I was at the library, waiting for our workshop to begin. It was the first day of the new year, a day when everyone had off from work and was prepared to meet in various states of hope and hangover, the diffuse gray light of winter a sheet stretched tight across the sky. An unlikely place to meet as any, the library, since government buildings were typically closed on this day. Yet somehow, we’d managed to find the one, a cozy two-story structure with bright blue chairs and circular orange couches, located in Coney Island, a few miles from the ocean.
I sat, waited. I’d made no resolutions this year, except for the one I had been making every year since graduate school, that somehow, I’d find a kind of happiness with my work. I’d had a major setback almost a decade ago after finding, quite soon after graduating, a gallery to represent me. I then produced a massive amount of paintings in a short time, made repeated trips into the city to discuss my work with visitors, students, reporters, and even buyers. I attended the right parties with the right people, even saw my name on various Artists to Watch lists and small write-ups in a few important magazines.
Then, the gallery owner, Clyde, a man who wore navy pinstripe suits daily and had the rattling wheezy breath of a man four times his age and yet signed off all his emails with a smiley face and XO!, suddenly disappeared. No phone calls. No word. No smiley-faced email.
Those in the know seemed to now know very little. All we could confirm was that Clyde was neither laid up in some hospital, reported dead, nor was he paying his rent on the space. Eventually, the bank took back the property, replacing it with another bank. Clyde’s clients were summarily divvied up, redistributed among other galleries, or else sent back into the fray.
Only in my case, no one seemed to want me. Was I cursed? I asked, my joke met with uneasy laughter, changes in topic.
Maybe try another part of Manhattan? friends suggested, as if there was a specific neighborhood dedicated to the work I did — the Neo-Expressionist Landscape District, three blocks between Garment and Meatpacking. Try teaming up with other artists. Go back underground and produce more work. Get out of the city. Move to Jersey. Sell yourself. Focus on your portfolio. Wait it out. Hustle. Network. Don’t push so hard. The advice came and came. Until, suddenly, like wind in a forest, it went away.
Days, weeks, months, years. I gave up on Clyde. I gave up on galleries. I gave myself over to my other work, teaching art to middle schoolers at P.S. 172, grateful every year our funding had not been cut, collecting loose change in a cookie jar to supplement the kids’ sad collection of supplies. I dated casually, but noncommittally, my free time taken up mostly by my art. But it was art I’d long stopped being excited about. It was art I simply made, more duty than passion. When the clock in my tiny studio collective swung round to nine p.m., I was usually more than ready to untie my apron, soak my brushes in turpentine for the night, and wash my hands clean.
The workshop, then, was a tether to some small hope. Though I hadn’t been producing anything that truly excited me, and though my instincts were now all twisted and contorted (Did this image need more contrast or less? Should these colors attack the viewer or appease? Foreground or background? Warm or cool?), I kept up with our monthly meetings. We — fellow grads from my program — looked at one another’s sketches, traded gossip about who was showing where, exchanged vital information about residencies and opportunities I would never hear about otherwise, and celebrated when one of our members had good news. I met with them consistently, hoping for their excitement to rub off on me, hoping I would not be forgotten.
The front door opened and I heard laughter. I peeked up, not recognizing the voices. I didn’t expect anyone else at the library on this gray day, but oddly, there arrived a group of people. A man and a woman, then three behind them, looking delirious with joy, as if they had not yet slept from the night before, maybe not in weeks, a kind of happy hysteria giving light to their footsteps, sheen to their smiles.
“Oh,” the man said upon seeing me.
They stopped short, the ones in back almost colliding into him, as in a cartoon.
“Hi,” I said, and made a motion as if to stand, but changed my mind and stayed seated.
“We’re here for the bachelorette party,” said the woman in front. She had light brown skin and long, soft, dark curls. She was wearing a shiny, black, off-the-shoulder blouse that showed the smooth, crisp lines of her collarbones.
I couldn’t think of what else to say. What sort of bachelorette party met at a library?
“Okay.” I looked around. No one in my own group had arrived. In fact, no one was here at all. The building was immaculately clean and ghostly quiet. The librarians, wherever they were, worked in soundless whispers. “I’m here for a workshop.”
A long silence passed between us. I looked at the clock, saw that it was twenty past the hour, the collective lateness of all the members of my group perhaps the strangest part of the day so far. Had I confused the day and time? But we always met at the same time each month, and New Year’s Day was a hard day to get wrong. Had they all finally given up on me? My heart gave a hard, little thump.
“Well?” asked the woman with the curls.
I looked at all their faces, which appeared expectant, a bit insistent. They seemed to be waiting for me.
“You want me to…?” I began, but paused, not wanting to be presumptuous, to assume they wanted me with them. I was just a stranger, after all.
“Aren’t you coming?”
I glanced again at the clock. Then I stood.
“The first thing we do,” the man explained when we had all come to the library’s lower level, “is the hokey-pokey.”
“The hokey — ?”
“Pokey,” he said, a bit impatiently.
A ritual, I gathered. And I did not judge. One of the men I was casually dating in what was already beginning to feel like my other life, my regular life, many train stops and tree-lined city blocks away, once confided to me that in grad school, before he and his friends went out on Saturday nights, they watched a series of Michael Jackson videos. They made claws of their hands during “Thriller.” They moon-walked.
I understood pre-gaming to be an important and yet mysterious form of self-preservation, perhaps as important and mysterious as art itself, with its promise of safe passage from one’s inner to one’s outer life. What I’m saying is, who was I to question another’s hokey-pokey?
And so it went, in the gray-carpeted lobby, just in front of the library’s glass doors: Right hand in, left. Right foot in, left. You do it. And you turn yourself around. That’s what it’s all about.
Even I felt lighter afterward.
“But where,” I asked, “are the pink, plastic dicks?”
“Pardon?” asked the man.
“If this is a bachelorette party — ” I made a whirring motion with my hand, indicating all the expected accoutrements, feather boas, rubbery dildos, tiaras, and the like.
“This,” said the woman with the curls, “is not that kind of party.”
She gazed at me, her rich chocolate eyes containing a question, perhaps whether I was still game to join them, perhaps whether I thought I could handle it.
With my own eyes, I told her, Yes. Parties that were not that kind of party had always been my favorite kind.
* * *
Deep-sea diving, I soon learned, was the agenda. We piled, six of us (the bachelorette party and me), into the man’s green Toyota, which he drove with great caution toward the boardwalk, the street so empty that he found a parking space nearly right away, which made everyone scream their first true bachelorette-party scream.
No plastic dicks, but there was gear, plenty of it. Masks and wetsuits, flippers and oxygen tanks, stopwatches and tubes of various lengths and degrees of ribbing. All of it inside suitcases that we wheeled against the wind, up a sand-speckled ramp, over boardwalk slats, then across bumpy cold sand, to where a boat lay waiting against the shore.
The sun had come out like an amused parent, poking his head from his house to see what the kids in the backyard were up to, but still, the air was sharp and cold. It had not fully reached me that this was a real thing, something that was happening, something that I would be doing. That we were to enter the water. That I, who had grown up in this city, who had been warned all my life against this very ocean, its HIV-contaminated hypodermic needles, its shit-filled plastic bags and dead Mafiosi with cement blocks chained to their ankles, that into this water I would deeply dive.
Perhaps, I thought hopefully, I would not. I had no wetsuit, after all, had only my backpack with a spiral sketchbook inside, some loose gesture drawings that I could not now even remember having made.
But in moments the boat’s engine roared and throttled, and an invisible motor began churning, and we were soon breaking ranks with land, the boardwalk and white condominiums along the avenue, the amusement park with its Ferris wheel frozen in winter sky. One of the women held up a wetsuit against the frame of my body and nodded. This one would be just my size.
Wind roared in our ears, waves gushing back behind us, everything so loud that we could not talk to one another. Saltwater hummed in my throat and stung my eyes.
“Won’t the water be freezing?” I asked when, at last, the engine sputtered and quieted.
“At first,” said the man, rubbing his palms together. “But down below, there are warm pockets.”
“Warm enough?”
The man tilted his forehead toward mine, angling to see me up close. “I don’t want to die. Do you?”
I said nothing at first, not sure what to make of that. Was he trying to say that his instinct for self-preservation, his desire for comfort, his love of sunlight and flannel pajamas and potato chips with pepper on them was equal to my own? That if this excursion was not safe, maybe necessary, he, of course, would not do it?
“I do not want to die,” I agreed.
The only way to change into a wetsuit out on the ocean on New Year’s Day is very, very quickly. Their extra suit fit me so perfectly I half-giggled, giddy now with the cold and the smell of sea and a fear that buzzed in my fingertips and skull. I waited for the others while bouncing on the boat’s wooden deck to stay warm.
They fitted me to the breathing hose, attached what they kept calling the aqua lung. A harness was placed on my back, straps adjusted to my height. The breathing plate sat hard and snug upon my back. Goggles were slipped over my head and strapped tight around my eyes.
“Can you see?” The man’s voice sounded muffled through the hood of my suit.
I nodded. I could see.
And then there we all were, the five of them and me, black suits taut against our skin, tight around our heads and hands, blue-black flippers encasing our feet, the wind held back by this new dermis we had closed ourselves inside.
“I’m Dwayne, by the way,” the man said.
“Emily,” I told him.
Awkwardly, we shook hands, the skin inside our wetsuits unable to feel each other’s fingers.
“I had a babysitter named Dwayne once,” I said, which was a true fact about my life that I never ever thought of, except for now.
“Oh. Was he nice?”
He had been the nicest, in fact, the one I remembered best, a man, who, like bachelorette-party Dwayne, had bronzy-brown skin, hair cropped close to his head, and small round glasses. With Dwayne the babysitter, I used to sit at a low table in the living room of my mother’s house and eat salami on white bread sandwiches while we did puzzles.
This is a memory that my mother, to this day, insists never happened, that she would never allow me to eat salami, so salty and heavily processed, or white bread so void of nutrients. Though Dwayne was, of course, real, she says, and though she loved him, too, there as he was during all the tumultuous years of my parents’ fighting, my father’s leaving, my brother losing his mind to drugs and all the rest of it, when my mother was working two jobs and could not be there to pick me up from or take me to school, we all loved and relied on Dwayne like family. Though all that was true, my mother says, the part about the sandwiches was something I’d made up.
“But it was so real,” I insisted to her, probably licking my lips, because even in the telling I could taste it, the contrasting flavors and textures, salami sliced thin and salty-sweet bread tearing like a cloud along my tongue, sticking to my teeth. “How could that be?”
“You must have dreamed it,” my mother said.
“I always liked the name Dwayne,” I told this Dwayne now, who was meticulously removing his glasses, folding their wire stems, placing them into a case lined with red velvet, which he then rested in another box under a blanket below a table near the boat’s stern.
“Yeah?” he said. “I like it, too, Emily.”
Moments later, he shoved me into the water.
* * *
At first, it was an effort to breathe. Such a demanding act of trust, to keep one’s mouth open, to pull in and out from a ribbed tube that tasted, just vaguely, of strawberries. And the water, as I suspected, was pure ice, my limbs at once numb and frigid at my sides. I flopped and kicked and bobbed. I breathed and panted, legs burning like tall matches sure to go out any moment. My heart banged and burned.
No one had come in after me and I was just beginning to panic when, out of the blue-gray green, Dwayne appeared, his hand taking hold of mine, guiding me farther under the water. The others were at my side not long after, and together we swam toward something indistinct but bright, downward, until I felt a warming, so warm I almost laughed, thinking of all the times I accused my brother of peeing in the pool on some family trip, that warm pee was exactly what this felt like, and me, so cold. I did not mind one bit.
Down and down and down until there was sand again, and again my instinct was to hold back, to stop breathing, because it was shocking, to be confronted with the finite end of this, the perimeter of the ocean, its floor. But, of course, laughing was not an option. As I had told Dwayne, I did not want to die.
Instead, I opened my eyes.
And did I see them, the angels we sing about in lullabies? Did I hear them, those gods that haunt the underworld of mythological lifetimes? Did I touch the faces of my alternate selves and did I understand the smallness of my own person on this planet in a vast expanse of infinite time and deep space?
Maybe. Some of that might have happened. But also —
Coral reefs and long threads of floating seaweed. Golden fish, skinny as bracelets.
Slithering whitenesses that glimmered before I could fully see them. Puffed-up blue fish with shimmery bellies. Schools of tiny pink fish that made me think, fleetingly, of the children crowded in my hallways just before the bell rang for lunch. Sources of light, yellow and silver, which I could not discern. Long red fish the length of my arm. A plant so colorful I thought of a peacock, of feathers, and another fish with a sharp point shooting off its head like a unicorn.
A smell, everywhere, of saltwater and bodies, something familiar, like sweat. And the noises, so much sound, of bubbles, of churning, as though everything down here were singing to itself, different songs, but all at the same time. A fish brushed my heel, gentle as a hand. Another came directly up to my goggles, its large, white eyes open and blinking, gills like sequins along its smooth, round belly.
Deeper in, there was more to see. The white knuckles of my grandmother’s hands.
Black ink, which I recognized at once to be my grandfather’s memoirs, something he always claimed to be typing up in his attic, but which none of us had ever seen, even after he died. The ghetto packed with refugees, waiting for news, waiting in line for the one toilet…I tried to grab a page, but it slipped away. And then, riding a low bobbing wave, came the jingle of an old commercial from my childhood, Grab a stick of Juicy Fruit / The taste is gonna move ya, which I had to dodge quickly before it tangled in my hair and curled its way back inside my ear.
I heard the color red, charging in great roiling bursts, flames of echoing heat. My brother is a lion, someone whispered. My life is a sentence. Or was it, My wife is a sentence? A fish with puckered white lips came before me. It said, I tried and I tried and I tried and I asked, Tried what? But it bonked me in my goggles, then slipped away.
I want to say it was beautiful, all of it. But it wasn’t. There were cold pockets, hidden in the warmth. But worse were the piles of bodies. Limbs, just as I had feared. Blood still clinging to the bone. A piercing blue light that was the color of screaming. Fish that looked like porcupines, fish with misshapen jaws, bullet casings where eyes should have been. Knowns and unknowns, said a sad weeping voice. And unknown unknown unknown unknown…I coughed, tried to steer myself in another direction.
But there was my mother, again in my thoughts, old now, living alone in a house too big for her, where I’d recently complained, “All the mirrors here are warped. Each one is telling a different story.”
“Then choose the one you like,” she’d told me, “and only look at that one.”
Easy, maybe, in a house. But in the sea? There was no direction but everywhere. And I turned, then, and saw him. Clyde, or some version of Clyde, the white stripe of his pinstripe suit, the clacking sound his heeled shoes made along his gallery floor. The white light that had been the promise of Clyde. Where did you go? I reached for one of his smiley faces, smacking at the water. What happened, Clyde?
I could grasp nothing. Water slipped through my black-suited hands.
Clyde!
I took the tubing out of my mouth. Bubbles heaved out of me and blurred my vision.
CLYDE!
His clacking heels grew distant.
A thick plant jostled my elbow, the tubing went flying from my hand. I reached for it but could not get it back. The water had turned cold, suddenly painful. I swam after my tube but then could not even see it. Fuck. I held my breath and looked right and left of me and saw only swarms of plant life, mucky green and brown, my flippers kicking at mud.
I felt a gush of moving water then, saw Dwayne and the others swimming past, their sleek, black-tinted bodies pointing upward, and I spun, following them, back through the water, up its layers and layers of warm then cold, toward the metal ladder extending from the boat.
We surfaced, air and sunlight a shock that made me gasp. The upper-level water was cold again, quickly numbing me so that it was nearly impossible to manage the metal ladder that took us back onto the boat deck. Once aboard, wetsuits were peeled off, thick towels were passed around, hair was shaken out, skin was dried, shriveled and thin from the saltwater and the cold.
But I could not stand. I had lain myself out on the boat deck and now sat curled like a shrimp, shivering with my arms around me.
“You took off your tube!” Dwayne was screaming. “You told me you did not want to die. But you took out your tube!”
Behind him I heard the women murmuring to him, telling him to calm down, to wait until I had warmed up, to stop yelling at me.
“But doesn’t she know?” he shouted at them, and even as the engine started up again and the waves churned behind us, I could hear the strain in his vocal chords, the agonized plea in his voice. “Doesn’t she know that you can’t shout at the sea?”
I heard the others continue to murmur his name. Then another voice, maybe the woman with the curls. “It’s okay, Dwayne. She’s still new. Still figuring it out.”
I brought my knees tight to my chest and wrapped a towel tight around my body. I wanted so desperately to explain myself, to tell Dwayne yes, I did know that. And yet, I couldn’t help myself. Sometimes the sea needed shouting at. But I was too cold to utter anything at all. My teeth clacked as I searched for Dwayne’s eyes against the sky, as I held my knees, waiting for the boat to dock.
* * *
They carried me off the boat, helped me peel off my wetsuit, and soon, wrapped in warm knitted blankets, I began to feel better. I apologized, feeling awful, sorry for causing them to worry, sorry for ruining their party.
“It’s okay,” Dwayne whispered at last. He placed a fur hat on my wet head. “Will you come with us for food?”
“Who are you?” I asked, a question so simple I was surprised I hadn’t asked it sooner, though I barely heard myself asking it now.
Dwayne studied me with a serious face. “We are hungry. Aren’t you? Hungry?”
I glanced at my stomach, as though the answer would be visible there. Yet, I knew that I was. I had been hungry for a very long time.
“Also,” Dwayne said, “we will now warm ourselves with vodka.”
I placed my hand in his and let him help me up to standing.
Tall tin lamps heated the outdoor area of the restaurant. A clear plastic sheet along one side let us see the whitecaps of the waves in the distance, while keeping out the wind and the cold, the shadows of bodies passing along the boardwalk. Underneath my fingers, the table was pleasantly warm, a polyurethane that held under it old Russian newspapers and, under that, a red tablecloth of that fabric I had always found odd, in which beads of water didn’t soak through, but instead lingered on its surface like glass. At the other end of the restaurant, some kids ran around in an inflatable playground. A standing fan blew the tips of a castle back and forth, which made the kids howl and scream with rapturous glee.
It took a long time for the waitress to come, and when she did, she looked down on us with her hands on her hips.
“Privet,” said Dwayne in such a perfect Russian accent my jaw dropped open.
Hearing her native language, her brow softened. Dwayne leaned back, gently placed his hand on her elbow. He gestured with his other hand around the table, speaking in a calm, easy Russian. We all watched the waitress, unable to look away from the pleasure washing over her face, her small eyes now crinkling with a smile as Dwayne made some kind of insider-y Russian joke.
She went away and came immediately back with a bottle of Żubrówka and mismatching shot glasses that we distributed among us. Dwayne poured and we clinked, a wordless toast, me holding my elbows against my chest for body heat.
“So,” Dwayne said, looking at me cautiously, but not without tenderness, as if to gauge whether or not I was okay.
I sipped the vodka, held its bitter warmth on the back of my tongue, then nodded. I was okay. Or would be.
“So,” he said. “What is it that you do, Emily?”
Perhaps he thought he was being nice. Giving me a way to open myself up to the group. To atone for my foolishness by entertaining them with some conversation.
But it was not nice. To close my eyes and see that sharp white line of Clyde’s suit. To watch that brightness disappear from view. To confess that what I did was waste my time, that what I did, for the past decade or so, was really nothing at all.
I looked at each of their faces. Dwayne, Miranda, the other three women whose names I’d learned were Emerald, Camille, and Suzanne, each with brown eyes of various light-filled tints, one with skin the same copperish umber as Miranda’s, the other two pale white, like me, their fingers resting on the table, or cupped around their vodka glasses, or hidden on their laps.
Something occurred to me. “Which one of you is getting married?”
No one answered. Camille traced one of the Russian headlines under the table’s surface with the tip of her purple fingernail.
I leaned forward, spoke in a whisper. “Isn’t this a bachelorette — ”
“She’s not here,” Miranda said.
“Well,” said Suzanne, who had a husky smoker’s voice, “she is.”
“In her way, yes,” agreed Miranda.
Dwayne placed his hand on mine. I shuddered, fearing he was about to say that it was me. Though whom or what I was to marry, I could not guess.
She had been born here, in the United States, he explained. Monique. The bachelorette.
“Oh,” I said, and laughed a bit at my own silly presumption.
Dwayne was not laughing. Monique’s parents were Somali, he went on. She had taken a trip to return home a few years back. While there, she’d met the man of her dreams. “Her words,” Dwayne said, with an affectionate half-smile and eye roll.
After she returned to the U.S., this man came to visit and shortly after that the man, whose name was Josiah, proposed. Monique said yes, and soon they began planning their wedding.
“And you know it was going to be a good one,” Miranda chimed in.
The other women grunted in agreement.
“What happened?” I asked.
Dwayne patted the air, calming me down. But something was already twisting in me, a dark knot of dread.
That fall, the president issued his travel ban. Months later, the courts approved it. Josiah was not allowed to enter the United States. Dwayne’s voice rose, his words sounding clipped and sharp as he talked about Josiah’s attempts to contact the U.S. embassy, then his attempts to work with his own embassy, to be granted an exemption, the pages and pages of paperwork he filled out, the news outlets he tried to contact, the weeks and months of futile efforts to break this idiotic restriction.
I wanted to place my hand on Dwayne’s arm, where a vein was bulging thick underneath the skin. But I gripped my shot glass instead, wrapped my palm around it.
As for Monique, she wanted desperately to visit Josiah. But she was afraid she would not be let back into the United States. Somalia was a place Monique did not want to live. Apart from a few visits with her family, she had no physical connection to the place. Not to mention the violence.
Dwayne stopped abruptly, seemed to be scanning his own memories as, for a long moment, he stared through the restaurant’s plastic sheet and into the sea.
Anyway, he went on, everyone was telling her what to do. Wait it out. Fight it. Stage a protest. Do nothing. Do everything you possibly can. I sipped my vodka, the heat fanning the flame of recognition in my gut. To want something so much. To feel so helpless, so adrift. Maybe Dwayne saw this understanding flash in my eye.
“Emily,” he said, “have you ever waited for love?”
“I — ”
“One cannot,” Dwayne interrupted me, evidently unable to wait for my answer. And, of course, that was what it was, to wait for love. Unbearable. Impossible. I knew exactly. Though up until this moment, I’d been unaware that it was love I had been waiting for, or that I had been waiting at all. The last time Dwayne had seen Monique, she had been a changed person from just the years before. Hair haggard and in knots. Eyes wide and unrested, creased and underlined by dark half-circles. Nails clipped, jagged, bitten down.
I looked at my own nails, their rough edges, ragged cuticles.
Dwayne’s hand was on mine again. Listen, he was saying. Listen.
Toward the end there had been a ray of hope. At last. Monique could retrieve her documents at City Hall that week. Documents that would let her leave and return, she and her husband, guaranteed. All she had to do was pass an exam.
“Oh! Great!” I heard myself exclaim.
Dwayne shot me a sideways look. As if to say, You know nothing of this world. And maybe he was right.
It was all going to happen for her. But then.
“Then what?” I asked.
All five of them stared at the table. It was Camille who continued.
“Then,” she said, and her accent was distinctly French, pronouncing “then” like “zen.” She slapped one hand with the fist of the other, said, “Buf! Hit by a bus.” Eet by a boos.
“Monique?” My high voice caused the couple at the nearby table to turn and look. I couldn’t help myself. I reached out, gripped Dwayne’s fingers tight. “She…?” My voice dropped to a whisper. “She died?”
“Gone.”
“But…I mean, she was on her way to…She was just about to…”
Dwayne turned from me, lifted his glasses and pressed his index finger against his eyes.
“Oh God,” I said, my words short, empty of breath. “I am so, so sorry.”
We all fell quiet. The waitress came by with a shiny metal basket of warm rolls, sliced rye bread, small golden foil-wrapped packets of butter. In spite of our hunger, no one moved. The children at the inflatable playground had calmed, their voices a distant murmur against some soft opera coming from the restaurant’s interior, the clanking of plates and silverware around us. A man in the corner of the restaurant laughed, then stopped abruptly. Footsteps clattered by on the boardwalk.
“She is the bachelorette,” I said finally.
“We gave her to the sea,” Miranda said. She rolled her shot glass back and forth against her lower lip.
“This way,” Camille explained — zees way, “maybe she finally is with him.”
“Through the ocean,” I said.
They nodded.
I turned toward the water. Had there been ashes? An urn? A body? Had they deposited Monique as we had gone out? Said a prayer for her? I had seen nothing. Perhaps it was after Dwayne pushed me into the water. Or maybe it was while I lay on the dock, lips chattering, and only half-aware of the world around me. Or else, I had to admit, it was possible I had seen the whole thing plainly, had let it pass me by. That we so often do not see the things transpiring right in front of us was an undeniable fact of our species.
My mind returned to Dwayne’s question, of what it was I did. And, as might be expected, it all felt trivial now, minute as the dust of our bodies.
“I’m sorry — ” I began to say again.
But then our food came. And we were too hungry to ignore it.
* * *
We busied ourselves for a good while by deliriously satisfying our appetites. Lentils with crispy brown onions, rice thick and soft with salted butter, tilapia rimmed with tiny capers that exploded in my teeth, salty as the sea, drenched in creamy lemon sauce. Bronzed and garlicky cauliflower that melted along the palette. Had I never eaten in my life? Had there been food anywhere until this moment? It seemed not.
The waitress refilled our water glasses, ice clattering happily against our plastic cups. She smiled with satisfaction at our oil-slicked mouths, our quickly moving forks. She held up the empty bottle of vodka, turned it at an angle.
“Da,” we all said. “Da!”
A platter of blintzes passed around the table, crepe wrapped around sweetened cottage cheese, my fork slowing halfway through, my eyes now taking on a slow, dreamy gaze, the room vodka-softened, blurring and warm at my vision’s edges.
Dwayne took the platter from me, handily scooped a blintz onto Miranda’s plate, gave the last one to Camille, then set the empty platter, whitened with sauce, on the empty table beside us. The restaurant had filled some, the lamps glowing brighter orange, the sea and boardwalk harder to see in the deepening night outside. The playing children were long gone, the inflatable playground in the corner now flattened, a red and blue tarp along the ground, which, I imagined, would soon be whisked away, opening space for more tables, or possibly a dance floor.
“So,” Camille nudged me with her elbow, “you never told us what you do.”
“Yes,” I said, keenly aware that this was true. How to explain it then? What I did. I was certain that I owed these people, Dwayne, Camille, Suzanne, Miranda, Emerald — for finding me at the library when no one else did, for feeding me when all I could do was shout at the ocean and choke on its salty cold, for sharing their Monique with me, fitting my body into a suit meant for her, filling my life with hers. The debt was one which could only be paid by the fullest presentation of who I was. Which meant claiming all that I had wanted to be, excavating all that I had ever been.
“I formulate lines and work through the shapes of shapes,” I said. “I place opposing colors side by side. I stretch canvas. I clear my throat. I attempt to render. I place small circles inside larger ones, and no matter what I do, everyone mistakes them for breasts. I think about dots. I find geometric echoes in nature and work to capture them with a bright palette, something that does not look exactly like Piet Mondrian, whom I have loved all my life. I think about the major religions. I apply Gesso over all my mistakes. Most of it is mistakes, you know. I stop time and hold on to the tiniest leaves within a flower, the roiling current of a cloud.
“I doubt myself.
“I sell myself.
“I look for myself.”
They were quiet. Finally, I laughed gently. I shrugged and said, “I do the hokey-pokey.”
They all nodded, as this, at last, was the truest thing.
Gradually, our eating slowed. We took to leaning back, moving the food around our plates with the tines of our forks, jabbing at stray blueberries, bits of fish, placing them gently on our tongues. Emerald, who had not spoken a word this entire outing, picked up the thin, smile-shaped peel of an orange from the edge of her plate.
“Did you ever wonder,” she said, “why oranges are the only fruit named after themselves?”
We all looked at her.
“Bananas have a name — they’re bananas. Apples are apples. Pears, mangoes, persimmons, kiwis…” She rotated her fork, spinning the peel into a frown, then back to a smile, then a frown again, a face wrestling with the conundrum of itself.
“And oranges,” she went on, “it’s like they got there and ran out of titles. Like they were like, ‘Yeah, we’ll just call you what you are. You’re Orange.’”
We laughed, but only briefly, and picked up our shot glasses for Dwayne to refill.
“Well,” Emerald said, shaking her head, “I would like to meet the person in charge of naming fruit because, really, I find this lack of imagination to be not only depressing, but frankly a little odd.”
“Nothing even rhymes with orange,” Miranda pointed out.
“Yes,” Emerald said. “Nothing does. Isn’t that strange?”
* * *
No one was sober enough to drive, so Dwayne left his car where it was, and together we walked to the F train. At the station, they did not get in with me, only gestured vaguely toward some other direction, another neighborhood, I guessed, where they all lived, unreachable by train, or else close enough they would walk.
I hugged each of them, pressing my face against the puffy shoulders of their winter coats, feeling soft hair against my forehead, tears at the corners of my eyes. I did not want to let go. Yet moments later, I was ascending the metal staircase, swiping my MetroCard, passing through the turnstile, shuffling my feet to keep warm as I waited on the outdoor platform, my head fogged from food and liquor, pigeons nearby pecking at small crusts of bread.
The brightness of the subway car, the glimmering orange and yellow plastic of the mostly empty seats, felt like an attack on my senses. I wanted to preserve the entire day and night, the bitter flavor of vodka on my tongue, the numbing chill of saltwater in my bones, the dimple on Dwayne’s cheek when he smiled, the fruity scent of Miranda’s dark curls. And, of course, Monique, her body now a splash of particles, drifting toward her love.
I wanted to, but the train clanked and hammered against the tracks. And at the other end of the car a guy with a low baseball cap was listening to loud music on his headphones, a tinny song that echoed all the way down the car. And above the doors and windows were brightly smiling people insisting I drink Vitamin Water, call a personal injury lawyer to collect my workers comp, and guzzle 5-Hour Energy Drinks to “fix my tired fast.”
As I left the station in my neighborhood and walked home in the cold, entered my building and then my apartment, I felt the world, the one I had occupied just that morning, reassert itself around me, as though I had been dripped into some kind of shimmering wax that was now sliding away. Here was the mug of tea I’d left in the sink with its soggy tea bag in now cold water. Here were the blue notebooks containing empty reports I had yet to fill out for my students. Alex is excelling in his understanding of color relationships. Jennifer enjoyed our papier mache segment but still has a problem keeping her hands to herself. Amelia should be reminded that throwing glue sticks, pencils, gum, etc., is unacceptable in a classroom setting (or anywhere). And, of course, there was my laptop, closed on my little foldout table, seeming to be waiting for me, a lover who only pretends to be asleep but truly has some pressing conversation on their mind.
For as long as I had been living in New York, and even before, back in grad school, there had been the desire, the compulsion, upon returning home, to check something. Maybe for adults in the old days it had been as simple as the answering machine. Who called while I was away? Now, the compulsion was splintered into a million parts. Email — my three different accounts. Social media — my four different pages. And beyond that, sometimes even Google. Like a nightcap at the end of the night, some shot of gossip or change, news of some artist’s latest escapade, some mention of myself, perhaps, somewhere out in the virtual world, the world over there, the one that mattered.
Checking, as a way of checking in. Here I am. What happened? What did I miss, while I was away, with myself? Though what it really was, of course, was checking out. Washing away whatever had come before in a blue-lit haze. Don’t worry, world. I didn’t go anywhere. None of that mattered. I’m right here.
Where was I now? For the first time in a long time, I had no desire to sit at that desk, to feel the screen’s glow like a glaze across my skin. I went elsewhere instead. In my bedroom inside my closet, up on a shelf next to seldom-worn heels and summer sandals, were boxes of pens, pencils, charcoal. When I took them down, the boxes rattled, like something alive.
There were blank things in my apartment also tucked away — scraps of canvas I had yet to use, paper I had not covered. Blank surfaces were everywhere, in fact, once you decided anything could be painted on, anything could be reimagined. The wooden knobs of my bedpost. The white door that separated one room from another. Bathroom ceiling. Windowsill. How had I gone so long, surrounded by so much empty space? How had I let the forms of this world take over with their functionality and practical use?
I sat on the floor, pulled my sketchbook to my knees. It was not a sketchbook, though, nor were its pages simply paper. This was the ocean in my lap. My stick of charcoal would move across it in slow dark waves. This was coral reef against my fingertips. I blew dust, thought of Monique scattering into the water. My heart burned. There was art and there was life, I heard a voice say to me. The voice was flat, direct, spiked with a Brooklyn accent. My mother’s voice, perhaps. Or anyone’s.
This world is no place for your fancy flights, this voice said. For your moonlit mumbo jumbo. Your deep dives, your sea screams. Your hocus pocus.
No? I asked the voice. Then what is this world a place for?
I did not wait for an answer. I ran charcoal across the ocean’s white foam. I filled the page with lines that rippled and swam. I held my breath, turned to a new page. For a moment, its blank eye stared back at me. Then, I took a step forward and jumped into the water.
