Helen Oyeyemi - What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

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AT THE FRONT desk of the Glissando, guests can request and receive anything, anything at all. Odette was there when a man with very bad nerves had asked for a certificate guaranteeing that the building’s foundations were unassailable; this man was convinced that he was pursued by a burrowing entity that lived beneath any house he lived in and raised his floors by a foot every year, the entity’s long-term goal being to raise his quarry so high that he could never again descend into the world of his fellow human beings. Our mother made no comment on this man’s convictions but provided him with a certificate stating that there never had been and never could be room for any form of other dwelling beneath the Hotel Glissando. The only thing a hotel guest may not ask for is, for some reason, an iguana-skin wallet. The woman who requested one was told to “Get out of here and never come back.” And as the doorman threw the ex-guest’s luggage out onto the street he said: “An iguana-skin wallet? Where do you think you are?”

As far as we know, that’s the only time a Glissando guest’s request hasn’t been fulfilled. For years Odette and I have felt that our parents’ dedication to taking care of Hotel Glissando’s guests borders on the unnatural. Odette has told me that in some way the hotel and its guests are like the broken clockfaces, except that Mum and Dad are compensated for their work instead of being punished.

Even so: “They’ve given the best years of their lives to that place, and that’s their own business — but now they want to throw my life in too?” That was how I put it to Odette. Odette said she felt I was overlooking something: For as long as we’ve known our parents, my mum’s professional value has been dependent on my dad’s. She’s been treated as a facilitator for his talents for so long that she’s come to believe that’s what she’s here for. Mum brought Barrandov Senior to Hotel Glissando, so by hook or by crook she’ll bring Barrandov Junior there too.

“I don’t know… if I give in to this won’t I be setting that image in stone? Is that really good for Mum?”

Odette’s eyes twinkled. She said she thought I’d actually ruin the image, since there was no way I could match up to Dad.

“Thanks, sis… many thanks…”

“I, however , can match up to Dad, and maybe even outdo him.”

Was Odette’s confidence well-founded? I thought so. She’d always wanted to learn all that Dad had wanted to teach us. And when we asked Dad which of us he’d prefer to work with he said: “Odette, obviously.” My sister was making a killing as a self-employed plumber, but she gave all that up to be there for my parents. She had no regrets either: said she loved the work and could see why our parents were so committed to the Glissando. I asked her to elaborate and she became so emotional that it made me feel lonely.

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I, ON THE other hand, lost my way for a while. Mum took to behaving as if I’d never even existed: “Imagine if I’d only had one child… one child who’d throw my life’s work away in favor of Hayseed Class or whatever it’s called,” she told Odette. Dad and I spent Sunday evenings at the pub as usual, but it just wasn’t the same. I hadn’t realized how important it was for me to have both parents on my side. Mum did a lot for us when we were coming up. Just like all their other work, she and Dad split their share of raising us right down the middle, finding mostly trustworthy grown-ups to be with us when they couldn’t, keeping track of all our permission slips, hobbies, obsessions, allergies (both faked and genuine), not to mention the growth spurts, mood swings, the bargaining for their attention, and the attempts to avoid their scrutiny. I remember Mum repeatedly telling us we had good hearts and good brains. When she said that we’d say “thanks” and it might have sounded as if we were thanking her for seeing us that way but actually we were thanking her for giving us whatever goodness was in us. She didn’t believe I was giving my all to teaching and she was right. She wants to see good hearts and good brains put to proper use, but I’m not convinced that everybody ought to live like that, or even that everybody can.

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AISHA TOLD me — what did she tell me, actually? What does she ever tell me? She’s what people call an “up-and-coming” filmmaker; far more accustomed to showing than telling. So what did she show me? Plenty, but not everything. We live in the same building and met in the stairwell: I’d locked myself out and was waiting for my flatmate Pierre to come home. It was going to be a long time before he came home: You see, being a key part of the socialization process for Poppy Class is only Pierre’s daytime identity. At weekends he turns into the lead singer for a band, Hear It Not, Duncan, and their gigs go on forever. Of course I couldn’t get him on the phone, and it seemed every other friend who lived on our bus route was at the gig too, so I sat outside my front door going through all the business cards I’d ever been given and dialing the mobile numbers on them, getting voicemail each time since nobody likes surprise phone calls anymore.

Aisha walked past me as I was leaving somebody a rambling voicemail message about the time I was walking past a neighbor’s front door, stuck my hand through the letterbox on a whim only to have that hand grabbed and firmly held by some unseen person on the other side of the door — that really happened, and I’ve never been so frightened or run so fast since. Aisha walked past and heard me saying this, and she smiled. She smiled. I’m a simple lad, unfortunately the kind that Aisha can’t really smile at unless she wants a boyfriend. I told her I was locked out and did all I could to inspire pity; she asked me if I had a car and asked if we could go and pick up hitchhikers and take them to their destinations. She’d always wanted to do that, she said. “Yeah, me too!” I said. We drove up and down the A534 but couldn’t persuade anybody to get into the car with us: Maybe we seemed too keen. We got back at dawn and Pierre had come home; I wonder what would’ve happened if he hadn’t.

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AISHA TOOK to knocking on my door as she went past, inviting me to screenings and more, but no matter what meeting time we agree on she arrives half an hour later than that, sometimes forty-five minutes late. I’d probably wait for an hour or longer but she mustn’t ever discover that. Perseverance doesn’t seem to move her: I only ever get to seduce her up to a very specific point. I’ve tried to think this through, but I only get as far with the thinking as I do with the seduction. When entwined, our bodies build the kind of blaze in which sensation overtakes sense — it becomes possible to taste sound — that half hiccup, half sigh that tells me she likes what my tongue is doing to her. And so we each take a little more of what we like and lust swells until, until she pulls away. No penetration permitted, no matter how naked we are or how good the stroking and sliding feels, no matter how delectably wet she is when I nudge her legs open with my knee. I look into her eyes and see craving there, but there’s also what seems to be abhorrence. Then she breaks contact.

Could it be that nobody likes a man without ambition and everything is withheld from him until he changes his ways? Is A saving herself for some fictional character, Willow Rosenberg or fucking floppy-haired Theodore Lawrence or someone like that? Is there somebody else, somebody nonfictional? Is she doing this to make me tell her in words that I want her? I don’t like saying that kind of thing. So for now, if she doesn’t want to then I can’t. This sounds completely obvious but I’ve heard stories, from men, from women, that demonstrate that that’s not how it is for others. Consent is a downward motion, I think — a leap or a fall — and whether they’ll admit it or not, even the most decisive people can find themselves unable to tell whether or not their consent was freely given. That inability to discover whether you jumped or were pushed brings about a deadened gaze and a downfall all its own.