One
My mother reached out to me again this morning, trying to reconcile. Odessa asks me what I would say to her if I could say anything. “I guess I would thank her for teaching me to be so kind,” I say. I put her on speakerphone and hold my camera up to my crotch. I send Brian a picture with my underwear pulled to the side. My bedroom looms in the background.
It’s been three years since I’ve spoken with my mother, since she said to me: “Why don’t you cut yourself, take some pills, starve yourself, drop out of school, and suck some dick, Nina?” I had just told her I was considering not returning to college. I was two months out of rehab, talking to her on my bicycle en route to my second job as a line cook at the Pizza Shack. I told her never to contact me again.
You’re my only child. You know I love you, she said in her email. You’ve learned so much about yourself since then. You’ve had a difficult recovery. She said we could resolve our differences on my terms. She offered to come back to St. Petersburg.
“Have you responded?” says Odessa.
“No.”
“Are you going to?”
I touch myself and send Brian a picture of the gloss on my fingertips. “I don’t know why she would come here if she knows I’m leaving in a month,” I say. I place my fingers in my mouth.
“How would she know that?”
“She talks to my dad.”
I imagine Brian wheeling over to the senior editor in his chair. Having to cross his legs.
He texts me. You’re killing me.
“Hang on,” I say to Odessa.
You should touch yourself, I type.
“What are you waiting for her to say to you?” she says. “Isn’t this what you wanted?”
I’m at work, says Brian.
So go to the bathroom.
“Yeah,” I say, “I just don’t think she’s sincere.”
Odessa has known her since we were five. I expect her to agree with me. She’s quiet. A picture of Brian’s dick appears on my phone. It’s thick and curved, with trimmed hair, dark and tight against his groin. He snapped the photo in the mirror of an employee bathroom. It’s lit from above.
Are you making yourself cum? I say.
You should help me, he says.
“Hang on, Odessa,” I say. “Seth is texting me.”
“No worries.”
Brian and I make plans for him to pick me up at eight. This gives me a few hours to file my article with him about the ongoing effects of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. If I have time after that, I’ll read Numina submissions and wash my pussy.
“Let me call you later,” I say to Odessa. “He just asked me to help him with something.”
“Okay.” She hangs up.
BRIAN ARRIVES AT eleven. I meet him down the street and climb into his black Jetta. He offers no explanation for how late he is, but carries on a side conversation as he drives, holding his phone down by his left thigh. We pass Seth’s apartment, where a gauzy white bedsheet hangs in the window, illuminated by the light over his worktable. I imagine him smoking weed, listening to Kurt Vile, painting color studies in his sketchbook. He texted me just as Brian arrived and invited me over. I was disappointed by his tenderness, his willingness to have me in his space. It makes me look like a bad person.
We park down the street from the beach and walk hand in hand down the brick road, past craftsman houses cloaked in darkness. We cross the last road to the Gulf of Mexico and are met with the sulfurous stench of red tide. We look out at the water, but it’s too dark to see the fish kills lying along the shore. Brian turns toward me and lifts my shirt to find the small of my back. My body lights up. I realize I’ve stopped breathing and inhale, coughing at the smell. He pulls me over to a dune, and I kneel to take him in my mouth.
IT’S PAST MIDNIGHT when he drops me off at Seth’s apartment. The light above the worktable is off, but the light beside his chaise is on, which means he’s reading. I take the alley down the side of his building, past the group home for teenage mothers, so I can enter from the back to give him the idea that I’ve walked to his house from my own.
I cross the crushed-shell parking lot and climb a set of sun-bleached wooden stairs. I knock on his kitchen window. The warm light from his bedroom spills down the hall when he opens the door. He moves to let me in. “Odessa said you told her you were helping me with something,” he says.
“I didn’t want to talk on the phone anymore and I didn’t want to hurt her feelings,” I say.
“What were you doing?”
“Finishing an article.”
He closes the door behind me and gestures toward his room. “I walked by your apartment and didn’t see a light on.”
“I might have been in the bath.”
He’s covered the rugs with plastic tarps. A vertical canvas, recently primed, leans against the wall atop a waist-high bookshelf of tattered monographs. He’s pulled out two by Richard Diebenkorn and Gerhard Richter and laid them open on the worktable. Several color-field paintings lean together against another shelf of paperbacks.
I sit on the chaise longue. “What were you doing so late at the gallery?” I say. As the artist-in-residence at Black Box, Seth is paid for nine hours of work there every week, but as it happens, he ends up working almost forty. Last week, I went with him to the home of the gallery’s owner. Their conversation centered on small-town gossip, gallery business, and light flirtation of the kind gay men employ with straight men. Seth reciprocated and deflected, ever aware that his reputation, his future, and his self-image were in Theo’s hands. My mind was two mirrors facing each other. I pretended to be absorbed by Theo’s collection of African diaspora art. I wasn’t actually engaged until Theo asked me about my progress on the inaugural issue of Numina, the gallery’s flagship publication, which Seth volunteered me to edit. “People are submitting,” I told Theo. “I’d be happy to go over it with you this week.” It’s clear he continues to hope that I’m temporary, two years after meeting me. He refers to me sarcastically as Dorothy Parker. “That would be fine,” he said.
Seth closes the monographs. “Theo entrusted me with the deinstallation of the emerging artist show,” he says. “Taking down a show involves removing artwork from the walls, wrapping it properly for shipping, patching the walls, repainting them, mopping the floors. It’s not glamorous, but it affords me time for contemplation.”
“What were you contemplating?”
“The situation I find myself in.”
He swirls a paintbrush in a yogurt container filled with water. He taps it gently on the brim and lays it on a paper towel.
“A studio practice utilizes various discoveries,” he says. “My recent discovery is that direct confrontation leads to a personal clarification of environmental relations. The most urgent themes in art break down barriers between people. Yet a studio is a place of isolation. A contradiction. And in the present period, my studio practice is not solitary.”
“Are you saying you want me to leave?”
“I don’t believe that’s what I said.”
“I’m not sure what you’re saying.”
“The polemic push of the organism against the uncontrolled dynamics of his environment can be very generative.”