“Honey?”
“Hi, Mom,” you say. “How’s it going?
As if ringing her doorbell at midnight is a normal occurrence.
“What’s wrong?” she says, and pulls her robe tightly around her.
“I need help.”
“What is it?” Her eyes are sharp—she quickly notices the taxi waiting on the street. “Who’s in the cab?”
“He’s sick, Mom. He’s really sick.”
“Lucas? You’d better take him to emergency.”
“No, um...”
“You want me to come?”
“No. Mom, it’s not Lucas. Lucas is fine, but he’s, um, he has to finish his thesis piece or he’ll fail the year, so I can’t disturb him.”
“Then who—?”
“It’s Dad. He won’t go to the hospital and I can’t handle him by myself. He’s sick.”
Her posture changes—she stiffens, stands up straighter.
“Mom?” you ask when the pause gets too long. “Please, will you help me? Can I bring him in? I don’t think he’d hurt anybody but he’s...”
“Drunk?”
“Well, yes.”
“Take him home and chuck him in a cold shower.”
“I can’t take him to his apartment, Mom. If he causes a disruption he’ll get evicted again. And I can’t take him home because Lucas...” You trail off. “Because there’s no room at our place.”
She considers it, glancing from you to the car and back.
“No,” she says finally. “I said I would never let that man in my house again, and I meant it. I’m sure there’s something else you can do with him.”
“But Mom...”
“I gave years of energy to him and I’m done. Some people will suck you dry, Mara. Maybe you need to ask yourself if this is doing you any good.”
“He’s my father.”
“Nevertheless.”
“What am I supposed to do with him? He’s gone crazy, Mom, he’s not just drunk.”
She looks you straight in the eye and says, “Some people have to hit bottom before they’re willing to change, Mara. Maybe you have to let him hit bottom. Stop rescuing him.”
You hear shouting behind you and you look back to see Dad lurching out of the taxi.
“Uh oh,” you say.
Mom steps back from the doorstep.
“Do you need money for the cab?” she asks.
“No thanks.” You lift your chin, fight the tears. “I don’t need anything from you.”
“I’m sorry,” she says, and shuts the door.
By the time you get Dad back into the taxi, the driver insists on taking you to the police station. You beg him not to, but he radios ahead and by the time you get there, two uniformed officers are waiting.
“You promised,” Dad says.
“I’m sorry, Dad. I’m so sorry.”
He tries to fight, which makes it all worse.
***
Lucas opens the living room door with a flourish.
“Ta da!” he says. “What do you think?”
You haven’t seen the inside of this room for a month—since Lucas began his grand effort to finish his thesis piece on time. It’ll be nice to have the room back, to sit on the couch, look out the window...
Or not. Because the couch, what was the couch, has been transformed. The entire room has been transformed. The walls and (beautiful hardwood) floors are painted glossy black. The wooden arms of the couch and chairs have been covered in a papier-mache of dollar bills and newspaper and the cushions have been completely resurfaced with tennis balls, all sitting shoulder to shoulder. There is cardboard duct-taped to the window and the only light comes from a blinking string of blue and red Christmas lights.
You stand very still.
“Check this out,” Lucas says, and practically bounces past you into the room. He points to a pair of jeans he has shellacked to the floor. They’re yours. Your eyes now follow the path of the jeans and then land on another piece of clothing—a beige bra. Next is a T-shirt, then a sock, and finally, crumpled on the floor in front of the couch, a pair of not-so-new yellow cotton underwear. All of it is shellacked to the floor. All of it is yours.
The couch, all the furniture, everything in the room, is yours—carefully chosen and bought with hard-earned bartending money, with the job you got at nineteen when you realized you had to pay your way through school.
Lucas has a trust fund.
Lucas has never had to preserve things like clothes and furniture because he can always replace them. Without working for it. Lucas has never stood for hours in beer-soaked running shoes. Never had his butt pinched while carrying dishes of half-eaten chicken wings, never had smoke blown in his face by creepy, drunk men who he smiled at anyway because he needed the tip. If he had, he might have hesitated to ruin your furniture.
Not a lamp has been left unmolested.
“I’m calling it Life Inside,” he says.
“Hm.”
How about: I Stole My Girlfriend’s Panties and Glued them to the Living Room Floor?
“You like it?” he says.
Do you like it?
Um, no, you don’t like it. You’re fucking furious. And frozen. Because fury comes up against fear and neither wins. You can’t say anything because then you will fight and bad things will happen. Nothing good ever happens when people fight, only screaming, words as weapons, points for damage done. It doesn’t matter what he’s done, you can’t fight, you won’t. And yet you want to rip him into shreds for this.
Do you like it?
The answer is supposed to be yes.
“Very unique,” you say and hold your arms rigid at your sides.
“Cool, huh?”
Breathe. Cool air in, warm air out.
“Cool. Mmhmm. How is the committee going to see it?” you say, but you already know the answer.
“They have to come here!” Lucas says. “The whole faculty can just come here!”
Of course. Who needs privacy?
“So what else? I want your opinion,” he says.
“It’s...shocking.”
He grins. “That’s what I was trying for.”
“I just hope we don’t get evicted.”
“Imagine the publicity if we did though,” he says.
Your eyes keep going back to your crumpled underwear, on the floor for everyone to see. Your urge to clean it up is going to get you exactly nowhere.
You can only hope he didn’t take it from the laundry bin.
“What’s wrong?” he says.
“Nothing.”
“No, really.”
“I, um,” Carefully, gently. “No big deal, I just wish you’d asked me.”
“Oh, you mean about the clothes?”
Duh.
“All of it. I mean, this is my furniture—was my furniture.”
He gets that look in his eyes, the wide-eyed wounded look.
“I no longer look at things as yours or mine,” he says. “We’re together.”
“Yes, but—”
“I thought you’d understand—this is art. Art is for everyone. Art is to be shared.”
“Does my underwear need to be shared though? Do we have to sacrifice my furniture?” You try to say it with a laugh, with a funny shrug and a touch of irony. No fight, nothing serious, just a little cajoling to make the point.
But Lucas looks incredulous, isn’t buying it.
“Do you hear yourself?” he says. “My this, my that—if we’re going to talk that way, then what about me? What about my chance to prove myself? We only have a few weeks left and then we’re out in the world. I need to have something to show for my schooling—something big. You can replace the furniture, but my reputation? I have to build it. Why do you have to ruin this for me?”
“But did you have to—”
He shakes his head.
“I never realized you were such a pedant,” he says, and then strides over to the couch and rips a tennis ball off, revealing the glue-encrusted fabric beneath.
“What are you doing?”
“Taking it apart. You win. You can have your couch back. And your damned underwear.”
His rips off another one and looks at you. “Happy? Come on. Come and help!”
He reaches for a third.
“Stop!” you say. “Stop it. It’s fine.”
“Oh no, it’s no problem,” he says. “I’m sure I can whip up something else by the end of the week.”
He’ll fail. He’s neglected to hand in a lot of projects, done badly in his academic courses, and been warned that his thesis project better be impressive. He’ll fail and he’ll blame you. He’ll leave you.
And you’ll prove to yourself, once again, that you are incapable of sustaining a relationship.
Besides, it’s not his fault that he hasn’t had to work as hard as you have, not his fault he doesn’t understand. You are the one who is damaged, who is freakish and possessive and unable to let things go.
“I’m sorry,” you say. “Please stop. Leave it.”
He pauses, studies your face.
“Really?”
He’s not perfect, but he loves you. He loves you and he has stayed with you. No one else has stayed.
“Really. I think it’s brilliant. I was just...a little surprised, that’s all.”
His face, his entire demeanor changes and he is once again beautiful, sweet, warm.
He picks you up and twirls you in a circle.
“You are the absolute best,” he says, and kisses you. “I don’t know how you put up with me.”
***
After the big showing—the tromping of half the school through your apartment and into your living room—Lucas is ecstatic.
You have dinner at China Lily. His blonde hair is shaggy and his dress shirt is wrinkled, but he still looks like an angel to you. A fallen angel perhaps, especially with the bags under his eyes.
Graduation looms, and so does the future.
Your classmates have lofty goals, but you are living with a dreamer, so you’ve been trying to create art people will actually buy. Otherwise there is far too much waitressing in your future. Some of your professors are disappointed, but it’s not like they’re going to fail you.
Lucas nudges your knee with his under the table.
“Thank you for your patience,” he says.
“With what?”
“My thesis project. I realize now I should have asked you, but I was so inspired, and I wanted to surprise you. I just didn’t think. I was a bit obsessed.”
“That’s okay.”
“I get carried away sometimes,” he says and then looks down at his hands. “And I know I can be selfish. I’m sorry.”
“Oh, Lucas, you’re passionate, you’re an artist. It’s part of what makes you talented.”
He grins at the compliment. “It’s nice of you to say that, but I want to be nice to live with too. And I’m not the only talent in the household.”
It’s your turn to grin.
“We have a wild future ahead of us. We should move to Prague,” he says. “We can live cheap and travel Europe, sell our work to boutique galleries until the big ones recognize us.”
“What about our families?” you ask.
“They’ll still be here, sweetie.”
“And my Dad?”
“We’ll come back every few months to visit.”
You sigh. “I worry.”
“You worry too much. We’re going to make a life together, Mara, I’ve known it since we met.”
You smile and tell yourself how lucky you are to have such a guy, such a talented, beautiful guy who loves you. If he’s a bit idealistic, acts like a spoiled child sometimes, well, you’re not exactly a prize yourself.
And most of the time you’re happy. At least, you think so.
Maybe once you’re away from here, out of school, far from your families and your too-small apartment, you might be able to feel your happiness.
Because though Lucas is right beside you, though he is holding your hand and staring into your eyes with love, there is always that part of you he cannot reach, a part of you he does not even know is there.
Someday he will, though. These things take time.
Later, in bed, your skin wants to creep from his.
It’s happened before, but in small moments, little twinges you could ignore. This is different. This is hating the sound of his panting and the feel of his tongue pushing into your mouth, this is every muscle in your body wanting to jump out of the bed and run so far he will never catch you.
Nothing has changed in how he loves you, in how he touches you or the tender, sweet things he says. And you love him. You need him for his passion, for the way he sees everything as possible and the world as good. Nothing has changed in that.
But something is wrong with you and you squeeze your eyes tight and grind your hips faster which makes him think you are desperate for him when in fact you are just desperate for it to be over. You lie awake all night staring at the ceiling.
You begin to have headaches and avoid bedtime.
You pick fights.
You wonder why your body has abandoned you.
But perhaps your body thinks you have abandoned it.
Lucas begins to notice. He asks if you still find him sexy and if you still love him. You start giving more blowjobs. You try to keep clothes on during sex so he can’t touch you.
“If there’s something wrong, you can talk to me about it,” he says one day when you won’t let him touch your stomach. “I’m your friend, too.”
“I’m fine,” you say. “Just stressed.”
He gets a phone call from his mother one Sunday afternoon and afterward loses his customary sunny demeanor. When you ask him about it, he shakes his head and rolls his eyes but doesn’t tell you anything.
You wonder if you are frigid.
But if you were frigid, you don’t think you’d be fantasizing about the new model in Life Drawing class.
On the day he appears, disrobes, and poses on the podium, you feel hot where you haven’t in months. It would be a relief, except it doesn’t go away. What is it about him?
It could be his body—he’s tall and lean and reminds you of Caleb. His hair is long, loose, and red, and freckles cover his torso and thighs.
It could be the scars on his arm. It could be the way his eyes hit yours and held that first time, and the way he shook his head as if to dismiss a strange thought when he finally looked away.
Day by day, you see more of his eyes.
You know him. You don’t know him, know him, but you understand something about him—you are the same inside.
Your drawing professor watches over your shoulder as you draw him and she says, “Yes, yes, that’s it exactly.”
On his last day, you take a long time packing up, and he takes his time getting dressed.