We sipped our whiskeys. “Tell me,” I said, “how he found out.” Important to imagine us, here, backs to, elbows on, the bar. Not looking at each other.
“I used his computer to check my e-mail.” Staring, instead, at the photographs across the room.
“And you forgot to log out.” Staring straight ahead.
“Forgot. Sure, that works.”
“You wanted him to find out.”
“I did.”
“Why?”
“You want to know a funny thing?”
“Always.”
“I wasn’t even cheating on him.”
“You mean technically? Like, you hadn’t had sex?”
“No, I mean it was all—” My friend made a shooing motion with her free hand. “The guy I told you about, the one I was cheating on Paul with. I made him up. I made it all up.”
“The e-mails that—”
“I wrote them. From a different address, of course. It was fun, actually. Thinking up a character, his job, the words he would use. Where would he suggest we get together. Did he prefer pussy or cunt.”
“And when you told me. That you were having an affair.”
“A lie. He preferred pussy, by the way. That’s when I knew it wouldn’t work out. Vile word.”
A slight increase in the effort involved in keeping my face still. My friend’s revelation had apparently pained me.
“Cunt is the better word, that’s true.” The revelation of the lie, I mean. Because beneath the first premise of our friendship was the understanding that we were, both of us, bad people. Or that we believed ourselves to be bad people. What’s that old line? Ah, yes, now I remember: Every adult in the Anthropocene who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows he’s a real piece of shit. We believed that, and the fact that many others did not, this was, wouldn’t you know it, a real barrier to intimacy. In a deliberately even tone: “Is it worth asking why.”
My friend shrugged. “I don’t know. Is it?”
“Okay. Why?” And if my friend had been hiding this from me, she might also have been hiding other things. And if she had been hiding this and also other things from me, it was perhaps because she thought I was not bad enough, felt I could not understand her most evil deeds. And if she thought that, well, our honesty had served no purpose, for in that case it was clear that she did not understand me at all.
“Bored, mostly.”
“Have you considered getting a job?” My friend had, has, family money.
“I have a job.” This was an argument we’d had before.
“You don’t.” The fact of my friend’s family money meant that I loathed her, just a little, for political reasons. Also that I let her pay for dinner.
“I volunteer.”
“Why not tell him?”
My friend shrugged again. “Boring. What time is it?”
I checked my watch. “Noon.”
“Another?”
“Why not.” To the bartender: “Two more, please.”
* * *
—
In a separate building, my friend and I entered a small gallery temporarily pressed into service as a changing room. We took off our clothes and put on bathing suits. Back in the building’s main gallery, we entered the swimming pool that had been installed at its center. It was a Monday, midafternoon, and the pool was otherwise empty. The bottom of the deep end was not tile or plastic or ceramic or stone. Instead it was a video screen. On the video screen the Swedish artist appeared naked, also in a pool. The perspective was such that her pool seemed to be located directly beneath ours. Such that it seemed almost possible to move from our pool into hers. I reached out with one hand. I touched screen. The Swedish video artist’s mouth was moving. She was saying something, I think, though it was impossible to hear her, to know even in what language she was speaking. Then my lungs were burning and I came to the surface. My friend rose, too. Her eyes, if they had been puffy before, now weren’t. The irises blinked green. I had, until that moment, forgotten the color of my friend’s eyes.
We exited the pool and dried off.
“What did you think?” I asked my friend.
“Nice tits,” she said.
“I mean the concept.”
“Did you notice the name?”
“I Have an Important Message.”
“Obvious, don’t you think?”
“Yes,” I agreed. “A little obvious.”
Los Angeles, 2011
My parents live in Los Angeles, in a shambling three-story in the Hollywood Hills. Inherited, my mother’s father’s mother a minor star, silent films, with what they used to call a Cupid’s-bow mouth and a smart bob, she bought the house with her first paycheck, financially savvy and good thing, too, didn’t survive the transition to talkies, or maybe it was giving birth to my grandfather, how the pregnancy changed her body, the softness around the middle she never lost. Don’t like it, them, my parents. Talking about them, I mean. Not being modest when I say shambling, my grandfather and my mother, both only children and too good for any kind of regular work, the house decaying and no money for repairs. There’s a picture on the wall along one of the staircases, not a picture, a page from an old tabloid, framed, newsprint, a shot of my great-grandmother, in low heels and a dress with no waist, on the arm of Rudolph Valentino. I have been, in my life, just close enough to wealth to touch the rotting lace of its hem. Another way to put this: my family has been, still is, richer than most.
What happened was my friend got divorced, and then, for a while, she went to live with my parents. She said, my friend, that she wanted to spend some time with people who liked her. I live in California too, though up north. With my husband, though my friend did not ask if she could stay with us. I guess I was a little offended. Told myself she wanted to be tended to, knew I would not tend to her and knew my mother would. Though also I was relieved. Just then we were trying to have a baby. Baby books everywhere and me lying on my back, in bed, a thermometer in my vagina, trying to take my basal body temperature so I’d know when to fuck my husband, this, we’d been told, was the most natural way. My mind so filled with this one desire—baby, baby, baby—it might as well have been blank. Dutiful copulation. Tension and resentment packed into each of our small rooms like pudding into pudding cups. “Do you think,” my friend asked me, “that it’s ethical, right now, to have a baby. Considering where we are. In late capitalism, the life cycle of the planet.” I hung up. My husband and I did not end up having a baby, though not for ethical reasons. Later we also got a divorce. Having a baby, in any case, is never ethical. I don’t mean it’s not, just that’s the wrong scale.