Dirty Diana

Chapter 15

Chapter 15

—

After I hang up with Alicia, I can’t sleep. I book a flight from Dallas to Albuquerque for early the next morning, pack my suitcase, then sit at the kitchen table and watch the sun coming up.

The plane is mostly empty, and without having to hold extra snacks for Emmy or Oliver’s neck pillow, my bag fits easily under the seat. I lean my head against the window and doze most of the way, thinking about New Mexico and what I might be going back to. I haven’t let myself think about Jasper or my Santa Fe life in so long.

As soon as the plane touches down, I text Oliver.

Landed.

K. Good luck.

We’ve barely spoken since he told me his secret. I saw him briefly this morning and left for the airport moments later.

I text Alicia.

LANDED!!

And she responds

!!!!!

On the curb outside the airport, she screams, “Dirty Diana!” and pulls me into her. “I’ve missed you like crazy. ” She hugs me like she never learned that you’re supposed to hold back. And I realize I’ve missed her like crazy too.

As we’re driving the hour to Alicia’s house in Santa Fe, memories come flooding back. We pass dozens of places where we catered events with Barry. We pass the Cross Gallery where I first met Jasper, and I can’t help staring. It has a fresh coat of paint and new plantings out front but otherwise looks the same. At a red light, Alicia taps her fingers against the steering wheel, her wedding band making a faint tapping sound in time with the music. I glance at her profile—she’s only gotten more beautiful, any hard angles filled in and softened. She seems so at home in Santa Fe. As soon as grad school was over, Alicia moved back here and started teaching film classes at the university and she never left again. What if Oliver and Emmy and I did the same? What if we picked up and moved here now? Would I feel more at ease too?

We pass the turnoff for Jasper’s old house and I wonder where he is right now. All this time, I’ve resisted the urge to look him up, even though it would be so easy to do.

The rest of downtown speeds past us until Alicia pulls in to the driveway of a small adobe home. When she opens the front door, her three-year-old, Elvis, comes running across the polished wood floor. “Mama!” Elvis throws his arms around Alicia’s legs and she swings him up and he wraps his legs around her waist.

She kisses Elvis on his cheek and announces, “Auntie D is here!”

“Hi.” Elvis places a chubby hand on each of my cheeks and presses them together until my lips purse.

“Sorry. It’s his favorite greeting.” Alicia’s husband, Nico, appears and plucks Elvis up and throws him, giggling, over his shoulder.

“Oh, Elvis.” I sigh and look at his upside-down face. “I am so happy to see you.”

Nico gives me a warm hug, nearly as tight as Alicia’s. His eyes are a deep green and he has the same rosy red lips and wide smile as Alicia, only a little less mischievous than hers. Nico asks me to remind him how I take my coffee then takes my bag to the guest room while Alicia shows me around the house.

In her sun-drenched backyard, we sit on a bench and watch Elvis sway on his stomach on a wooden swing hung from their elm tree. My sunglasses are somewhere inside; the bright light burns my naked eyes, and I have the most disorienting feeling of having traveled from one world to another. Wherever I am now feels both familiar and alien.

“I’m really glad you came.” Alicia squeezes my knee.

“Me too. I should have come sooner.”

“It all happened so fast. Barry didn’t really tell anyone how sick he was, except his sister. And me, because I made him.”

I shake my head. “He loved you so much. He used to let you get away with murder.”

Alicia laughs and sighs all in one breath. “We have an hour before the service. You must be hungry?”

“Starving.”

Alicia turns toward the house and calls, “Nico! Waffles!” Then to me, “Don’t worry, he orders me around too. We’re into it.”

—

As soon as I got settled in Dallas all those years ago, I sent Barry a check for the money he lent me, and he never cashed it. So a few months later, I sent him a goofy card with a hand-drawn picture of bananas yelling “Thanks a bunch!” and cash inside. He emailed me back a photo of himself in front of the catering van with all new shiny, metallic purple rims and a note that said, “Money put to good use.”

A year later, when my book came out, the publisher offered to send me to an art book fair in New York. Alicia was still in grad school at NYU so I had a free place to stay and Barry flew out to join us. While Alicia was in class, Barry came with me to the book fair. The organizers sat me at a tiny table near the back with a pile of Sharpies. Barry and I had planned that I’d be signing books for an hour or so while he browsed the convention floor and found us some good books to take home. But when it grew clear to us that no one was coming by my table to get my book signed, Barry pretended his feet hurt and asked if he could sit with me. He kept us distracted by asking me to read from the book. Twice he interrupted me to say, “You made this, Diana,” and he held up the book, admiring the cover. “Can you believe where we are?” We sat back in our folding chairs and looked around the fair. Barry shook his head and made it feel like it didn’t matter that no one had come by because we were already in the most exciting place on the planet. To repay his kindness, I researched the city’s hottest culinary spots. With Alicia, we waited in long, snaking lines for dim sum and knocked on unmarked doors for cheeseburgers, then sang karaoke until all three of us were hoarse. We stayed up for what felt like forty-eight hours straight.

Soon after I got back to Dallas, I met Oliver, and Barry got busier than ever with work. Over the next few years, his catering business doubled and then tripled in size. He had a new kitchen space built and hired a team of chefs and more reliable cater waiters. Our correspondence became less frequent and more focused on the big occasions—phone calls on birthdays and holidays, then a lot of missed calls and voicemails and text messages. Occasionally, one of us would write the other a long meandering email but usually our check-ins were brief. He wrote asking about Oliver and apologized for not making it to our wedding, and I apologized right back for scheduling it the same weekend as his sister’s, and we both promised to visit as soon as things were “less hectic.” He always asked for more pictures of Emmy and reminded me to share what I was working on. And the less time I spent writing and drawing, the less I wrote to him, as if him knowing how little I was working would make it all suddenly true.

Then Alicia called to tell me Barry had stage four pancreatic cancer. I called him and told him I was way overdue for a visit and to clear his dance card. He made me promise to wait until he was done with chemo because he wanted to feel “electric” for karaoke. I laughed and told him he had a deal. I sent him playlists with all his favorite songs and gave them titles like Slow Jamzzz for Fast People.

Now I rest my head on Alicia’s shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

“Honestly, Diana, it all went so fast. Mostly he just held my hand and made me promise to not let his sister serve any food at the funeral except for the stuff he’d already put in the deep freezer.”

Nico sets the table and we eat breakfast in the sunshine of Alicia’s yard.

“How’s Oliver?”

“Really good.” I hope I sound convincing. “He wanted to come, but we’d have had to pull Emmy out of school…. It’s a whole thing.”

“Are you painting much?”

“Here and there.”

“I wish you could stay longer,” Alicia says, cutting into the small talk.

“Me too.” I mean it. It’s so calming in her backyard, with stalks of purple and pink flowers and a bright yellow slide. Nico brings us coffee and sits beside us.

I want to tell them all about the cassette tapes I found in my closet and my overly strong reaction to losing them. And about what Oliver said to me before I left, and how disconnected we’ve become. About how little I desire him, how sometimes it seems like there’s not much about my life in Texas I desire at all. But I don’t know how or where to begin.

—

The service is packed. Barry’s sister, Nancy, sits in the front row with Barry’s mom, who is tiny and frail, and his three aunts. It’s as if anyone Barry ever catered a party for is here—at least every gallerist, events coordinator, and party planner in Santa Fe. I see a few of the clients from our regular jobs, but most of the faces are new. Halfway through the service, a tall, lanky guy with a close-cut beard slips into the pew opposite mine. I recognize his face, but I can’t place him. I try to catch his eye, but he only looks straight ahead.

After the service, we go back to Barry’s house and Nancy pulls Alicia and me into a double embrace in the kitchen. “Oh, you girls. You’re so good to come. Barry would be so happy.”

“We wouldn’t miss it,” Alicia says and takes another tray of baby quiches out of the oven.

Nancy busies herself counting flatware so she won’t cry. “I want you girls to each pick out something from Barry’s room. A keepsake.” She can’t be more than five years older than us but she calls us “girls” in the most maternal way. She squeezes my hand. “He’d want you to have something.” Her lip trembles, and she wipes her eye with the back of her other hand. “It’s upstairs. Last door on the left. Don’t leave without taking something.”

Barry’s room is exceptionally tidy. There’s a bookcase full of cookbooks organized by rainbow color, and beside it, an impressive shrine to Julia Child. Alicia scans the space. “I’m not sure what to take.”

“Me neither.” Just beside the window is a set of floating shelves lined with tiny clay figurines. There must be nearly fifty of them, each one three or four inches tall and a bit misshapen, with crudely painted faces and ornate hats, mostly shaped like giant flowers. “Did Barry make these?”

“Oh.” Alicia stands next to me. “I remember these…”

I pick up the one with a mushroom for a hat.

“Is that the Mario Cart guy?” Alicia asks.

“I think…” I squint harder. “I think it’s Barry?”

She leans in to get a better look and sees the teeny white platform sneakers. “Oh. I loooove him!”

I cup him in my palm and make a lap around the room. I’ve never felt so relieved by the weight of something, the figurine heavy in my hand. I think of Barry checking in on my work and reminding me to always be making something, no matter what it is. When he said this, I’d think, just like you, and I’d picture him cooking, the artist in his kitchen. But the figurines have a different kind of permanence. I wonder if he had always made them or only started after getting sick. Did he know we’d all be desperate for a piece of him to carry with us?

On Barry’s dresser, I find a few framed photographs. One is of him and Nancy and their parents; there’s another of Barry with his three aunts, at what looks like his culinary school graduation. And beside the frames, there’s a weathered copy of the book I made so many years ago. When I open it, a Polaroid falls out—the three of us, me, Barry, and Alicia, posing in our aprons in front of Barry’s van.

My eyes fill with tears, blurring our photographed faces, and I feel Alicia’s hand on my shoulder.

“I have an idea,” she says.

“What’s that?”

“Let’s get really stoned.”

—

We lie on Barry’s bed side by side, the windows wide open to air out the smoke. Nico is downstairs with Elvis. He’d shooed us away after we set out the buffet. “Have fun.”

“You’re the best,” Alicia told him. I watched as she kissed him. I tried to remember the last time I kissed Oliver that way.

Now I’m stoned and my defenses are depleted. I bite my lip and turn my face up to the ceiling fan. “Alicia, can I tell you something?”

“I already know what you’re going to say.” She props herself up on an elbow and peers down at me. “You’re getting a divorce.”

“What? No! Why would you even say that?”

“I don’t know, you just seem…secretive? Like you’re hiding something. And you’re not talking about Oliver. At all.”

“Okay, well, maybe, but that’s not why. I’ve been wanting to make something new, but I don’t know what it is. And I’m scared. I’ve let so much time pass since I’ve really made anything. But now I feel disconnected, and just, off. Like I’ve lost something, but maybe it was never really mine?” I drape my arm across my face, hiding in its crook. “And then I found these old tapes and I keep thinking, what if I talk to women, the way I used to, about love and sex, but maybe different this time.” The weed has made my mouth dry and my head fuzzy. “Like I’ve started wondering, maybe if I could live in someone else’s place for a while, in their desire, I could find my own. Does that make sense? I don’t know. I can’t figure it out, exactly. What it could be.”

Alicia is so quiet I worry that perhaps, in combination, the weed and I have put her to sleep.

But then she says, “Oh thank god.”

“What?”

“You always do your best work when you have no idea what you’re making. Remember when you tried to make those creepy nightmare dioramas? Those were wild.”

“That was so so long ago.”

“Who cares what this thing will become? Maybe that’s not for you to know yet. Love and sex and desire…” She lets it roll over in her mind. “You’ve always been fascinated by how squeamish we all are about sex. That was the whole idea of our point system.”

“That was your idea,” I say.

“No.” She shakes her head. “No, I told you the story about the frat boys who were bragging about it, but it was your idea for us to do it.”

Suddenly I know she’s right—I hadn’t remembered it that way at all, but she’s right. “Okay, but you were better at it than I was. Bolder—”

“No, I was having more sex than you, maybe. In more interesting places, probably. And with hotter people…”

I roll my eyes and Alicia smiles.

“I just thought, the more sex I have, the more chance I’ll get to what feels right. I liked to try things out. I still do. Oh my god—” She bolts up in bed. “Ask Nico about how we bought him a cock ring to try out. It said ‘one-size-fits all’ but it didn’t fit his balls!”

“What?” I say, laughing.

“Nico?” When he doesn’t answer, she goes out to the hallway and whisper-shouts from the top of the stairs. “Nico!”

She lies back down on the bed and I smack her with a pillow. “When he comes in, ask him to tell you.”

“I’m not asking him.”

Nico appears in the doorway in his short-sleeved shirt and tie. He doesn’t look even the tiniest bit annoyed that he’s been summoned by his stoned wife and her friend.

“Tell Diana about how your saggy balls wouldn’t fit in the cock ring we bought.”

Nico looks at me like he’s about to describe the weather. “Diana, it didn’t make any sense. I mean, it fit on my”—he briefly glances over his shoulder, then back at me—“my shaft… ”

Nico’s expression is so earnest that it makes us laugh harder. He shakes his head, recalling his bewilderment. “I don’t get it. Whose balls fit in that thing?” Then he leans over and kisses his wife on the forehead. “I gotta get back downstairs. Barry’s sister is feeding Elvis insane amounts of chocolate babka.”

When he leaves, Alicia flips through the worn-out book of my old paintings. She traces her fingers along the cover, then places it on the nightstand. She smiles. “Never stop making stuff, whatever it is—that’s what he’d say, right?”

Thinking of Barry opens an ache in my chest. I stare up at his ceiling fan and hold the mushroom-headed figurine high above me. I close one eye, and then the other, so that Mini Barry does a kind of jig, suspended in midair.

“Silent Rod!” I sit up, excited. Alicia furrows her brow and I quickly explain. “That tall, quiet guy who walked in late to the services. Rod, the botanist-bartender. He was there today! Remember he studied flowers and…” I wave my arm. “It doesn’t matter.” Just knowing he was here today makes me happy. I look at Barry’s shelf of flower-hatted figurines and smile, feeling suddenly closer to him and to what he was making and thinking. And then, annoyingly, I start to cry. Maybe it’s because I’m stoned, but I’m smiling and weeping and I don’t want to be. Alicia grabs my hand, which only makes me cry harder. I feel like a kid, suddenly alone and turned around at an amusement park, her family evaporated into a sea of strangers. My shoulders shake and I sob.

Alicia wraps a steady arm around me until I catch my breath. When I do, she hands me a tissue. I blow my nose then roll my eyes at myself. “Alicia, am I having a nervous breakdown in Barry’s room?”

My best friend squeezes my hand and shrugs. “Seems like a healthy place to do it?” She grabs another tissue and gently wipes the mascara from my face. Then she stands and pulls off my shoes.

“Alicia—”

“No one will care. Get under.”

She kicks off her own shoes and crawls beneath Barry’s quilt with me, pulling it over both our heads. We turn our bodies toward each other, our faces so close they nearly touch.

The closed-in space feels like a confessional and in the quiet I say, “I’m really lost.”

“I know.”

My marriage is at sea. My desire for my husband has vanished. I want to make art, to produce something beautiful that helps people connect to one another, maybe. But instead I work in an office, helping people move their wealth around in an endless loop. I was on a path, I thought, and then it, too, disappeared. I don’t need to say any of this out loud. Beside me, Alicia stays still, keeping her eyes open so that I can close mine.

—

When Alicia comes back to wake me, the sun has already set. Barry’s house has nearly emptied of guests; only a few stragglers remain, saying goodbye on the front porch. Alicia, Nico, and I put away the food and finish up the dishes while Elvis naps on Nancy’s chest. When the house is tidy, we hug Nancy goodbye. Back at Alicia’s, Elvis shows us how he swims in the bath and washes his own hair. The grown-ups applaud, and Alicia beams with pride. I never thought that I’d feel unsettled in comparison with Alicia and her restlessness. But that’s how I feel right now, like I’m champing at a bit that she doesn’t even feel in her mouth.

While Alicia and Nico tuck Elvis in, I wonder if I’ll be able to sleep after such a long nap, but as soon as I lie down, I drift into a deep, dreamless sleep.

—

On the way to the airport the next morning, I double-check I have everything—wallet, phone, tiny mushroom-hatted Barry figurine. At the curb, I hug Alicia hard, like I don’t know you’re supposed to hold back.

I feel lighter at thirty-five thousand feet. My flight is nearly empty and in the hum of white noise, I begin to form a plan. I’ll keep making stuff, even if I’m not sure yet what it is. And in the making, I’ll find what’s been lost. When I close my eyes, I can almost see lines of text and new paintings, like scrying stones for my own desire. I begin to imagine recording new interviews, each one a little like Barry’s figurines, with its own story to tell. I’ll try harder with Oliver and fight for what I know is there. If it’s sinking, I’ll pull it to the surface.