EVERYTHING WAS BEAUTIFUL AND NOTHING HURT
JONAH KEPT THE best girls in boxes, crates, and cabinets—anything with four walls and a lid. He wrapped them in linen, and, with a litany of chemicals, he preserved them as best he could. Everyone thought he was a taxidermist, with all the skull bleaching, skin tanning, and preservatives he routinely carted into the house—a man should have a hobby—but he was an artist who kept the murdered girls in chain-wrapped boxes, and locks in the shape of hearts. Jonah loved his miniature dolls, and sometimes he’d open the crates and smooth their hair, tend to their cotton and silk dresses, finger their lashes, and imagine a life where all his creatures played house. Their collective murmur drowning out Lionel’s angry voice in his head, for Lionel was a shouter.
“You’re too weak for this kind of work,” Lionel said after the last girl, baring rows of gleaming white teeth. If you looked closer, you could see his incisors, chiseled bone. Lionel was the kind who liked to linger; he wanted to spend time with the girls long after they were gone. This was important because each of them had to know they were among the chosen. They were special. After a while he got ravenous—one doll would be fresh in a bag while he whispered to Jonah about the next hunt. When it came to their projects Lionel sometimes regarded Jonah, and his care of the prey, with disgust. “I’ll leave you with the lady parts. You dress them up and put on that glitter nail polish while I do the real work.”
Lionel was good at cleaning the scene.
Jonah was a coward; this was true. He couldn’t even bring himself to say the word “murder” out loud; it was far too coarse and cold for conversation, so instead he called their kills “excavations” or “projects.” Responsible for scouting, Jonah would find girls standing alongside empty roads and highways, thumbs outstretched, or in the parking lots of bars after they locked their keys in the car, or alone at the bus stop, shivering, knowing the local would never come. All of them wanted to go home, and as soon as they slid in the passenger seat Jonah promised them this. It wasn’t a complete lie; he’d just neglect to clarify whose home he’d take them to, or whether they’d make it to the front door intact. That’s when Lionel stepped in and took over. He never appeared like an apparition, rather he was a constant mutter, a sonata rising from the side of Jonah’s mouth.
In the car, the girls always pleaded for their lives. Always with the tears and wet, matted hair. The guttural feline cries for mercy rising up from their stomachs, gurgling. Jonah loved their flushed faces and wide eyes; they were alive. Invariably, they’d cry out for their families: the children who expected them home and the boyfriends who missed tracing the shapes of their faces.
Many of the dolls smelled of wild flowers and cotton, and Jonah often imagined the boxes coming to bloom, bleeding arms reaching out of the dead land and mouths catching their first breaths.
They’ll come looking for me was their constant refrain, and this was true, too. Men always hunted for women killed by other men. Pressing a knife or a gun to their cheeks, Jonah would nod and make promises that their lives would be spared if they didn’t scream, if they drove a few more miles. He knew it was cruel to dole out hope like foil-wrapped sweets, but he was a coward. How do you tell someone that you’re about to kill them? Snuff out their life like some cold, cruel thief in the night?
“You always leave me with the dirty work,” Lionel said. “How do you think that makes me feel? Always the bad guy left to snap their pretty necks. Washing the blood off my hands. Blood stains, you know. Bullets leave holes in windows and car seats.”
“I clean up. I do my share,” Jonah said.
“You gotta take some responsibility. Own some of the work. We’ve been at this for years and you’re acting like they’re all Lucia.” No more knives or guns, Lionel decided. Stick to belts or our hands. It’s neat that way. Close.
“Can we not talk about Lucia, please?” Looking down at Lionel’s hands and then at the marks on the doll’s neck, he continued, “Leave that one’s face alone. I want her eyes intact.” This creature was special. When he picked her up in Roanoke, hitchhiking, she called herself Victoria, but he’d change that soon enough. Give her a new name like the rest of them. Her skin was bruised and blue, and for a second he could remember the way her teeth cracked. He could hear his voice telling her that this was the moment her life would begin. Tonguing the word extinguished, Jonah played around with the syllables, allowed them to linger. Words had more power than hands around a woman’s neck.
After the first time, Jonah got sick for three days. He hadn’t anticipated all the blood, the mess of it under his nails and on his face. This was before he learned how to manage the details and be clean about it. This was before he’d feel the thrill of bones cracking.
Jonah wanted to stop, he did, but the urge to kill was always greater than the urge to stop. Then Lionel: “You’re in this. Deep. There’s no going back. Mop up those tears; I don’t give a shit about those people and you shouldn’t either.” After the first time, Lionel had quoted someone he’d heard on television: “You learn what you need to kill and take care of the details. It’s like changing a tire. The first time you’re careful. By the thirtieth time, you can’t remember where you left the lug wrench.”
Jonah pressed his eyes shut. No, no, no, that wasn’t him. Those weren’t his hands laboring that last breath out. That wasn’t his voice humming a lullaby as her chest fell quiet. That was all Lionel’s doing. Jonah’s work was afterward, dressing up the remains.
This one he’d bury in his wall, standing upright, one hand waving. First, he’d have Lionel skin her lips.
“No one gets out of this,” Lionel said, stepping over the body with a paring knife. “You get it one way or another.”
HE’D MET LUCIA on a plane two years ago. She was on her second flask when she leaned over and offered a swig, by way of introduction. “I hate flying. They say you’re more likely to get killed in a car accident than on a plane, but I don’t buy it. Every single time I get on a plane I feel like I’ll soon be barbeque.”
“They have pills for that,” Jonah said. Shaking a packet of sugar, he poured it into tepid coffee.
“Drinking’s cheaper, and I don’t have to spend an hour of my life that I won’t get back lying to some doctor just to get a scrip.”
Midway through a flight from Los Angeles, and this woman threw up four times. Every time she returned to her seat, she proceeded to drink some more. Even flagged down a nervous flight attendant for backup miniature bottles of Merlot. “We could hit turbulence,” was her excuse. She was something out of a film noir, with her black hair bordering on blue, lips painted red, and a crooked nose, as if she were built to break the surface of things. Dressed in sheer black crepe with only a cashmere shawl to lend modesty, she was beautiful in a way that made you think she’d cut open your face with her mouth, and pry her fingers in.
She also smelled of vomit.
Jonah made a dramatic showing of opening his manila folder and examining the photographs. Fixated on the construct of home, he was an artist who spent his life deconstructing its meaning. His photos were of his latest canvas installation, The Kingdom of Limbs, where he superimposed daguerreotypes onto blueprints of California mansions. Vermont barns and New England Tudors collided with cool Spanish tiles, billowing palm fronds, and floor-to-ceiling glass windows. On top of the photos, he drew Victorian figures swimming in indoor infinity pools and cooking frankfurters over hot pots. The women wore corsets while the men stood stalwart in their wool coats and expensive hats. The children were styled as Kurt Cobains in miniature, with their sweeping blond hair, dour mouths, and track marks. Jonah loved this carefully composed mess of image, time, and texture, and apparently the woman did too. He felt her sour breath on his cheek.
“It’s straight out of a Buñuel movie. I’m waiting for a mother to start waving raw meat in a kid’s face. I’m Lucia, and I’m drunk.”
“Telly,” Jonah said.
“Like the virgin hunter in Kids. You must get that a lot.”
“No, mostly I get Telly Savalas.”
“The bald guy with the lollipop? Which generation are you rolling with? Just how old are you?” Lucia laughed.
Something in Jonah curdled. This woman set his teeth on edge. He had this sudden urge to choke her. “The kind of generation that has a name for the amount of drinking you do.”
Lucia snorted. “Alcoholics go to meetings. I’m a catalog girl. Well, former girl. I’m twenty-eight and I’ve already been put out to pasture. Replaced by some teenager with implants and a hollow throat. I imagine they’ll make glue out of me. You know what’s hard about getting old? People look at you and find fewer ways to use you.”
“Do you always speak this way to strangers?” He noticed that her teeth, like her nose, were crooked.
“Do you always flaunt art that makes you look like a mental patient?” After what seemed like an extraordinary amount of time had elapsed between her last word and her next, Lucia said, “You have sturdy hair.”
Jonah looked at her and felt the whole of his world invert. Cars tumbled out of the ocean, the sky birthed trees, and everyone tiptoed on their heads. Lucia was a blind nymph, some sort of black star that, having collapsed into an airplane, found her way to the seat next to his.
“You show me yours and I’ll show you mine,” she said, tapping his folder with a blue fingernail.
When they arrived at JFK, Jonah had to carry Lucia to his car. Later, she’d joke and say that he liked his women narcoleptic and his bed cold, like the inside of a grave.
Lucia made a habit of breaking into empty apartments. Maybe because it was the only place where she could really hear the records she still played with the volume turned up, or perhaps she was comforted by what had been abandoned; she liked to imagine the lives of people left behind. Sometimes she’d find small dresses in large closets, tags stapled to the sleeve. Other times, she’d thumb through secondhand books filled with pictures of couples who were once blinded by their love. And now, these pictures—a catalog of them through the seasons—were shoved into the books you read as a teenager: Salinger, Cheever, and Faulkner. Lucia imagined the division of a home and the business of leaving, and she’d text Jonah, “Come.” Come. And he did, and he kissed her ten times on her nose and told her, “You can’t eliminate what you don’t own.” They would never have to suffer through the mess of math; “There will never be an end,” Jonah promised. There would never be a leaving.
Always she came before the paint, before the crew of men lumbered in and whitewashed the previous owners, and their lives, away. She came before the women who swept and scrubbed floors, the women who woke before dawn and took two buses and a train to neighborhoods where men spent hours watering sidewalks, carrying their sons and daughters on their backs. Lucia came when the place was dirty, when the scent of the departed—wet leather and something rotting and sweet—still lingered.
Jonah always followed, even when she didn’t know he was behind her. He watched other men stare at her parts. He understood her loneliness, which was a mirror of his own, and when she called, and she always called, he made a show of running up the stairs, climbing through the windows, and holding her close when she sat on the floor with an old record player and a stack of 45s.
“We’re going to get caught,” he said, once. They were on the first floor of a Park Slope brownstone. Lucia told him she picked this one because of the bay windows, and how she felt when the light came through the wooden blinds. Look at the children play. She played Sade’s “Smooth Operator”: Jewel box life, diamond nights and ruby lights, high in the sky / Heaven help him, when he falls. / His heart is cold.
“No, we’re not. I’ve cased this place for a week. Do you know the people here pass one another in the lobby without even saying a word? Collect their mail without so much as a hello? For all they know, I could be the new neighbor.”
“But you’re not.”
Lucia shook her head, as if she were speaking a language Jonah didn’t understand. “We’re always someone’s neighbor. You think a number on a door decides that?”
“You brought me here to pick apart the etiquette of stroller moms and banker husbands?”
“I have two Italian sandwiches and a sad song playing, and I thought you might want to share them with me.”
“You know, we have an apartment where we can do that. Eat sandwiches.” Jonah kissed her ear, bit it. He loved her because she was the kind of woman who would eat a pork sandwich without faking it. She’d see the whole thing through.
“I know.” Lucia nodded, taking a bite of her sandwich. She tore the bread with her teeth in a way that was savage. “I like it better here. I like us in the in-betweens. There’s never a beginning or an end.”
Jonah handed her a letter. “This came for you today.”
She eased open the envelope and laughed at the check, a final payment from her former agent for work in her former life. “No, I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t like endings.”
He took her hand in his and felt the coolness of her. She had pastry hands, and for a moment this reminded him of his sister. “You don’t have to worry about money.”
“Do you think that’s why I’m with you? For the money?”
“If only you were that simple,” Jonah said.
Lucia handed him a sandwich and purred into his neck. “Eat before it gets dark.”
The record skipped. They permitted the stutter.
Lucia gave him her pickle because she knew he liked it. “So, where were you last night?”
“We’re here again?” Jonah sighed in the dark. He picked up Death in the Afternoon and flipped through the photographs. “There’s only so much of this I can take.”
“It’s a simple question.”
“Out. I was out.”
“Out where?”
“I was out not fucking another woman.”
How do you keep a wave away from the sand? How do you hold it back from grabbing at the one thing it desires? Lucia slid her underwear down her legs and let it rest at her ankles. “I’d like you to fuck me now,” she said.
Afterward, in the dark, Jonah traced three words on her back. Three blind mice.
In the city, the former catalog girl traded her bejeweled corsets and Chantilly lace for crepe suits and tweed jackets. Four days a week Lucia was the telephone girl at McCann Harrison, responsible for managing the carousel of phone lights, the sprucing of conference rooms (sprucing was included in the fourteen-bullet job description), the watering of plants, the rearrangement of lobby magazines, and the doe-like fawning over the male executives who strode past her on their way to close deals. Lucia didn’t know what actually transpired at McCann Harrison beyond the cackling of We’re on a deadline! We’re not selling a bar of soap, people—we’re promising a lifestyle! We ran out of coffee filters! Someone stole my yogurt! WHERE IS MY DAIRY-FREE, LOW-FAT, GLUTEN-FREE BLUEBERRY YOGURT?
Sometimes it was Lucia’s job to procure yogurt, even though she was the one who stole it. During one of her three allotted bathroom breaks, she’d sneak the tubs in and devour the insides. Flaxseed and whipped lemon meringue and cherry crème, she’d wrap the evidence in tissue. No one ever noticed the evidence on her upper lip or cheek because Lucia was the front-desk girl, the girl who transferred calls—she was universally invisible and routinely ignored.
Pilfering the supply closet was the work of low-rent clock-watchers, but food theft was primal. Only a former catalog girl, whose fame had been eclipsed by a knock-kneed teenager with tits the size of Kentucky, would opt for the more dubious art of snack theft. No one would dare suspect the girl whose sinewy hips once tumbled out of their mailboxes of hoarding string cheese, frozen grapes, and Lean Cuisine meals. Models, even former ones, didn’t eat the food relegated to the plebian, peanut-crunching lot. They hired Lucia to set a mood, project an image, although they never thought that the mood would be one of rampant distrust and the image of paranoia. Coworkers started labeling their food with notes that read, I may not know which one of you animals stole my salad dressing, but God does. Jesus is watching.
Tensions were high; interns went ballistic over the theft of their carefully budgeted and packed lunches. They booked a conference room and spent two hours deliberating a desk-to-desk search, but knew HR would never comply for fear of lawsuits and vigilante recriminations. “This is bullshit,” Ryan, the experience guru intern, lamented. “My sandwiches cost my parents a lot of money. Multigrain isn’t cheap, people.”
Lucia made it her mission to eat all of his sandwiches.
“I SAW THE devil last night,” Lucia said. This time, they were in their home with all the lights turned off except for a tangle of Christmas lights she’d strung up. She liked how they winked at her.
“Come again?” Jonah said. He picked out all of the pork from his pork fried rice because he knew how much she liked it, and how much the Chinese joint on the corner overcooked it. Lucia liked her meat either raw or well-done. In life she needed the middle, but when it came to meat, she couldn’t tolerate the suggestion of something undone. It either had to be bruised or burned. “You saw the devil. Like Damien in The Omen devil?”
“Damien was the Antichrist,” she corrected. “And no, I didn’t actually see the devil; I saw a movie. About a man so consumed by his grief, you end up wondering who’s the predator or the prey. I thought of you and me. I’m wondering if I’m the predator in all of this. Am I what will undo you?”
“Why are you talking nonsense?”
“I just wonder if I’m keeping you from . . .”
“From what?”
“From living your life?” Lucia said. Under the pink and blue lights, her cheeks were flushed and her eyes appeared dark and gray.
“What life? No life of mine,” Jonah said, quoting a line from a Grace Paley story his sister had once sent him. He couldn’t remember the story, but it began with, Hello, my life. “There was no life before you.” And this was true. What Jonah had, has to a certain extent, is a like life. A suggestion of something real, something just in the periphery, and it was only when he was around Lucia and all her sadness—he loved his walking wound, he did—that Jonah felt as if he understood the quality of his breath: the involuntary inhalations and exhalations, the taking in of new life and the letting go of waste. He only understood love through the act of sacrifice, and in Lucia he saw mouth-to-mouth personified in the way she would involuntarily give up her breath for his.
“There was life. You just weren’t there for it.”
“Maybe you’re right. But all I remember from this life is you on a plane trying to play hotel instead of house,” Jonah said, and kissed her collarbone and allowed his mouth to settle in the delicate space between bone and skin. They were quiet for a time, until Jonah asked, “Tell me, what’s with the lights? It’s July.”
“I had in my contract that all of my sets and hotel rooms had to be filled with Christmas lights. Even when the men with their cameras told me that I was as cute as kittens, I wouldn’t come out until I saw the blinking lights. Only then did I give them a hundred watts and a thumb inching a bikini down low. God, my ass used to be epic. Feel free to forward your bereavement cards to this address; you’re looking at a widow mourning her former life.”
Jonah went into the other room and got his camera. “I’ll take your picture,” he said. She was beautiful in parts, and Jonah photographed her that way, limb by limb, with the flash on. Lucia was a face full of high beams: jumping up and down on the couch, she posed, preened, and gave him a light that blared a little too bright, and he saw something in her that resembled happiness. In the pictures, she looked bone white and the Christmas lights resembled tears, but in life, oh in life, she looked terribly, terribly happy.
“Don’t stop,” she gasped. “Don’t ever stop taking my picture.”
“IF YOU WERE going to die and you knew you were going to die, and you could choose how . . . what would you choose?” The road ahead of them unfurled a blanket of varying shades of gray: paved to gravel to dirt to gravel and paved again. They barreled down the back roads of Virginia; Jonah pressed a steak knife into Victoria’s neck as she drove. He watched the symphony of her body—the quick rise and fall of her chest, the uneven breath and quivering lips—and he found comfort in her terror. He liked this disquiet.
“Please let me go. I’ll be good. I won’t tell anyone, I promise,” Victoria said.
“This isn’t about being good, Victoria. This is about choice,” Jonah said, suddenly impatient. “Not many women in your situation have options. Someday we’re going to die, because everybody dies. I haven’t seen anybody yet that didn’t die. And I’d like to choose my own kind of death for a change. I’m tired of being tormented to hell, that’s what I’m tired of. Tired of people’s lives in my hands, and I certainly don’t want your life in my hands, and I’m going to tell you, Victoria, without me, life has no meaning. But if it were me, I’d choose a midair plane collision. There’s poetry in that—a burning body falling to the ground like some sort of star.”
“I have money. We can go to an ATM, and you can have it. I’ll give you my pin, account number—anything you want. Just let me go.”
“You think this is about money?”
“They’ll come looking for me.”
“I don’t doubt that. Tell me, are you the slit-wrists-in-the-bathtub kind of girl, or the hail-of-bullets kind of woman?” Jonah tossed her a napkin. “Fix your face.”
Victoria wiped her mouth, crumbled the napkin in her lap. “Pills,” she said. “A bottle of sleeping pills.”
“It’s like you’re a fifties housewife, chewing tranquilizers and burning steaks. Folding before the first hand is even played. Maybe we should talk about all those bags in the trunk and where you’re going.”
“Why are you doing this?” she cried, gripping the steering wheel. Veering the car outside the lines. “Please take me home. Take me home.”
It took everything in him not to jam the knife all the way in, Lionel or no Lionel. Always with the shelter they’re privileged to have, but inevitably abandon. Always with the family they complain about, and secretly hate. Always with the men with whom they lie frozen between undisturbed sheets. They all begged for the life they didn’t have, but thought they could if they had the chance. Jonah’s job wasn’t to help them live up to their fiction; his work was excavation and preservation.
Why didn’t they understand that?
Why is it that we miss what we’ve always taken for granted at the very moment we’re on the verge of losing it? Nearing death, we cry out for our rotting floorboards, the oven that burns all the cakes, and the lovers who crawl into our beds stinking of someone else’s happiness. But what we really mourn is our own loss; we lament the time that exists just beyond our last breath, when a shovel presses cold earth on top of a wooden box. How do you mourn this loss when you’re on the precipice of it? We’re unable to say its name or define its shape, it’s so elusive; instead we call out the things that compose this minor life, in hopes that the sum will take form from its ramshackle parts. We are nothing if not children who regard a manual with terror when we see the words some assembly required.
Jonah’s sister went to the crazies; his mother became a light in a house that had blown out, and his father, well, he’d never loved his father to begin with. And for all of it, Jonah felt nothing. So why should these women make a case for a miserable life they’re so desperate to save? Be honorable. Lay a blanket down over your sadness because the only way around pain is through it. These women were fucking lucky to receive the gifts that Jonah gave; Lionel wouldn’t stand for release; he would never allow Jonah to go quietly.
Lionel’s here, and it’s about time.
Lionel reached for Victoria’s hair, petted it. It was no use, though; she couldn’t hear or feel him. She was only a repository in which their pain could be placed. Lately, he’d been getting these nightmares of a girl in a white lamb’s mask, wearing a Crazy Eddie’s T-shirt and ripped dungarees. The girl, who couldn’t have been older than ten, stood in the middle of the street with a snake in her hand, and in the snake’s mouth you could see a mouse trying to claw its way out, only to be swallowed whole. Lionel remembered the claws that took on the appearance of tweezers. The girl held the snake to the sky like some kind of victory, and then Lionel woke up.
Lionel woke to another car speeding down a back road, another woman pleading for her life who would invariably become another doll stuffed in a box or buried under the floorboards.
“Took you long enough,” Jonah said. “We need to have a discussion about punctuality. Quit it with the snakes; you know how I hate them.”
“You’re not the one dreaming about them,” Lionel said.
“What snakes?” Victoria cried.
“Seems to me that you’re on the run,” Jonah said. “All those clothes folded up neat and tidy. Pictures of your kids shoved into books. Tell me about the home you so desperately want to go back to, but when you picked me up it was the one thing you seemed intent on leaving.” A thin line of blood trickled down her neck from where Jonah pressed the knife a touch too deep.
“Easy, soldier,” Lionel said. “Look at you, cutting up her neck. Making a mess. Are you looking for a one-way ticket to a needle in the arm? What did I tell you about the belts? They’re clean, honest. But no, you got to be the kid throwing sand outside the sandbox.”
Jonah peered over his shoulder. “Put on the gloves.” To Victoria, “Pull over. Park.”
“What are you going to do to me?”
“We’re going for a walk. See those trees over there? I’m going to leave you there and take the car. All your talking’s giving me a headache.”
“I told you to gag them. I told you to take the wheel, but you never listen. Sometimes I think you’re suited for back office, because you’re starting to fuck up the basics,” Lionel said.
“You’re going to let me go,” Victoria said. This was the part Jonah secretly loved most—the walk from the car to the tree, and the hope occupying the small space between the two.
She cut the engine and Jonah tied her hands with rope. Behind him, Lionel shook his head and said, “The gloves, you moron.” But Jonah didn’t listen. Skin on skin excited him.
They walked into the forest and stood under a canopy of trees and purple sky. He told Victoria to get down on her knees, that he had to blindfold her before he drove off. Security measures, he called it. Then he told her that he wanted to give her a hug before he left. He was sentimental like that. She nodded, thinking this was the end, and it was.
Her jaw, in particular, was probably broken. Jaws tended to break around him.
He pressed her face into his chest and stood still as she writhed and screamed. Choked on her cracking teeth. “Everything’s okay,” he assured her. Be assured that the choice is not ours now. Children, it will not hurt if you’ll be quiet. When she collapsed into him, he started to hum a lullaby about buttons and lambs—the kind of song his mother used to sing. Slack and beautiful, Victoria was a blond version of his Lucia. Two dolls, two hearts ceasing to beat.
ON MONDAY, LUCIA got caught. She’d gotten sloppy with the merchandise, stuffing granola bars and rotting bananas and half-eaten apples in all of her drawers, until the flies came with their multiplication. She hardly noticed when they formed a halo around her desk because she was drunk. Yvonne and the interns huddled in the kitchen, whispering about the tragedy that was Lucia.
Banding together, the militant clock-watchers dissected the events of the past month: the botched call transfers, dead plants, and conference rooms littered with trays of picked-over muffins, and melon and cantaloupe, second-class fruit. Lucia used to send email alerts detailing the bounty up for grabs. Now, she just let the trays pile up. Deal makers clicked through their PowerPoint presentations with one eye on a lone pineapple congealing in its own juice and the other at the glare from their computer screens.
Everyone at McCann Harrison was apoplectic; Lucia colonized. Last week, she stole a pile of printouts and set them on fire in the bathroom. Watching them burn in the basin gave her a certain kind of calm. Lucia hungered for the days of Sancerre lunches and lace thong shoots. In Biarritz, her body was a ticker tape of ivory along the shoreline. Surfers strode past with their wetsuits and boards, murmuring to her in clumsy Basque. Come nightfall, she’d eat steak with her hands and let the meat slip through her fingers. Back then they called her carnivorous—the girl with the twenty-inch waist who could devour you down to gristle and bone. The threat of Lucia sold millions of bikinis and mesh tanks. When the famous catalog fired her, they promised her a lifetime supply of terry shorts, to which she replied, “Fuck the shorts. I want the million-dollar bra.”
Lately, she’d taken to measuring her waist, thighs, and hips, and couldn’t stop them from expanding. The gap between her thighs closed up, and she felt that her thirties were one long, steady march to the grave. At home, she’d press the tape measure into Jonah’s palm and beg him to strangle her with it while they fucked, because her neck was the one area of her body that did not multiply. String me up like tinsel, she’d plead, and after a time she saw something ferocious in Jonah, as if this were the one thing he desired all along.
“Black me out,” she’d scream.
When Lucia returned from her lunch, which consisted of her coworkers’ half-eaten snacks, Debbie from HR and Yvonne hovered from behind Lucia’s desk. Debbie said, “We need to talk about the granola bars, Lucia.”
“And my fucking yogurt,” Yvonne said.
Lucia could’ve fought it, could’ve said that the items were planted, that she had been framed, but all she wanted to do was inch home, crawl under her bed, and stare at photographs of herself in silk and vinyl. “So, let’s talk about it.”
Lucia already saw her replacement: a pert blond with berry-stained lips and red-soled stilettos. Lucia noticed the subtraction of years and pigment, and understood that she was being replaced again. On a long enough timeline, everyone will expire. There were no second acts, no revivals—there was only a tawny blond on the cover of a magazine, or a temp sitting behind a desk cooing, “McCann Harrison. How may I direct your call?”
Lucia calmly collected her things in a small brown box and carried it to the elevator, down twenty-two floors, and beyond a glass revolving door. In the street she dumped her box on the ground, kicked it, and walked home in heels that tore at her ankles. She wouldn’t cry; she wouldn’t allow herself that privilege, so instead she laughed. Laughed so hard it hurt. She stopped in a store and loaded up on Entenmann’s cakes, donuts, and pies. One by one, she took a bite and hurled the desserts, piece by piece, to the pavement, as if leaving a trail.
People stopped and stared, but not like they used to. It didn’t matter though, because they were staring, and Lucia felt good, calm, and right.
At home, Jonah’s face was so complicated it would take days to describe it. “How was your day?” he asked in a perfunctory way, in a way lovers were supposed to do. But on Jonah it felt wrong, scripted, as if he were trying on normal for size, not realizing the pants were too tight and the buttons had come undone.
“A day is a day like any other day. There’s a food thief in the office,” she said, extending her legs as Jonah removed one shoe, then the other, and pressed his hands against the arches of her feet. Closing her eyes, she murmured, “That feels good.”
“Did you call the FBI?” Jonah brushed crumbs from her face; he never made inquiries.
“Funny guy. I’ve a far more dangerous weapon in my arsenal: Human Resources.”
Jonah laughed.
“What did you do all day?” Lucia said, moving his hair out of his eyes.
“Waited for you to come home.”
“And at night? Tell me, what do you do at night while you think I’m asleep?”
“I know you’re awake,” he said and paused. “You know what I do. I drive around. Take fares. Make money. Mostly I drive around the city waiting for you to wake up.” He rattled a DVD in his hand, some Korean horror movie where everyone is haunted by their past and ends up dying from the guilt. “I got us a video, some takeout. Chinese. Remember Lost Boys? The scene where Kiefer Sutherland’s character makes Jason Patric think he’s eating maggots? You’re eating maggots, Michael.” Jonah bared his teeth.
“Come on. It’s not like you have to work.”
“So I should just sit around and count my money? Is that what you’d like me to do, Lucia?” An edge creeps into Jonah’s voice and he closes his eyes, prays that his anger won’t awaken Lionel.
“I’m asking you to be honest. Is this about her, your sister? You know she keeps calling in the middle of the night when we’re supposed to be sleeping. Maybe she knows you’re not home and this is why she calls when she does. Maybe she knows you’ve trained me to disable the voice mail, to never pick up. Tell me, Jonah. Does she know something about you that I don’t?”
“I know what you’re doing. You’re trying to get a rise out of me,” Jonah said. “We can keep at this all night if you’d like.”
“Why won’t you take her calls? What did she do?”
“What makes you think she did something?” Jonah said.
Lying in the dark, Lucia said, “That day you met me on the plane, you told me your name was Telly. Why did you lie about your name?”
“Because everyone lies. That’s the foundation of every relationship,” Jonah replied. “No one wants to know the truth, otherwise I would’ve asked you again how your day was. Because the bloody feet—and what is this, chocolate on your chin—tell a different story.”
“I quit my job today,” she said, closing her eyes, drifting to sleep. “That’s the ten o’clock news. Maybe this’ll get a rise out of you.” She delivered the words as if they were barbed wire intended to keep Jonah from getting closer.
Jonah regarded her as a doll with two cracked eyes and a sewn-up mouth. He shook it away, desperate to retrieve the image of the woman he loved—the woman who was breaking, was broken—as she was at that moment: real, human. Doll parts, beating heart, doll hair, knotted ropes—Jonah’s eyes were a shutter that slowly edged out the human part of Lucia. The one thing he had been wedded to.
He stood over her sleeping body and pressed a box cutter against her cheek. Over and over he said, “I love you, I love you, please, please let me love you . . .”
Lucia went to meetings in basements. Sometimes she’d get a call about a location change—a high school auditorium on the Lower East Side or a Baptist church in Washington Heights—but mostly she met in basements crowded with picked-over pastries, Styrofoam cups, and men who smoked Camels under No Smoking signs.
For the first weeks she couldn’t speak. Instead, she’d hold up evidence from her former life, which was unnecessary since half the men recognized her from the junk mail piled up in their mailboxes (her catalog was the lone piece of mail that would survive the avalanche of Final Notices) and the rest didn’t care. It didn’t matter that Lucia had once been “that famous catalog model” because in this room everyone had been something once. This room was the Last Exit—no seriously, this was the end of the road, the final Final Notice before the repo man or undertaker took it all away.
But still, Lucia held up the pair of jewel-encrusted underwear she’d stolen and said, “This was me.”
From the back of the room, a woman laughed. Her name was Asia and her shrill was the loudest sound. “Girl, that ain’t even you.”
“Lucia is sharing,” the counselor said in a voice that made you crave powdered, arsenic-laced donuts.
“She’s not sharing, it’s self-pity.” To Lucia she said, “You need to stop carrying around your panties like you’re Linus or something. Holding on to them won’t bring your life back. You white women are always crying over some bullshit. You’re not a model . . . you’re not a millionaire. Try living with your mom in East New York and having to ride the A train for a fucking hour because this is the only meeting you can make before you have to work the night shift. Now that’s some sad shit right there. Now that’s a story.”
“I’m feeling a lot of hostility in your voice,” a man said.
Lucia balled up the diamonds in her hands. Everything was ugly and everything hurt.
“You about to feel my fist, old man,” Asia snapped. To Lucia, “Say something!”
The counselor asked Asia if she wanted to take a break or go outside, as if the words were a code for Asia to cool it, because as soon as she heard them she leaned back in her chair, crossed her arms, and remained quiet for the remainder of the session.
When the group broke, Lucia wrapped her scarf around her neck and walked out into the cold night. Asia followed.
“That was me trying to help you back there; that was me paying you a compliment,” Asia said.
“You’re right,” Lucia said. “I don’t know what it’s like to live with your mother in East New York. But I do know what it’s like to feel like you’re nothing before, during, and after you were something, and having to live with a man who only loves you because he knows you know you’re nothing.”
Asia nodded and said, “Let me get your phone.”
“What?”
“Your phone, your phone. I want to give you my cell, you know, in case you want to talk. You may be fucked-up, but you’re not nothing.”
Lucia watched Asia in her white puffy coat race down the subway steps.
From a parked car Jonah watched Lucia, his dark, fallen star. Over the coming weeks, he’d remain here, bearing witness to her slow ascension and his steady, frightening decline.
When Lucia phoned and asked him to meet her in a house, he thought it was like old times, but when he arrived he found a second-floor apartment half-filled with boxes and a cat weaving through them.
“What the fuck is this? What’s with the cat?”
“Calm down. She’s gone off to work. She won’t be home until morning.” Regarding the cat, she said, “Oh, that’s Felix.”
“We’re not taking the cat,” Jonah said. He was a fuse ready to blow at any minute. “Our building doesn’t allow pets.”
“Our building doesn’t allow heroin, but you don’t seem to have a problem with that, do you?” Lucia snapped. Today, there were no sandwiches, but there were bags of groceries on the counter and boxes of food on the floor. “Don’t bother with the fridge. She doesn’t even drink real milk.”
“Do you want me to take your picture?” Jonah touched her hair but she turned away.
“No, the last thing I want you to do is take my picture. But I guess you already knew that since you’ve been following me to my meetings.”
“Maybe I wouldn’t follow you if you were honest with me.”
“Honest? Do you even hear yourself? You stalk me at my AA meetings. The same man who disappears for hours at a time at night, and don’t even start that nonsense about being a cab driver. You hate people. The last thing you’d ever do is drive them.”
“Let’s talk about this at home,” Jonah said.
“I am home.”
Jonah surveyed the apartment, opened the boxes, and saw piles of Lucia’s things. Her life, their former life, dismembered: books in one box, clothes in the other. He moved from box to box and saw none of her lingerie, photographs, or even the bejeweled panties she treasured. But he did see another woman’s clothes. This woman was larger (XL) and wore cheap polyester, knockoff bags, and a sweatshirt that read, “I like my Michael Coors, Light!”
Pointing to the cat, Lucia said, “I’m spending tonight in your home but then I’m leaving you. I’m so sorry, Jonah. I don’t love you.”
“You don’t love me,” he said quietly.
“Right now I need to love myself, and Asia is helping me with that.”
“You’re moving in with a woman named after a continent?”
“It’s better than a man who stockpiles chloroform in his closet.”
Jonah laughed. “Come home.”
“For tonight, I will.”
Lucia woke with a headache. Her skin hurt. Jonah sat on the edge of their bed, his hands steadying the mattress. In the corner of the room was a wooden crate. How did it get there?
“I know you’re awake,” he said. “I just didn’t know for how long.”
“Come back to bed,” Lucia said, reaching for him, but all he could do was stare at the wall as if he were looking through it, already clawing his way to the other side. “One last time before I go.”
“I wanted to give you everything. I wanted to give you all of it. But now I realize I can’t.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Remember that winter we went to Utah and you wore that red hat and we realized we didn’t know how to ski and drank instead?”
“I remember the bourbon.” She also recalled the sex, and how Jonah tied his belt around her throat and pulled so hard she feared her neck would snap, but she kept on and closed her eyes.
“How the old man who ran the inn nearly kicked us out for getting booze on the floor and all over the sheets? And then you got naked in the snow, rolled around in it, and yelled at anyone who would listen that you were in camouflage?”
“I did blend beautifully into the scenery. We had a time.” Lucia sat up and drew her knees to her chest, waiting for the searing pain in the front of her head to move to the back, to wane. She was confused. She didn’t remember drinking. All she could feel now was the pain, the sharpness of it. All she could see were parts of their room, pieces of their furniture, through a fog.
“I don’t think there was a moment when we weren’t drowning. When we weren’t anesthetized.”
“I want to learn Arabic,” Lucia said. “Maybe I can take some classes. Go back to school.”
“Arabic? Christ, Lucia. Do you hear yourself?” Jonah said.
Lucia palmed the sheets and slipped her fingers between her legs and felt only warmth. She looked at the sheets and then at her hands, not noticing the cuts down her leg that Jonah had made while she slept, and said, “Why is there blood on the bed?”
“I tried to give it to you,” Jonah smiled and gave her a white dress he’d been holding. Told her to put it on. “I tried to give it to you. I’ve practically laid down my life. I’ve practically died every day to give you peace. And you still don’t have any peace. You look better than I’ve seen you in a long while, but it’s still not the peace I want to give you.”
“Jonah, you’re starting to freak me the fuck out.” Lucia eyed the door, the window, any means of escape. “Stop this.”
“I know about you and my sister. I know everything.”
“Your sister? What are you talking about?”
Jonah drew her close and kissed the place on her head where her hair was the thickest, the unruliest. This is sacrifice, he thought, swallowing his love for Lucia because he knew that she wasn’t fit to survive this life. On that plane he’d thought she was just like him, but he’d come to realize that Lucia, his great love, was nothing like him. She was ordinary, just like the rest, and he hated her for it.
“Jonah, I can’t breathe,” she said.
There’s a figure at the door, watching. The figure advances. “Let me take care of this.”
“What? I don’t hear you,” he said.
“This is me making other arrangements,” Lionel said, pressing down on Lucia’s mouth.
When it was over, when their work was done, Jonah said in a small voice, “I wish I had the strength to kill you.”
JONAH SAID TO his sister, “Fine, you won. I’m coming home.”