Luster

by Raven Leilani

“Why?” He frowns, and I realize I have seen this one before, that after a few hours his facial expressions are already becoming familiar to me. When I think of how we will only move forward from here, how we will never return to the relative anonymity of the internet, I want to fold myself into a ball. I hate the idea that I have repeated an action, that he has looked at me, discerned a pattern, and silently decided whether it is something he can bear to see again. There is nothing I can do to level the playing field. Some men at least have the decency to guide you immediately to all the things that are wrong with them. But everything I’ve seen of Eric, I want to see again. Like this vaguely paternal old man frown, his gentle disapproval.

“You don’t ever lie to spare feelings?” “Never.” “Interesting,” I say. Of course, it is not interesting that he has been allowed to live candidly. It is not interesting that he cannot conceive of anything else. He has equated his range of motion with mine. He hasn’t considered the lies you tell to survive, the kindness of pretend, which I illustrate now, as I eat this bacterial hot dog. This is the first time I sort of understand him. He thinks we’re alike. He has no idea how hard I’m trying.

He wants me to be myself like a leopard might be herself in a city zoo. Inert, waiting to be fed. Not out in the wild, with tendon in her teeth.

It’s not that I want exactly this, to have a husband or home security system that, for the length of our marriage, never goes off. It’s that there are gray, anonymous hours like this. Hours when I am desperate, when I am ravenous, when I know how a star becomes a void.

She plays the game well, I mean. Better than I do. And so when we are alone, even as we look at each other through borrowed faces, we see each other. I see her hunger, and she sees mine.

She still rearranges herself, waiting to be chosen. And she will be. Because it is an art—to be Black and dogged and inoffensive. She is all these things and she is embarrassed that I am not.

I am good, but not good enough, which is worse than simply being bad. It is almost.

“Good idea,” Eric says, and we start in earnest on a few G&Ts. It gets us loose enough to talk about politics, but as he talks, I hold my breath. I know we are in agreement on the most general, least controversial ideological points—women are people, racism is bad, Florida will be underwater in fifty years—but there is still ample time for him to bring up how much he enjoyed Atlas Shrugged. Even with good men, you are always waiting for the surprise.

As I am standing with my back to the door and he settles down on my futon, gingerly, like he’s afraid the frame will not support his weight, I know that the dissonance is finally dawning on him in a serious way. And while I never enter a room without wondering what personal adjustments need to be made, it is strange to see something similar happen to this friendly, white, midwestern man. It is strange to see him noticing about himself what I always notice—the optimism, the presumption, this rarefied alternate reality in which there is nowhere he does not belong. He looks around with this gentle horror in his eyes, as if it has just occurred to him—upon the introduction of this economic dimension—the mutual desperation involved in merging two people at opposite ends of life.

During this time, I couldn’t tell if I liked being alone, or if I only endured it because I knew I had no choice.

This was the contradiction that would define me for years, my attempt to secure undiluted solitude and my swift betrayal of this effort once in the spotlight of an interested man. I was pretending not to worry about the consequences of my isolation. But whenever I talked to anyone, I found myself overcompensating for the atrophy of my social muscles.

So when it hurt and I was too proud to say stop and so said more, I believed, like a Catholic or a Tortured Artist, that the merit of a commitment correlates directly to the pain you endure in its pursuit.

All this time Eric hasn’t looked away from me, within his confusion a promise of retribution that I find thrilling—historically the sort of high sweetest at its inception, when a man’s wrath is just a consideration, when he curtails the impulse because he thinks he’s different while you know he is the same.

she can wage war with large corporate vendors whose algorithms sweep book files for errors but have huge blind spots for the speculative lexicon of science fiction, and she can say to them: This is not an error; this is human; this is style.

They start out with a few compliments, which I receive readily. Yes, I’ve whipped the digital archive into shape. Yes, I delivered on the K–5 Maya Angelou and Frida Kahlo biographies, wherein the sexual assault and bus accident were omitted per a Provo parents group who weren’t ready for their kids to see the blood women wade through to create art.

In the lobby, there is a Diversity Giveaway. I go up to the table and scan the books, and there are a few new ones: a slave narrative about a mixed-race house girl fighting for a piece of her father’s estate; a slave narrative about a runaway’s friendship with the white schoolteacher who selflessly teaches her how to read; a slave narrative about a tragic mulatto who raises the dead with her magic chitlin pies; a domestic drama about a Black maid who, like Schrödinger’s cat, is both alive and dead, an unseen, nurturing presence who exists only within the bounds of her employer’s four walls; an “urban” romance where everybody dies by gang violence; and a book about a Cantonese restaurant, which may or may not have been written by a white woman from Utah, whose descriptions of her characters rely primarily on rice-based foods.

I think of my parents, not because I miss them, but because sometimes you see a Black person above the age of fifty walking down the street, and you just know that they have seen some shit. You know that they are masters of the double consciousness, of the discreet management of fury under the tight surveillance and casual violence of the outside world. You know that they said thank you as they bled, and that despite the roaches and the instant oatmeal and the bruise on your face, you are still luckier than they have ever been, such that losing a bottom-tier job in publishing is not only ridiculous but offensive.

As I watch my roommate leave, the idea that I have a pussy seems preposterous. I move through the apartment and try to reconcile the existence of the clitoris with the broccoli smell my roommate left behind. I rinse the cheesecake from my hair and get back out on my route, where the men who line the street remind me that technically yes, I do have a pussy, and that I will live with the terror of protecting it for the rest of my life.

“You noticed our daughter. When you came to the house,” she finally says, and in this moment it becomes clear to me that despite this evening-long conspiracy, she is moving toward her most natural conclusion, which is to engage me not as a person who has just watched her dissect a man but as a person who is Black, and who is, because of that, available for her support.

I take a moment to revel in the schadenfreude, but mostly I feel suckered into admitting it, that it matters, that I have thought about it, the apparent isolation of their child, a thing immediately recognizable to me for being myself that thing which is both hypervisible and invisible: Black and alone.

We were bonded in our mutual hatred of our bodies, though my hatred was adolescent and hers was infinitely more developed, partly a trick of her newly sober brain, which found in food a substitute for the narcotics that had kept her lean. By the time she killed herself, she would still be eleven pounds shy of her goal.

there is no fluffy alternative word for what I’m trying to convey, no way to effectively explain violations that are not overt. It is a rhetorical hellscape. A casual reduction so frequent it is mundane. Almost too mundane for the deployment of the R word, as with a certain sect of Good White Person the accusation overshadows the act. Racism! I should yell, because I’m sure Rebecca will receive it in the uppercase regardless, and already I feel her seizing on the drama of its implication, even though racism is often so mundane it leaves your head spinning, the hand of the ordinary in your slow, psychic death so sly and absurd you begin to distrust your own eyes. So it has taken a long time for me to get here. To say, Yes, this is what happened. It happened just like that.

I find it very rich, to have been invited here partly on the absurd presumption that I would know what to do with Akila simply because we are both Black, and now be rebuffed when I have not performed the role of the Trusty Black Spirit Guide to her taste.

She was disappointed to find I had inherited her ugly, glottal laugh, and encouraged me to hold it behind my hand.

He’d spent his formative years in various homes in the Bible Belt with grim aunts who could trace their American lineage to the original bill of sale.

While he collected disability, it was not enough, and he had done it, the thing that most animals do but which only a few animals grieve, he had been up close and found it fetid and strange, killing for his country—a country that, once he was back home, reminded him that patriots could be shell-shocked, could be spangled in Arlington grass, but absolutely could not be Black. And after having walked around with a child’s blood underneath his fingernails, at home the banks, the churches, the women, were nothing. He saw that the people at home did not see Black men like him among them, that they were unprepared.

When I was young, I didn’t understand it was cruel. My father’s remarks about my mother’s moods and Bible studies felt innocuous and brought some air in the room, his ambivalence about God appearing to be a welcome bit of levity as opposed to what it really was—a profound vacuum in the place where God used to go. During the years he killed for his country, he’d killed God, too, and he came back home inspired to make one of his own.

When I sit down, he takes my face into his hands and I can feel the salary in them, the forty-plus years of relative ease.

I lie in bed and wonder how women don’t feel it, the exact moment their bodies begin to create.

Rebecca ushers me over to that one Black instructor and introduces me as a friend of the family. Of course, we have already met. We have already noticed each other and engaged in the light telepathy necessary in rooms like these, acknowledging that here we are, being careful and softly Black.

I do my initial sketch of the body in watered-down cyan, and as I go to fill in the flesh, I find she works faster than I can accommodate. One moment the body is whole, and the next it is turned out like a rind.

I do my best not to think too much about it, but it is hard not to take the point of the surgery scars between the rectum and bladder, which is that he tried, and he failed. Of course, this is what Rebecca loves about the work, the stories the bodies tell. She believes the best way to see how a thing is made is to take it apart. She says she was a kid who dismantled all her toys, that it disturbed her mother but her father understood and started buying her things she could assemble from scratch—clocks and cars and model airplanes.

The cadavers in Rembrandt’s paintings were all criminals. The subjects are really the learned men around the corpse. Within my paintings, there is always a half-articulated form of a woman, too mobile to be opaque, craned over the body with forceps in her hand. If she sees herself there, she doesn’t mention it. But there are moments when she looks over my shoulder and hums her approval, which of course I resent, but also, a little bit, love.

think of all the gods I have made out of feeble men. I go to my room and get stuck in a Wikipedia hole about religion on Tatooine. I finish my costume and sit in the dark in my metal bikini, and in the morning I stumble to the bathroom and take the pregnancy test. I am inclined to pray, but on principle, I don’t. God is not for women. He is for the fruit. He makes you want and he makes you wicked, and while you sleep, he plants a seed in your womb that will be born just to die.

He is already in costume, and out of all of us, his physique is closest to the material, a supple inverted triangle that is practically canon, though he has gone for the updated costume, the muted ballistic nylon instead of shiny spandex, which feels less patriotic, but along with his whole working-father vibe is maybe the Captain America you get when the country has, relative to the rest of the world, entered its surly teenage years.

If I’m honest, all my relationships have been like this, parsing the intent of the jaws that lock around my head. Like, is he kidding, or is he hungry? In other words, all of it, even the love, is a violence.

He is the most obvious thing that has ever happened to me, and all around the city it is happening to other silly, half-formed women excited by men who’ve simply met the prerequisite of living a little more life, a terribly unspecial thing that is just what happens when you keep on getting up and brushing your teeth and going to work and ignoring the whisper that comes to you at night and tells you it would be easier to be dead.

sure, an older man is a wonder because he has paid thirty-eight years of Con Ed bills and suffered food poisoning and seen the climate reports and still not killed himself, but somehow, after being a woman for twenty-three years, after the ovarian torsion and student loans and newfangled Nazis in button-downs, I too am still alive, and actually this is the more remarkable feat.

But when they ask if I live in the house, I hesitate, and Akila crosses her arms and says that she does, her tenor markedly less reverent than mine. One of the officers turns to look at her, and I can feel the impending spiral of this exchange, my fear of the officers’ increasing proximity tempered somewhat by the oddness of our shared incredulity at Akila’s departure from the script. I can’t tell if it is defiance or if she simply doesn’t know the words. I step in front of her and tell her to go around the back. But she won’t, and there is a part of me that sees her ease, her self-possession, and is frustrated for what she hasn’t been told. But when I see how she is resolute, casual in her claim of what is hers, I am envious.

This is my home, Akila says, and I know that the moment between when a Black boy is upright and capable of speech and when he is prostrate in his own blood is almost imperceptible, due in great part to the tacit conversation that is happening beyond him, that has happened before him, and that resists his effort to enter it before it concludes. I know that the event horizon is swift because of the gulf between the greeting and the pavement, but in real time, as they press Akila to the ground, every second is long.

As it happens, everyone involved is denied some kind of dignity, the officers’ brute force sincere and absurd, the exertion rendering them small, and Akila, surprised and clumsy and afraid, so conspicuously a child that I run over without thinking and try to get them off, the whites of her eyes bright in the porch light before an officer lifts me into his arms and presses me down into the grass and says Stop resisting, which my ears receive as Greek but also as déjà vu, because not even in what is feasibly my last moment can I be free from the internet and the digital hall of mirrors in which orders are issued unironically to dying women and men. When I stop resisting, it is because I can no longer hear Akila’s voice. For a moment, I only hear geese, and somewhere, an ice cream truck.

shouldn’t have talked back,” she finally says. “I feel—” She pauses, collects herself. “I feel really stupid.” “No, there’s nothing we could have done. It was always going to go that way.” “Is that supposed to make me feel better?” she says, her voice low, tight. I remember when my parents tried to tell me this, the only time in their miserable marriage they were ever united. It must be strange for every Black kid, when their principal authority figures break the news that authorities lie. Ironically, I didn’t believe them. I had to find it out for myself. “You’re not going to feel better about this,” I say. “You’re going to feel angry, for a long time, and that’s your right.” “Okay,” she says. “Okay. I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

Later, I try to paint. When I can’t, I sit in front of the mirror and do a quick graphite study of my face, and for the first time in my life, there I am. Or, at least, something about it is recognizable, but the timing is bad. Because among the dumb, insufficient platitudes I might offer to Akila or myself is the truth. And the truth is that when the officer had his arm pressed into my neck, there was a part of me that felt like, all right. Like, fine. Because there will always be a part of me that is ready to die.

Then we move through the day side by side, and I feel like the exception, like there is some vestigial organ we share that is essentially a second tongue, our language furtive and crude and articulated only in private, this feeling in both of us, that we are building something out of glass. At times, it feels awful, like it is only this way because there is an expiration date. I go into the city and I watch a broker in a tracksuit flush a newly installed toilet. I get stuck underground while another broker is waiting for me in Forest Hills. On the F, a rat scurries over my feet. And of course, there are babies everywhere. Haggard parents hefting carriages up and down the subway stairs. When I get back to New Jersey, there is an ache between my legs.

When she is gone, I stow the painting in a place I am unlikely to notice it regularly, and for a moment, I feel like I’ve forgotten how to be alone. It is not that I want company, but that I want to be affirmed by another pair of eyes. The acceptable interval for which I can be embarrassed for what I said to the doctors has passed, but I still think about it for weeks, what I meant when I said I was an artist. I think about the painting in the clinic and the canvas fibers curled beneath the oil. All the raw materials that are gathered and processed into shadow and light. The pigments drawn from sand and Canterbury bells, the carbon black drawn from fire and spread onto slick cave walls. A way is always made to document how we manage to survive, or in some cases, how we don’t. So I’ve tried to reproduce an inscrutable thing. I’ve made my own hunger into a practice, made everyone who passes through my life subject to a close and inappropriate reading that occasionally finds its way, often insufficiently, into paint. And when I am alone with myself, this is what I am waiting for someone to do to me, with merciless, deliberate hands, to put me down onto the canvas so that when I’m gone, there will be a record, proof that I was here.