Know Your Beholder: A Novel Read online

  “You’re exclusively mobile? I only ask because I’m looking at your lease and I’m noticing that you didn’t fill in a cell phone number.”

  “Because I got rid of it.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So but what if I have to get in touch?”

  “I’ll make sure you can.”

  We looked at each other for a full five seconds. I think I actually counted them out in my head.

  “Oh, and no pets,” I added for some reason. “Meaning mammals. I’m cool with fish, or something that can be kept in a terrarium, but no mammals. Guinea pigs, dogs, ferrets, cats, gerbils, hamsters, that kind of thing.”

  A bustlike response. Complete stillness. An expression I would describe as Beethovenish.

  I left with my copy of the lease, feeling sort of gently freaked out. When I got back to the attic, I filed his lease in a cardboard legal box under my desk and took a shower for the first time in two weeks.

  Before I got under the water, I finally looked in the mirror, focusing exclusively on my beard, which had begun to look like it was made of granite. I tried to avoid my eyes. Somehow I knew they would be ringed with shameful, baggy, bourbon-colored circles. Of course I failed. When you start to become your own science experiment, you can’t help looking. They weren’t as bad as I thought. I looked mostly sad. Sad in the same way that weather can be sad. I was the human equivalent of a cold, rainy day. I was a brown puddle in the middle of a dead-end street, with maybe a Popsicle stick or two floating in my dank, dog-slobbered water. If Sheila Anne were to see me I would be embarrassed. The thought sent such an intense pang of shame through my stomach and kidneys that I had to sit on the toilet for a moment.

  I realized that I hadn’t left the house since around Christmas. This was my second one without Sheila Anne. I thought it would be easier than our first one apart, but it was harder. On Christmas Eve I wound up drinking a bottle of Maker’s Mark and crying myself to sleep and staying in bed the entire next day and maybe even the day after that. It was a bad forty-eight hours. I’m pretty sure that was the beginning of not being able to leave my house. You figure there’d be some horrible inciting incident, but there wasn’t.

  The hot shower felt like needles on my skin. To rid the oil slick that had congealed on my head I had to shampoo my hair three times. I really dug into my scalp and sideburns, which actually burned a little, giving newfound literalism to the word. I shampooed my beard too, an act that gave me so much relief I whimpered.

  So I have a bad tooth.

  My lower first molar on the right side zings when I drink anything cold or inhale the winter air. Almost a year ago, I was supposed to have a root canal, but I kept putting it off, and I now get repeated calls from Dr. Hubie, the Falbo family dentist. Yes, the calls are from Dr. Hubie himself, not his secretary, the ageless, honey-voiced Julie Pepper. I don’t have the heart to tell him that I’m having serious problems leaving the house, but I need to get this tooth fixed before it rots through my jaw.

  Post microwave lunch of Dinty Moore beef stew, I was flossing in front of my bathroom mirror, trying to wrest material from my bad molar, when I heard something being slid underneath my door. No envelope, just a blank piece of heavy-bond sketch paper, one fold, elegantly creased.

  It read:

  Mr. Falbo,

  My toilet’s running again. Would you mind taking a look?

  Sincerely,

  Harriet Gumm, Unit 3

  Harriet Gumm often almost smiles when she speaks to you, as if she’s constantly harboring a secret. It makes her a little sexy in a mischievous sort of way.

  Her apartment is set up as a portrait studio. There is a simple mahogany stool in the center of the living room, surrounded by a handful of wooden easels, each easel loaded with large, variously grained sketch pads. There is no furniture here, nothing cozy or domestic, nothing feminine, a simple iPhone dock resting on the floor, no magazines or books—only the stool and the easels and the iPhone dock and an apple box filled with countless stubs of charcoal and pieces of colored chalk. Under the centered stool, a large piece of muslin, gathered around the legs. I couldn’t imagine this girl owning clothes or shoes or makeup, but she obviously did. She practically wears costumes! Her bathroom contained only a cake of generic, peppermint-smelling soap, a bottle of No More Tears shampoo, and a simple white towel hanging from the chrome rack that I installed on the inside of the door. It could be the bathroom of a construction worker.

  Affixed to the living room walls with blue masking tape were drawings of all the black men she’d been studying, mostly in charcoals. I recognized the African-Americans who’d been coming to the house over the course of the past several months: Cozelle; Markeif; Jershawn; and her present subject, Big Keith.

  Each man had a seven-part narrative progression.

  Panel One:

  Nude slave being purchased shipside by a plantation owner, ankles and neck ringed in medieval-looking iron shackles.

  Panel Two:

  Semi-clad, barefoot slave engaged in some form of plantation work involving cotton picking, soil tilling, or field clearing.

  Panel Three:

  Freed slave fighting in Civil War setting, dressed in makeshift Union Army soldier’s garb, aiming a musket at unseen Confederate enemies.

  Panel Four:

  Educated freed slave sitting in a high-gloss university lecture hall, bespectacled, in collared shirt and tie, slacks, and fine leather shoes.

  Panel Five:

  BCS college football player striking a Heisman pose in the end zone, white Amazonian cheerleaders going apeshit with oversized pom-poms.

  Panel Six:

  Wealthy professional football player manning the wheel of the infamous O. J. Simpson white Ford Bronco, a trio of bikini-clad, blond Caucasian women fawning over him from the backseat, one of them fondling him under his uniform pants.

  Panel Seven:

  Modern-day, twenty-first-century African-American, nude again, confident in expression, staring straight at the viewer, holding a smartphone, a Bluetooth device in his ear, penis dangling midthigh, a noose around his neck, an ancient Southern oak tree in the background, conflating the literal and ultrasymbolic “lynching” theme, bringing the whole thing full circle, back to the Inescapable South.

  Each subject has a slight variation to his story. For instance, the thin, sinewy Cozelle, instead of scoring a touchdown, is playing NCAA basketball, knees bent at the free throw line, mid-rhythm-dribble, wearing a North Carolina Tar Heels uniform and classic Air Jordan high-tops.

  In his slave work setting, the dark-skinned, abdominally endowed, large-eyed Markeif is picking cotton, bare-backed, with grotesquely raised flogging scars, whereas the light-skinned, GQ-handsome Jershawn is dressed as a white-gloved butler, fully wigged and facially powdered, serving silver platters of food to the plantation owner and his family in their decadent dining room, ghostly portraits of patrician, Hircine-faced forebears looming on the walls above.

  The only panel that is exactly the same throughout is the rendering of the white Ford Bronco; the one thing changing being the actual subject, but each receiving a handjob.

  “What are you calling these?” I asked.

  “The Seven Stations of O. J. Simpson’s America.”

  “Wow,” I said. “Intense title.”

  “It’s my senior thesis project.”

  “You’ve really nailed Keith’s face.” She had obviously nailed his enormous penis, too; vermiform like his arms.

  “Thank you,” Harriet said shyly, wearing the faintest hint of a smile.

  “They all pose nude for you?”

  “That’s what they agree to.”

  “Do they sign a contract?”

  “We simply have a conversation over coffee. If it feels right, we agree to meet for one sixty-minute session, for which I pay them twenty bucks. If that goes well, we continue the process, hopefully eventually arriving at the white Ford Bronco.”

 
; I asked her if she ever felt unsafe.

  “No,” she replied.

  I asked if her subjects ever get excited.

  “You mean erect?” she said.

  “Yeah, that.”

  “One of them had that happen the first few sittings, but the problem resolved itself.”

  I tried to imagine what this could possibly mean. I envisioned Harriet handing Markeif a tube of Astroglide and a paper towel and leaving the room.

  She asked me if I’ve ever posed nude.

  I told her that I hadn’t, that I couldn’t even imagine it.

  “It’s surprisingly liberating,” she said.

  “You’ve done it?”

  “In my life drawing class we all do. Even Professor Chubb models.”

  “Wow,” I said, taking in the detail work. “Jershawn…”

  “What about him?”

  I told her it was hard not to notice his “endowment.”

  To which she replied: “The African-American male is perhaps the most unfairly sexualized archetype in modern culture.”

  I told her that according to her drawings, it didn’t seem to be unfair at all. “The word ample comes to mind,” I said. “The word fortunate. The word blessed.”

  “Those are not exaggerations. The renderings are physiologically accurate.”

  Cozelle had the most normal penis, meaning normal-looking by comparison. And even his was impressive.

  “What’s unfair about a large penis?” I said.

  “I would argue,” Harriet said, “that the owners of these penises are not seen as full human beings. The African-American male is blatantly heralded for his athleticism and genital endowment. It’s as unfair as Marilyn Monroe being worshipped for her body.”

  I told her that I worshipped her face too.

  Harriet shot me a circumspect look.

  “And her underrated singing voice,” I added.

  She told me I should pose for her. “In all seriousness,” she added.

  “Why?” I asked, totally thrown.

  “Why not?” she replied.

  I took a half-step back, still holding the cardboard and plastic packaging for the toilet’s new refill flap. “How old are you?” I said.

  “I’ll be twenty-one in March.”

  I asked her if what she was doing was even legal.

  “Of course it’s legal. My subjects come to me by their own volition. They’re grown men. They’re not mentally challenged in any way. It’s not like some form of reverse statutory rape.”

  “Do you even like me?” I said.

  “Sure,” she said. “Why?”

  I told her that I wouldn’t want her to render me if she didn’t at least like me a little. “You might be predisposed to highlight all my flaws.”

  “I like you,” she replied. “You dress like you live in an institution, and I think you have a secret life.”

  “You think I have a secret life?”

  She sort of squinted and pursed her lips.

  Arranged on the cutout over her kitchenette was a set of three charcoal drawings unlike the others. The subject was a small blond girl wearing fuzzy, footy pajamas, wandering through a dark forest. In the drawing her figure is illuminated by a long blade of light too narrow and focused to be from the moon. Its source is unseen, but the feeling its omniscient perspective evokes is one of surveillance, be it government-, Hollywood-, or UFO-motivated. The only colorized elements are the long beam of light cutting through the forest, the lit-up trunks of trees featuring oily snakes, an owl, some nocturnal rodents of prey, and the little girl’s blond hair and Pooh Bear pajamas. The subject appears to be either oblivious or gently bemused that she is being followed through the tall, dark, and hairy forest.

  “Who is that?” I said, completely absorbed by the three-paneled narrative.

  “A girl.”

  “Anyone in particular?”

  “No. Why?”

  “It’s just that everything else on your walls is based on actual people.”

  “Maybe she’s me,” Harriet offered mischievously.

  “But you don’t have blond hair.”

  She said she dyed it.

  I asked her if she was a natural blond.

  “I feel like you’re asking me if the curtains match the drapes. Do you like it?”

  “Your hair?”

  “The triptych.”

  “Yes,” I heard myself say.

  She asked me what it was precisely that I liked about it.

  “The little girl,” I said.

  “What about her?”

  I told Harriet that it really felt like she was somewhere. “Lost but definitely somewhere,” I added.

  “Else?” she said.

  “Yes,” I said, “somewhere else.”

  “Well, she’s definitely somewhere.”

  I’m not sure we were talking about the same thing. Of course I was thinking of Bethany Bunch, but who knows where Harriet Gumm was coming from.

  “She’s in a never-ending forest with slithering nocturnal creatures,” she said.

  I asked her why the forest was never-ending.

  “Because that’s what I wanted it to be,” she replied.

  “And the light?”

  “What about the light?”

  “What’s its source?”

  “Who knows?” Harriet said. “Maybe you are.”

  That’s where she lost me. Harriet Gumm liked being provocative for the sake of being provocative.

  “You should seriously pose for me,” she said.

  Again I asked her why.

  “Because I think you’d make a good subject. I’d pay you twenty bucks a sitting.”

  “Nude?”

  “Yes.”

  I looked at the surface of the stool and imagined all the large black men who’d sat upon it, their anuses and perinea, their bulbous testicles dangling. Did she disinfect the top of the stool after each sitting? Was there like some special disposable doily that was utilized?

  “Okay,” I heard myself say.

  We were quiet for a moment. Harriet wouldn’t take her eyes off me. It was like she could see me naked. My atrophying muscle tissue and fish-belly skin. My average, flaccid, circumcised penis. The strange mole in my belly button that Kent used to say was Nestlé Toll House’s lost chocolate chip.

  Her buzzer sounded. She crossed to the front door, let in whoever it was.

  “A subject?” I said.

  “Keith. Final session.”

  “Time for the noose?”

  She didn’t answer.

  Before I let myself out, I said, “Should I shave?”

  “No,” she said. “Keep the beard.”

  And then I glanced at the triptych again and asked if she’d made a snowman in the past few days.

  To which she answered: “I’ve never made a snowman in my life.”

  I didn’t want to run into Keith, so I exited toward the second-floor aft staircase. From the stairwell window overlooking the backyard, I spied Mary Bunch on her way to the alleyway Dumpsters with a bloated black Hefty bag. With great effort, she lugged it through two feet of snow. I had an impulse to scream out to her. From behind the double-paned window she likely wouldn’t have heard me, but I still had to cover my mouth to stop myself.

  What the hell was in that Hefty bag? I couldn’t contend with the dark possibilities, so I went down to the basement and started pacing the laundry room. There was a load tumbling in the dryer. Was it a load of the Bunches’? Were they washing bloodstains out of their clothes? I couldn’t quite get myself to open the dryer door and check.

  After I heard Keith’s heavy feet pad across the second-floor hallway and disappear into Harriet Gumm’s apartment, I headed to the front porch to check the mail. Bradley was coming up the steps, wearing the black trench and skullcap, carrying a bag from Ace Hardware.

  “Bradley,” I said. “What’s up?”

  “Hey,” he said, the y barely resonating.

  His beard had really
cool cowlicks in it. Sort of silvery-blond whirlpools that seemed to have their own little fairy-tale universe. I imagined Lilliputians emerging, stealing crumbs, and diving back down into the depths. He could probably store things in his beard. Like almonds or match heads or even a mailbox key. He was almost fifteen years younger than me and his beard was teaching my beard a serious lesson.

  For someone so low-pulse he seemed a bit agitated. It could have been the simple fact that he’d been walking and was out of breath. If he’d hoofed it all the way to the Ace Hardware and back, it meant that he’d covered some four miles.

  “Everything okay?” I asked.

  He didn’t respond, so I said, “Long walk?”

  “Longish,” he replied, hardly hitting the g.

  He wore old mustard-yellow Chuck Taylors, which were soaked from the snow, and no socks. All of the buttons but one were missing from his black double-breasted trench. He kept it closed with a brown extension cord. Underneath the trench he wore a white thermal not dissimilar to the one I was wearing.

  I pointed to his footwear and told him that he was going to get trench foot walking around in all the snow.

  He didn’t respond.

  He was starting to look homeless, a little malnourished. I could sense that we were about to start another awful, thick silence, one that contained the sad realization that I was the loser whom his sister had left and that I was even more of a loser because I tried to access her vicariously through her younger brother who didn’t even like me. For a second it felt as if our beards were communicating animalistically, independent of their owners, like two dogs sniffing each other’s asses on the street. Bradley’s beard smelled like weed and nacho cheese Doritos and some other faint but ripe moschatel odor I can only describe as deeply wrong.

  “What’s in the bag?” I asked, worried about power tools, drywall anchors, carpentry nails, etc.

  “Supplies,” he answered obliquely.