I look at him.
“What were you doing tonight, Nina?” he says.
“Writing in the bathtub,” I say.
“I knocked and you didn’t answer.”
“Sorry about that. I was wearing headphones. Would you like to hear what I was writing?”
“Sure.”
I take my phone from my purse. In my email, I find the latest finished story in the Ira Cycle, my new series of thinly veiled meditations on my relationship with Seth, which I began after abandoning my novel. This story is called “An Opening.” In it, Ira has invited Liz to an opening at the art gallery where he works, and has hung a solo show of his paintings. A nice-sized gathering has convened on the space, among them his high school art teacher and the gallery’s owner. He’s introducing Liz to a small group of people, but is describing her as a friend and new collaborator rather than his girlfriend, though they have been dating for almost two years and have never collaborated on a project. Liz is playing along. She doesn’t want to contradict and embarrass him, or humiliate herself, and though she wants to be known as his girlfriend, it is also validating to be described as an artist.
Afterward, Liz stays at Ira’s apartment. They spoon on a chaise longue, which functions as his bed, in his bedroom, which is also his studio. Ira acquired the chaise longue for twenty dollars at a yard sale. The original fabric is worn through, so he’s tucked layers of blankets around it rather than repair it. When they share it, Liz is trapped against the wall, so she can’t turn or stretch or adjust her position. She is never comfortable, and always wakes in pain, but she would rather be in pain than sleep alone. Ira never stays at her apartment. He can’t paint there.
She disappears in the morning before he wakes. She knows he would be annoyed to find her there. He would solemnly make her toast, as if it’s his duty. Ira’s bedroom window faces east, she writes in her journal. The sun shines on him every morning when I leave him.
“Is that a threat?” he says when I finish.
“What do you mean?”
He snickers. I light the roach in his ashtray. Outside, headlights streak past on the freeway on-ramp. Gulls take flight from the guardrail. Four Post-its taped to the window correspond to miniature empty canvases beneath them: EPIC VOID, PREGNANT SPACE, EMPTY HOLE, HOLLOW LOT.
“I passed a mother and two young children this morning on Ninth Avenue petting a dead squirrel,” I say.
“How maudlin.”
“Isn’t she worried about disease?”
“Some people aren’t.” He smiles at me, then pulls his shirt over his head and drops it on the tarp at his feet, where he also deposits his underwear. He disappears into the bathroom and takes a long shower while I wait. When he emerges, he smells like tea tree and Fast Orange. His long hair drips down his back. “You can stay here, but I can’t guarantee you’ll enjoy it,” he says.
“Why not?”
“Because I’m not going to sleep with you.”
“You think that’s why I’m here?”
“I think physical intimacy is more important to you than it is to me.”
He sits beside me. I undress and press myself against the wall, and he lies down in front. I wrap my arm around him and lower my face into his hair.
“I know you love me,” he says.
Two
I began cutting myself and sneaking pills in middle school, resentful, bored, and unsupervised. I suspected my feelings were more intense than other people’s. My parents were preoccupied with their mutual hatred of each other, inspired by the acrimonious divorce and my mother’s new residence in a trailer park in Lutz. She has since moved to a nudist colony in Kissimmee to live with her polycule.
I moved to New York for college. I stole Adderall from my suitemate. I fucked her boyfriend on a weekly basis. I fucked people without condoms. I especially liked men who already had girlfriends. The hope was always that they’d leave their girlfriends for me; for them to leave their girlfriends would have been the ultimate victory, proof of my irresistibility, but they never did.
I believe it was my suitemate who called my father upon the advice of other students whose identities remain a mystery to me. I lived for eight weeks in a Tampa facility named after one of the twelve steps. My official diagnosis was drug addiction, but I was never picky, and any numbing or mood-altering agent would do. Weed, wine, sex, starvation. I signed up for trauma counseling because I felt something had happened to me, although I was unable to articulate a single event. Others in the group shared stories of incest, combat, rape, dead children.
I became infatuated with a Kevin Spacey look-alike in facility-wide group therapy. He sat across from me and never looked at me, but I felt we had a connection that ran deeper than flirting. We were warned not to start a new relationship until after a year of sobriety. I never said more than two words to him, but I continued masturbating to his memory until he called me one morning, a month after I’d left. I’d never given him my number. Hearing his voice, I remembered that he had a family. He had stolen his daughter’s Girl Scout money for meth. He’d hired prostitutes on business trips to Thailand.
IT’S SWARMING SEASON, and my building is infested with termites. I awake to their wings beating against my cheekbones. I gather some into a plastic lunch bag to bring to my landlord, who has insisted she needs to see a “living sample.” My duplex neighbor composts in a plastic trash can five feet from my back door. I drag the can in front of their sunporch screen and ride my bicycle to the hypnotist’s office.
“My mother disappeared and my father was always working,” I tell her. I’ve been seeing the hypnotist on a sliding scale for the last month because I have a deep intuition that something is wrong with me, somehow related to my unnameable trauma, and hypnosis seems compatible with my daily wake-and-bake habit. She is white, in her late forties, with dreadlocks and carved wooden gauges weighing down her ears. The henna on her hands looks like Spanish moss, and her office is plush with amber lighting, palo santo, and embroidered pillows. She told me in our first session that after ten years of working with children in foster care, and five years in disaster relief, this is the field where she feels she can make the most difference. “I wish I could offer it for free,” she said.
“I’d have a babysitter three or four nights a week, and it was always some teenager who would invite her boyfriend over,” I say. “I’d call boys in my class who didn’t want to talk to me, who would answer the phone and hear my voice and hang up. Sometimes there were friends, but everyone eventually leaves me. When I moved back to Florida, none of my college friends even called me.”
AFTER REHAB, I attended NA for two weeks, then hooked up with a crust punk I met smoking outside after a meeting one night. The topic had been loneliness. I was gazing at a light fixture where moth after moth incinerated itself. “I’m an only child, too,” he said to me, bumming a cigarette. Though drawing him closer into my emotional sphere seemed risky at that critical stage in my sobriety, I couldn’t bring myself to prefer being alone after that. I couldn’t find it in me to reject him when he’d shown me such kindness as to ask me for a lighter.
I moved him in with me. He began smoking crack again, but I couldn’t kick him out because then he’d be homeless. This went on for weeks, until I met Seth riding my bicycle home from the Pizza Shack. He was two blocks from my apartment, unloading bags from the back of the gallery’s pickup. I recognized him as a moody artist from my high school. He invited me upstairs to drink tea, and a week later, we fucked on his mite-crawling rag rugs. I continued fucking him for another month until I worked up the nerve to dump Mission. Mission skipped town to go train-hopping again. Seth has never let me forget this series of events, even two years later. Whenever he can, he subtly alludes to “the way I live my life.”