Ghost Story
His name is Eric, and he picks you up from your apartment in a red car with plush leather seats that are soft to the touch when you slide in. Gleaming chromium exterior like glossy icing on a donut, or a coat of vermilion red that’s more linseed oil than pigment. “I see I should’ve worn the red dress,” you say after the proper social niceties have been exchanged. “Would’ve matched with the car.”
“I think you’d look stunning no matter what color dress you wear,” he says without taking his eyes off the road, but then again he had given you the expected once-over when you’d first stepped out onto the pavement, clanging the door of your Murray Hill walkup shut behind you. He hadn’t said anything then, but you like that he’s being complimentary now. He doesn’t know that you spent an hour standing in front of your closet considering the sweetheart crimson dress in the corner, the one your mother had bought for you ages ago, the one that really showcases your collarbone and cleavage, but you’d thought red too much for a first date and so you’re wearing a recently attained navy blue romper instead. It’s October and the weather has started to cool, but it’s not so cool yet that you’ll need a jacket where you’ll be going - a classy Flatiron district restaurant that you’re secretly hoping he’ll cover because your budget doesn’t magically expand when you go on a date; besides, your romper, a cute flowy thing you found in an overpriced thrift shop three blocks away from Washington Square, is long sleeved and has pockets.
You rearrange the edges of the romper about your legs, just so, and make sure said pockets aren’t inside out. “Thank you. I like the suit. Grey looks good on you.”
“Well, you’ve almost exclusively seen me naked, so.” He winks, and you laugh; you are excited, you realize, anticipatory in a way that’s rare these days. You are looking forward to good food and good conversation with an attractive man you have grown accustomed to seeing mostly in the nude, and if you’d taken a long hot shower beforehand, shaving everywhere except the V between your legs because you’d done it once when you were seventeen and it had itched like crazy for a week and if that happens tonight, then, well, he’s just going to have to take you as you come, well, then, what of it?
He is pulling up in front of the restaurant now, and you are talking about your living situation with your roommate Natalka, whom you adore and are forever indebted to - “It’s her apartment, actually - I’ve just crashed for long enough that we’re roommates at this point, we split all the bills” - when the conversation goes on hold because the valet is ready to park the car. You stand on the curb as he hands over the keys and comes over to you, putting his hand on the small of your back to escort you into the restaurant.
Behind you, the engine purrs; the valet drives off. “You’ve got a nice car, by the way,” you say.
"Thanks, it's not mine," he responds.
*
Some days, you want to tear yourself apart. You tense and untense and squeeze whatever you can grab, crossing your arms over your body and gripping the grabbable flesh of your sides and you hate it you hate it you hate that you are a fist clenched around the ceaseless thought of who am I what am I what do I do where do I go?
But it’s been long enough now that you have a routine now for when you find yourself thinking these thoughts. You take a long shower, scalding, and then you towel your hair and exfoliate your face and rub shea butter into your dry skin and then you pad into the sunroom, leaving oily footprints on the floor that Natalka is too nice to complain about even after nine months of living together, despite the occasional pointed comment she’ll give you about the water bill; and in the corner of the sunroom that is yours due to the heaps of art supplies with six-foot easel as centerpiece you put your pencils and graphites and pastels and paints in your bag - you never use the paints, haven’t been able to in a while, but you never leave them behind. You go outside and take the D train to Grand Street Station and if it’s nice out you sit in the park watching the teenagers in old graphic T’s play pickup and the laborers in stained tank tops smoke cigarettes on the sides and the little old Chinese ladies in clean patterned clothing patter along with small children, their grandchildren you think, their pride and joy, water of the womb. You sit there until it’s time and then you pick up your bag and brush leaves and living things out of your hair and you walk the two minutes to the nondescript door sandwiched between the Chinese bank and the Chinese spa, and you take the three flights up narrow stairs up to Minerva’s, where you can sit and stare at a human body for three hours without saying anything, without thinking beyond the lines and limbs and musculature you are putting onto the page, into your little notebook, steady eyes to steady hand, almost leaving your brain out altogether, and isn’t that lovely?
*
Eric had shown up in Minerva’s studio one cold blustery Thursday afternoon, weeks ago. You’d walked in to the sight of a young male posing nude in the center of the room, on his knees, one hand on his neck, eyes downcast in a surprisingly demure gesture, and you’d blinked at him briefly before heading over to your usual spot, furthest from the door, closest to the window. You’re used to older, female models with sagging butts and belly rolls - great for art, sure, but oh boy you are not complaining about this one.
You ask Minerva about the new model after the session is over and he is dressed and gone. “Oh, E’s new, yes. Victoria won’t be back for a while, she just got knee surgery; it’s a very good thing E showed up when he did.” She eyes you, and then grunts and tilts her head. “About time we had a male model, eh?”
You feel your face grow red. “Yes,” you nod, and you don’t ask Minerva about E again. But you do find yourself coming to life drawing sessions more frequently, and sometimes he’s there and sometimes he’s not; and one day you’re sitting in the park before class watching a group of old men speaking rapid fire Mandarin play a lively round of cards when he shows up in a charming loose button-down you can’t wait to see him shrug off later. He very matter-of-factly asks you out on a date; you learn that his actual name is Eric, and that no, modeling for life drawing sessions is not all he does; that he’ll treat you, and that you should wear something nice, and in Minerva’s studio that day he looks directly at you for the entirety of the long pose and you stare steadfastly at your hand moving over the page for the duration of the thirty minutes, looking up for reference only when absolutely necessary, blushing the entire time like the teenager you never got to be.
*
You eventually slip away to use the ladies room. Not as an excuse, as you are in fact having a great time, but because it’s been close to two hours and Eric’s settling the bill, and the two painkiller cocktails you’ve had began knocking on your bladder somewhere between his opinion of Minerva - “Given how well she knows the human body, I’m convinced she could get away with murder” - and your relationship with art - “Oh, it’s just a hobby, really. I used to do it more seriously, I used to paint a lot, but it’s been a while since I’ve had a good idea… practicing anatomy has been very good, though. Very good.” You check your reflection as you wash up; you smile, and it’s real, this is real, this is yours, you think, and when you head back to the table the bill has been paid and Eric feeds you the little complimentary dessert that came with the check; within five minutes you are leaving the restaurant arm in arm. It’s a gorgeous autumn night - the moon is full, and you look up at the sky and breathe.
Eric begins walking, commenting on the fall weather, and you walk with him. It occurs to you a block later to ask about the car, about retrieving it from the valet, and where are we going?
“Don’t worry about the car,” Eric says. “I was thinking, how do you feel,” and he takes your hands between his own, large and warm - “about an excursion?”
“Come again?” but you keep pace.
“You and me, Coney Island, take the subway all the way down,” he says, and he does stop walking now to look at you head-on. “Have you been to Coney Island before?”
“I have, but - you know what, that’s enough about me,” you say. “What about you?”
“What about me?” he repeats, gamely. You open your mouth, and nothing comes out. He grins. “Ask me anything you’d like.”
You open your mouth again, and you close it again, because you feel like you know him already, inexplicably, unexplainably. A small part of you is whispering worrisome statistics in your ear, date rapes and disappearances and murders and what would Natalka think (she wouldn’t think, she’d yell, she’d berate you for being an idiot - “Chris, that’s like, the first rule of dating, you do not go to remote locations with men you barely know” - except Natalka’s out of town right now and her voice is a little less urgent in your head), but the greater part of you thinks you do know Eric, or trust him, and how different are those two things anyway, and the biggest part of you wants to get on the subway and see where the night goes because you have an empty canvas at home and nothing to fill it with and that terrible, terrible emptiness, you want it gone. “I’ll ask you when I think of something,” you say much later, after you’ve walked two more blocks with Eric and descended the stairs into the subway station, just as the train arrives, and he nods.
“You do that,” he says, and together you board the train; by the time the train operator announces Stillwell Ave, you are the only two people left in the car, and it’s somehow like no time has passed at all. The train glides to a halt; the doors slide open, ker-thunk, ker-thunk.
“We’re here,” Eric says, standing, and takes your hand in his.
*
The last time you’d gone to Coney Island, you had been seven years old. You were on vacation with both your parents, staying in the Madison Square Park-adjacent apartment of your mother’s college friend’s friend Debbie. You don’t remember much from that trip except that you’d worn something entirely inappropriate for a beachside amusement park in summertime, like thick pajama pant leggings or something, and that your father had refused to let you go on any of the rides. You remember maybe throwing a screaming fit, and a spanking in public, right on the seat of your star-patterned pajama pants. Or maybe that didn’t happen - maybe you’d simply stayed silent and wide-eyed, trailing along behind your parents, soaking up the evidence of what other children wore and said and did, how other parents let their children scream for joy going round and round on the Electro Spin or up and down on the Cyclone.
Perhaps you remember enough from that visit, after all.
You’ve actually stayed in touch with Debbie, all these years later; or rather, she’s taken it upon herself to stay in touch with you, to make sure you are doing alright these days, all alone in a great big city despite knowing full well you have Natalka; so busy, so dangerous for a single girl. “Tina, are you eating alright? Are you cooking for yourself? Do you have a rice cooker? Is it a good one, does it work? Let me give you some mantou, hua juan to take with you, I know you like them, and I have extra boxes of longjing cha too.” The gratitude spills from your mouth in waves, repetitive, lapping in the face of such generosity, and you usually end up sharing the spoils with Natalka and any friends she might happen to have over, especially the longjing - you prefer rooibos yourself, enough to drink it on a daily basis.
Thing is, Debbie knows that you like mantou and hua juan because you’d once spent an entire two months living with her somewhere between the ages of nine and eleven, when your father had broken his collarbone jumping off your scooter going down a slope - because he had taken a break from work to be a good father and play with you but hadn’t known how to brake. He’d been in PT for a long time - Clavicle Fracture Physical Therapy Exercises, each word capitalized - and at every social gathering thereafter, you could count on finding him rotating his arm to show that “it’s almost back to normal, it’s getting better, it’s healing, thank you for the well wishes, thank you for the prayers.” But for the space of those two months all you knew was that your father was going to the hospital a lot and there were maybe money issues involved and it was probably a good idea for you to not be home and instead stay with Aunt Debbie, who was divorced and had grown-up kids and lived alone in a nice apartment in New York City and fed you things like homemade mantou and hua juan almost every day when she discovered you liked them so much. It had been Aunt Debbie, too, you remember, who had given you your first cheap paint set and a block of multimedia paper and said, “Why don’t you give it a try? Paint whatever you like, whatever you want.” You remember painting a picture of a fire truck; you remember being proud. You remember showing it to your parents when you were sent home, and your father saying it wasn’t good, and your mother quietly taping it up on the wall above your bed. You remember, you remember, you remember.
You remember looking at your father’s collarbone after you were sent home; there had been no scar.
*
This Coney Island is very, very different. You meet a few people bundled in warm jackets heading away from the shore, into Brighton Beach and the rest of Brooklyn; you pass them with little acknowledgement, and after them the dark structures of the amusement parks ominously shadowed against the moonlit sky, and the vast empty boardwalk with its bending, creaking planks; beyond that, beyond the pale stretch of beach bathed in blue glow, the ocean under the moon is an enormous shimmering sheet of black. You follow Eric onto the beach and take off your heels before they can sink all the way in; the sand is cold and a little damp beneath your toes, the arches of your bare feet. You feel a thousand miles away from New York, though this is New York, of course, this is American history and tourist attraction and childhood memory and the strangest date you have ever been on, as far as you can remember, though you suppose that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Up ahead, Eric has stopped walking. He’s taken his shoes off, his suit jacket too, and is shuffling indistinguishable shapes into the sand with his left foot. You hang back because it’s cold and because you don’t think your sense of reality is all here anymore - what are you supposed to do? But then Eric turns and offers you a hand, beckoning you without moving at all, and oh, that’s easy, then; you go to him.
“I forgot to ask if you prefer a nickname to Christina,” he says when you reach him, though he drops his own hand back to his side and turns once again to face the wind blowing in from the sea.
“Not really,” you say. “My parents call me Tina. My roommate, a few other friends call me Chris. I don’t have a preference.”
He hums. “Okay, then. Christina,” and now he’s turning toward you, and taking your face in his hands, and kissing you, and his hands have lost some of their warmth to the chill in the air all around you; you close your eyes and kiss him back because how many times have you outlined this man’s mouth, shaded in his cupid’s bow and philtrum and the vermilion of his lips with graphite and soft charcoal in your little notebook in all these weeks past?
The next thing he does, after ending the kiss, is pull out a deck of cards.
“What,” you say as lights flicker on in the distance, startling you - a faraway part of the park has lit up.
“Come on,” and he sounds playful, young; he laughs out loud, retreating in the direction of the boardwalk.
“Let’s play a game of poker!”
You eventually find your way to a bench you inspect for splinters before sitting on, right on the edge of the boardwalk, and for somehow the first time you absently note that the color of his dress shirt, as best you can make it under the moonlight and in the faint distanced glow of the lit-up rides, is a deep shade of red. He starts dealing cards - fast, like a pro.
“I don’t know how to play actual poker, American poker. I never learned how,” you find yourself saying. “Besides, don’t we need more than two people to play poker?”
Fwip fwip fwip fwip fwip go the cards. Eric huffs a laugh at you, and his eyes are smiling, and for a singular moment his teeth glint pale-blue-white in the light of the moon over the ocean, lips stretched wide. You had just kissed that mouth. You shiver; you want to do it again.
“We are playing whatever kind of poker you want. And if you win,” he says in a tone that makes you think this is how ghost stories must begin, blankets and smores by a crackling dying bonfire, not that you’ve experienced them yourself; except you’re on a beach sitting by the vast expanse of the murmuring sea and he’s just a man, a boy, a mischievous boy with a spooky idea for a first date and you have no idea where this is going to go but you want it to go somewhere, you think, you feel.
“If I win?” you prompt.
“If you win, I’ll take you home, yours or mine, and we can do whatever you want. Which could be nothing at all.” The final card is laid, now; his hands, long-fingered and thin, pianist’s hands, you think randomly, are bare.
You lean in, you can’t help it. “And if you win?” you say, and you wonder how you got here, playing cards by the sea in the light of a full moon with a man - a boy - a person you are slowly realizing you know next to nothing about, despite your own self-deceptions, despite your own pride, despite - whatever.
He grins, and his teeth flash. “If I win - ” and now he tips his head in the direction of the rides, dark towering structures rising into the sky, the eeriness of Tilly’s dilapidated grin over the entrance to Luna Park - “if I win, we’ll take a tour of the premises. Just the two of us - a private tour. I’ll make it worth your while,” and he touches your hand, feather-light and quite cold now. “I promise.”
You think about it, and you find you don’t care how you got here. “Deal,” you say.
*
The problem is, you’ve only ever learned Chinese poker, and you were never very good at it.
It had always been your mother that won - your parents playing cards around the kitchen table until late, until four in the morning, the only occasion for which they’d stay up long enough to see the pale light of dawn the next day, over the cracking of sunflower seeds and mostly good-natured, jabbing banter in Mandarin; your mother nursing a competitive streak and a youth you didn’t know your mother could have. But you think of late nights in the dormitories back in Beijing, cards flying almost as quickly as banter. You think of June 1989. A man - a grad student who’d marched at Tiananmen for three days, absent on the fatal day because he was busy teaching elementary school English - sits down to have lunch in one of the university cafeterias. He meets a woman; two months later, they’re filing for a marriage license, and they leave for the US on student visas two months after troops mow students down en masse at Tiananmen Square. Maybe it’s love at first sight, something like that; maybe it’s expedience. If there had been any love, it hasn’t lasted but the late night card games have, and the woman will always beat the man - you hadn’t known your mother’s triumph-giddy face would look so beautiful, but it does, and so you never learned to play all that well - but the point is, you lose the game, and Eric gestures in the direction of the darkened amusement park.
“Shall we?” he says.
*
As you walk toward the moonlit mass of rides you realize, in a slow murky muddling sort of way, like the way raw sticky honey tips out of the jar and into your daily mug of rooibos tea, that you aren’t very sure of Eric’s ethnicity. Have you glossed over it the entirety of this evening, the entirety of the past few weeks? You think about what his face looks like, and you draw a sharp blank; stupidly you try to recall the many, many sketches of him in your notebook, the size and shape of his eyes, the swoop of his hair, the contours of his jawline, how darkly you’ve shaded his skin but all you can summon are the lines of his naked back, the width of his thighs, of his shoulders; the shape of his limp cock. When he turns around you immediately stare at his face; you can’t tell, you can’t tell. You can’t tell. You don’t feel the concern you think you should feel at this revelation, and you open your mouth and say so.
“Mm,” he says, smiling a little. You keep staring; you can’t tell at all.
*
“Why don’t you paint anymore?” he asks as you pass through the entrance to Luna Park, Tilly’s leering, paint-faded face looming overhead; the gate had been closed, but Eric had pushed it open, just like that, and you don’t want to ask.
“I don’t really know,” you say. “No inspiration, I guess. But I spent so long painting anyway, it was time I moved on. Minerva’s has been really helpful for me so far.”
“I see,” Eric says. “Who taught you to paint?”
You almost say Aunt Debbie, but that’s not quite true, is it?
“Myself, I suppose,” you say.
Around you, everything is faded and gray; the smell of rust and fog hang heavy in the air, lingering in your nostrils. You look up and around, at the bright white moon first and then lower, and you see to the west an enormous metal tower with spokes like the branches of a tree; it looks decrepit, ominous, sharp. Eric tells you that it’s the parachute jump tower, but you cannot for the life of you imagine people on that thing.
“Well, we won’t be going there, then,” he says good-naturedly. “Want to try the hall of mirrors?”
Inside the hall with its twisting corridors and shoddy lighting, mirrors cracked at the edges and blackened in spots, you lose Eric pretty quickly, and you find that you are unexpectedly alright with that. You find a room that may be the center room, and you are fascinated. You spin in a slow, slow circle, watching a dozen you’s from a dozen different angles flickering past in the glossy shimmering panes of glass with their rough blackened patches. You wonder if you were ever one person, and you think you might have been once, a long, long time ago. That was another you, another lifetime. Dead. Divorced, beheaded, died. But maybe it was never dead and can’t ever be dead and there’s only ever been one you and a multitude of you’s, one Chris-tina, one desire thrumming through your veins, sluicing out of every open wound burning, the beat beat beat of your young-old heart.
You move on to the next corridor, and there are two faces in the mirror opposite you that are not yours. A terrible shriek pierces the air, shattering the glass - breaking, tinkling showers all around - and suddenly you’re being gathered into the confine of Eric’s arms and held tight, and you realize that you are still screaming.
“Shh, shh,” you hear, but everywhere you look you see them, even when you have squeezed your eyes shut with everything you have and the panic rises sharp in your throat for a moment before you’re just exhausted, head swimming with the sight of them, your parents, lovely to you and resentful to you and all of the above, and you want to laugh and cry and scream yet again but you’re tired, too tired already, you feel wearied and restless and so, so old -
*
The last time you had seen your parents, you had just gotten into art school, and your mother had looked at you with so much grief in her eyes that you’d almost wished you hadn’t sent in that application after all.
“We just want you to be successful and happy,” your mother says, pleading softly while your father rages in the background about test prep classes and college counselors and research competitions and everything he has slaved for your entire life to make sure you are successful and happy, and how you are spitting in his face by wanting to give everything up for art school, and how he will not pay for it, and see what you can do without tuition.
That had been nine months ago; you move in with a friend in New York, and you don’t go to either art school or college. You don’t paint again, either.
*
You kiss Eric a second time atop the Wonder Wheel in Deno’s that is somehow working, here in the middle of the night with no operator, with soft yellow lights around a red-framed structure and music you cannot place playing from nowhere, and when you open your eyes again after the kiss the park has, oh, the park has come alive - lights and music and spinning rides, invisible laughter and the smell of fresh popcorn, churros, and inexplicably, mantou and hua juan and a dozen other things you remember from Aunt Debbie’s house.
And meanwhile inside you everything is mào chū lái - leaking out of the cracks, spilling out of the woodwork, squirming out of deep dark hidden places you didn’t and don’t like thinking about because nine months nine months you are nine months old and yet you feel ancient with everything still in you, and you know that if you start talking now your throat is going to close and all that’s going to come out are these little hitching sounds and you don’t want Eric to hear those, you don’t want to hear them yourself. So you keep your mouth shut, and in between all the lights you notice the shadows flitting in the corners of your eyes, shades of things you think you might recognize but avoid looking at directly for fear they will overwhelm you, drive you insane.
So instead you focus on the lights, colorful, dazzling, glorious, until it’s too much, and you shut your eyes and ask Eric to kiss you and he does until you’re breathless and wanting, but then he’s bending to whisper directly into your ear, hot breath on your skin, too hot, burning you -
“Christina. Christina, open your eyes,” he says in a voice that is not the Eric you know, if you ever knew Eric at all, which maybe you really don’t. But you open your eyes, and the world is too bright and too noisy and so alive, and a hot rush of some emotion - fear? gratitude? relief? - is the last thing you feel before his jaw unhinges and you look into his red mouth as it gapes open and the world around you turns like a kaleidoscope - amusement park rides and steel beams and broken clavicles and ocean salt and damp gritty sand between your toes and putrid food stand grease and the smell of scallions and fresh baked buns and encompassing it all, confining it all - a warm-cold body, warm blood, cold hands, the contours of muscle under skin and of eyeballs and teeth and a thousand voices born of a thousand others and the thing that you have been drawing in your notebook these past few weeks, the thing-that-is-Eric-but-what-is-Eric - the thing opens its mouth and swallows you whole and down you go, down, down, down, down, down.
*
In the morning you wake up in your apartment and you’re alone, sunlight and street noise streaming in through open windows. Grittiness in your mouth, the tangy taste of vinegar and oranges. You get up and close the windows to prevent any more cold air from coming in; you walk into the sunroom, and stop, because on the easel you haven’t touched in ages is an enormous painting of you, naked, sitting on a bench on an empty pale-sand beach, hair in your face so you can’t quite see your own eyes, and you are holding your bloody carved-out heart in your hands and it’s not a heart but a heart-shaped mess of bent warped folded torn playing cards covered generously in red paint that could mean blood or could mean just that, red paint, because it’s rather too bright to be blood, you think; there is a tube of vermilion red painted lying on the sand by your feet and a brush dipped in red tucked behind your ear, dripping onto your clavicle.
There is whistling coming from the kitchen; it is empty, but you find water for tea boiling on the stove.