The Mere Future (18 page)
I had noticed nothing. I had missed entirely that our mayor had not made things better. She just rearranged Capitalism so that it was easier to take. She made it more aesthetically pleasing, less visually oppressive, and threw us some bones.
But as the trial made clear, the same people were clearly in charge.
The same companies were making more of the same money, our same minds were being similarly enslaved. The same famous still had fame, and those with power remained powerful. It was all just prettier and a bit more fun.
Harrison claimed innocence. He had an explanation. He had walked in on these three monsters cleaning up after having murdered his love. Overcome with grief, he ran to her side and held her still-beating heart in his enormous hands. “Still-Beating Heart.” That was his Defense Slogan.
Every guy who ran anything testified on his behalf, and Dom, Freddy, and Jeff had only each other.
So it was a done deal.
We’d all been framed.
It was a shocking revelation. And I wanted Nadine and I to unite in it. I wanted us to be alone together, like we used to be. That way we could go back to giving each other meaning in private, as all lesbians must.
But something had turned forever in her tiny heart. My stupidity, I suppose, made her love me less. Can that ever be undone? Where was she—my love? We needed to confess.
T
HE DAY
H
ARRISON
Bond was acquitted, he walked over to Glick’s house. Not having any technology or devices, she didn’t know anything about the trial. She was so out of it. She didn’t even know that Spiro T. Agnew had died.
Glick was home, drawing, and making some onion juice. Assuming that Harrison was just a friendly visitor, she invited him in and lit up a Camel.
But then she realized that the man before her was in deep pain.
That’s okay,
she thought. She too was in pain. People shouldn’t turn their backs. Glick was not afraid of other people’s humanity. When they started to tell her something, she just sat back and listened.
It was all right to listen.
She didn’t tell them, “shhhhh.” She didn’t tell them what she imagined she would do if she was in what she imagined to be their situation, and then insist that they make her fantasy of herself come true in their life. She didn’t do that. She just listened.
She didn’t tell them to “let go” or “move on” while screening their calls and not returning them, thereby causing more pain. She did not employ any of these dishonest and disrespectful ways to tell someone to shut up. That their life is worthless.
So when Harrison started telling her what happened, she just sipped her juice and listened.
“The day of her death, Claire was engaged with the insidious merging of longing and memory. Wanting the past,” Harrison rhapsodized, baseball cap in hand. He was a novelist after all, so he could contextualize and terrorize other people’s moments.
“People spoke to her over coffee, but she wished they were gone. She wished her next event was over. The next moment, over. The next. The next detached orgasm, embarrassingly complete. She came because she had to. Dishes dried, tub drained, TV flickering— oh no. She demanded isolation now so she could mourn her lost opportunities for peace.”
Glick felt pretty relaxed.
“Claire looked for a bad book,” Harrison said. “Hoping to not be in one. Hypocrite
lecteur,
have pity. It could happen to anybody who foolishly defends writers.
Ma semblable?
Oh, brother.”
That last statement was pretty abstract
, Glick noted appreciatively. She was trying to see the good in all people.
“Refusing to inhale, Claire prolonged the glow of her cigarette. Small moments of power. Can growing long toenails be a performance? The rain swayed, unheard. If she was British, her thoughts could possibly turn to the Queen from time to time. That’s inevitable. That’s their culture. But, alas, it was Diet Pepsi that crossed her heart.”
Harrison looked at Glick.
“A knock came at her door,” he said. “It was Harrison Bond.”
He told Glick that the day in question had been Harrison’s birthday. He had come over hoping for some kindness. Someone to say, “Happy Birthday, my friend. I love you. I’m glad you were born.” And to give him a present.
Unfortunately, he came to the wrong house.
For Claire was busy rewriting the story of her life.
Somewhere, subconsciously, she knew that she had fucked Jeff over. She knew that cutting him off was cruel and detached, but she didn’t care. Well, really, she didn’t want to care, so she repressed it.
Somewhere she knew that she had deep, loving feelings for Harrison, but that made her feel terrified. She knew he would violate her. How did she know? Who cares? She didn’t want to think about it.
As soon as he walked into her apartment, she felt loving feelings and deep desire. Therefore she hated him. She wanted to kill him. Everything was his fault. Everything.
“You are Satan,” Claire said. “What you have done to me is worse than anything my father ever did to me.”
“What did I do?” Harrison asked. It was his birthday.
“How could you do that to my life?”
“Do what?”
“I’m sorry that I ever trusted you. I will never, ever, speak to you again.”
“Wait a minute,” Harrison said. “What happened? It’s my birthday. Can’t you be nice?”
“You are desperately needy, you are suffocating me, demanding that I be nice. You are sick, sick, sick. Sick, sick, sick.”
“Honey,” Harrison said, both hurt and worried. “Honey? I know … I mean, I
do
know that your father sexually abused you. And I understand how that can make love threatening …”
“I hate you. I hate you. You are destroying my career. Everything about me is your fault, except that I am perfect. Well,
FUCK YOU
.”
Harrison watched her splitting in front of him. He watched the person that he loved become a feral monster, possessed by the devil, lying to herself and the world every second. He watched her blaming him for all her pain—all of it, and pretending that the pleasure they had between them did not exist. It was the most dehumanizing, sinister kind of lie that any human can commit, to pretend away the love, the fun, the pleasure, and the kindness that you have received. It was awful.
“Did you kill her?” Glick asked.
“Yes,” Harrison said.
“Shit,” Glick said.
“Yeah,” Harrison said.
“Do you want me to call the police?”
“It won’t do any good,” Harrison smiled for the first time in weeks.
“Why not?”
“Try it.”
“Okay,” said Glick. She picked up her receiver and dialed 911. “Nothing is happening.”
“That’s not their number anymore. Just say
police
into the phone.”
“
Police
.” She was connected immediately.
“Hello, officer?” Glick looked at Harrison intently as she spoke. “My name is Glick, g-l-i-c-k. I have a man here who is confessing to a murder. What? Yeah, I want to turn him in. His name is …” She looked at him with raised eyebrows.
Harrison Bond
, he mouthed.
“Harrison Bond. Yeah, okay.” She put her hand on the mouthpiece. “They are running your name through the currency counter.”
Harrison was happy.
“Yeah, I mean yes, officer. He’s famous? No, I didn’t know that. And who am I? Glick. Glick.
G-L-I-C-K
. Oh, you mean,
WHO AM I
? No one, I guess. Huh? What? His currency count is higher than mine so you won’t take my report? You might get back to me? You might return my call? I thought that was only for getting tables in restaurants. Oh yeah, yeah, I did hear that there was some kind of new system, but I don’t know what it is. Okay. So now, even reporting confessions require connections? Have you told this to the Catholic Church? Well, I think they have the right to know.”
She hung up the phone.
“Why did you tell all this to me?”
“I knew that if you tried to turn me in, no one would call you back.”
G
LICK IS DEAD.
A suicide.
Her note said:
Pattern and Design.
It was one thing being nobody alone in your apartment. But when people came over to tell you so, life was no longer livable. She’d given up.
Nadine and I watched her remnants lie scattered over the sidewalk, stepped on by traveling mailmen. Nadine broke down crying, and I watched her little shaking sadness, knowing that something new would come in its path. This gal wastes no time.
When Harrison Bond was released, I earned a bonus point. But it was when I was alone in my apartment, Nadine off in her studio, that I first saw Dominick’s expression on the TV set. It was the expression of nostalgia for nothing. He’d never had a life, but now he missed it. I was caught. A tremor resonated from my past, all my former hopes. And I stared at the framed blank marriage certificate on our wall, longing for a quiet moment with my dearest one, when I could convince her to sign up. Something that was not possible and had never been possible. There were too many pressures.
Facing facts, and recalling the address of her compression chamber, I set off to pay my lover a visit for some mutual truth.
It was in a section of Manhattan I had never seen. It faces west over the diamond scope of sea. White spires of sailing ships rock obscenely without relent. Shifting their weight. It is a methodic movement, seemingly casual, but no human thereby engaged could escape without judgment. Disdain, likely enough. Perhaps confinement. Old white crow chewing passively atop its phallic peak.
The surface, of course, is thick, lurid, white. We long to see it emanating from the genitalia of our lady friends. Oh, that groan. Deeper than any tabletop word I’ve heard her utter. The sound of my lady’s pleasure is sordid and therefore perfect, having reached the gravel depths that transcend every bit of etiquette. Thick, the sea, its weight the slick twixt algae and humanity.
It is summer now, but winter’s cajole sits, undecided, on my lips. This new part of Manhattan must have a name. Avocadoville or Horse’s Lane. Suzibelle Drive, Tequila Row. Lime and Salt Subdivision. Inferno. Har-ho.
In the breeze I remember, suddenly, my dead old friends. Some were sexy, some were sad. Together, a calm refrain of understanding, their vulgar deaths transcending fad.
I want to be a bowl of fruit on your lovely lap. Vagina Caverna is a kind, quiet place. My suddenly large fingers, yours braided white. One folded sky and its hidden head. Entire homes in Mexico are painted this color. Cavernous markets of colonial lust. Someplace between nectarine, red plum, and dust. Light cotton
shmattas
are ever so daring when artifice cannot conceal your appeal.
In this hidden part of the city, there is a twist around the cove. It’s evening now and the soft mountain slums look out from the rock. Sallow lantern light. Yellow hand-dipped candles in clouds of glass. The streets are stairs. Top down from block to block. Carry your water for the best view. See your enemies before they see you. Around a dark corner in the soft yellow light, she paints with no windows. She just looks at her hands. She puts them in my pockets and then she lets go. This is just a few blocks away from Soho. Where men exchange lira twenty hours a day.
My friend the painter? I can imagine her, but I cannot see through her eyes. As a character she stumps me. Words are counter-indicated. Squirm on the meat-hook of verbal precision. I impose the spare room, the hue of light. I impose my own delight. But I cannot make the paintings on her wall.
“Look at me,” I say.
I writhe, wide-eyed for her display. Scythe, sigh, task, tryst, width, gasp, grasp, twist. The spin within. Her horny body. The noose tightens as the evening speeds away.
I don’t like men, I like you. In this neighborhood, my vagina is a two-way street. Children could conceivably come through, but I’d rather have that wine bottle propelled by your tender hands. If I was a gay man, I’d be dead. Penetration is very important to me. I want my lovers inside my body.
My vanity was calling, true. I wanted to be drawn by you. I’ll see what you see. I’ll be preserved for posterity. A map of your desire and your feelings about me.
And then I realized that Nadine would leave me. I, her catalyst for change, had become her old discarded self. Maybe later I’d get a thank you, but goodbye anyway. Then, someday, I’d happen to wander into a barro in her part of town.
FINISHED
SARAH SCHULMAN
is the author of twelve books: the novels
The Mere Future, The Child, Shimmer, Rat Bohemia, Empathy,
People In Trouble, After Delores, Girls Visions and Everything,
and
The Sophie Horowitz Story,
the nonfiction works
Stagestruck:
Theater, AIDS and the Marketing of Gay America
and
My
American History: Lesbian and Gay Life During the Reagan/Bush
Years,
and the play
Carson McCullers
. She is co-director of the ACT UP Oral History Project (
www.actuporalhistory.org
). Her awards include the 2009 Kessler Prize for Sustained Contribution to LGBT Studies, a Guggenheim Fellowship, Fulbright Fellowship, two American Library Association Book Awards, and she was a Finalist for the Prix de Rome. She lives in New York, where she is a professor of English at City University of New York, College of Staten Island and a fellow at the New York Institute of the Humanities at NYU.