Harder (Caroline and West) Page 26

  “He didn’t hire me,” Annie says. “I applied.”

  “He didn’t hire Josh, either,” Raffe says. “Or Macon. I didn’t even know you were in the running for that job.”

  “I wasn’t,” I admit. “I didn’t know there was a job in the first place. He just offered it to me.”

  “There you go.”

  There I go.

  And actually, I feel like I’m moving. Like I’ve taken a step to the left and cleared a path that was blocked.

  I’ve got a sketchbook at home full of ideas for shit that I would build or make or do if I had unlimited time and supplies. A sketchbook I’ve never showed anybody – not even Caroline – because it’s scarier than it should be to step away from what I know is practical in favor of what might turn out to be impractical but fucking pleasurable.

  My sister keeps drawing these grid drawings, one after another, like she can’t stop. They’re all she wants to do. But she keeps telling me they’re not real art, even as she gets better and better at them.

  My grandma Joan has a houseful of blankets she’s knit. She makes them without patterns, and they’re fucking impressive, but if you ask her anything about them she’ll tell you she just does it for her arthritis.

  Not because it feeds something in her to make beautiful things.

  I don’t know if what I want to make would come out beautiful, but fuck, I’ve got things I want to try just for the sake of trying it, glass I want to melt and metal I want to cut up and this idea I had for if you could take a tree and cut it into slices and suspend them, somehow, vertically, so you could see what the tree looked like when it was alive the same time you could see inside the tree and read the story of its life.

  I don’t know if that’s art.

  I guess it is if I say it is. If it makes people feel or think when they look at it.

  I don’t know if it would be good art. Could be it’s just playing. But giving myself a chance to figure it out – that’s what I want.

  That’s what I want for me, and that’s what I want for Frankie, too – to be able to see me doing that, so she knows it’s okay if she wants to do it herself.

  I’m starting to see that if I get what I need, Frankie’s going to get what she needs, too. That what’s good for me and what’s good for Caroline is what’s good for my sister.

  “Where’d Rikki go?” I ask.

  “Back to her office,” Annie says.

  I check the clock and I’m surprised to see it’s seventy-five minutes since I got here. I was supposed to be stopping for a minute. I’ve got to get dinner sorted out. But it’s late enough now that Caroline’s probably fed Frankie.

  “I’d better head out,” I say. “Thanks for showing me this stuff.”

  “You want to grab dinner?” Raffe asks. “Annie and I were going to go into town for subs.”

  “Thanks, but I can’t.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  I’m reminded of that day with Krishna, when he came up to me outside the art building and harassed me into coming over for dinner.

  He’s back in Chicago for the break.

  I think tonight I’ll give him a call.

  “Would you guys want to come out to my place?” I ask. “Not tonight, because I don’t know what Caroline’s got going on, but I don’t know, tomorrow? Day after? I have to warn you I’ve got a kid sister living with me, so if you’re not into kids…”

  I trail off.

  I guess what I’m saying is, I’ve got some baggage. I live off-campus with my girlfriend and my little sister. I don’t really know how to have friends, and I can be a grouchy fucker if things aren’t going my way, but I’d like to talk about art with you. Both of you.

  It takes a year, waiting for their reply, and I age a decade.

  “Kids are good,” Annie says.

  “Is there anything we should bring?” Raffe asks.

  It’s that easy.

  Just that fucking easy.

  Caroline

  Spring comes late in Iowa, but that year was an exception. The December snow gave way to a frozen January, clear and blue, everything crystalline and sparkling.

  West’s eyes under that sky were all fire and ice.

  His hands were cold when they moved beneath my jacket over warm skin, and I would shriek, but I loved the shock of it.

  The shock of having him. Keeping him.

  How that could become normal – how it could fall into a rhythm of busy days and familiar nights, but still surprise me into gratitude over and over again.

  February was projects and papers, phone calls and television interviews. It was waking up early to drive to the Quad Cities for hair and makeup so I could film something for the morning news. Seeing my name in the Des Moines Register, sitting in a hotel conference room and answering questions for eight state senators, none of whom implied I was a slut.

  All of whom shook my hand and thanked me for my service to the citizens of Iowa.

  February was reading about nonprofits, political action groups, and campus organizations. Talking to activists. Thinking about guest speakers.

  Planning for a future with no walls on any horizon.

  February was Frankie making friends with a girl named Nadine and bringing her home to play once, then a second time, then as many nights as the two of them could get away with it.

  It was Quinn back from Florence and me making time to see all her pictures and hear about her Italian escapades.

  It was me making time for Bridget, too, to listen to how things were going with Krishna and give her advice she didn’t need because actually, it turned out, things were going pretty well.

  It was the beginning of art therapy for Frankie, her nightmares easing up, my insomnia getting a little bit less intense.

  February was West at the studio or out in Laurie’s shop. West talking about Raffe and Annie, West telling me what he was making, what he would try next, what he’d failed at but he had an idea, he had another idea, he had a new idea.

  I gained ten pounds in February.

  Then it was March, and it rained so much that the world turned brown and squelching. The snow melted away. The rug inside the front door developed a crust of mud. We had to leave our shoes on garbage bags to keep flakes of dirt from falling off us everywhere we walked.

  Spring break marked a year since West left Putnam for Oregon. We gave Frankie over to the Collinses and drove to Iowa City for dinner, just the two of us. Appetizers and main courses and dessert over a flickering candle, plates passed back and forth across the table, more to talk about than we could ever say.

  I laughed a lot at that dinner, because my life was so full it spilled over. West pulled me close in the truck, kissed me with the rain pounding onto the roof and the windows until I was breathless and laughing all over again.

  And then there were crocuses.

  April brought sunshine, the world drying out, the first questing blades of grass pushing through the earth. Rugby practices to plan. A rally to organize. Every day, some contact to be made, some reporter to talk to, some new thing to pursue.

  This was how it would be. It was how we would be, always.

  This full of change. This full of life.

  Spilling over into words and laughter, cold hands and hot mouths, and the sound of rain drumming down.

  The lawyer’s office is cold.

  Outdoors, the temperature is exactly perfect. Sixty-four degrees and sunny, which is unheard of for April in Iowa, so that all anyone wants to chitchat about is Gulf currents and global warming.

  At Putnam, it’s one of those afternoons when the entirety of the winter-pale student body emerges blinking from their dorm rooms and spreads out blankets on the lawn of the quad. Boys strip off their shirts and toss Frisbees. Girls hold their textbooks, their chem notes – whatever props they require – when really they’re out there to watch the flesh parade.

  I’m sitting at a conference table with the lawyer and my dad on one side of me, West and Frankie on
the other. Across the gleaming cherrywood surface, Nate is flanked by his lawyer and both of his parents.

  This isn’t how it’s normally done. My father made that abundantly clear.

  It’s not normal to insist on signing the papers in front of the person you’ve accused.

  It’s not normal to bring your boyfriend with you, or to invite along a girl too young to fully understand what it is she’s being asked to witness.

  Settlements don’t usually take fifteen weeks to negotiate, either, I told my dad, but I let you have your way. Give me this.

  The document is nothing. I don’t know why I expected a sheaf of pages, binder-clipped together, covered in tape flags, when I’ve been part of hammering out every single one of these terms.

  I guess we expect the turning points in our lives to be plastered in flags and warning signs when, in fact, most of the time our lives change when we’re not paying attention. We blow past the markers without even seeing them, and then we come to the end of some path and find there’s no label for it at all.

  No guardrail. No dead-end sign.

  Just six pages and fifteen paragraphs, with a blank line at the end where I sign my name.

  “Initial here,” the lawyer says, so I do that, and I watch him shove the sheets across the table to Nate.

  The man holding a pen across from me isn’t anyone I know. I broke up with him before the start of our sophomore year. Now we’re coming up on the end of junior year, and we’ve slipped past estranged to the other side of it.

  We’re strangers.

  His father slides the pages from under his hand to read them through before Nate can sign, leaving Nate with his hand wrapped around a pen and nothing to do while he waits in the cold and embarrassed silence of the conference room.

  Nothing to look at but me.

  We stare at each other.

  He’s a young man with sandy hair, blond at the tips, and a scruffy not-quite beard framing padded cheeks and bright blue eyes. He wears a dress shirt and tie. Slacks.

  He wears his privilege in his clothes and his sour expression, as though he’s been asked here for no reason, harassed to the limits of his tolerance, and now this.

  This requirement that he look me in the eye.

  This distasteful performance I’ve staged.

  When his father puts the sheets down in front of him, Nate signs on the last page, initials where he’s told to, and shoves the document across the table toward me.

  “I hope you’re happy,” he says.

  And there is this moment when any number of things could happen.

  West could leap across the table and deck him.

  I could ask to be left alone with Nate and take one last opportunity to give him a piece of my mind before the settlement kicks in and I’m legally obliged to avoid contact with him forever.

  I thought I would do that. Fantasized about it.

  I imagined what I would tell him, what words would sink right into the heart of him and make him see what he’d done, why it’s wrong, why it devastated me.

  I had a whole speech.

  But this isn’t my life here in this conference room that’s cold as a tomb. Everyone is dressed for a funeral because this is the end of something – the final act of a drama that’s been difficult and hurtful, complicated and rich.

  A drama that’s taught me more about myself than anything I went through in the years preceding it.

  What Nate did to me will never go away. I will never stop being angry, because it will never stop rearing up to hurt me. He lashed out at me, attacked me with the weapons at his disposal, and changed the contours of who I am forever.

  He changed my future.

  He made everything harder.

  But God. Here I am with West and Frankie and my dad – these people I love more than anything. And after I walk out of this room, I’m going to get into West’s car and roll down the window and stick my hand out to feel the spring air sliding through my fingers.

  We’re going to drive down the interstate at seventy miles an hour, and all of this will slip away.

  Back in Putnam, I’ll change into shorts and find a blanket, drive over to campus, plant myself on the lawn, and pretend to study while I watch the boys playing Frisbee with their shirts off.

  I’m going to head home and eat dinner with West and his sister. I’m going to talk to her about why we took her out of school to be here today, what it means for my life and my future, what it means for hers.

  What it is to be a woman in this world.

  After she goes to sleep, I’m going to lock the bedroom door and strip down to nothing and press every inch of my body against West, my boyfriend, my guy, the love of my life. I’m going to fuck him, be fucked by him, slide against him in the glow of the bedside lamp, kiss him and pant in his ear and tell him I love him, I love him, Jesus God I love him.

  All of that belongs to me.

  Nate can’t take it away.

  I hope you’re happy – that’s his accusation.

  It turns out that I only have one thing I want to say in response. Two words.

  “I am.”

  Dude, that is fucking creepy.

  It’s not creepy, it’s evocative.

  It makes my balls shrivel up.

  That’s not my problem.

  No, it is, though. You made it. You made this thing that shrivels my balls, so you’ve got to own it.

  Can you stop talking about balls?

  Balls are objectively relevant to the conversation.

  Ball conversations are exclusionary. Pick a different metaphor.

  The art building has long hallways, and at night when it’s mostly deserted, they amplify every sound. I came in the door nearest the library, which means I can hear this whole conversation as I walk the span of the building.

  The building is plenty long enough to figure out who’s talking to who. West is the one who keeps referring to his balls. Annie’s the one who doesn’t want to hear it. And Raffe, I discover as I turn into the studio and get a look at what they’re discussing, is the one who’s created the strangest piece of mixed-media art I’ve ever seen.

  It’s a metal folding chair tipped over. On the floor, stuck beneath the seat, is a small cloth doll dressed up like an adult man. It has a miniature red wig, a little suit, and shoes.

  But rather than a doll’s face, it has a human face, projected onto it with a camera. Moving human features. It’s talking.

  “That is fucking creepy,” I say.

  They all three turn. West is already grinning. “See,” he says. “I told you.”

  “You made that on purpose?” I ask.

  Raffe smiles. If he were wearing overalls, he’d stick his thumbs under the straps and rock back and forth on his heels – he looks that proud. “Yep.”

  “Why?”

  Annie groans. “Don’t ask him why.”

  “But —”

  Then West is beside me, dragging me across the room by the elbow. “Never mind Raffe,” he says. “Look at this.”

  There’s a smear of something dark on his cheekbone. His T-shirt is spattered with white spots that I would swear weren’t there when he left the apartment this morning. He’s wearing the jeans he wears for art stuff, the denim almost impossible to spot under a layer of paint and slip and grease and I don’t even know what.

  Those jeans turn my crank so hard.

  So hard. Seriously, he can’t ever be allowed to know. He’ll hold it over me with his knowing smirks and bossy teasing.

  To conceal my lust, I only allow myself quick sidelong glances at his thighs, where he’s rubbed every possible art substance off his hands. The marks of all the projects that have engaged him this semester.

  There are so many of them. I think if he were anyone but West, I might be worried that all the projects were a sign of some kind of manic disorder, but I know him too well to worry. I know what it means when West sits me down and says, “Close your eyes,” and starts rustling around in one o
f the cabinets built into the room’s walls.

  It means he’s found something he’s excited about.

  It means he’s got something he wants to show me.

  It means he’s finally figuring out how to let himself try stuff, make mistakes, waste materials, fail.

  I’ve never seen him so happy.

  He slides his sketchbook across the table in front of me, flipped open to a page about halfway through. “Look at that,” he says.

  I see what looks like an exploded diagram of a tree. Trunk, roots, branches, all of them separated out with space between them, floating in the air. It isn’t a picture that makes sense to me, and it makes less sense when West starts piling tree parts and metal rods on the table in front of me.

  He’s assembling the pieces, telling me about drill bits and cutting tools and how he tried Lucite but it was too obvious, and then he started thinking about copper pipe, the kind of fittings you use for doing plumbing, and how that would look if he fitted the pieces together that way, and Laurie suggested he look into the kind of piping that chemists use, the old-fashioned systems, because they have a kind of elegance, so he did some research on that…

  He talks and talks, the words rushing out of him, and the whole time he’s moving. Shifting from foot to foot, reaching up to fit one piece of pipe onto another, threading fittings together.

  I have this thing for the way West moves.

  It’s worse than the jeans thing.

  Especially worse because he knows about it.

  When West is working, and happy, he gets into this physical kind of flow that unhinges the door on my libido and just lets everything out. I watch the muscles beneath his skin bunch and release. I watch his thighs in those jeans, his ass, his shoulders. Mostly, though, I watch his mouth, because I love to see him animated, love it when he’s got this much to say about something that makes him happy.