The Curse of St. Cecile

That night Alix was a rock star’s girlfriend. For several weeks, she had been dating her hairdresser, a woman who was, among other things, the drummer for Skyward 7, an unheard of, melancholy rock band. They had a show that night at the Luna Lounge and Alix was excited to see and hear Wendy playing her drums on stage at a club.
     After a recent tortured phone conversation about the aesthetics of underarm hair, Alix had shaved hers as a gift. She herself thought it looked sexy on women, peeking out, and she preferred the texture of actual hair to that of hacked-off stubble. Wendy disagreed. She said that she would never find it sexy. Alix held her own in that conversation, sadly, but early in the evening, before the rock show, sitting on the edge of the bathtub, she had removed the hair patiently, with a new razor and thick barbershop cream. It was for her date, like wearing black underwear or putting lipstick on your nipples; something sexy for later.
     After the ritual of exfoliating and moisturizing all the skin she was planning to show, Alix dressed in a hot outfit, which was not new, but a chance assemblage of some under-used elements of her wardrobe. Her high-tech shirt was sleeveless black nylon, sheer, with an eerie plastic hologram sewn on the front. What was good about it was that people would stop to look at the hologram, to figure out what the image was, and then, in their close scrutiny, they would realize that the shirt was transparent. Alix didn’t usually wear transparent clothing, but this two-step revelation of her nudity was fun for her and even comfortable. She wore the shirt with a black Lycra skirt—elastic waist, straight to the knee, not especially tight—and a pair of black Nike flip-flops. The whole outfit worked for her because she felt like herself and she could move, yet she was putting out, giving body.
     Dressed for a date, she was psyched even to be having a date. It was phenomenally erotic, the whole idea. After the subway ride and the long walk down Houston to Ludlow Street, she arrived in the middle of Skyward 7’ s set. She passed through the antechamber barroom to the back, trying to catch the buzz, what was being said. In the back of the back room, she moved along the wall, looking to the stage, through the crowd. Looking for Wendy on stage and looking through the crowd to see how many other women might be there, looking for Wendy too, Alix was adjusting to the bass, pushing in her orange foam earplugs, noticing the searchlights that cut across the square room at decapitation level.
     The song she had walked in on ended and the blank-handsome singer in brand new leather pants salivated into the mike, “The name of this song is ‘The Effects of Alcohol.’ ” The girl bass player in a silver minidress moved only a heartbeat more than the hands she played with. She was morbidly still in front of the drum set. Slow waves of music that elicited repetitive head movements radiated, sine-like, from the band. A lot of times, Alix would stand still at rock shows, like the bass player, but with the skirt and all, her body started turning simply in this direction and that—really just her shoulders and head—to the slow trod of the beat, which was deep and spongy, like rubber bouncing on steel. Searchlights cut through the cigarette smoke; the bass player recoiled from the massive reflection of light off her dress. Alix saw Wendy’s arms.
      “What do you wear to shows?” Alix had asked Wendy’s face in the mirror, back when they were just hairdresser and client, chatting.
     Wendy didn’t pause with the scissors: “Jeans and sneakers.” That was a surprise; it wasn’t her look at the salon.
     There were jeans and sneakers behind the drum set and Wendy’s arms and hands, the sticks. The black-painted darkness of the stage hid her head, though at moments, in some drummer’s reach, her black and blue hair fell into the horizontal beam of light.
     The song repeated and repeated a slow resounding beat and shrill layers of emotional guitars until it drove like a car crash to violent stillness. The crowd liked that one. Alix liked it. The band had something going on: a distraught, futuristic sound and indecipherable lyrics that the singer delivered like a boy moaning into his pillow. One more song and it was over. Alix wished she had arrived on time.
     Half the crowd funneled out to the bar for new beers, while the others lit up cigarettes, finding themselves with the elbow room to smoke. Alix hung back as a small entourage surrounded the popular drummer, who had finally crossed over into the light. Alix’s attraction was reconfirmed. Wendy’s confidence was amusing to watch and so appealing. Compact and strong, with a good relaxed posture, she smiled her white straight teeth and made contact, talking for a minute to one after another of her friends and fans. Alix could hear little bits. “I asked myself, ‘Does Wendy want beer or does Wendy want water?’ And I got you a beer!” A tall hairdresser was being witty; Alix recognized him from the salon.
     They made eye contact then and Wendy’s look beckoned. Alix moved in to give a kiss on the cheek and, “You sounded great!” She didn’t know how many other women Wendy was dating; she backed off again. Finally, when a rising singer/songwriter began his set, Wendy sought Alix out.
      “You look hot! Let me see you? I love your shirt! This is your look!” The outfit had worked; Wendy’s compliments took effect. They stood together in front of the stage. Wendy’s back pressed against her front. Alix fingered the seam of Wendy’s jeans, slipped her hand, up to the wrist, into the tight front pocket. She got more bold, intoxicated by the Aveda scent of Wendy’s hair, and pulled the drummer’s hips back, pressing their bodies closer. It was a little bit of paradise, the erotic charge.
     She whispered into Wendy’s ear, “I shaved under my arms.”
Afterward, packing up the drums, there was a question. The band was going to a hotel room, to party, smoke dope, have some drinks, food. The singer’s family owned the hotel. He thought the band should celebrate. The drummer consulted with her: Did they want to go? It was the first clear signal that they would spend the night together. Alix didn’t use drugs and didn’t really drink. She had one drink at a time, occasionally. She didn’t want to party all night. She wanted to have sex. She was attracted and convinced that tonight it would be dynamite. Perched on the ledge of formidable lust ... it seemed mutually agreed upon. Wendy, who had a hard time saying no, said no to the invitation. The band seemed a little resentful of Alix, “the girlfriend,” but dropped them and the packaged drum set off at 1 a.m. in front of Wendy’s rehearsal space.
     Together, they hauled the equipment from the abandoned curb into the building. Wendy opened locked doors that led down corridors and upstairs to more locked doors. The rough brown carpet, with so many cigarette burns, was like a leopard skin. They went into a tiny soundproof room where Wendy rented a closet in which she stored the kit. The room was set up for a band to play. Two microphones stood lean in front of squat amplifiers and heavy black cords. Wendy turned one mike on and started speaking in the voice of God. “Alix, this is God. I am coming to you from Heaven. You have been living in a dream, but now you will live in truth.”
     After snorting and laughing, Wendy sat down and sang, more seriously, a few verses from a song she had written about an ex-girlfriend who had a split personality: “Jekyll and Hyde.” The big sound coming through the microphone and the amplifier made Alix want to sing too. She took the mike and stood quietly terrified until Wendy was about to give up, and then she sang:

I wish, I wish,
I wish in vain.
I wish I were
A child again.
But this I know,
It will never be,
‘Til cherries grow
On an ivy tree.

It was her lullaby. On long train rides, she had leaned her head against the glass window and sung it in a voice that was just inaudible. Wendy was still when the song ended, chin tilted up in a posture of listening to the quiet. “Sweet,” she said. “You have a strong voice. I like how you held the note on were.” Alix shook out her arms, giddy with relief.
     They retraced their steps to the front doorway. Wendy stopped in the bathroom and Alix scratched on the door, joking, “I can hear everything!” She scuffed her flip-flop feet, waiting, and spotted a quarter on the carpet. Score! she thought, stupidly, until getting the silver piece into her hand, she saw that it was a medallion. The delicate silver circle held the bas-relief image of a young woman whose long locks fell past her shoulders from under a modest hood. She held a sheaf of wheat and a lyre. Her name, St. Cecile, was engraved beside her head in archaic script. Alix slipped the medallion into her bag and said nothing as Wendy reappeared.
     At Wendy’s art-deco apartment, all the glasses were dirty and three champagne bottles were empty. The band had met there earlier. Wendy retrieved half a joint from the freestanding ashtray and sparked it up in the kitchen. They watched each other suck hits off the joint. It was fun, face to face, the smell was good. The third hit affected Alix’s mind. She felt herself withdrawing. She didn’t know what to say and her smile felt fake. She wanted to sit down on the vinyl couch and play with Wendy’s space-age digital watch. She tried to excuse herself: “I shouldn’t get high. I should just steer clear. Sorry, I know I’m acting weird.”
     Wendy sat beside her on the sticky upright couch. The avocado vinyl blended with the eggplant-painted bricks behind it, reminding Alix of spoiled guacamole. Two weeks earlier, they had both been naked right there. They had propped a full-length mirror horizontally against the coffee table, raising it up on Wendy’s red platform sandals. Wendy had been on top of Alix, kissing her, making her come. Three weeks before that, they had played “Subway” on the couch, sitting too close and seeing how it felt. Alix had touched Wendy’s hair for the first time. They had come from a long, late dinner in Tribeca. Before dessert, they had written each other notes and passed them under the sidewalk table. In a curving, back-slanted hand, Wendy had written, “The sky fell and changed color.” Previously, Alix had thought that dating for five weeks made you girlfriends, but it wasn’t like that with Wendy. It was more like they’d had a series of dates over the course of five weeks.
      “Listen,” Wendy said, “why don’t you sleep over tonight. I know I’m exhausted and I think that joint had PCP in it or you’ve been possessed by aliens or something, so why don’t we just go to sleep.”
      “Like friends,” Alix tried to joke, “like girl scouts.”
      “That would be us,” Wendy smiled.
     In the humid back bedroom, Alix couldn’t sleep and Wendy couldn’t rouse herself to full consciousness. Alix undressed Wendy. “Just let me touch your body,” Alix asked. Wendy’s arm fell off the bed and came up with a bottle of oil. Stoned and wide awake, Alix warmed the oil between her palms and massaged Wendy’s muscles, starting with her hands and arms, which felt strong, but tired. Alix was finding Wendy beautiful and feeling worshipful. With her head at the bottom of the bed, she was massaging Wendy’s arch, kissing her sole, taking the big toe suggestively into her mouth. Wendy’s hips started moving, pressing into the mattress. Alix slid up beside her, thinking that tonight she would make Wendy come. She talked into Wendy’s ear, letting her know what it felt like, letting her know how attracted she was, how lucky she felt. They reached a hot moment of grind and Alix wanted to kiss, to talk, to see Wendy’s face.
      “Aargh!” Wendy pulled away. “It’s 5 a.m.,” she snapped, “I want to come or I want to go to sleep!” Alix was crushed and confused and felt entirely at fault. With that kind of ultimatum, an erotic breakthrough was out of reach. She went to the bathroom and stared in the mirror until she was sure Wendy was asleep, then she returned to the big bed and slept beside the drummer.
     The next morning, Alix woke up first, found Wendy’s keys and ran out to Starbucks, talking to herself, shaking her head. Wendy was the first person she had dated since ending a long, failing love affair. Sex had been a problem then. Gretchen had supposedly been deeply in love with Alix, but never wanted to have sex. And that was just the beginning of the problems. They had tried three sessions of couple’s therapy, where whoever cried was the winner. The therapist had advised them to order food in when they were stressed. That spring, in the final months, Alix felt she had become a monster. Gretchen would wake her late at night, crying, wanting to talk, and Alix would tell her that it was too late, it was the wrong time. They had planned to adopt a tiny baby; they had considered names, and whether or not they would dress the child in fancy Gap clothes. They had decided that thrift stores were the key. A week before Alix actually moved out, her mother told her on the telephone that she would take it as good news if Alix and Gretchen decided to adopt a child.
     Now she couldn’t make Wendy come. She had been so spastic last night. She’d had no focus; she couldn’t tell what Wendy wanted and she couldn’t shut up with her embarrassing romantic questions: “What’s your favorite part of your body?” Wendy had been practically unconscious! Alix blushed before the Starbucks cashier, whom she knew Wendy flirted with each morning.
     She sat on the edge of the bed, stroking Wendy’s hair with one hand and gripping the grande macchiato in the other. The drummer rolled over and her eyelids, still dusted with pink shadow, opened slowly. “Deja vu,” Wendy said, recognizing Alix there.
     After the third sip of coffee, Wendy rose up with snarled curses against her job. “I should already be at the salon.” Her music, her drumming—she didn’t like it being on the side. She was frustrated. She didn’t know if she wanted a career in music either. Hole was auditioning new drummers. She had a client who knew Courtney Love. “I might be flying to L.A. any day for that.” Alix listened and watched as Wendy dressed in a metallic blue full-length skirt with racing stripes and a lime green boucle tank top. She slipped on the red platform sandals that were her everyday shoes and asked, “Does this work?”
     Alix told her she looked great, beautiful. Wendy pulled and pushed her hair, sorting the blue from the black with her fingers until the bedhead disappeared and she looked like a stylist again. They carried their coffees to the street, where Wendy threw herself into a cab so suddenly that goodbye was just Alix’s sheepish wave reciprocated by an impish smile that curled only the corners of Wendy’s lips.
     Alix wished they could spend the day together. She worked too, but it was much different. On a grant from her university, she was translating Les Figures du Discours, a handbook not available in English. Alix made her own hours and liked thinking of herself as a scholar. She knew she was lucky and that it probably wouldn’t last.
Back in Brooklyn, at her own apartment, Alix remembered the silver medallion; she studied it again and decided to depend on its energy. She had a silver chain hung with a Star of David that she had purchased in Madrid with Gretchen. Time to return to her Catholic roots. She let the star fall from the chain and replaced it with the St. Cecile medallion.
     She waited three days before leaving a message on Wendy’s machine. Wendy called back, from work, two days later. She was busy, under a lot of pressure. She said, “Maybe Sunday . . . maybe Tuesday . . . maybe Wednesday.” They left it up in the air and a week went by. Alix was doing other things, keeping busy, but it felt almost intentional, as if she were going out just so that Wendy would have a chance to call and leave a message. She worked the silver medallion into her summer style, wearing it with white ribbed tank tops and the same black Lycra skirt. She started to enjoy shaving under her arms.

*          *          *

Wendy had been cutting Alix’s hair for almost a year when Alix had asked her out. That was back in June, just weeks after she had moved out from Gretchen. Alix had a well-developed crush and went into the salon that afternoon with the goal of getting a date. In an unorthodox move, Wendy had washed Alix’s hair herself. Head tilted back, throat stretched across the dip in the porcelain sink, Alix could hardly swallow while Wendy massaged the lather into her roots and then rinsed it out with a jet of warm water. Back in the chair, Wendy rubbed Alix’s head vigorously with a towel. Alix sat there and let her do her thing. They chatted about music and movies and clubs. From appointment to appointment, Wendy remembered most of Alix’s biographical information, but again and again, she misremembered Alix’s being from Canada. Alix wasn’t from Canada, and she had clarified this, but sometimes she played along. If she said she was thinking of moving back to Ottawa, Wendy would remember that she was from Boston and they would both laugh.
     On the chair, Alix breathed and tried to feel relaxed and casual. She would look into the mirror, into Wendy’s eyes, and Wendy would stop for a moment and then smile, holding Alix’s gaze. Then Wendy would get back to work. As she moved around the chair, cutting around Alix’s head, Alix thought she had located Wendy’s center of gravity. There was a way Wendy stood that made her seem so relaxed and confident. She wore tight synthetic clothes that showed her figure and Alix was attracted to the small roundness of her belly. Most women hide that, but Wendy showed it.
     That day in June, Wendy spent almost an hour and a half cutting Alix’s hair, which had been short in the first place. Right at the end, Alix felt a surge of power and said into the mirror, “Would you like to get together sometime outside of here?” Wendy seemed surprised, but happy. She took control and orchestrated the exchange of phone numbers.
     They started out dating once a week, but they talked on the phone all the time. During the third week, Wendy had called Alix after midnight five nights in a row. They would talk for hours, until Alix’s ear was hot. The first week of July, they dated two nights in a row, and after the second date, watching fireworks from a rooftop in Williamsburg, they had returned to Alix’s apartment and gone to bed together for the first time.
     They didn’t have a lot in common, but they had a good time together. Alix often felt like a nerd, while Wendy was obviously cool. Alix tried to be healthy, eating right, exercising, doing yoga; she limited her toxic intake to coffee. Wendy ran herself down, eating on the run, pounding on the Stairmaster until she sprained her ankle, smoking cigarettes, enjoying recreational drugs when they came her way. She was accustomed to going out for drinks. Despite all that, they were having fun. Alix was entertained by Wendy’s lifestyle and loved making jokes about pills, flashbacks, and rehab. Wendy was amused to be around someone who was healthy. Getting to know Alix’s body, she had thumped her stomach and said, “You’re so solid!”

*          *          *

A week after the rock show, they had dinner at a Tibetan restaurant. Wendy was sick, blowing her nose and ordering greens. Alix was wearing the medallion. They leaned into the table and talked about taking a trip: Santa Fe, Puerto Rico, Canada—they laughed. Alix mentioned that Sioxsie Sioux was playing at Life the following week on the night of Wendy’s birthday. Wendy was feeling bad, she wasn’t interested, so they kept it short and said good-bye after dinner.
     A full week went by and Alix didn’t hear from Wendy. Alix had called many times, but left only two messages because she didn’t want to seem obsessed. She didn’t want to pressure Wendy to call her; she wanted Wendy to want to call her.
     In the desperate seven days of hearing nothing, Alix had seen Gretchen. She had gone over to Gretchen’s apartment at 11:30 one night, after Gretchen had called her. Drinking a glass of water, observing the changes in the apartment, some trinkets from another woman, Alix felt the monster possessing her. “I’ll give you a dollar if you take off all your clothes,” Alix said. She was making a mean joke, a comment on their lack of a sexual connection, but faster than she could stop, Gretchen was getting naked.
      “But you can’t touch me,” Gretchen said, and this condition cut through Alix. She rose out of the yellow armchair.
      “This sucks. I need to leave. Why did you invite me over here at this time of night?”
      “You know, you’re like a nasty guy,” Gretchen said. “You provoke me to undress, then point the finger at me when I do!” Gretchen was putting on her underwear. They had probably been Alix’s once.
      “This fucking sucks,” Alix repeated. “I’d like to be able to see you, but every time I do, something sucky happens. It’s unsteady ground ... Yuck! I don’t like it.” She left, feeling angry and like a failure.
     Why did she invite me over? Alix wondered, walking home. Did she want me to see the little presents from her new girlfriend? She’s so full of shit. She always talked about being single for a year and getting a dog if we broke up! It does bother me; I am jealous! These thoughts don’t help me! And she doesn’t care what I do—as long as I’m not with a man! It’s so degrading.
     Alix called Wendy on the morning of her birthday. She was expecting to hear Boy George, followed by the thirty beeps of popular Wendy’s messages, but instead she heard, “Hello.” Alix was shocked. “Things are crazy. I’ve been so busy. I haven’t been calling anyone. I haven’t even called my own grandmother back! And I’m going to Puerto Rico tomorrow! My therapist said to go.” Wendy was on her way to work, so would have to call her back. Alix didn’t trust that plan, but she had no choice. Wendy did call later when Alix, who had abandoned her work for the day, was therapeutically gluing centimeter squares of cut-up magazines onto a piece of translucent paper. She was making a birthday card for Wendy, a Puerto Rican scene with sea, sky, sun, skin, and cafe tables.
     Again, Wendy didn’t really have time to talk, so Alix just managed to say the important thing she needed to communicate: “I want you to know that I have really missed you.” After the call, Alix looked in the hall mirror, into the eyes of her own pathetic red face.
     That evening, after eleven, Alix crept over to the East Village and loitered across the street from Wendy’s building until a guy came out to smoke on the stoop. He let her into the foyer where she dropped off the card, which was signed with a heart. From the street, she could see that Wendy’s lights were on, but she didn’t ring the bell.
That night, in her dream, she went to Wendy’s salon. She didn’t expect Wendy to be there. The receptionist told her, on the way in, “You know Wendy’s a hundred dollars now.” Alix didn’t know, but she didn’t mind.
     The telephone rang after 5 a.m. and she didn’t answer it, but minutes later checked for a message. It was Wendy. Her voice sounded tired and quiet, sad. “Alix, this is Wendy, I’m at the airport leaving. I’m sorry I didn’t get back to you. Everything is crazy. The card is amazing. Gorgeous. It’s really fucking cool. I love it. Thank you so much. It’s really cool and creative. I’ll call you when I get home. I like your new message. I’m off into the wild blue yonder. The card is really sweet, thoughtful, and amazing. I love it a lot.”
     The message gave Alix hope. That day, she called the salon and made an appointment for when Wendy was back in town.
     When the appointment came up, it had been almost three weeks since Alix and Wendy had eaten at the Tibetan restaurant. Wendy looked rested, but not tanned at all. Alix masked her earnestness. “Let’s have conversation like I’m just your hairdresser,” Wendy suggested. She turned the chair sideways for a lot of the haircut, so that Alix couldn’t see either of their faces. When the time came for Alix to see the haircut, Wendy spun the chair, but Alix didn’t look at her hair. She looked at Wendy in the mirror and beyond her at the tall salon assistant with vermilion hair and smudged, literal-raccoon eye-makeup. She had paused with her broom and pile of clippings and was watching Alix not look at her hair at all.
     Alix had been Wendy’s last client, so they left together, to have a drink. She felt extraordinarily tall, walking beside Wendy who wasn’t wearing her red platform sandals. Wendy started stressing out in a way that made Alix think that she needed a cigarette. “I’m like this after work,” Wendy said. “I need to decompress.”
     They walked quietly to Wendy’s block and went into the Big Bar. The tiny place had three booths and four stools. They sat in a booth by the front window; Alix went to the bar for two glasses of the house merlot. She’d borrowed Wendy’s high-tech watch to time the date. Wendy bummed a cigarette from the bartender and smoked it, holding Alix’s hand. “You’re adorable,” she said, “Do you want me to sit on that side with you?” Alix was noticing the hickey on Wendy’s neck. “I’m no good at dating,” Wendy said.
     Sadness rose in Alix. She was so sad she couldn’t speak. She was mute, incapacitated. Wendy was looking at her, waiting. They were supposed to be having a conversation about dating. Alix had a few important things she wanted to say, and some questions to ask, but the way her throat was constricted, she knew she would lose it if she began. Wendy checked out to the ladies’ room.
     While she was gone, Alix did some deep breathing and jotted a note to Wendy on her cocktail napkin. Mainly she apologized for being so upset. She wasn’t quite sure why she was so upset.
     Wendy returned and read the note. “You know,” she said, “the funny thing is that I just had this same conversation with another woman. I’m really just dating myself!” Alix stopped the watch: forty-six minutes. She walked Wendy to another bar where she had some socializing to do, they kissed cheeks and Alix headed west, feeling crazy herself.
     She wandered through the Village and felt like a stranger. She felt she couldn’t go in anywhere. All she had on her was a hundred-dollar bill (in case her dream had been prophetic). It felt like being stranded in a city where she understood nothing. Finally, she went into Two Boots Pizza on 7th Avenue and convinced them to break her bill. While she was eating her slice and drinking her seltzer, the cashier started blasting Hole’s “Rock Star.” Alix felt comfortable then, at home. In less than one minute, a woman in pumps and a suit got upset and asked the cashier to turn down the music. “It’s making my stomach churn,” she said to the whole place.
     At home, Alix unclasped the silver chain on which hung the St. Cecile medallion. She’d always had a sense of the original owner. She thought he was a skinny white guy, a downtown rocker who used heroin, played guitar and thought that poetry was the first thing you scrawled. The medallion was, undeniably, cursed. She thought of how you can have things blessed, but didn’t see herself going to a mass. On the wall of her apartment, she’d hung a ceramic holy water font, another souvenir from Madrid. She had grown up in a house with one of these by the door. You blessed yourself on the way out. She had a bottle of holy water from her grandmother. It amazed her that she had these resources, and that she had overlooked them for so long. Now they seemed potent. She placed the medallion in the font, which was like a mini-birdbath that had room for only a couple of dipped fingertips. She covered the silver with the holy water, which looked fleshy in its plastic bottle.

*          *          *

Toward the end of August, Alix got bold and invited Gretchen over for dinner. She coached herself: Tonight I’m going to see Gretchen for the first time in a month. Let me watch closely. How does she make me feel? The doorbell rang. After buzzing Gretchen in and checking herself in the mirror, Alix remembered the medallion, soaking all this time. Her fingertips in the font felt the cold, dry silver. The holy water had evaporated. She put the chain around her neck. The flat back of the medallion smacked her breast-bone lightly. Gretchen knocked on the door.
     It started in the kitchen. Gretchen was giving her an update. “I went to the Ricki Lake Show!” Gretchen didn’t watch TV. “Have you ever been to Tom’s Diner?” Gretchen didn’t explore greater Brooklyn. She wasn’t mentioning her new girlfriend, yet she was. Alix got the spaghetti and salad out onto the table. She had made lime sorbet for dessert. She didn’t think they’d get to it.
     While they ate, Alix focused the conversation on Gretchen’s painting. Gretchen used to complain that Alix wasn’t interested in her art, when really it had been the first thing that had drawn Alix in.
      “I don’t really feel like I’m painting,” Gretchen said. “I’m a student. The feeling—well, say you were going to be a poet of the German language, you’d really know German. So, I’m not a painter; I’m a student.”
     Alix held her focus. “Well, are you learning?” she asked.
     Gretchen considered the question. Her cheeks were rosy and she had on blue terry-cloth shirt that Alix didn’t recognize. “I’d say I’m not learning what I want to be learning,” Gretchen answered finally. “I sometimes think that if I took matters into my own hands, left school and got a studio, I would learn what I need to learn. The possibility that I might get better is exciting .... Are you listening to me?”
      “Well, I’m listening to you,” Alix said, “but I’m thinking about you and your girlfriend going to Ricki Lake and to Tom’s Diner—”
     “She’s not my girlfriend. I call her ‘the person I’m dating.’ ”
      “I’m sorry,” Alix continued, “but the burning question for me is are we done as lovers and can I accept that. I’m jealous of your gir—the person that you’re dating—and I’m pissed to feel jealous. It’s not good. We struggled for so long, like an old car with engine parts dropping off.” Alix held the medallion at her chest. “I shouldn’t be seeing you.”
     Gretchen looked at her empty plate, “So should I go then?”
      “Yes,” Alix said.
     Alix woke up that night at around 3 a.m., clothes drenched in sweat like a feverish tuberculosis patient. There was an insect somewhere near the head of her bed. She could feel the intermittent buzz and sense the presence and feel the tiny bites it had already taken out of her. Her ear, in the bathroom mirror, was red and swollen; hot, bitten and soft. Returning from the bathroom, she saw the bug—more of a fruit fly than a mosquito—on the wall at the head of her bed. She smacked it with the palm of her hand. There was her own blood, a tickful of it, splattered red on the wall. She knew the thick red color as her own. Bastard insect, she thought, full of my blood. One insect against me. I found it and I killed it.
     She had a hard time sleeping then. She felt alone. She didn’t feel lonely. She kept thinking, I’m alone. I’m very alone. I’m extremely alone.