Alexandra Kleeman: You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

At that moment I wished that C would look at me like that, touch me like that, and I wondered if there were a way to trick him into doing what I wanted. A new product had just come out from Fluvia cosmetics, designed to soften your skin by tenderizing the subdermal layers that were sometimes stringy with things such as fat, muscle, and pores. The ad claimed that nobody would be able to resist falling in love with your new skin, then showed a beautiful woman holding still as her boyfriend, boss, best friend, and workplace nemesis gathered around, stroking her skin wonderingly with the tips of their fingers. But I didn’t think a product like that would have any influence over C. He was one of those rare people who seemed only to do things that were their own original idea. When he bought deodorizing underarm spray at the Wally’s Supermarket by his condo, it was as though the need had suddenly occurred to him and the correct product had simply presented itself — even though I knew that he had seen the commercials because I watched them with him, watched him laughing at them. He was a graceful consumer: he could consume without being consumed in turn.

In C’s living room, the television talked on. It must have been early in the day: the show had the calm irrelevance of programming at hours when only the trapped and the old and the infirm are watching. Michael was still on-screen, explaining what had led him to attack a supermarket employee with the veal cutlets he had hidden away beneath his shirt. He stopped me and asked what was under my clothing. He told me stealing had consequences in his store, Michael said. That’s when I realized I wasn’t just eating the cutlets. I was eating a whole machine, a machine much bigger than me, and a lot better organized. And when I thought of all the parts of that machine, the meadows and the grasses and the slicing machines and the plastic wrap machines and the factory farm gates and the steel manufacturers and the person who stuck the price sticker on the outside of the package, and the person who killed the calves, and the people they went home to after work, how those and other invisible parts were all there working away inside the piece of meat, I don’t know. I just felt so full. I had been so empty and now I was full like I was maybe going to throw up. And I knew that if I did, it would be just veal, all veal. All the veal I had hidden from danger. I couldn’t let that happen. So I guess I just panicked.

On the grainy surveillance footage, small figures drained of color grappled with light-colored rectangles, tugging them in opposing directions. Michael was the thinner, taller, dark-haired one facing off against a store employee wearing the Wally’s uniform, his foam head huge and smiling. Though Michael was larger and stronger than the grocery store kid, whose flabby arms peeked from his polo sleeves, you could tell he was frightened by the grimace on his face, like a photo of a man on a roller coaster, taken midplunge. He started hitting the uniformed employee over and over and over again with a package of veal, as another shopper stopped to stare. Eventually something dark came out of the employee and spilled onto the floor: it could have been blood or vomit. The image looked just like the grocery store down the street from C’s apartment.

Do you consider yourself a hero? asked the talk show host, a woman dressed in royal blue with stiff, sculptural hair.

What? asked Michael. What? He looked so confused, doubly confused, as though the question were confusing him, but also and more important as though he couldn’t even understand where he was, or how he got there, or how to get back out.

When I looked over again, C had fallen asleep. His head was tipped back and his mouth lay open and pointed up, all the hardness gone out of it, the hands loose and docile as flowers. I saw all the things I liked about his body laid out like a map, and I knew how his chest would feel under my hands, I knew what it would be like to take the lobe of his ear between my front teeth and press them together. At the same time, I had no idea what his dreams were made of, whether they ever involved me, whether they involved other women I knew or did not know. Though I had spent hours and hours for months with C, I possessed a better understanding of what went on inside of Michael’s veal-addled psychology. What Michael wanted leaked through him like blood through a tissue. C, by contrast, remained obscure. I was still staring over at him when he woke up, looking straight into my eyes, scratching at his cheek blearily.

“How long have you been awake?” he asked.

Before I could answer, he stood up.

“We have to get the laundry,” he said.

C sloughed his sweater in preparation for entering the summer swarth. He inhaled sharply, sucked snot back up into his nasal cavity. We were behaving exactly like people behaved, there was nothing wrong that I could name, but for some reason I wasn’t feeling that unalone feeling you were supposed to have when you were with someone else. Was there anything joining me to my life that was a matter of necessity rather than chance? It wasn’t my body, which could be moved from place to place, job to job, fed nearly anything, partnered with anyone. It wasn’t my mind, which seized the fake lives of television people with greater enthusiasm than it did its own. Sometimes I thought about C and the idea came to me that any man’s genitalia, however large or weirdly shaped, would be guaranteed to fit inside my own. Our pairing was coincidental or, at best, lucky. I wished that for once he’d just agree with me on any one thing about how I saw the world.

THE LAUNDROMAT WAS A TEN-MINUTEwalk from C’s condo, a stand-alone building with a crummy parking lot riddled with cracks in which dandelions tried to grow. At the front counter they sold detergent, fabric softener, bleach. They also sold tampons, shaving cream, disposable razors, small dinosaur toys made out of glow-in-the-dark plastic, novelty pencils, candy bars, and hot dogs. C bought a hot dog from a sunburned teenage girl who sat behind the counter watching a game show where a woman applied makeup to a man who I decided might have been her husband.

“Do you want one?” C asked. “Mmmm,” he added, his mouth full. He made squeaky sounds as he chewed. The casing was popping, splitting, tearing.

“I’m all right,” I said. The Laundromat hot dogs tasted okay, but sometimes you found bits of things in them that had the texture of knuckles. There were only a few other people in the place, older women leaning against the folding tables as they watched their clothes struggle behind the thick glass of the washing machines. We walked over to our dryer, where the clothes had been still for over an hour. I opened up the dryer door and squeezed them. They felt like limp wet fur. “Still damp,” I said. C fed some more quarters into the slot.

I hopped up onto a folding table and watched the clothes jump up toward the top of the chamber and fall back to the bottom, over and over again. C was looking back toward the counter. “Do you think I should get another hot dog?” he asked.

I felt grossed out. “I’ll probably be hungry after we’re done with this,” I said, hoping that we could go someplace after. I was hungry now, but I didn’t want to deal with C making me eat one of those hot dogs or explaining why I didn’t want to or what I had been eating the past few days with B.

“Yeah, still,” he said, “that’ll probably be forty minutes or more from now, I don’t know if I’ll make it.” He looked toward the girl at the counter and then walked up, ordered another hot dog, choked it down effortfully while checking his phone with the other hand.

All of the machines at the Laundromat were full, even though the place was almost empty. Pale-colored fabric spun around endlessly, and from the look of the sudsless water it seemed as though the machines had been running for some time. I took out my phone and checked to see if C was doing anything on his phone that I could see on mine, but he wasn’t. The older women read magazines or stared. The girl behind the counter unwrapped a package of chewing gum. On the TV screen mounted to the ceiling, the woman stood proudly next to her husband, whose thick, cakey makeup made them look weirdly similar.