Sam Lipsyte - The Ask

Now the climax arrived, the charmingly improbable half-nude chase through the gallery district of Dumbo, the couple finally reunited in embarrassed ecstasy as pretentious art aficionados punctured their skeins of cynicism and cheered (had they just exited the latest Billy Raskov exhibit?). The sob rippled up, burst in my throat. Maura and I had already found each other. The desperate, emboldening quest for love, the beautiful, electrifying unknowingness of it all, was forever gone. (Unless we divorced, started over, which would surely be disastrous. She'd find happiness with some curt, sporty banker. I'd live in the laminated basement of a Cypriot retiree near the airport, never talk to a woman under seventy-five again.)

"Fucking pussy," I wept, sipped my drink. "Fucking pussy-hurt pussy."

They sped the credits but I did catch a name. The governor's daughter. An early producing gig. Maybe a favor from one of her father's liberal Hollywood foes? She'd gone on to become an important person in the business. Once, I'd watched her hold up a statue, make a speech on television about film and justice. I thought she might apologize to the nation for stealing my Spanish knife.

Good old Constance, she had hid behind the others that night the governor's daughter claimed her nine-tenths of the law. Her black pigtails doubted me, indicted. Constance knew it was my knife. I'd shown it to her in my room, under the blue light. But that night at the party she made no sign she remembered. She just stood there in her tank top, pink with tequila and summer, watched me squirm. Maybe she believed I had it coming.

Maybe I did. The previous spring I'd been briefly inhabited by the ghost of Roger Burke, sneaked around the whole semester, cheated on Constance every chance I got. The hate in me was huge, but I had always wanted happiness for Constance, still did, years later, when a thick cream envelope arrived in the mail, the names of her mother and father in fancy ink in the corner. Maybe getting hitched wasn't the most Marxist thing to do, but she had found somebody she loved enough to hire a calligrapher. I tossed out the envelope unopened, didn't need to know, for example, the name of the groom, or the wedding site. I had no intention of seeing these people again until I could boast of an accomplishment beyond my failed attempt to sell wallet-ready oil portraits of people's children online. Yes, this had been my home business.

Everything went off, went bad, or so I told myself, though I knew my crucial role in the spoilage. I had skipped my last meeting with Sayuri Kuroki behind Scissor Kicks. Even then I could feel myself doing the dumb thing, as though I wanted to guarantee I had memories to haunt me, feared I might lack a good reason to wince. I should never have worried. I could still picture Sayuri standing there near the Dumpster in her denim jacket, fiddling with the scrunchies on her wrist, maybe worried I'd been knocked off my BMX by a lumber truck. Though maybe she never reached the rendezvous, either.

Constance, I'd just turned abruptly away from her, seeing something better in whatever Lena's adulterous hunger could deliver. I'd almost let Maura drift off a few times, too, before Bernie reversed the inertia. We'd been together off and on for ten years, Maura and I, had tried very hard not to be the love of each other's life. It was like the stupid movie, without the cute bits.

Not one of the cute bits, for instance, was the night we had a foursome with that lascivious couple whose Greenpoint loft, perhaps because of the hillocks of cocaine on the coffee table, we found ourselves the last to leave. After some preliminary dialogue that wanted so much to parody the clunky verbal vamping of vintage porn, but had veered into grim, jaw-grinding consequentiality, Maura and the other woman had stripped and entangled themselves on the bed, all pinches and strokes and theatrical licks. Even through the fog of powders and booze, the sight of them aroused me and I turned to grin at the other guy. He smiled back, held up a palm for a louche, almost Wonderlandish high five. I shoved my tongue in his mouth. Really, I just meant to be friendly, to complement the writhings beneath us, complete the servicing circuit, but suddenly it seemed I'd broken the sacred swinger's code.

"What the fuck," the guy said. He pulled away, wiped his lips. Then he stuck himself in my wife, glared as he pumped.

"I'm not into that," he said. "You had no right."

I crawled off to the coffee table, decided then and there I had no fondness for Greenpoint.

So, things hadn't always been perfect, or even hygienic, but Maura was my love. I wanted to ravish almost every woman I saw on the street, regardless of age or body type, but if I ever did picture myself not married to Maura, never did another woman hove into view, just a taxing still-life: a handle of chilled domestic vodka and sick-making amounts of Korean barbecue.

But now I kept thinking of Constance and Lena, those early confusions. I got up and made my tipsy way to Maura's desktop. I'd kept tabs on Lena before. She taught painting at a state school in Connecticut now, must have been near retirement. I hadn't run a search on Constance lately. Soon I had a photograph of her up on my screen. I'd entered-the invasive quality of the word was not lost on me-the website of an elite girl's academy in New England where Constance served as headmaster.

She looked older, of course, glancing up from her tidy and morally instructive escritoire, her pigtails gone, her still-black hair shorn with sour elegance. It was hard to detect the plump, glowing, self-righteous coed in this dour professional. I had no doubt she was still a feminist. Marxist was debatable. But maybe she was waking up the rich girls to the crimes of their kin. Wasn't there a tradition of that in such places? She did look wiser, happier. But I grieved for her lost radiance, which is just to say I was weeping for myself again.

Lena was another story. Lena shook me with old shame. Lena was another name for my failure to become what I'd once believed I already was. But tonight, strangely, when I thought of her, a different face floated past, a background ghost.

It was one of the last times Lena had visited my campus studio, a corrugated shed near the biology labs. The room got good light, but whenever I opened a window the stench of burnt rats wafted in. Often I'd light a cigarette, let it smolder for the stink, but this day Lena stood there smoking, studied my canvases.

I'd gone in a new direction. It hadn't turned out well, but I thought there was an idea there, a gesture, I could salvage. I'd be graduated in a month, was headed into the savage, supercilious world. This was my last shot at an uncompromised critique. Though of course it would be compromised. But only by lust.

Still, who knew? It was easy to forget Lena was also an artist, that she hadn't been put on earth just to mentor me. She made it easy to forget. She didn't linger in her past, and her triumphs were in her past.

"Thoughts?" I said. "Feelings? Pangs?"

Lena stood with her hand on her head, cigarette between her fingers. She singed her hair often this way.

"I think you've lost your mind, Milo."

"Shit, really?"

"No, not really. Finally. You were close, but now you've gone crazy. Controlled crazy. They're funny and sly, like always, but they've got this turmoil now, too. A newfound urgency. God, listen to me. That stuff in the corner, is it wax?"

"Rubber cement. Treated. I treated it."

"Treated it with what?"

"Trade secret."

"For what will you trade the secret?" said Lena, put her cigarette in my ceramic frog ashtray, and slid her hand into my shirt.

"I thought we weren't going to do this anymore."

"Do what?"

"We weren't going to. . Oh, fuck you."

"We weren't going to fuck me?"