She is standoffish, unwilling, harsh, up to something. She is a narcissist, a snob, a spy, some suspect. She is haughty, selfish, plenty vain, and proud. Affected. She puts on airs, I’ve heard people say.
She picked this place too for its wall-length bistro-antiqued mirrors. Even when she’s looking at you, she’s looking just beyond you—at her reflection.
Despite your grievances, she isn’t withholding. Simply, she’ll never tell you the things she takes an interest in, because what she doesn’t want is this: that you procure them for her.
You yearn for her vulnerability. Which you believe comes complimentary, like peanuts on a flight; two packets. Like a smile. Vulnerability she refuses to give you because she is, after all these years, gaining back custody of herself. Lost long ago, before she was born, somewhere in the ripped lining of a purse where, I assume, most things lost will eventually be found.
Hers is an everyday process of retrieval. In general, she moves at the speed of someone gathering dirty laundry from her floor—bending down, scooping up, yanking socks from jeans, inspecting smells, discovering tears or a stain she’ll deal with later. Regretting a brown cardigan she only wore once; the buttons were all wrong, but she knew that when she bought it. Slipping on heels she’ll only wear at home. Getting distracted by a ticket stub in a pants pocket. That’s the speed she moves at.
She isn’t one for accomplishing anything fast. She’s too sensitive to accomplish anything fast. Even her thoughts come out like goop from a tube. Like those Sunday hangovers—her brain nodding and floating like a bouquet of delivery balloons wrapped in plastic.
What absorbs you though is merely her. Your obsession is your obsession. You’ve been encouraged to believe since boyhood that your fascination has manifested her. She is an iceberg you’ve mistaken for an island. Discoverable in your eyes.
She is open in ways that do not attract attention in the same manner she attracts attention. There is a difference. And neither requires your sanction. One is private while the other occurs when her joke lands. Or when she extends her neck and communicates her posture. Like when a copper penny is dropped into a vase of limp tulips. Within hours, the tulips look spry. Standoffish, unwilling, harsh, up to something.
The girl’s life forces include, in no particular order: pleasure scored from what is incomplete; a firm belief that procrastination provides charge, builds muscle, helps to—over time—discover register; tenderness for people who arrive places in a panic, sip fast, are in possession of fail-safe exit strategies.
She wishes she had a genius for curbing small talk; for manufacturing an arbitrary tone when airing something considered; for soft-boiling an egg.
She always feels like a tourist the morning after she spends the night; after she leaves your place and experiences the glare of sidewalk. Like she’s meant to be going to a museum, so sometimes she does. Like she’s meant to be ordering a pastry. So, often, she does. An espresso too—those small to-go ones she can cup between her thumb and index finger. Like she’s meant to be a woman who wears sunglasses. But she’s never worn sunglasses. Not once in her life. So she doesn’t. But she feels like she could, and that’s the point. She feels like a tourist whenever she has sex.
She has trouble sleeping. It shows because people tell her it shows. Those dark, deep-set half-moons that hammock under her eyes invite appraisal. In pictures, her mouth is slightly open as though she just said Tapioca.
It still isn’t clear to her what turns her on. Though just recently, while going for a walk, she spotted a stranger’s pale rose curtains from the street. An early-summer breeze sent them flapping out the window only to get sucked back in, clinging against the building’s outside brick like the thin skin of collapsed bubblegum. The flapping. The clinging. The sucking-in. This turned her on. Or maybe the spectacle was, simply put: intimate. Belonging to someone else. A person she would never know, whose entire room on sunny days is stained pink when the curtains are drawn. Walls blushing. Inside looking like insides.
The girl sometimes confuses what’s intimate with what turns her on. You like this about her. You love that she is confused. You lean into the table and tell her, adoringly, “I can’t believe you exist.” The construction of your praise troubles her. It’s your claim to her, after all. Is that your best offer? Your disbelief? The whole display, like most displays, is a small dog wearing a top hat and monocle. It’s a gift you expect her to open in public. Because recognition of this kind is humiliating for both parties. Taking notice—if one isn’t cautious—is smug. Chaffing. Tedious.
“I can’t believe you exist,” you repeat.
While inured to this variety of compliment, she would like nothing more than to climb out from behind the scrim and roll her eyes to the point of migraine. She wants to bark. Shake the ground. Grow tentacles. Swing on a chandelier. She wants to hide. Disappear. Become a speck.
Tell a woman she is beautiful, and she might—it’s very possible—feel like a fool. Roses die quick. They will do.
The girl you want does not exist.
The girl you want does exist.
But not like that. And not like that. Or like that. Or like that.
She is sitting across from you, looking just beyond you—at herself.
6
Idea of Marriage
“MY dad’s idea of fun,” my friend Tait once told me, “is having a few drinks and then telling either me or my brother how beautiful his wife is.” Tait’s mother, Sandy, is very beautiful. Elegant. She speaks with steadied attention and just enough breaks between her thoughts, like someone rummaging through her purse for a pen. Some women sound as if they are working through their ideas out loud, open to doubt but not impaired by it. Some women hand you a pen before you even ask for one. Sandy is one of those women.
She looks nimble and ready for whatever; capable of contorting her body like a woman from Robert Longo’s Men in the Cities series. In fact, if I remember correctly, Sandy was one of the women Longo depicted in charcoal and graphite. Makes sense.
It doesn’t surprise me that Tait’s father’s idea of fun is telling his two grown sons how beautiful his wife is. What entertains Tait’s father, at least as Tait tells it, is Sandy.
But more so, what I’ve always enjoyed about that anecdote is how Tait expressed it to me the first time. The construction of his telling. How Tait chose to describe Sandy not as his mother but as his father’s wife. The indication being that his father was speaking about marriage, about his wife, Sandy, and the woman in the Longo, and while he was speaking to his two sons about their mother, he wasn’t.
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