He sinks into his calfskin recliner. Everything in his house looks brand-new, like he just remodeled. There’s something on his mind, I can tell by the way he adjusts his position, but instead of speaking it aloud, he changes the channel on the HDTV. Odessa and Max sit beside me on the Boca do Lobo sofa, and we all commence watching the last episode of the first half of the last season of Mad Men. My father likes Mad Men because he, too, used to be a drunk, over-the-hill ad exec watching the world leave him behind, and he remembers the sixties being an easier time for white men like him.
“Your mother called me,” he says, looking at me.
“I don’t want to see her.”
“You don’t have to.”
“She’s not moving back. It’s a test to see if I’ll stay here for her. She knows that I’m moving.”
He smiles at the television. “I’m not arguing.”
Odessa watches Max navigate to the page on their Instagram where they can see what their friends are liking.
“What?” they say to her.
“Why is Violet liking Jorden’s posts?”
Violet is Max’s girlfriend, but I’ve promised not to share this with Odessa. She thinks they’re best friends. “Consider that your mother may be a closet lesbian,” I told Max. “Maybe it would be good for her to see you living authentically.”
“Didn’t Jorden call you a retard?” Odessa says.
“In fifth grade.”
“That was only two years ago.”
Odessa was thirteen when she had Maxima. For the first ten years of Max’s life, Odessa was still a child. They lived with her mother, an ultraconservative cunt rag. It’s only recently that Odessa has been able to afford an apartment where they can live alone. They still share a bed, so when guys sleep over, Max moves to the sofa.
I barely talked to Odessa while I was in New York. It’s only since moving back to Florida that she and I have grown close again. My hypnotist has asked me why I continue to feel that I can extend myself to her, if I feel I’m in any way able to help her, or if there’s another reason why I let her in close to me. Does it mean that I’m compassionate? Do I have poor boundaries? Am I codependent? Am I infantilizing her? Am I in love with her?
“Do you want me to talk to Violet?” she says. “I won’t say anything about you. I’ll just be like, ‘How do you know Jorden?’”
“I would rather you didn’t.”
“I adopted a cat from the street,” I say.
“How sweet,” says my dad.
“Do you want to see a picture?”
I take out my phone and pull up a picture of Butters. She’s in the bathtub, lathered with shampoo. I combed the fleas from her fur for forty-five minutes the day I rescued her. They came off in clumps like tiny landslides.
“She’s cute,” says my dad.
“Yeah, she was a stray.”
“Where’s Seth tonight?”
SETH INVITED ME to Black Box the night before. I came in at the end of a demonstration by a local experimental dancer. She was a middle-aged woman with olive skin and close-cut hair, dressed in a black linen midriff two-piece, shoeless on the smooth concrete of the gallery’s floor. She practiced a kind of dance involving spelling with her body, and explained how the sound of a name is inherently linked to a precise lexicographical gesture, which she demonstrated with names from the audience. People were seated on risers. I recognized many of them as self-proclaimed “art workers,” owning property downtown or otherwise working in the nonprofit sector. The dancer assumed the position of an egg, on her knees, bent over herself. I stood near the back, in the aisle. The first notes of Janis Joplin’s “Little Girl Blue” came down from the ceiling, and the lonely guitar crept through muted darkness. The dancer broke open, like a flower blooming underwater.
After, Seth closed the gallery but left the risers up with the folding chairs on them. He extracted a tripod screen and projector from the closet where he keeps the mop, and cued up Peter Greenaway’s A Zed & Two Noughts. In it the wives of zoologist brothers die in a swan-induced car crash, and the men become obsessed with rotting. Paolo had suggested it. Paolo will be finishing his MFA in studio art in New York just as we’re arriving. Seth talks about him like he’s Jesus.
Seth visited Paolo last month while deciding whether or not to move with me to the city. For the first time, he sent me long, rambling love letters via email. The first came as I was finishing a twelve-hour shift at the Pizza Shack. You didn’t know I had noticed you pacing the halls of our high school like some animal in a cage, he said. I read it standing with one hand on the oven door. After you left for New York, I remember thinking of you from that great distance. I would try to remember what you looked like. I would conjure you in my mind, recall the shift in contrast between your freckles and your pale skin.
I walked home greasy and floating at three in the morning. I knew for the first time with certainty that he loved me. I read his emails over and over. I’d see your pale green eyes, forever piercing my thoughts.
A swan, a car crash, a woman maimed. Seth held my hand through the movie. He crept from my wrist to the waistband of my jeans. We saw a long, still, accelerated shot of a zebra decomposing.
Afterward, we stacked chairs and carried the risers to the shed in the alley. It was a thick, wet night, with fireworks going off over the bay. A storm was lowering, cool and heavy.
Most of Seth’s time is spent at Black Box, but most of his income comes from his part-time job at a kava bar on Sunset Beach. He has to be there at six in the morning. “I can’t stay, but I’ll walk you home,” he said.
HIS EMAILS CAME every day he was gone, each one longer and more embroidered. It began to rain, he wrote on the last day. We hadn’t talked on the phone for the duration of his trip; he hated talking on the phone. Instead, I’d imagine him sitting at a coffee shop, perhaps somewhere near Union Square, spending an hour or more of each evening distilling what he’d taken in since the last time he’d written to me. The sun falling over the wooden tables. Through the tall, clear windows, light spilling over a yellowing wall of magazines. I imagined him imagining me receiving him, taking his words into my corneas. I thought I could walk a straight line through Central Park, but I ended up walking a parabola from 85th to 80th, he said. I became disoriented while trying to return. Each line held metaphorical properties. And one redeeming moment came when I had to urinate—I pictured this; was aroused—I turned to face west moments before the sky opened up. Suddenly fireflies lit the walkway in daytime.
“IT’S GOING TO be a busy week,” he said on our walk home from the gallery, stopping at a bench beside a retention pond. We were midway between our apartments. He wanted to talk. “You may not see me much.” He had one week to finish bringing his senior thesis together to complete the BFA he’s been working on for six years. “Where are you hoping we’ll go?” he asked me.
I sat. “I know you need to go home.”
“No, that’s not what I’m asking. I’m asking, why do you want me to move with you?”
“Why do you want to come?”
“I don’t know, Nina. I think New York has something to offer me, but it will also steal a part of my sanity. I have a community here. I have a reputation.”