the name of their blog again?
With love,
Ann-Marie X
Back at the apartment, I lay on my bed for about three hours, watching Beyoncé’s “Deja Vu” video again and again and again. I watched her shimmy across the screen in a colonial-style grass skirt against a fake backdrop of dry earth and deep sky. She waved her beautiful arms around dementedly and kicked up the dust and then collapsed on the floor at the song’s crescendo, screaming about seeing her lover everywhere she went.
I pulled on my red silk kimono. The bathroom door was closed. I could hear Freddie running a bath and the squeal of an American cartoon.
“I’m coming to jump in there with you in just about ten minutes!” I shouted.
I had a look in the living room; it was fucked. Freddie’s portrait of me had been taken down from the wall and lay on the coffee table, covered in white dust and a rolled note. He painted it last summer on the roof at Hammerton Hall, the stately home where his father keeps all his art but never visits. Maxine, the housekeeper, had decked the roof out in fairy lights and candles because I think she wanted to turn Freddie straight. I had lain on blue velvet with my clothes off while he pretended to be seized by inspiration: a cigarette clenched between his teeth, splattered with paint the approximate shade of my skin. He had insisted that I wear a sapphire necklace that belonged to his mother. The result was a hybrid of Francis Bacon and soft-focus 70s porn. My mouth was a yawning black chasm and there were boxing gloves on my feet, but my lips and nipples were painted a tender pink. Maxine said that the portrait made me look about ten times more beautiful than I am in real life. Freddie loathed it; he couldn’t even accept it as self-consciously derivative. He said that it revealed him in a light that he didn’t want to be revealed in. I said that I thought the portrait was supposed to be of me? He said no—he had exposed himself as sentimental, as sentimental as a dirty old flasher in the park. I asked him: “How is a flasher sentimental?” And he said: “A flasher is just a romantic at heart. He just wants to be naked under the trees.” Freddie decided to give up painting altogether and invest his creative potency in video art. Now he only works in 8 mm.
Next to the chaise longue, there was a bust of Freddie’s uncle, Professor Timothy Frank, an esteemed anthropologist. The bust was commissioned by Freddie’s father who hated Freddie’s uncle. It looked like a remnant of an exploded car factory. The face was more or less a steering wheel embedded in a tire.
There was a lot of tribal hunting equipment too: scythes and axes, charged with a preternatural energy. They were full of wrath. They didn’t want to be estranged from their country of origin. There was a taxidermied peacock with fanned feathers.
In the kitchen, I ate some chicken livers and stale bread, checking my phone constantly. Vic hadn’t called or texted.
I went back upstairs.
Now the bathroom door was ajar. Disney’s The Little Mermaid was playing on our old mini TV, which stood on a marble plinth at the end of the bath. I watched the screen as I got my tights off in the hall.
“Keep singing!” barked Ursula the sea witch, reaching her phantom fingers down Ariel’s throat and usurping her voice.
Ariel spasmed; her tail turned into legs.
“This bit is, like, so romantic,” came a voice. It wasn’t Freddie’s voice.
I pushed the door open.
There was a boy in the bath. He wasn’t Freddie.
“Who the fuck are you?” I said.
The boy turned his freckled, crying face toward me.
I knew who he was; he was Samuel, Allegra’s younger brother. I hadn’t seen him since the day after the night of the crème de menthe—that was nearly two years ago. He used to be a preppy little bastard, but now he had transformed into a hipster of some description.
“Get out,” I said.
His hair was ginger, not black like hers. His body was thin and white, but not exactly alabaster like hers. His eyes were not gray like hers, but hazel. He had the same high domed forehead as her and I hated him violently.
I attempted to haul the TV into the bathwater.
He leaped out.
The cord strained. The TV rocked on the edge.
It didn’t go in.
Now Ariel was scrabbling on the shore, trying to figure out how to walk.
Samuel clung to me, wet and ludicrous. I pushed him off. He was almost as tall as Vic. With shaking hands, he returned the TV to its plinth. He got back in the water.
A moronic smile appeared on his face. “Look.” He pointed to the screen.
Eric the prince was trying to interpret Ariel’s damp-eyed sign language. They were standing by a rock on the beach.
Samuel put on my exfoliating mitts and lathered himself up. “Freddie is so analog,” he said. “That’s why I love him.”
I tried to drag Samuel out of the bath by the arm, but he shook me off with ease. He said, sadly: “Yeah, Freddie told me you had a lot of anger management issues after you totally caught the G. She gave you the G. Because even though people are from the same blood buffet, it doesn’t mean they’re the same type of sick gangster. What she did was Frigidaire.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” I said. “Where’s Freddie?”
He guffawed. “Sleeping it off. Last night we got more than shellacked and Freddie boggled and, like, got hit on by a flavorless but then he hit on me and I was like, you can totally tap this. You’re a juicer and a hypo but I love you.”
“What?”
“Oh, yeah, right.” He blushed. “That’s how they speak in Brooklyn. In Williamsburg. I’m reading this.” A wet copy of Shoplifting from American Apparel by Tao Lin lay on the bath mat. “Have you read it? Freddie told me to read it. He’s going to improve me.”
“That’s mine,” I said. “I haven’t read it.”
He laughed. “Where are my manners, babes?” He held out his hand. “I’m Samuel.”
“I remember.” I didn’t take his hand.
“Freddie told me that you two are, like, majorly liquid even though he’s not a CK1.”
“A what?”
“That you’re on a spectrum.”
“We’re not on a spectrum.”
“He said it was like The Cement Garden and incestuous and shit all up in this place but that I shouldn’t be perturbed if you got jealous because one thing he likes and can’t stand about you is your temper.” Samuel turned back to the TV.
Now the crazy French chef was trying to murder the blatantly racist rendition of a crab with a cleaver.
Samuel
