It does not envy/it does not boast

He stepped out into the warbling heat just as the plate shattered against the doorframe. He knew that by the time he came back, she would be sweeping up the pieces from the floor, the dishwasher humming away contentedly. For a little while, she would pretend not to hear him stepping gingerly around the splinters of broken glass, even though she’d written once about how she could smell the warm leather of his boots from a mile away, could feel his steps echoing through the ground like the stirrings of some mythic god. He read most of the things she wrote with an eye out for clues, some hint of what it was that so captivated her attention all the time and kept her so far from him. In the beginning, she had been so hard to read, but now he knew where to look. Eventually she would say his name, softly at first, waiting to see if he would answer: “Jace,” she’d say, “I’m sorry Jace.” And he would likely cry also, and tell her that he loved her, though the word had lost its glossy veneer at some point in the past few months, and he didn’t trust the sound of it so much anymore.

It was May and the heat had begun to settle slowly on the city like a fine mist, weighing everything down, day by day. The red-eyed cicadas had emerged from the ground after seventeen years of silence, and screamed like angry children, flitting through the curtains of dry leaves that hung moribund from the oak trees.  It was a day for fighting; the air was agitated in the wake of restless birds and insects, the children were out of school and gathered on the corner of Orleans and North Carrollton,  their black skin glowing hot and wet beneath white wife-beaters, smoking cigarillos and drinking from red plastic cups, eyes like flashes of heat. All of the city hung precariously on the edge of summer; it was as though they were holding their breaths, waiting for the great blast of June to roll over southeastern Louisiana and silence the city in its quivering in its wake. 

He rounded the corner of North Hennessey street, nearly stepping on a dirty white cat so skinny and long it looked like a bearskin rug stretched out over the sidewalk. Cleo was always feeding the cats: leftovers that he’d been planning to eat, food from her plate under the pretense that she “wasn’t hungry.” Jace could hardly get her to eat anything at all, and she didn’t keep much around the house. It wasn’t like he hadn’t known about her food behaviors before; back when he still lived on Napoleon Avenue they’d have dinner in the neighborhood every Monday, and joke about it being a date as though it weren’t, as though they had plenty of time to figure it out. Back then, her fragility was part of the appeal. She was so much smaller than Emily, she folded so neatly into his body when he embraced her, and when she wanted a hug, she held up her brittle arms and whimpered like a child. 

A small, grey cat slinked between his legs, mewling pitifully, glaring up at him with eyes like pewter, cold and hard. He kicked reflexively and the cat took off towards his house, looking back every so often, like a child seeking the more lenient parent. Cleo would be wiping down the floors with paper towels or smoking a cigarette on the steps outside, waiting for him to return, preparing to deliver yet another carefully constructed monologue. Had she always wrangled conversations away from him like that? He only remembered how entranced he had been when he first heard her speak, how she wove patterns with her fingers through the air, the way her little body seemed to burn up with excitement. She hypnotized a room like a guileful politician; people- especially men- hung onto her every word like spanish moss from the trees. She made everyone feel like she spoke only to them, like she was sharing secrets she’d never divulged before. 

Perhaps she had always been that way. After all, Emma had said something, the first time that they gave her a ride home from work, about her tendency to interrupt, but Jace had chalked it up to envy- Emma had always been wary of Cleo, with good reason- and so he’d dismissed it at the time. And maybe it wasn’t so bad. Jace believed in extending grace, forgiving the little things for the sake of harmony- like the cats and the way she ended arguments by melting into tears. He thought of the vows he’d written a few months earlier, in the final hours of a sleepless night, cocaine whistling through his body: Love is patient. He laughed- a short, dry sound- and thought about Emma, what fighting with her had been like, the things he’d had to tell himself to carry on sleeping beside her every night. He wondered how long he had been so miserable, and whether or not she knew it and kept it a secret from him. 

Cleo hadn’t been the first to react with incredulity when he’d told her about his engagement. The story was funny, really. Before he knew for sure that he was an addict, he’d come up with various plans to turn his life around, to fill the hot, gaping hole inside him that seemed to swallow everything up and burn it down: he took up boxing, he painted the kitchen an ugly, pale dogwood color, he proposed at a bar one night when he was drunk and Emma had been crying only moments before. It hadn’t felt impulsive; he had invited her parents down to celebrate despite their loveless marriage and constant arguing, had asked her friends to meet them outside with balloons and rice to throw, like in the pictures he’d seen of weddings in distant places. 

By then it was too late, and for every couple of thousands of dollars her parents poured into the whole ordeal he was snorting a few thousand up his nose and out of his checking account. He bought everything else with the credit card- it was so easy to hide it all from her- and he stole a few things here and there. Emma had already picked out the ring. She’d left a printed image of it on the kitchen table a few times, as though it were an accident, as though she weren’t always trying to get him to do things her way. 

He was nearing his corner of the block again, walking slowly against the heat like he was treading through water. A sinking feeling seemed to pull him even further into the ground; his neighbors, two women who were also social workers and had asked that they refrain from doing laundry past 10 p.m,  were leaning over the balustrade of their balcony, craning their necks to see into the courtyard, where Cleo had apparently been screaming and throwing pots and pans at the side of the house. If there was one thing that Jace couldn’t stand, it was other people witnessing his private affairs- particularly conflicts. He could hear them whispering.

 “Where do you think she is now,” the fat one said. 

“Should we go check up on her,” said the little one with damp, dull blonde hair hanging

like the ears of  a wet dog. They were always asking questions, talking over one another in the way that women did when they got excited. Impossible to get a word in. People, it seemed, were always looking, even when you least expected it. There was always someone itching for a glance into your home, into your bed, behind your eyes. That was one of the first things that he and Cleo had talked about: no privacy anymore, no real intimacy at all. Fucking rubberneckers. As if to complete the image, the fat one stretched her neck out a bit farther, leaning over the balustrade from her waist. How easy it would be to climb up there and wrap his hands around her neck, to twist those flaps of skin that hung from her chin, to feel the burning of the blood bulging in her head, straining her eyes. He decided to take another lap. 

Cleo was always saying that his relationship with Emma had been abusive- on her end, not his. And he supposed she was right. After all, what kind of a person, after finding out that her fiancé was a drug addict, continued to believe in the integrity of a half-baked proposal planned and executed under the perpetual influence of a powerful stimulant and god knows what else? But it didn’t seem so simple to him. From the time he had met Emma she had always been obstinately driven, motivated solely by pragmatism, stubborn and eerily incapable of self reflection, like the gods of the great Greek myths, or the Old Testament’s Yahweh. And that’s exactly what she was: an all-powerful, omnipresent entity prone to cruel and bizarrely elaborate punishments. For instance, when he had lied to her about his trip to Chicago to visit family, driving southwest to Chiapas instead to pick up a few ounces of cocaine, she had killed all of his plants, one by one, drowning them in whiskey and wine, leaving them out in the sun to dry out and shrivel up like the bodies of migrants that they found out in the desert- so close to home. But afterwards she’d felt so bad. She had cried and cried, begging for him to forgive her, for weeks she had gone to Al-Anon as promised, and returned brimming with ideas, her yellow eyes wet with hope and promise. And that’s sort of how things went with them. It wasn’t like he was faultless; in fact, he’d begun to work a program that demanded of him that he take full accountability of his actions, that he atone for the things that he had done, what he had put her through. Which, of course, was part of the problem, part of the reason he hadn’t noticed what was happening to him and how he’d gotten there. 

For a long time at the beginning, Cleo often asked him why he hadn’t left earlier. Had he done it just because he’d met her? Would he have gone through with the whole thing had they never spoken after that meeting, had they never had lunch that day in the empty classroom, while Emma ate alone downstairs? Of course such questions were pointless. How could he possibly know what he would have done differently? He was decidedly a determinist, and didn’t believe in free will anyway. So he kept from asking himself those kinds of questions, which of course, did not keep her from looking for answers. 

It was the way Cleo spoke that at first had drawn him to her. She was so brazen, so truculent, grey eyes flashing like cold metal. She was the first person he’d ever heard speak of the program with such nuance, such fearless criticism. To a room full of die-hard book-thumpers she said things like “accountability without groveling,” and “god, of course, is a human construct.” He hadn’t quite worked out whether or not he believed in the same things that she did- or rather, didn’t believe in the same things that she didn’t believe in- but her words struck him like the sound of a church bell, at once startling and comforting. She didn’t remember this part, but after the meeting he had walked up to her and said something inane and she had touched his shoulder with her long, spidery fingers, sending debilitating shudders down his spine. And then later, after the first time he mentioned Emma and a conflict they’d recently had, she had said “love keeps no record of wrongs,” and touched his shoulder again. That was part of her thing, he guessed: touching people softly, as though she were blind, feeling for their features, creating them in her own image. That was the day that they found out they worked for the same organization. They had run into one another at a conference, in an old school building in the East, and she had said, complicitly, “we should find someplace quiet to have lunch.” So much meaning in that seemingly innocuous suggestion. He met her in an empty classroom on the third floor, dusty bay windows overlooking the dull grey fabric of the Mississippi river, the faint perfume of moths’ wings on stale air. Somehow classrooms seemed to him to always smell the same; like his mother’s closet, like rubber and cotton and skin. How beautiful she was, dressed like a teenage boy, like one of his students, in cropped khaki pants and a wrinkled white polo shirt, half tucked into her waistband. She had her Vans propped up on a desk and was smoking some sort of electronic cigarette. The pale smoke matched the color of her eyes, billowed up around her head like a halo. There was something so irreverent about her, as though she were holding a middle finger up to the world. She was so different from Emma, who wore brightly colored dresses that hugged her full figure, and brushed her hair until it gleamed like water. But Cleo was so beautiful, so handsome in her own dusky, dark way, and wild like an animal in a cage, pacing. Later on she told him that she dressed like that because she didn’t like people watching her. They had that in common. 

The sun had begun to set. The shadows of things peeled slowly off their surfaces, stretching out across the ground as though warming themselves against the hot cement. The air began to cool, the smell of water seeping out from City Park and the river beyond, people coming out of their houses to lift their faces up to the sky, people sitting on their porches and smoking, people leaning over balconies, or petting skinny cats. It had been forty-seven days since the public ordinance banning public gatherings and closing businesses, forty-seven days since the official declaration of a global pandemic, forty-seven days, smokey and surreal, unbearably slow and hot. Jace’s neighbors still thought that he would have a wedding in the fall, even though he’d only just moved there; they shrugged apologetically from afar, they didnt ask about the new girl in his house. He thought about what that would be like, being married in the fall to the woman he thought he loved. The current projections were grim; the virus would subside during the sweltering summer months and resurge in the late days of autumn. He imagined a cool November day, shrouded in mist, everything swollen from the passage of water in the summer months. He imagined guests arriving in ball gowns and gas masks, tuxedos and N95s, people dancing six feet apart with invisible partners. It reminded him of the scene in the Virgin Suicides- Cleo’s favorite book- in which a marginal character- Alice maybe-  holds a debutante ball around the theme of “asphyxiation.” And the woman walking down the aisle is heavily veiled, a mosquito net draped around her shoulders like a spider’s web, unrecognizable. 

In the beginning they were grateful for the lockdown: so much time to spend together at last! They ate nothing but spicy ramen from Costco and cold pickles after sex. She wanted him in ways that Emma never had. They moved together like water. Her small, lithe body seemed to be everywhere at once. She straddled his hips and said things like “I could do this forever,” which he believed, because no one had ever wanted him as much as she did, not even the woman he was supposed to marry. They spent hours reading books, swapping books, discussing their ideas, tangled up in one another like branches in the wind. It seemed like at last, he had found what he’d been looking for from the beginning. Their bouts of jealousy were funny, the events of the past few months were but a bitter dream. There was nothing left of the people they had been before; the pieces of them had been cast to the passing months: March, April, May and then June. 

And then, there was the issue of the bananas. Cleo was angry because there weren’t any bananas, and she needed bananas to eat at night. Little by little, he was learning about her that she was regimented, bound to her routines out of a crippling fear of relapse into chaos and disorder. She had told him about what it had been like before, and he didn’t blame her for not wanting to go back there. But the more he built his life around hers, the more resentful he became. And then, the thing with the bananas. She had slammed the pantry door and said something along the lines of “this is why I suggested that we go to the grocery store.” Was it his fault that he’d reacted the way that he had? One thing about women that he just couldn’t understand was the passive aggression, the suggestive comments that later lent themselves to the total circumvention of blame- she could pretend that she hadn’t meant anything by it, even though he knew that she had. There was little ambiguity in the sullen sound of her boots hitting the ground, the way she narrowed her eyes into little slits of silver, daring him to speak. Her anger took up so much space that it always pushed him out the door. 

And it wasn’t just about bananas; it was about everything else that had led up to what was supposed to have been the perfect moment, a seamless enmeshment to end all other prospects of intimacy, the end-all-be-all of relationships. Could she trust him, after everything that he had done? He thought of Emma then, the way that she had clasped her hands together when he told her the truth, how she had lowered her gaze, brown eyes glowing like hot coals, shaking and crying- for what? Was it surprise? Was it shame? Could she really not have known what was going on? But that was the problem with Emma; she plowed ahead, obstinately crashing through anything in her way without even stopping to take notice. He’d come home from Oak Hill and she had rearranged all of the furniture in the house, as though that was enough to make it a new place, a place where none of this had ever happened. 

“How could you do this to me,” is what she said, looking at him in the bathroom mirror as he tried to take a piss. The medication had reduced his penis to a shriveled, useless inconvenience, hanging between his legs like a rotting fruit. That’s what he was thinking about when she said that. 

Even after it was all over, and she’d told his college roommate that she was at peace, that she had come to terms with everything, she could only say to him that she accepted his apology, blind to her own transgressions, barrelling in a different direction now, like a tumbleweed. She had called him a few weeks earlier- she was writing something (Emma? A writer? Cleo had laughed in her clear, cruel way, throwing her head back like it was the funniest thing in the world). She was going to submit it to the New York Times’ “Modern Love” column, and maybe to a few magazines. She hadn’t used his name, and seemed to expect some expression of thanks when she told him so.

He wasn’t surprised to find that the piece was written like a summary, a list of events, like something a kid might write for school. Emma, her reactions, her feelings, her words, didn’t appear in it at all. It was all about him, really. In it he was charming and they carried on conversations about topics in which she had never been interested: nineties hip-hop and quantum mechanics, their feelings for each other. In it they were happy, then he had lied, then he had gone into treatment and then left her behind to plan a wedding. In it there was almost a wedding, until the date was only two weeks away, and he left the house for the last time, without any explanation, without even a fight. But there was no mention of Cleo, no mention of Emma, just Jace: playful and charismatic, wild and untamed as an animal- no one, according to Emma, would ever be enough for him. 

It seemed like the world fell apart at just the right time. He drove around for two days, slept in his car, kept pepper spray and crackers in the glove box, and talked to Cleo on the phone. Across the country, cities were extinguished by the virus, one by one, like the power going out in a giant warehouse, room by room. One could almost hear the shutter of storefront windows, the locking of doors, the river winds picking up dust, blowing trash through the empty streets. They called it a plague; “we deserve this,” read the plywood nailed across one restaurant’s front door. “Maybe you did,” someone had written underneath with a marker. No one agreed on what it meant, or what they were supposed to do next. In the meantime, there were riots across America. “Just as things were getting better,” Jace thought wryly. Another Black man killed in broad daylight, beneath the glare of a police badge, under the gaze of passers-by. Buildings were burning up in giant blossoms of gas and flame, splintered glass littered the streets like flakes of icy snow. And the heat had brought new challenges; no one could catch a clean breath, the neighborhood cats fought and raped one another, the murder rate rose with the temperature. And all the while Jace was slowly dismantling his life, piece by piece, purging it of everything he’d thought he’d wanted but didn’t deserve, believing that it was he that was the problem, that he was still sick, still healing, still full of rage and hungry, hollow emptiness, something that would never be satisfied so he might as well settle. And Cleo on the other end of the phone, telling him “No Jace, you deserve better Jace, you deserve something real Jace.” 

That was the problem with the program; it had taught him that he was always the problem, and that the solution lay in committing himself to others. So that’s what he had done: thrown himself headfirst into what they called “service” but was really just being agreeable, acquiescing to every demand, every request, with the implicit understanding that he had an insurmountable mountain of mistakes to atone for, and this was the place to start. And of course, it kept him busy, but it didn’t make his bad decisions go away. Cleo said that a healthy degree of selfishness was important, that only he could reverse the damage he had done. She called it a “trauma bond,” she had read books about it- that was her solution, to read books about the problems that arose in her life- and she had told him that the only way to move on was to start over again. 

And so he’d done it. Two weeks before the wedding and one hundred thousand dollars of flowers and fabrics later he had stood in the doorway of the house and looked her up and down and for a moment, he hesitated. She was crying, screaming, but he couldn’t hear her. The windows were open, the door was open, everything he owned strewn on the lawn outside, heavy currents of heat pouring in from the windows, rising up into the corners of the house and falling down again in thick ribbons like rain. He was listening to the glaring white noise of the heat, trapping everything in its oppressive stillness. He was listening to the cats moaning eerily outside, the sharp, grating sound of their nails dragging against the hot cement. He listened to anything but the sound of her voice rising up louder and louder, drowned out by the sounds outside, by the pressure building up inside his head, against his ears. And then, he turned around and walked away- easy as that. The last thing she said, the last thing he heard, couched between the screaming of the cicadas and the rush of blood behind his eyes, was “I promise I’ll be different.” 

But of course, no one ever did change all that much. This is what he was thinking as he approached his corner for the third time, kicking at the shriveled, sun-baked carcasses of lizards on the sidewalk, that blew away like bits of paper in the wind. The social workers were gone, though he could hear the fat one inside saying something about the summertime, and how it made people crazy. From the courtyard, a shimmering, shuddering silence. The grass, brown and gleaming like fur, seemed to call to him. Heat seeped up from the earth and into the slowly cooling air. He collapsed in slow motion onto the ground, digging the backs of his bones into the supple dirt, splaying out his limbs like roadkill. Colors bled down from the sky and pooled down at the edge of the horizon. The cats were quiet. The neighbors were quiet. Cleo was quiet as she crept out from the house on bare feet and lay down beside him. At seven o’clock the neighbors leaned out of their windows and banged their pots and pans, threw confetti from their windows and held out posters that said things like “thank you healthcare heroes,” and still they lay there in silence as the world began to darken and the creatures came alive again. And they lay there until the streetlamps blinked and flickered, bleary in the thick, moist air, and the fog began to unfurl along the ground like a carpet, and wrapped them in the cool sweetness of water. And they listened for the sounds of the earth, the sleeping and the waking, the moaning and the mewling, the screeching of the cicadas crawling up from their burrows, shaking the dust from their wings. And they listened to one another, though neither said anything at all, while the slow burn of summer heat dissipated around them.