Short People (16 page)

“Hey.” She was unfazed. Unimpressed. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Nothing.”

“You’re not doing nothing. You’re trying to fuck me.”

“No, I’m not. I’m just . . . messing around.”

I pushed up her t-shirt and, wedging my fingers under her lacy black bra, I pulled a breast loose and ran my thumb over the aureole. Her nipple was unaroused. Massaging, sucking, nipping did no good; the skin would crinkle, the nub would rise, but only momentarily, intermittently, with resignation. Mere physiology. I didn’t capture her imagination. She lay there silently, arms at her sides. I placed my ear to her nipple and gazed at her face, which likewise betrayed no emotion.

“What’s the matter?” I asked her.

“Nothing. Are you done?”

“I don’t know. You don’t seem to be liking this.”

“It’s fine.”

“Really?”

“No, but . . . whatever. Hey, did Lapin tell you I’d let you fuck me just cause you’re his friend or something?”

“Uh . . . no.”

“Cause I’m sort of seeing him, you know.”

“Okay.”

She propped herself up on her elbows to look at me. “Okay? Is that a yes-I-know okay? Or a no-I-didn’t-know-and-since-you’reseeing-my-best-friend-I’ll-get-off-of-you-and-let-you-put-your-tit-away okay?”

“I guess a yes-I-know okay.”

“Oh. Alright.”

She lay back down, but what could I do? I kissed her shoulder and asked, “Are you in love with him?”

“No, I’m obsessed. There’s a difference.”

“Tell me about it.”

“You really don’t want to know.”

“Sure I do.”

“It’s complicated,” she said, but I got her to tell me. I didn’t know that it meant hearing her whole life story.

Her father, that night when he entered her room, stopped and swayed every few feet, staggering from doorway to dresser to desk to bed. He sat on nothing and then sat again, with a jolt, on the mattress, lunging to keep himself from toppling. He shoved a heavy palm into her inner thigh. “Ow, Daddy, that hurts.” He leaned over her. His body, built like a beer keg, was crushing her. “Don’t— what do you want?” Saliva hung like stalactites from the dark cave of his mouth, falling loose, twirling, cold, down onto her cheek. “You know damn well what I want.” She was pretty sure this was true, just as she’d known what his brother had wanted that afternoon, but she said, “No, I don’t. Daddy, you’re drunk, you’re scaring me, what do you want?” because she didn’t want to believe this of her own father. “I want to know who you’ve been fucking.” Whoa—not what she expected. “Nobody,” she said. “Don’t lie to me.” “It’s true.” That’s when he slapped her. “I said don’t lie to me. You don’t get to be a whore without fucking anybody.” These were his words, as if being a whore was something for which only the fearless were chosen, yet also, because of his tone, as if being a whore meant that she was untethered from him, that she belonged to no one now and was thus everyone’s property. “Really, Dad, nobody. You woke me up.” He pulled away from her. The night was muggy and all she had on was a t-shirt—one of his
—
and cotton undies with one tiny flower sewn onto the waistband. He sized her up; the sheet between them hid nothing. Was that a lascivious look in his eyes? She couldn’t tell. They were glassy, rheumy. “If I ever catch you . . . I’ll kill you. I’ll rip your heart out and feed it to him, whoever the fucker is.” This threat was not quite idle: as he shuffled out of the room, she felt like he
had
ripped her heart out— but who could he feed it to? Her sin this day had had no accomplice. Her carnal knowledge was entirely hypothetical.

Good riddance, she would eventually say, but first she had to learn the wiles by which she would live from now on. The next morning her mother wouldn’t come near her, didn’t ask for help with the dishes or the garden or any of the housewife chores she’d previously been teaching piecemeal to her daughter. Instead, her mother gave her these cockeyed looks that said, What has become of you? I’m disappointed, I disapprove, so whatever you do with your life, don’t blame me.

From then on she did what she wanted. If she was sullied already, she might as well play in the mud. She messed around with whoever, did whatever felt right in the moment. She put out, so what? Everyone knew she was that kind of girl, why deny it? When her uncle came around, drunk again, looking for action, she gave it to him, repeatedly. They had a thing for a while. Her father knew, he must have. They’d flirt in front of him. They’d go for walks from which they’d return blushing, not touching, smirking and straightening their clothes and hair and lying that they’d been bird-watching. They fucked in her parents’ bed once while they were at a Friday fish fry. Her father didn’t care though, not really. After that one night, he’d given up on her. Or maybe, unable to bear their abhorrent behavior, he convinced himself that his suspicions sprang from his paranoid mind. Or maybe he realized that if he were his brother and this tart were his niece instead of his daughter, well, maybe then he’d be the one tasting young flesh. He could judge and distance himself from the crime, but he could not condemn it. For whatever reason, he let these things happen. Her mother remained on the margins, where she’d always been. Never one to assert anything too loudly, she did what she’d done all her life: sit in the background and watch, brokenhearted. The whole family, it seemed, had fallen from grace.

She sensed that was what they felt, but she saw things differently. Her beliefs, as she expressed them to me, were vehemently self-forgiving, defiant, defensive, fanatical, so much more self-assured than her behavior all evening had shown her to be. Simply put, she thought you’re either a prude, trapped in your too-tight white dress, or you’re a whore, free to swing in the zoom of the world. At some point in their lives, everyone must choose one way or the other. And it’s a pity, but still it’s true, that the prudes, those tight-asses who don’t know what they’re missing, they’re the ones who decide what’s right and what’s wrong. Which doesn’t mean they’re not all whores behind closed doors. It’s just that they’ve mastered duplicity, and of course—duh—why wouldn’t they despise the people like her who call them on their bullshit? Really we’re all whores, but only a few of us—those willing to combust in public view—can accept the fact and get on with it. She was, she claimed, a martyr to the truth. “And the truth is that life is all zoom, all speed and forward thrust. If you stop and look for the goodness, life races forward and leaves you to die.”

I wasn’t sure how I felt about this. I’m not even sure she believed it. But as I said, it ruined the mood. Though I had tried to be a brutal man, I was, at heart, soft and scared, inclined toward looking for goodness in myself if not necessarily the world. “Did you come up with that all by yourself?”

“Basically. Yeah.”

“You don’t think anybody else sort of helped put those ideas in your head? Not even a little bit?”

“You think I’m stupid, don’t you.”

“I didn’t say that.”

She heaved an arch sigh.

“Alright,” I said, trying to save myself. “So what does all that have to do with obsession? What about Lapin?”

Her answer took so long to come that I thought she was done with me, that she’d decided to lie there and stare up at the sky and think her thoughts and wait until I went away.

When she did speak, it was as if she were holding her emotions apart so the words could slip out like ghosts. “Lapin’s like me. He’s . . . we’re the same. Except when he does it, it makes him sexier. Everyone loves him for it. They . . . forgive him or something. I don’t know. And . . .”

I couldn’t see her face. I thought she might be crying, but I didn’t move to look.

“I feel . . . normal with him. I want to be with him. All the time. It’s like, if I was, there’d be nothing wrong with me.”

I didn’t know what to do. My fingers were twined under my chin, my palms flat on her rib cage. Her spread legs cradled my body, casually, almost but not quite incidentally. I was aware of the size and shape of every touch: her thighs yielding to my hipbones; her pelvis nestling up to my navel and swaddled in two different fabrics, the sheer poly-synth of her miniskirt and the absorbent cotton beneath it; the slight feather brush of an ankle against my knee; and, most disconcertingly, her exposed stomach, the unsteady rhythm of her breath coming and going, caressing my sternum and then withdrawing. A deep inhalation would press her abdomen into my chest and raise me an inch or two. Her breasts would shimmy like jello. Her awareness of our two bodies seemed heightened as well. She didn’t swat at the fly that crawled along her shoulder. She twitched her nose instead of scratching. When she did move, it was with a delayed reaction, as if she were thinking:
My scalp itches and there’s my arm on the grass, my thumb an inch from his elbow, so I’ll lift it and quickly scratch the itch; there, that’s okay, now, I’ll put my arm back exactly where it was, but no, slightly closer, so my thumb touches his elbow.
Despite all this physical intimacy, despite what my body was telling me, I didn’t want her, it seemed wrong to want her, and who knows what she wanted, she definitely didn’t want me.

“It was the same with my uncle. Except more fucked-up.”

I wondered which was more compassionate: to continue holding her, sublimating my own rage, and trying to comfort her for pains that she claimed didn’t hurt, or to pull away and go home where I could be safe from the sordid life to which she was committed.

“Anyway,” she said, “listen, I need some drugs or a drink or some something. Then I should drag my sorry ass home. Do I have to let you fuck me to get a ride?”

I didn’t have the heart to say no. It would’ve disappointed her, pissed her off. I think. I don’t know. Maybe she wouldn’t have cared either way. At the time, though, I thought I was being kind.

When we got to her house, I leaned over to kiss her on the cheek. I didn’t want to, but it seemed like the chivalrous thing to do. She pulled away, the expression on her face disgusted, scornful.

Her name was Emmy; it seems important in retrospect. I didn’t see her again after that. I think Lapin saw her a few times, but I can’t be sure, I never asked him directly. I couldn’t. I didn’t want to know.

I was eighteen, and before her I’d only slept with one girl, with whom sex had been about love, about romance. It’s not anymore. Emmy was right. Like everyone else, I have failed.

IT’S BLUE UNTIL YOU LET IT OUT

Have you ever gone to Love’s Drugstore and asked for razor blades, the ones that cut on two sides? I have, Dad. I did it again today.

What did you think about on the walk home? Did you think about me? Or Mom? I bet you thought about Mom. I bet some memory from back when the two of you were an inseparable team was lodged in your brain like a tumor. I can imagine the scene: an opening-night party, maybe in the Public’s front lobby; she was the ingenue—in life as in art—and you were the man she adored. The hoity patrons, the rest of the cast, the director, the theater’s staff, maybe even Joe Papp himself, all made their way to her, gulping down white wine spritzers, munching on satay and salmon pockets. The room worked her. She was boxed in by people who were, for the night, in awe of her, who wanted to be near her, wanted a piece of her they could claim as their own, but who knew from her professionally charming small talk, her broad smile, her gracious, almost disbelieving gratitude when they got around to their awkward, embarrassed praise, that she was still acting. I bet on your way home from Love’s, you remembered how she glanced around the room for you during these parties and, once she found you, she momentarily broke character, blushing, eyes twinkling. You would mime pouring wine over the head of the thousand-dollar donor talking at her, and she’d twitch her nose flirtatiously, like a rabbit, before snapping back to work. It was as if the two of you had an inside joke, your irreverence reminding her that these fund-raising events weren’t nearly as important as the sustenance you gave her throughout the months and months in between shows, when she felt forgotten, like a failure; it strengthened her, helped her endure the brief, minor, meaningless nights of pretending she actually was a star. As a little girl at those parties, I felt like I was the star, like my parents were the coolest, most in-love people in the world, and when the grown-ups at the parties crouched and asked me about second grade and if I wanted to be an actor or artist like one of you, they saw me not as a little brat out after bedtime but as the incarnation of something exceptional, the extension and twining of each of your talents, the palpable evidence, the public proof of your private love.

As you trudged home from the drugstore, how long did it take for you to begin speculating on what she’s up to now? Did you imagine her on location for that period piece, buying sandals at a street stall in Athens—or some man, her director or costar, buying them for her—and wonder what would happen if you flew there to . . . rescue her is what you probably told yourself. I know you got the address of her hotel off the package she sent me, but that won’t be much help; she left there three weeks ago and now she’s vacationing in Hydra. Even if you found her, what would you say? That you love her? You can’t live without her? All that blah, blah, blah? Can you think of anything that would surprise her even a little bit? If you say yes, you’re lying. The power dynamics between you two have atrophied. It’s like arthritis: the joints don’t pivot, the muscles clench in a gnarled tension. She’s an actor, Dad, and you were always in too much awe of her. You should throw away all the photos from that show you devoted to her—and the contact sheets, too. Now that she’s found sustained adoration from an audience larger than two, she no longer needs you—she needs me, she’s still periodically compelled to tell me she loves me, but that’s just so she can feel wholesome and less like a fraud when she thinks about what she’s achieved in her life. If you were to find her in Europe and confront her, whatever words you used, you’d say only one thing:
Why don’t you need me anymore?
And she’d have only one response:
Because I already have you.
Of course you know this without me telling you, but that doesn’t help, does it? You still—at least until today you did—obsessively imagine other scenarios . . . but Love’s is only a quick hop from our building, not a long enough walk for you to have a thought you haven’t had so many times already that even you find it boring.

I understand you, Dad. The shrink you send me to thinks I have an unhealthy identification with you, but I don’t, it’s just that I’m just like you. This was a big issue right after Mom left, but then, for a while, I was my own person. I credit this to Yegal. Remember him? I told you about him last fall when you and I got stoned in your studio.

He was the assistant art teacher from that summer class I took at the New School. He came up behind me the second week of class and, while explaining how I might expand the emotional breadth of the painting I was working on at the time, he rubbed my back—not with a soft, slight palm on the spine, but with both hands, his thumbs kneading my shoulders—a rub I couldn’t misinterpret as mere teacherly encouragement. Even though Yegal was generally touchy-feely with everyone, this was different; the placement and movement of his hands was careful, timid. There was a level of self-consciousness about it that made me nervous. I freaked out. I didn’t go back to class. A week later, Yegal showed up during my shift at the Downtown Guggenheim, smiling out the side of his mouth. He leaned against the wall outside the gift shop until I took a break. His hair was matted flat on the left side, and I wanted to comb it for him. I wanted to wash his clothes. Even though, at twenty-two, he was closer to being the adult than I was, I felt like he needed me to take care of him. He couldn’t do it himself. I walked especially slow and kept my distance, leaning back defensively and jutting out my jaw at him. He glanced around the lobby and then said, “Hey.” “Hey, yourself,” I said. “I mean . . . Hi.” “Surprise, surprise.” “Are you okay?” “Why wouldn’t I be?” “You haven’t been in class since . . .” “So?” “I, um, I thought maybe I’d . . . okay, it’s like this. There’s the line, right?” He drew his foot along one of the cracks in the floor. “I thought maybe I’d—” He stepped over the line, toward me. “Like that.” And he cracked his halfway smile. That was too sweet already, sticky and sappy, and I tried to resist letting it touch me. I think I might have even scoffed. He’d been hiding one hand behind his leg. “I got you a present.” He held out a paper bag. “It’s Rilke. Do you know Rilke?” “No. Well, sort of. I’ve heard of him,” I said, not moving to take the bag. “Rilke’s great . . . really great.” The longer I waited, the more his arm sagged and strained to hold the bag up in front of me. “I picked it up at that used bookstore over on Sixth. Have you been there? It’s great. You can actually find what you’re looking for.” I still didn’t take the bag. His arm finally fell, and after shaking out the strain in his muscles, he unsheathed the book and leafed through it. “It’s dedicated to some girl named Ruthie. From, um, Ben. And she seems to have marked it up and underlined her favorite parts. So, you, while you read it, you can sort of imagine what their love was like and speculate on what might’ve happened that was so huge for her to throw the book away. I . . . um . . . I thought you might appreciate that sort of thing. Take a look.” I hesitated, but since I knew I was going to take it eventually, I thought, fine, this’ll be when. I swiped the book from him and tried to make sure he understood that it was the book, not him, that interested me. I thumbed through it, trying to look bored. “Check this out,” he said. “This is my favorite. ‘Turning Point.’ ” I let him stand next to me and flip through the pages as I held the book by the spine. He read the poem out loud to me. It
is
a great poem, and Yegal must’ve known that I’d listen to it with an ear toward figuring out what he was telling me—that something about me inspired him to “do heart-work,” like the man in the poem is told he must do. I fell for it, Dad. I’m a sucker . . . and Yegal seemed so pained and honest, so awkward, while he stood there waiting for my response. I threw my arms around his neck and let my legs give out so all that held me up was him. I let him kiss me . . .

But why am I going on like this? I’m obsessing, just like you do. It’s as if I’m trying to paint his portrait over and over again in my mind, and if I get it perfect, he’ll suddenly be here next to me.

I didn’t do this before he disappeared to that artists’ colony in Vermont two months ago. When I told you about him before, I was really only interested in me, in the changes going on in me as I fell in love. I rambled childishly about the squirrelly feeling I got in my stomach every time he reached out to touch or kiss me. How safe and cozy I felt each time he stopped himself—conscious of the danger involved in flirting with the physical boundaries he’d placed on his desire—from caressing certain parts of my body. The look on your face while I talked was the happiest I’d seen you in months. The tension relaxed in your cheeks. You stroked the button of skin between your eyebrows, and your crow’s-feet came out. You actually focused—for a couple of hours you were listening to me, instead of off chopping at the brambles of your memories of Mom. You said he sounded “hip,” and that if I felt comfortable about it, you’d like to meet him, do the old father thing and size him up, maybe scare him a little, just to make sure he’d think twice about breaking my heart. It made me giggle and wince, Dad. I said, You couldn’t scare an eleven-year-old, much less a twenty-two-year-old, that you’re too much my pal to wield any real authority. “Well, then,” you said, “what if I took you two starving artists out to a rock concert. Or we could see a play? How ’bout it? What if I palled around with you guys some afternoon? We can . . . hang, or whatever the kids call it now.” For a moment I almost considered the prospect, but I could see from the way your face tightened in on itself that you were gone, returned to your darkness, brooding, I’m sure, about the thought of setting foot in a theater with everything that that connotes: Mom’s old friends, Mom’s old props, two hours trapped on her turf. “No, that’s okay,” I said softly. “I just wanted to tell you about him.”

Now that he’s gone I’ve been flailing, bleary-eyed from my own loss of love, and overidentifying with you again.

You seem different today, though. This morning, you began to work again. For the first time since Mom left, the red light was on over your darkroom door. After hours in there, you came out all wound up, the muscles in your neck and shoulders tense, and you held your head low like you were flexing your brain. You seemed preoccupied with thoughts that gave you energy instead of taking it away. I should be happy for you, but seeing you like this, so busy and vigorous, depressed me. It propelled me into a kind of self-chastisement. I thought, if Dad can recover his sense of direction, shouldn’t I be able to, as well? I tried to will myself into happiness, but instead got stuck and dug deeper and deeper into my sad, worthless self.

What was your lowest point, Dad? The first few months after Mom left? A response to the initial shock of her absence? I bet not. You were still speaking twice a week or so. She’d only done the one movie then, that John Sayles thing, and you still thought she was going to come back from L.A. after pilot season. Remember how that first two weeks slowly stretched to a month, then to two months, then three? How many return tickets did she change before she finally told you she was staying out there indefinitely? And then it was just for the work, so she said, though she hadn’t landed a show yet. Her stuff was all here. She didn’t want a divorce. How many nights did you and I argue about her right to abandon us? You were the one who defended her, reciting her reasons and ignoring your own emotion. The air there, even with the smog, was somehow less oppressive; it was hopeful air in which anything seemed possible. She didn’t dread daylight and wasn’t sleeping until noon anymore. Unlike New York, where each day was just like the last except harder to live through, with L.A.’s sun and breeze and the hum of the industry, each day erased the last and she was accountable only to her dreams. She didn’t feel guilty about eating well and could rollerblade on Santa Monica Beach; she could be whoever she imagined herself to be, no longer trapped in the precedent of bad behavior, the downtown attitude, that, back here, had been both her draw and her downfall. She was happy, you could tell, and you weren’t selfish enough to put your own happiness ahead of what was best for her and her work.

It’s called masochism, Dad.

Look at what happened to you in the process. You wandered aimlessly through the Village, staring at pigeons and handing out smokes to the homeless. You used to have this passionate arrogance that showed up in everything you did. When you walked down the street with that slouching strut of yours, people thought you were famous and wondered why they didn’t recognize you. But when Mom left, you disappeared as well. Your body was still here, but your mind and your wit and your artistic vision were all packed away in her suitcase like t-shirts. You missed deadlines, turned down money jobs, stopped shooting photographs altogether. The world began to underwhelm you, or Mom overwhelmed your world, I’m not sure which, but either way you were no longer engaged with it in any real, vigorous way. You lived to send her things—it didn’t matter what—clothes she’d left behind, that mirror she adored so much, Central Park leaves in the fall.

I can remember one night especially. Mom had been gone over a year. She’d just finished the five-week shoot for
Say You Do,
which was already getting enough buzz to put her in the collage of stars on the covers of the summer blockbuster issues of
Entertainment Weekly
and
Us.
Proclaimed a rising star, she was getting her own write-ups in
Vanity Fair
and
Rolling Stone.
Mentions of you or me were carefully omitted from all the publicity, and despite your rationalizations, you were finally beginning to realize what had happened to your life. On the night I’m thinking of, she called, crying, to tell you her lawyers—she had
lawyers
now—had held a conference call demanding that she divorce you. For the good of her career. She’d already cut ten years off her age. Besides the fact that marriage had been seen as unattractive in focus groups, it was those thirty-six years they were most eager to hide. You and I were liabilities—a sixteen-year-old daughter, a seventeen-year-old marriage— the numbers just didn’t add up. And they wanted her to ask, what would it cost to keep you quiet? Do you remember your answer, Dad? Of course you do. Nada. You didn’t ask for a thing. You interpreted her blubbering histrionics as a confession of love, and the loss of your right to acknowledge your past, the heartbreaking price of stardom. But you didn’t fight for that love, and you never conceded the truth: that actors never stop acting. But you knew. Behind what you wanted to hear, you understood and trembled at what was actually being said. This was her choice, and her career and her lawyers were simply the easiest excuse.