Cleopatra and Frankenstein

by Coco Mellors

“British?” he asked. “London.” “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.” He gave her a respectful nod. “But it’s insanity to suggest you sound anything like a Golden Delicious. That’s a midwestern accent.”

“Undeniably.” He ran ahead to open the building door. “Accompany this odd man to the deli? I just need to hear you say a few more words.” “Mm, like what?” “Like aluminum.” “You mean aluminium?” “Ah, there it is!” He cupped his ears in pleasure. “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.”

He had the slight, energetic build of a retired dancer, a body that suggested economy and intelligence. Cleo smiled approvingly.

It hung over her shoulder in two golden curtains, sweeping open to reveal that much-anticipated first act: her face. And it was a performance, her face. He felt instinctively that he could watch it for hours.

Frank, who had spent much of his life surrounded by beautiful people, had never met anyone who looked like her.

But I’ll just walk, it’s not too far.” “I’ll walk with you,” he said. “No, you mustn’t,” she protested. “It’s too far.” “I thought it wasn’t far?” “You’ll miss the countdown.” “Fuck the countdown,” said Frank. “And the ice?” “You’re right. The ice is important.” Cleo’s face fell. Frank laughed.

“Anyway, in one of the essays he talks about being able to tell how giving a person is as a lover by how curious they are. You’re meant to actually count in your head how many questions they ask you in a minute. If they ask four or more, then they like to please.”

peal of laughter.

“You really want to know all that about me?” “I want to know everything about you,” he said, and was surprised to find he meant it.

But before you can create order, you have to make a mess.” “I’m following.” “That’s what painting is like for me. Inevitably, there’s a moment when I’ve pulled everything out of me, and it’s just … it’s chaos on canvas. I feel like I should never have started. But then I keep going, and somehow things find their order. I know when I’ve finished because I feel … I feel this click that means everything’s in its place. It’s all where it should be. Total peace.” “How long does that last?” “Maybe seven-point-five seconds. And then I start thinking about the next piece.” “Sounds exhausting,” said Frank. “But those seven-point-five seconds are …” She looked up at the sky dramatically. Frank waited. “As you would say, they undo me,” she said.

“I think feather boas should make a comeback,” said Cleo. “I think you are an exceptional person,” said Frank.

Everyone Frank knew was the greatest something in the world. His half sister Zoe was the greatest actor, his best friend Anders was the greatest art director and amateur soccer player, and Cleo, well, Cleo was the most talented painter, the deepest thinker, the most beautiful woman on earth. Why? Because Frank wouldn’t have married anyone else.

Slim-hipped, full-lipped, and covered in tattoos of quotes from books she’d only partially read, she was what Frank called one of Cleo’s strays. Cleo went to kiss her, but Audrey stuck out her long pink tongue instead.

people who had found the intersection between creativity and economy, who made beautiful things but did not suffer for it.

amor mira con unos antojos que hacen parecer oro al cobre, á la probreza riqueza, y á las lagañas perlas.’” Santiago looked around expectantly to a vague murmur of approval. “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.”

She felt very young, very beautiful. To delight in another, to be delighted in turn by them, that was what she had always wanted.

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

“It’s just tender,” said Cleo, cupping his cheek with her palm. “He got your tender part, is all.” He bowed his head and pressed his forehead to hers. He was about to tell her that all of him was the tender part when her phone buzzed and she pulled away.

“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?”

She had an open, leonine face and bronze-flecked eyes that had a light of their own. Her beauty was a mild source of concern for Frank, stemming from an inchoate sense that every really attractive woman he knew was secretly deeply unhappy.

She couldn’t stand, or understand, his passivity.

“Is that how you feel with Frank?” asked Zoe. “Like someone’s in the hole with you?” Cleo looked out over the unlit buildings. The street below them was quiet and empty. It felt as if they were the only people still awake in the whole city. “Sometimes,” she said. She paused to think some more. “And sometimes … Frank is the hole.”

Cleo, on the other hand, was having a fantasy of reaching across the table and delivering Miriam a sharp slap to the face. But if her childhood had taught her anything, it was to do the opposite of what she felt. “Sounds like they’re lucky to have you,” she said.

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.

Myke insists on talking to me, despite having no verifiable interest in me as a person at all. I am playing a game with myself where I see how many questions I can ask him until he asks me one in return. So far, I’m at nine.

“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.” “All men leave you!” I scream. “I still have a chance!” “What exactly are you saying to me?” yells my mother. “YOU CANNOT BE THE LOVE OF MY LIFE!”

She is a pearl. A perfect pearl of a girl.

Frank lays his hand, palm up, on the desk. I think about kissing it. Just those two parts of us, my lips and his palm, are in communion. I sit on my hands, but my head keeps tugging forward like it’s trying to bob for apples. It’s listening to my mouth.

I find this line of poetry by Sáenz and email it to my mother: I want to dream a sky / Full of hummingbirds. I would like to die in such a storm. She replies: I think I’d rather die in my sleep like Auntie Louise.

Sometimes it does not pay to make an effort, I’m learning.

room. Have you noticed that?” I look at Frank. That was the thing about him. He noticed that. He noticed people. It was his gift. Or really, it was the gift he gave you. To be seen.

We stop walking. Frank is looking at me. I am looking at Frank. This is a place of exquisite beauty and extreme danger.

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. They had never touched, never kissed, but his response to her was titanic. Everything in him rose to meet her.

She sipped her drink and smiled to herself in that funny, secret way she had. She always seemed to be keeping up an amusing dialogue with herself in her head, one that he was constantly hoping to become a part of.

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. It was a detail seemingly inconsequential, but which had come to signify everything to him. He would ask her if his emails were the highlight of her day, like hers were of his. He’d ask if her father was dying and if that was why she was always a little sad, even when she said she wasn’t. He’d ask her what it was like to have a father. He’d ask her if she believed you could be in love with two people at once. If she knew what it felt like to love someone you shouldn’t. If she knew what it felt like not to love yourself like you should.

felt the relief tinged with resentment that came with doing what other people wanted her to do.

Quentin’s face was preternaturally expressive; his emotions seemed to live just below the skin’s surface, like fish that survive in the shallows.

diaphanous

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

“You want to know what the key to a happy life is, Zoe?” “There’s just one?” “Just one that matters,” said Jiro. “No expectations. No preferences. If you prefer one outcome over another in life, you will likely be disappointed. I prefer nothing and am always surprised.”

He rested his forehead on the slope beneath her belly button. She took his skull in her hands, his lovely curly hair sprouting between her fingers. Devotional. That was the word for two bodies like that.

Danny wasn’t prone to sympathy, something she’d always liked about him. Fondness was the best word she could think of to describe what they felt for each other. Fondness was warm but not tepid, the color of amber, more affectionate than friendship but less complicated than love.

of bees. Underneath it were the words “Out of the strong came forth sweetness.”

“People who feel the need to say ‘I’m fine’ are never fine, sweetheart,”

perspicacity.

So what?” “Let me tell you something,” says my mother. “Those are two of the most powerful words in the English language. Right between them is a free and happy life.”

“You want to know one of my personal favorite prayers?” “What?” “Wow,” he says.

“Do you know the word humiliate comes from the Latin root humus, which means ‘earth’? That’s how love is supposed to feel.” “Like hummus?” “Like earth. It grounds you. All this nonsense about love being a drug, making you feel high, that’s not real. It should hold you like the earth.”