Cleopatra and Frankenstein

by Coco Mellors

“That extra syllable. A-luh-mi-nee-uhm. It undoes me.” She tried to look skeptical, but she was amused, he could tell. “You’re easily undone,” she said. He surprised her by stopping to consider this with genuine earnestness. “No,” he said eventually. “I’m not.”

“Oh, have you read him?” “No, it’s just, that title is—never mind. I keep meaning to read more,” he conceded. Cleo shrugged. “Just buy a book and read it.” “Right. I hadn’t thought of that.”

“I’m leaving in a few months.” “I think we can finish before then.” Cleo suppressed a smile. “I just don’t want to attach,” she said. She looked down between her knees. Frank crouched in front of her. “I’m afraid it might be too late for that.” “You think?” “I attached the moment I heard you say aluminum.”

What she fantasized about was her first solo show as an artist, a day dedicated solely to her. What scared her was that recently it was easier to imagine the opening than the actual paintings. She worried that she was one of those artists who care more about being an artist than they do about making art. It was a fear so base, so desperately ordinary, that she never mentioned it to anyone, not even Frank.

“Eighty percent of relationship,” she said, “is tolerating difference.” “What’s the other twenty percent?” asked Frank. The woman shrugged. “Fucking.”

“Ah, I see I have to translate for you gringos. It means ‘Love looks through spectacles that make copper look like gold, poverty like riches, and tears like pearls.” He turned back to Cleo and Frank with a warm smile. “But, of course, in my eye you are both already gold.”

She had not told Quentin what Frank’s actual vow was. He’d surprised her by requesting to say something at the end of the ceremony, after the usual script had been read. He was noticeably nervous, his usual gregariousness gone. When he finally did speak, it was a single sentence. When the darkest part of you meets the darkest part of me, it creates light.

“British bitch,” he sneered. “Would you like her better if she was from Ohio like you?” snapped Quentin. “For the one hundredth time, Quentin, Cincinnati is one of the most European cities in America.”

“Just let me ask you one question. And you have to answer honestly.” He looked deep into her eyes. “When was the last time you were with a straight man, I’m talking any straight man, and he said something more interesting than what you were already thinking?”

It was the last storm of the winter, midway through March, which heaped five feet of snow onto the city and swathed it in a silence Frank had never before witnessed. There was something miraculous about meeting each other at the empty cinema, which was improbably still open, the two of them sitting alone in the dark, the smell of damp wool and melted butter curling around them. Afterward, they’d walked blindly through swirling white streets, the occasional headlamps of a car crawling past illuminating their path. There were no cabs, so they’d ducked into an Italian bakery on Bleecker Street that was still open.

It felt almost impossible to imagine the severity of the cold now during the heat of August, the same way it’s impossible to think of being hungry when one is full.

In my psych class we read this study that said what men feared most was pity, and what women feared most was envy. And it resonated with me. For a guy envy can be empowering, but for a girl it just means you’re going to get attacked or excluded.”

“Opinionated women just aren’t celebrated enough, are they, Cleo?” “And some a little too much,” said Cleo.

She’d tried to explain this to Frank, that life in public for her happened from the outside in.

Grief wasn’t linear, she knew, but she hated to feel the old sensations return.

“The park is a place of exquisite beauty and extreme danger.”

I watch the car headlights stripe the ceiling and try to make a list of everything I want to do with the rest of my life. I get to number three, “Find my rollerblades,” before the rain starts plucking at the roof and I give myself over to sleep.

“He’s the best,” he says. “He got drunk at our last holiday party and started giving out hundred-dollar bills. Last year we shot an air freshener ad in Tokyo and he bared his ass to the whole of Shibuya Crossing from a Starbucks window because he lost a bet. All these Japanese people were freaking out.” “And yet, amazingly, the glass ceiling still exists,” I say. Myke rolls his eyes and wheels his chair away from my desk. “It’s not because he’s a man he did that stuff,” he says. “It’s because he was drunk.”

My mother is like a hummingbird in that if she stops moving, even for a moment, she will surely die.

I am lonely, of course. I’m so lonely I could make a map of my loneliness. In my mind it looks like South America, colossal, then petering out to a jagged little tip. Sometimes I’m so lonely I’m not even on that map. Sometimes I’m so lonely I’m the fucking Falklands.

I will not say anything stupid for the rest of the day. If that means I do not say anything for the rest of the day, or every day thereafter, so be it.

“Hair looks great,” says the lady in line for coffee ahead of me into her phone. “But generally, I’m falling apart.”

“Don’t talk that way about your father,” says my mother. “Are you kidding me? He left you, Ma. For a lesbian!” “And so what?” she says. “All men leave! We outlive them anyway. I’ve got news for you, baby, in the end it’s always just us.”

“If you could have bought anything in that whole mall, what would you get?” I ask. She closes her eyes and thinks. I watch a smile spread across her face. “An electric can opener,” she says. Sometimes I worry my mother is shrinking in every way.

I tell Frank my favorite painting is Hans Holbein’s portrait of Thomas Cromwell in the Frick. There’s a patch of carpet in front of it that’s grown bald from the thousands of feet that have stood before it. I tell him I think that’s a good thing to hope for in life, for the carpet to grow thin before you.

The pair of high school students next to me on this PATH train know so much more about life than I do. “I was trying to be, like, hyper-rational,” says the first girl. “And explain to him that he can’t treat me this way.” “That’s smart,” says her friend. “But all my human feelings got in the way,” says the first girl. “That happens,” says her friend.

“You’re not a bad man, Frank,” I say. “You’re just drunk.” “Same thing,” he says, falling backward across the seats.

I put them on with the utmost care, knowing that if I ladder them with one of my hobgoblin toenails, I will surely have to kill myself.

“And I don’t know about you.” He raises his glass over his head. “But I need to drink heavily to be around my family. So mazel tov!” Everyone is laughing. Everyone except Cleo.

“What’s your New Year’s resolution?” one intern asks the other. “Get off my antidepressants for good,” the second intern says. “I’m tired of feeling numb to life’s joys. Yours?” The first intern reaches down to pull up the hem of his pants. “Fashion socks,” he says.

“How’s your day going?” Jacky asks me. I lift my head up from my arms. “It’s no double dolphin kiss,” I say. Jacky roars with laughter. “Nothing is, hon,” she says.

“I don’t understand this obsession with happiness,” she said. “Happiness is like the Hollywood sign. It’s big, it’s unattainable, and even if you do make it up there, what’s there to do but come back down?”

“Get her a cat,” said his mother. “It will do you both good.” “She’s allergic,” he said. “Then get her a hairless one. Get her a lizard! We all need something to look after.” “What about someone to look after us?” “You’re not children. You can look after yourselves.”

“Well, whosyoursugarmomma1956 doesn’t seem to think it’s so crazy.” “I’m going to ask you to think about what you just said,” said Frank. “And then we’ll talk about crazy.”

He tapped his forehead. “Most dangerous neighborhood I know.”

Redheads were, incidentally, Quentin’s greatest weakness.

They were in love. She was having his child. They lived in a one-bedroom in the West Village that no one had to lie to anyone to live in. Did Cleo want that? And if not now, ever? What had she done, marrying Frank? She should have married Quentin. She should have married no one. How did a person learn to live? Learn to be happy? She had surrounded herself with people who didn’t know. This couple, with their his-and-hers vacuums, had figured it out.

She should have known on their wedding day when Frank bought her the blue orchid, dyed with poisonous ink, that he didn’t understand her, never would.

“Oh, you have a roommate. Where is she?” “Getting a lobotomy.”

“How long were you married?” “Just a moment. We are still married”—he tapped his heart—“in here.”

There was Frank dozing on the sofa, a book tented on his bare chest, and Cleo gently setting it aside to lay her head in its place. It was on the train home that he had asked her to marry him. She’d lifted her cheek from his shoulder in wonder. How did you know that was what I wanted? He’d laughed. So that’s a yes? Yes, she’d said, a thousand yeses, yes. And it had felt like the beginning of everything.

This mention of her mother surprised Frank. He could not have known that, though Cleo had been assigned roommates at the hospital (a compulsive skin picker followed by a bipolar bulimic), her real living companion that week had been her mother.

Worst of all, when Cleo looked in the mirror, it was her mother who now stared back. She was fighting to think of them both, her mother and herself, as something other than broken and suicidal. They were women, at least, who could make fires.

She had spent so many years trying not to be defined by what her mother did, trying to be whole, trying to be happy and light. Now she had undone it all.

Some lives are worth more than others. That’s just a fact. Your life is worth a thousand sugar gliders’ lives. Christ, it’s worth a thousand people’s lives to me. I know that’s not ethical, but it’s how I feel. It’s how the human heart works. Your life is more precious than any other life to me. Even more—even more than my own.” “Is that meant to be romantic?” “It’s not meant to be anything. It’s just true.”

“I don’t need you to say it! I’m sick of your words! Words, words, words—” Cleo slapped the table in front of her for emphasis. “Words might be enough for Eleanor, but they’re not enough for me.” Frank gave her a startled look.

tea

“You want credit for not leaving me? Are you joking? Sorry, Frank, but you married me. For richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health. That was the deal. You said those vows. You made those promises. And now you want credit for, what, living by them?”

“Why did you do this to yourself?” Cleo murmured something that was barely words. “What?” “You did this to me,” she whispered. He dropped her wrist and stepped back as if struck. He felt struck. “You’re just trying to hurt me.” She shook her head. “No,” she said. “I’m trying to survive you.”

“Those have to be the saddest words a person can utter.” “What?” “ ‘That’s just who I am.’ ” “Why?” “Because it shows a total unwillingness to change. That is not just who you are, Frank. It’s who you’ve become, who you choose to be. You just refuse to acknowledge the choice.”

“She can still be your friend, even if she’s not mine.” Zoe cocked her head. “But she was never your friend,” she said. “Not really.” Frank looked down at his lap. “The thing is,” he said, “she was my best friend.”