Symptomatic Read online

  Andrew had explained to me that Sophie was an off-Broadway actress, and as I looked around I figured somebody else had to be paying the bills. My eyes settled on a purple flyer on the refrigerator advertising a play. The xeroxed picture showed Sophie wearing big nerdy glasses, Pippi Longstocking braids, her mouth open wide in a scream under the words “Critical Bitch: A One-Woman Show.”

  “So you’re quite the mystery girl,” she said, hands on hips, watching me. “Andrew has literally told us nothing about you. I mean, where’d you grow up?”

  “California,” I said. “Berkeley.” I picked up a piece of cheese from the platter and popped it in my mouth.

  She nodded at me sideways. “And where’d you go to college?”

  I could see her mind working hard to place me—like a computer searching for a file that doesn’t exist—the circle of pixel arrows that rotate but never point.

  “California.”

  “University of—?”

  I shook my head and told her the name of my alma mater. Private. Expensive. Her eyes brightened in relieved recognition. “Oh, wait. When did you graduate?” She knew people.

  “Just this past spring.”

  She was a year older. She began to rattle off a bunch of names.

  “Kyla Mallet.”

  “No.”

  “Peter Levy?”

  “No.”

  “Alex Carmichael?”

  “No.”

  She went on for a few more names but none of them struck a chord. And I missed my friends with a sudden, surprising intensity. Most of them had stayed in the Bay Area after graduation. My best friend, Lola, had gone to live in Mombasa, Kenya, on a Fulbright Scholarship. She was studying local art and culture. I’d since received sporadic postcards from her with details that made her seem very far away: She had picked up parasites and a six-inch worm had come out of her butt. She had taken to wearing a buibui and head-scarf.

  “Oh, well, must have been a different crowd,” Sophie said, looking slightly perplexed. “And how did you and Mr. Andrew meet?”

  I hesitated, trying to think of a more appropriate story. But my mind wasn’t working, so I settled on the truth. “On the subway,” I said. “He, well, he approached me.”

  “Wow,” she said. “The only men who approach me on the subway are shaking a tin can from a wheelchair, or trying to sell me a yo-yo.”

  “I know. That’s usually my story too. And normally I wouldn’t have responded.”

  “But you knew a keeper when you saw one,” she said, her head cocked slightly to the side. She sighed then, touched her forehead, tilted her head back, and said in a high, wistful voice, “Oh me, oh my. Where oh where is my Prince Charming?” Then she shrugged and added in a deeper voice, “Or at least a good fuck.”

  “Andrew,” she said, as we entered the living room. “On the subway? You dog!”

  AFTER DINNER we played charades. They’d all gone to Andover together once upon a time. Or “Bendover,” as they preferred to call it. A few of their imitations were of people from school—a housemaster they all hated, the principal’s secretary who was always drunk, a perverted philosophy teacher who liked to dress up as a pumpkin each Halloween. But for the most part, people chose to mimic an assortment of fallen celebrities: Dana Plato, Shirley MacLaine, John Belushi. When it came my turn I couldn’t think of anybody obscure. And for no good reason I did Bruce Lee—leaping around the room doing a series of kicks and cuts close to but not touching people’s faces.

  After forty minutes or so, people were drunk and a little high, and the routines had become more and more ribald. People kept disappearing to get props from Sophie’s bedroom. Jeanie, a curly-haired publicist, came out wearing a leotard, and she gyrated around the room until somebody guessed Jennifer Beals from Flashdance.

  When it was Sophie’s turn, she affected an indignant expression and began walking around with her butt stuck out and her hands on her hips, eyeing each of the guests and chewing imaginary gum as if it were cud, shaking her head. Everybody stared at her, dumbfounded.

  “Sophie, you gotta do better than that.”

  She started laughing and said, “You’re right.” She grabbed a couple of pillows from the couch, and disappeared into the hallway.

  While we waited, they played a game where they reenacted a whole scene from the movie The Breakfast Club. Word for word. Gesture for gesture. Andrew whispered to me that it was called “Custodial Arts.” They had played it in high school. Now they fell easily back into the old routine, each one taking up their assigned role in the production. Chloe was Molly Ringwald. Andrew played the Emilio Estevez role. I sat quietly laughing at them all—their sole audience.

  And it seemed they could have gone on reciting the whole movie, but after about ten minutes Tommy let out a shout. “Good God!” he said, pointing toward the door. We all turned to look.

  Sophie stood, arms held in the air, transformed. She had rubbed something—maybe shoe shine—all over her face. She’d put bright orange lipstick around the edges of her mouth. And when she turned around in a fashion-plate pirouette, I saw she’d punctuated her behind with twin pillows she’d strapped on with a belt. She strutted into the center of the room and began shaking her head and sucking her teeth and talking in a voice that wasn’t her own. We weren’t allowed to talk in charades as a rule, but nobody stopped her.

  “How many times I gots to tell you?” she drawled. “Sheeyit. Don’t be leavin them tampons soakin’ in the toilet for my ass to clean up. I ain’t yo’ mama. And another thing. Yo skinny ass be leavin’ paypah towels all over the fuckin’ sink and you think I got time to clean up that shit?” She turned and scratched her pillow-clad bottom.

  When I looked at Andrew, he was laughing until tears were streaming down his cheeks. So was the rest of the room. They all knew who it was she was imitating, but they were not saying it, allowing her to continue the routine a little longer. When she began to mime mopping a floor, singing in a deep voice “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” they all shouted in unison, “’Retha!” Then collapsed into laughter and scattered applause.

  Sophie whipped around. “Finally!” She slumped down into an armchair. “For God’s sake. Could it have been any more obvious?”

  Andrew said, “We just wanted to watch the show a little longer.” Then he turned to explain to me, “’Retha was this insane cleaning lady who used to do the dorms at school. She was, like, four hundred pounds and always mumbling about how much she hated us as she cleaned up the bathroom.”

  Tommy, beside me, added, “My God. Do you remember her husband? He used to pick her up on Fridays? He looked like he’d just stepped out of the federal penitentiary. He had a Jheri Curl and drove a Chrysler LeBaron.”

  “Oh right, what was his name again?” Chloe, wiping the tears off her cheeks, wanted to know.

  “LaVonne or Laroo something,” said Len, a wiry kid with a tousled mop of black curls. “The names. The names. Remember when I subbed in the public schools that one semester? God. I remember I had three Keishas in my classroom and they all spelled their names wrong—the most bizarre variations.”

  “I think it’s kind of cool,” said Estelle, a wan blond girl by the fire. “Creative.”

  “The real question is,” Sophie said, standing up and undoing the straps that held the pillows to her behind, “are those names supposed to be creative, or is it all just kind of an epic spelling mistake? Like dyslexia on a mass scale?”

  The room was silent for a beat, seeming to ponder the question. Then Tommy leaned forward in his seat with sudden excitement and said, “All right. So get this. I was watching a rerun of The Newlywed Game a few weeks ago.”

  Somebody groaned, like maybe he’d told this story before. He ignored them.

  “Anyway, this big fat black lady was on it. I mean huge. And Bob Eubanks asks all the women to answer this question: ‘Where’s the craziest place you and your husband have ever made whoopee?’”

  Sophie began to titter. “Oh my God
. Whoopee.”

  “So all the other women go down the line blushing, giggling, saying things like ‘the kitchen table,’ ‘his office,’ ‘the gym.’ You know, typical places. Then he gets to the big black lady. And she thinks for a moment—real hard—then says, ‘Uh, I’ze gon’ hafta say in da butt.’ ”

  The entire group exploded into laughter around me. Sophie leaned forward and slapped Tommy on the thigh. “You are so bad.”

  “What? Come on!” Tommy said. “It was funny.”

  Andrew’s face was flushed with affectionate pleasure as he smiled at his friends. He glanced at me and squinted, his eyes flickering something—a vague remembrance, like he knew me from somewhere and was trying to remember my name.

  “Hey,” he said, and reached for my hand, but I was already standing, heading out of the room. I found the bathroom at the end of the hall and shut myself inside. Fancy skin products were lined aggressively on the sink counter. Exfoliating scrubs. Clay masques. Moisturizing creams. Milk cleansers. I recalled a joke I’d heard as a child. Your epidermis is showing! The big kids used to say it to the little kids, just to watch them burn with shame as they searched themselves for the private part they’d left exposed.

  I turned on the water full blast for no reason, and opened the medicine cabinet. I pulled out some of Sophie’s La Prairie eye cream with collagen and sniffed the contents. Its scent was expensive, weak, barely there. There were lots of pills. Prescriptions. A douche. Tweezers. A diaphragm container. I closed the cabinet and saw the mirror had steamed up from the hot water. I drew the outline of a face in the fog. I had been doodling this same face since I was a little girl, on napkins and glass, an anxious tic I resorted to whenever I felt out of place. It was a crude sketch of a woman. She had big eyes with long lashes, a long nose, full bow lips, and wavy lines around her face to signify hair. Ambiguous. Guarded. There was a certain refracted quality to the features that made her hard to place. I don’t know who she was supposed to be—only that her face calmed me, like an old friend who shows up at just the right moment. Now I watched the fingerprints that were her fade into the mirror.

  After that I sat for a while on the tiled floor near the window, hugging my knees. The glass on it was pebbled, blind. I opened it and breathed in the cold wet air. The rain was coming down pretty hard. We were on the sixth floor, and down below I could see the tops of umbrellas moving past—a procession of West Side couples. I shut my eyes and listened. The rain in the leaves sounded like a fireplace crackling.

  I thought of things I could do or say—things I’d already said and done. But I was all of a sudden so sleepy. I yawned, literally unable to move from my seat by the window. I curled up on that cold tiled floor and closed my eyes. And I started to fall asleep. Me, the insomniac. A profound heaviness came over me. In the dream I was babysitting for somebody else’s child. A baby, no more than a few months old. I’d put it down on a bed to sleep, but had somehow lost it under the sheets and comforter. I heard the baby’s smothered cries, but no matter how many blankets I ripped away, I could not find the baby. I was frightened, not of the baby suffocating but of the mother coming home to find what I’d done.

  I woke to a sharp knocking.

  “Everything okay in there?” Andrew called through the door.

  “Yeah.” My voice was groggy.

  “We’re getting ready to serve the cake. You coming?”

  “In a sec.”

  “You sure everything’s okay, babe?”

  A sound like laughter from my throat. “I’m sure.”

  Have you ever seen the end of the story before it begins?

  “Well, all right.” He sounded worried. He had seen the look on my face—the look of somebody on the verge of extinction.

  “I miss you,” he whispered into the crack. A second later I heard his footsteps moving away down the hall.

  When I got up and looked in the mirror, there were lines on my cheeks, a faint grid of squares where the tiled floor had pressed into my face. It made me look old, wrinkled on one side. I ran my fingers across the impression, wondering if it would fade by the time I reached the party.

  MY FATHER did not approve of my decision to move here, either. He told me so one day last spring while we stood in line at a grocery store. He pointed at the magazine, my future, where it sat on the rack, and told me in no uncertain terms what was wrong with the cover image—why it was problematic. That was the word he used. Problematic. I saw what he saw and agreed with his analysis—but, I told him, that only proves that they need more people like me on the inside. People who can identify a problem, name it, fix it. He smiled and shook his head and started unloading groceries. But it seeps inside, baby doll, he said. It seeps inside.

  3

  T HAT NIGHT, I lay curled in the corner of Andrew’s mattress, my back to him. Outside, I could hear a strong wind bashing across garbage bins, and far distant voices disappearing into it.

  Andrew leaned over me and touched my hair. He tried to kiss my neck. His breath smelled of Chartreuse and birthday cake. “You make me so happy. Do you know that?”

  I examined my fingernails. There were little white flecks in the pink. Some kind of vitamin deficiency. I’d have to look it up.

  He went on. “Sophie thought you were great. She told me so.” He tucked a strand behind my ear. “Thanks for coming. I know it was a little awkward for you, not knowing anybody, but it meant a lot to me.” He pressed in tighter against me, and I could feel his desperation. He could feel me slipping away. He whispered, “My life is so much better with you around. I was—so—sad—before you came along.”

  I looked at his wrist where it lay flung before my face. His veins were thick and visible, the blue resting so close to the surface. And above them I could make out the faint scar.

  He had been infatuated with a girl—the daughter of a diplomat, named Flavia. When she broke up with him, he carved her name into his wrist with a jackknife. He lost blood but survived the cut, and spent the next year in a hospital outside of Boston, called McLean. That’s where he’d first been prescribed the medication that made him itch and tremble. If you looked closely enough you could make out an F and an L. He had told me the story the first night we slept together, in the monotonous tone of somebody who has had too much therapy. He had rehearsed this disclosure in counselor’s quarters. I’d wanted every detail, but he was reticent and only wanted me to know that he had since learned to “moderate his emotions.”

  I touched the scar. “Do you think you’ll be on that medicine your whole life?”

  He loosened his hold slightly and was quiet, just breathing for a moment. He often seemed embarrassed by the fact of his dependency on the medication, no matter how well he’d learned to divulge it.

  “Who knows,” he finally said. “Maybe. Oh, I don’t know.” He stroked my hair. “I’ve always been sad. Ever since I can remember. It’s like I’ve been in mourning since the day I was born. But you—you make everything better. New.” He paused. “It’s mysterious, isn’t it?”

  “It is,” I said, turning to look at his face.

  His eyes were a strange color. An opaque swirl of gray and blue. They looked odd to me, half-blind, like the eyes of a newborn, before they turn a more ordinary, permanent shade of brown. And I thought about how sometimes another body beside you in bed—the heat and weight of it—can make you feel more alone, not less.

  He slid his hand under my shirt and rested it on my belly.

  “I love you,” he said.

  I opened my mouth to say something but he touched my lips.

  “Shhh. I just want you to know.”

  I WOKE THE NEXT MORNING before dawn. Andrew slept heavily beside me. His writing day wouldn’t begin for many hours. I stared at his face while he slept. His hair was stuck to his forehead with sweat. His cheeks were flushed, his brows raised as if he’d been surprised by something in his sleep.

  I slid out of bed, showered, and got dressed in the dark of the living room. Outside,
the light was faint, barely there, just a hue in the sky. I always found half-lights more blinding than utter darkness, and my eyes didn’t know which way to adjust.

  Winter was coming. I could feel it. Drizzle lay like a veil across my face. All along the way, out of the corner of my eye I saw things that made me twitch and gasp. A wet, pink fetus curled in the gutter, which was really just a raw chicken wing. A severed finger lying between two trash cans, which upon closer inspection was really a steak fry with ketchup on the tip. A puddle of colorful vomit that was just that.

  I stared into the faces of the women I saw, studied them as if they were road signs—warnings of what lay up around the bend.

  “Do Not Enter,” read one woman’s face.

  “Slow Down,” said another.

  Once the game started, I couldn’t stop.

  Blind Corner, Merge Left, No Passing, Stay Clear, No Thru Traffic, Soft Shoulder, Dead End. I saw disappointment in the deep lines etched around a mouth. Rage in the cracks between the eyebrows. Wide eyes signified a bewildered hurt. A jaw jutting forward spoke of unfulfilled desire.

  I wore only the corduroy jacket I’d brought with me from California. By the time I got to Midtown, I was shivering. The doors to the office building were still locked. I had to knock on the glass to get the attention of the security guard.

  Upstairs, I headed down the hall toward my office, with my face turned down. As I rounded the corner I nearly crashed into a cleaning lady pushing a cart of equipment. We both jumped in fright. I had never seen her before. I had never come to work this early. She was tiny, with skin the color of molasses, and she wore a net over her straightened silver hair. She was old enough to be my grandmother.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, touching my chest.

  She chuckled. “Don’t be, baby. Don’t be.” Then disappeared down the hall.

  Back at my desk, I scanned the classifieds for leads on a new place to live.

  4

  A NDREW WATCHED ME with anxious eyes all week. He wanted to know what was the matter. I told him I was coming down with something. It was true. But it was a nameless illness, yet unformed, and I didn’t bother going to a doctor. In bed, I shrank away from his touch. No stirring of desire when he kissed me. His tongue in my mouth felt like a dentist’s instrument. I told him I had my period when I didn’t, and lay stiffly on the farthest edge of his mattress, not touching. He didn’t argue, but I could see he suspected the problem was more than blood.