Dana Spiotta - Innocents and Others

After Mark, she used the photos with two other men. Things always proceeded in one direction, and she ended things when they escalated to an unavoidable meeting.

But what about Jack? She didn’t want to send him those photos. Some part of her thought that maybe Jack would love her no matter what. She thought about sending a neck-up flattering photo of herself, just to see what happened. The second time he asked her for a photo, she addressed the envelope and started to cry as she put the photos of Lynn inside and sealed it. She realized she was ending any future between them. But she had to. Before he wanted her photo, before he wanted her to visit him, he asked her the question they all had asked at some point. But it was an artful, gentle version with Jack: “You sound so young when you laugh. How old are you?”

She laughed again. Jelly knew how to avoid answering questions. But you couldn’t laugh off questions forever. She didn’t want to lie to Jack, which was something she’d just realized. But all of his circling around eventually came to the point. What do you look like? It wasn’t that she didn’t expect it or that she didn’t understand it, it was just so hopeless to always wind up against it. And how could she answer it? After she hung up the phone, she sat on the couch for a long time, staring into the faint dusk light.

What do I look like? If you look or if I look? It is different, right? There is no precision in my looking. It is all heat and blurred edges. Abstractions shaped by emotion — that is looking. But he wants an answer.

What do I look like? I look like a jelly doughnut.

Jelly got up and looked in the mirror. What to do if what you look like is not who you are? If it doesn’t match?

I am not this, this woman. And I am not Lynn-in-the-photograph. Jack must know, Jack knows who I am. I am a window. I am a wish. I am a whisper. I am a jelly doughnut.

I am beautiful when my hair brushes my shoulders, when the sun makes me close my eyes, when my voice vibrates in my throat. When I am on the telephone, I am beautiful.

How would it go? Jelly knew, just as she knew so many things without ever experiencing them. The knowing seemed to come from her senses, her fingertips and her skin. She knew that if she met Jack, he would be disappointed even if she were beautiful in the common sense of “beautiful.” Common is an interesting word. It could be comforting when you mean what we all have in common. But it also means ordinary; it means something we have all seen many times and can find easily. So a common sense of beauty is agreed upon by all but also dull in a way. Still his disappointment would come out of something human and inescapable: the failure of the actual to meet the contours of the imaginary. As he listened to the words he heard come across the line and into his ear, he imagined the mouth saying them. Even more so, as he spoke into the receiver, he imagined a face listening, and an expression on that face. Maybe it was made of an actress on the TV from the night before plus a barely remembered photo of his mother when she was very young and a girl with long hair and bare tan legs that he glimpsed at the beach. But there was no talking without imagining. And once imagining preceded the actual, there was no escaping disappointment, was there?

What about Jelly? Would Jelly feel disappointment with Jack, when he showed up sweaty, old, smelling of breath mints and cigarettes? It never occurred to her to think this way. She would be so focused on him that her own feelings wouldn’t matter. She would feel disappointed if he felt disappointed. She would hear it in his voice, and she would feel herself lose everything, all the perfect, exquisite moments that she had made with him.

“I want to see you,” Jack had said. “I need to see you.”

“I know. I know. Okay,” Jelly said. “I will send you some pictures.”

Of course she was right to send Lynn’s photos; she needed to make things last just a little longer. But she cried, because for a minute it might have gone a different way.

The alarm went off, and Jelly stared into the murky early morning light. It was the day she was supposed to get on the plane to California, a 9:00 a.m. flight. She hadn’t packed, but she thought about it. She really did. Last night he laughed on the phone, excited, and she would never have let him go this far if she was sure she wasn’t going to go. Last night, after a glass of wine, she laughed too and imagined being with him at last. But as they said good night and hung up, she knew.

She hit the button on the alarm, pulled the comforter up over her head, and heaved a long breath into the dark, warm air.

Meadow came an hour late to Carrie and Will’s rehearsal dinner. As toasts were being made, she slipped quietly into the empty seat next to Carrie with a smile. Later, Will made a face when Carrie explained traffic, parking, picking up the dress. (Meadow wore a silk suit to the rehearsal dinner but had agreed to wear a dress to the wedding. Meadow never wore dresses, but she would do it for Carrie.)

“At least she showed up,” he said.

“Of course she showed up,” Carrie said, slightly annoyed. She knew he was only being protective of her, but she couldn’t help feeling protective of Meadow.

“And she didn’t make it to your screening even though you gave her a month’s notice.”

Carrie’s thesis project — a short called Girl School —had been selected for a film festival as part of the shorts program, but Meadow was not able to attend. The night before, she left a message on Carrie’s answering machine. Will rolled his eyes as they listened to Meadow apologize, but Carrie knew that he read Meadow wrong, that Meadow was in deep in her upstate world. Editing. Or researching and filming. Meadow disappeared into a frenzy of work. “You went to her screening,” Will said, and although that was true, Carrie felt she should have visited Meadow more often; she hadn’t managed to in a long time. How long since they had seen each other? A year? No, nine months. But now Meadow had come down for Carrie’s wedding; she was the maid of honor and, although she showed up late to the rehearsal dinner, she appeared perfectly on time to the wedding, with her angular sidekick Kyle holding an arm around her waist as though he might lose her in the crowd. Early in the evening, Carrie whispered to Will that she wondered how long Kyle would stay in the picture. Surely he would soon exceed Meadow’s usual short expiration date? Will snorted in agreement, and she immediately regretted saying what she said. She actually liked Kyle. And Meadow. So why? Often her comments were harsher than she intended, meaner. And she wished she could unsay them.

Although neither she nor Will were Polish, they had their reception in a Polish wedding emporium in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where they received a discount for getting married during Lent (when no Polish couples wanted to have a wedding). They did everything themselves, getting some of their friends to donate help instead of giving gifts: flowers, invitations, photography. Even so, it all cost more than Carrie had hoped. She resolved to enjoy herself and the tacky perfection of the mirrored wallpaper stippled with gold and the giant bride and groom thrones strewn with dingy net and worn white ribbons. Each table had bottles of Polish vodka on it, and when they first saw the bottles, Carrie joked to Meadow that it would be a drunken marathon like the Polish wedding in The Deer Hunter.

“Russian. Russian wedding,” Meadow said.

“As long as no one lifts me in a chair,” Carrie said.

“The close-up of the wine spilling on the white dress was not exactly an example of subtle foreshadowing,” Meadow said.