Torch

  “Who was her favorite author?” Claire had asked Bill.

  “Author?” he’d asked back, as if he were unsure of the definition of the word.

  She couldn’t help herself; her mind went in these directions. On her visits to Duluth, she wanted to know both everything and nothing about Nancy. But wanting to know everything won out and so she pumped Bill for information every chance she got. What Nancy was like in bed, why Nancy had decided to become a teacher, who Nancy’s best friends were, and what she had loved and hated about them.

  When Bill spoke to her of Nancy he had the demeanor of a talkshow guest, not wanting to go on too long, always ready to be interrupted. He said he couldn’t remember certain things, or if he could, he didn’t know how to explain them. He’d take Claire in his arms then and pull her close. He’d say, “But that was the past and this is now,” or “That’s ancient history anyway, kiddo,” and kiss her throat and Claire’s jealousy or uncertainty or curiosity—it was all three—would be sated and they would go forward, forgetting about Nancy.

  Bill didn’t ask about David, didn’t even seem to recognize his importance when Claire spoke of him. He listened as if all along David had been nothing more than a friend.

  She picked up the phone again and pressed the redial button. “Hey,” she said to Bill’s machine, making her voice sound lax and light. “I forgot to tell you—I’m all moved in to my new place! It’s great so far. But anyway, you can call me at my old number. I had it transferred. Anyway. I should be here unpacking all night, so you can call me late—whenever. Because I’ll just be here. Bye.”

  She hung up the phone and sat staring at it again, not because she believed anymore that it would ring in a moment, but because she wished she could take it back: the second message, the first. And also because she had to fight the impulse to pick up the phone and call him again, to say something that would obliterate everything she’d said before. Something that would make her sound stronger, better, less lonely than she was. She dialed his number again and then hung up before it rang. In a flash she hated Bill, his pathetic little paunch, the way he had to clear his throat violently upon waking and then again after sex, how he cut the meat on his plate entirely before taking a single bite.

  She went to a box of things she had kept under the bed when she lived with David and picked up a doll that she had been given for Christmas more than a decade ago. It was pristine, barely used: as a child she hadn’t been interested in playing with dolls. “Claire was always my reader,” her mother would exclaim on her radio show every chance she got. “But now Josh,” she would continue on, “he’s the artist.” The doll was made of a malleable plastic and topped with a crown of impossibly shiny hair. When Claire squeezed its fat center it said “mama” and “papa” and “baba” in alternating turns. She squeezed it until it said each thing four times and then she tossed it back into the box with enough force that it said “mama” again.

  “Knock knock,” said Andre from the door, stepping into her room. Behind him there was a man and a woman. “This is Claire,” he said to them. “Claire, this is Ruthie and Victor.”

  “Oh, hi,” she said. “Nice to meet you.”

  “So we had an idea,” said Andre.

  “What?” she asked, but he ignored her and looked at Ruthie and Victor instead and asked them what they thought.

  “Oh, totally,” said Ruthie. She turned to Victor, “Don’t you think?”

  “I do,” said Victor, nodding. His flaxen hair was matted into five enormous dreadlocks, a pair of bright barrettes meant for little girls embedded into the ends of one.

  “Do what?” asked Claire, feeling daffy and self-conscious and elated to be included in whatever plan they had.

  “Okay, Claire, just say yes. You must say yes,” said Ruthie. She had the air of a cartoon witch about her, big leather boots and long hair, dyed jet black, a tattoo of a spider’s web splayed across the top of one hand.

  “Yes, what?” Claire asked, doing an excited little hop.

  Their band, Binge, was making a music video the next day, Ruthie explained finally, and the woman they had cast in the lead role had backed out an hour ago.

  “What’s it involve?” asked Claire, though she already knew she would do it.

  “Just some rolling around on a bed,” Ruthie answered. “It’s our one love song.”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” Victor disputed her contemplatively, fingering one of his barrettes. “I would call ‘Avenue Nine’ a love song too. Granted, a highly, highly demented love song.”

  “I’ll be in it too,” Andre added. “You and me on a bed, but it’s very G-rated.”

  “Oh, totally,” Ruthie agreed. “We’re trying to get this on Soundquake—do you ever see that show? It’s this late-night thing. Anyway, it can’t be porno or anything.”

  “Okay,” said Claire with tentative glee, and then they each hugged her, one by one.

  They all drove downtown together in Victor’s van the next day to the warehouse where they would do the shoot. The music video, Claire quickly realized, was more a home-based arts and crafts project than a film production, paid for by Andre, and shot by an undergraduate film major who wore thick leather bands that attached with silver snaps around each wrist. It took them nearly three hours to get the set in place, first hauling a bed up the roasting stairway, and then meticulously arranging it the way the film major thought it should be.

  “Where the fuck is Jason?” Ruthie kept bellowing as she stomped around in her boots, but no one ever answered her. Jason was the drummer and her former boyfriend and a heroin addict, she confided to Claire as they stood together in the little area they had made for her to get dressed, a room formed by bed sheets that served as walls.

  “How’s it look?” Claire asked Ruthie when she put her outfit on. It was less revealing than a one-piece bathing suit, a white lace teddy with a tiny pink bow at the front.

  Ruthie only nodded and tugged at the top. She was grumpier than she had been the evening before, when she was so intent on getting Claire to say yes. “Now how about your hair? Let’s try it up,” she demanded.

  Claire lifted it into a pile on top of her head, and they both stood staring into the mirror that was propped up against the concrete wall.

  “Now how about with it down again.”

  Claire dropped her hair and Ruthie reached over and pulled it up again, a skeptical expression on her face. Her eyebrows were hairless black swathes, painted into a lurid arch above each eye. Claire wondered if they smeared when her face got wet, though she didn’t dare ask.

  “We’re going for post-punk, post-feminist baby whore,” Ruthie said almost angrily, as if Claire were wrecking her video.

  “Post-feminist?” asked Claire, but Ruthie didn’t explain. Instead, she turned and pushed her way out of the sheets and howled Jason’s name.

  Methodically, Claire removed her own bracelets, the ones she wore every day, two from one wrist, three from the other; each was different but also essentially the same, composed, alternately, of silver or colorful yarn. When she was done she tucked them into the pocket of her jeans, which sat folded up on a chair. Beyond the sheets, Andre and Ruthie were arguing about whether there should be a bottle of beer in the shot or not. They had gone to high school together, some exclusive private school in Edina, and the way they talked was like husband and wife, in equal parts worn down and enraged by the other’s opinions.

  Claire played with the bow on the front of her outfit, trying to get it to sit straight, and then gave up and began toying with her hair again, glumly attempting to make it stay in a formation fitting of a music-video babe. When she had bleached her hair the month before, she had intended it to seem ironic, though standing here now she realized she was not the kind of woman who could pull off ironic hair. Ruthie was that kind of woman. And what kind of woman was Claire? A big farm girl, she thought immediately, remembering what David had once said.

  “Okay,” Ruthie said, pushing through th
e sheets, invigorated from having won her argument with Andre. She studied Claire. “I’m thinking your hair is good that way, but now mess it all up. Make it look like you just got fucked and fucked.” Together, with bobby pins and hair spray, they set themselves to the task, until it became too complicated for Claire to help and she stood watching Ruthie work in the mirror.

  “Perfect,” she said at last, and parted the wall of sheets so Claire could pass through without disturbing her exquisitely disheveled hair.

  “Over here,” Andre ordered from behind a very bright light. His hand appeared, directing her to the bed.

  Afterward, she didn’t ride home in the van with them, deciding to walk back to Andre’s house instead, relieved to be alone after a long day of writhing on the hot bed. It was nearly seven by the time she left, the sun slanting against the industrial brick buildings she passed. They seemed impenetrable from the street, aside from one in which a garage door gaped open, revealing a loud generator humming inside. She passed a shoe store and a dry cleaner and then came to a series of blocks that she drove past each day on her way to work. Most were lit with white Christmas lights and filled with pretty silk pillows and wineglasses arranged into pyramids and cutlery set up on gorgeous tables, as if someone were about to sit down to dinner. In between these stores, she noticed the darker, quieter places that she hadn’t been able to identify driving past, tiny used bookstores and antique stores and a wig shop that had a window display in which half of the dusty mannequins were bald.

  She walked slowly, lulled by the warm evening. She used to wander in this aimless way a few years before, when she’d first moved to Minneapolis and started college, before she met David. She liked to look into the houses as she passed, seeing whatever she could see—people eating dinner, talking on the phone, watching TV. Sometimes she struck up conversations with people she met along the way, innocent and curious, stupid and at ease. Once she met a man who asked her if she was working and she took it to mean did she have a job, though it soon became apparent that what he really wanted to know was whether she was a prostitute. “No,” she’d said and run away, instantly terrified. She thought of that from time to time, about what if she’d said yes. About how a single word could change everything and how other words could change nothing at all.

  She entered a café a couple of blocks from Andre’s house, not yet wanting to return to see either her housemates or her unpacked room. The café was filled with worn-down but comfortable chairs and low tables smattered with magazines. She ordered a cup of chamomile tea and sat down with it, setting it on a table nearby. After a few minutes, she took a sip of the tea, though it was still too hot, and then set it loudly back on its plate. There was a man sitting across the room from her, gazing into the screen of his laptop. It took her a moment to realize who it was.

  “Andre,” she called.

  “Hey.” He closed his computer, thin as ice, and carried it with him to her table. “Did you have fun today?”

  “Yeah. It was a new experience.” She gestured to the chair beside her.

  “I’m glad you found this place,” Andre said, sitting down. “It’s kind of our second home—the housemates.” Even when he said the most ordinary things, he spoke in a way that seemed to contain both mockery and a flirty sweetness that Claire found insulting and appealing in equal, oscillating measure.

  She took a careful sip from her cup. “I like the song.”

  “The song?”

  “In the video. It’s good.”

  He gave a private, disparaging snort. “It’s our biggest hit to date.” He paused, like he might tell her something about it, but then he shifted in his chair. “You know, I realized I think I know the town where you’re from. I think my cousin has a cabin there.”

  “Probably. Lots of people have cabins on the lakes.”

  “His name is Doug Reed.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever heard of him. I don’t know too many of the city people, except for their faces.” Talking with Andre about it, she had the feeling that Midden was suddenly like her old apartment with David—so far off, so far in her past that it seemed preposterous that she’d had any relationship to it at all.

  “Do you go up there often—to see your parents?”

  She nodded and then contradicted herself. “Not too often. Not anymore.” She reached up and twiddled the sharp points of her rhinestone necklace. Ruthie had seen it on her the night before and insisted she wear it in the video. “My mom died last spring, actually.”

  “Oh my God,” he said in an exaggerated voice, as if she’d told him something more scandalous than sad. “I can’t even imagine.”

  “I can’t either,” she said, and then smiled to lighten the tone.

  “What about your dad?” Andre asked.

  “He’s—gone,” she answered, rolling Bruce and her real father into one for the sake of simplicity.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said, hushed, reverent now.

  “Thanks,” said Claire, realizing that Andre thought her father was dead. Though she hadn’t meant that, she didn’t bother to correct him. As a child she’d often wished that Karl had been dead. Not out of any kind of rancor, but instead so that she could have a place for him, a story that explained why things had gone the way they had. In her fantasy he had been a fireman, killed on the job.

  “You’re so strong,” Andre said, staring at her with awe.

  “I don’t know if that’s true. I just—”

  “You are,” he insisted, more fervently now.

  A brittle, sealed-off joy rattled through her, as if, in truth, she was perfectly fine with the death of her mother and the alleged death of her father, as if she really were incredibly strong, but only shy about admitting it. She looked down at the table, at her hands, which had gone completely numb. This same thing happened to her whenever she was extremely nervous or excited, whenever, in the past, she’d been about to mount a stage to collect an award or give a speech. She willed herself to stop feeling this now, but the more she tried, the more nervous or excited and numb she became. She’d never done this before—basked in the glory of her mother’s death, of her own orphan story. It felt dirty and cruel and yet also like a complete relief, as if her grief really had passed away from her entirely now, as if her life was only a story that she could hold up for display.

  With great concentration, she picked up her cup with both her hands and finished the last of her tea and set it carefully back on its plate. “Are you going home now?”

  Together they left the café. The streets seemed different now that she was on them with Andre. It was nearly nine and the air had cooled. After they’d gone a block, Andre took her hand and they continued on as if nothing was different, though everything between them, in that gesture, had changed. By the time they approached their house, Claire had laced her fingers into the waistline of his shorts, her knuckles brushing against a tiny patch of his skin as he walked. She led him into the backyard so they could enter through the back door and ascend the dark stairway to her room undetected. When they were there, she turned and kissed him without switching the lights on.

  “I’m breaking my rule,” he said, stepping away from her.

  “What rule?”

  He reached out and undid the zipper of her jeans. “The rule about not sleeping with my tenants.”

  “I thought we were housemates,” she said coquettishly, and pulled her shirt over her head and stepped out of her jeans and stood before him in her bra and underwear. He looked at her earnestly, as if he were truly pained by the sight of her, as if he hadn’t been rolling around with her in a bed simulating sex only a few hours before. They grabbed onto each other and kissed while she removed his clothes.

  “I have a condom,” he whispered after several minutes. They were lying on the mattress by then, which still sat on the floor near the boxes she hadn’t had time to unpack. She watched Andre as he found his shorts on the floor and took his wallet from them and extricated the condom. When he rip
ped it open, she laughed raucously, as if she were drunk.

  “What’s so funny?” he asked, rolling the condom on.

  “Nothing,” she said, and laughed again. The feeling she had for him now was the same as the feeling she’d had all day. It was not so much sexual as it was good-natured, and not so much good-natured as it was unavoidable, as if their connection was nothing more than that of two children who’d been introduced and then forced into the backyard to play.

  “I don’t usually do this,” he said, hovering over her. She kissed him again and then rolled over onto her stomach and he pushed into her. She felt a searing half happiness while her chin rubbed rhythmically against the blanket, though another part of her traveled ahead to the next day. How she would hide in her room until she was sure Andre had left the house, empty and depressed and remorseful as she tried to make sense of her boxes of things.

  Andre came with a moan and then momentarily collapsed on top of her.

  “Do you want me to make you come?” he asked, his breath so close to her ear that she shuddered. She twisted around and saw the edge of his face, phantomlike and girlish in the pale streetlights that streamed in through the windows.

  “I came,” she lied, and squirmed out from beneath him. She wandered around the room finding her clothes, putting them on piece by piece while he lay on the mattress. She tried to seem carefree and dignified, sexy and bright as she dressed, in case he was watching her, but then she saw that he’d fallen asleep.