He drew one elaborate sketch of me riding a horse that just about took the breath out of me. I was both beautiful and muscled, like the horse. A naked woman on a horse, two animals. I thought: if he can see me this way, then what else would I ever need?
A return to the fiction about Sarah visiting home in Chagrin Falls that I began two days ago…
When Sarah walked back to the house, she could see her mom and sister sitting on the couch in the living room. A few of the lamps were on and the room was lit up yellow. From the street, Sarah almost couldn’t believe this was her younger sister’s house. It looked so plain, so suburban and so, nice. While Sarah had moved away as soon as she could, her sister went to college nearby and married a man named Jacob who had always been kind to her. Her sister had a nose for finding pleasantness, always had, hadn’t been attracted to the sharp and dirty like Sarah had. One of the windows was open and the conversation between her sister and her mother floated out onto the quiet street.
“Lynnie, I’m just nervous for her,” Sarah’s mother said, “she doesn’t have anybody.”
Sarah slowed down, allowing the walk up the last parts of the sidewalk to take an enormous amount of time. She knew they were talking about her and she wanted to hear it.
“She’ll figure it out,” Lynnie said. She sounded tired and Sarah’s mother sounded nervous, as if she was, at that very moment, wringing her hands.
“I just want her to be able to be as happy as you are.”
“How do you know she’s not happy?”
This, Sarah thought, would be a dramatically pleasing moment to break in, so she loudly skipped up the steps and opened the front door and walked into the living room.
“Hi mom,” Sarah said, “I didn’t know you were coming over.”
“Does something smell like smoke?” her mother asked.
“No,” Lynnie said, sighing, and Sarah felt an outpouring of love for her nine-month-pregnant younger sister for still covering for her.
Her mother, however, elicited none of her sympathy. It was this kind of conversation that kept Sarah from coming home very often, that made her think hatefully about the people that had raised her. Nervous for me? You, mother, have not and will never experience half of the things that I have. Nervous for me? I could say the same for you.
Whenever Sarah wanted to feel quite different from where she had come from, a particular memory presented itself. One of her first years in New York, while she was still working off the midwestern glow, Sarah fell in love with an older playwright. She didn’t really think anyone was still or could still be a playwright. And so, as soon as he introduced himself and told her what he did—in line at the bodega down the street, she was carrying a copy of a Cormac McCarthy book and so was he—he seemed out of time, magic. This was not the memory that her brain conjured up, though. It was later, a few weeks into what would only be a few months of their love affair. Though, Sarah would argue time and again, duration does not equal intensity when it comes to love. Often, she would think of love like something with a compressed kernel at its center. The center was the beginning and yes, sure, it was interesting to see how things grew, but wasn’t the best part always going to be the kernel, when everything was densely packed together and overwhelming?
He asked her to come to rehearsal for a new short play. When she got there, she first watched the rehearsal of another short play about two ice cream truck owners who were fighting with each other. Then Hank—that was his name—came out from backstage and joined her in the audience. It was time for his short play and when the characters came out onto stage, she thought that one of them looked just like her but assumed she was being narcissistic. Then the actress started speaking and said things Sarah had said to Hank in the kitchen, in the subway, at a restaurant. Sarah was breathless, watching herself on stage. The short play followed the seduction of the main character by a variety of suitors; the main character was muse. It felt like being in a film, Sarah thought, to be sitting there in the audience.
This is what, exactly, was the way her brain presented the memory: seeing a version of herself as the erotic, desired character on stage, feeling Hank’s breath rise and fall next to her, the knowledge that he’d written it about her. That was still the most beautiful secret she’d ever had, that the woman the play was about was sitting in the audience right then. I love it, she’d whispered in Hank’s ear.
Her mother wrinkled her nose again. “You’re sure it doesn’t smell like cigarette smoke?”
Sarah wanted to scream at her mother, yes it smells like smoke! I fucking smoke and have for ten years. But she was taken over with pity, the same brand of pity her mother had just been feeling for her. Had her mother ever known that kind of love, though? The kind that feels like injecting drugs in your veins? Sarah couldn’t imagine she had and so Sarah just nodded her head.
“I’m going to bed,” she said and walked up the stairs.
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