Authors: Jessica Chiarella
“I’d say your chances for reelection would fall somewhere around the likelihood that the Cubs will sweep the Series this year.” Jackson looks as if he’s regretting the words, even as he says them. He paws a hand through his hair, everything about him scrawny and tired. But I know there are limitless reserves of energy there, under the surface. This is a man who doesn’t know how to stop fighting his particular war. “Sir, you knew there were going to be times like this. Where it’s not about right and wrong . . . where right and wrong has nothing to do with being smart.”
I nod. “Sure, except it never seemed to matter as much before.”
“I know.”
“It matters now,” I say, though it’s impossible to resolve my desire to be good, to do the right thing, while I’m sitting wrapped in the musty sheets recently vacated by my new mistress. And despite the fact that it’s barely ten in the morning, I want a drink so badly my jaw aches.
“Of course, sir,” he says and hands me the phone.
In the morning I end up on Penny’s doorstep. I don’t want to go back to my empty apartment, not now, not yet. I use my spare key to get into Penny’s building and wait on the steps below the third floor landing for her to get home. I could let myself in, curl up on her couch in one of her beautiful old quilts and sleep a little. I could sit in her kitchen with a drink. But I don’t do any of those things. I wait on the steps, all lank hair and overused muscles, smelling of David’s sweat, because anything else doesn’t feel penitent enough.
I can hear Penny on the phone when the door bangs behind her. Her voice floats up the staircase before she does, and at first the exactness of her diction sounds strange and jumbled, until I realize she’s speaking French. She’s talking to her father. She pauses on the steps when she sees me there and then sits down next to me. She’s carrying a bag from Chicago Bagel Authority. It’s the first time I realize I’m hungry. When she hangs up she squeezes my shoulder.
“Rough night?” she asks.
“Sam and I . . .” but she’s already nodding.
“He called. I went by your place but you were gone. I was worried.”
“Please tell me you didn’t know,” I say.
“Of course not,” Penny replies, and my trust in her word is absolute, as always. “I’m not in the business of keeping Sam’s secrets for him.”
“Right, because that’s my sister’s job.”
“At least you know they weren’t having an affair.” Penny opens her paper bag and offers me a bagel. I shake my head. The idea
of eating, of anything that will serve this traitorous body of mine, which will lie down so easily for a man like David Jenkins just hours after the love of my life walks out the door, feels sacrilegious. And vindictiveness is my new religion.
“This is worse.”
She shuts the bag, setting it on the step next to her. “Yes, it is.”
“Anyway,” I say, rising from the stairs, feeling my legs protest under me. “You busy?”
“Not particularly. Want to get some coffee?”
“I don’t think I can face the world right now,” I reply. She doesn’t rise. It seems uncharacteristic for Penny, who is always the one charging forward, always the leader. “You want to talk about this out in your hallway?”
“See, Hannah, the thing is,” Penny begins, but it hits me before she even has a chance to say it. That stinging realization, that wire of truth uncoiling inside me.
“Sam’s here,” I say, and then carefully press a hand to my mouth so I don’t scream something awful at her. Impulse control does not seem to be this body’s forte.
“He needed a place to stay,” Penny says, on her feet now, speaking fast. “I figured better he stay here, give you some space for now.”
“You hate Sam,” I say, taking my hand from my mouth, feeling tears creep up. “You’ve hated him ever since you’ve known him. And now? Now is when you choose to take his side?”
“I’m not taking his side, Hannah,” Penny says.
“He can afford a hotel. He doesn’t have to stay here.”
“I was worried about him, all right?” she says, standing now to face me, everything in her animated with her usual righteousness. Penny, who has never questioned a step she’s ever taken. “The way he sounded last night . . .”
“What about me?” I ask, a child pulling at her mother’s skirts. Perhaps selfishness is my new religion. I don’t care. “You’re supposed to be the one who is there for me. When I need you.”
“And if you’d shown up here, I would have been,” Penny replies.
“But I’m not the one you went to last night. And I have a pretty good idea who that was.”
“Fuck you,” I say, shaking my head, trying to take a full breath as I begin to descend the stairs.
“You’re making the wrong choice, Hannah,” Penny says. I pause, though I don’t turn. “You’re not capable of loving someone like him. You know that.”
“That’s pretty much the whole point, Penny,” I say, continuing down the stairs without looking back.
I stay a week in L.A. instead of a day. Harry puts me up in a very expensive hotel in Beverly Hills, like he used to when I was very young and very pliant and the idea of dating an older man seemed chic, even if the older man was my slightly slimy agent. I can’t quite tell if he’s trying to get back into my good graces or under my skirt, but it doesn’t really matter to me when the spoils are the same. I spend my days working on my body’s inaugural tan by the pool, and in the evenings Harry takes me out to what is always the newest, the next big restaurant.
It feels a little garish to be so ornamental for this man. Harry has an excellent reputation as an agent and as a womanizer, and I get the impression that people think I’m serving his latter persona more than his former. It’s bad enough that I’m letting him buy me dinner, but he’s also buying the dresses I wear, and the combination makes me feel a little like a call girl, a kept woman.
If only he knew, I think, on my last night in Los Angeles, my skin pink and raw with sun, sticking to the leather interior of his town car in a way that is just this side of painful. I watch the streetlights tick by outside and think of all the things I haven’t done in this new body. It’s not that I want to be celibate. It just seems to have turned out that way, in the months since the transfer. It’s turned into a bit of a game, in fact, a test for me, like those women who create contests around who can go the longest without eating carbs or chocolate. As if denying yourself pleasure could hone you into something more perfect, something more essential.
Harry, of course, doesn’t want to take the hint when he drops me at
my hotel that night. His hand snakes down to my ass when I kiss him on the cheek, and my body responds without waiting for the approval of my head. I’m not attracted to this man, not at all. I’m a bit repulsed, in fact, but it’s been so long since I’ve been touched. I have to take a breath before taking his wrist and drawing it away from my skirt.
“I’m reinventing myself, Harry,” I chide. “It’s about breaking my old habits.”
“It’s hard to argue with something that makes you look like this,” Harry says, adjusting his belt buckle in a way that seems obscene. “But I’m willing to give it the old college try.”
“Maybe some other time,” I reply, and adjust his tie as I escape back into my hotel room. I wonder how long I’ll be able to hold Harry off. That’s the thing about men with power, they’re not accustomed to being denied the things they want. They don’t worry at all about being sharp, about being essential.
I fly back to Chicago in the morning with a suitcase full of new dresses, courtesy of Harry’s American Express card. Dr. Grath’s apartment door is partway open when I get home. I’m simultaneously worried and annoyed. Worried, because what if the old man is lying dead on the floor and a robber is tossing his place as I stand here in the hallway? And annoyed, because I know there’s no burglar, but Dr. Grath knows I’ll still have to check to make sure. I put my own keys away and cross the hall, making sure he can hear the animosity in the click of my heels.
I push the door open and stalk in. Dr. Grath is waiting for me, a book open on his knee, his hand moving across it as his eyes track limply in middle space.
“Your door was open,” I say, even though it’s obvious, because I want him to know what a stupid thing it is to do to get my attention.
“Funny,” he says, and goes back to his reading. I stand there tapping my foot, unwilling to break the silence myself, and unable to go now that I’m here, in his damp little apartment, with him sitting there by himself in one of his threadbare sweaters.
“You need something?” I say, finally, because my feet feel like
shit in the heels I’m wearing. They’re new, of course, and not particularly ideal for walking home from the L. They’re made for women who can afford cab fare.
“You’ve been making yourself scarce,” Dr. Grath replies. “You missed
To Kill a Mockingbird
last week.”
“I’ve seen it.”
“Of course you have,” he says. “But it’s the sort of film that can’t just be seen once, you know.”
“Sure,” I reply, still standing in the doorway.
“Sit down,” he says, motioning to the other chair in his living room.
“I just got in. And I’m tired.”
“You want to stay, honey,” Dr. Grath says. “It’s
Casablanca
tonight.”
I sigh. The man is good, I’ll give him that. It’s the perfect trap, and I’ve stepped right into it, and now I can feel its cold jaws snapping shut around my leg. He knows, too well, that there is a part of me that can’t refuse this.
Casablanca
was the first movie I ever watched in this tiny apartment, only a handful of weeks after I moved back to Chicago. I’d followed the pot smell down the hall and found Dr. Grath watching the flickering black and white of the screen. The movie had left me in tears that night, even though I’d seen it before and never thought much of it. Somehow things felt much more potent in this apartment than they ever have in the rest of the world. Now I stalk in, shutting the door behind me with a little too much force, dropping into the chair with bratty resignation.
“I’ll stay for a few minutes,” I say.
“I’m glad you can work me into your schedule,” Dr. Grath replies. “You’ve been quite busy lately. I thought you disappeared off the face of the earth again.”
“I was in L.A.,” I reply. “Seeing my agent.”
“Seeing him?” Dr. Grath asks, eyebrows rising.
“Not like that. Well, at least not for me. He’s going to get me some work. Modeling. Maybe a movie.”
“Picking up where you left off, eh?”
“Just, you know, taking the new body for a little spin,” I say. “He’s going to fly me back out in a month or two. When he’s got meetings set up with producers and such.”
“Of course,” Dr. Grath says, with a hint of mockery in his tone. “Just as long as that new body of yours doesn’t catch anything you can’t get rid of with a strong course of antibiotics.”
I laugh, throwing my head back, and it feels like something I’ve forgotten. How to laugh, when it’s genuine. This week I’ve found myself giggling, like a reflex, even when the person across from me isn’t the slightest bit amusing. It’s an unnerving habit, like smiling at strangers, or flipping your hair. Something that’s done purely for another person’s benefit, something completely artificial. It makes me wonder what I’m teaching this new body, what habits I’m creating that have nothing to do with what I’m thinking or feeling, that only involve being seen in a certain way.
“I appreciate the concern, old man. But I caught the virus through the needle, remember?” I say. “Now how about you turn on the goddam TV?”
I end up falling asleep on Dr. Grath’s couch halfway through the movie, waking only to hear Bogey send Ingrid Bergman on her way with the uptight Nazi-fighter and drag myself back to my apartment in a stupor. I didn’t realize how badly I needed sleep.
My apartment is reassuringly spartan, after the clutter of Dr. Grath’s. After those first few nights it wasn’t enough to get rid of the mess that had built up in my five years as a hermit. I had to get rid of everything save for my bed, my better clothes, an old lamp, and the mugs and plates that weren’t overly chipped. The rest had to go. Everything that belonged to that sick girl, everything that could be linked back to my former life.
I wonder, sometimes, why I came back here from L.A. when I got sick. It’s a puzzling sort of question because it would have been much easier to wither away in the warm sunshine of the West Coast than here, where the winters can just about kill a person without trying very hard. All I can think is, on some level, I must be like my
mother. She was in New York when she got pregnant with me, and she dragged herself back here, to the city where she grew up, to have her baby and live out her years in a suburban trailer park and lament her lost dance career. Some part of us must still be wild, I think, like a wounded animal that drags itself back to its home to die.
The only recipe I can remember is my mother’s recipe for chocolate chip cookies. I used to make them when Jack and Katie were little, on rainy days or when February grew particularly cold and dreary, when I needed something to fascinate and occupy the little girl who sat with me on the kitchen counter, dipping her fingers into the bag of flour and delighting in the silky grit of its texture. Cookies are necessary now, I think. I need to make something sweet and simple and full of fleeting happiness. It’s the sort of task I’ve always associated with being a mother.
I haul my big stand mixer out of the attic, where it sat collecting dust for the past eight years in a box labeled “Garage sale??” I wonder why Tom didn’t sell it, when it would have fetched an easy hundred or two from some neighbor on our street. I imagine all of my things, my only things, spread out on the blacktop of our driveway for neighbors to paw through. I wonder if Tom and the kids have made cookies since I’ve been gone. Somehow, I doubt it.
In the kitchen, I whip coconut oil and sugar together with vanilla inside the stainless-steel bowl of the mixer, and the sound of it draws Katie down from her room. She glances at the frothy liquid spinning around the sides of the bowl, and then looks up at me. She’s nervous, I think. I recognize it, because it mirrors the clench I get in my stomach whenever my children are around. I think of this next child, the one I’m carrying with me, and wonder if she will feel so foreign to me as well once she’s born, or if she will be connected to this body in a way that Katie is not.