Museum Person

some short fiction. i'm dabbling.

“I don’t think lip filler counts as plastic surgery, though,” said Beatrice, who was smoking a joint on the toilet and half-heartedly painting her toenails a sterile Barbie pink. “Because, like, it’s not really surgery. It’s not surgery when you get an allergy shot.” 

“Lip filler isn’t an allergy shot, Bex.” Alana had recently lost ten pounds and wanted to make sure everyone knew it, so she insisted on Beatrice’s company while she took a long bath. It wasn’t like they didn’t often see each other naked. Just last week they had fucked on the couch in Alana’s living room, but Beatrice was on molly then and besides, seeing someone in the bath is a very different context to having sex with them. It’s more objective. Alana raised a freshly shaved leg from the lukewarm water, admiring her handiwork. “And I’m not saying I wouldn’t get lip filler. I just think you should be ready to contend with the psychosexual implications of changing your fucking face.” Alana gesticulated haphazardly with the razor as she said this, flinging bubbles across the bathroom with each flick of her wrist, which made Beatrice laugh. 

“Psychosexual implications. You’re so annoying.” Alana smirked disingenuously, but Beatrice didn’t notice. Instead, she was captivated by a pimple just above her cupid’s bow. “Can you still feed Max tonight?” Beatrice slurred her words as she yanked her lip skin to and fro, coaxing out the whitehead. Alana nodded. She hated that cat. Whenever she came over he would claw at her ankles and meow outside the bathroom door when she took a shit, and besides, Max was a stupid fucking name for a cat. But Beatrice had been invited to some gallery opening in the Arts District and Alana hadn’t, so she didn’t have an excuse to get out of it. 

Alana rose from the bath and stepped, dripping, onto the tile floor. “Pass me a towel?” she asked, and Beatrice obliged.

“God, I so don’t want to go tonight. Museum people, you know?” said Beatrice, waltzing out of the room, which embittered Alana. What was the use in being beautiful if no one was going to linger in her nude presence? She stared at herself in the mirror. She did not like to think of herself as an exhibitionist, though, she supposed, she sort of was. She had been the first girl in high school to stop shaving her armpits; she wasn’t a lesbian, as everyone had thought. She just relished the boys recoiling in disgust when she raised her hand in the summer months, tank top putting her pits fully on display. Did it make her a lesbian that she liked being looked at? 

“Get your ass out here!” Beatrice was screaming from the bedroom. Alana flew from her post, abandoning the tweezers on the counter. Looking up from her cardboard bowl, Beatrice: “Have you noticed Sweetgreen is putting less in their salads lately? Like, they’re less full, right?” Alana cackled, breathless, blood un-curdling. 

It wasn’t that Beatrice was stupid. “We met at Brown,” Beatrice made a habit of interrupting before Alana could offer a less branded “in college.” It was true; since one fateful seating choice in a lecture on Jungian dreamwork sophomore year they had been inseparable. She knew Beatrice wasn’t stupid; she’d proofread her essays on Kant and So Much Longing in So Little Space (even though Alana thought Knausgard was just the poor man’s Anthony Burgess), and she spoke much better French. No, Beatrice wasn’t stupid; she just didn’t apply herself. This was something Alana liked to tease her about, knowing that it would flush those full cheeks of hers, furrow that beautiful brow, tease out a musical laugh. Alana often fantasized about throwing it in her face during a screaming match, a catfight they never had. Their friendship was serene and that’s what Beatrice liked about it. 

“I should probably get going soon,” Beatrice said, draping a dress over her naked breasts in the mirror. Alana watched silently as Beatrice burrowed her toes into the Moroccan rug on the bedroom floor, smearing still-wet nail polish with each step. She caught Alana’s eyes in the mirror behind her and pouted her lips. When she did this, which was often, there appeared a few shallow lines in her forehead for Alana, cartographer, to study, to track their spread. “Are you sure you don’t want to come?” 

Alana gave a bereft half-smile. “I wasn’t invited, Bex.”

There was then an eye roll and a toss of long blonde hair.  “Fine. Be that way. I’ll see you later, yeah?” They traded cherry chapstick cheek kisses, Beatrice took the dress, and then Alana was alone. 

A few hours and a bottle of wine later, Alana figured she couldn’t avoid her responsibilities any longer. She stumbled through the darkness and across the hall of their building to Beatrice’s apartment, the door to which was always left unlocked. Upon crossing the threshold, Alana felt her body split into a thousand little parts like a flock of murmurating birds. She floated familiar from each point of intrigue: the heavy crystal ashtray from Beatrice’s mother, a pair of earrings abandoned just before walking out the door, the bottle of Lillet Blanc they’d stolen together from the shi-shi shop where some boy they’d both fucked worked. Her record collection was gathering dust; the Diet Coke can on the mantle was long flat. Alana thumbed a poetry collection she’d tried to pick a fight over. (“I’m just not sure how much freer we can get with the free verse. Like, does nobody want to learn what a fucking villanelle is? Are they not teaching meters at Columbia anymore?” which earned nothing more than a light laugh, a hand on her shoulder.)

She entered the bedroom, suddenly singular again. On the lovely white bedspread was a black shroud. Alana regarded Max with a nod before he fled the room, probably to declaw on the Roche Bobois sofa in the living room. She winced at the museum opening invitation lying open on the bureau. Its heavy paper, rich blue typography; it taunted her, snagged its claws in her skin. Alana imagined the conversations Beatrice must be having right now. Some starlet would be waxing poetic about her third marriage (“Well, you know what they say! Big wedding last year, small wedding this year.”) while her new husband in ill-fitting Thom Browne lamented the state of the modern movie score (“And God forbid a character have a theme these days… You used to go home whistling the Batman theme. Chris Nolan’s a friend, of course, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t have notes.”) If Alana had gone with her she would spend the cab ride home dishing the dirt on her least favorite characters of the evening’s theater, making Beatrice roar with laughter while the pair fed each other whatever burrata small plates they had smuggled out of the gallery in their pockets. 

Instead she flung herself on the bed with a sigh. Her body ached in ways she didn’t even know possible; she’d only been at the magazine a few weeks but Lord, the sitting. Every day around lunchtime she’d indulge in about an hour of imagining herself at age 45, decrepit and disheveled from years of laborious grind, unspooling into a little pile of flesh-ribbons there at her desk. Then she’d go across the street and buy a $20 smoothie, praying the collagen would rescue her from predetermination. Sometimes she’d rendezvous with Beatrice, who would always be on her way back from hot yoga or a meeting with the agency or her publicist or some other nonsense endeavor Beatrice would invariably refer to as “work”, which boiled Alana’s blood but she never said anything. She and Bex were practically related, she thought. Like sisters. She knows when I’m upset. 

The window was open, and it had started to rain a bit. A photograph of the pair of them smiled at Alana from the bedside table. She was making snow-angels in the white sheets, her senses heightened by that regrettable last glass of wine. Her thighs felt so warm and the bed smelled like Santal 33. She didn’t even notice her hands in her pants until she could barely suppress her noises of pleasure. Her breath was heavy, performing in time to the rhythm of the rain outside. 

Eyelids fluttering, she fumbled through Beatrice’s bedside table drawer for the vibrator she knew would be in it. When it wasn’t, the image of the room around her snapped back into sharpness, drained of the pastel glow of a steadily approaching orgasm. She wasn’t even sure she could finish now, she had lost the flow of the thing, but dutifully rifled through the closet, just in case. There were so many lovely things to fall into there. Alana buried her face in a blue silk slip and inhaled deeply, so captivated she missed entirely the creak of an opening door. 

“She was going fucking on and on about how derivative his portraiture was… how many new ways are there to paint a hot fucking girl? Who gives a shit?” Beatrice was drunk, stumbling through the door and wreaking havoc on the delicate ecosystem of trinkets. Alana wondered who Bex would have called to debrief other than her, but swallowed her irritation and put on her very best welcome-home face. 

A voice: “Yeah. Yeah, right.” Not Beatrice, and not on the phone. Alana stopped cold. A man—handsome, by the sound of his voice anyway. A few moments of silence, and then sloppy wet kissing sounds. “God, you’re so fucking hot.” Alana rolled her eyes at his lazy attempt at dirty talk, at the shoes he hadn’t removed on the hardwood, the sliver of blonde hair she caught through the crack in the door, but most of all at how all of it seemed to be working on Beatrice. 

They tumbled onto the couch and knocked a glass of water onto September’s Vogue (Christ, they were really going at it) and Alana recognized this as her window. She would grab her things, issue an insincere apology and genuine goodbye, both of which would go unremarked upon, and leave to press her ear up to their shared wall all night to hear if he made her cum or not. This was her window, but she didn’t take it. Instead, she returned to her post in the closet, and just in the nick of time: the happy couple would’ve broken her shin with the door if she’d waited there just a second more. 

He was hot, all things considered, but with terrible tattoos, which was much more important because at least you get to pick those. Unless you go under the knife, which was, she supposed, not out of the realm of possibility for this poor man’s Paul Walker, you don’t get to select your favorite Roman nose out of a lineup. What would compel a man to sit still while some chick from Portland inked a pine tree onto his forearm was beyond her. 

She watched hungrily while he undressed, her laundry list of his flaws growing steadily. Any man with washboard abs either comes from generational wealth or doesn’t read or both. Boxer briefs are an epidemic. Okay, his cock is pretty big, but who cares? Beatrice was on her knees by then. Alana found blowjobs degrading but Bex did look pretty from this angle, her head tipped back and blonde hair kissing the top of her thong. Can the small of someone’s back be particularly lovely? Were there standards for that kind of thing? Alana wasn’t sure, but her pants were still off so she took advantage of the moment. 

From the other room, a phone rang. Drunk enough to be distractible, Beatrice ran off to answer it, leaving her man a little bereft. He got over it quickly, though, grabbing his own phone from his pants pocket. Alana thought that a man who can’t sit in the quiet of his own company for two minutes without electronic stimulation was worse than being a heroin addict. Then, much to her delight, it got worse: he was taking pictures of himself, propped up like a mannequin with a hard-on in the full-length mirror on the bedroom wall. Every third shot or so, he yanked at himself for a few seconds to ensure full size. 

His preening made her hate him even more, so naturally she began admiring his neck, the veins throbbing just beneath the surface. It would be so easy to grab a fistful of that blonde hair and run a knife across his throat. He could even watch in the mirror as the blood saturated first the duvet, then the white rug, and eventually absorbed into the floorboards. God willing, he’d lose that coital expression. She imagined that the sound of it would not be so different from the ones he was making now—slightly strained, a little breathless. Alana was so wet now. 

When Beatrice floated back into the room, he flung his phone to the floor and took her in his arms. He was on top while they fucked, which made it convenient for Alana to imagine coming up from behind with one of the silk scarves hanging from the closet door and wrapping it around his eyes. There was no need for him to see what would come next. It would be a private show, just for herself and Beatrice. His stomach looked so hard, pulsating as he thrust. What a delight it would be to cut it open, to see what was inside. 

The first time Alana had ever masturbated was in 2007. Her babysitter was asleep on the couch while the ten year old entertained herself with a little channel surfing when a ten year anniversary screening of Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers flashed upon the screen. It was the shower scene, and Denise Richards’ bare breasts are enough to make a girl grab a throw pillow to sit on, even before she knew why it felt so curious and warm. They were talking about the war, of course. Alana knew about war. She knew about 9/11 (bad) and President Bush (good). She knew about Iraq and Afghanistan (very bad) and guns, of course (good, dangerous, titillating). Alana began to squirm so violently her babysitter was startled awake. So horrified by what had been allowed to happen on her watch, she sent Alana to bed. She never told the child’s parents, but she never came back, either. Alana had this effect on babysitters. 

When her college boyfriend choked her during sex without asking, Alana broke up with him the next day. They had only been together a few months, so it was simple to cite a loaded academic schedule and frank incompatibility, but they wordlessly acknowledged what had really gone wrong and went their separate ways. They never spoke again—she didn’t even see him at parties, which was peculiar. When they were together, they had all the same friends, and Alana didn’t think of herself as particularly likable, so she was hard-pressed to imagine she had won them in the split. He simply evaporated from her world. At least, until two years later when she ran into Andrew, his old roommate, after they were tapped for the same society. 

“Yeah, it’s good to see you too. You know, I always meant to apologize for not shutting Sam down when he was doing all that stuff after you guys broke up. I mean obviously it wasn’t my fault but maybe I could have said something? I don’t know, we were never really that tight…” Andrew had always had a tendency of trailing off mid-sentence when a beautiful woman in a tight dress walked by. 

“What do you mean? What stuff?” 

Andrew blinked hard. “Oh. I thought you knew. He never deleted those photos of you. It was never that big of a group of guys, but you know how he would get after a couple beers. Everybody thought you were really hot,” (he said this like it was supposed to be reassuring) “but like, kinda cold? And they didn’t know how to flirt with you, you know? I guess we just wanted a window into Alana-world. I mean, they did. They wanted a window.”

Strangely, Alana didn’t really care. The photos had always been taken just after sex, while Alana dressed or smoked or lay there sleepily. She didn’t feel particularly sexy. That part was over; a switch had been flipped in her and now she was just her again. She found sex to be incredibly embarrassing, what with the performative sounds and the pouty lips. After, she was just a pretty girl hoping she didn’t get a UTI. Those were just photographs of her being beautiful. 

Anyway, she thought about killing Sam then because it seemed like the thing to do. She and Beatrice concocted an elaborate scheme to put microdoses of poison in the Soylent he drank for literally every meal so he would slowly and painfully crumble into ash. Instead they put his email on as many Scientology mailing lists as they could find and then made out in the library until they got kicked out.

“That was fun.” The couple lay breathless on the bed after an unremarkable finale (he finished on her face and she didn’t at all). She had begged him to hit her and he obliged, leaving vibrant pink ghost-hands across her skin. Pools of sweat mixed with mascara that had formed on Beatrice’s temples slid down her cheeks as she swerved to avoid his feeble attempt at spooning. 

“Uh huh. Yeah.” She rose from the bed and tousled her hair in the mirror. Beatrice’s signature look always had an element of “I just had sex” to it, but Alana liked it best like this, with her flushed skin and bangs sticking to her forehead. “Uh, I’m gonna go take a shower.” 

Her man jumped to his feet. “I’ll join you,” he replied, breathless, reeking of desperation. 

Beatrice shrugged. “No, that’s alright.” She extended her hand for him to shake. A wall of formality had descended between them. The air had changed; the rain had stopped. “It was nice to meet you.” He looked astonished, refusing her hand and dressing quickly. He really was a very beautiful man. His hands were so clean, Alana noticed, further confirming her suspicion his musculature could never have come from actual manual labor. Not with those fingernails. Not with that haircut, that Valley lilt. 

Rage bubbled beneath his surface; what he felt she was denying him, Alana wasn’t sure, but she was glad to see him go. He swiped his wallet from the table. “Cunt.” The door slammed as he left.

It all rolled right off Beatrice’s sculpted shoulders. It meant nothing to her; she was smiling, still staring herself down in the mirror. She placed her hands delicately on her breasts, lingering in the sweat. It was several minutes of stillness, silent admiration, before she started to cry. Softly at first, then her chest began to heave as she gasped for sips of air. Her knees buckled and gave way to the floor. She clawed herself across the room to the foot of the bed where she buried her face in the comforter. It looked almost like she was praying, with her slender hands clasped and her head tucked. It looked almost like she had caught a firefly in her hands and was holding it there to her chest, like if she let go it would fly away and take its glow with it, leaving her with nothing, leaving her alone at last.