Indestructible Object Read online

  I thought that if we could just get away from here it would all be different and I could be the person you want me to be.

  I guess I was wrong.

  I put my phone facedown like that will make Vincent’s texts go away. I can practically see the disappointment and frustration on his face as he typed them. Disappointment and frustration with me, with the world, with the whole stupid situation that could have been avoided if I’d had enough self-control to avoid kissing one feckless coffee-shop rando. I wonder what kind of person he thinks I want him to be—someone who would do more than just kiss me? I don’t understand why that part would be different if we lived in Washington, DC, instead of Memphis.

  Max sets a bag of chips and two cans of soda on the counter in front of us and takes a seat next to me.

  “I listened to the last episode of Artists in Love during the set,” he says, cracking open his can. “Were you and Vincent always like that?”

  “Like what?”

  “So serious about everything.”

  “We took it seriously. We took each other seriously.”

  “I liked the metronome.”

  “The one that watched Man Ray while he worked, or the one he wanted to smash with a hammer?”

  “Object of Destruction. So fucking metal.”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “I’m sorry about what happened with you two.”

  “Thanks.”

  We eat and drink in silence for a minute, before Max adds, “I’m sorry about your parents, too.”

  I feel so grateful to have him here, someone who already knows what happened, understands the people involved.

  “It’s kind of my fault,” I say. “Not that I’m wishing myself out of existence, but if you think about it, there’s an alternate universe where I was never born, and therefore, there was no reason for my parents to spend eighteen years making each other miserable.”

  “That’s not on you,” Max says pragmatically. “They’re adults. They made their choices.”

  “Can I show you something?” I ask.

  Max nods, and I take him into my parents’ office, open up the desk drawer that sticks, and pull out my dad’s expired passport and my mom’s poetry chapbook.

  “All of this was happening around the time that my mom got pregnant and my parents got married.”

  “What was happening?”

  “My dad was thinking about leaving the country, and my mom was dedicating books of poetry to Greg, ‘for everything.’ Your parents must have known at least something about that.”

  “Maybe they didn’t want to get involved. Or maybe they thought it was a bad idea for your mom to end up with Greg. Or, very likely, they had their own shit going on.”

  “But the thing is, nobody knows. There’s a story in these objects. Not the kind that they tell at parties and everybody knows by heart. There’s a story in here that nobody ever talks about.”

  Max gives me a teasing grin and starts to back slowly out of the room.

  “What?” I say.

  “You just seem a little worked up is all.”

  “I am worked up! This is serious!”

  “It’s also…” He takes some time choosing his next words. “You’ve had a pretty intense day, Lee. Are you thinking about this just so you can avoid thinking about that?”

  “That’s not what this is,” I say. I pull out my phone and show him the Mary Oliver poem that my mom had texted me. “Do your parents talk to you like this when you break up with someone?”

  Max lets out a bitter laugh. “I wish.”

  “This is my one wild and precious life. And I could choose to spend it feeling terrible and guilty, or I could spend it trying to get to the bottom of this.”

  Max considers this for a moment as he looks around my parents’ office.

  “Do you think there’s anything else in here?” he asks.

  Without discussing it, the two of us begin searching the room. Max goes through boxes in the closet, and I look behind the furniture, under the couch.

  Then, for the second time that day, I hear my dad’s voice in the doorway.

  “Lee!”

  I push my mother’s desk back where I’d found it, stand up quickly.

  “Yes?”

  “Are you looking for something?”

  “A pump for the air mattress,” I lie. My eyes dart across the room just in time to see Max hide something behind his back.

  “It’s in the hall closet,” my dad says. “I think we’re about to turn in, so you’d better clear out. I’m sure Sage wants to get some sleep.”

  Max and I go back out into the living room, where Harold is already snoring on the couch. This is a sight I’m used to. Even though Harold lives just downtown, he often prefers to stay up late and crash in our living room, or our attic, or even occasionally on our front porch. This half-feral habit is left over from the days when his band, the Little Thieves, was touring, hoarding their per diems and crowding together in one hotel room to save money.

  “Come on,” I say to Max. “We can go to my room.”

  “Don’t stay up too late,” my dad says, I guess because that’s what parents are supposed to say, but why did it matter? It’s summer, and I’ve been dumped and fired. There is nothing I need to be well rested for.

  As soon as Max and I are in my room, I whisper, “What’d you find?”

  Max reveals a VHS cassette labeled The Dirty South Literati: Maya & Arthur’s Engagement Party.

  “Do you know anybody with a working VCR?” he asks.

  I shake my head. My parents are the kind of people who wear vintage clothing, shop at used record stores, and live in a creaky, hundred-year-old house, and not even they are retro enough to own a VCR.

  Max lays the tape on the floor. Next to it, I place the poetry book and the passport.

  Some stories you can research out of books. Others only take an interview or two to reveal themselves to you. But then there are stories that have to be chiseled out in pieces, reassembled like dinosaur bones.

  Nineteen years ago, my father was getting ready to leave the country. My mother was writing love poems to another man, but those aren’t the stories that happened. This one was. They got married and had me.

  What I want to know is, why?

  CHAPTER 8 Go Back to Being Us

  A podcast loses a quarter of its audience within the first five minutes. You have to start strong and re-engage constantly. Vincent taught me that.

  The introduction writes itself in my head while Max and I are sitting in my room. I imagine that I’m pitching the idea to Vincent for Artists in Love. I imagine showing him the passport, the tape, the poetry chapbook, and saying, I just have to get to the bottom of this story.

  He’d nod seriously and ask, Who will you interview first? What if they won’t talk to you? Or worse, what if they do, and you find out something you don’t want to know?

  And then I’d say, I don’t give a shit what I find, as long as it’s the truth.

  I like imagining myself in a role like this. Not a heartbroken disaster and disappointment, but a fearless investigator tailing a story. Someone Vincent would respect.

  Max is yawning, so I tell him he can have my bed, and instead of sleeping, I go up to the attic and make a list of interview subjects, a list of questions. I write three different scripts trying to explain exactly what it is that makes my parents so bad together, crumpling each of them up when they don’t properly capture the dysfunction.

  When that approach doesn’t work, I pick up my mom’s poetry chapbook, Map Room Love Songs, and start to page through. What surprises me the most is that they aren’t love poems—not happy ones, anyway. A lot of the poems mention Greg by name, but they never turn out well. At the end, he’s always leaving, and she can never hold on to him, so she writes another one, like if she keeps putting the same information in slightly different configurations, she might eventually arrive at a different conclusion.

  There’s one poem in the
book that’s not like the others, though. It’s sillier. Happier. And while the other poems in the chapbook have titles like “Burn All Your Letters” and “Suffering Bastard,” this one is just called:

  GROSS

  When I come home after my shift

  you never ask how my day was.

  Instead you ask,

  “What was the grossest thing you had to touch all day?”

  All day, I save up memories

  of damp straw wrappers

  wadded at the bottom of milkshake glasses,

  already-chewed French fries,

  a cold, runny egg yolk,

  lipstick-smeared coffee cups—always fuchsia—

  so I can turn them into a story for you.

  One summer night you come home late,

  caked in a dozen layers of sweat,

  secondhand smoke, bar rags, and bleach.

  “Can I be the grossest thing you touch all day?” you ask.

  You’re the only person I would have wanted to tell,

  so I keep our story to myself.

  “What was the grossest thing you had to touch all day?” It sounds like the way my dad would start a conversation. I wonder if he’s the person she was writing to, the person she was keeping a secret while she’s breaking her own heart on every other page, agonizing about her relationship with Greg. This poem is a ray of goofy sunshine compared to the rest. I can’t decide whether this makes me feel better or worse.

  At six in the morning, I finally stagger down from the attic and fall asleep on the air mattress in my parents’ office, only to be awakened by Sage’s phone alarm at eight. I cover my head with the sheet as Sage steps over me, and a few minutes later, I smell coffee and bacon.

  I rub my eyes and go out to the kitchen, where Sage is standing at the stove, turning strips of bacon with a fork. There’s a plate of croissants already laid out on the table and a bowl of freshly washed grapes.

  “Dig in,” they say. “Where’s Max?”

  “I couldn’t sleep, so I let him have my bed.”

  “Poor kiddo. I’m sorry we’re all crowded in here. That’s probably the last thing you want right now.”

  I consider the alternative, my parents in separate bedrooms, not speaking to each other.

  “I don’t mind,” I say.

  My eyes sting, my body aches, and my ideas, which had sounded so shiny and exciting at four in the morning, now seem like a lot of work and a waste of time.

  “Why are you up so early?” I ask Sage, who seems cheerful and industrious despite drinking a fair amount of bourbon the night before.

  “I have tattoo appointments lined up all day at Trinity,” Sage says. “I’m their guest artist.”

  “You’re famous,” I say.

  They wave me off modestly. “It’s just because I’m from somewhere else. Some people get very excited about that.”

  “When are you going to do my dad’s tattoo?”

  “I was thinking tonight, if he hasn’t changed his mind.”

  “Right here in the house?”

  “That’s the plan.”

  Suddenly, the sound-engineer part of my brain engages. I imagine rigging up my mics, recording an interview with Sage and my dad with a tattoo needle buzzing in the background. I think there must be a way to do it, where it would add atmosphere without being annoying.

  “Would you mind if I was there?” I find myself asking. “Like, if I talked to the two of you and recorded it while you’re doing the tattoo? It’s for something I’m working on, maybe. A story.”

  “What kind of story?”

  “A love story,” I say, then add, “I’m not sure exactly what it is yet.”

  “Ask your dad. If he’s okay with it, then I’m okay with it.”

  The smells of Sage’s cooking lure everyone else into the kitchen, and soon my dad and Harold and Max are gathered around the kitchen table, filling plates.

  “Thanks for letting me sleep in your bed,” Max says.

  “Anytime,” I reply.

  My dad looks up from his breakfast, alarmed, like he’s wondering what my mom would say about his parental judgment if she was here. I roll my eyes because he should know by now that it’s not like that between Max and me. It’s not just that we’ve been friends since we were little kids; it’s that, in all that time, Max has liked guys, and only guys. During his family’s last few visits to Memphis, Max had been dating some sweet, saintly boy named Niko, about whom Sage and Maggie would not shut up. I’ve seen pictures, so I remember the blonde French-crop haircut, the oxford shirts and crewneck sweaters, the catalog-model aesthetic that Max seems to have fully abandoned now. I realize that no one has mentioned Niko’s name once this visit, not even Max. Is Max recently heartbroken like I am, I wonder, and if so, why is he being so well-adjusted about it? What’s his secret?

  My phone buzzes, and I pick it up to see that I have three new texts from Vincent, in addition to the ones from last night. I don’t want to know what they say, but also, I do—because it’s Vincent, and I still want to know what he thinks about everything, in his beautiful, irresistible, long-winded texting prose. I would miss out on bacon to know what he’s thinking.

  “Excuse me,” I say, and take my phone into my room, where I sit down on my bed and scroll up through the long string of messages.

  It’s me again. That’s not the note I want to end on. I hope you haven’t read these yet. I hope you don’t see anything I said. Just disregard it and skip to this part.

  I love you and I don’t know what to do. I wish you’d write me back and just say it was a mistake and it will never happen again, and that you’ll come to DC with me, and we can go back to being us.

  That’s what I want. Say you’ll come with me. I understand if you need time. I love you. I’ll wait.

  I understand why Lee Miller broke up with Man Ray. For him, the situation was perfect. He was an established artist at the height of his powers, with the most beautiful woman in Paris in his studio and on his arm. Without her, he was still Man Ray.

  But as long as Lee Miller stayed with Man Ray, she’d always be in his shadow. People would think she only got the breaks she did because she was his lover, and she’d never be taken seriously as an artist in her own right.

  I know how she felt, a little. Vincent was the one with the buttery radio voice on Artists in Love. I talked less during our shows because people didn’t respond as well to my voice. I know this because they said it on the internet, frequently. The show was equally ours, but he wrote the words that made it beautiful. I added to them, edited them, made them sound beautiful, but the work I did was less visible, which made it seem more like his show than mine.

  Come to DC with me, and we can go back to being us.

  In his last texts, he wanted everything to change. Now he doesn’t want anything to change. Then again, what was wrong with that? Weren’t we always happy together? And besides, it’s not like I was doing anything else with my life here.

  CHAPTER 9 Disappearing Act

  My mom seems surprised to hear from me when I ask her to get on video chat, but I can also tell that I haven’t caught her in the middle of a debauched New Orleans bender. She’s dressed and wearing makeup, and unlike the adults at our house in Cooper-Young, she isn’t visibly hungover. She shows me the view of the French Quarter from her room, and then Maggie pops on-screen for a moment to say hi and that she’s on her way to the park and the art museum.

  “How are things there?” she asks.

  She knows, I think. She’s using her witchy mom powers, the ones that let her hear the difference between when things are fine and when you’re just saying that they are.

  Then again, isn’t that part of the reason I called her?

  “I got fired from Java Cabana. Or not fired. Put on leave. There was some drama between Vincent and this other guy.”

  “What was Vincent doing there?”

  “We’d sort of gotten back together, and he was being supportive.”
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  “By getting you fired.”

  “Put on leave. Max was there. You can ask him.”

  “That’s fine, Lee. I believe you. Who was the other guy?”

  “Nobody. A rebound. A bad idea.”

  “Lee, do you need me to be there?” she asks, sounding worried. “Is everything really, actually okay?”

  “Everything’s okay. Mom, look, the other reason I wanted to talk was, you asked me what I was going to do with my one wild and precious life. And I was calling because I wanted to see if I could ask you some questions and record them for a story I’m working on.”

  “Have you slept?”

  “Why did you dedicate a book of poetry to Greg Thurber?”

  MAYA SWAN:

  Can we start somewhere else, Lee?

  LEE SWAN:

  What’s wrong with starting there?

  MAYA:

  You can’t just lay on a big question like that all at once. It puts the person you’re interviewing on edge. You have to work your way up to a question like that.

  LEE:

  Can you tell me about your first book, then?

  MAYA:

  Killing Time?

  LEE:

  No, your first first book. Map Room Love Songs. What was the Map Room?

  MAYA:

  A coffee shop. I used to write poetry there when I was in college.

  LEE:

  What kind of poetry did you write then? Is that a better work-your-way-up question?

  MAYA:

  Ha ha. You asked, so I’ll tell you. At first, my friends and I, we were all even. We were all nobodies.

  But then Harold’s band got signed and went on tour, and Sage was invited to do their apprenticeship in Berlin, and Greg got into art school in Los Angeles. And I was staying in Memphis, waiting tables at a TGI Fridays.

  So that was what my poetry was about: being terrified that I was being left behind, and I was never going to catch up.

  LEE: