Quarantine: Stories (12 page)

Several days later, we are fighting about little pieces of chopped onion that have spilled and stuck to the linoleum floor.

I tell him, “I cannot bear the things I must say, day after day, and the words I must use to say them.”

O
ur last summer together, we take a trip with our friends from New York, as we do every summer, to Carson’s family’s summer house, called The Camp. The house was built over a hundred years ago, before the Brice family lost all its money. Most of the family’s other properties were sold off long ago, but The Camp is protected by a trust.

When we are shopping for summer reading before our trip, Carson buys a recent issue of a literary quarterly that published one of his short stories, years ago, although its editors have rejected all his subsequent submissions. The recent issue is guest-edited by a woman who wrote a famous memoir about a sexual relationship she had with her estranged half-brother after they were both adults. The issue is called “The End of Love” and is filled with stories about couples breaking up.

Carson is into symbolism. During the trip, I hardly see him actually reading the quarterly, but he carries it around and places it next to him, face up, when he sits on the couch. He lies on the beach, hugging it.

This year, one of our old friends, Becky, has brought along a new girlfriend, Laura, whom none of us likes. Becky is a writer and Laura is an artist. At the beginning of every month, Laura presents Becky with a blank book she has made by hand. At the end of the month, Becky returns the book to Laura, full of poems. They have been doing this every month for the seven months they have been dating.

I think it’s a bad idea.

In the car on our way to the beach, I ask Becky and Laura, “What happens when a month goes by and no one feels like making a book? Or what if someone has a busy month at work or falls ill? Or what if someone runs out of inspiration and has nothing to write about?” To emphasize my point, I start singing “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers Anymore.”

Becky looks at Laura and says, “That won’t happen.”

“But what if it does?” I ask.

Becky says, “It won’t.”

“But what if it does?”

Laura says, “Even if it does, maybe it would be for the best. At least there’d be a sign that there is a problem. There is nothing worse than stumbling along, with everyone knowing the relationship is over except you.”

The beach where we are driving used to be owned by the Brice family. It’s about two miles long, crescent-shaped, with rock jetties bracketing it on either side. Most of it was sold, fifty years ago, to the state of Connecticut, which turned it into a very popular public beach. But the family kept a sliver of sand, forty yards or so, partly to remind themselves of better times, and partly so that they would still have something to call Brice Beach, which has such a nice ring.

Neither the family nor the state erected any marker to separate the public from the private, so naturally, the crowds spill over onto Brice Beach. Usually, it isn’t a problem.

On this particular day, a noisy motorboat drops its anchor just offshore in the private part. The driver, who has a deep tan, which will surely turn cancerous, is lying in his boat with the motor running. Now and then he pops up, as though he is expecting someone, and then lies back down. The motor spews fumes, chopping the water, and preventing us from swimming.

Monique, who is Carson’s oldest friend, says, “Carson, maybe you should tell that guy to leave. It’s your beach.”

Carson is lying on a blanket with his sunglasses on, the quarterly resting open, page-down, on his chest.

“Yeah, Carson,” I say. “Tell him.”

Carson says nothing. Monique may have been joking, but I am getting angry.

“You’re not going to tell him, are you?” I ask. I walk over to where he is lying, and my shuffling feet kick sand on him. “That’s just like you. You want to tell him, everyone wants you to tell him, but you can’t.”

Carson says, “If you feel so strongly, why don’t you say something?”

He brushes the sand off his arms and legs and rolls onto his stomach.

When Carson gets up much later, he has marks on his torso where the edges of the quarterly have dug into his flesh.

C
arson finally manages to leave me the following fall. I come home and find the
dear john
letter taped to the mirror in the upstairs bathroom. I read it once standing at the bathroom sink, from beginning to end. Then I close the toilet seat cover, sit down, and read it again.

He says he needs time.

He says nothing is definite.

He says he misses New York more than he knew.

He says he is going back to sort things out. He will be at Monique’s, but please don’t call; he will be in touch when he is ready.

He says it isn’t me.

The letter is all lies, especially the last part. If it were true, if it isn’t me, then why didn’t he leave the note somewhere else: on the kitchen counter, where the muffins should be, or taped to the screen of the television set, the one we bought when Sangeeta didn’t give us hers? Why did he leave it in the bathroom for me to read and have nothing to look at except myself in the mirror? Why has he left me alone?

I say alone, but I suppose I am not. Krishna is downstairs, thriving quietly. We have kept our promise. He is twice the size as when we got him, and his bluish hue has disappeared. Sangeeta was right about what the color meant.

T
hree weeks after the
dear john
letter, a month after the
mind the deer, dear
one, the animal I encounter in the road is not a deer, but a dog. He has a plastic trick-or-treat basket, shaped like a jack-o’-lantern, stuck on his head. He is stumbling around in the middle of the road.

Several cars in front of me swerve. I pull to the side of the road and get out, intending to remove the basket, but I can’t catch the dog. He is scared. There is no reasoning with him.

I decide the dog must belong to someone in the neighborhood, and I start ringing doorbells. The first two doors go unanswered; behind the third is a man who has not brushed his teeth. He looks at the dog through squinty eyes, thinks for a minute, and says the dog belongs to the woman in 152. He points down the street and quickly shuts the door.

I walk two houses down and ring the bell. A woman answers. She is wearing nice slacks and a thin leather belt and drinking a breakfast shake from a can.

“Is that your dog?” I ask.

She looks at it as though she’s never seen it before. After a minute she says, “How’d that get there?” She marches out to the street, grabs the handle of the trick-or-treat basket, and leads the dog back to the door. She asks me to hold her breakfast shake. She pushes the dog into the house, without removing the basket, and shuts the door behind him. She reclaims her breakfast shake from me and says, “I’m late.” She gets in her car, which is parked in the driveway.

I am late now, too, but I am worried about the dog. Perhaps there is someone inside the house to help him, though I wonder if that someone isn’t the one who put the basket on his head in the first place.

I walk over to the woman and knock on her car window. She is fumbling for cigarettes. She looks startled and annoyed. I motion for her to roll down her window, which she does.

“Do you need help getting the jack-o’-lantern off the dog’s head?” I ask.

She pauses and then says, “Mind your own business.” She rolls up her window and adjusts her rearview mirror.

As she is doing this, I notice in her rear window a high school parking sticker that identifies her as “FACULTY.” A smudge on the window obscures the letter “C.”

I understand, and I forgive her her faults.

I knock on her door and motion for her to roll down her window again. “What now?” she asks.

“Every day after work,” I tell her, “when I get in my car, I have to readjust my rearview mirror. For a while, I wondered why this was happening. I thought maybe someone was breaking into my car and taking it for a joy ride. Then I realized, it is because I shrink during the day. My life makes me shrink.

“I sit at a computer all day. I took an ergonomics workshop so I could figure out how not to shrink. ‘Your head is a balloon,’ they told me. They said, ‘To correct your posture, think of your head as a helium-filled balloon, pulling your spine upward.’ ”

The woman’s eyes have wandered to her front yard, where her dog, who has somehow gotten out of the house again, is stumbling around. He still has the basket stuck on his head.

“So the ergonomics people,” I continue, “installed software on my computer, so that every forty-five minutes a stick figure of a man sitting in a chair appears on my screen. The figure’s head is a balloon. The balloon makes his neck long and his spine straight. It’s supposed to remind me to do the same.

“But if I were the stick figure, I wouldn’t want the balloon just to straighten my spine. I would want it to carry me away, off the screen, as far away as it could.”

“Why are you telling me all this?” the woman says, looking angry.

“Because,” I say, “I am faulty, too.”

“I don’t have time for this,” she says. She shifts the car in reverse and peels out of the driveway, almost running over my foot.

I look at the dog, who is whimpering and pawing at the basket on his head.

I try again to remove the basket. Now he is too tired and defeated to resist. When I get it off, he licks me.

It is no longer early morning. My boss will already be at work, as will my co-workers. Wan-Chen will be crying quietly at her desk, since mornings are hardest for her.

I have decided what to do. I will rescue the dog, which I have already, in my head, named “Lucky.” I will put him in the car, turn around, and drive home.

But when I bring the car over and open the passenger door, Lucky doesn’t want to get in. He looks at me and runs in the opposite direction. He dashes around the front yard, toward and away from the house, barking insistently. He sounds strange, not like a real dog, but more like a cartoon dog, or a stuffed dog with a speaker and a button that says, PRESS HERE.

What is he barking at? It could be anything: the sun, the tree, a squirrel or a bird he has glimpsed out of the corner of his eye. Or maybe he is barking at the small blue house itself. Or someone inside the house, or something that has happened there. How can anyone know what happens in houses?

I think of TV dogs like Lassie, Benji, and Rin Tin Tin. When those dogs bark, they are trying to communicate something vital. People who hear them understand. Someone is trapped in a burning house. Someone is tied to a chair in an abandoned warehouse by the wharf. Someone is holding on to a branch in a fast-flowing river heading for a waterfall, and the branch is about to break.

1.

W
hen Antwon was awarded an Individual Artist Grant from the NEA—back when the NEA was still routinely awarding such grants; before Congress, enraged by artists like Andres Serrano submerging a crucifix in a vat of piss and Karen Finley smearing her naked body with chocolate, threatened to defund it—Antwon used the money to hire men for sex and then write about it.

Don was one of them. Or so it would seem.

That was before Don was my boyfriend.

Don wasn’t a prostitute. He was Antwon’s friend. He was also his former student: “Structured Improvisation,” at a summer dance festival a few years earlier. Don was still in college then. Now he was in New York, trying to make his way in the dance world.

Antwon knew Don needed money. Don knew Antwon wanted him.

Antwon was almost twice his age. (Not that he needed to pay for sex: he had a dancer’s body.)

Even after Don and I met and moved in together—a one-bedroom in Crown Heights overrun by cockroaches we named after conservative politicians—Don continued to see Antwon once every couple of weeks. They sat at a back table at Kiev, and Antwon ate pierogies and Don, borscht. Or they met on a Monday night at Marion’s and drank cosmopolitans.

I knew what they ate, what they drank, because these were answers to questions I allowed myself to ask.

One of Antwon’s short stories about paying men for sex is anthologized in a collection of gay erotica I discovered on my bookshelf shortly after Don and I moved in together. I found the book on a shelf I had designated for Don. We segregated our books on my insistence. I told him that, as a writer, I needed to be able to locate my books with ease. Don was suspicious; he detected no order—not alphabetical, not even thematic. The truth was, I didn’t trust the relationship. It was all so new. I was already imagining the night we split up, the following days: looking for new apartments, untangling our lives. I remembered the scene in
St. Elmo’s Fire
after Ally Sheedy and Judd Nelson have broken up. For me it was the saddest part of the movie. They are sorting through records, unable to remember which belongs to whom, fighting over an artist they both love. As a concession, Judd Nelson says, “You can have all the
Carly Simon
,” sneering at the singer’s name. In our case, Don and I would fight over the Carver; Don would say to me, “You can have all the
Anne Tyler
.”

In Antwon’s short story, the narrator asks of the young man something simple, but specific. He wants to enter him from behind, something the young man has never allowed anyone to do. In the story, the young man is hesitant, and he takes a few days to think about it. When he finally agrees, saying, “I need the money,” Antwon’s narrator isn’t surprised by the rationale (after all, he’s heard the young man express his need for money on many occasions). However, Antwon’s narrator can’t help pointing out the irony, the obvious falseness, of “this white boy” (those are the narrator’s words), a recent graduate of an Ivy League school which he attended as a fourth-generation legacy, selling his body because he “needs the money.” “Surely,” Antwon’s narrator notes, “
need
means something different to him than to me.”

I was lying on the floor in the apartment, still reading An-twon’s story, when Don came home.

“It’s not about me,” he said, without my asking.

Several months earlier, when Don and I were drunk—slumped on the cheap leather couch at the Boiler Room, The Smiths’ “How Soon Is Now?” on the jukebox, the white stuffing from the ripped couch glowing in the black light along with the white of Don’s eyes, into which I was looking—I had asked Don, “Who is Antwon?” and Don told me about Antwon’s project paying men for sex. I knew this short story in this anthology was an account of Don’s participation. The hair color might be different, the eyes, the name, but I could recognize Don in a story. There are things only a lover knows.

“It isn’t me,” Don said again. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Rudy Giuliani skittering under the dresser.

I was still holding the book, and I pointed to the dedication in italics just below the title:
To Don, for Inspiration.

“I don’t believe you.”

2.

O
ne night, about a year after I found the book, Don said to me, “Antwon asked me to ask you if you want to participate in a reading he’s curating.” Don told me the name of the reading series, which was prestigious and which I myself had attended many times. I was flattered but unsure.

“He’s never read my work. He doesn’t know anything about me.”

“Antwon is lazy. He’s probably filling the program with friends.”

“I’m not a friend,” I said.

I told Don to tell Antwon I’d think about it.

A week later, Don came home from drinks with Antwon (Temple Bar: martinis) and handed me a stack of cards with a note:
Please distribute.
The card announced the reading, and it listed my name along with three others’.

“I never said I’d do it.”

“You’re stuck now.”

I thought:
Antwon has a way of getting what he wants.

I only had one story that seemed polished enough to read. It was called “The Night Jagdish Learned to Drive.” In it, the sixteen-year-old narrator, Jagdish, is woken by his mother late at night. She tells him her father—his grandfather—is gravely ill, and they are all driving from West Virginia to Chicago in a matter of hours, and she is hopping on the first flight she can get to Bombay. She hands him a list, and asks him to drive to the twenty-four-hour supermarket to buy what she’ll need: toilet paper, deodorant, tampons. She either forgets or chooses to ignore the fact that Jagdish has only a learner’s permit and is not allowed to drive at night, not even accompanied by an adult and certainly not alone. While at the store, he buys, in addition to the items his mother has requested, a porn magazine. He pulls to the back of the parking lot and, under the dim lamps, studies the pages, focusing on a pictorial story of a couple named Rocco and Lacey. It’s Lacey’s birthday, and she’s at a bar all alone. At closing time, Rocco, the bartender, tends to her birthday needs. Jagdish tucks the magazine away. But later that night, while he and his parents are driving to Chicago, Jagdish finds himself replaying the images from the magazine. He remembers Rocco in particular, and Jagdish furtively masturbates in the backseat, while his parents are in the front, his father driving. The next morning, not long after daybreak, Jagdish’s father tells him he is exhausted. Jagdish takes over, and the story ends with an image of him at the wheel.

Later, in a writing workshop, a classmate would rip apart the story—“Isn’t ‘driving’ too obvious a metaphor for Jagdish’s sexual awakening? Didn’t someone else just publish a story using the same metaphor?”—and I’d find myself agreeing with her. But for now I was proud of the story.

I sent a copy to Antwon:
Thought you might want to see this. Would love your feedback.

Several days later, Antwon called. “Sure,” he said, “let’s talk about it. How about meeting at my office?” He gave me an address. It was only when I arrived that I realized it was for an Italian pastry shop in the East Village. I stopped at the counter and bought a plate of cookies and a cappuccino before proceeding to the back, where Antwon was sitting at a corner table.

“Nice office,” I said. “It’s better than mine. I work in publishing—did Don tell you? My desk is shoved into a tiny cubicle. But my boss calls it an ‘office,’ not a ‘cube,’ because she wants me to feel important. She has a real office, with a framed Hannah Hoch poster above her desk. When she wants something from me, she knocks on the flimsy partitioning and asks, ‘Can I come in your office?’ It all feels so silly.”

“Come in my office,” Antwon said, and pulled out a chair.

I had come straight from work, and I felt self-conscious about my outfit—khakis and an oxford shirt with a button-down collar—which must have seemed preppy to Antwon. He was wearing a black T-shirt and jeans and heavy, black-rimmed glasses I didn’t recognize from the two or three times I had met him out at bars. On the table in front of him was an espresso, a copy of my story (pristine: no dog-eared pages, no marks, at least none that I could see), and a legal pad flipped open to an empty page, a fancy pen resting diagonally across it.

I asked him if he had read the story. He grunted yes. I expected him to elaborate, but he didn’t. I was still new to writing and insecure about my work. I wanted to ask him if he liked the story, but I didn’t want to sound needy. I didn’t want to admit to Antwon there was anything I needed from him. I finally asked, “Any suggestions?”

Antwon thought for several seconds then said, “Not really. I’m not the best person to ask. I’m not good at giving feedback.”

We nibbled at the cookies. They were so pretty, I had bought them forgetting I didn’t like that kind. I asked Antwon questions about the reading series, the venue, the other readers. We didn’t talk about my story.

Just before it was time for me to leave, I again tried to muster courage to ask if he liked my story. But I asked instead, “What do you think of the sex scenes?” I thought:
This you can comment on. Isn’t it your specialty?

He asked, “Which specifically? The description of the photos in the porn mag or the masturbation scene in the car?”

“Either. Both.”

He scanned a few pages, thought for a moment. “Is the word ‘rare’ really necessary?” It took me a minute to realize he was referring to my description of drops of Rocco’s come on Lacey’s breasts as “rare pearls.” He said, “Aren’t pearls ‘rare’ by definition?”

“I’m not sure I’m looking for line edits here. I’m wondering more about the thrust of it.” I blushed at the pun.

Antwon removed his glasses, lifted his gaze to the ceiling, clasped his hands behind his head. “I was interested in how boring the sex scenes were.” He chuckled and said, “That’s nothing against your piece. Honestly. I think it’s true of all sex scenes. They’re always boring. What words do we have to describe sex? The terms are either clinical and sterile or they are childish and comical. It’s impossible to get sex right.”

“What about your own sex scenes?” I asked. “Are they boring?”

“That’s not for me to say. It’s for others to judge.” After a moment, he said, “You, for instance. Do
you
find my sex scenes boring?”

“I’ve never read your work.”

I couldn’t tell if he knew I was lying.

I pushed the plate of cookies toward him. “I don’t like these,” I said. “I don’t like anise.”

As I was leaving, I turned around and saw Antwon biting into one.

T
he reading, when it rolled around, was fine. I was nervous. As the least-published of the four writers (
un
published, in fact), I read first. When Antwon introduced me, he said nothing about my work, my bio, my qualifications, only, “I met this writer through my friend Don.”

Afterward, my cousin came up to congratulate me. He was an investment banker and showed up in a suit. He smiled mischievously and said, “I know how those West Virginia back roads are,” referring to the geography both my narrator and myself shared. I wanted to tell him just because he recognized some of the details didn’t mean the story was true. I wanted to take him through line by line, noting every exaggeration, every misrepresentation, every fantasy and lie. Instead, I said, simply, “I did
not
jack off in my parents’ Dodge Caravan,” although, in truth, I had. I told him my friends were taking me out for a drink and asked if he wanted to join. He said no, he had to return to the office. I pointed out it was almost midnight. He said something about Asian markets and left.

Several of my friends were in the audience, too, and they waited their turn to talk to me. It was my first time reading one of my stories, and I was grateful for their goodwill. But I wasn’t listening to what they were saying. Instead, I was looking around, searching for Antwon.

I spotted him across the room talking to the guy who wrote for the
Village Voice
and who had read an essay about growing up in Rochester and the woman next door who had taught him how to be a drag queen. Everyone seemed to want to talk to Antwon. It made sense. The reading was as much about him, the curator, as it was about us, the readers. Besides, he was more established and better known than any of us. Don pointed out, swirling around Antwon, several luminaries from the downtown scene: an F-to-M transsexual sex columnist; a performance artist who referred to herself as “A Woman Who Just So Happens to Have a Beard”; a cabaret artist whose cult following included Parker Posey, Debbie Harry, and Courtney Love (when she was in town). I waited a long time to talk to Antwon, hovering close to him, searching for an opening, but I never found one. I finally left.

In the coming weeks, I waited to hear from him. I waited for him to invite me to his office. I would dress better this time and order a cannoli instead of those cookies. He would smile at me from across the table and say, “I’m glad I asked you to read. Everyone was impressed.
I
was impressed.” But he didn’t call.