What You Make of Me

I’ve stopped writing for a bit. It’s dark now. Through my kitchen window I can see across the street into an elderly woman’s bedroom. She’s asleep but has left her lamp on.

I like to stare out at her. On the pane of glass between us I see my own reflection, a specter. I stare at her real form through my reflected one. I open my mouth and arrange it so that her whole bed is inside me.

A week after the reception, Demetri wants to sit down for lunch. We choose our usual place, Awang, where the women like to talk to him about the hair on his knuckles (“like from a baby’s head”).

He sits on the linoleum chair across from me, sweating from the spices, and announces: “At certain dates in life you are to do certain things with your life.”

I think he’s talking about me. At this point, as far as my art is concerned, no one likes what I’m doing. Or, worse, no one cares, including myself. My most recent work was shown in a group exhibition titled Chronos. The theme was “new ways to register time.” My piece was sculptural. I’d collected bits of hair from my own combs, shower drains at the gym, or anywhere public. I dried and then glued the hair together into long, wiry stalks. Then I arranged the stalks of hair so that they outlined shadow patterns cast throughout the day at the park on Seventh Avenue—the shadows at dawn, at noon, at dusk. I was try‑ ing to combine the idea of biological time—accumulated hair loss—and spatiotemporal time—sun, shadows. I am still seething from the sole review (“labored, trite”) when Demetri, his mouth full of noodles, says: “I guess I’m thinking that right now you need, or maybe we both need, but mostly you need, I think, to find someone to fall in love with.” This is how I know he is going to tell me about Nati. His elbows rest sharp on the table. “Where do you find someone like that?”

“To fall in love with?”

He nods yes, numb to the bits of chili on his lip.

“You go pick a girl from the line,” I say, gesturing to‑ ward those standing and waiting for their takeout in a little parade of shifting weight. “Just go say hi.”

Behind him a waiter opens a swing door. Briefly, I see inside the kitchen—two chefs are standing, one with his fingers in a bowl, the other studying a smoking pan. The door swings shut.

“I’m not just gonna go say hi,” Demetri says.

I turn around. “She’s cute.” I’m nodding my head to‑ ward a young woman in jeans and a tunic, her brown hair up in a tortoiseshell clip. Fingers painted black. Medium‑round tits. I look back at Demetri. His eyes match his shirt, gray and cottony. “You’re afraid you’ll expose yourself?”

“Yeah. And the wrong version of myself. The bolder version.”

“The better one.”

He nods and studies the splinters on his chopstick. “Yes. I’ve thought about doing that—about just talking to a per‑ son in a line, random like that. But the issue is that she’ll start off thinking I’m spontaneous. That I’m comfortable in making unprompted, impulsive decisions. Really, the rule is I’m uncomfortable.” He wipes his forehead. “And over time she’d come to realize this. What do I say when she realizes who I really am, which is a lover of routine? But not just with the big things, like the time I fall asleep, but the little things . . .”

“Like?”

“Like you know. All my shit. The ring stains.” Deme‑ tri’s wooden table was riddled with ring stains. He didn’t mind the stains. He never bought coasters. He only made sure that if anyone were to put a cup down that cup would land right over an existing ring stain. Not to protect the wood. “I just like things on top of each other like that,” he tells me.

“I know. That’s not too bad, Demi.”

“Well, they’re all like that. These fucking habits.”

“Well then you’ll be okay.”

“Okay well, what do I tell this girl, is what I’m asking you. Because habits live longer than we do. I mean when we die, we’re remembered by them. He always took his toast like that. She always ordered the red.” He’s pointing and pointing. “We live by them and then are remembered by them . . . so that all we are when we die is really just a collection of decisions we made so often that we stopped making them. That’s my point. We are remembered by a series of decisions we made so often that we stopped making them. We like to be efficient. To eliminate choice for ourselves—let’s replace real desire let’s replace our free will.”

“Right.”

“But then at the end of your fucking life you’re wonder‑ ing what in the fuck did I actually even do, or feel, for my‑ self. Unless you’re an artist.” He looks at me like he’s caught me in something. Suddenly everything on him and in him—every bone—is very still. “If you are an artist you get to escape this whole thing. If you’re an artist you’re re‑ membered for your work. You transcend your habits. No one really knows Sappho’s habits. No one knows Shake‑ speare’s habits. Their habits are irrelevant. Though the truth is I felt much closer to Hemingway once I knew his habits. And that he wrote standing up and all that. But I think ultimately, I respect the person who has no habits. A person who lives most freely. But then, of course, living freely becomes a habit and loses its charm. So what do I say? Do I tell her this? Maybe she’ll think I’m condescending. Because she knows this already. Because we all know this already.”

“We do,” I say. I know he has some kind of point but I’ve lost it. I’m only following his energy.

“And then one day”—he’s no longer talking to me—“I’ll have to make some huge fucking admission. I’d have to give her source material for my personality. Something complex enough to keep feeding into her sense of my potential for depth. And then what if it doesn’t work.”

“Demetri.”

“Because that’s a great fear, I think, Ava, that we tell someone everything about ourselves and they say, ‘You know, you don’t go down as deep as I thought. I can see the bottom of you.’”

“Demetri.”

“I don’t even know what I’d say. To tell her anything that has actually happened would be like seeking congratulations. But then if I don’t tell her I’ll just be congratulating myself on my own restraint.” He’s rubbing hard at his temples. “Or I do tell her—something totally strange, like I let my mother walk into the sea and drown . . .” I look down. “And this girl’s going to think I can think nothing complicated in the present moment because everything complicated is behind me. Because that’s the plot of my life. And that’s grotesque. But also maybe true.”

I say nothing. Demetri knows that I won’t. My mind cleaves white. Until—with a clarity that surprises me—I think of our mother walking up the steep hill to our house. She had one friend in our town, named Audrey, who she liked to go on walks with. Audrey dressed like our mother and said things to Demetri and me like “I’m speaking with my mouth” every time she spoke to us. She thought this was hilarious. Audrey and our mother told each other things: They were going to go out auditioning together. My mother would move beyond the commercials our father wrote for her. They’d take trips to the city and branch out. They’d start a production company themselves. They’d only hire each other. I knew Audrey would never. She had an underactive imagination that liked to be taken over. Our mother was then growing quickly and increasingly deluded and ready to subsume. Sometimes Audrey couldn’t keep up. Sometimes they let Demetri walk with them. “What do they talk about?” I asked him once. “Audrey doesn’t talk,” was all he said.

At Awang, my mother’s face pounds into my conscious‑ ness, and I haven’t spoken. The woman I pointed to earlier is picking up her order. She has a beautiful speaking voice. I gather my focus. “Who is it?” I ask. “I mean tell me the real thing. Who is the woman? Who are you talking about? You don’t want me to meet her?”

“You know.” But he doesn’t say her name.

“The Italian,” I say. He only nods. “Okay. And the issue?”

He sighs. “She’s in America. But she hasn’t contacted me, and I don’t know if I should get ahold of her.”

I ask him why not.

“We met the last time she was here. Just two months ago.” When he leans forward, he rubs his hands over his eyes. The people seated at the table beside us look at him. His feet tap the back legs of my chair. “Soon after we got back from Italy. She was here in the city the day of that Chronos opening. It’s why I didn’t go. I was with her.”

“I thought you were ill.”

“I was ill,” he says. “Because I knew she was here, in town.”

I push my pot away.

“You don’t even go to your openings.” Demetri springs forward. “You don’t even know who shows up.”

“Yes, but I like when you go.”

“But I wasn’t going to invite her to your thing. And then what if I went on my own and saw her there. And then if she fell in love with me, it’d be through you.”

I protest. “That does not tend to happen.”

“It does.” Again his feet tapping the back of my chair. “I’m there at your show and I watch women think maybe they’re falling in love with me, when really it’s with your work and I just happen to be there and catch the excess. Or they don’t love the work. Equally possible. But then they want to feel the things they think they should be feeling.

So I’m there. They give me the imitation of a feeling. Or, I don’t know, the periphery of a feeling. I don’t know.”

I put a napkin under my coke can. “Or, Demetri, what you think of as peripheral is actually center.”

“Oh boy.” He leans back.

“That’s the point of my work, maybe: to take all the weight of all your suppressed peripheral sensations, over your whole life long, seriously, and in my art I center them, glorify them and give them focus, so that the totality—”

“We’re not talking about your work.” Demetri laughs.

“I know. I’m talking about you.”

“As if I’m part of your work.”

“You are.”