The alarm clock went off and she did not remember setting it. It was a summer day: one of the first really hot ones. She could barely sleep from the heat yet had not yet put in the air conditioner. How could she get it up from the basement? She would have to ask a male acquaintance, someone she texted with from time to time in an unspoken détente of mutual half-interest, and then stand very carefully in her apartment to forestall any glance toward the bed. There was an expression she had heard her father use when she was a child, though her brothers denied it and of course she could not confirm it now. All cats scratch the same in the dark. It did occur to her, every time she woke up alone and looked out the window toward the construction site, that she might never fall in love again.
“Again,” it then occurred to her, amid the provocation of meaty sweat that had built up in her sleep, was a mental device against a more horrific possibility. She had completed many online quizzes as an adolescent in the process of realizing she was not pretty, however romantic and tragic her blue eyes even then with deep hoods appeared to her in the bathroom mirror. Years later, she still hesitated over the question: Have you ever been in love? If so, add (1) [slut point, experience point, etc.].
Had she?
The question of love’s return or arrival was something men of diverse ages and experience had alerted her to. More than one “lover,” of hours’ or years’ duration, had informed her that she was not, in their view, capable of love. Twice it had been professors, who prefaced the remark with the menacing if also pedantic “If you think that…,” i.e., If you think X, then you are not capable of love, have not fallen in love, do not know what love is. When asked to clarify, they had claimed to be saying something about verisimilitude, the aleatory, apostrophes of desire in Elizabethan drama; and yet her real question, which rebounded with queasy acuity, was simply: How did they know?
Most recently, a splintery photographer almost twice her age, who she was quite certain for all her uncertainty had never loved her, had told her, If you don’t know that I love you, you don’t know anything. She could review, in her head, the various forms of love, and was even familiar with some of the relevant terms in Greek. But she would have to admit that she had never really experienced them, at least not with the unquestioned faith each one seemed to demand. Around the time she learned what a man liked to eat for breakfast, she always felt a kind of restlessness and terror, like she was putting all her chips in with a hand she couldn’t see. It did not seem like the photographer even liked her—in fact, it usually seemed that he hated her—but did she know anything? About anything?
For example: What was she supposed to do tonight?
She looked to see what time it was, slowly rubbing her knees together. Half past six. Why had she set an alarm for half past six? Was she supposed to have dinner with someone? The photographer who averred to adore her was in any case out of town with his improbable daughter (her decision not to accompany them having provoked another memorable accusation, i.e., that she lacked a maternal instinct).
She lived in a neighborhood full of flowering wisteria and funeral homes. She lived here in a place too small to breathe because the photographer lived here, a legacy of his ex-wife’s wealthy father, and there was no other neighborhood in New York, when it came time to sign a new lease and she really thought about it, where anyone much cared to see her. The buildings here—the funeral homes and yeasty bakeries and dying capicola shops, between which the wives of finance men pushed babies ghostly white with zinc—were a deep red brick. When the sun burned them in the high hell of afternoon, they shimmered like blood.
In the summer she ate plastic bags of peaches and wiped the juice off with toilet paper. She drank gallons of sugar-free tea and sucked on ice when she got migraines. She let the ice cubes melt on her forehead and on her breasts, by the window, under the wheezy Walmart fan from college, thinking of an erotic scene in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. She wore white socks and everything she did reminded her of something she had done before. The men who haunted her had common names. When she googled one of them, as she now did while leaning against the counter eating a peach wrapped in her last sheet of Charmin, she saw a quote from someone with the same name: “When a man is in despair, it means that he still believes in something.”
Why was she reading this? One of the other things the photographer with a daughter had told her was that she was a masochist. Was he by corollary a sadist? If he was a sadist, he maintained, it was in a metaphorical, artistically generative sense. She remembered: at 8 p.m., there was a test screening at a penthouse downtown.
●
She was invited to these things because of her association with the photographer with a daughter who had been said in a major magazine to have “destroyed his life […] for art.” She did not entirely enjoy attending them. She knew that the people at them admired him but found her rather disgusting for actually sleeping with him. She also suspected that if she were significantly more attractive, they might nonetheless excuse her, maybe even admire her.
She was three years out of an unimpressive degree. It was her first year in New York and, in the increasingly ubiquitous accounting, her first without sexual appeal. She worked a nine-to-five at a desk, a vague title for a vague job that involved herding those with more dignified ones. Having gone to a gallery during one of her first lunch hours—not having realized one ate at one’s desk at even the most terrestrial rung of the ladder—she found herself emailing the photographer from her sticky-keyed Dell desktop, and now, in the evenings, she traveled among a more rarefied set in which her occupation was not so much immoral as incomprehensible.
On the one hand, this at least partially assuaged a primitive yearning for real life occasioned by the usual middle-class misfortunes: her parents did not, it goes without saying, appear to be in love. On the other hand, the year she “dated him” was the year she became—through proximity to the film industry, experience viewing herself on camera and his explicit comments—aware of minute and major distinctions in female attractiveness. When she called him cruel for drawing her attention to these, he posed to her a “thought experiment” that a psychologist versed in his New Age belief system had posed to him fifteen years before on a rocky beach in Spain: Imagine that you go around at a party surveying people about where such-and-such guest stands on the totem pole; ranking them, basically. Wouldn’t everyone pretty much come up with the same list? That had been after a festival in Bilbao; he’d won a prize.
He hastily addended that no one ever thought, when she walked into a room, She is ugly. On the contrary, he proposed, they probably thought, She is pretty. In fact, he showed her the relevant page from his journal (a long Microsoft Word document): “Met girl who sent fan mail. Pretty, too young. Lacks wisdom.” He had other files on his desktop titled “Women to Date.docx” and “Regrets.docx.” He estimated she was a seven, or possibly eight. On one bone-cold night, they had a screaming match as he insisted that an intern he had, but certainly no longer, wished to sleep with was a ten. She thought the intern was a nine. “Scarlett Johansson is a nine,” he said. “Where are you getting these from?” she asked. On a much earlier occasion, winter light blurring the edges of his disappearing mane, he told her that she should see the advantages of dating an older man: in his eyes, at least, she was always going to be beautiful. When he said this, she became very aware of death, his and her own, and by consequence wished to be gentle with him in a way that did not entirely exclude feeling that she had made an unsurvivable mistake.
And yet at around 1:35 each weekday afternoon, as she watched her coworkers scoop wet Chinese chicken salads into their mouths before a bluish glow, as she saw receipts for Amazon returns stack up atop the printer, as they pursued their small colloquies about mid-range restaurants and spin classes and warehouses where you drank wine and threw axes, she knew she would not leave him.
One night he turned 45. They went to a bar with a big, rainy patio where a stream of young acolytes, girls in corsets and boys in Adidas, paid him homage. They sometimes turned to her and nodded, or, more often, did not. The grown-ups said things like, “A real grown-up, huh?,” and as the last young people left, piling into a car to the city, she heard him say to his friends from art school, “I think I was too picky back when I could do the picking.”
But he was out of town this time. She chose some shorts that chafed her thighs, took the F to the beige and immaculate penthouse, removed her shoes and greeted the host. He asked where the photographer was. She said he was out of town. He considered her.
●
The host was a scion of some mysterious fortune, possibly to do with a candy nobody ate anymore. He had blond dreadlocks, an electric fireplace and art books displayed cover out. “I love that it’s not about politics,” he always said at his weekly test screenings, which had begun in March with the photographer’s film about his first ex-wife’s suicide. “It’s aesthetic.” He was small and stringy, like a nugget of meat.
She knew he’d spent years in Los Angeles and returned to his native New York with little more than a well-managed trust fund and 500 XL t-shirts that said “improve the energy.” He had leased three thousand square feet of what, he claimed, was a city far less beholden to the disgusting machinations of the Industry. His home of three months would be, he believed, the site of an artistic renaissance, and he extended his invitations with professionalized strain. People attended with an equal sense of exhausted obligation, leaving heavy glasses on the bland blond wood and tracking dirt on the geometric rugs as a final protestation. When the light was good for photos, they filed up to the roof and its vertiginous, flattering view of the Manhattan sky, briefly smiling until they descended again.
It was dark. A few important-looking people milled around the room, speaking very quietly, with some shame at being there at all. The men were what in Middle America would be middle age. The women were a generation younger and looked expensive. She poured herself a glass of “orange wine” (this was the summer orange wine became popular) and heard a man say, “You like it when he’s not around, don’t you?”
●
Something she had learned in her brief time in New York was that anyone she would meet in New York had relocated there at great personal and financial cost to chase ambitions none of them achieved. Subsequently they had taken to whining about people they perceived as possessing unfair advantage, i.e., having rich parents, even when and perhaps especially when they themselves possessed the financial literacy of the objectively quite rich—spinning out further and further into intricate financial structures and their subtle consequences, speaking of income versus capital, closely held versus public corporations, pass-throughs, write-offs, disbursements and distributions.
The man speaking to her was an arts writer who catalogued, on a monthly schedule, the deficiencies of “cultural elites.” His father, she had discovered with a few clicks, was a urologist who had performed ten thousand robotic vasectomies. He was 34 but looked younger. He had a heart-shaped face and creatine arms, like a muscular infant. In addition, he had a pale girlfriend with a trim figure and hair down to her waist who was always sleepy. She wondered if she was less sleepy when they did it, if they ever did.
She told him no. “Were you his student?”
No—he had been his assistant. The photographer had paid him—always the reminder that this had been a real job—out of the sixty-thousand-dollar grant for What You Know About Yourself Is Not Your Self. For the first year of his daughter’s life, the photographer had documented her expression every time he saw her; the visitor to the gallery would click on a button to project a random photograph at enormous scale and the overwhelming majority were expressions of pain. In the gallery text, the photographer said that when he held his daughter in the hospital he had the violent impression that his life, in that moment, in the reflection of her face, had ended. She had gone to see the project as a state-college student staying in her richer friend’s NYU dorm and felt like he understood something so tragic it felt delirious to see it expressed. She found herself sobbing in the toilet, and felt the world was so large it made her ears ring. This had all been years ago; now the photographer was divorced, and his daughter no longer wished to appear in his photographs.
Anyway, the arts writer told her, he took another assistant job before the project was over. It was too weird, he said. The wife and baby were always crying in the next room. She wasn’t used to hearing stories like that from his fans or, as she called them in her head, sycophants.
●
She wished she had sixty thousand dollars. She wished she had fifty thousand dollars. She wished she had forty thousand dollars. She had lived on less than forty thousand dollars for her entire life and she was sure that if she were somehow promised forty thousand dollars a year, if she knew that much, at least, was coming, she could do incredible things. At times the photographer told her, as they lay at rest in his gray sheets, that she had an artistic soul, that if it weren’t for her job she could be the Anne-Marie to his Godard, and at those moments, not quite registering the insult within this insight, she sensed that something intact and essential remained about New York, regardless of however little she—for nine-tenths of her waking hours—had to do with it. She could no longer articulate, however, exactly what she would like to do. It occurred to her that the most disturbing realization was how free she was, and how little she could think to do with that freedom.
When she began dating the photographer, it was February and the air was clear. After wandering into his show on that lunch break, she had emailed him with a vague offer to help him with anything; she had studied a little photography in college. He said okay, and as she packed up at the end of a shoot that weekend, an exhausting one spent with two young women he’d dated, he told her that she was a very sweet person who had formed a very hard exterior. She began to cry, embarrassed even as she did at the horoscope genericism of the comment.
She began to go to his apartment when his daughter was not there. They went through boxes of negatives he had never developed, and she saw him as a younger man with lush, dark curls; she saw his ex-wives, younger then than she herself was now. There was a project he had done of women before and after he slept with them; there was a project he had done of women before and after he broke up with them; there was a project he had done of women before and after he told them they were beautiful, and before and after he told them they were ugly. It was like he was attempting to document what it was like to be alive, with almost no ability to experience it.
They flipped through catalogs from the late Nineties, through journals, through fat envelopes of slides. It seemed like everything she had ever wanted to happen to her had happened to him twenty years before.
One night a lock of hair fell from behind her ear, he pushed it back, and the inevitable occurred. As they drank watery coffee the following morning, the photographer told her a story from the memoirs a French photographer had rushed to write as he died of AIDS. His storekeeper father, having recently acquired a Kodak in some Norman hovel, had wanted to photograph his daughter’s new breasts. The mother had cried; the daughter had cried. Eventually they acquiesced—but already she was not as beautiful as she had been. Did she understand?
There were many conclusions to take from the foregoing, and one of them was: art must begin right now.
Ice-cold water dripping from every door, she entered a brief period in which she kept a journal. One of her first entries was: I have the sense that my real life is beginning. Their nights together were often sleepless, spent in compulsive and impersonal confessions of love, as if their power of conviction could excuse their meagerness. In the morning, hungry and weak with fresh light across her cheeks, she had the sensation that for once she was playing the character she’d wanted to play: a young woman in love. For a long time, the story of her life had seemed to cease to exist; to become a formless, unfocused mass. Suddenly, it all became very important, and her previous frustrations were the necessary proof of future, near-future, greatness. It horrified her that she had no record of what she had done on any given day when she was eight, ten or eighteen. She could not remember what she had done on a typical day at any age of her life. In the conventional account, the best year of her life had already transpired; and yet she felt it was only in his sight that she had begun to live at all. They performed acts she had never imagined possible, in an alternation of silence and screams.
●
She recalled this, smiled at the cherubic arts writer, and took three steps to the left to refill her wine, pouring nearly to the rim. She heard a woman say, “I’ve always been an admirer of Dr. Seuss.”
The movie was starting. A fire crackled in the air-conditioned air with New Money insistence. Underweight people in understated streetwear sat on taupe sectionals. She thought back to the photographer’s thought experiment and thought: “Am I the ugliest girl in the room?” She sat on the couch near the fire; it made her sweat. Had he hired an interior decorator? Why were these men wearing baseball caps inside?
The arts writer with the urologist father tapped her on the shoulder. He was standing behind her. His girlfriend was vaguely smiling. Why? “We’re going to Dmitri’s,” he whispered.
He ordered a taxi to Brooklyn. She finished her wine.
●
The taxi left them near a littered yard close to the East River. Tonight was the Sabbath and Hassids were walking out of the synagogue, little boys skipping after men in black coats that smelled sharply of sweat. She tugged down on her shorts.
They climbed a wooden staircase chipped with paint and made their way through a long, twisted hallway into the party. The arts writer’s girlfriend asked if she knew the host. She shook her head. She felt tipsy and hungry. “It’s like, an unsuccessful painter.” The girlfriend gestured at the menstrual watercolors on the walls. “They’re for the Chinese market,” she said meaningfully. She then noticed her most famous friend across the room and walked away. Vandersloot made glitch art about amphetamines. People thought she was very cruel, glamorous and Dutch; she was actually from Boston.
The address was listed as a gallery on Google Maps but it was just a big apartment, a loft by consensus if not strict definition. The brick was painted white, and easy-care pothos trailed down blond-wood shelves. There was the stacked washer-dryer of the well-cushioned adult child, even a record player. She found herself pushed past six closed doors into a kitchen of almost-empty bottles and poured a residue of vermouth into a MoMA mug. She drank it quickly, and then poured some vodka and the last bits of soda. A pour-over coffee filter, a four-hundred-dollar chartreuse Le Creuset, a matcha brush. She wondered how much the place cost.
A noise performance was going on, though she couldn’t see the musicians through the crowd: someone rang a triangle and then a man said, “Oh.” The audience nodded and pretended to keep rhythm. Everyone whispered, waiting for it to end. A short woman said, “This is like, the worst thing I’ve ever done.” A tall brunette said, “In some sense, secrecy is the corollary of value.”
The girls here were even younger and wore heels. Dresses in onion-peel fabrics, silvery and thin, showed the tiny vertebrae down their backs. A few mannish ones, tall and silent, wore dark lipstick and low-slung leather pants. Their wide, white throats bore down like swans to small breasts. With great deliberation, they lit cigarettes they pulled from brand-new packs. Her understanding was that they were artists.
She was standing by a shoe rack stacked with size-ten tennis shoes when a chubby man came up to her and addressed her by full name. She asked if they had met. He said, “I’m a fan of your boyfriend. I know lib women are always giving him shit, but I think that he’s incredibly brave. He’s just saying what all guys think. I sometimes think that he might actually be God.”
The man handed her a small booklet and turned to someone else. The Way of Water: A Poetic Manifesto. Page one:
We sit at a white tablecloth eating spaghetti
Exactly twenty years after September 11th.
You tell me about your fat sugar daddy from the FDA,
How he knows government secrets about microplastics.
She tried to imagine this young man beginning, fingers flexed before a keyboard, to consider himself a poet.
●
The photographer had become something of a cult figure for his new project, A Thing of Beauty. He was taking portraits of all the women that, as he first explained to her, dragging his cartilaginous nose along her salty neck, he found himself attracted to. Later that warm spring day, eating spaghetti with nutritional yeast in his small kitchen full of art and fruit flies, he showed her one. It was of his studio assistant, specifically her freckled legs in a maroon miniskirt, the leather wrapped tight around tight thighs. Her hands, with long black nails, were clasped in her lap; she fingered a rosary. She went to Pratt.
Why did he want these other girls, she asked. Why did he need to show her this? Didn’t he love her? He went to the fire escape and stood outside, leaning into the green of trees. Over the sounds of the French preschool downstairs, he told her that for the average person, life was merely the avoidance of pain. He said that this was why her attempts at art lacked freedom.
If you don’t know that I love you, you don’t know anything, he said that night.
In the shower the next morning, staring at the soap dripping down her legs, she realized she had never thought of herself as old before.
She called a college friend. It increasingly seemed to her, she told her friend, that the pursuit of success in art was no less sociopathic than the pursuit of success in anything else, only less financially remunerative and thus less comprehensible, or excusable. The friend worked a normal job back in Georgia and found all this insulting. Artists? Seriously? No one gave a shit about any of these people—who was she even talking about?
●
She remembered this and walked around the party, the alcohol making her dizzy. She took careful steps around groups of skater boys who huddled in the corners. One room was very hot; one room was very cold; and at the distant end of the hallway, the arts writer’s girlfriend, looking at her phone, suddenly noticed her. She hesitated for a moment and then said, “I was looking for you!” She took her into a large room, sparsely furnished in light wood; it smelled slightly of something rotten, like black bananas. There were colorful Christmas lights strewn across the floor. On TVs and monitors on every surface, there was what seemed to be animated porn.
Two milky-cheeked brunettes with slicked-back hair sat talking by a large, industrial window, ashing cigarettes out onto the street. The arts writer sat on a black futon with a large blond man in a windbreaker that she recognized as a certain Finnish animator, laughing about something.
She’d seen him a few times at the penthouse; he’d exchanged hellos with the photographer, nodding at her. At some stilted, middle-aged artist dinner that month a woman had told the photographer that the animator was doing so much coke that the director he worked with, who’d finally gotten a studio deal, had kicked him off all his productions. He was taking girls to screenings who looked like high schoolers, she added quietly.
“He’s an artist, not Mother Teresa,” the photographer spat back, and the party grew silent. On the way home, in the eighties orange of the subway, he told her that the animator was the only living artist he knew. The next night, the photographer was with his daughter. With her laptop in bed, she stayed up late watching and rewatching the animator’s solo work, ten-minute shorts he’d put online years before. She was mesmerized: they were so sensitive, so obsessively observed, so shot through with uncontrolled despair. She considered writing to him and did not, and had a hard time sleeping for many nights.
Vandersloot was on the floor at their feet. She was wearing a tennis skirt and a t-shirt that rode up above her belly button. It was an outie. The arts writer and animator leaned on each other, toasting bottles of something fruity and disgusting.
“Two million,” the girlfriend whispered to her.
The arts writer got up from the futon and with his sleepy girlfriend dragged Vandersloot onto her feet. She had tears in her eyes. They pulled her out, her dirty ballerina slippers tugging on the carpet.
It was quiet. She asked the animator if Vandersloot was okay. Of course she was, the animator said, she just got like that sometimes. Did she want something to drink? He asked if he could read her palm.
“You have two wounds,” he told her. “One of them is deep, and one of them is ripped open every day.” The brunettes looked at her and then at each other. They smiled, closed the window to a crack, and left.
●
When the animator introduced himself, she pretended not to know his name.
He’d just gotten back from Cannes, he told her. He’d finally met with the elusive funder from “the organization.” They’d gone down to sandy beaches and launched out in candy-colored fishing boats, on a sea so blue it was like Tide detergent. Big bowls of bouillabaisse they ate at starchy restaurants, big bottles of champagne they drank until they passed out in their tuxes. The funder had a drinking problem, everyone knew that, and he was with so many beautiful girls, so many different ones, it seemed unbelievable. They had hardly slept at all that week, and as they dropped acid together that final night, down in a beautiful cove, crabs and scallops pink at their feet, as the night advanced and never darkened, he had the sensation of being flooded with a painless and incinerating light. He felt that he had already died. He felt like he was all ages at once.
And he got it, he said. He got the funding for his script. “Two fucking million,” he told her. He began twisting her hair between his fingers. He did a line of ketamine and passed her one. It was bracingly rocky; she tugged on her nostrils, afraid she was bleeding, as the animator relaxed into the couch. The pain lifted; there was a draft on her face. It felt nice. She recalled lying on a trampoline the first time she got drunk, out in that horrible suburb where people went to wait to die.
“You know…” She considered telling him how she had first heard about him, and decided against it. “You know, I watched some of your stuff once. Like, the shorts.”
“Oh yeah?”
“I really liked them.”
“What’d you like about them?”
“Um.” She looked at him. He looked pale and handsome, with an expression of surprising need. There were orange freckles sprinkled across his nose; he seemed boyish and impossibly old at the same time. “It was like…” A hand of his rested against her knee. “It was like you… I don’t know. Like you noticed beauty more than…” She winced. “Not beauty. Like you noticed everything. Like everything people don’t have time to notice…” She trailed off. He was doing another line. This all sounded stupid. He passed her one. As she did it he asked, “You really liked them?”
Her nose hurt. “I just felt like you… like you understood how miserable and ashamed people are. Like that line at the end of one of them: ‘At a certain point you feel so alone that it’s like your whole life was a comment taken out of context.’”
He sat quietly. “I guess I felt,” she said, “Like you understood me.”
He gazed toward the window with a dreamy expression, one that gradually, despite the warm draft, began to appear more pained. “I wasted my whole life,” he finally said, “on some other fucker’s ideas.”
“Me too,” she said, feeling very close to him.
“People like you just show up one day and think that it’s all going to get handed to you just because you sleep with some old guy. Let me guess: You wrote a script?”
He stood up and walked toward the door, shaking his head. She watched him disappear down the hall. She didn’t even have a script.
After a minute, he returned. “I’m sorry for getting heavy,” he said, sitting closer to her. He passed her another line and did one himself, pulling her toward him with a pale arm thickly matted with hair. His lips were very hot against her ear as he pronounced: “I want you.” She perceived something oddly businesslike about the way he spoke, as if he were narrating the thoughts of another person. He rubbed a hand on her thigh. “Smooth,” he said, laughing, and kissed her.
He moved his tongue around her mouth quickly, like it was mopping a room. Her thoughts were getting jumbled. She thought of a car wash she had seen by the beach the day before the photographer left, the way the men outside had leered at her, in their navy coveralls and rubber shoes. The sand had been so wide, steaming and flesh-colored, and they’d glanced in silence at all those girls. Walking and walking, and then the damp-dog smell of his underarms as their return marooned on the jammed Beltway. Turkish lounges, massage parlors with no windows, law firms with red signs in Russian. She sat by him in his Scion, the afternoon air like cotton in their eyes. Dark gray clouds were gathering on the horizon; gulls flew so low she imagined them hitting the cars, their eyes jelly against the glass. There had been a girl at the beach in socks, he finally said. Had she seen her? She nodded. I’ve been thinking about her for a while. The way her socks went up to the middle of her thighs, even in the heat…
The animator was surprisingly heavy as he pushed her onto her back. Her limbs felt nice, like being in a bathtub. She heard a ringing in her ears. The room was hot. It was very dark. It was like she wasn’t anywhere.
She didn’t have to do very much. Sweat fell on her eyes, pooled in a dark slick on her stomach. The sound of his ears against her own was like a seashell. It hurt her in a familiar way.
She saw their reflection in the dark window, like two pale cows, and closed her eyes.
Art credit: Danielle Roberts, “Cast by the Contrast of the Night (Reflections),” 2022. Acrylic on canvas, 60 × 54 in. Courtesy of the Fredericks & Freiser, NY. Photo by Cary Whittier.
The alarm clock went off and she did not remember setting it. It was a summer day: one of the first really hot ones. She could barely sleep from the heat yet had not yet put in the air conditioner. How could she get it up from the basement? She would have to ask a male acquaintance, someone she texted with from time to time in an unspoken détente of mutual half-interest, and then stand very carefully in her apartment to forestall any glance toward the bed. There was an expression she had heard her father use when she was a child, though her brothers denied it and of course she could not confirm it now. All cats scratch the same in the dark. It did occur to her, every time she woke up alone and looked out the window toward the construction site, that she might never fall in love again.
“Again,” it then occurred to her, amid the provocation of meaty sweat that had built up in her sleep, was a mental device against a more horrific possibility. She had completed many online quizzes as an adolescent in the process of realizing she was not pretty, however romantic and tragic her blue eyes even then with deep hoods appeared to her in the bathroom mirror. Years later, she still hesitated over the question: Have you ever been in love? If so, add (1) [slut point, experience point, etc.].
Had she?
The question of love’s return or arrival was something men of diverse ages and experience had alerted her to. More than one “lover,” of hours’ or years’ duration, had informed her that she was not, in their view, capable of love. Twice it had been professors, who prefaced the remark with the menacing if also pedantic “If you think that…,” i.e., If you think X, then you are not capable of love, have not fallen in love, do not know what love is. When asked to clarify, they had claimed to be saying something about verisimilitude, the aleatory, apostrophes of desire in Elizabethan drama; and yet her real question, which rebounded with queasy acuity, was simply: How did they know?
Most recently, a splintery photographer almost twice her age, who she was quite certain for all her uncertainty had never loved her, had told her, If you don’t know that I love you, you don’t know anything. She could review, in her head, the various forms of love, and was even familiar with some of the relevant terms in Greek. But she would have to admit that she had never really experienced them, at least not with the unquestioned faith each one seemed to demand. Around the time she learned what a man liked to eat for breakfast, she always felt a kind of restlessness and terror, like she was putting all her chips in with a hand she couldn’t see. It did not seem like the photographer even liked her—in fact, it usually seemed that he hated her—but did she know anything? About anything?
For example: What was she supposed to do tonight?
She looked to see what time it was, slowly rubbing her knees together. Half past six. Why had she set an alarm for half past six? Was she supposed to have dinner with someone? The photographer who averred to adore her was in any case out of town with his improbable daughter (her decision not to accompany them having provoked another memorable accusation, i.e., that she lacked a maternal instinct).
She lived in a neighborhood full of flowering wisteria and funeral homes. She lived here in a place too small to breathe because the photographer lived here, a legacy of his ex-wife’s wealthy father, and there was no other neighborhood in New York, when it came time to sign a new lease and she really thought about it, where anyone much cared to see her. The buildings here—the funeral homes and yeasty bakeries and dying capicola shops, between which the wives of finance men pushed babies ghostly white with zinc—were a deep red brick. When the sun burned them in the high hell of afternoon, they shimmered like blood.
In the summer she ate plastic bags of peaches and wiped the juice off with toilet paper. She drank gallons of sugar-free tea and sucked on ice when she got migraines. She let the ice cubes melt on her forehead and on her breasts, by the window, under the wheezy Walmart fan from college, thinking of an erotic scene in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. She wore white socks and everything she did reminded her of something she had done before. The men who haunted her had common names. When she googled one of them, as she now did while leaning against the counter eating a peach wrapped in her last sheet of Charmin, she saw a quote from someone with the same name: “When a man is in despair, it means that he still believes in something.”
Why was she reading this? One of the other things the photographer with a daughter had told her was that she was a masochist. Was he by corollary a sadist? If he was a sadist, he maintained, it was in a metaphorical, artistically generative sense. She remembered: at 8 p.m., there was a test screening at a penthouse downtown.
●
She was invited to these things because of her association with the photographer with a daughter who had been said in a major magazine to have “destroyed his life […] for art.” She did not entirely enjoy attending them. She knew that the people at them admired him but found her rather disgusting for actually sleeping with him. She also suspected that if she were significantly more attractive, they might nonetheless excuse her, maybe even admire her.
She was three years out of an unimpressive degree. It was her first year in New York and, in the increasingly ubiquitous accounting, her first without sexual appeal. She worked a nine-to-five at a desk, a vague title for a vague job that involved herding those with more dignified ones. Having gone to a gallery during one of her first lunch hours—not having realized one ate at one’s desk at even the most terrestrial rung of the ladder—she found herself emailing the photographer from her sticky-keyed Dell desktop, and now, in the evenings, she traveled among a more rarefied set in which her occupation was not so much immoral as incomprehensible.
On the one hand, this at least partially assuaged a primitive yearning for real life occasioned by the usual middle-class misfortunes: her parents did not, it goes without saying, appear to be in love. On the other hand, the year she “dated him” was the year she became—through proximity to the film industry, experience viewing herself on camera and his explicit comments—aware of minute and major distinctions in female attractiveness. When she called him cruel for drawing her attention to these, he posed to her a “thought experiment” that a psychologist versed in his New Age belief system had posed to him fifteen years before on a rocky beach in Spain: Imagine that you go around at a party surveying people about where such-and-such guest stands on the totem pole; ranking them, basically. Wouldn’t everyone pretty much come up with the same list? That had been after a festival in Bilbao; he’d won a prize.
He hastily addended that no one ever thought, when she walked into a room, She is ugly. On the contrary, he proposed, they probably thought, She is pretty. In fact, he showed her the relevant page from his journal (a long Microsoft Word document): “Met girl who sent fan mail. Pretty, too young. Lacks wisdom.” He had other files on his desktop titled “Women to Date.docx” and “Regrets.docx.” He estimated she was a seven, or possibly eight. On one bone-cold night, they had a screaming match as he insisted that an intern he had, but certainly no longer, wished to sleep with was a ten. She thought the intern was a nine. “Scarlett Johansson is a nine,” he said. “Where are you getting these from?” she asked. On a much earlier occasion, winter light blurring the edges of his disappearing mane, he told her that she should see the advantages of dating an older man: in his eyes, at least, she was always going to be beautiful. When he said this, she became very aware of death, his and her own, and by consequence wished to be gentle with him in a way that did not entirely exclude feeling that she had made an unsurvivable mistake.
And yet at around 1:35 each weekday afternoon, as she watched her coworkers scoop wet Chinese chicken salads into their mouths before a bluish glow, as she saw receipts for Amazon returns stack up atop the printer, as they pursued their small colloquies about mid-range restaurants and spin classes and warehouses where you drank wine and threw axes, she knew she would not leave him.
One night he turned 45. They went to a bar with a big, rainy patio where a stream of young acolytes, girls in corsets and boys in Adidas, paid him homage. They sometimes turned to her and nodded, or, more often, did not. The grown-ups said things like, “A real grown-up, huh?,” and as the last young people left, piling into a car to the city, she heard him say to his friends from art school, “I think I was too picky back when I could do the picking.”
But he was out of town this time. She chose some shorts that chafed her thighs, took the F to the beige and immaculate penthouse, removed her shoes and greeted the host. He asked where the photographer was. She said he was out of town. He considered her.
●
The host was a scion of some mysterious fortune, possibly to do with a candy nobody ate anymore. He had blond dreadlocks, an electric fireplace and art books displayed cover out. “I love that it’s not about politics,” he always said at his weekly test screenings, which had begun in March with the photographer’s film about his first ex-wife’s suicide. “It’s aesthetic.” He was small and stringy, like a nugget of meat.
She knew he’d spent years in Los Angeles and returned to his native New York with little more than a well-managed trust fund and 500 XL t-shirts that said “improve the energy.” He had leased three thousand square feet of what, he claimed, was a city far less beholden to the disgusting machinations of the Industry. His home of three months would be, he believed, the site of an artistic renaissance, and he extended his invitations with professionalized strain. People attended with an equal sense of exhausted obligation, leaving heavy glasses on the bland blond wood and tracking dirt on the geometric rugs as a final protestation. When the light was good for photos, they filed up to the roof and its vertiginous, flattering view of the Manhattan sky, briefly smiling until they descended again.
It was dark. A few important-looking people milled around the room, speaking very quietly, with some shame at being there at all. The men were what in Middle America would be middle age. The women were a generation younger and looked expensive. She poured herself a glass of “orange wine” (this was the summer orange wine became popular) and heard a man say, “You like it when he’s not around, don’t you?”
●
Something she had learned in her brief time in New York was that anyone she would meet in New York had relocated there at great personal and financial cost to chase ambitions none of them achieved. Subsequently they had taken to whining about people they perceived as possessing unfair advantage, i.e., having rich parents, even when and perhaps especially when they themselves possessed the financial literacy of the objectively quite rich—spinning out further and further into intricate financial structures and their subtle consequences, speaking of income versus capital, closely held versus public corporations, pass-throughs, write-offs, disbursements and distributions.
The man speaking to her was an arts writer who catalogued, on a monthly schedule, the deficiencies of “cultural elites.” His father, she had discovered with a few clicks, was a urologist who had performed ten thousand robotic vasectomies. He was 34 but looked younger. He had a heart-shaped face and creatine arms, like a muscular infant. In addition, he had a pale girlfriend with a trim figure and hair down to her waist who was always sleepy. She wondered if she was less sleepy when they did it, if they ever did.
She told him no. “Were you his student?”
No—he had been his assistant. The photographer had paid him—always the reminder that this had been a real job—out of the sixty-thousand-dollar grant for What You Know About Yourself Is Not Your Self. For the first year of his daughter’s life, the photographer had documented her expression every time he saw her; the visitor to the gallery would click on a button to project a random photograph at enormous scale and the overwhelming majority were expressions of pain. In the gallery text, the photographer said that when he held his daughter in the hospital he had the violent impression that his life, in that moment, in the reflection of her face, had ended. She had gone to see the project as a state-college student staying in her richer friend’s NYU dorm and felt like he understood something so tragic it felt delirious to see it expressed. She found herself sobbing in the toilet, and felt the world was so large it made her ears ring. This had all been years ago; now the photographer was divorced, and his daughter no longer wished to appear in his photographs.
Anyway, the arts writer told her, he took another assistant job before the project was over. It was too weird, he said. The wife and baby were always crying in the next room. She wasn’t used to hearing stories like that from his fans or, as she called them in her head, sycophants.
●
She wished she had sixty thousand dollars. She wished she had fifty thousand dollars. She wished she had forty thousand dollars. She had lived on less than forty thousand dollars for her entire life and she was sure that if she were somehow promised forty thousand dollars a year, if she knew that much, at least, was coming, she could do incredible things. At times the photographer told her, as they lay at rest in his gray sheets, that she had an artistic soul, that if it weren’t for her job she could be the Anne-Marie to his Godard, and at those moments, not quite registering the insult within this insight, she sensed that something intact and essential remained about New York, regardless of however little she—for nine-tenths of her waking hours—had to do with it. She could no longer articulate, however, exactly what she would like to do. It occurred to her that the most disturbing realization was how free she was, and how little she could think to do with that freedom.
When she began dating the photographer, it was February and the air was clear. After wandering into his show on that lunch break, she had emailed him with a vague offer to help him with anything; she had studied a little photography in college. He said okay, and as she packed up at the end of a shoot that weekend, an exhausting one spent with two young women he’d dated, he told her that she was a very sweet person who had formed a very hard exterior. She began to cry, embarrassed even as she did at the horoscope genericism of the comment.
She began to go to his apartment when his daughter was not there. They went through boxes of negatives he had never developed, and she saw him as a younger man with lush, dark curls; she saw his ex-wives, younger then than she herself was now. There was a project he had done of women before and after he slept with them; there was a project he had done of women before and after he broke up with them; there was a project he had done of women before and after he told them they were beautiful, and before and after he told them they were ugly. It was like he was attempting to document what it was like to be alive, with almost no ability to experience it.
They flipped through catalogs from the late Nineties, through journals, through fat envelopes of slides. It seemed like everything she had ever wanted to happen to her had happened to him twenty years before.
One night a lock of hair fell from behind her ear, he pushed it back, and the inevitable occurred. As they drank watery coffee the following morning, the photographer told her a story from the memoirs a French photographer had rushed to write as he died of AIDS. His storekeeper father, having recently acquired a Kodak in some Norman hovel, had wanted to photograph his daughter’s new breasts. The mother had cried; the daughter had cried. Eventually they acquiesced—but already she was not as beautiful as she had been. Did she understand?
There were many conclusions to take from the foregoing, and one of them was: art must begin right now.
Ice-cold water dripping from every door, she entered a brief period in which she kept a journal. One of her first entries was: I have the sense that my real life is beginning. Their nights together were often sleepless, spent in compulsive and impersonal confessions of love, as if their power of conviction could excuse their meagerness. In the morning, hungry and weak with fresh light across her cheeks, she had the sensation that for once she was playing the character she’d wanted to play: a young woman in love. For a long time, the story of her life had seemed to cease to exist; to become a formless, unfocused mass. Suddenly, it all became very important, and her previous frustrations were the necessary proof of future, near-future, greatness. It horrified her that she had no record of what she had done on any given day when she was eight, ten or eighteen. She could not remember what she had done on a typical day at any age of her life. In the conventional account, the best year of her life had already transpired; and yet she felt it was only in his sight that she had begun to live at all. They performed acts she had never imagined possible, in an alternation of silence and screams.
●
She recalled this, smiled at the cherubic arts writer, and took three steps to the left to refill her wine, pouring nearly to the rim. She heard a woman say, “I’ve always been an admirer of Dr. Seuss.”
The movie was starting. A fire crackled in the air-conditioned air with New Money insistence. Underweight people in understated streetwear sat on taupe sectionals. She thought back to the photographer’s thought experiment and thought: “Am I the ugliest girl in the room?” She sat on the couch near the fire; it made her sweat. Had he hired an interior decorator? Why were these men wearing baseball caps inside?
The arts writer with the urologist father tapped her on the shoulder. He was standing behind her. His girlfriend was vaguely smiling. Why? “We’re going to Dmitri’s,” he whispered.
He ordered a taxi to Brooklyn. She finished her wine.
●
The taxi left them near a littered yard close to the East River. Tonight was the Sabbath and Hassids were walking out of the synagogue, little boys skipping after men in black coats that smelled sharply of sweat. She tugged down on her shorts.
They climbed a wooden staircase chipped with paint and made their way through a long, twisted hallway into the party. The arts writer’s girlfriend asked if she knew the host. She shook her head. She felt tipsy and hungry. “It’s like, an unsuccessful painter.” The girlfriend gestured at the menstrual watercolors on the walls. “They’re for the Chinese market,” she said meaningfully. She then noticed her most famous friend across the room and walked away. Vandersloot made glitch art about amphetamines. People thought she was very cruel, glamorous and Dutch; she was actually from Boston.
The address was listed as a gallery on Google Maps but it was just a big apartment, a loft by consensus if not strict definition. The brick was painted white, and easy-care pothos trailed down blond-wood shelves. There was the stacked washer-dryer of the well-cushioned adult child, even a record player. She found herself pushed past six closed doors into a kitchen of almost-empty bottles and poured a residue of vermouth into a MoMA mug. She drank it quickly, and then poured some vodka and the last bits of soda. A pour-over coffee filter, a four-hundred-dollar chartreuse Le Creuset, a matcha brush. She wondered how much the place cost.
A noise performance was going on, though she couldn’t see the musicians through the crowd: someone rang a triangle and then a man said, “Oh.” The audience nodded and pretended to keep rhythm. Everyone whispered, waiting for it to end. A short woman said, “This is like, the worst thing I’ve ever done.” A tall brunette said, “In some sense, secrecy is the corollary of value.”
The girls here were even younger and wore heels. Dresses in onion-peel fabrics, silvery and thin, showed the tiny vertebrae down their backs. A few mannish ones, tall and silent, wore dark lipstick and low-slung leather pants. Their wide, white throats bore down like swans to small breasts. With great deliberation, they lit cigarettes they pulled from brand-new packs. Her understanding was that they were artists.
She was standing by a shoe rack stacked with size-ten tennis shoes when a chubby man came up to her and addressed her by full name. She asked if they had met. He said, “I’m a fan of your boyfriend. I know lib women are always giving him shit, but I think that he’s incredibly brave. He’s just saying what all guys think. I sometimes think that he might actually be God.”
The man handed her a small booklet and turned to someone else. The Way of Water: A Poetic Manifesto. Page one:
She tried to imagine this young man beginning, fingers flexed before a keyboard, to consider himself a poet.
●
The photographer had become something of a cult figure for his new project, A Thing of Beauty. He was taking portraits of all the women that, as he first explained to her, dragging his cartilaginous nose along her salty neck, he found himself attracted to. Later that warm spring day, eating spaghetti with nutritional yeast in his small kitchen full of art and fruit flies, he showed her one. It was of his studio assistant, specifically her freckled legs in a maroon miniskirt, the leather wrapped tight around tight thighs. Her hands, with long black nails, were clasped in her lap; she fingered a rosary. She went to Pratt.
Why did he want these other girls, she asked. Why did he need to show her this? Didn’t he love her? He went to the fire escape and stood outside, leaning into the green of trees. Over the sounds of the French preschool downstairs, he told her that for the average person, life was merely the avoidance of pain. He said that this was why her attempts at art lacked freedom.
If you don’t know that I love you, you don’t know anything, he said that night.
In the shower the next morning, staring at the soap dripping down her legs, she realized she had never thought of herself as old before.
She called a college friend. It increasingly seemed to her, she told her friend, that the pursuit of success in art was no less sociopathic than the pursuit of success in anything else, only less financially remunerative and thus less comprehensible, or excusable. The friend worked a normal job back in Georgia and found all this insulting. Artists? Seriously? No one gave a shit about any of these people—who was she even talking about?
●
She remembered this and walked around the party, the alcohol making her dizzy. She took careful steps around groups of skater boys who huddled in the corners. One room was very hot; one room was very cold; and at the distant end of the hallway, the arts writer’s girlfriend, looking at her phone, suddenly noticed her. She hesitated for a moment and then said, “I was looking for you!” She took her into a large room, sparsely furnished in light wood; it smelled slightly of something rotten, like black bananas. There were colorful Christmas lights strewn across the floor. On TVs and monitors on every surface, there was what seemed to be animated porn.
Two milky-cheeked brunettes with slicked-back hair sat talking by a large, industrial window, ashing cigarettes out onto the street. The arts writer sat on a black futon with a large blond man in a windbreaker that she recognized as a certain Finnish animator, laughing about something.
She’d seen him a few times at the penthouse; he’d exchanged hellos with the photographer, nodding at her. At some stilted, middle-aged artist dinner that month a woman had told the photographer that the animator was doing so much coke that the director he worked with, who’d finally gotten a studio deal, had kicked him off all his productions. He was taking girls to screenings who looked like high schoolers, she added quietly.
“He’s an artist, not Mother Teresa,” the photographer spat back, and the party grew silent. On the way home, in the eighties orange of the subway, he told her that the animator was the only living artist he knew. The next night, the photographer was with his daughter. With her laptop in bed, she stayed up late watching and rewatching the animator’s solo work, ten-minute shorts he’d put online years before. She was mesmerized: they were so sensitive, so obsessively observed, so shot through with uncontrolled despair. She considered writing to him and did not, and had a hard time sleeping for many nights.
Vandersloot was on the floor at their feet. She was wearing a tennis skirt and a t-shirt that rode up above her belly button. It was an outie. The arts writer and animator leaned on each other, toasting bottles of something fruity and disgusting.
“Two million,” the girlfriend whispered to her.
The arts writer got up from the futon and with his sleepy girlfriend dragged Vandersloot onto her feet. She had tears in her eyes. They pulled her out, her dirty ballerina slippers tugging on the carpet.
It was quiet. She asked the animator if Vandersloot was okay. Of course she was, the animator said, she just got like that sometimes. Did she want something to drink? He asked if he could read her palm.
“You have two wounds,” he told her. “One of them is deep, and one of them is ripped open every day.” The brunettes looked at her and then at each other. They smiled, closed the window to a crack, and left.
●
When the animator introduced himself, she pretended not to know his name.
He’d just gotten back from Cannes, he told her. He’d finally met with the elusive funder from “the organization.” They’d gone down to sandy beaches and launched out in candy-colored fishing boats, on a sea so blue it was like Tide detergent. Big bowls of bouillabaisse they ate at starchy restaurants, big bottles of champagne they drank until they passed out in their tuxes. The funder had a drinking problem, everyone knew that, and he was with so many beautiful girls, so many different ones, it seemed unbelievable. They had hardly slept at all that week, and as they dropped acid together that final night, down in a beautiful cove, crabs and scallops pink at their feet, as the night advanced and never darkened, he had the sensation of being flooded with a painless and incinerating light. He felt that he had already died. He felt like he was all ages at once.
And he got it, he said. He got the funding for his script. “Two fucking million,” he told her. He began twisting her hair between his fingers. He did a line of ketamine and passed her one. It was bracingly rocky; she tugged on her nostrils, afraid she was bleeding, as the animator relaxed into the couch. The pain lifted; there was a draft on her face. It felt nice. She recalled lying on a trampoline the first time she got drunk, out in that horrible suburb where people went to wait to die.
“You know…” She considered telling him how she had first heard about him, and decided against it. “You know, I watched some of your stuff once. Like, the shorts.”
“Oh yeah?”
“I really liked them.”
“What’d you like about them?”
“Um.” She looked at him. He looked pale and handsome, with an expression of surprising need. There were orange freckles sprinkled across his nose; he seemed boyish and impossibly old at the same time. “It was like…” A hand of his rested against her knee. “It was like you… I don’t know. Like you noticed beauty more than…” She winced. “Not beauty. Like you noticed everything. Like everything people don’t have time to notice…” She trailed off. He was doing another line. This all sounded stupid. He passed her one. As she did it he asked, “You really liked them?”
Her nose hurt. “I just felt like you… like you understood how miserable and ashamed people are. Like that line at the end of one of them: ‘At a certain point you feel so alone that it’s like your whole life was a comment taken out of context.’”
He sat quietly. “I guess I felt,” she said, “Like you understood me.”
He gazed toward the window with a dreamy expression, one that gradually, despite the warm draft, began to appear more pained. “I wasted my whole life,” he finally said, “on some other fucker’s ideas.”
“Me too,” she said, feeling very close to him.
“People like you just show up one day and think that it’s all going to get handed to you just because you sleep with some old guy. Let me guess: You wrote a script?”
He stood up and walked toward the door, shaking his head. She watched him disappear down the hall. She didn’t even have a script.
After a minute, he returned. “I’m sorry for getting heavy,” he said, sitting closer to her. He passed her another line and did one himself, pulling her toward him with a pale arm thickly matted with hair. His lips were very hot against her ear as he pronounced: “I want you.” She perceived something oddly businesslike about the way he spoke, as if he were narrating the thoughts of another person. He rubbed a hand on her thigh. “Smooth,” he said, laughing, and kissed her.
He moved his tongue around her mouth quickly, like it was mopping a room. Her thoughts were getting jumbled. She thought of a car wash she had seen by the beach the day before the photographer left, the way the men outside had leered at her, in their navy coveralls and rubber shoes. The sand had been so wide, steaming and flesh-colored, and they’d glanced in silence at all those girls. Walking and walking, and then the damp-dog smell of his underarms as their return marooned on the jammed Beltway. Turkish lounges, massage parlors with no windows, law firms with red signs in Russian. She sat by him in his Scion, the afternoon air like cotton in their eyes. Dark gray clouds were gathering on the horizon; gulls flew so low she imagined them hitting the cars, their eyes jelly against the glass. There had been a girl at the beach in socks, he finally said. Had she seen her? She nodded. I’ve been thinking about her for a while. The way her socks went up to the middle of her thighs, even in the heat…
The animator was surprisingly heavy as he pushed her onto her back. Her limbs felt nice, like being in a bathtub. She heard a ringing in her ears. The room was hot. It was very dark. It was like she wasn’t anywhere.
She didn’t have to do very much. Sweat fell on her eyes, pooled in a dark slick on her stomach. The sound of his ears against her own was like a seashell. It hurt her in a familiar way.
She saw their reflection in the dark window, like two pale cows, and closed her eyes.
Art credit: Danielle Roberts, “Cast by the Contrast of the Night (Reflections),” 2022. Acrylic on canvas, 60 × 54 in. Courtesy of the Fredericks & Freiser, NY. Photo by Cary Whittier.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.