Authors: Pamela Klaffke
“Right.”
“I’m Dave.” He shakes my hand.
Michelle gives me a tour of the loft. She’s a sculptor, Dave’s a painter, they have two kids who are staying at Michelle’s sister’s house overnight. I don’t care. I recognize Dave’s work—he’s good and his pieces are expensive. He shows in
New York. The creative couples are gathered on angular sofas and around the island kitchen. I count ten people, twelve including Jack and myself. Michelle points to each person like she’s a first-grade teacher doing roll call. “That’s Susie and her artner, Charles. That’s Steven and over there—that’s his artner, Geoff. That’s Carol—I think I saw her artner, Travis, sneak off to the bathroom. And that’s Rachel and her artner, Paul. Rachel’s writing a story for
Toronto Citylife
about our dinners.”
I stare at Michelle. “I’m sorry?”
“Rachel’s writing a story for
Toronto Citylife
about our dinners.” Michelle speaks slower this time.
“No. I got that.
Artner?”
Michelle laughs. “It’s clever, isn’t it? Julia and Ryan came up with it—they’re in L.A. this week. If you’re here next month you’ll meet them.”
I am somewhat stunned by my hangover, by Ted and Genevieve’s anger, by Esther, by the suitcases full of a dead woman’s things and by my imaginary mutant baby. But I am clear about this: I will not be here next month, I will not be meeting Julia and Ryan, I am not anyone’s
artner
.
There is no meat at dinner. I haven’t touched the mock salt-and-pepper squid or the mock Szechwan beef but am confident in the fact that the only thing worse than an artner dinner is a vegan artner dinner cooked by a woman who truly believes that tofu tastes like meat and says so.
“The first time I made this sweet-and-sour tofu pork—this is so funny—Dave spit it out on the plate. He was convinced that it was
real meat
. Can you imagine! But it
is
very authentic, isn’t it?”
The artners agree. I push a soggy piece of fake meat something-or-other around on my plate. Jack frowns at me
from across the table—artners do not sit together at artner dinners, they’re separated to achieve maximum social networking potential as I learned from Michelle when I mistakenly tried to take a seat beside Jack.
Jack points to my full plate indicating he wants me to eat.
Fuck you.
I mouth the words at him. The social networking at the table has reached a fever pitch. Someone makes a toast to tofu chef Michelle. I raise my glass along with the others but would like nothing more than to bind each pair of artners together with ropes of messy animal intestines that they have to gnaw through to escape then slap their smug faces with slabs of raw veal until they cry. I’ll hook up one of Jack’s video cameras, maybe a webcam or two, and lock them in the loft indefinitely with no food but the slapping veal. After days, a week at the longest, they’ll give in to the inevitable and cook up the veal, but it’s maggoty and rank so they fight over what to do next even though they all know what they’ll have to do. I’ll get Jack to stream the video live to the
Snap
Web site and everyone on earth will watch as the captive vegetarian artners turn cannibal, dismembering each other piece by piece—it’s Michelle’s arm for lunch, Steven’s left leg for dinner. And soon they’re limbless, just a pile of talking torsos huddled together in a puddle of urine and sticky feces. People will watch, the artners will die and someone will sue us for something. Jack will blame himself and I’ll be there to remind him, as I bounce on my knee our mutant baby who, it turned out, I couldn’t give up, that he was the one so keen on us working together, on
Snap
having an online show.
I wander around the loft after dinner looking at art and pictures, guzzling wine and avoiding Rachel the writer, who is asking people questions and taking notes while her artner,
Paul, scampers about taking photographs of everyone with a vintage Polaroid Land Camera. Eventually, Rachel and Paul catch me coming out of the bathroom and pounce.
“Do you mind if I ask you a few questions about tonight, Sara? Your initial impressions of the artners concept since you’re a newbie, how these get-togethers can benefit both your personal and professional life—that sort of thing. And maybe Paul could get a picture?” Rachel has a piece of tofu stuck between her front teeth. She stands poised with her pen ready.
“Do you have to use my real name?” I ask.
Rachel seems taken aback by this. “I’d like to—I’m using everyone else’s.”
I lean in close to Rachel. My voice is hushed. “It’s just that this night has been such a moving experience. I’m at a critical juncture in my life and, well, I shouldn’t be telling you this, not unless you promise not to use my real name—”
Rachel’s eyes flicker with excitement. A confession is second only to swag on the official list of journalist turn-ons. “Sure, anything you want.”
“I don’t want to be a downer, but I’ve been having a tough time lately and this artners thing is what I need to get my life back on track. The camaraderie, the conversation, the networking opportunities—I don’t feel so alone anymore. I mean, I was going to kill myself tonight, but then Jack brought me here and now I feel so connected, not just to Jack, but to the whole artners community.”
“That’s pretty powerful stuff,” Rachel says, closing her notepad. She wishes me luck on my
journey
and Paul moves in to take my picture.
I bring my hand up to my face. “I really don’t like having my picture taken.” This is not a lie. “Here. Let me see that.”
I hold out my hand and Paul reluctantly surrenders his camera. I hold it at arm’s length and point it at my face. I stare into the lens and press the shutter button. The camera whirs and spits the photo out. I thank Paul and give him back his camera. I tuck the Polaroid in Lila’s evening bag and from across the room announce to Jack that we’re leaving.
Jack is blabbing on the way home about Geoff, who’s a film producer. Jack’s taking a meeting with him after his latest music video wraps. Geoff told Jack it’s time to take it to the next level, to get out of the music video ghetto and move up to features. He’s holding Geoff’s business card and stroking it like it’s pussy.
I let Jack fuck me and for a change he doesn’t pet me and call me darling and tell me how beautiful I am and how much he loves me. He just fucks me, and hard—no foreplay. He pins my arms above my head with his hands and doesn’t look me in the eye and I like it. I know he’s not fucking me. He’s fucking Geoff’s card, the networking
artners,
some vision of a feature film, a brick of extra-firm tofu. This is fine, preferable, really. He grunts a good-night and gives me a lazy kiss between my shoulder blades, above the band of my ruffly underwire balconette bra. As soon as he starts to snore I inch away from him, out of the bed and onto the floor.
I grope around in the dark for one of Jack’s T-shirts and the brown leather carry-on. I wriggle into the first shirt I find then I stand up and feel around the floor with my feet for the bag and stub my right baby toe on the sharp edge of the white laminate chest of drawers I’ve always hated. A little yelp escapes from my mouth. Jack tosses under the sheets but doesn’t wake up. Jack’s semen is running down my thighs. With any luck our imaginary mutant baby is expelled with the ooze.
I locate the bag and creep out into the living room where I take a roll of Scotch tape from Jack’s desk drawer. I sit on the floor and pull out Lila’s notebooks. I find the blank one and open it to the first page. Lila’s black evening bag is lying on the coffee table and I slide out the Polaroid I took of myself at the party. I tape the picture into the notebook and with a Sharpie write
Artners Dinner
on the strip of white space below the photo in a fat loopy hand that makes me think of optimistic ten-year-old girls who have flat chests and dream about unicorns. I scrutinize my face. The edges are soft, but that’s from holding the camera too close with an unsteady hand. A grin saturates my face, but my eyes are tired and sad, a portrait of another lady undone.
Jack has work and places to be. I putter and I try, unsuccessfully, to sleep. I ignore Eva’s phone messages and Ted’s and don’t bother to check my e-mail. I wear Lila’s dresses and spend at least an hour every day on my hair and makeup, something I didn’t do even as a teenager. Sometimes I go to the store for cigarettes or wine, but mostly I stay in Jack’s apartment and pore over Lila’s notebooks and try to untangle her life.
Lila had very specific ideas about things: fingernails are red or plain and buffed with a layer of clear polish; dresses are black—always; when cooking at home, one-pot meals trump elaborate dinners with several courses; men are insufferable, women are worse; being a tree is better than being human. She hated squirrels and drew several versions of a voluminous fur cape made of squirrel pelts, heads still attached. She wrote at length about trapping versus shooting the squirrels that ran rampant in her neighborhood; she had no qualms about guns but was unsure of what the most effective method of killing the trapped squirrels might be.
POISON???
she wrote in capital letters.
Lila eavesdropped on conversations and recorded snippets
of dialogue in her notebooks—a married couple talking about the weather, a man in a park laying out his career options to a bewildered dog, a young mother at the supermarket scolding her toddler for snatching a lemon from the bottom of the pile causing hundreds of lemons to tumble to the floor. Her writing about people was devoid of emotion or empathy, the photographs pasted into the notebooks were all of herself.
She made shopping lists and wrote detailed instructions about her beauty regime—weekly baths in buttermilk and baby oil, petroleum jelly hands in rubber gloves for an hour each night, facial tightening exercises. In the mornings after Jack’s gone to work I open the notebook to that page and spend thirty minutes in the bathroom contorting my face to match Lila’s step-by-step photographs and tell myself it works. I do it again when I’m bored and can’t sleep.
It’s noon by the time I’ve done my facial tightening exercises, gotten dressed and done my hair and makeup. Today I have resolved to go out to buy a pound of ground beef and a box of Velveeta cheese for the casserole I’m making for dinner. I found the recipe in one of Lila’s notebooks. She scribbled a star beside it and the page is dotted with grease stains and this is enough to convince me of its tastiness. It’s Wednesday. Jack calls as I’m almost out the door and says the video will wrap by seven, eight at the latest, and that I should come meet him for drinks with the band and the crew at nine at a pub on Gloucester. He calls me
baby
and
sugar
. I don’t tell him I’m making casserole.
I pass the market deciding I’ll go for an extra-long walk and pick up the ground beef and Velveeta on the way back. Lila had strong feelings about walking—she wrote that walking at a brisk pace for one hour every day kept the legs shapely and
the buttocks high. She recommended that one squeeze their buttocks and stomach as they walked and drew a picture of the ideal walking posture: tilted slightly back, feet before shoulders, eyes forward not down. She also noted that a lady wearing heeled shoes should be sure to walk heel-toe, never toe-heel, as the former will make walking effortless while the latter will cause nothing but pinched toes, bunions and blistered feet. I run through Lila’s directions in my head: shoulders back, feet forward, bum and tummy in, then heel-toe, heel-toe, heel-toe. I get the rhythm and am astonished by how simple it is. I’m gliding, I’m giddy, shoes clickety-clicking against the pavement. I want to poster the city and share my news, bestow my newfound heel-walking know-how upon lesser women. I see myself on talk shows, laughing and graceful, demonstrating my moves and garnering thunderous applause. But my goodwill vanishes as my clickety-click is silenced by the squish of fresh dog shit. I will keep the secret of walking in heels to myself.
The sky is overcast, but by the time I hit Queen Street, the sun has broken through and the black Lila dress I’m wearing sucks in the heat and the smell of the dog shit on my shoe wafts up around me, making me gag.
I’m closer to the
Snap
store than I am to Jack’s so I stop in to use the bathroom and clean the dog shit off my shoe. We have three stores: the one in Montreal, this one in Toronto and another in New York. We sell T-shirts and sneakers, accessories and music, books and expensive Japanese toys. I rarely visit the stores except when I’m feeling especially slothful and in need of a fresh batch of DOs and DON’Ts—I’m guaranteed to find both hanging around a
Snap
store.
I don’t recognize either of the staff behind the counter. The
girl has choppy hair with extra-long pointy bangs and a phone pressed to her ear; the guy is her doppelganger: same hair, but no phone. They’re poking each other, pointing and giggling as I make my way toward them. My face burns. There’s a display of plastic figurines from Japan at the till, a set of limited-edition characters with round heads, mix-and-match animal bodies and snap-on hair. I reach for one of the figurines and pop off its hair and its bunny-body. I roll the head around in my hand and remember a story a cousin of Ted’s told us as teenagers, about skinning an animal with a golf ball. He explained how he’d make an incision, slide the golf ball under the skin, then place his hand on top of the fur and roll the ball to separate the skin from the body. He told us that once the skin is loose it should slide right off and it’s ready to be dried or taxidermied. I squeeze the round toy head in my hand. I’d skin the girl first, then the guy. I’d do it carefully, hiding the precise incisions in their ass cracks. The faces would be tricky—working the toy head around the eyes without any tearing could be difficult, and the girl’s nose is very small—but the results would be spectacular and
multipurpose
and Ted would like that. We could use the skins to dress mannequins, have an art opening with wine. I could style and shoot them as DOs then as DON’Ts. They could be mascots and hipster talismans, the new star faces of a perennial Halloween.
“Aren’t those wicked?” the girl asks me.
I look down at the toy head in my hand and quickly set it down. “Wicked. Yes. Indeed.”
Indeed?
I want to slice open my ass and roll the toy head around until my skin is falling off and it’s easy to step out of. I could do it here at the store. We could print up handbills and posters, it could be an event—performance art—the kind of thing people talk about forever
and lie and say they were there even though they were across town eating barbecued pork chops at a picnic table in their parents’ suburban backyard.
The Hipster Twins nudge each other and look past me. They’re barely able to contain their laughter. Their faces are bright with gleeful contempt and I relax knowing it’s not directed at me. I look across my shoulder pretending to pick a thread off the sleeve of Lila’s dress and freeze when I see him, but it’s too late.
“Sara B.! My God! How the fuck are you?” Alex strangles me in an awkward embrace. The Hipster Twins are quiet.
“Alex, hey,” I say as I pull away from him. His hair is bleached platinum and thinning and his face is deeply lined. I count two, no, three holes in his nose where he once wore thick rings. His breath is bad and his crushed velvet pants are too tight. A small, spongy belly hangs over his belt exposing a sliver of flesh and the hair that peeks out from the neck of his shirt is gray. He’s got to be fifty. I stare at him, not knowing what to say. I want to clean the dog shit off my shoes and run.
“It’s so weird to run in to you—I was just talking about you the other day and saying to Jamie…twenty-six, so hot, long story, you don’t want to know. So I was telling Jamie about how insane we used to get and, oh my God, the parties and you’d wear that big black wig and we’d be doing piles of blow in the DJ booth, and that time we had the doll-burning party and the sprinklers went off in that warehouse and the cops came? I was just talking about you!”
Alex puts his hands on my waist and jumps up and down. The Hipster Twins gawk. “That was some party indeed,” I say.
Indeed? Again?
“Listen. I’ve got to scram, but I’m doing a party on Friday.
You have to, have to come.” Alex reaches into the leather messenger bag that’s slung across his chest and pulls out a square of pink paper.
Midsummer’s Night Dreamz
. Fantasy costumes, DJ Miss Alex, two-for-one highballs before ten.
“Wow. I really wish I could, but I’m going back to Montreal tomorrow.” I am a liar, worse than the ones who would say they saw my self-skinning performance art live but were in reality pork-chop-eating suburban gluttons.
I can read the disappointment in Alex’s face. He stuffs the pink paper back in his bag. “Sure. Well, maybe next time. Give me a call when you’re coming to town. Same number.”
“Definitely.”
“Well,
ta
, then!” Alex says. He blows me a halfhearted kiss on his way out the door.
I turn my attention back to the Hipster Twins. “I need to use your bathroom,” I say with what I hope is some authority.
“You’re Sara B.,” says the Boy Twin, holding out a limp hand.
“This is, like, amazing,” say the Girl Twin. “You’re, like, amazing.”
“The bathroom?”
“Yeah, sure. Okay, of course.” The Boy Twin is still holding my hand and yanks me past the counter and down a short hallway to the bathroom. I’m afraid he’s going to follow me in, hold my hand while I pee and try to get the dog shit off my shoe. I consider this. I’m not keen on him watching me pee, but I’m sure all I would have to do is ask and he’d gladly clean my shoe; he’d probably keep the paper towel, ask me to sign it, sniff it when he’s stoned or feeling low.
I shake the Boy Twin off and step into the bathroom. “Let us know if you need anything,” the Girl Twin calls out.
“Will do.” I stand still and listen for the sound of footsteps
walking away. Nothing. I turn the water on. The Hipster Twins are waiting. I take off my shoe and scrape the dog shit off with wet paper towels, which leave behind a pulpy residue and I hope I haven’t ruined Lila’s shoes. I find my shopping list in my wallet and make a note to pick up black shoe polish at the market, along with the ground beef and Velveeta.
I keep the water running as I gather my dress up and sit on the toilet to pee. The Twins are waiting. I try not to think about them or about Alex or about the fact that I’m unsure whether I asked the Twins to use
their
bathroom or
the
bathroom when it’s technically
my
bathroom, mine and Ted’s. There’s a copy of the latest
Snap
on the back of the toilet. I flip through it, hoping it will distract me enough to be able to pee. I skim a semifunny piece on mimes and an interview with a porn star notorious for having sex with six guys at once—two oral, two vaginal, two anal, all simultaneously—and am finally able to pee. But then see Eva and I stop, everything stops.
Eva B.’s Life of Style,
the piece reads. It’s two pages, color, the DOs and DON’Ts pages,
my
two pages. But there’s Eva—Eva at home, Eva entertaining, Eva at brunch, Eva at a club. It’s a diary of snapshots with pithy captions. There’s an editor’s note written by Ted welcoming the new column. I close the magazine then open it again. I look closer at the photos. At brunch Eva’s flanked by Tiff and Rockabilly Ben. There’s another girl facing away from the camera. I take off Jack’s glasses and hold the magazine right up to my face and squint until I’m convinced it’s Parrot Girl.
I sit, frozen, with the magazine in my hands for I don’t know how long. My brain is loud with flashes set to a heavy backbeat: Eva laughing at brunch with Parrot Girl, at the office twirling in my fuchsia chair; Ted and his it’s
embarrass
ings
and
you’re exactly the same
s; Jack and his fucking artners; Lila and Esther and their red-colored hair; Genevieve singing “J’taime My Baby Tonight” as Olivier screeches; the Hipster Twins laughing at Alex—poor Alex. They all laugh and talk and sing over each other, crashing against my skull. The Girl Twin is wearing a shrunken pink T-shirt with a black silk-screened skull. It’s not very original. I’ll make her a DON’T. I need to find Alex. His number is not in my current address book or the one before, but the one before that, the bulky one I rarely used that Ted gave me that had sections to keep track of birthdays and anniversaries and pockets to keep important receipts. It’s in the back of a drawer in my desk at the office. I have to call Eva. I don’t want to call Eva. I want to kill Eva. I’m wearing a dead woman’s dress.
“Is everything all right in there?” The Boy Twin.
“It’s fine. I’m fine.” My throat is dry and my voice comes out scratchy. I’m sweaty and my head is pounding. I push Jack’s glasses back onto my face but my eyes won’t focus, they’re turned inside-out, watching the strobe show in my brain. I can’t shut it off or turn the volume down. My ears are ringing. I slide off the toilet and onto the floor. I reach my arms out in front of me and crouch in a resting pose I learned in a yoga class I went to with Gen. I breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth. I turn my head and see shadows move in the crack at the bottom of the door. There are whispers but the water is still running and I can’t make out what they’re saying. The Twins are waiting. I have to buy black shoe polish and ground beef and Velveeta at the market. I’m making casserole and meeting Jack. I have to find Alex and ask him if he’s happy.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” The Boy Twin has his arm
around me and helps me down the short hallway and into the showroom.
“Here, have some of this.” The Girl Twin shoves a can of energy drink at me. It’s sweet and disgusting, but I’m parched so I swallow it in three gulps. I steady myself against the counter and separate myself from the Boy Twin. The Girl Twin is suddenly beside me with a Polaroid camera. “Do you think maybe I could get a picture with you?” she asks. Her voice is timid and she blinks a lot when she talks.
I shrug. “Sure. But only if I can borrow the camera and whatever film you’ve got.”