Belly Up Read online

  Stephen got up from the table and went into a bedroom and returned with a laptop. I’m too curious, he said, I’m too interested in the immaculate tragedy of it. I am going to look our incarcerated architect up. Our incarcerated architect? I thought. How dare you. I was the one who sent him the samples, I was the one who wrote him a letter, I’m the one who’s now being forced to have tea in the house of his mind. He’s mine.

  Please don’t, I said to him, really, I mean it. Marie looked at me playfully and said, Come on now, Ursula, let us have our bit of fun. Everyone huddled around Stephen as he typed in the information. I tried to keep it together as the round circle that signaled the computer search thinking spun around and chased its own tail. Damn, said Stephen, let me restart it.

  In this lull I tried, in my drunken state, to get ahold of how I was feeling. My hands were gripped to my knees and no one was looking at me, no one was paying me any heed at all. The conversation had taken off without me and had no need of me. All I had at that moment at that wretched dinner party was my imagined Danvers and what he could, depending on what he had done, mean to me. Danvers’s desire to build something of beauty had touched me. I had an image of him in my head, some older man, gently feeling the fabric I sent him, that I couldn’t shake off. I was scared of myself, scared to see how I felt about anyone who had done something bad enough to get stuck in a black box, and scared to admit that, in all likelihood, he deserved it. He probably deserved to be dead. I tried to be optimistic. Maybe he had been wrongly accused. Maybe he killed someone, but that someone was a very bad person. He spoke so articulately and had shown me, generously, the depths of his imagination. What types of crimes require imagination? To calm myself I made a list in my head of the worst possible things Danvers could have done: raped a child, raped many children, raped many women, killed many people, raped and killed a young woman who looked like me. Stephen came back to the table and typed MALCOLM DANVERS CRIMINAL RECORD into the search engine and it came up immediately—child pornography ring bust, biggest in Pennsylvania history, creator and distributor Malcolm Danvers put behind bars for only fifteen years because they couldn’t find any evidence that he killed them, although eleven of the girls used in his videos (ages eight—thirteen) still couldn’t be found.

  Mr. Malcolm Danvers, I thought, Mr. Malcolm Danvers you are a murderer and a rapist.

  Jesus, said Stephen.

  Are you happy? I asked them. Should we go protest for his release?

  Calm down, said Marie.

  Why don’t you write him? I said to her. Why don’t you tell him how sorry you are that he has to be in there all alone? Maybe you should go visit him? Pennsylvania isn’t that far away, maybe we should all go there together and express our deep regret at the injustice of his internment and the inhumanity of solitary confinement? Maybe we should send his architectural plans to the homes of the girls he raped, to the families of the victims, so they can sleep well knowing that Danvers has a very nice, luxurious home?

  Drunk and infuriated, crazed by the fact that I felt I had had my reality violated by this information I so did not want to know, I goaded Stephen to keep going, keep searching, keep digging for more information that would make me want Malcolm Danvers dead. Stephen didn’t respond, and only looked at me silently with his brows furrowed, so I took his computer from him. Why don’t we search for images? I yelled at him.

  Hundreds of photos came up, but they weren’t photos of Danvers after his arrest. Rather, they were pictures of him well dressed, beaming, clearly communicating him as a real estate agent for multimillion-dollar homes. One of the photos was surrounded by text in a way that showed it was excerpted from a magazine. Under a photo of Danvers sitting in a living room was the caption PHILADELPHIA REAL ESTATE AGENT MR. MALCOLM DANVERS IN HIS OWN HOME. My god, I thought as I looked at the photo, Mr. Malcolm Danvers, you might use children like furniture, but you have very nice decor. In the photo you could see a great deal of his interiors. There was an Eames chair and a large fine kilim woven rug and expensive mahogany wood floors. On a modern, glass coffee table sat a design book. I could even make out the title—The French Inspired Home. I thought back to the man who had taken photos of me in the showroom, the man who had wanted a human element in the photographs of the furniture. What was the human element in this photograph of Mr. Malcolm Danvers? Where was the humanity here?

  I looked at Stephen and Marie and Suzanne. What do you think of his taste? I yelled at them. Do you think he chose a nice color for the leather on his Eames chair?

  Stephen said he was sorry for looking everything up, that he didn’t know how upset it would make me, a terrible half limp of an apology that somehow placed the blame back on my shoulders, back on the fact that I was the one screaming and ruining all that they had enjoyed about their evening, as if without me they’d have had Danvers all to themselves to contemplate and enjoy.

  I could feel it then that I had threatened them, threatened their nice cutlery and their beautiful handmade dishware and their abstract, geometric prints that hung on hooks above their sink.

  I kept yelling at them, asking them loudly where they got their gorgeous outfits. I complimented everything in the apartment at a deafening volume. I walked into the bathroom and said, These tiles are the most beautiful white. They’re perfectly minimalist, I yelled. They do a perfect job at not being noticed.

  I could hear Marie and Suzanne at the edges of my awareness, whispering in the living room about what to do with me. Stephen came into the bathroom, where I was rubbing their towels against my hand, and offered me more words that lacked an actual apology, and then asked if I would like it if he called me a cab home.

  No, I said. I’ll walk out of this apartment. And I did. And then I walked alone under the light-swollen city sky the many miles it took to get to the room where I slept.

  I WOKE UP EARLY the next day, at 4:00 a.m., feeling ill and empty. I climbed out of my bedroom window and onto my fire escape, where I sat and watched the sun creep over the adjacent brownstones and thought of what I would send Danvers in return. I could just send him a printout of his conviction summary. A simple message—I know what you’ve done. But what would that do? It would perhaps incite shame, or just disappointment at being found out. Maybe that was how all his prison correspondence went—generosity and then shame. I do think shame is a useful weapon, but it relies so heavily on the person’s own self-hatred, and maybe Danvers didn’t really hate himself at all. I wanted to make Danvers feel the worst thing I had ever felt. Make no mistake, if I could have, I would have killed him. People that evil aren’t ever cured. It’s crazy to me that someone could look at that photograph of Danvers grinning in his luxury home, know what he had done, see his eyes, and ever think that this was a man who should go on living.

  I knew that if the gallery opening friends ever heard me talk like this they’d mumble about cruel and unusual punishment and forgiveness for even the worst crimes, some rhetoric that, while true and intelligent, would only prove to me that they had never experienced violence in their own lives.

  And then it came to me. I knew what I had to do. I needed to send Danvers something that would make him feel less living.

  Earlier that year I had seen an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the furniture of Louis XIV, a fat man who was obsessed with the svelteness of his own legs, who thought he was king of the sun, and who also very much liked furniture that imitated beastliness. His chairs had the legs of deer, his sofas were made from pelts of lions, the hooves of horses were used all over his house to hold up pots or gold urns. It disturbed me when I saw the exhibit, those lion paws holding up Louis’s favorite seat. This was perhaps the best way, or the only way, I knew to degrade Mr. Malcolm Danvers.

  As soon as the image came to me I felt much more at ease. I could sketch Danvers into a piece of furniture in the style of Louis XIV, make his hairy arms the front legs of a sofa and his toed feet the back. I’d upholster it in a combination of Danvers’s skin
and that dark linen from his coveted lounge chair.

  I went inside and got my notebook. I made an incredibly detailed sketch, and drew Danvers’s head mounted at the center of the back of this baroque sofa, right where Louis XIV always put the sun. I drew the back of the sofa scalloped. I drew the arms as intricately carved wood that bent with the curve of the seat.

  At 6:00 a.m. I got dressed and went in to the showroom, several hours before everyone else arrived. I made color photocopies of my drawing. I even shrank down my Danvers sofa to a small enough size that I could fit it on his blueprint. I put it right in front of his fireplace, where his skin would singe. Then, using the copier, I zoomed in on the beige sketch of the skin that I had drawn and printed off several color copies. After they were printed I taped them together to make a large 2’ × 2’ swatch of Danvers’s skin. I put my drawing of the Danvers sofa and his blueprint with my added product placement in an envelope that was 8˝ × 11˝. I then wrapped the envelope in my Danvers skin paper and addressed it and walked down the stairs and placed the envelope in the public USPS mailbox on Sixth and Fourteenth.

  As I slid the envelope into the blue metal slot I imagined Danvers opening the letter slowly, the seal of my skin package already broken by prison wardens who probably hated Danvers as much as I did, prison wardens who would relish letting my hate mail slide by. I imagined Danvers poring over my plans, poring over my drawings, with a confusion that slowly morphed into fear when he realized that I fully intended to cut off his ankles, if I had the chance, to make them into the footrests for kitchen stools, his knuckles the decorative knobs on the bars where I would rest my feet, and that in this house of my imagination he’d be murdered, murdered in the type of way that the murdered person’s defining characteristic becomes how they were made into the dead.

  I thought of him in prison, dismembered and inanimate, and imagined him finally realizing that he was no longer a man, just a thing in a house that would never be built, and would never be visited—a house that would disintegrate when I died because the mind that held it would melt into liquid and rot as soon as oxygen seeped inside.

  This imagining hovered there for a moment, in the air above my head on Sixth and Fourteenth, and it felt good to look at it, and claim it, and acknowledge at least within myself that it was a creation that was mine. As I walked away from the mailbox I could feel the imagining following me. It hovered above my head. When I returned to the showroom to start my day at work, I could still feel it upon me, clamping the crown of my head as jewel settings prong a stone, and so when my boss called a meeting in the afternoon, I had trouble understanding what it was, exactly, he was saying, though I could hear his words perfectly fine.

  There was going to be an overhaul of the company image, he said. We had previously carried many fine wood products, beautiful mahogany tables and chairs, beech-wood outdoor chaises, but this was going to change. Within the interior design world, open-grain wood furniture is referred to as a living aesthetic, as in, the product’s visual presence reveals that it did, in fact, come from a living thing. The living aesthetic is associated with rustic interiors, specifically those made by Scandinavian designers, who pioneered the realm of reclaimed wood. My boss said that this trend had become so popular that it had escaped the world of high design and invaded the mainstream. One could now buy wood-grain wallpaper at Target or pick up an open-grain table from Crate and Barrel on the cheap. This market, we were told in our meeting, was no longer something we were interested in serving. From here on out there would be no more open-grain wood, no more raw leather available from our showroom. The showroom would now exclusively embody a nonliving aesthetic. New lookbooks were already being made. There was going to be a lot more chrome, and a lot more white leather, and many more big glass boxes, which, my boss told us, were chairs.

  The open-grain sample showroom furniture got lacquered over. I coordinated shipping the pieces to the workshop and they came back shiny, white, and gray. I could see myself in the reflection of their top coats. Chrome and lacquer scratch easily, my boss told me, so be careful of your rings. I wondered if the aesthetic change in the showroom demanded I now dress differently. Was there a way I could make myself look less living? Was my shaggy cropped hair too rustic, too suggestive that I too had once come from a living thing? How could I make myself more severe? I imagined my insides dissolving from their wet earth-tone tissues into a semisolid silver chrome matter. I saw a team of little men shaping the matter into a ball. They polished the ball into a perfectly shined chrome sphere that floated in the middle of my rib cage. All the little men looked at their reflections in my chrome sphere. They saw their faces fish-eyed, their body parts closest to the ball magnified. These drapes are horrid, I heard one of them say as he ran his fingers over the rungs of my ribs. Why do the curtains go so poorly with this chandelier? I felt my interiors breathing. As I brought fresh air into my lungs I could feel the chrome ball inside of me quivering.

  CONCERNED HUMANS

  KARL WAS A SNAKE who coiled himself into the shape of a pear and bit the children who tried to eat him. He lived in a tree surrounded by sidewalk cement on a busy block in a big city. He hung from the low swinging branches and wrapped himself into the shape of a fruit. He stuck out his tongue on the top of his coil to give the children who passed what looked like a newly sprung leaf. He shifted color to match the tree. He greened with a perfect speckle. A young boy came up to the pear and stuck out his arm to pick it, and Karl, instead of juicing, revealed his fangs and said, rather boldly, “I love you.” And with that the venom entered the boy’s veins. Karl lapped up the extra blood and then went back to pretending to be a fruit. Pigeons picked at the dead boy’s bones and then water fell from the sky and washed away his remains and police did eventually find the dead boy but nobody suspected a snake, because who would suspect a pear? Also, this was a city, and city people suspect many things, but cuisine, specifically fruit, generally isn’t one of them. Time passed and Karl again waited. He bathed in the night and blinked his lashless eyes and whispered sweet nothings to the spiders who wove webs in his tree. The spiders, squirrels, rats, bugs and stray cats that lived on the block conversed with Karl with caution. Karl said things none of them wanted to remember. He said, “That little girl looked really nice in those shorts,” and then later “I have always thought I had a specific type of attraction.” The spiders, as well as much of the other surrounding urban wildlife, attributed Karl’s strange behavior to his foreign origin or perhaps even to some childhood trauma that Karl himself had yet to explain. They resented that he had killed the little boy, inducing an extreme increase of police traffic on their block, but liked the exotic company and, while they condemned his strangeness publicly, many of them privately reveled in it and were thankful that at least Karl was there, doing his fruit-snake thing, adding some amount of diversity to where there had previously been only vermin. An urban pear tree is a rare thing, the spiders, squirrels, rats, bugs and stray cats all recognized, and having a snake to go with the pear tree, especially a snake masquerading as a pear, was a rare thing indeed. Karl had, in fact, come with the tree. A group of concerned humans had imported the tree from outside the city and planted it in a barren square of sidewalk soil to add some green and life to their block, which had previously been thought of only as a block without green and without any real space to do anything but walk through. But now, with the pear tree, people sat on their porches and talked on the street and breathed in the air with such enthusiasm that it was as if prior to the pear tree, the air had not existed at all. This made Karl’s job extremely easy. With all the humans huddled to his trunk, gulping down smog, he had more children to eat than he could swallow. When the weather turned warmer and his tree blossomed, this was especially obvious. To his despair, he maybe no longer even needed to pretend to be a pear. This realization was devastating. Karl liked pretending to be a pear. He liked being a pear so much that he identified heavily as an actual pear. Who was anyone to tell him he wa
s otherwise? Karl realized he liked being a pear in the same way that many humans like not just doing their jobs, but being their jobs. Karl was a pear, now and forever, in the same way retired lawyers are always lawyers. Karl meditated on this reality as he saw humans pass. He saw construction workers, teachers, bus drivers and chefs and, very clearly, how some of them were just people who had jobs, but others were people who were their jobs. Was Karl a snake who was a pear? Was he really a pear who only looked like a snake? If you cut him open, what would be within him? Snake flesh bleeding green guts? No. Karl knew what he was. He was certain that within he only held white sugar-filled flesh. Flesh that could be poached or jellied or painted or simply sliced. Flesh, that when children chewed, would sweeten, soften and slide down. Thus Karl started to have fantasies about being eaten. It started out as just dreams but then he started planning to let the next child who tried to eat him do so. “I am done as a snake that looks like a pear,” he thought. He thought, “I simply am a poison pear.” The squirrels and the spiders on the block all thought Karl was crazy, confused, “hyped up on spring.” But Karl went through with it. One morning, a boy about the age of eight came up to Karl, and plucked him from his tree, and Karl stayed put, stayed coiled in his pear-shaped form, and sat in perfect stillness as the boy bit into him, ingested his venom orally, and died on the street with Karl in his palm. There Karl lay, chewed in two, happily being seen and understood as the thing that he was: a poison pear. But wasn’t Karl also just a snake? A snake trying to find a way to eat that was respectable, and clever, and allowed a little time to be left over in the evenings so that when the sun set over the urban sky he could chat with his neighbors? In this way Karl was and was not the thing he wanted to be. As his snake blood seeped out of his snake body, the spiders and the squirrels and the bugs and the rats and the stray cats crowded around. They looked at Karl, and they wept for him, and they admired him as the sweet and fleshy product of a tree, as a plant that contains seeds, as a simple food that can be eaten.