The Answers Read online

  That afternoon she went to the park and lay in some grass, stared at the clouds, thought of Tennessee, thought of the woods where she never saw a man she didn’t know, never saw a man who wasn’t her father, and she wept. She wept but her face did not move. She wept but she made no sound. She told no one until she told Chandra a year later, a secret that cemented them, made them family, and Chandra told her what you tell a person who tells you this: This does not define you. You are not this.

  Four minutes of a life. Almost nothing, but there it is, recurring in her after being recalled by one smell or another, the quality of some light, the texture of a brick wall. It could have been so much worse, she sometimes thought, but it wasn’t worse. Nothing’s ever worse.

  Chandra took her to a self-defense class—something physical to do, a motion, a movement they could make together—and a women’s circle in Park Slope, though they both felt too shy to say anything—and Chandra took her to a rally for survivors of sexual violence, but Mary felt overwhelmed by the crowd and had to duck into a department store and take the escalators up to a floor overlooking Union Square, watched the mob of surviving women from above, ashamed she couldn’t withstand just standing with them.

  5

  Though she’d been trained by Matheson in what to say and how to say it and though she had been outfitted in exactly the right clothes and instructed how to apply the supplied makeup and though she’d done the guided meditation through the app installed on her GX phone and though Matheson had given her the Relational Experiment outline from the Research Division, Mary still did not know how to be around him.

  It was 8:00 p.m. on a Tuesday, in the secret back room of an unmarked cocktail bar in the West Village—Savant House—full of mahogany and velvet and dead animal heads. The illusion of exclusivity made the patrons feel privileged to spend forty-three dollars on a single glass of liquid. The back room was nearly impossible to find, the last of three doors, the other two fake, down an alley beside the main unmarked door, and Mary had been instructed to press a doorbell three times before listening for the click, pushing the door open, going up the narrow spiral staircase to the right, heading down the hallway and down another narrow spiral staircase, through the blue velvet curtains, showing her ID to two security guards and a maître d’.

  Of course Kurt wasn’t there yet, wouldn’t arrive until she’d been waiting for at least twenty minutes (It’s one of his things, Matheson said), so as Mary waited alone at the only table in the cavernous room (Mr. Sky will be with you shortly), she tried to read a book but the light was too low, and though she didn’t order anything, a wisp-thin man in an all-black suit placed a glass of pale pink liquid floating a cucumber slice before her. His eyes were so deep set and shadowed she could hardly see them.

  From the Savant. A tonic for health and vitality, he said.

  He kept standing there, watching her with the bored intensity of a child staring into a television. Savory and slightly effervescent, the first sip immediately deadened her nervy stomach, and it was suddenly so easy to be herself that she felt as if she were someone else. Mary looked back up at the waiter, still waiting, and not knowing what to say, she just nodded and he nodded and slipped away. Several empty minutes later she caught the waiter staring at her, half his face and body obscured by a burgundy curtain, but before she could even have a feeling about this, Kurt appeared, saying, Hey, you, and hugging her in a long-lost-friend way instead of the halting, protected way that strangers usually touch each other for the first time.

  Did you find the place all right?

  He smelled like campfire but somehow sweet and his face was so symmetrical it almost called his humanity into question. His eyes had this constant tension, as if he were looking into a bright light and forcing himself not to squint. One of her guidelines was to mirror his expressions, so she tried to smile in the alert way that he smiled, concentrating so intently that she didn’t notice the waiter taking away her first drink and replacing it with two glasses of something clear and slightly blue and Kurt lifted his glass, so she lifted hers and he smelled his so she did and they drank—sweet, floral—and though he closed his eyes while swishing and swallowing, she kept hers open, watching him.

  He explained how this place had no menu, that a bespoke cocktail artist—the Savant—made each drink in a hidden lab, creating the exact beverage that he believed that particular patron needed through methods that no one knew. Some thought it was hidden cameras; others said the waiters were in on it; a few claimed he was psychic. The drinks sometimes, but not always, contained alcohol, but they always contained medicinal tinctures and some hypothesized that the Savant dosed some with peyote or psilocybin, though this had never been proven or disproven.

  It’s the only place to ever earn a Michelin star without serving any solid food, Kurt said. Chandra had explained to Mary what a Michelin star was, though she couldn’t remember now, but it didn’t matter whether she understood Kurt. She wasn’t expected to conduct any meaningful discussions—as there was an Intellectual Girlfriend for that—or to comfort him—since that was up to the Maternal Girlfriend. She only had to listen and respond to Kurt in the way she’d been trained, putting a hand on his hand or knee when he brought up a memory of his mother and putting a hand on his shoulder when he said anything about being stressed about his work. She spoke as infrequently as possible, always below the decibel level she’d been trained to never breach, and never using any of the words on the black list: vibe, fiscal, underscored, kitty, literally, lactose, hashtag, hoopla, whatevs, vomit, and several others. If he asked her a question about herself, she was to answer it as honestly and concisely as possible, but during this first session he didn’t ask her one.

  A fleet of liquids were brought out over the evening, some in cups as small as a thimble, some low and lonely in a wide-mouthed glass. They made Mary feel both calm and alert, a mysteriously clear feeling that seemed, almost, to originate outside her body, hitting her like a sound, like music.

  My mother once told me that I would take the pacifier out of my mouth as a baby and I would cry even though I had the pacifier in my hand, that I could put it back whenever I wanted. But I would just look at it, crying, until I felt I was done with crying, then I’d put it back in my mouth and I’d be fine, totally content. Kurt paused for effect here, ran his finger around the edge of his glass, then looked above Mary’s head. I think it’s because I’ve always wanted to feel everything there is to feel.

  He kept on with anecdotes like this, each imbued with some sort of lesson about him, something Mary should know about him, some wisdom, some clue. She kept nodding, making eye contact, paying close attention, as her guidelines had instructed.

  The question arose—after nearly two hours of Mary’s listening and nodding and humming a hundred hums of acknowledgment—of whether Kurt was just behaving in the way he’d been assigned to behave, or if this was just how he was. He never, not once, segued out of a story about himself by doing that thing she had noticed other people doing—by abruptly saying, well, anyway—a phrase it seemed that everyone said in exactly the same, rushed way, as if some level of self-exposure could trigger a need to send the attention elsewhere. Mary couldn’t even imagine Kurt saying that phrase—well, anyway. She knew that the main priority of this Relational Experiment was for Kurt to talk and for her to listen, but it wasn’t against the rules of the Relational Experiment for him to listen to her and wasn’t he at all interested in what she had to say? Or perhaps he already knew everything he needed to know about her from the interviews and background check and everything. Perhaps she’d never have to say anything to him and perhaps that suited her just fine.

  Mary couldn’t tell from the way he was behaving, but Kurt had actually looked forward to meeting her—a thirty-year-old woman in New York who had never even heard of him. Yet he found it impossible to not mention the parts of his career that impressed people the most, craving, despite himself, the automatic awe he usually got from a stranger. He
told her the story of his first film, The Father Game, how it was a huge critical and commercial success, and how his performance as a teen runaway trying to find his biological parents in Cleveland had earned him an Oscar and how it was only then that his real-life father, estranged throughout Kurt’s childhood except in the form of child support checks, tried to reach out to him with this ridiculous letter that said he was, more or less, somewhat proud, even though Kurt’s part was overwritten and most of the characters were only moderately believable. In fact the letter wasn’t quite as harsh as Kurt remembered it but it wasn’t as warm as it could have been, and since Kurt had endured his mother’s cancer and death alone, he was sure he didn’t need a too-late father now. Kurt never wrote back, and his father, now dead as well, remained moderately, if not completely, satisfied by only keeping up with his son through magazines and movies. When someone asked this man about his first short marriage and son, all he ever said was People make mistakes.

  Kurt paused in the middle of the story. He bit his lip, tapped his fingernails against the table, and slowly smiled. (This gesture sequence had become so deeply ingrained in him, a reflex, that he didn’t even know he was doing it, a tic that appeared in most of his characters, at least in his later films, and when someone impersonated him, this was always part of the act. A website even posted nothing but looping GIFs of this—the bit lip, tapped fingers, slow grin—and once Kurt found this page deep in some anxious Internet searching for himself, and for some time he couldn’t look away from all those tiny hims, biting and tapping and grinning, endlessly.)

  When strangers recognize you and know stuff about you, it makes things really confusing, he said, and I couldn’t tell when someone was genuinely connecting with me or when they were just connecting with the idea of me or something they wanted.

  Mary nodded.

  This might sound crazy, but I’m tired of the attention. I really am. I want to be understood, not just wanted. (Kurt was quiet for a moment, thinking back to the girls in the early years—crowds of jumping girls, shaking girls, girls screaming, girls in shirts that said MRS. KURT SKY, girls who somehow didn’t mind being packed shoulder to shoulder with all those other Mrs. Kurt Skys as they mobbed hotel lobbies or spilled over sidewalk barricades, girls reaching stick arms at him, girls in glittery blue eye shadow hoping the shimmer might bring his eyes to theirs, girls hyperventilating, girls breaking out in hives, girls stabbing each other with EpiPens, girls holding up fainted girls, girls dropping those girls to stampede him—determined and in some kind of love, these girls. (This odd moment before adulthood: biologically old enough to know desire, but young enough to believe in magic. Hormones and hope creating a fantasy as they shook with a ferocious love, or the idea of love, or the fantasy of a future love, or the love of the idea of the fantasy of love.) A few young women (women who had remained girls) even found his home address and occasionally stood at the front gate, screaming his name, watching his windows with a sniper’s focus as they lit or darkened. Each time Kurt heard one of them standing out there, he felt a slight annoyance followed by a flood of pleasure, pleasure when he had to call Matheson to say another one was at the gate, pleasure to feel so wanted, to feel he had driven someone moderately insane. It was a dangerous power, and only years later did he wonder if this had ruined him in a way, if it had raised his tolerance for another person’s desire to such a degree that he could never be satisfied by a normal love. Kurt would sometimes sit in his darkened living room before the police took one of those girls away, listening to her voice fray as she screamed his name. I know you’re listening, one of them once shouted, I know you can hear me! and he almost felt found.)

  The session was almost over when Kurt said, We should really talk about what’s happening, Mary’s cue to look down, inhale slowly and subtly, reach for his nearest hand with both her hands, wait for him to place his other hand on top of hers before looking up, her expression a sort of wistful-overwhelmed-elated, a look she’d practiced with Matheson for a solid hour the prior day.

  Yes, she said.

  She was thinking of how she’d been told to not think of her Emotional Girlfriend sessions as work or acting but to inhabit each moment as if it were a meditation, and though she knew that thinking of this instruction prevented her from following it, maybe that was the closest she could come to that hyper-unawareness, intentional un-intention. She’d been told the most important part of her job was to follow the instructions, since the instructions were scientifically designed to bring about the correct feeling in her that would bring about the correct feeling in him. Though Mary had studied her handbook intensely, had tried to push all the rules into a place of muscle memory, she was often unsure if she was being the correct way, an uncertainty that chaperoned her constantly.

  This is so important, he said. What you’re doing. It’s hard for me to feel like I can fully explain how important this is.

  Mary looked at Kurt with a blank expectance and it had been so long since he’d seen someone look at him in such a way that he was immediately comforted, taken back to a time he was less filtered, freer, less observed. He remembered that naïve privacy he’d had, something he didn’t notice until it was gone, until strangers regularly descended on him in the street, before hungry faces hovered over his restaurant tables saying, Please, saying, Sorry, just saying hello. They beamed at him—I’m sorry—half-embarrassed, half-certain, half-trying to back out of themselves—I’m sorry to interrupt but I just had to say—deeply needing to get these few words in—I’m sorry but I had to say something because you, your work, you just—decades of these people and he still couldn’t decide how to feel about them—I’m sorry but I had to say something and I’m not sure what to say, just that I’m a big fan, and I know you must get this all the time, but I had to say something and I’m sorry. This sorry/please/sorry/please, these strangers asking for hugs or autographs or photos, wanting proof they once existed with him, already an artifact, already a memory. Well, nice to meet you. Thank you so much. No, really. Have a nice night. Take care. Bye now.

  Kurt placed a hand on Mary’s face, open and soft and relaxed, as instructed, and since the session was off-site, she didn’t wear the facial sensors, just the bodily ones, which sat warm on her skin, between dress and waist, between bracelet and wrist, behind the ears, recording. Mary remembered that when he put a hand on her face she was to remain in silent eye contact for three slow counts before closing her eyes and pressing her cheek into his palm, the way cats will push into a petting hand, giving themselves to what’s given.

  It was still strange for Mary to be alone with a man (except Ed, which was strange in another way). She felt odd cramps and tensions in her body. She tried to force herself to be relaxed, and though she could never completely do so, she did manage to enjoy, somewhat, the spectacle and difficulty of being around him.

  Kurt looked at her, said, Thank you, ran a hand through her hair, kissed her cheek, and left.

  Mary sat there awhile, staring at the table, feeling herself being watched again by that waiter as he slipped between velvet curtains at the edge of the room. She was required to wait several minutes after Kurt left a session before she left. Kurt hated goodbyes, and she was never to make any goodbye-like gesture or even give the impression that she was ever leaving. She thought of this on the walk home, how she would always be in the places he entered or left. Still, she slept that night better than she’d slept in years or possibly ever.

  6

  Traffic was backed up for blocks, holding his car at a standstill in the neighborhood he used to live in, on his old street. The car rolled slowly past the door that had once been his and he found himself staring at it, waiting for his past self to come walking out. Still painted the same blue, he noticed, nauseated and annoyed by how much time had passed. Fifteen years already? He didn’t want to do the math.

  Traffic, the driver said, flicking his eyes at him in the rearview.

  Yeah. Kurt rolled down the window, peered up at h
is old balcony. He could almost see it and began to feel wistful, almost weepy— No. He was being ridiculous. He raised the window, but the memory of his time with Alexi sat like a pill in his throat. They’d had a good run for a few months, hadn’t they? Or had they? Maybe they’d even been in love for a little while or maybe it only seemed that way from a distance. A vague set of images cued up—Alexi across a room at a party they’d gone to, pretending to not be together. He and Alexi sharing a midnight cigarette on his roof—or was it hers? Alexi in the second row of some theater somewhere, staring neutrally at him onstage as he was interviewed for a film festival—though he couldn’t now remember what it had been. Anyway. It had been a good summer, he thought. They’d had a good time.

  But then a bomb went off—or at least what sounded like a bomb—a plane crashing into a building a mile away. Alexi had been at her place that morning, a microscopic two-bedroom she shared with another actress in a hazardous walk-up, and when she heard it, she immediately thought of Kurt, became increasingly frantic when he didn’t pick up the phone, then terrified that something had happened, then certain that something had happened because he would have found a way to reach her by now, and her body went wild trying to escape itself—vomiting and achy and collapsing—and she thought of how tragic it was that this, potentially losing him to whatever had happened out there (so many rumors in the street), had finally revealed that their love had a real weight, real roots in her. Against her roommate’s shouts and tears, she walked out into the ash-hazy streets, surrounded by a chorus of sirens as she dashed to his place, arriving coated in ash and sweat at his door, trembling. His first words to her: You should take a shower.