EFFIGY GIRL

Fiction By Ivy Wolk

The haunting started in Rudy’s Fort Greene loft when I was keyed up and much too alert for the hour, looking and listening in a way that was dangerous for me, and I found myself consumed by a feeling that hadn’t had access to my spirit in forever, putting a faraway but familiarly acrid taste in the back of my mouth. Rudy and Patrick were wrestling on the floor to the tune of an MGMT album and I was sitting with Ike on the couch, staring at Robbie who was on a beanbag to my right, and Corinne who sat in a chair across from me. Robbie and I were hooking up, and Robbie and Corinne were also hooking up, and this was the first time the three of us as a unit were put together in a setting fit for audible conversation since the night she was briefly introduced to me in the loudest and darkest bar ever a few weeks prior. A tacit agreement was made to keep it cute and tight (Robbie’s shifty feet and sweaty palms practically demanded this from me, and I would’ve turned inward so hard that it hurt just to see him breathe easier) so we passed a gram around over beers while the surrounding cast pretended not to know that she and I were obviously sleeping with the same man. It was generous of them to behave like all was well and good and copacetic, because I truly could’ve copped an indecent exposure charge based on the noxious energy of “NEWLY OFT-FUCKED AND RUMINATING ON IT” that I radiated before Robbie’s tight-lipped anxiety brought me back down to earth. The coyness about it, the pussy-footing of it all, sort of unsettled me. I was tempted to make a meal out of the absurdity I felt in front of everybody but couldn’t identify my angle. How could we all be so flippant? When in Rome, I guess… I adjusted my outward demeanor to suit the temperature of the room, but really, getting to observe her so up close now made me sweat. I’d only ever seen her blackout drunk or nearing it but tonight she was performing this charming and cool disaffection that managed to never veer into total apathy or spook, a balance I could bet you every woman in her orbit was jealous of. She appeared somehow to be both utterly bored and endlessly curious. I wanted to hate her so badly, to ignore her until my neglect drove her crazy, but I was so fascinated that I just couldn’t. I wanted to toss her around like a ragdoll. I wanted to slice her down the center and see what was going on inside. I imagined that her lungs and liver were miraculously squeaky clean despite her heavy substance intake, her stomach and intestines completely empty and slicked only with bile and the acid of starvation. Her heart was probably sweet and child-sized just like everything on the outside of her was, and I could see it wheezing inside her chest from stimulant-induced exhaustion. From shoulder to ankle she was speckled with feathery sun-bleached lanugo and like a hundred little gray bruises, each no bigger than a thumb print. She looked like a clubbed baby seal. I realized upon finally seeing her in decent lighting that she was really not that pretty at all, but rather sort of rodential in her essence. But “pretty” doesn’t quite matter, I thought, when one has the indelible stains of SEX and GUMPTION on their side. She gave a fuck about falling apart. The thrill of Corinne was that she could probably drop dead in a heap at any second but she chose instead to move through her life like a crash test dummy, if crash test dummies accrued their damage from chugging vermouth and having medium-violent kinky sex. Robbie and Ike were getting in on the drunk roughhousing that Rudy and Patrick had started, and Patrick took Robbie to the floor and planted a big wet Modelo-soaked kiss on his mouth to disarm him. We all laughed and the boys retreated back to their separate corners, Robbie and Corinne all of a sudden transfixed in deep eye contact with one another. “There’s three spit sisters in the room now,” I said toward Corinne, pointing at Robbie. “Who?” she asked, looking around at everyone else before landing on me, a demure look of puzzlement washing over her mousy face. She was high as shit that night, sure, but still quick in her own way, so her misunderstanding confused me. How did she not get what I was referencing there? Robbie glared daggers into me and then shifted his gaze back to Corinne with his head cocked toward her in sympathy, as if he was trying to level with a retarded child. She just smirked at him, an unknowing smirk, a smirk that said, “I’m not sure what you’re getting at and I’m too sweet to lie and pretend otherwise, but don’t I have such a pretty half-smile, my gums are numb so I’m kind of stuck like this, won’t you stick your cock in my mouth and warm me back to life?” It took me until the end of this body language analysis to realize that my fingernails were pushing deep into the skin of my palms so I released the tension and sipped my beer, staring down at the limp left hand in my lap as the white crescent indents filled up and eased back to pink again.

Like a purging, like a wave, I felt something pour out of me and used it as an excuse to create some temporary distance. I stumbled to the bathroom in the hall and scrubbed myself hard with toilet paper to lift the syrupy blood I had expelled out of my underwear and inner thighs. I got up and flushed and stared myself down in the mirror. My tongue was caked in plaque from chain smoking and post-nasal drip, my hair was matted down with grease like I got licked across the scalp by a horse, and the texture of my skin under the wan fluorescent bathroom light was what can only be described as “methy.” I was dirty in the wrong way, in the way that was wholly an accident. I tried scrubbing my tongue and teeth off with a paper towel but it dried my mouth out even more, so I blew out a few coke boogers and adjusted my bangs as best I could with my hands instead. I closed my eyes after a bit of fussing and imagined what I’d look like with Corinne’s immovable fringe and thick blonde curls. Then, in the dark behind my eyelids, I saw her nose replacing mine and my lips thinning and stretching the way hers did when she smiled and all of me became paler and smoother. I must’ve stood in the fantasy for about five minutes before startling myself awake with how much I loved these dreamt-up changes, so I ran the sink to make it sound like I was washing my hands and headed back into the living room. “I’m so glad I’m wearing red shorts tonight because I’m free bleeding like a motherfucker,” I said, making my reappearance known. “Damn. I haven’t had my period in seven years,” Corinne replied, bobbing her head down toward the back cover of Rudy’s Woody Allen coffee table book for another line. The swiftness of this response and the vacuity in her voice put a very lonely pit in my stomach that I hadn’t felt the full weight of since I was probably fifteen. My eyes zeroed in on Corinne’s clavicle poking through the taut, vascular skin of her décolletage as she leaned across the living room to hand me back the vape she was babysitting, her knuckles sharp and stark white from stretching themselves around the square neon pink device. She was a classically trained ballet dancer (because why not?) and moved as such, and when faced with it like this I found myself overwhelmed to the point of nausea. The lightness in her physicality wasn’t the thing that made me the sickest, though; it was the fact that she could maintain this appearance in spite of (or, perhaps, in tandem with) the dour gravity her eyes evinced. Even when she laughed, the notes rang out like the saddest fucking violin melody ever composed. I couldn’t really tell if it was deliberate, but Corinne must’ve been cognizant of what she was.

Every night out with her thereafter during my summer break in New York only deepened my sophomoric envy. I’d watch her twirl drunkenly in the dark for hours, the songs blasting from a club’s DJ booth shooting into her little feet like bullets with every thrust of bass. Her steps never made any sort of thud or impact and her ass never so much as indented a leather barstool. One such Saturday I stood against the glass front windows at Clandestino in Chinatown and watched for five minutes as she vomited what looked like straight tequila into the street. Robbie, who ignored me the entire night having taken on the role of resident Corinne-Keeper, rushed outside with stunning speed to pull her long blonde hair into a fist away from her face and mouth. I wondered if he did the same when she deep-throated, something I had established to him whilst we were hooking up that I was not yet brave enough to do. I bet she sucked dick like she was hungry (which, judging by her puke that night, she definitely was). Tears streamed down her face as she dry-heaved but she was otherwise expressionless sans the open mouth. Her back was straight, no fault in her posture, and her head jutted out only slightly from the force of the spew, managing to just miss her white Mary Jane shoes and linen skirt. I was never going to catch her slipping. I was sure the only time she ever expressed any pain was when she was reacting to a hand over her throat in the throes of passion. She’d gag then, and her eyes would mean it. I wondered if she would jump if I came up from behind her with a shout or whacked her in the back of the head with a shovel, if she could react any other way than coolly saying “woah” before getting on with the rest of her life.

I hated myself for the contempt I felt for her, but I couldn’t get over it, or maybe I didn’t want to. I could not disentangle this annoyance from my insatiable jealousy; I was petulant and fussy in the face of her wide-eyed wonder. Corinne had mastered this balance of haplessness and whimsy that even I, beneath all of the agitation, found irrefutably sexy. Sometimes when I would defy my nihilistic streak and reach out a hand as she approached the sloppy point of no return, I’d catch my own reflection in her guilty glassy eyes and imagine what it was that she really thought of me. The truth is, probably nothing salacious or scoring. She was a perfectly nice girl whom I had perversely chosen to project my cynicism onto; I was really no better of a person than any of the men she’d talk about dating and teaching valuable lessons to about spontaneity and modernity until they’d tell her off by writing roles for her in their short films that watered down to “Willowy Woman-Child” or “Cokewhore with a Chip On Her Shoulder.” Corinne seemed to be in a constant state of muse-hood. She’d love it until it cut too deep or stopped ringing true and then she’d flutter on to the next, because there was always a next to be had. My mind’s eye couldn’t produce any faces for the nameless figures in all of her stories about being used up and fucked well and being along for the ride in spite of the pain, but I imagined them all to be older than us, gruffer, maybe richer, maybe not very smart. I figured she and Robbie were new flavors to each other. Imagining her as his work wife or airport crush made me feel better about the whole thing, I guess. I also rationalized all of my fervent assumptions about her interior life by coming to think of her as a shadow figure, an avatar, a ghost. No one talked about her when she wasn’t around like she was a real person anyway. If everyone who had known her much longer than me could fill in the blanks and talk out of the sides of their necks that way, why couldn’t I? It’s not even like she didn’t give us any information… On the contrary, she was a walking museum of signifiers that I guess she figured would bolster and punctuate the mythology she had built around herself. Corinne seemed to spend so much time curating a personality through books, clothing, her art, and her myriad scandalous experiences, but everyone, myself included, imprinted upon her whatever it was that they wanted to anyway. I pitied her for this, probably in the same shallow and guiltless way everybody else pitied her. She was a picture book, not a person. But I didn’t do anything to reject that practice. Making her real to me would have made her real to Robbie, too. So, to my own psychic detriment, she stayed a concept.

I soon began to feel and compulsively invoke the spectre that was Corinne when she was not actually around. On another night of sleeping in Robbie’s bed, probably the third week in a row at that point, I was struck with dread upon realizing that our intimacy no longer provided any respite from my visions of her. She’s suspended over us, she’s on the fire escape, she’s got a finger in his ass. I could see her doing everything, and no matter how farcical the ideas got she was always something core-wrenchingly scary. But Corinne had never been here, he’d never fucked her in this apartment, only at hers, and knowing this for sure gave me the brief air of confidence I needed to get through a stilted session of parallel masturbation. I came silently with my legs straight and locked stiff below my now sweating hand, but he couldn’t get himself there on account of the Adderall and whiskey combo circulating his blood, so I rolled over toward the other side of the bed while he tucked his soft penis back into his briefs. She’s perched atop the bookshelf, toes dangling before his Uta Hagen biography and prized Pinter hardcover collection. The pressure in my ribs was seismic. If nothing happened soon I could have started dry-heaving. “What’s your greatest sexual fantasy?” I blurted, cutting the tension, though I had no solid answer of my own to offer in return. “Like, the one thing you’ve never done but have always wanted to try?” Robbie took his time to think, his breath bated and shallow. She’s in the closet. “I guess… I’ve always wanted to try group sex. Specifically a threesome. I love threesome porn,” he said, finally. “Who’s in your dream lineup?” I pried. “I don’t think I have one. Do you mean like, like celebrities? Or people I know?” She’s hitting my vape. “Either. Well, actually, people we know,” I pried further. There was another pregnant pause. He always did this, never offering an umm or a huh to let me know he hadn’t tuned out entirely. Throw me a fucking bone here, I thought, wondering whose faces he must’ve been leafing through in his mind for this long. She’s by the radiator, flashing her perfect little tits at me and laughing. “Would I be in it?” I yelped, trying to maintain composure. He took yet another moment, this one shorter. “Yes, definitely. I think that would be… cool,” he said, and I exhaled a little too obviously from the relief. “But I don’t know who the third person would be. You, me, and I don’t know who else.” She’s under the covers. “What about Corinne? She could be fun.” “What?” he asked. “I think you’d like fucking us both. She’s probably crazy. Is she? Crazy?” I pried again. “I guess… yeah. She is… was. She’s pretty submissive. Like she likes to be hit and stuff. I think it would be too much,” he laughed nervously. I kissed his shoulder and walked my fingers across his chest. “I’m sure. But wouldn’t fucking us both be hot? Both your girls?” He sat up a bit. “My girls? I don’t have a girl.” I scooted in closer. She guides my hand toward his waistband. “If you fucked us both, you would,” I whispered in his ear. More silence. Then, he gave in. “Yeah… Would you like that? Would you like to fuck her?” He lifted my shirt up and grazed my nipple with the pad of his thumb. She gets hold of the other one and twists. “I want to watch you fuck her,” I said. “What else?” Robbie asked, slowly, breathily. He leaned in and licked my neck. I slipped my hand into his underwear and she lets my hand take the place of hers around the shaft of his cock. “That’s all. I just want to watch.” She’s gone.

Another evening soon thereafter I found myself stomping around somewhere in the Lower East Side to meet Robbie and the rest of the ensemble at a ramshackle literary salon slash party venue where nothing interesting had ever been read or performed, but I was 45 minutes late at that point and had to show face anyway because showing face is always a wiser choice than letting my snark keep me sat at home and in the negatives socially. I liked Robbie and I liked fucking him and I liked most everyone that I’d been introduced to as a result of fucking him, so hauling ass to Manhattan and standing off his shoulder as he networked with meme page admins and Substack bloggers and burgeoning playwrights and half-clever video artists was just a necessary part of keeping myself stitched into the fold of “happening” things with “happening” people where cups of boxed wine were a buck each and smoking indoors was permitted. It was something to do, better than being all alone masturbating or napping or snorting a few lines of ketamine and then masturbating and napping, so I’d put my impertinence aside and listen to the tail end of what was probably an hour’s worth of grating, derivative poetry to at last cash in my one-way ticket to mingle-town. These things were always the same and I could usually predict the monotony exactly as it’d unfold before the door girl could even cross my name off her list. Robbie and I did briefly meet Corinne at the afters to one of these mixers, though, on a night that was vaguely entertaining at best for everyone else involved but would prove to be emotionally and sexually colossal for me, as the very idea of her soon came to eat me from the inside out. I think I dragged myself out to events like this in hopes that I’d encounter someone else I could shift my obsession onto, or perhaps someone else to at least balance it with, but nothing and nobody could overtake me the way she did. Thus, bored and disappointed became as classic a combination to me as white t-shirts and red lipstick, or fat girls and denim jackets. I’d already planned in advance to just seethe up against a wall the entire party. Google Maps put me at around 2 minutes away when Morrissey’s voice started chirping in my earbuds…

The kind people

Have a wonderful dream

Margaret on the guillotine

Cause people like you

Make me feel so tired

When will you die?

The door girl tonight was a zaftig New School photography major whom I had known in middle school and now only kept tabs on via Instagram, a surprise that made me feel like I was suddenly in a wind tunnel, but she didn’t seem to recognize my face or my name as she crossed me off the list and inked a big red X on my hand. I stepped through the doorframe and of course, there Corinne was right beyond the threshold, smoking a fucking Capri and looking into a tall rando’s eyes as intently as one would a sexy male guest lecturer at an all-women’s college or something. I hadn’t seen her in a week, meaning Robbie hadn’t either, because unless he was out fucking her under my nose or at play rehearsal, he and I were most always attached at the hip. Corinne-time ran like dog years so I knew she’d have some drastic life update to unburden onto anyone who’d half listen, given she could get drunk enough to discard her costumed feminine mystique. I scanned the room. Robbie was by the coat rack chatting with Benny, who had directed him in a music video last year, presumably about another “project” that was “casting” (I use “casting” lightly as all of these People At The Helm sort of swap and recycle the same few groups of actors for literally everything, interchanging everybody with no rhyme or reason or discernible intention, all in the name of curating a vibe and letting the scene eat its own tail until the end of time). Ike, Rudy, and Patrick were chasing each other around with lit cigarettes, weaving through and bumping into the crowd. Jacky and his boyfriend Brett were tucked away in a corner very obviously scoffing at their surroundings, so I decided to approach them because to me gossiping with fags is tantamount to sniffing cocaine, something which I’d also be on the prowl for to help pad the evening’s runtime. I didn’t have to look far, though, as the second I sat down Brett whispered in my ear that he had something for me and grabbed my hand. He led me swiftly through the salon with Jacky in tow and we pushed past two total smokeshows flirting in the bathroom line who I would’ve begun to fantasize about mowing down with a gat if I looked at them for too long, but around the corner was a flight of rickety stairs and we soon found ourselves in a basement alone. Like clockwork, Brett pulled a gram out of his wallet and I brandished my spare key to Robbie’s apartment hooked to my long red Oberlin College lanyard. I took a bump, then another, then two more in the other nostril for balance. I passed the bag and keys to Jacky. “Fucking Clark is up there,” Jacky said. “Ugh, I know. Sanctimonious retard…” Brett scoffed. “Who’s Clark?” I asked. The gays looked at each other and then laughed. “Clark,” Jacky sneered like it was a slur, “is a playwright. The worst of the breed, where nothing he’s ever written is even remotely decent but he’s also the only reason anyone we know is ever somewhat employed. Well, employed is used loosely. You know they all work for free.” “You said you’re a theatre student, right?” Brett asked me. I nodded. “Watch out for him then. He’ll fuck any aspiring actress on his radar. Literally anyone. Even you. Just kidding. But yeah, Clark is fucking gross.” Brett took a bump and handed me my lanyard back. “How haven’t I met this guy?” I grunted, licking the last of the coke out of the ridges in my key. “You’ve been hanging out with Robbie every day, honey,” quipped Jacky. “He’s not gonna let Clark be his eskimo brother for the thousand-and-first time.” I glared at the two of them, still confused. Brett rolled his eyes at me. “Corinne, dumbass. Clark and Corinne were in the most destructive open relationship in New York history. HIV in heterosexuals starts and ends with them, I swear. Intra-Venus as a Boy…” I ran my tongue over my numb teeth and mulled this over for a moment. “What do you mean intravenous? Like, they were shooting up together?” I asked. “Yeah, shooting his dick into the pulsating asses of like half the women upstairs at her behest… and she was doing the same. Not with her dick, she doesn’t have a dick… She’s not too fond of that community vis-a-vis her Twitter these days… Anyway,” Brett lamented, “they’re probably a petri dish of infection. You should get tested since you’ve shared cock with her. And thus many pussies with him by proxy. Everyone has fucked Clark and everyone has fucked Corinne. I probably blacked out and hit them both in one night and just don’t remember.” I winced and let a zoetrope of explicit images flash before my eyes, this time seeing not just Robbie’s body lifting her with one arm off of a couch or hocking a loogie onto her worse-for-wear vulva, but also seeing every guy we knew in a successive montage standing over her and jerking off above her face. And yet, sans Brett and Jacky’s private admonishments, everyone we knew somehow stayed so totally chill with these alleged truths hanging in the air all the time. I felt, however, like I was suddenly choking on smoke. I’d only ever had sex with a sleepaway camp boyfriend from high school before Robbie (a not-so-fun fact that Robbie didn’t know or rather had never been curious enough to ask about), and I avoided sex at college because it always seemed too much like shitting where you eat… It’s also not like I had many eager prospects. New York was new territory, a chance to be untethered, to find people who spawned out of the ground just for me and who would fling up into the sun never to be seen again once it was time for me to move forward and settle down somewhere ungentrified and untainted post-grad. Every ex that Corinne described and every anecdote anyone ever shared about her exploits seemed similarly far away. I figured she was collecting her lore from distant sources, pillaging other lands and coming home with war stories to serve as moral and cautionary tales for everyone else to learn from and disseminate as fables to future generations. I thought Robbie was maybe particularly unique or defiant in his attempt to explore the truth of what was heretofore unvalidated, the first of his local kind to touch the source and run back home to either confirm or deny if the truth was as hot as fiction. I was wrong. The word for this type of girl at my high school, the derogatory term used in rumors I only ever overheard but was never let in on, was “homie-hopper.” “Homie-hoppers” ran through friend group after friend group until all options were exhausted and they had nowhere left to go, fucking off to exile, to Leprosy Island for HPV, where their genitals would shrivel up and fall off as punishment for sowing so much discord between previously solid brothers and comrades. But Corinne was still here. Ike, Patrick, Rudy, Benny, Robbie, and, to some extent, Clark were all still friends. Robbie was not a lone venturer into parts unknown, he was the most recently initiated. It’s not that everyone was pretending not to know about the sexual triangulation, it was that nobody cared, because in truth it was octagonal, or worse, an endlessly accelerating sphere rolling down a hill and absorbing everyone previously untouched standing in its way. It was a tacit code of conduct that everyone agreed to and acted upon with ostensibly no discussion or debrief that only two bitchy monogamous gay men and I weren’t cool with. I suddenly felt very old. I wondered if I was next. Was Robbie going to waive his rights to me and let me walk blindfolded into the dick pit of New York City where it’s gauche to stake your claim or bat an eager hand away? What secret tincture lay between Corinne’s legs that made everyone under its spell stay so cool? If I too fucked them all would I be the one to tear shit apart? Would they stop hanging out and get girlfriends? Would they want to fuck someone like me anyway? Did they think Robbie was crazy or tasteless for trying? If Corinne wasn’t the one they wanted intel on, maybe it was me. Would they be at once abhorred and titillated by the gossip that Robbie may or may not be bringing back with him? Why hadn’t any of them tried to fuck me before he did? What about Corinne made her the perfect candidate? If she inspired vapid pity, and that parlayed itself into sexiness, then what did I inspire? Was I not pathetic enough to be beautiful? All I realized after asking myself these questions so quickly was that I had done too much coke and had a sinus headache. Brett and Jacky didn’t notice my silence and had fully moved on to a conversation about Jacky’s apparently fat and loud coworker that I didn’t have enough context for to participate in so I excused myself and ran up the stairs.

There were more people at the party than there were when I arrived, and I had already considered myself tardy then, and it felt suddenly like everything was a sign that I was way out of my depth here and too different from my supposed peers to stay afloat for much longer. I am worse than a pervert, worse than a slut, I thought, because I stand and think and postulate and stew while everybody else does. The world I had ideated was inaccurate and naive. Maybe I’d be happier and prettier if I let everyone have me. Maybe Corinne only seemed sad because of something I found too challenging and confronting to be curious about that had nothing to do with her sex life at all, something distant and without quick remedy like a dead mom or a tornado in her hometown or a latent tumor. Maybe she wasn’t an anorexic demon from Hell by way of Bushwick and actually got that thin because vigorous sex with willing and able suitors of all body types and creeds provides a wide range of exercise equipment and a detail-perfect regimen. I was doing it again. This place is not safe for me, I thought. Cocaine is not for girls like me. I am lame and I am square and I am doing it wrong. I shook my head to wipe the slate clean and something wet started trailing its way out of my nose and onto my lip. I touched it and discovered that it was a glob of bright green snot. I kept my head down as I crossed the back wall to the bathroom and locked myself inside. Not a shred of toilet paper to be found. I blew my nose into the sink and rinsed my hands and face, with no way to know if I’d gotten it all off because the mirror was covered in stickers and graffiti. I got a peek at one of my eyes between a sticker that said “I’D RATHER BE SMOKING CRACK” and a cardstock cutout of Bettie Page, and my pupil was fully dilated, filling the shit water brown of my iris with a glaring black. I dried my face on my shirt, a shirt too tight and too small to easily lift up, a shirt that I suddenly realized connoted an oozing desperation for the second set of windows to my soul to be looked at in lieu of my eyes. I knew now who I wanted to be in this shirt and what I wanted to say, what I wanted to prove, but I did not examine that urge within myself as I hastily got dressed to get myself out of the door and onto the subway for this total humiliation ritual. The top was so tight that my breasts were smashed under my bra into an unflattering oblong shape, like two nasty eclairs suffocated by tissue paper. I wished that I wore a jacket just as much as I wished that I could be swallowed by the dirty tile floor down into a portal that would take me to my mother’s house back in New Brunswick where I would be allowed to languish in silence on the sheets I’ve had since middle school, sheets upon which I masturbated for the first time unexamined and alone the way it all should be, until the fall semester begins and I’m made to fly begrudgingly back to Ohio. I can’t stay here but I can’t go home. I wondered if I should try and find Robbie, put the ritz on and seduce him away from his road-to-nowhere networking exercise, get him back into his apartment and pull out all of my previously undone sexual stops, like letting him open-hand slap me or telling him it’s okay to cum inside me because I am on birth control which I’m actually not seeing as up until this summer I wasn’t fucking with any regularity nor was my acne severe enough to ever warrant it. There was nothing interesting about the sex I gave him, no risk or thrill or adventure. Plain bagged white bread pussy. He seemed content enough, albeit a bit withdrawn, but so was I. Maybe he needed both Corinne and me to satisfy his unspoken sexual duality: one girl to fuck in the ass and another one who can only orgasm when the lights are off. Under this framework, I thought it would be rather rude of me to demand exclusivity or sole attention when I wasn’t giving him my best, or rather my most. He never asked me to prove myself to him, he didn’t seem overtly bored or agitated, but that didn’t provide me any reassurance seeing as he was outsourcing his more specific desires. I wondered what I could do for him that would make him forget about her. I stared into the sink at a chunk of my snot still stuck to the side of the basin where the faucet couldn’t flush it away and before I could try and shove it down the drain there were four thunderous knocks at the door. I rushed to open it, suddenly filled with the fear of being found out even though I wasn’t really doing anything, and standing a few inches from the doorframe was Robbie. He brushed past me and slid across the tile onto his knees and began to wretch into the toilet bowl, his hands gripping for dear life to the ochre-splotched lid above his head. I shut the door and turned around toward him, watching his neck and shoulders heave and shiver and pulse with pornographic emphasis. When he finished vomiting and caught his breath he looked over his shoulder at me and made a face that was at once incredulous and totally senile, like I was a new nurse in the care home with ass-wiping hands he was unfamiliar with. There was purple crust in the corners of his slightly agape mouth and sweat dripping from the furrow in his brow down the bridge of his nose. “What are you still doing in here?” he grunted. I wanted to conjure a sing-songy answer that would make me sound sweet and maternal but his brusqueness caught me so off guard that I immediately replied, “Why are you fucking mad at me?” and he turned his eyes back to the inside of the toilet bowl. He spit into it and flushed the handle. “Just, like, wanted some fucking privacy… Figured that would be a given,” he muttered. “I’ve swallowed your fucking cum!” I snapped back, surprising myself. There was silence, and then he snickered slightly. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry… I had 15 cups of Franzia and 6 lines of ketamine and some fucking edible that Ike had and I never get fucked up like this,” he whined. “Yes you do,” I replied. “You pissed on Patrick’s air mattress like two weeks ago.” He rolled his eyes. “That was, like, a bit. This isn’t a bit. Fuck, I don’t wanna K-hole here…” he trailed off. I stepped closer and hovered next to him, breasts at his eye level, and started to lift the bottom of my shirt up toward his mouth, revealing my ribcage and the purple elastic band of my sports bra, but he backed up toward the wall and waved his hand in front of his face. “What are you doing?” he yelped. I wriggled my shirt back over my waist. “Don’t take your fucking tits out right now.” I blinked at him. “I was trying to wipe your mouth for you. There’s spit on your chin.” He closed his eyes and scrunched his face like he was trying to multiply large numbers in his head. “Oh,” he murmured. “Sorry. But don’t do that.” Robbie stood up slowly from the toilet bowl and ran his face under the faucet of the sink, taking five long, loud gulps of water. He turned the water off and hunched over again, wheezing slowly. “Why would it be so bad if I was gonna take my tits out?” I asked. He turned on his heels and looked at me like I was a horse who could suddenly speak English. I shrugged at him, the slap of my hands against my thighs on their way down echoing into the silence. “You always want my fucking attention for nothing,” he rasped, and then pushed past me and put his hand on the doorknob. Without turning around, he murmured, “Sorry. I’m going home.” Robbie unlocked the door and swung it open, lumbering straight through the crowd to the other side of the venue where I lost the image of him in a sea of heads and torsos. I released the breath I’d been holding in my stomach since I last spoke, stale air whistling its way out of my clogged nose. It felt like he had pried my ribs apart through the center of my chest with all of his might and flung both halves of me down to the floor. I couldn’t tell if I wanted to chase him down and batter him with reassurance-seeking questions and apologies, or if I wanted to evade him for the next week and go cold turkey silent until we both forgot the other one existed. I was scared to return home to him tonight, to pass his glaring roommate in the hallway, to peel my clothes off and lie gingerly beside him in bed so as not to stir or agitate him any further. Part of me hoped he was so high that he got lost and maybe walked into the Hudson River so I could sleep alone tonight, but I immediately felt guilty about that idea and chastised myself into remembering that he was actually a really nice and generous guy. He didn’t have to let me stay with him rent free, he didn’t have to introduce me to his friends, he didn’t have to have sex with me, but he did it all anyway. Of course I pissed him off… I was taking so much and demanding even more without realizing it or stopping to express any gratitude outside of thrice-weekly lackadaisical handjobs. God, I’m a freeloading bitch… a silver spoon liberal arts welfare queen… I wanted to bang my head against the wall until my hair flew off of my scalp like a wig in the wind, do more blow, and blunder down the side of the Brooklyn Bridge bald and bleeding and humiliated, because it’s what my behavior warranted. I wanted to groan aloud, to scream RAPE and FIRE until everyone at the party ran to my aid, but instead I just kept staring right ahead at Robbie’s path, my brow furrowed and my lips parted in breathless confusion. There was nothing to be done. All I could hope for was that he would make it back to Crown Heights safe and sound and fall into a twelve-hour memory-erasing blackout the second his key pushed through the door. I rubbed my eyes, my mascara crumbling into little black balls on my fingertips, and started toward the front door to get some air and to hopefully find Robbie wracked with guilt, idling about on the front patio, conjuring up a prosaic apology that I’d force myself to accept.

It was still warm outside. I checked my phone for the first time all evening and it was 11:53 PM, meaning I’d only been here an hour and change somehow. I walked around either corner of the block, peered into storefronts, and squinted my eyes to pull focus to the other side of the street, but Robbie was gone. I don’t know why I cared so much about the idea of keeping him happy when I wasn’t able to get it together to actually do it in practice. I’d always figured that once attraction was in any way reciprocated, the pain and reticence and turmoil would all cease, making way for domestic bliss to let itself in no matter how illicit or unconventional the arrangement. I should feel calm and secure in spite of the noise. He fucked me, so on some level, though maybe only biologically, that meant he liked me. And who was I to ask for something deeper than biology? Liking someone with your dick is probably more objective than liking them with your heart. Maybe he didn’t relish my company so much, so what? I stayed in the rolodex anyway, because his monkey brain would light up in an MRI machine if he was presented with a slideshow of me looking my most fertile, and that was more real than him liking me for the conversations we had or the laughs we shared. If his time with me was strictly predicated on shared wit, and we both got our tongues cut out tomorrow, the relationship would fall through. If he kept me around because I made him laugh, but one night I got struck by lightning and my brain turned into a bread bowl of clam chowder between two ears, I’d never see him again. But because he liked me with his dick, because something about me urged him to breed in spite of my lacks and flaws, I got to stick around. Luckily for me he was usually so crossfaded that he didn’t have time to take stock of how he felt about me intellectually or spiritually since the only part of his body he could ever really operate was his penis, and even that was contingent on his pharmacological cocktail of the day. Science was on my side, science would let him forgive me, science would provide me the excuse to never learn how to suck dick without gagging gracelessly… I found myself actually craning my neck upwards at the stars to thank them for making it so easy to be a somewhat kept woman. The bare minimum would hopefully keep me scraping by. I thought about Corinne, who did so much and worked so hard. Robbie awarded my mediocrity and her athleticism just the same, it seemed. I felt a revelatory peace wash over me in the understanding that there were no ranks to climb insofar as Robbie; her game plan was elaborate and detailed but she and I were still tied for this one prize. She’d always be the woman with more trophies in many more disciplines, but maybe it was enough that I had a hold on the sole thing I wanted, especially given my limited means. So long as the orgasms she gave him didn’t exorcise an “I love you,” I really was just fine all things considered.

I got up off the wall I was leaning against and walked down the block to a deli for cigarettes. I picked up a pack of American Spirit yellows, the ones Robbie smoked, so I could have something to act as a broker between us in the awkwardness I was positive would ensue. I never smoked these, they lasted too long, but every night Robbie would take one or two onto the fire escape of his apartment and leave me alone inside for 7 or so minutes to stew and wonder what he was thinking about or who he was texting in my absence. The one time I attempted to join him he seemed bothered and didn’t scoot over for me when I swung my legs out of the window frame, so I never tried again. I lit up and walked around the corner and sat on a bench a few doors down from the party venue, decided I forgave him even though I couldn’t guarantee he’d forgive me, and opened my phone to scroll myself into the come-down oblivion. The next time I thought to check, 30 minutes had passed. What was I waiting for? Every time I had the idea to stand up and walk away, my ass would tell my brain that it was glued to the wood beneath me. At this juncture it would be wise to catch the train home as I’d smoked myself into nausea and knew the 4 would be scary by the time I transferred into Brooklyn, but every time I craned my neck, more and more people were swinging the party’s door open and each was as beautiful and malaised as the last. There was a lull in entrances and exits for a few minutes and the block got quiet. I didn’t realize how still everything was until I cleared my throat and the sound reverberated into space, crashing back onto me and blowing my hair into my eyes in a gust. I stood up and puttered about, walking in a circle around myself. There was nothing left here for me. When I finally resolved that it was time to go, the door of the venue swung open so hard that it smashed into the wall around its frame, rattling the glass enough that I could hear it from a hundred or so feet away. A lanky man in wire-rimmed glasses and a Yankees baseball cap thundered onto the sidewalk, letting the door close on Corinne, who came up right behind him. She was moving like a wizard had just fulfilled her wish to possess motor control. The man was pensive and steady. I sped away from the bench and tucked myself into a narrow alley between the neighboring bar and a children’s dental clinic and peered around the corner. He stared at her with his hands on his hips while she shuffled and swayed, never letting her gaze catch his. After a few moments, she spoke. “I don’t know what you want me to say, Clark…” She shrugged at him obstinately. “So fucking what? So what? I slept with him. I don’t know what you want me to say. I didn’t know he was off the table.” He scoffed and bent down toward her face. “You didn’t think fucking the guy who was gonna fund the ENTIRE PRODUCTION while you were my GIRLFRIEND would be a bad fucking idea?!” Clark’s voice boomed. She wiped her face with a limp hand as if he’d spit on her. “Shhhhh… It was six months ago… He didn’t give you the fucking money anyway so why does it matter?” she slurred. “You don’t think maybe that’s why? You don’t think that must’ve been the ‘sudden conflict’?” He put his hands on his head and looked around. “I can’t fucking believe you Corinne. I can’t FUCKING BELIEVE you.” He turned around and kicked the brick wall behind him, recoiling in pain. Corinne, unfazed, began to giggle. Something glazed over her eyes, palpably enough that I could sense it from where I was standing. She smirked like she was about to ace a board game. “Maybe he realized the play was a piece of shit, baby. Maybe I was the only reason he liked it.” Clark removed his baseball cap, the roots of his shoulder-length brown hair drenched in oil. His long forehead shone against the red neon sign from the bar next door. He turned his body toward me, hands on his hips now, and as I pulled further back into the alley I saw that his hair was thinning quite a bit around the scalp and temples, entire splotches of pallid wet skin exposed to the elements. He was quiet for a moment. Corinne pressed further. “No rules, baby. We weren’t allowed to get mad, remember?” There was silence again. She uncrossed her arms and let them flit down to her sides. “And it wasn’t just the one time.” At that, he bent his knees again and got back in her face. “YOU’RE A FUCKING WHORE,” he screamed. Corinne chuckled again. I almost wanted to as well… “Whore” was such a goofy and anachronistic turn of phrase, one that a Tony Soprano-caliber voice may exclaim, but it sounded unserious from the mouth of an agitated Jewish-looking mid-30s Brooklynite artist type. In a nagging, child-like tone, Corinne retorted, “Takes one to know one,” and Clark threw his hat onto the concrete. His newly free arm shot up into the air, stopping for a millisecond at level with his eyes, and then began its descent toward Corinne a foot below him. The din of the street lamps and any remaining chatter in the neighborhood fell away. All I could hear was the sound of my own breath. It took some time for his long fingers to coil around her wrist and meet back up with the base of his palm, as there was so little to grab ahold of. It seemed like his arm was flying downward in a slow forever. In that eternity I thought about a million things… my flight home next week, my unfinished summer reading assignments, how Robbie was navigating the late night train schedule in a K-hole, how dry my mouth suddenly was… but not one of those thoughts involved intervening. When his hand finally did make its way around her wrist he whipped her downward and she sprung up from the ground ever so slightly on the recoil, her little Mary Jane shoes digging into and then leaving the pavement and then clicking back into place. Her arm could’ve ripped clean off her body and flung its way over to me, like a boomerang of revenge. He bent his hand to avoid touching his own skin and dug the tips of his bony fingers into hers. He shook her again and her eyelids fluttered and her mouth gaped the way an American Girl Doll’s would. He wouldn’t release her. Fear only briefly washed across her face… As soon as it came it went and she was stolid again. “You’re hurting me,” she said, meekly, blankly. “I’ll call you a car,” Clark murmured and loosened his grip to pull his phone out of the front pocket of his too-tight jeans. She stayed put, catatonic, sheet-white but unreasonably calm. I ducked back into the alley and stared at the concrete wall across from me. I felt a tinge and looked down to see that I had ripped a hangnail clean off of my finger, revealing a purulent yellow wound with translucent skin peeling back around it. I looked back around the corner. Clark had Corinne pulled tightly into his chest, her head buried into his sternum. His arms were resting atop her blonde hair. Around his back, she used her right hand to pick at a cuticle on the left one. I walked out of the alley and down the street toward the subway.

A week later, on my last night in the city, I went out by myself. I got shitfaced in Williamsburg alone. I spilled a vodka cranberry down my halter top. I decided to forgo the train and drunkenly spent $60 on an Uber back to Robbie’s. I was queasy in the back of the car, suddenly overcome with sentimentality and affection for everything I’d done and seen this summer, forgetting the ennui and insecurity as North Brooklyn transitioned into Central Brooklyn and the buildings atop the sidewalks became crummier and smaller. The car pushed through a mass of bottles and plastic bags and sheets of cardboard lying in a pile in the center of a crosswalk, the detritus blowing back past the windows into the unseasonably windy sky. I admired each moving piece like they were snowflakes. The car pulled up outside of Robbie’s place and I stumbled up the stairs, pushed my key into the door and clunked my way into his room. He was asleep, naked, tangled in blankets, all of the pillows on the bed underneath and on top of him. I watched his chest rise and fall. A wistfulness befell me that-- in conjunction with the three cocktails and two shots I had-- crested hot tears in my eyes. He looked so sweet. He was sweet. He would be able to go on the way he was forever because he’d never not get away with it. I smiled to myself thinking about what he’d get up to in my absence, and then the dam broke and I started to really cry. I closed his window. I peeled my clothes off and got into bed next to him, playing big spoon. I clutched his chest from around his side and buried my face in the crook of his neck. I was cold, but I didn’t care much. I kissed his ear and sniffled loudly into it. Robbie stirred slightly and turned around toward me, his eyes shut gently. He looked like a baby when he slept. I wanted to love him like a son. I planted another kiss on his chest and he grumbled a bit. “Hi,” I whispered. “I’m back.” Robbie, eyes still closed, reached up and cupped my face. “Corinne?” he murmured, and then turned back around. Before I could correct him, before I could stop myself, I squeaked back, “Yes, baby…” Like it was a cue to relax, he began to snore as my affirmation trailed off. I stared at the side of his face, his mouth agape now, his breaths widening and slowing. I nestled into his back tighter and drifted off to sleep.

I woke up at 7:30 AM. Robbie didn’t hear me getting dressed and packing my bags. I called a car to Laguardia. On the kitchen table was a small red spiral notebook and a pen. I flipped through it. To-do lists, itineraries, work shit, doodles… but on a page in the back, there was a date written in big blue letters. 3/20/03. It was my birthday. I stared at it for a moment, running my fingertip across the ink. I ripped the page out of the book and crumpled it into my pocket. On the blank sheet below it I scribbled THANK YOU and tore it out neatly. I put the note at the head of the table and placed my spare keys atop it. I walked out of the apartment, looking straight ahead, scared that if I turned around it would suck me back in for the rest of time. Would that even be so awful? Today I’d be back in New Brunswick, back to mom and dad and little brother, back to the cul de sac, back to mezuzahs in door frames. Soon after that I’d be in the dorms with Seo-yeon and Lexi, my two new randomly assigned roommates with whom I had not made any attempt to correspond. There would be no sex, there would be no ketamine, there would be no privacy. I checked my phone. 8:00 AM now. I guessed it would be about five more hours until he texted me. I’d look for the message every hour on the hour anyway.