“Here.” I snatch Tall Jon’s lighter from his hand, ignite the girl’s smoke, toss the lighter back to Tall Jon with a ballet-like swoop, and leave the balcony.
I take to the sad little half bathroom off the living room to flush my cigarette. Tall Jon still hasn’t bothered to hang toilet paper or a towel in here. The lights are four bare bulbs stuck horizontally in some fixture above the mirror. It all gives me a brutal look, like one of those high-contrast photo filters, my eyes so dark as to be opaque.
“Mercedes, are you in there?”
It’s Vic.
“Yeah. Just a second.”
“I wanted to make sure you were okay.”
I poke my head out of the bathroom. Vic’s face is right there, like she was leaned up against the door a second ago. Like we missed each other by an inch.
“Bill was wondering where you were.” Vic takes a step backward and fiddles with one of her silver barrettes. “He wanted to say hey.”
Bill is in the kitchen, having a beer and hovering over a plate of mismatched snacks. Fries and cheese slices and potato chips. His T-shirt is partially obscured by a gray jacket, but it’s not worth looking at because I’m sure it’s a cheeky reference to some movie or old cartoon that he would have to explain to me. His jeans I recognize—the rip on the right-side pocket.
“Well, well, Mercedes.” Bill cracks a smile through about a week-old beard. “I thought you were a myth these days. Every time I’m here, Jon’s like, oh, I’m seeing Mercedes Moreno tomorrow, or, Moreno was here yesterday and we ate hot dogs and sang the blues together, or something.” He puts a hand on my head. “You’re larger than life.”
“Thanks, I guess.” I take one of the fries. It’s cold and shiny. “I heard about your band. What are you guys called now?”
“We’re Self Saint Rage,” Bill says.
“What’s that mean?”
“It means whatever you want it to mean.” Bill smirks. “But our bassist got the idea when he drove by a self-storage place.”
“Oh. Clever.”
“Are you still doing art about salmonella?”
“Sort of.”
He takes a swig of his beer. “I’ve learned an important lesson this year. About, you know, the philosophy of creation.” He waits for me to ask him what this is. “I’ve learned that if you have hope, you can make anything happen.”
“What?”
“I know, you think I sound weird, but I’m being one hundred percent sincere here. It’s important to visualize exactly what you want.”
“I do that, you know. It’s one of the few things I’m good at.”
“Well, then, if you don’t have what you want, then you’re not visualizing hard enough.”
“That’s ridiculous, and I have an example for you. My grandmother, you know, my abuela Dolores, is unconscious in a hospital in San Juan. She had a stroke.”
“I’m sorry, Mercedes.”
“Well, it’s been a few weeks. I’m getting used to it. But seriously, how in the hell am I supposed to visualize her out of her current state? That has nothing to do with how hard I think about her, and everything to do with her own body and how she responds to treatment.”
“But you’re thinking about her, right?”
“Oh my God.” I take a few more fries. These are even colder, and they worm around my mouth as Bill stares me down, as though he is visualizing me visualizing Abuela. “Imagine a time machine, Bill. Visualize that thing really, really hard. Okay? See if you can make it happen. And if you can, let me know so I can take it back to last year and never go out with you.”
The party is migrating. Expanding to the apartment below, and out to the parking lot. Contracting here in Tall Jon’s place, in the rooms I’ve felt so comfortable in. Tall Jon moved out of his dad’s house the second he turned eighteen: signed a lease, amassed a collection of free furniture, covered the walls with band posters and old maps and framed album covers and photos of his mom. This one he’s placed in the hallway, next to the light switch to the unflattering and perpetually paper-free bathroom, has always haunted me. Tall Jon’s mother is beautiful. Was. She’s standing next to Tall Jon on the beach, and Tall Jon is middle school age but already taller than his mom. And both of them are staring straight at the camera, and their eyes are smiling, and I never understand when I see her how she doesn’t exist in this world anymore. I know she wasn’t saintly or anything; even if she’d lived, I think Tall Jon still might have moved out on his eighteenth birthday.
“Ah, here’s your latest hiding place,” Vic says from behind me.
I sit on the carpet beneath the photo, and Victoria fumbles herself into a sitting position across from me, slipping out of her silver heels as she does. She kicks them aside, braving the old carpet on her bare legs and feet.
“What’s up?” she says. “Why did we switch social roles at this party?”
“I can’t deal with these people. They’re all good at things. Even stupid Bill.” I glance at her face to see if she knows what I’m talking about. “How in the hell did he do it?”
“Probably just practice, you know?”
“You and him, I swear. Both of you serve up these easy answers for these things that to me are huge and impossible.”
“I don’t mean to make it sound easy. It’s just that it’s not that mystical for me. By the time I got old enough to think too much about why and how I dance, I had already been doing it for years.”
“Because your nanny locked you in a room.”
“See, I never should have told you about that.”
Vic crosses her ankles and doesn’t seem to realize she is putting her poor, wrecked feet on display. I guess she has been dancing in pointe shoes for about six years now? But her feet are like that of, well, if not an old lady, then at least a Mom-aged one. But they are small and tough and have created lovely things and have been around the world.
Maybe the problem is that I can’t imagine Bill or Gretchen Grayson or sometimes even Victoria doing the work. I experience every second of my own work, and then I ponder on those seconds and chew them up and relive them too many times—why did I decide to create a painting called Food Poisoning #1? (Oh, right, because I was grumbling about Bill’s musings.) Once I started it, how did I know I wanted to stick with it? Why did I choose purple and yellow and newspaper? Why did I add a tiny pink flamingo in the top right corner? Why did I decide it was done? A hundred little choices, each of them so critical.
I suppose Vic has made those choices, too.
“Anyway!” Vic sounds too bright for having danced most of the day away. “You know what I was just remembering? That time Bill said he had a surprise day trip for all of us, and it turned out to be—”
“Disney World! Except that the pass that was supposed to get us in turned out to be, what, someone’s expired family pass?”
“Something like that,” Vic says. “Let us concentrate briefly on the symbolism of being locked out of Disney World, staring at the gates.”
“Bill was so pissed. I thought he was going to try to find a Mickey to kick in the balls or something.”
“Oh, come on, dearie. That was all for show.”