Black Iris (7 page)

Nothing was different after that. It was still the three of us, always.

At stores Blythe and I modeled clothes for Armin and he flashed his glossy AmEx at the register. He had a sterling silver money clip with two discs embossed on it, like an eclipse. The Umbra logo. Blythe refused his gifts; I didn’t. He loved seeing me in things he’d bought. I loved it, too. I learned to read him just as well, which dresses made his eyes go soft and gauzy. Blythe would always be prettier than me but I had something she never would: vulnerability. When I slipped into girlish frilly things and donned my solemn, wide-eyed pout, Armin looked at me as if nothing else existed. When his back was turned Blythe and I slipped into dressing rooms together and stuffed trinkets beneath our clothes: tubes of gaudy lipstick, garish charm bracelets. The tackier and costlier, the better. We didn’t even want them. In the cab on the way home we’d toss them out the windows, laughing. Armin bought me everything I wanted and Blythe destroyed everything I wanted to destroy.

The second time I kissed Armin, on the spiral staircase, I had one hand behind my back, my fingers knit with Blythe’s. When I told them my dorm assignment fell through, Armin was the first to suggest I become Blythe’s roommate. Donnie scored some X from my dealer back home and I offered it to my new friends, and Armin refused but Blythe, of course, didn’t. Armin wouldn’t leave our sides that night. He was worried someone would take advantage, not realizing we were
the predators. He slow-danced with me up in the Aerie, my cheek against his chest, a disco ball spinning out a field of stars. I breathed in his pine scent and ran a hand over the thick ropes of muscle in his back while Blythe sat in the lounge, watching us. That night I caught them arguing. They thought I was in the bathroom but I was standing behind a tall couple, listening. Blythe’s unmistakable accent cut through the crowd, saying
It’s not the same
and
You can’t punish me forever
. Armin’s mellow voice was lost, but when I stepped out I saw her hand on his chest, knotted in his shirt. He backed away from her and they became all smiles. The X smoothed the abrasions over, and later Armin watched me dance with Blythe, her body light against mine, her hand curled softly at the nape of my neck. When we stepped apart I stood in the silhouette of her smell, a sweet girl musk, blackberry and vanilla, and I felt dizzy and buoyant like something in me was rising and rising, endlessly. All I wanted to do was follow it higher.

Dawn broke as we walked to the beach. I lay in the sand between them, our arms linked.

“I love you guys,” I said, then felt dumb and cliché, so I added, “I really do.”

Blythe laughed. “You are fucking high.”

“Yeah, but I mean it.”

I rolled my legs, relishing the prickle of sand against my calves, and the hot pink tongue of the sun lolling over the water, and their skin, so different, Blythe’s silky and cool and Armin’s coarse and warm. Everything was so
real
. As if the life I normally lived was a pale ghost of this one, washed out and numb.

“Delaney,” Armin said, his hand moving over mine, to my dress, my thigh. “You make me feel so alive. What have you done to me?”

“I put a spell on you,” I whispered.

He leaned in. My breathing was out of control, but not for the reason you think. Because while he was focused on me, Blythe had brought my hand to her mouth, her lips brushing my palm, her breath tracing the saliva she left there, and I felt an insane thing surging in me, an upward twisting, all of myself winding with an awful torque that needed immediate release. I kissed Armin, hard, my teeth catching on his lower lip. He kissed me back and pushed me down into the sand. Gold dust rained out of his clothes. The long, hard thigh sliding between mine made me gasp, and he kissed my throat, the delicate swoop of my collarbones, while Blythe’s breath beat like a slow, airy heart against my palm.

That summer it was the three of us. Always, always, always.

Things feel eternal and timeless on X. Seconds or centuries later we lay sprawled in the sand, my legs tangled with his, my arms around her waist, my eyes closed and the sun gilding my body and the whole world golden, bright, and warm.

MARCH, THIS YEAR

I
’m a middle-aged man with an unhealthy attraction to prepubescent girls,” Professor Frawley said.

That got everyone’s attention. Everyone’s but mine.

I let my eyes wander to the windows. Top floor, ten stories above the city, with a view of frozen blue curving along the electric spine of Lake Shore Drive. The sun was falling, making flame-colored creases on the ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
, I thought,
I hold with those who favor fire.
From up here the tiny headlights looked like nerve impulses, a million neurons firing into the darkness.

Advanced Fiction Writing was a semester-long advertisement for Ian Frawley’s shitty novel. Apparently a lot of failed novelists became writing teachers, or writing teachers failed at becoming novelists. Chicken or the egg. We mostly discussed the themes of Frawley’s book—white middle-class academic suffers midlife crisis, has affairs with younger women (which Blythe would’ve undoubtedly called “Updike-wannabe sexist crap”)—then, occasionally, our own work. I was writing a novel called
Black Iris
, about a woman who kills herself and leaves a note for her teenage daughter, and how the daughter carries the note around without ever having read it.

“Why doesn’t she read it?” Frawley had asked, intrigued.

I could only shake my head.

“Work on motivation,” he said. “Behavior is deterministic. There’s always a cause.”

Prick, I’d thought. But he was right.

Now Frawley leaned against his desk, his trim, svelte frame clad in an Italian suit. Early forties, married, but with a foxish Petyr Baelish smile that said he slept with his students, the younger the better.

“I’ve got a plan,” he continued. “I’ve rented a room from a widow and her twelve-year-old daughter. The mother is interested in me, but it’s the girl I want. I live with them for months. I insinuate myself into their lives, earn their trust, their adoration. They both fall in love with me. But I’m only in love with one of them. When the opportunity arises, I remove the mother from the picture. Now it’s just me and the girl. What is age but a number? I take her on a road trip, a tour of the finest roadside diners and motels America has to offer. I buy her anything her heart desires. We make love. We’re crazy about each other, and it doesn’t matter that I’m three times her age. It doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks.”

The class watched him nervously, some of them evidently finding
Lolita
more true crime than fiction.

“She initiated sex the first time. She wasn’t a virgin. She enjoys making love, though maybe not as much as comic books and candy. If I have to trade her toys for sex, well, it’s no different from most marriages.” Uneasy titters from the class. “And if she calls me a brute and an ape, well, I’m tall, dark, and handsome, though unfortunately rather hirsute. Sometimes she cries herself to sleep because she misses her dead mother. It’s not that I’m afraid she’ll run away. Why would she run? We’re in love. It’s just that she’s a young girl, and young girls play games. She teases me and says she’ll tell the police what I’ve done, so I tease back and threaten to dump her in a home for wayward children. No more toys or candy. How would
you like that, Dolly? Isn’t it better to be with me, to see this beautiful country together? Why must we fight when we love each other so?”

Frawley laced his hands behind his head, raising his eyebrows.

“What do you think, class?” he said. “Are my young paramour and I in love?”

An instant chorus of
no, sicko, pedophile
, etc. Frawley smiled, patronizing.

“Yes, yes. Good. What else am I? Think about it in a literary context.”

Villain, antihero, antagonist
, etc.

He kept smiling, waiting for the right answer. Grudgingly I raised my voice.

“Unreliable narrator,” I said.

Frawley smacked his hands together. “Bingo.”

Everyone looked at me.

“Very good, Ms. Keating.” The professor paced, his voice looping around me. “I haven’t told you the whole story. But you can tell from clues I’ve dropped that something isn’t right. I’m withholding information. I want you to believe a lie.”

He stopped somewhere behind my desk. I didn’t turn.

“A novel with an unreliable narrator is really two stories in one. There’s what the narrator tells us, and there’s the truth. Sometimes they overlap. Sometimes one illuminates the other. Nabokov’s
Lolita
is the example par excellence: Humbert Humbert is so blind with lust and self-justification that he ignores his young victim’s suffering. Desire can be a powerful obfuscating force.

“In the Romantic era, writers would often conflate desire with the concept of the muse. ‘Divine inspiration,’ in the form of a beautiful woman in a toga with one breast bared, or whatever. Robert Graves envisioned the muse as a woman inhabited
by the spirit of a goddess. To love her was to be inspired. To want her was the genesis of art. It blurred the lines between lust and inspiration in a way we’ve always intuitively known they should be blurred, because desire underlies every act of creation. Yes, boys and girls, we’re talking about sex.”

My phone vibrated against my thigh, and I jumped.

“A writer does her best writing when she’s driven by desire. This is why romance is the most popular category in fiction, in the entire literary canon. It’s all romance. They were all writing about it, in one way or another. The great works of art, the religious ecstasies—it’s libido, transmuted to something socially acceptable. Why it was socially acceptable to talk about your passion for God but not a fellow human being is an interesting question. Anyway, in this sense, unreliable narration may be trying to tell us about a desire that can’t be expressed directly, but must be distorted, obscured. Perhaps it’s something the narrator doesn’t fully comprehend. Or perhaps it’s something she understands, but doesn’t yet accept. Ms. Keating, what’s in your head right now?”

Bastard. He’d tricked me into letting my mind drift.

“I don’t know.”

“You do know. Close your eyes. What do you see?”

My head was in a million pieces, in memories, in a moonlit hallway shoved up against a door, in a room where candles threw three shadows against the wall, in a catacomb beneath Umbra where you could scream your heart out without being heard.

“Nothing.”

“You didn’t close your eyes.”

I humored him, if only to get this over with.

“Please. Indulge us.”

This dickbag. I didn’t want to tell him I’d spent most of his stupid class fantasizing about skin. Skin against my hands, my
mouth. Heat. The sun burning through my eyelids, kindling the blood. A fist curled in the sand. All the grains running out, escaping. I kept curling it tighter, trying not to let go, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t hold on.

My eyes opened. The room was dazzlingly bright. I’d said all of that aloud.

“Interesting.” Frawley cocked an eyebrow. “Loss of love is an eternal theme. You may want to explore its subtleties in your work, Ms. Keating. Mr. Teitsch.”

He moved away, leaving me shivering and forgotten in the light.

“Close your eyes, Mr. Teitsch.”

My hands perched on my knees, crooked as claws.

The phone.

One notification: photo with text message. As I looked at it the rest of the room dimmed out like in a movie, a vignette fading in around the screen.

The photo wasn’t the shock. It was tamer than I’d expected. But I could not take my eyes from the words.

My mind was consumed with a single thought.

Run.

At the end of class I darted out the door, sprinting by the time I reached the elevators. I ducked into the stairwell, skipped down three steps at a time in a vaguely guided fall. On the ground floor I hurtled into winter air and ran flat-out along the black granite beach, across the commons where the grass was dull silver and dead gold, up the bridge over Lake Shore Drive and down into the city, banging people’s elbows and hips in my haste and never looking back. It began to rain. My soles slipped on slick asphalt. My lungs burned like an internal combustion engine. At the Red Line station I cut ahead of someone and jumped a turnstile. Shouts rose behind me. I rammed through the crowd on the platform, searching.
Grabbed a blonde’s shoulder and spun her around: a stranger. Every face was wrong. Too late.

At the railing a girl stared down into the street, watching rain fall on the red and black lacquer of Chinatown, the twin pagodas in the distance. She wore a beanie, so I’d missed her at first, but I knew the sun-gold hair framing that face.

I walked up as a train arrived and she didn’t turn around. She’d been standing there awhile, letting them pass.

My body felt like a burned candle wick. I’d spent myself on the mile run. Speech was too difficult. I waited until the L left and touched her coat sleeve.

We hadn’t seen each other in three months. Three months, one week, and four days, to be precise. I could tell you the hour and minute, too. When she turned we both stood there, speechless. This face.
Missing someone is the whetstone that sharpens want
, Mom said once. If it was true, then all that was left of my heart was an edge looping in on itself like a Möbius strip, slicing me up inside.

I breathed her name.

Blythe pulled out her earbuds and touched my cheek with cold fingers. “Are you really here?”

The edged thing that occupied my chest gave a sharp twist.

“We have to talk,” I said. “It’s an emergency.”

Despite this, neither of us moved. I couldn’t look away from her face. Mist lay on her skin in a gossamer film. She looked fey, unreal.

“Come on, then.” She slung her bag over a shoulder, visibly braced herself. One glance at me then no more. “And hide your face.”

I took a Blackhawks cap from my bag and drew it low over my eyes.

We walked through the red arch that said
WELCOME TO CHINATOWN
, crossing wet blacktop scribbled with neon like
leaking paint. Rain hovered midair in a diamond-flecked veil. We lit cigarettes simultaneously and both of us laughed, soft, more like sighs. Behind us the trails of our breath and smoke braided into a double helix.

Blythe picked a restaurant at random and we sat in a vinyl booth under a paper lantern, awkwardly staring at each other’s hands on the tabletop. I stripped off my soaked coat and cap and started shivering. She ordered something, asked where the restrooms were. The server watched us walk in together.

I locked the door. When I turned she took me in her arms.

My eyes shut.

For a long time we didn’t speak. We held fiercely, ribs touching, her heart beating against my breasts, every breath she took echoed by my body. Always falling into each other’s rhythm. I buried my face in her hair and inhaled that dark berry scent, my mind blanking except for her. My shirt was damp, my hair stringy with rain. I didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything.

“God, you smell good,” she said.

“Liar. I’m sweaty. I ran all the way here.”

“I never lie.” She pulled back, put her hands to either side of my face. “Your eyelashes are wet. Like little black petals.”

I lowered them and she pressed her mouth to my eyelids, one after the other.

“I’ve missed you so much,” I said.

Her hands trembled, touching the tiny gold cross at my throat. “I haven’t missed you at all. It’s just that there’s no color in the world anymore, and every sound is the buzzing of flies, and everything tastes like dust.”

Oh, this was dangerous.

I wrenched away and paced the bathroom. Sickly white fluorescence on bone-colored tile. The odor of ammonia and grease. I breathed deep, filling my senses, pushing her out.

“Sweet girl,” she whispered.

I dug my phone out of my pocket. Returned to her and drove her up against the door. Not sweet now, our old vicious selves returning.

Her eyes bounced rapidly between mine and the screen. Then lingered on the screen. Then returned to me, slower.

“Who sent this?”

“I don’t know.” I slammed my phone against the door, not caring if it cracked. It slipped and spun across the floor, faceup, the damning photo blazing. The three of us, seen grainily through an apartment window. My shirt was off. Just a black bra and their hands on my skin. His hands, and hers. The bloodied shirt wasn’t even in the frame but it didn’t matter. The words said it all.

I SAW YOU
.

My hands knotted in Blythe’s hoodie, nails meeting flesh. “I don’t fucking know who. But someone saw us.
And they know.
”