The Wrong Heaven Read online

  The film ended, and all of the women clapped. Two of them were crying. Then we went around the circle and shared our feelings. The two crying women went first. The first one said she had been touched by how the P’Buxupi all menstruated at the same time, in sync with the full moon, and she wished that the American women of today could do the same thing, we were so divided from one another now. The second woman began, “I was anorexic in high school.” She attempted to keep going—I assumed she was going to connect this to the film in some way—but she couldn’t, because she’d started sobbing again. Mindy leaned over and rubbed the crying woman’s shoulder, her earrings swinging like pendulums, her eyebrows gesturing maternally. “We’ll come back to you, Patrice,” she said.

  Then the rest of us went in turn. I was fifth. I didn’t know what to say, so I said, “The film was very provocative.” The group smiled pointedly at me and moved on. A gorgeous Asian woman with black diagonal bangs spoke next. “Frankly,” she said, “I found the film extremely retrograde. It had all the vestiges of colonialism.” She took particular offense at the scene in which one of the researchers is initiated into the tribe and then shows the P’Buxupi how to collect their menstrual blood in tiny rubber cups rather than using rags. “It’s the whole White Savior complex,” she said. Many of the white women nodded enthusiastically, including some who had, minutes earlier, claimed to love the movie.

  A discussion ensued. I wasn’t really listening. My right leg had fallen asleep, and my butt hurt from sitting on the lumpy pillow, but I felt like I couldn’t get up because it would disrupt the Safe Space.

  Finally Mindy said, “I want to open up the space, because some people haven’t had the chance to speak yet.” By “some people” she meant Sharon, the green-eyed woman sitting across from me.

  Sharon had been sitting quietly the whole time, not saying anything, smiling in this thin, secret way. Sometimes, during the discussion, she’d caught me staring at her, and her eyes had laughed and invited mine to laugh with them, and I’d looked away.

  Now everyone turned to Sharon, and Sharon said, “I’m just wondering how I can get a P’Buxupi boyfriend who’ll build me a hut and let me slut it up with women. That sounds pretty fucking ideal.” Everyone laughed, but in a strained way, because it was obvious that she was not taking things seriously.

  Mindy smiled tightly. “All right,” she said. “Refreshments!”

  I took a strange orange-colored cookie from the refreshments table, but hesitated before putting it into my mouth. Was its color due to carrots or something more exotic? This was a question I did not really care about, but I pretended to, so that I would not have to face the daunting task of making conversation.

  But then I sensed a presence in front of me, expectant and focused, and I looked up. It was Sharon, biting down on an apple wedge and staring at me with her laughing eyes.

  “I brought those,” I said.

  “They’re delicious,” she said. She leaned over to the table, grabbed another apple wedge, and matter-of-factly pushed it into my open mouth. I bit down, and the sweet acid taste rushed in.

  “Want to get a cigarette outside?” she asked.

  I nodded, although I didn’t smoke. I had asthma. As a child I wore an inhaler on a lanyard around my neck.

  “So,” said Sharon, pulling a cigarette out of her purse. “Let me guess. You’re a straight girl questioning her sexuality.”

  I felt my face grow hot. “Is it that obvious?”

  She smiled. “No,” she said, “but I was hoping. I think you’re cute.”

  My heart jumped up and kicked me in the ribs.

  She nodded and lit her cigarette. “Yeah,” she said, exhaling a perfect plume of smoke. “You remind me a lot of an Emily I used to date. Pretty but simple. Unpretentious. Like a—like a sexy pioneer woman.”

  I laughed. “I did play a lot of Oregon Trail as a kid.”

  “And I bet you never died of typhoid.”

  “Oh, all the time.”

  She patted her purse. “I’m sorry, I’m rude. Do you want a cigarette?”

  “I’m OK. I don’t really smoke.”

  “Good girl.”

  “So, um, what do you do and stuff?”

  “I’m an herbalist. I own a small store. I sell teas, elixirs, things like that. Also some sex toys.” She reached into her purse. “Here’s my card. You should stop by sometime.”

  The card was printed on thick lavender paper that smelled vaguely of sandalwood. Above a Brooklyn address it said

  EMILY

  WHAT’S YOUR DESIRE?

  I looked up. “Your store is named Emily?”

  “Yeah.” She laughed. “Surprised?”

  I said, “Do you want to come home with me?”

  This is my curse. I can never do anything in a moderate, human way. It’s like ridiculously extreme actions are the only way to catapult myself into doing anything at all.

  I shut my eyes and braced myself for rejection.

  But Sharon just laughed and said, “What are we waiting for?”

  As I fumbled with my keys at the door, Sharon reached down and grabbed my ass. I felt sparks shoot through my body, which may have been sexual excitement or just nervousness.

  I led her down the narrow hallway, past my roommate Helen’s door (thankfully, closed), past the kitchen where we made our spaghetti and stir-fry, and into my bedroom.

  As soon as we got inside, Sharon pushed me up against the wall and put her mouth on mine. It was right what they said. Her lips were really soft. She ducked her head down into my neck and kissed me there. “You’re sexy,” she murmured.

  We went over to the bed and sat down. Sharon started to unbutton my shirt, following the openings with her mouth, kissing me on the collarbone and chest. She pulled off my shirt, then removed my bra and took my left nipple into her mouth and began to flick it back and forth with her tongue. This is when I started to laugh.

  She looked up, grinning. “What?” she said.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

  “Does it tickle?”

  “It’s not that. I guess I’m just nervous.”

  “You’ve been carrying yourself so bravely,” she said, and laughed. I laughed too. “Well, the thing is,” I said.

  And then I told her everything. I told her all about my piano teacher Thomas, and Tony and Ben, and even my Christian day camp counselor Samantha, who I think I might have been proto-sexually attracted to, because she did not wear a bra and I got uncomfortable whenever she walked by with her jiggly chest. “It all adds up to one big question mark,” I said.

  “You’re just a cute, curvy little question mark,” she said, tracing the outline of my small pale breast with her finger. “Don’t worry about it, OK? Just follow your desires, and you’ll live into the answers.”

  My breast was still exposed, its rose-colored nipple pointing at the ceiling. I didn’t even feel self-conscious, lying there naked while her shirt was still on. In her gaze I felt the power of all the stares she’d absorbed, internalized and now turned back onto me. It was like an extremely flattering soft-focus light. In the light of that gaze I felt deeply interesting, glowing the way a pregnant woman glows, dense with the mystery of myself.

  We talked until we fell asleep, spooning (I was Nevada, she was California). In the morning I made eggs. “I like them runny and disgusting,” said Sharon, “basically on the verge of salmonella.”

  As we ate, we sat across the table reading the New York Times (me Arts & Leisure, she the magazine), like a married couple with a routine. When Helen came in, in the flannel shirt and overalls she wore to work at the organic farm in Red Hook, Sharon and I looked up, as if this were our house and Helen were an intruder.

  “Um, hi,” said Helen.

  “This is Sharon,” I said. “My—friend.”

  “Nice to meet you,” said Helen. But Helen was terrible at hiding things with her face.

  Sharon winked. “I’m not that frightening, am I?”
r />   Helen just shrugged. “Nice to meet you,” she said again, in a monotone. Helen, with her overalls and her Helga braids and her knitting. I had always ascribed myself to her level of general dullness, but perhaps I was actually more interesting.

  Helen went to the sink to fill up her Nalgene bottle, and I said, “I heard those might give you cancer,” and she said, “What might give you cancer?” and I said, “Nalgene bottles,” and she said, “Oh.” Then she left, and Sharon and I laughed as if we’d just played a joke on Helen, and I felt a little bit bad, but just a little bit.

  “I have to go,” said Sharon, when our laughter subsided. “But come by my store, OK? I’ll make something special for you. A gift.”

  “What kind of gift?” I asked, but she didn’t answer. She just planted a kiss on top of my head, like a mom.

  “You’re a good Emily,” she said. And then she left.

  Sharon’s store was located on an easily missable side street in Gowanus, on a block with an abandoned factory, an auto-parts store, and a seedy-looking bar. The large warehouselike building was totally nondescript, indistinguishable from the other warehouselike buildings that surrounded it. Next to buzzer number 1 was a label that said EMILY. I pressed the button.

  “Who is it?” came a voice through the intercom.

  “Um, my name is Emily?” I said. “I’m here for Sharon?”

  “Oh, OK,” said the voice. “She’s expecting you.” The buzzer buzzed and I went inside.

  I found myself in a narrow hallway smelling vaguely of urine, with a staircase covered in several layers of flaking red paint. The sign on the door to my left, made of the same lavender paper as Sharon’s business card, said WHAT’S YOUR DESIRE?

  I pushed the door open and found myself in a small, close room that felt more like a storage closet than a store. Brown glass bottles lined the shelves. In the middle of the room, below a single naked light bulb, was a free-standing desk, and at that desk sat a woman who was definitely not Sharon. She was fat and pretty and blond, with shocking neon-blue eyes and the most enormous breasts I’d ever seen.

  “Hi,” she said, smiling. “So I’m Emily.”

  “So am I.”

  “I know.”

  “Are you Sharon’s ex-girlfriend?”

  “Sharon has a lot of ex-girlfriends.” She smiled, kindly. “Here. She made something for you.” She reached below the desk, retrieved a small brown glass bottle, and held it out to me. It bore no markings, except for a white label with #17 written in dark calligraphy ink.

  “What is it?” I asked, accepting it and frowning. “Am I supposed to drink it?”

  She shook her head. “No. You just sniff it, three times a day.”

  “Like aromatherapy?”

  “You could say that.”

  “What does it do?”

  “It’s for definition.”

  “Of what?”

  “Your life.”

  “I didn’t know aromatherapy could do that.”

  She smiled. “Oh! I forgot. I was supposed to give you something else too.” She reached below the desk again, and this time produced a crumpled brown paper bag, the kind my mom used to pack my lunches in.

  She handed the bag over. “It’s a dildo,” she said.

  I pulled it out of the bag. I had never seen a dildo up close before. As an object, this one was a strange combination of girlish denial and brutal realism: it looked like a real penis, with veins and everything, but it was made of purple sparkly plastic.

  “Do you want a harness?” asked the other Emily. “To strap it on?”

  “No, I’m OK,” I said. I stuffed it back into the paper bag. “Do you know when Sharon’s coming back?”

  She shrugged and smiled. “I’ll tell her you stopped by.”

  When I got home, I stuffed the dildo deep in the bottom of my underwear drawer. I opened the brown jar and took a sniff. It smelled like sweat and flowers. Nothing happened.

  But as I did my weekend cleaning, I kept thinking about how the other Emily had handed me the dildo, so casually. I’d always assumed that my physical being (small body, flat chest, dull stringy hair) communicated certain qualities about me (a general timidity, a sturdy dependability, a guilty, diffused desire to improve the world). But if this other Emily could picture me strapping this purple sparkly plastic penis to my crotch and fucking another woman with it—then, well, wasn’t anything possible?

  “Short,” I told the hairdresser.

  “Like a pixie?”

  “Yeah, but maybe a bit more—androgynous.”

  I watched my hair fall to the floor. The newly naked tips of it tingled. Sharon, I thought, rolling her name around like a pearl in the wet gray oyster of my mind. Sharon Sharon Sharon.

  “Nice haircut,” said Mindy on Monday, her face red, her eyes averted. I wondered if she’d seen me leaving with Sharon.

  “Yeah,” said Trent. “I didn’t know you had a face.”

  “I have several,” I said. I puffed my cheeks out, crossed my eyes, and tilted my head to the side.

  Trent laughed. “You’re funny,” he said.

  I smiled and sat down at my desk. For once, I didn’t feel the need to mentally photograph this moment; I could let it go, like a shiny little fish. I picked up the bottle of Life Expanding Kombucha waiting at my desk, frowned, and threw it in the trash. The fact was, it tasted disgusting.

  But the novelty of the haircut soon wore off. Although I now looked like a person with a more interesting life, in reality everything was exactly the same as before. The same spreadsheets at FLOAT, the same apartment that smelled of spaghetti and cat litter, the same passive-aggressive arguing with Helen over the chore wheel. Every moment was predictable; every moment had an identically shaped lack. Every moment lacked Sharon.

  Weeks went by. She didn’t call. She didn’t come by. Every night after work I sniffed the brown bottle and turned on Cat Power and tried to use the dildo, but it mostly felt uncomfortable. I could have maybe gotten more creative with it, but the fact was, I didn’t really want a penis. I didn’t want any specific body part of a man or woman. I just wanted Sharon to lie there and look at me.

  Finally I couldn’t take it any longer. Exactly three weeks after my first visit, I went back to Sharon’s store.

  I turned down the same side street as before and found the building, but something was different: this time, there was no buzzer labeled EMILY. The first buzzer said NO NAME LLC, and the rest of them were blank.

  I checked the address again, against the lavender business card I still carried around in my wallet; it matched. I rang all the buzzers one by one, down the line, and then rang them again, going up. Nothing happened.

  I went over to the window nearest the door—the one that, by my calculations, should have looked into the tiny room containing Sharon’s store. But I didn’t see a tiny room at all. Instead I saw a giant open space: cement floor, cinder-block walls, a few cardboard boxes stacked here and there. I walked over to another window and saw the same thing, from a different angle.

  The store was gone. Like it had never existed.

  There was no other conclusion. The world seemed to be playing a joke on me. This discovery accorded with a long-held suspicion that it—the world—had never quite taken me seriously. But this time, instead of resigning myself to this fact, I was filled with rage.

  I went back over to the door and started kicking and pounding on it, full of petulant despair. I didn’t expect anyone to hear me—I didn’t think anyone was inside. This was a pure, purposeless act, the sort I hadn’t allowed myself since I was a child. I needed to throw my body against a solid object, as hard as I possibly could; I needed to protest the existence of everything, the placement of everything, especially myself.

  Just then, as my fists began to smart from pounding the metal door, it suddenly swung open. Startled, I pitched forward into the man standing in the doorway. He caught me, righted me, then took a step backwards, as if to brace himself against whatever I m
ight do next. I lowered my fists, breathing hard, grateful that I hadn’t accidentally punched him in the face.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  He looked at me with suspicion. He was a few years older than me, tall and slim, with sandy-colored hair and round glasses; attractive in a bookish way, like a young professor, or the daytime alter ego of a superhero.

  “I’m sorry,” I said again. “I’m looking for Sharon?”

  “Sharon, huh.” He folded his arms. “Who is this Sharon? Every once in a while some woman comes by looking for her.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But this is her address.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you.”

  So she really had vanished. I felt like I could just collapse in a boneless puddle onto the floor. But even collapsing was too much effort, too much of a decision. I needed someone to tell me what to do.

  “So,” I said. “What usually happens next?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When someone comes looking for Sharon and you tell them she’s not here. What usually happens?”

  “Sometimes they leave. Sometimes they ask to come in.”

  “Do you let them?”

  “Do you want to come in?”

  “OK.”

  I followed him into the building. It was a giant open space, with boxes piled here and there, like I’d seen through the window. Against the far wall, some plywood partitions had been set up, dividing the space into smaller rooms.

  “Those are studios,” the man said. “They lease them really cheap to artists. Some kind of shipping company owns the building.”