Jessica Chiarella - And Again

Of course I can. We are so much the same, this girl and me. I take another drink. The trill of my phone’s ringtone goes off in my pocket. I glance at the screen, and it’s Beth. I silence the call, and then shut my phone off.

“Who was that?” Hannah asks.

“Concerned citizen,” I reply, unwilling to get off-topic, like the politician that I am. “So what are you going to do now?”

She shrugs one shoulder, making her collarbone appear and disappear beneath the smoothness of her skin and the strap of her slip. “Maybe I’ll marry a congressman. A Democrat.”

Clever, this girl, I think, even as I’m striding toward her and hauling her up by her wrists. I forget the bottle on the glass of the coffee table. I forget everything for a little while.

David calls me on a Tuesday morning. Early. I ignore the call at first, afraid that it’s Sam, again, leaving a voicemail that I will again delete, unheard. I try to get back to sleep. But when I realize the effort is completely futile, I check my phone and realize it’s David who called. He picks up on the second ring.

“What if I’d been on a ledge when I called you?” he says, without even a greeting. “What if I was calling so you’d talk me down? You really think you could live with yourself if you left me hanging?”

“Are you on a ledge?” I ask, yawning.

“No, I’m in the middle of a conference call with the CEO of a fertilizer company. If that isn’t enough to make you want to off yourself, I don’t know what is.”

“I don’t know, isn’t dealing with excrement something that you’re used to as a member of the Republican Party?”

David laughs on the other end of the line. “Ouch, Reed. You really know how to hurt a guy.”

“How exactly are you talking to me if you’re on a conference call?”

“I have the linkup muted. You’d be surprised how much this guy has to say about fertilizer.”

“I’m sure I would,” I say, turning back over.

“Are you in bed?” he asks.

“Yeah,” I reply. “It’s a little early here in the world of the unemployed.”

“Can I come over?”

“No.”

“Come on,” he chides. “I want to see your place.”

“Why?” I ask.

“I want to see what you’re really like. See what books you have. Go snooping through your medicine cabinet. That sort of thing.” I think of bringing Sam to my old apartment, the one that held so much of me. David would learn nothing from this moneyed, sanitized version of my life.

“Sorry to disappoint you, but you’re not going to find out much about me here,” I reply. Then a thought occurs to me. “Hey, you want to see what I’m really like?”

The painting hangs in the Museum of Contemporary Art, where it has ever since Trevor won a commission for the lobby of the Wrigley Building two years ago and became the most in-demand young artist in Chicago. Penny was apoplectic about the whole thing, of course. It was all I could do to keep her from crashing her car when I told her.

“That pretentious weasel doesn’t have half of your talent,” she’d yelled, her voice careening around the interior of the little vehicle. “Why aren’t you more pissed about this?”

I hadn’t been, not at the time. Perhaps because I knew, in the back of my mind, that it was only a matter of time before it would be my work hanging in the galleries and the historic lobbies. Perhaps because I knew that Penny was right, that his talent couldn’t touch mine. That my time would come.

I’d come to visit the painting every once in a while before the transfer, as if it were an abandoned child, left in the city its maker had outgrown. Trevor was in New York, last I heard, dating a chef from the Food Network and failing to follow up on his early success. Now, standing in front of the painting again sends a low thrill through me, like running into an ex-lover on the street and smiling at each other a little too long. But there’s pain there, too. Because I can understand what Trevor must be feeling now, to have all the potential in the world and worry it will never be realized.

I’m quiet as David’s eyes move over it, taking in the lines, the warm color of my skin in the lamplight, the lavender tendrils of my hair, the tattoos on my arm and wrists and hip. I have an odd sense of déjà vu, of standing in front of this painting with a man and testing his reaction.

“This is you?” he asks.

“About five years ago, yeah.”

“You were a bit of a punk, huh?”

“Yes, grandpa. A bit.”

He adjusts the Cubs cap he’s wearing, no doubt an attempt to disguise himself out in the world. I wonder what he thinks of me now, now that he’s seen who I am, who I was. I wonder if he knows what he’s gotten himself into.

“It’s not how I imagined you,” he says.

“How exactly did you imagine me?” I’m a little afraid of the answer. He shifts again, and it’s then that I realize he’s uncomfortable. The great David Jenkins is uncomfortable here, standing in front of a nude painting with the girl it portrays standing next to him. Except this time, unlike last time with Sam, I doubt anyone would make the connection between me and her. How I miss her, I think, looking up at those dark lines.

“I don’t know. Not so rough, I guess.”

“Rough?” I can see his expression hardening in front of me, like he’s making the conscious decision to be a bastard. I’ve seen this look before.

“I never understood why perfectly attractive young women would want to mark themselves up like that.”

“You know, you have a real gift for paying someone a compliment while you insult them. Is that something that comes with the office?”

“All I’m saying is, it’s not my cup of tea. I’ve never been a fan of that sort of thing.”

“Well,” I say, injecting as much acid into my voice as I can muster, “Lucky I didn’t do it for men like you.”

“Did Sam like it? The tattoos and the piercings, and having a girlfriend who doesn’t mind stripping down for some schmuck with a paintbrush who couldn’t get into a decent college?” he asks. His expression is so smug, so painfully superior, that the desire to spit in his face is barely within my control.

“Even if he didn’t, he liked everything else.” It’s absurd, to be defending Sam, after everything. To be defending our relationship to the man I’ve used to break it apart.

“Not anymore, apparently.”

I walk away from him then, because staying for even one moment more would break the last thread of my control. It’s not that I’m afraid of the ferocity of my anger, or the ramifications of screaming at him in public. It’s that I’m afraid I might cry, the pressure of my anger is so intense it closes my throat, and crying is the last thing I want to do in front of David. It would ruin it, to cry in front of him, to put him in the position of having to apologize or, god forbid, comfort me. This, this interaction I have with him, it only works if I can hate him. Hating him makes it better. And even as I leave him there, winding my way through the exhibits until I reach the lobby, banging through the doors into the bracing air of the street outside, even then, even though he’s a bastard, and I certainly know better, I’m already anticipating the next time we’ll meet.

I go to see Dr. Shah. I’ve always liked Dr. Shah the best of all my doctors. I was surprised by her age when I first encountered her in the hospital, when she leaned over my still, supine anchor of a body. She comes into the examination room smelling like bubblegum, her hair held up haphazardly in a tortoise clip, her white coat loose over a precariously short pink dress. She is a half-decade younger than I am, though she possesses a list of accomplishments that would have been impressive for a doctor twice her age. Now she’s as fresh and enthusiastic as ever, almost comically so considering the program she’s charged with overseeing.