Cleopatra and Frankenstein

by Coco Mellors

“Your voice sounds like how biting into a Granny Smith apple feels.” Now she laughed, with less abandon. “How does that feel?” “In a word? Crisp.” “As opposed to biting into a Pink Lady or a Golden Delicious?” “You know your apples.”

“Cleopatra, the original undoer of men.”

“Frankenstein sounds about right. Creator of monsters.”

Cleo chuckled. “Would take a lot more than that to get me out of my cowboy boots.”

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

Frank’s aura suggested that he was creative, charismatic, and worried about money. Cleo’s said she was intuitive, sensitive, stubborn, and needed to drink more herbal tea.

“People don’t know it, but Polish is a very poetic language,”

Zoe was the only family member they had invited. At nineteen she was also the youngest person there. Frank and Zoe looked almost nothing alike, despite being half siblings, in part because of the age difference, in part because Zoe’s father was Black and Frank’s, like their mother, was white. Bespectacled, freckled, and curly-haired, Frank was charmingly handsome, but he was rarely the best-looking person in the room. Zoe, on the other hand, was breathtaking. Her face had the symmetry of a Brâncuşi sculpture. Her hair was a tumble of curls streaked with copper and gold. She did not appear to have pores. Every time Cleo looked at her, she couldn’t help searching for a flaw.

‘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.”

When the darkest part of you meets the darkest part of me, it creates light.

The thought occurred to him that if you listened hard enough in New York, you could always hear a siren. Someone, somewhere, was always getting hurt.

What he could recall with absolute clarity was the way Cleo had looked sitting in the window, her lovely shining face and honey hair. Everything about her was golden then, the stack of gold rings she was always leaving by his sink, the first surprise of her light, silky pubic hair. She even smelled like honey, some cream she was always lathering herself with, complaining that her skin was too sensitive for the harsh New York winters.

A down payment on my head surgery!” “We’re in Europe!” the voice yelled. “It’s free!”

“More of a dog person?” I ask. “Dolphin person,” says Jacky.

I find a tea towel that reads “You don’t stop gardening because you get old, you get old because you stop gardening.”

“You don’t stop bullshitting because you get old,” she says. “You get old because life’s bullshit,” I say.

“One last thing,” she says. “You! Could! Fall! In! Love! Today!”

“Myke with a ‘y’!” She throws her hands in the air. “And why not? Myke. Myke! I like it. A mover and shaker called Myke!”

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

Okay, so I am not beautiful or blond or British. But I can make jokes, be nice to your mother, and give a decent blow job. That’s what I got.

I am dancing slowly, arms outstretched, to Wham’s “Last Christmas.” This is my favorite song of all time. It is full of pathos and insight. Perhaps the real tragedy here is not that George Michael’s heart was given away, but that this beautiful song is relegated to only one month of the year, when its message of unrequited love leading to a deepening resolve to choose more deserving partners is undeniably relevant year-round.

Myke looks at Frank, who is looking at me, who is looking at her. She is turning and saying something that makes her friend laugh.

Eleanor. Frank had once seen an image of a tsunami wave carrying hundreds of species of sea life within it, sharks and stingrays and schools of silver-backed fish, all lifted high in the wave’s arc before crashing onto land. That was what it felt like whenever he was near Eleanor.

He was looking for Eleanor. He couldn’t help it; he was always looking for Eleanor. He found her perched on a stool at the far corner of the bar, where the crowd was thinner and less raucous. He leaned on the wooden countertop next to her.

Eleanor laughed again. Her laugh was the sound of a slot-machine jackpot, a soda can cracking open, fairground music in the distance, a Corvette engine coming to life, a thousand hands applauding all at once. It was one of those truly beautiful sounds.

If he could, he’d ask her if she remembered how the first time they met a current had passed from his hand to hers, an electric shock.

Anders looked around. Most of the work here was impenetrable to him. It all looked like it had been made by computers. He bee-lined toward an oil painting of a nude woman. This one, at least, wasn’t bad. He liked that you could feel the painter’s presence on the canvas, the brushstrokes equal parts expressive and restrained. He leaned in closer to read the artist’s name. It was Cleo’s.

There were certain foods respected chefs like him just weren’t supposed to like. This included in-flight meals, Mister Softee, string cheese, Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, street cart hot dogs, microwave dinners, supermarket sushi, Twinkies, movie theater nachos, and all fast food chains (though an exception was made for In-N-Out). But Santiago loved these things. To him, they tasted like America.

“Her name is Dominique,” he said. “We have been on three dates.” “And?” asked Zoe. “She is warm like the sun.”

the taste of loneliness is a glass of chardonnay and a turkey club sandwich at an airport bar. The shape of loneliness is his son’s single bed, which he uses on the rare nights he’s home, while his son sleeps in the master bedroom beside his wife. The beginning of loneliness was moving from Japan to Brussels when he was nine, then to Toronto at eleven, then on to Missouri, Paraguay, Switzerland … A new home every two years until he was seventeen. It was being given the nickname “Oh Wow”at one of the international schools he attended, an Americanism he’d picked up and used too often, until the other kids began to mimic him. It was returning to Japan for business school to find himself no longer Japanese enough. It was marrying a woman he barely knew before his father died so he could leave this world in peace. It was dutifully making love to his wife until he gave her a child, who in turn replaced him, which made him free and alone once more.

Fondness was warm but not tepid, the color of amber, more affectionate than friendship but less complicated than love.

“Enigma,” said Audrey, shaking her head. “I should probably go find Marshall. You okay here?” Cleo nodded and turned back to the water. The sirens flashed on, bathing the river in light. Red. Manhattan was stretched out before her like a handful of jewels. Blue. The city that never wanted you to leave. Red. So it offered you everything, anything. Blue. It was time to go.

“As long as there’s chicken parmigiana in the freezer,” a lady says into her phone as she walks past me, “everything will be okay.”

“What do you do not to feel sad?” I ask. “I let myself feel sad.”

impossible. I try to focus, instead, on listing all the different types of cheese I know off the top of my head. Camembert. Gouda. Swiss. Cheddar. Manchego … Could he really be pining for me? But if he was, why wouldn’t he tell me that Cleo had moved? Maybe he thinks I don’t care? How could he think I don’t care? Provolone. Feta. Stilton. Mozzarella … I didn’t even say goodbye to him the day I left the agency. But he knew how to contact me … Brie. Pecorino. Ricotta. American. He doesn’t think of me, or he would have reached out. This whole thing is in my head. Pepper jack.

Days I have held, days I have lost, days that outgrow, like daughters, my harboring arms. Next to them is a faded check mark. A restrained little check. My heart.

“What did I tell you about what other people think?” asks my mother. “‘So what?’” I say. “Exactly.”

I guess that’s what life should feel like; setting off on a long car ride with all your worries and hopes strapped around you, the people who love you most frantically waving you off as you go.

Crazy, that’s what I am. Crazy. No one looks good with bangs. Bangs are just a beard on your forehead, a hair hat that you can never take off.

I can feel the night pressing against my skin. It is cold, but I am warm. My breath meets the air. * Wow.

She was uniquely attractive, not just in her looks but in her essence. She had a way of bringing the light into a room with her, like a window being flung open.

Cleo cast her eyes around the courtyard. It struck her that somehow, miraculously, she was. In the seven months since she came to Rome, she had made art every day, rediscovering the pleasures of both solitude and community. She ate breakfast in the kitchen with the other artists on residency and reconvened with them every evening to discuss the day’s work over wine and pasta. She had seen the single bed where Keats took his final breath and walked with her face upturned through the Sistine Chapel, devouring the medley of gold and flesh and sky. She loved New York, but it was not her city, she knew that now. It suited her to be part of this intricate network of European capitals, each only a few hours away from the others, each containing its Caravaggios and Sorollas and Soutines. She had even started talking to her father more, now they were only an hour time difference apart.

And she was discovering that the slower pace of Rome soothed her. She was industrious, but never exhausted. She slept deeply and alone. She had not yet taken a lover, though one of the other artists, a shy Swiss designer her age, had confessed his feelings for her late one night in the studio. She needed more time, she’d told him gently. In the afternoons she drank espresso standing at the bar and watched the Italians flit busily around each other like butterflies. She had finally learned to be by herself in public without thinking about what others were thinking of her. It was a relief to live from the inside out at long last.

When the darkest part of you meets the darkest part of me, it creates light. Now she had completed that process on her own. She had met the darkest part of herself and created this.

They just don’t feel they have to do the tap dance, you know? They don’t have to prove themselves all the time to be loved. Because they always were.” Cleo smiled sadly. “But how do you stop tap dancing if you’re like us?” “I just got too tired, Cley,” he said. “The shoes didn’t fit anymore. And when I stood still, Eleanor was there standing with me. And I think you deserve to be with someone like that, who can provide that safety and that stillness for you in a way I never could. Even though God knows I wanted to, Cleo. I really wanted it.”

“Can you tell me what he said?” Frank asked again. “How strange you are,” said the boy looking from one to the other. “It’s an Italian saying. It is something like, ‘Wherever you are going, it is waiting for you.’”