Know Your Beholder: A Novel (10 page)

“Here,” I said, handing him a small Post-it note, “the Wi-Fi code.”

He accepted it and blinked. Or maybe he didn’t blink. Maybe he didn’t even accept the Post-it. A few breaths later, I did notice the Post-it note affixed to the anodized surface of his kitchen table, near the base of the bottle of Côtes du Rhône.

We were quiet. Above us Mary Bunch was running a vacuum cleaner.

“The Bunches,” I said, pointing toward the ceiling. “I’ll be sure to introduce you.”

Bob Blubaugh said nothing. He simply sat there, motionless, his face blank, almost blissfully neutral. Eyeballs framed by his tinted glasses. It was all so fucking subtle. Maybe he was undergoing some strange process of meditation? He knows how to make time slow down, I thought.

“If you ever need anything,” I offered, “don’t hesitate to knock on my door. I’m up in the attic. Accessible from the aft staircase. Welcome to the building.”

Still nothing from Blubaugh.

I turned to go but stopped. “By the way,” I said, “will you be getting a landline? I only ask because I have a pretty good connection with a guy at the phone company. With a day’s notice he can get it installed in no time.”

“No, thanks,” he said.

“You’re exclusively mobile? I only ask because I’m looking at your lease and I’m noticing that you didn’t fill in a cell phone number.”

“Because I got rid of it.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“So but what if I have to get in touch?”

“I’ll make sure you can.”

We looked at each other for a full five seconds. I think I actually counted them out in my head.

“Oh, and no pets,” I added for some reason. “Meaning mammals. I’m cool with fish, or something that can be kept in a terrarium, but no mammals. Guinea pigs, dogs, ferrets, cats, gerbils, hamsters, that kind of thing.”

A bustlike response. Complete stillness. An expression I would describe as Beethovenish.

I left with my copy of the lease, feeling sort of gently freaked out. When I got back to the attic, I filed his lease in a cardboard legal box under my desk and took a shower for the first time in two weeks.

Before I got under the water, I finally looked in the mirror, focusing exclusively on my beard, which had begun to look like it was made of granite. I tried to avoid my eyes. Somehow I knew they would be ringed with shameful, baggy, bourbon-colored circles. Of course I failed. When you start to become your own science experiment, you can’t help looking. They weren’t as bad as I thought. I looked mostly sad. Sad in the same way that weather can be sad. I was the human equivalent of a cold, rainy day. I was a brown puddle in the middle of a dead-end street, with maybe a Popsicle stick or two floating in my dank, dog-slobbered water. If Sheila Anne were to see me I would be embarrassed. The thought sent such an intense pang of shame through my stomach and kidneys that I had to sit on the toilet for a moment.

I realized that I hadn’t left the house since around Christmas. This was my second one without Sheila Anne. I thought it would be easier than our first one apart, but it was harder. On Christmas Eve I wound up drinking a bottle of Maker’s Mark and crying myself to sleep and staying in bed the entire next day and maybe even the day after that. It was a bad forty-eight hours. I’m pretty sure that was the beginning of not being able to leave my house. You figure there’d be some horrible inciting incident, but there wasn’t.

The hot shower felt like needles on my skin. To rid the oil slick that had congealed on my head I had to shampoo my hair three times. I really dug into my scalp and sideburns, which actually burned a little, giving newfound literalism to the word. I shampooed my beard too, an act that gave me so much relief I whimpered.

So I have a bad tooth.

My lower first molar on the right side zings when I drink anything cold or inhale the winter air. Almost a year ago, I was supposed to have a root canal, but I kept putting it off, and I now get repeated calls from Dr. Hubie, the Falbo family dentist. Yes, the calls are from Dr. Hubie himself, not his secretary, the ageless, honey-voiced Julie Pepper. I don’t have the heart to tell him that I’m having serious problems leaving the house, but I need to get this tooth fixed before it rots through my jaw.

Post microwave lunch of Dinty Moore beef stew, I was flossing in front of my bathroom mirror, trying to wrest material from my bad molar, when I heard something being slid underneath my door. No envelope, just a blank piece of heavy-bond sketch paper, one fold, elegantly creased.

It read:

Harriet Gumm often almost smiles when she speaks to you, as if she’s constantly harboring a secret. It makes her a little sexy in a mischievous sort of way.

Her apartment is set up as a portrait studio. There is a simple mahogany stool in the center of the living room, surrounded by a handful of wooden easels, each easel loaded with large, variously grained sketch pads. There is no furniture here, nothing cozy or domestic, nothing feminine, a simple iPhone dock resting on the floor, no magazines or books—only the stool and the easels and the iPhone dock and an apple box filled with countless stubs of charcoal and pieces of colored chalk. Under the centered stool, a large piece of muslin, gathered around the legs. I couldn’t imagine this girl owning clothes or shoes or makeup, but she obviously did. She practically wears costumes! Her bathroom contained only a cake of generic, peppermint-smelling soap, a bottle of No More Tears shampoo, and a simple white towel hanging from the chrome rack that I installed on the inside of the door. It could be the bathroom of a construction worker.

Affixed to the living room walls with blue masking tape were drawings of all the black men she’d been studying, mostly in charcoals. I recognized the African-Americans who’d been coming to the house over the course of the past several months: Cozelle; Markeif; Jershawn; and her present subject, Big Keith.

Each man had a seven-part narrative progression.

Each subject has a slight variation to his story. For instance, the thin, sinewy Cozelle, instead of scoring a touchdown, is playing NCAA basketball, knees bent at the free throw line, mid-rhythm-dribble, wearing a North Carolina Tar Heels uniform and classic Air Jordan high-tops.

In his slave work setting, the dark-skinned, abdominally endowed, large-eyed Markeif is picking cotton, bare-backed, with grotesquely raised flogging scars, whereas the light-skinned,
GQ
-handsome Jershawn is dressed as a white-gloved butler, fully wigged and facially powdered, serving silver platters of food to the plantation owner and his family in their decadent dining room, ghostly portraits of patrician, Hircine-faced forebears looming on the walls above.

The only panel that is exactly the same throughout is the rendering of the white Ford Bronco; the one thing changing being the actual subject, but each receiving a handjob.

“What are you calling these?” I asked.

“
The Seven Stations of O. J. Simpson’s America
.”

“Wow,” I said. “Intense title.”

“It’s my senior thesis project.”

“You’ve really nailed Keith’s face.” She had obviously nailed his enormous penis, too; vermiform like his arms.

“Thank you,” Harriet said shyly, wearing the faintest hint of a smile.

“They all pose nude for you?”

“That’s what they agree to.”

“Do they sign a contract?”

“We simply have a conversation over coffee. If it feels right, we agree to meet for one sixty-minute session, for which I pay them twenty bucks. If that goes well, we continue the process, hopefully eventually arriving at the white Ford Bronco.”

I asked her if she ever felt unsafe.

“No,” she replied.

I asked if her subjects ever get excited.

“You mean erect?” she said.

“Yeah, that.”

“One of them had that happen the first few sittings, but the problem resolved itself.”

I tried to imagine what this could possibly mean. I envisioned Harriet handing Markeif a tube of Astroglide and a paper towel and leaving the room.

She asked me if I’ve ever posed nude.

I told her that I hadn’t, that I couldn’t even imagine it.

“It’s surprisingly liberating,” she said.

“You’ve done it?”

“In my life drawing class we all do. Even Professor Chubb models.”

“Wow,” I said, taking in the detail work. “Jershawn…”

“What about him?”

I told her it was hard not to notice his “endowment.”

To which she replied: “The African-American male is perhaps the most unfairly sexualized archetype in modern culture.”

I told her that according to her drawings, it didn’t seem to be unfair at all. “The word
ample
comes to mind,” I said. “The word
fortunate
. The word
blessed
.”

“Those are not exaggerations. The renderings are physiologically accurate.”

Cozelle had the most normal penis, meaning normal-looking by comparison. And even his was impressive.

“What’s unfair about a large penis?” I said.

“I would argue,” Harriet said, “that the owners of these penises are not seen as full human beings. The African-American male is blatantly heralded for his athleticism and genital endowment. It’s as unfair as Marilyn Monroe being worshipped for her body.”

I told her that I worshipped her face too.

Harriet shot me a circumspect look.

“And her underrated singing voice,” I added.

She told me I should pose for her. “In all seriousness,” she added.

“Why?” I asked, totally thrown.

“Why not?” she replied.

I took a half-step back, still holding the cardboard and plastic packaging for the toilet’s new refill flap. “How old are you?” I said.

“I’ll be twenty-one in March.”

I asked her if what she was doing was even legal.

“Of course it’s legal. My subjects come to me by their own volition. They’re grown men. They’re not mentally challenged in any way. It’s not like some form of reverse statutory rape.”

“Do you even like me?” I said.

“Sure,” she said. “Why?”

I told her that I wouldn’t want her to
render
me if she didn’t at least like me a little. “You might be predisposed to highlight all my flaws.”

“I like you,” she replied. “You dress like you live in an institution, and I think you have a secret life.”

“You think I have a secret life?”

She sort of squinted and pursed her lips.

Arranged on the cutout over her kitchenette was a set of three charcoal drawings unlike the others. The subject was a small blond girl wearing fuzzy, footy pajamas, wandering through a dark forest. In the drawing her figure is illuminated by a long blade of light too narrow and focused to be from the moon. Its source is unseen, but the feeling its omniscient perspective evokes is one of surveillance, be it government-, Hollywood-, or UFO-motivated. The only colorized elements are the long beam of light cutting through the forest, the lit-up trunks of trees featuring oily snakes, an owl, some nocturnal rodents of prey, and the little girl’s blond hair and Pooh Bear pajamas. The subject appears to be either oblivious or gently bemused that she is being followed through the tall, dark, and hairy forest.

“Who is that?” I said, completely absorbed by the three-paneled narrative.

“A girl.”

“Anyone in particular?”

“No. Why?”

“It’s just that everything else on your walls is based on actual people.”

“Maybe she’s me,” Harriet offered mischievously.

“But you don’t have blond hair.”

She said she dyed it.

I asked her if she was a natural blond.

“I feel like you’re asking me if the curtains match the drapes. Do you like it?”

“Your hair?”

“The triptych.”

“Yes,” I heard myself say.

She asked me what it was precisely that I liked about it.

“The little girl,” I said.

“What about her?”

I told Harriet that it really felt like she was somewhere. “Lost but definitely somewhere,” I added.

“Else?” she said.

“Yes,” I said, “somewhere else.”

“Well, she’s definitely somewhere.”

I’m not sure we were talking about the same thing. Of course I was thinking of Bethany Bunch, but who knows where Harriet Gumm was coming from.

“She’s in a never-ending forest with slithering nocturnal creatures,” she said.

I asked her why the forest was never-ending.

“Because that’s what I wanted it to be,” she replied.