The Female Persuasion

  “It must be a burden to you to be the most important person to people who aren’t all that important to you,” he said.

  “I’m not sure I agree with your interpretation. I get a lot from them too, remember.”

  “What do you get?” he asked. “I’m curious.”

  “Well, they keep me in the world,” she said, and that was all she wanted to say.

  He wondered who Faith Frank opened up to. She had her friends, those old women from the old days, including Bonnie, the lesbian with the frizzy hair, and Evelyn, the society lady in her suits the colors of Pez. They were intimates of Faith’s, he knew; they’d all been photographed together back in a completely different time. Emmett had a sudden memory of a picture of Faith and the others sprawled around an office. The place looked hectic, messy, busy. But the thing he recalled most was how happy Faith looked among those women, how relaxed and content.

  Suddenly Emmett wondered why Faith hadn’t found a man to be with her all these years, after having been widowed so young. Why did a strong woman need to be her own shield? Or maybe that was just the way Faith wanted it, because men were a distraction, or too high-maintenance. Or maybe having a man in her life was just one thing too many. He and Faith might have loved each other, he thought now when it was much, much too late.

  “I’ve done everything wrong!” he said, not able to keep this to himself.

  “What?” Faith looked alarmed at the outburst.

  “I could have loved you,” he said. “I could have done that, Faith. We could have complemented each other. We both live these oversized, sort of ridiculous lives. The sex would’ve been a release, and a revelation. And all the conversations afterward. I would’ve made you scrambled eggs in the middle of the night. I make good middle-of-the-night scrambled eggs; I bet you didn’t know that. But I screwed everything up, and now you think I’m awful.”

  She stood facing him, still clearly shocked but recovering, one hand lightly massaging her neck for a moment. All she said, finally, was, “I don’t think that.”

  It was getting late, and he would need to go home soon. His car and driver were waiting, and later he and Faith would lie in their separate beds, in which there was plenty of room for another person if they so chose, which tonight they wouldn’t. They were older and they had to carefully mete out intimacy. Emmett slid the box back to where it had been; this box that had held the gifts that Faith had been given by the people in her life she’d known or met and had affected as she went through—the people she could sometimes barely keep track of—but it didn’t matter if she couldn’t keep track, because she felt tenderly toward them all, and they knew it.

  Emmett tried to picture what kind of gift he might give Faith to show her how he felt. He couldn’t imagine what he could possibly give her—what would have meaning and resonance. But then he realized he did know, for he’d already done it. He’d given her a foundation.

  THIRTEEN

  Cory Pinto came up with the idea for his video game not in one burst, but over a number of years. He didn’t even know he’d been imagining a video game all that time; he just thought of himself as someone who played a lot of actual video games while intermittently thinking heavily and obsessively about losing his brother. But a combination of playing and obsessing eventually made him see what had been inside him. So the story for the game, when it revealed itself, arrived nearly fully formed.

  For a long time he’d been periodically preoccupied by the idea that when someone you loved died, you could spend the rest of your life searching the world for that person and yet you would never, ever find him or her, no matter how many obscure places you went to, no matter how many caves you slipped into, or curtains you parted, or houses you entered. The dead person truly no longer existed, and while as a matter of science this fact seemed so simple, it was unaccountably hard to accept it when the person was someone you loved.

  But the thing was, after someone you loved died, the people you still could see—a.k.a., the living—might occasionally almost seem to be the person you longed for. There would be a startle of similarity, a flash of familiar head-shape or squirt of laughter, and you would whip around so hard, only to find a person who was not in fact the right person at all. And then you had to wonder: why did this kid in front of you, this stranger whose laugh was so unsubtle, whose expression was coarse, get to be alive while your little brother didn’t?

  And yet, maybe if you really did search hard enough and far enough, you could eventually find the person you were looking for. Maybe, maybe, Alby was still somewhere in the world, over three years after his death. Maybe the secret truth about death is that dead people are whisked away from their current lives and forced to live somewhere else far away—a process similar to reincarnation but taking place not in the future but now. A sort of mortality-based witness protection program. And if you found them they would look the same as they always had. If only you knew where to find them. If only you knew where to look.

  This was the premise of Cory’s game. He himself felt childlike in his inability to accept Alby’s death. Of course, in all the important ways, he did accept it, because he wasn’t mentally fragile like his mother; and he was able to socialize and have a drink and a conversation about subjects other than death, and he was able to actually interact well with customers and other employees at Valley Tek in crunchy Northampton, twenty-five minutes from Macopee. The store was a seemingly mellow but demanding place. Customers’ attachment to their computers was primal and urgent. They rushed in carrying their laptops like people at the vet cradling injured or sick animals.

  “How can I help you?” Cory would gently ask.

  “It just crashed! Right in the middle of an unbelievably important project.”

  “Have you backed everything up?”

  “Well, no, not recently.” Then, defensively, “I couldn’t have known it would crash.”

  “Let’s have a look.” Cory would go into the workshop in the back with this pliant and willing machine that had no say in the matter. What ailed it in the end was that it was a machine. You could bring it to life a few times, or even many times, but eventually you knew that the customer would have to abandon and replace it, and you would be the one to help facilitate that.

  It was through the store that Cory became familiar with the online gaming community, which of course wasn’t really one community, but an astoundingly large and amorphous aggregate of people in separate homes and different time zones around the world who enjoyed playing video games day and night. Sometimes a few people from work played Dota 2 as a team from their separate homes. And after work once a week the employees at the store gathered at the nearby apartment of burly Logan Berryman, thirty years old, who in addition to being the head tech person at Valley Tek and a programmer was part of the not-insignificant contra dance community that had sprung up around the Pioneer Valley.

  Logan and his girlfriend Jen lived on the upper floor of a house on Fruit Street with their fiddles, their cat, and canisters of bee pollen that stood in gleaming granularity on the kitchen counter. Relaxing there in the evening, the Valley Tek crew—Logan, Halley Beatty, Peter Wong, and now Cory—drank beer and with bared teeth popped edamame beans from their hairy little pods, and then they all played Counter-Strike for a couple of happy hours.

  Logan and Jen’s actual, physical world, the progressive world of Northampton, Massachusetts, home of Smith College, consisted of college professors and psychiatrists and various lesbian couples, as well as coffee shops and mixed-breed dogs wearing bandannas, and kids who looked like runaways, though half of them were the children of professors and psychiatrists—lost teenagers who slunk back into their book-filled homes at night in time for bed. It was a world that was sexually enlightened and supposedly egalitarian. In Logan and Jen’s apartment as the sun set, the women and men played lustily and freely. It was like an equal-opportunity dream, whereas Cory knew the online worl
d of gaming was studded with full-throated hate. Women were harassed and threatened constantly in that world, a miniaturized version of the real world. Cory had seen the illiterate screeds that trolls had written on message boards, like “I’D LIKE TO CHOP OFF YOU’RE HEAD AND YOU’RE TWAT.” As Greer had once said to Cory long ago, after she’d met Faith Frank and turned her attention to feminism, “I tell myself that the language of chopping off body parts is code for: I don’t know what to do about this rage I feel.”

  He imagined being here in this apartment with Greer beside him; there would be the stirring sensation of just knowing that these other people thought of them as a couple. He had the sudden, related thought that if Greer were part of a couple down in New York, dating or hooking up at length or however else she described it to herself, maybe the guy had wooed her with stories of combating misogyny. That would be a good way to get through to Greer. The idea flickered inside Cory briefly, then went away. He had no way to get through to her now, nor she to him. The more you were not with a person, the more your lives diverged. Cory could barely understand how people who hadn’t known each other early on in life could ever form a couple. The older you got, the more you developed specific peculiarities. A woman would have to be willing to absorb his circumstances. He was a grown man, after all, who lived with his mother.

  Whenever anyone asked Cory about his living arrangements, he didn’t say, “I live with my mom,” a sentence that might have a Norman Bates–y quality to it. He said, instead, “I live at home.” In the year 2014, as the economy had mostly recovered, living at home didn’t necessarily mean one thing or another.

  He couldn’t stay out too late tonight because he had to go home and cook dinner for his mother and settle her in before bed, not that he was going to announce why he had to leave. Maybe they would think he had somewhere to go, a woman to meet. He was a handsome man; he knew that about himself. But in fact the last woman he’d been involved with had been much earlier. Of all people, it had been Kristin Vells. Kristin had been just someone he was aware of on Woburn Road for so long that he had ceased thinking of her as a real person. She was simply someone to whom he and Greer had always felt superior. She had hazily occupied the role of Dumb Girl Who Lives on Our Street. But then when Greer fell out of Cory’s life, and Kristin was living at home and working at Pie Land, Cory would go to the pizza place sometimes in the late afternoon as the day sank into a violet-gray funk.

  When he walked in, he would sit and have a slice, and if Kristin was there they would engage in a monosyllabic conversation that might or might not finally flower into the polysyllabic. This went on for a while. One day he was there at closing time, and he and Kristin left together, walking back up the street with bodies close, which was interesting in its newness. Kristin Vells had a well-formed body, and the fragrance of dough rose up from it like a sweet breeze from an open window.

  “You want to come over?” he boldly asked this woman who had once been three reading groups below him. The beauty of adulthood was that reading groups did not matter! Or at least they did not insure against anything. You could be in the top reading group of everyone in the world, the alpha Puma among Pumas, and still it would not protect you from your brother dying, or your father leaving, or the person you loved no longer being in your life.

  Kristin went with Cory into his house for the first time ever, though they had lived on that same block for such a long time. He remembered the day that Greer had first come here, nearly two decades earlier. Walking into someone’s house was like entering their body. You saw what they were made of, and what they had been stewing in all this time.

  His mother was sitting in front of the TV when he appeared with Kristin. “Ma, you need anything?” he asked her, and she looked up from the recliner that she often sat in during the day.

  “I’m fine, Cory,” she said, but she squinted uneasily at Kristin. “Who is this girl?”

  “Kristin from down the block,” Kristin offered. “The Vellses?”

  “With the garden gnomes?”

  “That’s us. But actually they’re gone. Someone stole them a while back.”

  Cory took Kristin upstairs to his room and shut the door. Being there with her, he was forced to compare her with Greer. Here was a replacement woman, a far less interesting model but a woman too, fragrant and female, someone who knew what life was like here in Macopee and wouldn’t question why Cory chose “to live this way.” Plus, she had a plush mouth, the lower lip bisected into two little cushions. They smoked a joint, which was the only way to manage this moment. Weed had become more of a condiment in his life not long after his brief adventures in heroin with Cousin Sab. Smoking a joint took the edge off, whereas snorting heroin had taken the side off, as if in a tornado, and was to be avoided forever.

  So Cory and Kristin smoked silently together, and then he looked up and saw her suddenly perched above him like a construction crane. He lifted himself slowly toward her, their faces colliding. When her mouth opened, she smelled smoky and rusty, as if there was a taint of blood in there somewhere. While kissing Kristin Vells, Cory realized that sexual arousal came in different strengths, different concentrations, but beyond that the body didn’t judge who it was kissing. It had been so long since he had kissed anyone at all.

  “You were such a fucking little sissy when you were a kid,” Kristin said after the kiss ended and they pulled apart and observed each other. “With your neat little clothes. Did your mom iron your shirts all that time? You always looked so neat. So clean. Like, Mama’s boy.”

  “Yep. And now I iron her clothes. Quid pro quo.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  He couldn’t think of anything more for them to talk about then, so instead of talking he eased himself on top of her, using all the strength and interest he could gather.

  They remained entangled for a full month—a month in which they smoked weed and lay in bed for a dazzling number of hours. One day as they lay there, the room was suddenly flooded with light and there was a bang, and Cory looked up to see his short mother standing in the doorway. “I’m constipated,” Benedita announced.

  “Oh, give me a fucking break,” said Kristin quietly.

  “Cory, can you get me the Dulcolax? I look around and I can’t find it.”

  “Yeah, Ma, hold on a sec,” he said.

  His mother retreated, shuffling away. She had become a shuffler over the years; by now he was so used to the sound of her purple slippers on the floors of the house that it was almost soothing to him, as if it were a fire snapping in a hearth. But Kristin looked at Cory with proprietary anger, and he absorbed it and was angry right back at her, for she had no dominion over him, and why would she think she did?

  “How gross that your mom tells you her personal things like that,” she said.

  “Yeah, well, she’s got no one else to tell it to.”

  “I live with my mom too, but she tells me jackshit. Which is the way I like it.”

  Cory shrugged, wanted her gone. Caring for his mother had become part of his job, his way of being. He managed her life, made it no more painful than it had to be. He didn’t want Kristin intruding on that part; she was meant to ignore it, not comment on it. But here she was complaining, pointing it out, offering her opinions, and now everything that had been briefly erotic about Kristin Vells—the tiny tattoo of a doghouse on her ankle, and her long, well-cared-for hair and willing mouth—became a source of revulsion. Cory was now uninterested in everything that had to do with this person, because she had overstepped her bounds and also insulted his mother. Or, more than that, insulted his mother and him. What they were to each other. No, she had just insulted him.

  “Kristin, I gotta get up,” he said. When he was around her, he found himself speaking like someone he wasn’t. Gotta. Hafta.

  “So, what, Cory, you’re pissed at me because I was grossed out about your mom and h
er constipation?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Fuck you, Pinto.”

  “Yeah, well, okay, that’s so sweet of you to say.”

  He stood and found his pants, then his shirt, and had never been so relieved to get dressed. But Kristin wasn’t moving. She lay in his bed and just took her time. She smoked a cigarette, she flipped around the dial to see what was on TV, and actually settled on a rerun of Boy Meets World, from which he had gotten his name. He had watched this episode, in which Cory quits his school’s production of Hamlet after finding out he has to wear tights, multiple times when he was young, absorbing how all-American it was, feeling so excited by that aspect. He wished he could trade in the name Cory for Duarte now; he was ready to have that be him, except for the fact that it was his father’s name too, and that brought out another set of feelings entirely. Kristin took the remote control and raised the volume. She was planning to watch the whole show, he knew.

  You take your time, Kristin, he thought, and he went off to find the Dulcolax. It was exactly where he had visualized it: on a bathroom shelf half-hidden by an ancient, cloudy bottle of something called Jean Naté After Bath Splash. He grabbed the Dulcolax and brought it to his mother.

  After Kristin left that day, she and Cory became unspoken enemies. Seeing her on the street as she walked to Pie Land, he would give a grudging wave but she would simply make a guttural sound, like, Are you kidding me? and keep walking. Soon he stopped waving. Now he was not only Greerless, he was also Kristinless.