they'd gotten a few gigs. This made sense and she was happy for him. Then she heard it was over. She'd heard he was starting to write songs, had his own production company. It was vague, but she liked the idea of him bellowing orders, imagined him with a movie director's megaphone. She hadn't heard anything else.

She forces herself to speak before he hangs up, her voice too big and eager, trying to fill awkward emptiness with overwhelming cheer.

“How
are
you? Oh my God, small world! Paper, huh?”

His embarrassment leaks through the phone. She can picture something shivering in his eyes, his face fifteen again in her mind, and nobody next to him at his desk to help him by staying close. She wants to stop and start the conversation over, remove the crazed squeal from her voice. There has to be an unpatronizing way to say,
I care for you. You are better than where you are now. I believe that
.

He starts talking about paper prices. He says that he can offer her boss a better deal than anything he's currently got. He promises that.

Lena looks down at herself—the khakis, the white blouse with a cluster of unnecessary buttons up around her neck. Payless work shoes, sensible chic. Yes, she feels ridiculous, and no, she's not exactly happy. But still, fine, it's to be expected. This is a quiet beginning to a settled life that is, and has always been, appropriate for her. It doesn't bother her that much to think about it. He's the one who isn't meant to be in this conversation, but he keeps going, flat and almost mean with his persistence.

Lena stays silent through Josh's pitch, and when he's done she offers no counter. It would have been good, hardball negotiating if it were intentional.

“Well then, look, if there's no wiggle room, I've got to go,” he says.

She wants time to think of something to say.

“If you're happy with your supplier, that's fine,” he says. “Keep us in mind.”

She hears the phone click on his end, and she is returned to her high school self, the sound of a hang-up enough to make her limbs heavy. She holds the receiver to her ear until she hears a dial tone. She thinks of him on the bus. She thinks of the two of them, surrounded and alone. She tells herself that she will see him again. It's just a matter of waiting until he wants to be seen. Seeing him on his terms. The two of them on the bus in the morning, older, happier, too, but him still flexing, her still poking his arm to make him smile.