“What are you doing?” a voice says, and I turn around and find the kid in the wig eating a slice of pizza.
“You’re real.”
“Obviously,” she says. There are times I interact with kids and recall my abortion fondly, moments like this when I cross paths with a child who is clearly a drag.
“Obviously,” I say, screwing the cap back on the cough syrup.
“I’ve never seen you before.”
“Probably because we don’t run in the same circles, kid.”
“There are no black people in this neighborhood,” she says, and I catch my reflection in the mirror and feel a tightness in my chest.
“What’s your name?”
“Akila.”
“Are there really no black people in this neighborhood?” I ask, just as Eric appears behind her.
“Go to your room, please,” he says, and Akila shrugs and disappears down the hall. He waits for her door to close and then closes the space between us, and when I look up at him I receive him anew. His overwhelming height, the intensity of his eye contact, the general feeling that he is not a man who sleeps. To some extent I’ve had to revise him every time we’ve met, but this feels different. The last time I saw him was the first time I ever saw him come, an elastic split second made for paint, somehow analogous to the expression he is making as he tries to find the words, his mouth opening and closing without sound. I like this part. I remind myself of this when I realize I am nervous, when I notice how incongruously this degree of anger hangs on him, and that I cannot anticipate how this anger will manifest.
“What are you doing in my house?”
“Congratulations on the anniversary.”
“What is the matter with you?”
“Everything is the matter,” I say, just as Rebecca appears. She pauses and looks at us.
“I was thinking we could start a game of Trivial Pursuit,” she says, and now that I look between them and consider them as a unit, they do seem like different species: Rebecca a lonely, carnivorous bird, Eric a vegetarian mammal with a short, panicked life.
“I’m going to take her home,” he says.
“This is our anniversary party.”
“Yes, I know.” He fishes his keys out of his pocket, grabs my arm, and starts ushering me down the stairs.
“Okay, so call a car,” Rebecca says.
“The capital of Kansas is Topeka. Rosebud was the sled,” he says before he pulls me down the stairs and out of the door, then stuffs me into the car. Nothing about the interior of the car has changed. It is still vaguely moist, still smacking of something lightly fried, still old in a way that has less to do with the window cranks than the whine of the steering wheel, the car taking the road in rough licks, so distressed by the transition from Jersey to New York you can almost feel it burning through the fuel. Of course I can’t help but think about the night our route was reversed, when Rebecca’s name emerged in LED, my thumb above Decline. When we were high and inoculated against embarrassment, the car crooked at the curb as he pulled me up the stairs. But when you have nights like those, anomalies where all the stars defer, and you are not faking, not even a little, the polite thing is to never mention it again. Eric reaches into the glove compartment and retrieves a flask.
“Do you understand that this is not okay? This is my family,” he says, taking a long drink. I watch him, count the seconds during which his eyes are closed. For a moment, the car veers onto the shoulder. “I don’t owe you anything. I was clear. I have a life, a job, a wife—”
“A child. A child who is black.”
“What does it matter if she’s black?”
“You could’ve mentioned it.”
“I didn’t mention it because it doesn’t matter. My family is off limits.”
“And your wife. Jesus.”
“She wasn’t always like that.”
“What are you doing? Don’t defend your wife to me.”
“Marriage is hard,” he says without any conviction, like it is something he’s rehearsed.
“So hard that you can’t respond to a text?”
“This is the thing with your generation. Everything is always now. There was a time when you could not reach everyone all the time.”
“Maybe my life isn’t as serious as yours. But I’m a person.”
“You’re no more a person to me than I am to you.”
“What?”
“I mean I am of use to you. I take you out, and for another night you are spared from trying to hold a conversation with a boy your age.”
“I don’t need you.”
“Of course you don’t, that’s the fucking point,” he says, turning the wrong way onto a one-way street. Luckily the stretch is short, and we turn onto my block, my building looming in the city fog.
“We adopted her two years ago. She’s really struggling and I don’t know what to do,” he says as we pull up to the curb. I think about Akila—her big, watchful eyes. The way she moved through the party, an invisible girl.
“I’m sorry,” I say, and he looks over at me, his face flushed.
“I’m sorry I said I loved you. I feel awful about that.”
“It’s not a big deal. I didn’t take it seriously.”
“It had been a while for me.” He pauses, slides the key out of the ignition. “You’re wearing my wife’s dress.”
“Yeah. Is that weird for you?”
“Not weird, just—” He traces a seam in the dress thoughtfully, and it feels weird to me, the idea that he understands this dress better than I do. “I feel like I want to hurt you,” he says suddenly, thumbing the collar of the dress.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I’d like to hit you.”
“Okay.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, okay,” I say, and it’s odd how he rolls up his sleeve, the premeditation of it, the procedural flexing of his hand that makes it feel like he has already thought it through. And no guidelines have been established per se, but somehow I just know to present my face, to close my eyes. When the first blow comes, I feel it in my ears before I feel it anywhere else, the roots of my eyeballs curling, the general feeling like my head is sitting on a single pivot, like an owl. I bring my hand up to my cheek, almost out of expectation that the pain be concentrated here, but in a way, it is everywhere.
“Again,” I say, and this time it is harder. This time I keep my eyes open and admire his focus, whatever high or extremely low regard of me is moving him to use such force. Because it is a little impolite how gamely he satisfies this request. No doubt or initial softness, just his wide, rough palm and all the liquid centers of my teeth. And this whole time we have both had our seat belts on, but he unhooks his and I unhook mine, and I look around to make sure the street is free of police and slide into his lap, where I yank the lever and recline him all the way down, this old car and its trappings made foremost to take the air out of any sexual moment, his nose in my eye as the seat flattens swiftly from 90 to 180 degrees, his cry as I hike up his wife’s impossible dress, finish him, and promptly eject myself from the car. I unzip the dress before I climb the stairs so that when I reach my door I am already halfway out. I sit naked in my room and eat half a rotisserie chicken with my hands. I open my phone and find a voicemail from a number I don’t recognize. While I am prepared for the voice to be hers, I am not prepared for her familiarity. I am not prepared to hear her say my name, the minor background chaos warping her voice when she says, softly, I enjoyed meeting you, let’s do that again.