A Selfie as Big as the Ritz Read online

  Your new apartment is located in the university district off Oxford Road; potted between 24-hour convenience and grimly lit takeaways. You swipe two mirrors from the street, grubby but intact, and a pretty wooden box, marveling at your own resourcefulness. Who’d let a ticket like this slip through their fingers? Who’d let a number like this get away?

  “Well, exactly,” Kitty says, while you stack copies of Vogue in the corner, balancing the television on top, vine fairylights around the window. It looks good. It looks like a single girl’s apartment. Kitty recognizes a framed John Coltrane photograph as a birthday present from him.

  “Oh no!” she says. “There are to be no traces of He. He must be white-washed. He must be erased from the history books like the atrocity He is.”

  She drops it into a bin liner. The glass cracks. You survey the flat, the threaded scatter cushions across the bed, the Toulouse-Lautrec pictures on the walls. You look upon your new manageable life like a Polly Pocket in the palm of your hand. After Kitty leaves you fall fully clothed to sleep.

  It is at night that you hear the screams.

  A disembodied howl tears through the flat ripping you from your sleep. You jump wild to the window to locate the source, peering into the thin avenue, but you cannot see anything or anyone. You stare at the blank pavement, lit in orange circles, the breeze trailing the occasional plastic bag or dried leaf into the road. You wait there a while, the screams echoing and reverberating around your flat. You think about calling the police. You hold your phone in your hand, poised at the window, before going back to bed, waking to the hollow quiet of morning.

  * * *

  You skip your period. It makes sense. You have been eating less, beginning only to feed, handfuls of cereal, snatches of bread, meals now seem a pointless ceremony. Food has lost its flavor, only its texture can be noted. Your menstrual cycle has grown dopey. Wha? Today? It slipped my mind! You are, if anything, grateful for the reprieve, one month off in two hundred and twenty eight, it seems only fair, heck, it seems like basic common sense. You skip another. You sense the familiar twinges, the usual reminders, snapping twice at strangers, waking crying from a dream, and yet nothing, not a drop. You study the lining of your underwear like a forensic scientist. Hopeful ventures to the toilet result only in disappointment. Oh well, you think. Administrative error. Probably brought on by stress. Last Tuesday you padded around in your pajamas, sipping a sallow cup of tea, when it occurred to you that you should be at work, as you should every Tuesday, every weekday in fact.

  “You can take a little time off?” your boss cooed. “If you think that would help.”

  Can you not cut the same slack to your reproductive faculties? Can you not afford this base level of human compassion to your own body? What are you, a monster? The third skipped period is the clincher.

  “For chrissake,” Kitty says. “I wish I could pee on that goddamned stick for you.”

  She seats you with a bowl of iced tea like summer punch; slices of lemon bob hopefully in the water, the ice nudges sweetly against the glass. You scoop a cup with both hands as if receiving communion, a last ditch attempt with him upstairs—are you seeing this, fella? This one’s for you!—before retiring to the bathroom where Kitty has lit candles and left the test half-opened and to the side, the peculiar romance of friendship, and you sit, staring at your smugly unsoiled underwear, and pee on the goddamned stick. It is, of course, positive; which seems a bloody presumptuous lexicography.

  * * *

  “What are you going to do?” Kitty says.

  You are reading lines from Just Seventeen. You are a freeze-frame from Jackie. You look at your shoes, flower print plimsolls worn thin at the heel, with soiled smudged laces pulled tight in a bow. How long have you had these shoes? Three, maybe four, years? Why don’t you have nicer shoes? Why don’t you wear heels? Kitty paces around the apartment, her hand held navally to her brow. She sits down, wrapping both arms around you, pinning your elbows to your waist, and squeezes.

  “Well obviously I am not going to have it,” you say. “I mean, obviously.”

  Kitty offers to spend the night, to rent a movie, to cook you dinner, but you tell her you are fine.

  “I’m fine,” you say, noticing you are cupping your stomach, ever so gently, in your hand.

  You cannot sleep. The screams make it impossible. You throw back the covers and observe your body. It has become something else; something smooth and mechanical, something fit-for-purpose. We are all animals, you think. We are all animals and we are pretending not to be. A thought occurs to you, coiled and distant, looped in another universe, as secret as incest. What if you keep it? You dream of his sleeping back, his navy t-shirt creamy against the dark, before you are woken by a scream, forgetting momentarily where you are.

  * * *

  “I’m pregnant,” you tell your GP. “And essentially I need not to be.”

  The GP types something into his computer. Pregnant + Needs Not To Be = Abortion? “You are twenty-nine,” he says.

  “Yes, I am aware of that,” you reply.

  “Lots of women have babies when they’re twenty-nine. Twenty-nine is a good age to have a baby,” he says.

  “I am also aware of that,” you reply.

  “Why?” he asks, as you smooth your skirt, a demonstrative gesture of dignity, drumming your fingernails against the table, kicking your heel to the floor.

  “My career,” you reply, as he types something, once more, into his computer; assumedly checking the box that says One Of Them.

  Outside you light a cigarette. Smoking has taken a new gravity, a fresh poignancy, and you relish each inhalation, blowing thick plumes into the sky. You pluck your phone from your pocket. “Would you like to go for a coffee?” you type. You finish your cigarette. “In hell,” you add, flicking it to the ground.

  “I watched The Shining last night,” you tell Kitty. “Shelley Duvall is a woman I can relate to.” Kitty rolls her eyes.

  “Because she is a bad actress?” she replies. “Or because she is a really bad actress?” She leans over gloating at the bartender.

  “He keeps looking at you,” she says. “Why don’t you go and say hello?” You glance furtively across; he is tall, broad, with sleepy eyes and a jaw like a science project.

  “Because it’s a swiz,” you say. “It’s a horrible scrap that I don’t want any part of.”

  She sighs and finishes her drink.

  “Plus, I am carrying another man’s child.”

  You giggle. You giggle in an absent, hysterical way, that doesn’t feel attached or a part of you; silly trills peeping from your lips, fluttering nervously in the air. You can’t stop. “You know all of her hair fell out?” you say.

  “What?” Kitty replies.

  “Shelley Duvall. All of her hair fell out while she was filming.” You wind a lock of hair around your finger. You giggle again. “It just fell out,” you say. “Poof.”

  Kitty studies the cocktail menu and orders another round of drinks. “This is nice,” she says. “This is like the old days.”

  You lie tipsy in bed, a cool whip of sheet curls over your leg, you press your face into the pillow. You listen to your heart beating into the mattress; its stoic, earthy thump, jingoistic in its resolve, foolhardy in its rhythm. You lift yourself out of bed, taking a glass of water to the window, shouts and screams rising from below. How are you expected to sleep with this? How is anyone? You Google fetal development on your phone, swiping through the pictures, a grotesque slideshow that slips over your eyes like butter. You sense some metaphorical mountain, some veering, husked peak, feeling not that you have started to climb it, but that you are still stood blinking dumbly at its foot, unable to believe it is even there at all. “I need to talk to you,” you type into your phone. The screams swell and bounce around your flat. “In hell,” you add, pressing send.

  * * *

  Kitty pulls up in front of your building as you stand waiting outside knapsack in hand; book, iPad a
nd sanitary towels, ladies need their trinkets.

  “Hop in sugar,” she says, pushing open the door. She is wearing candy pink sunglasses and a single plait pinned neatly across her brow. “What do you want to listen to?” she asks. “Now That’s What I Call Jazz or Maybe Baby: The Best of Buddy Holly?” She holds the plastic covers in front of her face, your glossed reflection, watery and slanted, frowns back at you.

  “Radio,” you reply. “Talk radio.”

  “She’s here for her rhinoplasty,” Kitty tells the receptionist, and he forces a smile, recognizing the joke for the kindness it is. “Look at this idiot,” Kitty says, wafting the tissue-y paper of some gossip rag, some tanned blonde, grinning in a bikini, a title purring, “How I lost the baby weight without even trying.” Kitty is a good friend. You wear a hospital gown and it chafes against your legs.

  “Correct me if I’m wrong,” you say, popping your hip, sweeping your hair over your shoulder. “But is this Marant Autumn/Winter?”

  The anesthetist makes his rounds; he is distant, rehearsed, with the saintly vernacular of science. What’s worse, is that he is handsome, and you, you are strung out and braless, up the houses, though soon not to be. The gynecologist follows, short and stocky, her cat eye glasses balanced lopsidedly on her nose. She is tired; she has an underactive thyroid and a cat with leukemia.

  “Stripper glasses,” Kitty whispers. “Female doctors are always wearing stripper glasses.” A nurse calls your name.

  “It is nearly time,” she says, pulling up a wheelchair.

  You suddenly panic, scooping the soft pouch of your stomach in your hand, this last trace of him set to be ripped out and at your own request. You look at Kitty. She grapples for words like confetti in the breeze. There are no words. There are no words for this basic animal trauma.

  “It is one of those life things,” she whispers, hurriedly. “It is just one of those life things.”

  As you are pushed through the double doors, you think suddenly of your mother, wearing a wide-brimmed hat, slopping you in sun cream every day of summer, no matter how warm or cool the weather. How she would cover you and forget to cover herself; her skin sizzling to flakes.

  “You know we talked about having a baby,” you say to the nurse. “Just once. But we did talk about it.”

  The nurse kicks on the brakes. “Huh?” she says.

  * * *

  You wake up returned to your hospital bed, achy and disoriented, groggy and without words. It is done, over; zapped like a nuisance fly.

  “My nose is blocked,” you tell the nurse who hovers at your side.

  “That happens sometimes,” she says, handing you a tissue.

  You press it to your face, blowing into it inelegantly; a mess of spit, tears and mucus. You can’t imagine anybody in the world is more disgusting than you are right now. Kitty places her hand on top of your own.

  “Can I get you anything?” she says. You think, you would very much like some ice cream. You think you would like to be left alone. You think, really, you would very much like some ice cream. Miles Davis, Blue in Green, plays on some distant radio; and it feels like it is raining, everywhere, inside.

  Kitty drives you home, clutching your elbow as she walks you to your door, though you can manage perfectly well on your own.

  “I’d really rather stay,” she says, holding your arm.

  You tell her you just want to sleep, agreeing to let her go to the shops, to buy you some pistachio Häagen-Dazs, and leave it at that. She returns with three cartons, removing a bowl and spoon from the kitchen, scooping the ice cream into pale green baubles. You allow her the gesture. “You call me,” she says.

  “You call me if you need anything.” You fall asleep watching the news.

  You awake on the settee, in the early hours of the morning, erased and numb, huffing yourself to your bed. Your stomach is puffed and swollen, too sore for the elastic waist of your pajamas, which you have to roll down, exposing its rosy globe. You stare at your lumpen form; a throbbing mass, an object of pain. The shouts and screams, the usual cacophony, prove too insufferable an additional discomfort, and with sudden resolve, you pick up your phone and call the police.

  “I’d like to report some screaming,” you say. “I’d like to report some very loud, very present, screaming.”

  * * *

  You give your address; meticulously intoning the letters and numbers of your postcode. You hear the faint peck of a tapped keyboard.

  “Is that the university district?” the operator asks.

  “It is,” you reply.

  “It’s just students,” she says. “It’s just students making a racket.”

  You pull back your curtains, peering outside, funneling the howls that fill your room. You start to cry, just a little, just a bit; your doughy fat middle jiggling in the pale blue dark. You want only for him to be there, to hold you, in the most stupid, most childlike way.

  “But you don’t understand,” you say. “I hear screams constantly. I hear screams all through the night.

  “It is hell,” you say. “It is like living in hell.”

  You stare into the street, the jagged caterwaul of the road, the oppressive palmistry of the pavement.

  “Well if you don’t want to live in hell,” the operator replies, as clear as sunrise, as bald as earth, “then I suggest you move.”

  Both Boys

  She met both boys on the same night. The brown haired boy and the blond haired one. Both of them in one night. She couldn’t believe her luck.

  The brown haired boy said he wanted to charm her. To take her out dancing and buy her potted plants. To knock her off her feet.

  The blond one placed his palm flat beneath the waistline of her jeans. He told her she must have been put on the planet for his express delectation. He said he felt he deserved a girl—a nice girl like her—and why didn’t she join him in the bathroom; navigating her away like she was something he already owned. But that’s blonds for you. And with all that gold framing their peripheries it’s little wonder.

  She had sex with them both, on the same night too; because she was among many things, an equal opportunist. She had sex with the brown haired boy first. He told her she was very beautiful and came with a muted panic. She’d spotted him across the crowded kitchen thinking he looked polite or nice or something or other.

  She had sex with the blond boy some two hours later. By that point she was in the mood for something more primordial, something more aerobic, something like banging your head into a brick wall. He would not look at her, and when she caught his eye he looked terribly angry, like she had disturbed him working on a very complicated math equation or doing his taxes. She wriggled out from beneath him and thought: one day you may have a daughter, one day you may well have a daughter.

  It turned out they were best friends.

  “Best friends?” she said to the blond haired boy so scornfully she could have spat. “Best friends in all of the world?”

  “Yes I suppose,” he said, wiping his stomach with her scarf.

  “Well if you like each other so much,” she replied, “why don’t you just get married.”

  He buttoned his jeans and fastened his shirt.

  “I suppose you want to go out for dinner,” he said. “I suppose now you want the whole hoopla.”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t.” But she did. She did want the whole hoopla. Of course she did.

  A week later it was the brown haired boy who asked her on a date. He sent a bunch of flowers, with a tiny card, the paper of which was so fancy she ran her thumb over it for hours. Allow me to take you out, it said. Allow me to take you out on the town!

  She ignored it; ignoring things was a good way of making them disappear.

  A week later he sent her an email. Please excuse the informality of the platform, it said. But I should still like to take you out.

  She dragged it to her junk folder, vanishing it away.

  He rang her a week after that, calling
late at night.

  “I hope this isn’t because I told you that you were very beautiful,” he said. “Because I want you to know, I am equally, if not more, curious about your mind.”

  She agreed to go out with him. To get it over with.

  He sent a car to collect her, traveling her to the outskirts of town. He’d booked a corner table at a French bistro. She couldn’t decide on an entrée and so he ordered them all.

  “You know,” he said, “I think we could really make a go of things.” After he walked her to her door he kissed her so tenderly she thought he might cry.

  Some days later the blond haired boy turned up on her doorstep. “I thought we were going out tonight,” he said, handing her a box of chocolates.

  “These are diabetic,” she said. “Why have you brought me diabetic chocolates?”

  “I guess you look diabetic,” he said. “I think it’s your ankles.”

  He took her to a pizza place and had terrible table manners. He got very drunk. He spent the whole evening talking about his ex-girlfriend.

  “She’s the most attractive woman I have ever seen,” he said; and she smiled though the implication made her retreat to some dark inward beyond. He declined to spend the night.

  “I have to be up early,” he said. “Or whatever.”

  He told her he would call her. She sat in her living room, watching television, waiting; with the diabetic chocolates in her lap. She savored every one. Though they essentially tasted like shit, she admired the gesture all the more for its fundamental ineptitude. There was a hollow kindness in ineptitude. There was a sincerity.

  But he did not call that night. Or the night after that. Or any of the nights after that. The brown haired boy didn’t call either but that was okay; she wasn’t at all bothered about him.

  Where I Am Supposed to Be

  Was the kiss necessary? Did it soften the blow? A pixelated mwah, a chou chou flick of the wrist, a needless pop of the hip. What flavor yogurt would you like? Peach. Kiss. What time should we meet? Twelve. Kiss. Is it cancer or not cancer? Cancer. Kiss. The kiss felt like a punch to the gut.