Luster: A Novel

  “I didn’t even want to be a mother,” I say when Rebecca and I are almost halfway home.

  “Neither did I,” she says, and when we pull into the driveway and Eric walks past the kitchen window, I feel it anew. I fiddle with my seat belt and the AC, and Rebecca allows me the pretense. I would like to take a shower and bleed in private, but the hard, ceramic light of the afternoon changes the house, makes it feel opaque, too fixed to accommodate what has happened quickly and with significant carnage. In a year, maybe this will be okay. But today I wear an adult diaper and there is no god, no child, no hypothetical in which there is a farmhouse at the end of all that crunchy, brown grass. There is only the recycling and the white clapboard, dappled in sun.

  * * *

  Rebecca and I sit in the car for an hour, and once we are inside, she remains close by. I haven’t asked her to do this, and in fact, I feel some resentment at her presumption, but mostly there is this unspoken agreement that in the wake of this bloody and preposterous thing, everything else can be put aside. We orbit each other wordlessly for days, chamomile and ibuprofen appearing on my dresser out of nowhere, like the old days, when we were more tentative, and the house felt like it had a finite amount of air. Rebecca leaves me muesli and Percocet and I go on StreetEasy and look for studios in Bedford Park and Gravesend, and when I do a Google Street View of one of the apartments, it is just an enormous crater in the ground. Newly Renovated! it says, and so I move to Craigslist, and there are a few that look somewhat hospitable to women, but for each one there is a caveat, requirements that potential roommates be “fun” or into the holy spirit, florid descriptions of Orangetheory and how close everyone in the house already is.

  * * *

  In the week it takes me to heal, I go through a few boxes of thick, hospital-grade sanitary napkins, and in general feel like I am being kept as a new vampire’s main source of food, hard, dark clots of blood in the first days and then a bloodbath so relentless I feel godlike just to be alive. And on the day it stops, I get the internal communications job I interviewed for a few weeks before, a job I actively do not want but that offers paid sick leave, health insurance, and a free mattress, the hiring manager a black woman who halfway through the call tells me plainly to negotiate my package before I say yes, and so I say a number, about five grand more than I feel I deserve, and she simply says, Very good.

  * * *

  While I am waiting for the paperwork to come through, Rebecca and I take even more incremental steps toward each other until we are basically moving through these last days with our fingers linked, as stiffly as this can possibly be done, our adjacency embarrassing but somehow necessary, even as I am certain she is relieved the child didn’t live. Because in the moments we are closest, there is always a caveat, always a clock running out, and nothing can be purely sweet. I wake up in the morning and think for a moment that I am someone happier and then I remember where I am.

  * * *

  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.

  * * *

  I unpack my paints and I stretch a canvas. I take my time with the gesso, thin it with water to make sure there are no lumps. I lay down a cool background color, and while it dries, I feel myself becoming anxious, too particular about the state of my brushes, which, during the length of my short but generative pregnancy, became stiff with old paint. I sit in the dark and think of the doctors who performed the procedure, and I imagine them at home, spanking their children and smoking cigarettes. I wonder if it is common to ask a patient what she does as the twilight sleep begins, if it functions as a truth serum, or a moment in which patients think of what they would like to be doing with their lives and lie. I want to feel that when I said I was an artist, it wasn’t a lie. But when I try to paint, I am out of sync, still used to the rhythm I kept in my pregnancy-induced insomnia, when I stowed jars of oily artichoke hearts under my bed for delirious painting jags that went on until dawn, which I described, in great detail, to a child who did not yet have ears. Orange, yellow, pink. I do it now almost automatically, and when I catch myself, I feel angry.

  * * *

  I go down into the kitchen at dawn and fill a bowl with artichoke hearts, and I move through the house and select a few things I would like to take with me: Akila’s Captain Planet mug, Eric’s Bumblebee Unlimited vinyl, and a half-used bottle of Rebecca’s ginger and bergamot perfume. I wrap the breakables in a pair of jeans, and at nine, I haul my bags to Rebecca’s truck. The morning is blank and sullen, and the AC is dead. We stop for coffee, and the back of Rebecca’s shirt is dark with sweat. I try to make small talk and she puts on her sunglasses and says Yeah, yeah, though I did not ask a question and there is no sun. On the radio, every station is muddied by the echo of an approximate frequency, and it is only when we reach Crown Heights and Rebecca kills the engine that I hear a voice say, Tonight only, before we climb the stairs to my apartment, a sixth-floor walk-up with a brand-new toilet and too-friendly cat. I am happy to find that my roommate, who has texted only to ask if I am allergic to nuts, is not home. Rebecca goes through the apartment and turns all the faucets on, and after I am done spraying the perimeter of my room with Raid, I come out and find she has disassembled them all, the chrome, rubber, and silicone coils laid out neatly on damp paper towels. Your water pressure is terrible, she says, and I am tempted to say that she should’ve paid me more. I am tempted to ask why her sporadic payments included so many coins. After, the water pressure is better, but I cannot help feeling that any attempt to improve this situation, the indelible ruin of New York real estate, is absurd. My new full bed, which has been waiting at the bottom of the stairs for two days, already has something of a smell. It takes us a while to get it up the stairs, and a couple of times Rebecca falls. We don’t bicker, but after, we wash our faces violently, and then we share a cigarette outside. She touches the inside of my wrist, and immediately I feel like I might cry. Don’t tell him, I say, and when we are back in the apartment, we share a small bottle of vodka I stole from the Marriott minibar and I use my roommate’s record player to listen to the vinyl, which, despite Eric’s preservation method, has been warped by heat. And so as we drink, we are constantly adjusting the needle, though when it is dark, we give up and let it skip, the interval long enough to justify the return and render it almost invisible, though on some level we are aware of the drone and how we have begun to mirror its signature as we talk, the content of our words increasingly illegible as we move around each other like two magnets of identical charge. I hold this frustration inside myself until we are once again on opposite sides of the room, and I say Don’t move, too loudly. When she obeys, I think we are both surprised. But immediately after, there is an expectation in the air, the language that we share now whittled down to the essential vocabulary, to soft, yearning words, conjugations that are ardent and hard. I tell her to get undressed, to take her time, partly because I am getting my oils together and partly because I want to spend time with the body that has been showing itself to me, for months, in small, insolent degrees. When she is undressed, I still feel the old impulse to compare, but otherwise her body is like a dagger, like the body of a woman who is in the business of sending off the dead. And this is how she holds herself, like a person uninterested by her own anatomical drama, her bearing unselfconscious, indifferent. It feels like a challenge. I mix my paints, deep,
quaternary colors, rust, ash, dirty turquoise, and then I take her face into my hands and pull her mouth back with my fingers so that I can see her teeth.

  * * *

  When she doesn’t protest, I arrange her into the position I want, one limb at a time, until she is taut. There is no coy, lingering touch, though I can feel her expectation of me when I press an arch into her back, and I am struck by the soft knots of her spine, the way her body feels mutable, her age a vivid, enviable thing. I feel her commitment as she rises up onto her toes, and I have made the pose demanding on purpose, but as I collect my palette and take my place on the floor, it feels overly punitive, and I am not sure if after all of this, I will even be able to paint it faithfully. But then I see her seriousness, the way she remains as she was arranged, and the work begins on its own, her nakedness gorgeous data that in translation does not feel salacious. As we work, the light changes in the room, and the painting becomes a composite of contradictory shadows. When I turn it around to show her, she comes down onto her heels and puts a hand up to her mouth. Oh, she says, and then she takes a while to put on her clothes. I look away to give her privacy, but also because it is suddenly hard to watch, the indulgence so close to the aftermath that it feels indecent to watch her tie her shoes. But when this is done, there is no ceremony. There are no words, and she lets herself out.

  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.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book wouldn’t have been possible without the support of my family and friends. Thank you to Mom, Dad, and Sam for your light and encouragement. To Doug, for giving me the first book I ever loved. To Daimion, for giving me my first sketchbook. To Evan, for being an incredible partner and friend. Every day I am in awe of your kindness. To the literary journals who championed my work when I was just beginning to write. To New York University’s MFA Program, where I met friends and mentors who lifted me up and helped me keep going. To the people in my cohort who became family and made me a better writer and person. To Katie, Zadie, Jonathan, Deborah, Hannah, and John for seeing me and pushing me. To Ellen and Martha for your care and advocacy. To my fantastic editor Jenna, who whipped this book into shape. To Na Kim for this beautiful cover. To the whole FSG team for their brilliance and enthusiasm. Thank you all for helping me make this dream a reality.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Raven Leilani’s work has been published in Granta, The Yale Review, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Conjunctions, The Cut, and New England Review, among other publications. Leilani received her MFA from NYU and was an Axinn Foundation Writer-in-Residence. Luster is her first novel. You can sign up for email updates here.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  Copyright

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  120 Broadway, New York 10271

  Copyright © 2020 by Raven Leilani

  All rights reserved

  First edition, 2020

  Title page and chapter opener art by Sputanski/Shutterstock.com

  E-book ISBN: 978-0-374-91033-4

  Our e-books may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or by e-mail at MacmillanSpecialMarkets@macmillan.com.

  www.fsgbooks.com

  www.twitter.com/fsgbooks • www.facebook.com/fsgbooks