Maybe I did. The previous spring I'd been briefly inhabited by the ghost of Roger Burke, sneaked around the whole semester, cheated on Constance every chance I got. The hate in me was huge, but I had always wanted happiness for Constance, still did, years later, when a thick cream envelope arrived in the mail, the names of her mother and father in fancy ink in the corner. Maybe getting hitched wasn't the most Marxist thing to do, but she had found somebody she loved enough to hire a calligrapher. I tossed out the envelope unopened, didn't need to know, for example, the name of the groom, or the wedding site. I had no intention of seeing these people again until I could boast of an accomplishment beyond my failed attempt to sell wallet-ready oil portraits of people's children online. Yes, this had been my home business.
Everything went off, went bad, or so I told myself, though I knew my crucial role in the spoilage. I had skipped my last meeting with Sayuri Kuroki behind Scissor Kicks. Even then I could feel myself doing the dumb thing, as though I wanted to guarantee I had memories to haunt me, feared I might lack a good reason to wince. I should never have worried. I could still picture Sayuri standing there near the Dumpster in her denim jacket, fiddling with the scrunchies on her wrist, maybe worried I'd been knocked off my BMX by a lumber truck. Though maybe she never reached the rendezvous, either.
Constance, I'd just turned abruptly away from her, seeing something better in whatever Lena's adulterous hunger could deliver. I'd almost let Maura drift off a few times, too, before Bernie reversed the inertia. We'd been together off and on for ten years, Maura and I, had tried very hard not to be the love of each other's life. It was like the stupid movie, without the cute bits.
Not one of the cute bits, for instance, was the night we had a foursome with that lascivious couple whose Greenpoint loft, perhaps because of the hillocks of cocaine on the coffee table, we found ourselves the last to leave. After some preliminary dialogue that wanted so much to parody the clunky verbal vamping of vintage porn, but had veered into grim, jaw-grinding consequentiality, Maura and the other woman had stripped and entangled themselves on the bed, all pinches and strokes and theatrical licks. Even through the fog of powders and booze, the sight of them aroused me and I turned to grin at the other guy. He smiled back, held up a palm for a louche, almost Wonderlandish high five. I shoved my tongue in his mouth. Really, I just meant to be friendly, to complement the writhings beneath us, complete the servicing circuit, but suddenly it seemed I'd broken the sacred swinger's code.
"What the fuck," the guy said. He pulled away, wiped his lips. Then he stuck himself in my wife, glared as he pumped.
"I'm not into that," he said. "You had no right."
I crawled off to the coffee table, decided then and there I had no fondness for Greenpoint.
So, things hadn't always been perfect, or even hygienic, but Maura was my love. I wanted to ravish almost every woman I saw on the street, regardless of age or body type, but if I ever did picture myself not married to Maura, never did another woman hove into view, just a taxing still-life: a handle of chilled domestic vodka and sick-making amounts of Korean barbecue.
But now I kept thinking of Constance and Lena, those early confusions. I got up and made my tipsy way to Maura's desktop. I'd kept tabs on Lena before. She taught painting at a state school in Connecticut now, must have been near retirement. I hadn't run a search on Constance lately. Soon I had a photograph of her up on my screen. I'd entered-the invasive quality of the word was not lost on me-the website of an elite girl's academy in New England where Constance served as headmaster.
She looked older, of course, glancing up from her tidy and morally instructive escritoire, her pigtails gone, her still-black hair shorn with sour elegance. It was hard to detect the plump, glowing, self-righteous coed in this dour professional. I had no doubt she was still a feminist. Marxist was debatable. But maybe she was waking up the rich girls to the crimes of their kin. Wasn't there a tradition of that in such places? She did look wiser, happier. But I grieved for her lost radiance, which is just to say I was weeping for myself again.
Lena was another story. Lena shook me with old shame. Lena was another name for my failure to become what I'd once believed I already was. But tonight, strangely, when I thought of her, a different face floated past, a background ghost.
It was one of the last times Lena had visited my campus studio, a corrugated shed near the biology labs. The room got good light, but whenever I opened a window the stench of burnt rats wafted in. Often I'd light a cigarette, let it smolder for the stink, but this day Lena stood there smoking, studied my canvases.
I'd gone in a new direction. It hadn't turned out well, but I thought there was an idea there, a gesture, I could salvage. I'd be graduated in a month, was headed into the savage, supercilious world. This was my last shot at an uncompromised critique. Though of course it would be compromised. But only by lust.
Still, who knew? It was easy to forget Lena was also an artist, that she hadn't been put on earth just to mentor me. She made it easy to forget. She didn't linger in her past, and her triumphs were in her past.
"Thoughts?" I said. "Feelings? Pangs?"
Lena stood with her hand on her head, cigarette between her fingers. She singed her hair often this way.
"I think you've lost your mind, Milo."
"Shit, really?"
"No, not really. Finally. You were close, but now you've gone crazy. Controlled crazy. They're funny and sly, like always, but they've got this turmoil now, too. A newfound urgency. God, listen to me. That stuff in the corner, is it wax?"
"Rubber cement. Treated. I treated it."
"Treated it with what?"
"Trade secret."
"For what will you trade the secret?" said Lena, put her cigarette in my ceramic frog ashtray, and slid her hand into my shirt.
"I thought we weren't going to do this anymore."
"Do what?"
"We weren't going to… Oh, fuck you."
"We weren't going to fuck me?"
While we made love on the paint-caked workbench, I watched the cigarette burn in the clay lip of the frog. Why couldn't she just crush the damn thing out? The smoke curled up to the cement ceiling and Lena had an orgasm, or some approximation thereof, and I pulled out, spilled myself on her belly and the tails of her striped button-down shirt, a man's shirt, maybe her husband's. It felt good to do that, like that eureka moment when a child discovers just how, precisely, to be a shit. Lena's face flushed and she blew at her bangs. There was something sulky, unlikable, about that upgust of breath, but I couldn't pin it down. I had the sense I couldn't pin it down because I was too young, and suddenly felt my youth as a form of impotence. I snatched Lena's wrist, turned her toward my paintings.
"Now," I said. "Tell me true."
"I already told you, Milo. I don't lie about this stuff. I'm not that desperate."
"I think you are."
"You little bastard."
"Please, Lena. Who's going to tell me?"
I could see her soften. I was just a dumb, scared boy. I was also a demon, junior precious division. Lena lit another cigarette, sank into a squat.
"I don't know, Milo," she said. "You have talent. It doesn't seem to be outrageous talent, but who knows about these things."
"Compare me to Billy Raskov."
"I don't do that."
"Sure you do."
"Okay, fine. I know you think you're a better artist than Billy Raskov, but you're just a better draftsman. That's something. But there are mentally handicapped people who draw and paint with far more technical skill than either of you. So, like I always say, it all comes down to how much you need to inflict yourself on the world. You're good enough. If you kiss the right ass, you could certainly make a career. Get some shows. Teach. Like me, for instance. I'm not a failure. I'm in a very envied position. You have some big-dick fairy-tale idea of the art world, so you don't understand this yet, but hanging in, surviving, so you can keep working, that's all there is. Sure, there are stars, most of them hacks, who make silly amounts of money, but for the rest of us, it's just endurance, perdurance. Do you have the guts to perdure? To be dismissed by some pissant and keep coming? To be dumped by your gallerist? To scramble for teaching gigs? It's not very glamorous. Is this what you want? You're good enough for it. You're not the new sensation, but you're good enough to get by. But you have to be strong. And petty. That's really the main thing. Are you petty enough? Are you game? Are you ready to screw me again? You must be."