About a Girl Read online

  “To Shane?” Henri echoed, alarmed.

  “With Shane,” I said, kicking at the floor, where one of our tattered old rag rugs was slowly decaying into bits across the wooden floorboards. One of us should have thrown it out ages ago. There was a silence.

  “Ah,” Raoul said. “I see.” Henri caught on a second later.

  “Oh,” he said. “You know we’re here for you if you—if you need anything.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’ll muddle through it. But thanks.”

  But I was not accustomed to muddling through; I had never met a problem I could not solve with brisk efficiency and diligent application of my tremendous intellect. The possibility that the calculus of the heart might differ from the formulae with which I had successfully plotted forces and velocities was not one I elected to allow. That night after dinner I helped Henri with the dishes. “Let’s set up a hypothetical,” I said conversationally to the soapy water.

  “Tally, you know I don’t know the first thing about astronomy. Ask Raoul.”

  “I’m aware of your shortcomings,” I said. “I don’t mean a scientific hypothetical. I mean a—um, let’s say a personal one. About people.” I avoided looking at Henri’s expression. “Let’s say there are two platonic friends who have known each other for a long time, and one of them, hypothetically speaking, did—um.” I coughed. “Did a—did something not very platonic. Hypothetically.” Dorian Gray twined sumptuously about my ankles, purring. “I’m going to trip on you,” I said to him, “and you’re going to be sorry.” He yawned and sat on my foot. Dorian was a loving and elegant cat, but not an especially intelligent one.

  Henri, who knew me very well, had the courtesy to pretend he had no idea what I was talking about. “Are you asking my advice about boys? I don’t know if that’s a good idea. Raoul is the expert.”

  “I heard that!” Raoul shouted from the other room. “I will not have my virtue impugned!”

  “What virtue you have left,” Aunt Beast said, laughing.

  “Oh, you’re one to talk,” Raoul groused. They squabbled affectionately in lowered voices; I couldn’t see them from the kitchen, but I could picture them as clearly as if I were in the room with them: curled up on opposite ends of the couch, Aunt Beast with a glass of whisky and a cigarette (Raoul making faces at her for smoking in the apartment, her grimacing back and opening the window wider in an exaggerated manner) and the crossword, Raoul underlining his favorite bits in whatever poetry book he happened to be reading. They were even more like an old married couple than Raoul and Henri were. I felt a dopey, jolting surge of affection: my ridiculous, precious family, patchworked together out of love.

  “I’m not asking your advice,” I said. “I’m just proposing a scenario.”

  Henri handed me a plate to dry. “I don’t know, dear heart. Whoever it is, he wouldn’t be much of a friend if he ran off just because your feelings got complicated.”

  “We’re not talking about me.”

  “This hypothetical friend, then.”

  “What if he did, though? I mean, what one of the friends, the one who did—you know, the one who—anyway, what if that person wanted to continue being friends, and the other one didn’t? And after the thing happened that person didn’t call the other person? I mean the person who didn’t do the thing.”

  Raoul wandered into the kitchen, a pen behind his ear. He came up behind Henri and wrapped his arms around Henri’s waist, resting his chin on Henri’s shoulder. I never tired of admiring the gorgeous harmony of their faces—Raoul’s deep brown skin and shaved head, the unfair perfection of his beautifully symmetrical features; Henri’s own skin a velvety black that caught and held light so that he seemed almost to glow, his dense hair twisted up into short corkscrewed locks, his dark eyes glinting with laughter. I thought, as I always did, that they were the two handsomest people I knew. If only one of them had been my father, I should have fared much better in the attractiveness department.

  “I would say, hypothetically in this hypothetical situation,” Raoul said, “that a day would be pretty soon to start worrying about things like the demise of a hypothetical friendship that had weathered a decade already.”

  “This whole thing is making me feel insane,” I said.

  “The more you like a person, the more difficult it is to conduct yourself with dignity,” Henri said.

  “Is that supposed to be helpful?” I asked crossly.

  “I think it’s early to start worrying, too,” Henri said. “And it’s normal for this stuff to make a person loopy. Even adults. I mean, I had known Raoul for months before I worked up the nerve to ask him out on a date, but look at us now.”

  “I asked you out on a date,” Raoul said.

  “You did not.”

  “I did.” They gazed lovingly at each other until I made a vomiting noise. “Anyway,” Raoul said, releasing Henri and hugging me in his stead, “the point is, the course of true love never does run smooth, or what have you.”

  “It ran smoothly for you,” I said. They looked at each other and laughed.

  “Not so smoothly as it might seem now,” Henri said. “There were some…”

  “Hiccups,” Raoul said. “Maybe we’ll tell you when you’re older. Anyway, I’m sure things will get better. Just give it time. I know that’s a stupid thing adults are always saying, but it does usually turn out to be true.”

  “Press part, six letters, ends with an N,” Aunt Beast said from the living room.

  “Platen,” Raoul said.

  Aunt Beast came into the kitchen, chewing the end of her pencil and carrying the crossword. “I can’t get half this fucking thing,” she said.

  “Sunday is always a chore,” Henri said, “let us see.” She handed the paper to Henri and Raoul, and they looked it over.

  “I just don’t know anything about sports, I think that’s the trouble,” Raoul said. I left the three of them to their own devices and escaped to the safety of my room—

  What? A good book? There are a lot of good books, it’s a bookstore, we sort of specialize in that—No, I’m being serious—I mean, I just read this one—Not that one, okay, people seem pretty excited about this—Not that one, okay—Look, I thought you said any good book—Here, try Middlemarch, if you don’t like it you can hold the door open with it—

  —but things have not gotten better. At first it seemed best to leave Shane to his own devices—I wasn’t sure if I owed him an apology, or if he owed me one, and I wanted very desperately to know that things between us could be restored to some semblance of normality, but I had no idea how to go about setting them to rights. I briefly considered watching a romantic comedy or reading teen fiction; I knew, though not from personal experience, that these genres frequently dealt with the situation in which I found myself, usually with a happy resolution for all parties, but I did not think I could bear it if the correct course of action turned out to be something like an honest discussion of my feelings, or weeping. Or, god help me, marriage. I waited patiently all week for Shane to call, so that both of us could pretend nothing happened and I might continue nursing my unrequited passion until it finally burned itself out.

  But he didn’t. He didn’t show up on my doorstep, disheveled and stoned, and demand I come over; he didn’t push notes under my door; he didn’t, as far as I could tell, even leave his own apartment. If it had been bad seeing Shane all summer, it was even worse without him. Aunt Beast, Raoul, and Henri, perhaps cautioned by my bloodshot eyes and sullen, monosyllabic responses to the most innocent of enquiries, did not question me on his abrupt departure from the insular orbit of our family, as if he were some malfunctioning satellite that went rocketing off abruptly into the far reaches of deep space. They took turns coming in to say goodnight to me in the evenings, something they hadn’t done since I was a small child; I had suspicions that they got together and worked out a schedule behind my back, but I was secretly grateful for their company. Aunt Beast in particular, who is ordinarily reserved an
d even aloof, took to spending less time in her studio and more around the house, her presence inconspicuous but constant. I did not thank them for their increased attentions, but as a grieving adolescent it was my prerogative to be ungrateful and obstreperous.

  All week we ate dinner together every night, something else we hadn’t done regularly in years: the four of us gathered around the rickety-legged oak table that Raoul and Aunt Beast dragged in off the street when I was barely old enough to walk, and the three of them taking turns cooking (as the bereaved party, I was apparently off the hook for domestic labor for a while, which suited me just fine). Raoul made rich, lovely curries, so spicy they set us all weeping into our plates; Henri, yassa and salatu niebe; and Aunt Beast—who, for all her ongoing disparagement of hippies, sure eats like one—tofu stir-fry over brown rice, and an enormous salad full of tomatoes and peppers and greens from the farmer’s market, studded with nasturtiums and snapdragons.

  For the most part I was too listless and despondent to eat, pushing my food around on my plate like the melodramatically anorexic girls from high school I regarded at the time with disdain—Rowan Apple Paine-Lowell, for example, wanton progeny of the black sheep of a venerated New York line and a minor rock star. Cool and colorless as old dishwater, prone to malnourished fainting in the halls, and with the affected melancholy of a nineteenth-century consumptive, she had had a brief cameo on a popular television show about wealthy teenagers on the Upper East Side (as herself), and had, our senior year, fallen unrequitedly in love with the scion of a noted pharmaceutical family and cut his initials into her creamy thigh with an X-Acto blade during art class; where previously I had held her and her ilk in contempt, I was discovering a certain degree of unlikely sympathy. The hunger strike is, after all, a timeless strategy with which to highlight one’s grievances. And the less I ate the less I felt like eating, or breathing, or sitting up, or getting out of bed, or doing anything whatsoever with myself other than sinking into a self-created pit of my own increasing filth, encased in Shane’s dirty New Order shirt, which I only bothered to change when obliged to come to work, and staring at the walls of my room, willing myself to sleep. I did not leave my apartment all week except to come to the bookstore, which brings me here, to my birthday, and my stool. Every year since I was quite small I have had a chocolate cake, made by Henri and decorated by Aunt Beast (Jupiter and all its major satellites; a pair of happy astronauts laid out in black licorice candies on a vanilla-frosting moon; Voyager 2 painstakingly done in colored icing; that sort of thing); Raoul writes a silly rhyming sonnet; and Shane and his parents come over with sushi. I could not imagine a birthday in which Shane was not a crucial part—but I could not have imagined a week in which we did not speak to one another, and then it happened.

  At last it was four o’clock, and the bookstore’s co-owner, Molly, came in to relieve me. I often thought that Molly and her business partner, Jenn, had opened the store solely to further their own somewhat obsessive book-collecting habits; the store did a fine business, but probably a quarter of its profits came out of the pockets of the three of us. “God, if it’s this hot in June I hate to think of what July will be like,” Molly said, pushing her long brown hair out of her face and looking pointedly at the pile of books on the to-be-shelved cart, which I had not touched. I flushed.

  “I can put those away before I go,” I mumbled.

  “It’s your birthday,” she said, “you shouldn’t even be here. But don’t think my generosity will last all week.”

  “Sorry. And thanks.”

  “I’m getting soft in my old age.” She smiled at me. “Now get out of here. Save me some cake.”

  “Deal,” I said, and went out into the searing heat of the afternoon.

  On my way home I stopped in to see Mr. M, an elderly gentleman who lives alone in a sumptuous apartment around the corner from our building. I have known him nearly all my life, although I can never remember exactly how I first met him. He is something of a secret—I have never told Raoul or Henri or Aunt Beast about him, for no real reason; only Shane, from whom I have—had—ugh—no secrets, knows of his existence. Although that makes him sound sinister, he is just a lonely and sweet-natured grandfatherly old man who likes to discuss the sciences. As far as I can tell I am his only friend, and I have never known him to leave his apartment, although presumably he must occasionally egress himself. If he ever goes anywhere, he does not tell me, although he went all sorts of exciting places in earlier years, and has interesting stories about traveling around the world. He was once some sort of record executive, and knew a lot of famous people; more of interest to me, he is tremendously well educated and knows even more than I do about physics and astronomy. When I was smaller, he helped me with my math and physics homework—Raoul, Henri, and Aunt Beast, though all of them are very intelligent, possess temperaments more artistic than scientific, and none of them were much use to me after I got through prealgebra. Mr. M gave me books about astronomy and cosmology and mythology, and encouraged me in my projects, and helped me memorize the constellations, and would sit for hours and talk with me about the ramifications of the anthropic principle and the elegance of Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, and whether I should focus my future research on gathering observational data or developing theoretical approaches to unsolved problems.

  He seemed pleased as ever to see me, sweaty as I was, perched on his threshold like a lost kitten. He is very tall—taller by far than me, and I am not a small person—and thin; no matter the weather, he is always dressed in elegant and well-cut black clothes, neat black trousers and black shirts whose silky sleeves end in crisp cuffs at his wrists and sometimes a long black coat that moves about him like it has shadowy intentions of its own. Today he had a red silk scarf knotted at his throat like an ascot and a pair of pince-nez that on any other person would look idiotic but on him looked both scholarly and distinguished.

  “Tally,” he said, putting away the pince-nez, “come in, come in,” and I followed him into the blessed cool of his apartment, which has a strange trick of seeming much larger from the inside than it does from the outside. I have been visiting him for years and have never seen all of it. He left me in the big library—heavy, rich red velvet drapes at the windows to keep out the light, floor-to-ceiling shelves on all four walls, bloodred-leather-and-mahogany sofa, heavy oak side tables—and disappeared down the hall for a moment, and I crooked my head sideways to look at his books for the hundredth time. No matter how often I perused his shelves there were always more treasures I’d never before noticed: Aristarchus’s On the Sizes and Distances of the Sun and Moon in the original Greek, a massive leather-bound volume so old it looked as though its covers would fall off if you made cross-eyes at it, butted up against swaths of Shakespeare (some of them crumbling old folios that looked alarmingly like originals, though I could not imagine anyone in possession of such miraculous items would be so careless as to leave them on a bookshelf); Augustine’s Confessions tucked coyly next to the collected stories of Angela Carter; all of James Baldwin neighboring a first edition of The Secret History, its acetate jacket crisp and coolly glittering in the warm dull light of his lamps. He had a copy of Maria Cunitz’s Urania propitia, which was so tremendously rare that I was afraid to touch it and could not even have begun to imagine how much it had cost—he’d let me look through it, once, and I turned through page after page of her calculations of planetary positions with a kind of shaky awe. After he had unearthed my great affection for old science fiction and fantasy I had stumbled across a whole shelf of first editions: Philip K. Dick, Samuel Delany, Elizabeth Hand, Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler—even the dopey, shameful, misogynist stuff, although once I had explained to Mr. M how stupid Heinlein was about everything, especially women, his books had disappeared from Mr. M’s shelves. I had never asked him for a book he didn’t have, though sometimes it took him a while to find it for me.

  He came into the library with a silver tray bearing a silver pitcher and a pla
te of sandwiches that he certainly had not had time to make. “Sit, sit,” he said, but a new stack of paperbacks on a side table had caught my eye and I was busy looking through them. “Plooy et what?” I said, holding one up.

  “Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle,” he said. “My French is getting rusty, I thought I’d practice. It’s quite good. Lemonade?”

  “Yes, please,” I said, and he poured me a glass and set out a round coaster. I folded myself up onto the sofa, meditatively gumming one of the sandwiches (cucumber and cream cheese) and sipping idly at the lemonade, which was flavored with something that I thought might be lavender. “This is delicious,” I said, “did you make it?”

  “I thought you might like it. I got it from—” He made an odd face. “From far away.” He settled himself in a leather armchair. “You are unhappy,” he said.

  “I’ve been having some romantic troubles. Or nonromantic troubles. The trouble being that the romance is sort of one sided.”

  “I have on occasion had some doings with the romantic affairs of teenagers,” he said, “although I’m not sure you would want my advice.”

  “Do you know many teenagers?”

  “Over the years,” he said. I wondered if he meant musicians. Or if he’d had children. He was such a singular person, and so inscrutable, that I had never felt adventuresome enough to ask him about any aspect of his life he had not brought up himself, and I knew nothing at all about his personal life, or any personal life he might have once had. It was hard to imagine Mr. M parenting adolescents. He cocked his head at me slightly. “‘I would there were no age between sixteen and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting,’” he said.

  “It’s sort of irritating that everyone in my life keeps quoting Shakespeare at me when I have difficulties.”

  “‘We know what we are, but not what we may be.’”

  “Stop it,” I said.