Maybe what she needed, Jackie thought, as she absentmindedly fingered a large bag of individually-wrapped grass-fed beef jerky sticks, was a new definition of creativity, or a new word for the thing she was reaching toward—maybe she could replace the desire for creativity with the desire for connection to everything around her. And then she rolled her eyes at this thought, and then she noticed a CVS employee noticing her rolling her eyes at nothing.
When she arrived home, lugging two boxes of seltzer water, she saw her friend Lisa had texted. Lisa was only 25, but she’d already published a novel and a book of short stories, had tens of thousands of followers online. Jackie and Lisa had become friends because of shared bad experiences with asshole artist men, and because of their shared affinity for writing about their own lives. Lisa had sent a link to a blog post a male writer had written fictionalizing a night she’d hung out with him and their mutual friend. The three young people had run into an older Cuban poet, who’d brought them to his home.
“A lot of people reading it hate my character,” Lisa texted. “I don’t get it. You just hate horny fun women… like the story wouldn’t be anything without her. It would be boring as fuck.”
“I agree, your character sounded fun lol,” Jackie texted. “He tried to frame it as if you were vapid and oblivious just for drunkenly asking the poet questions meanwhile *he* was deep for *reading* the poet’s work which he then proceeded to summarize in the most pretentious way possible.”
“I like him as a friend, but I do think his writing is obnoxious,” Lisa replied. “Ego is simply too big for it to be good.”
Jackie smiled. She wondered if there was any writer in their online scene of writers who someone hadn’t had that thought about. She considered how boring her own writing, and life, would be without her friends. If she was in a cave, maybe she would hallucinate visions to replace them. She’d probably hallucinate visions to replace her enemies too.
Winter break ended without fanfare, Jackie having avoided having to visit her family by taking on a petsitting job, spending Christmas and New Year’s snuggling a dog and failing to seduce a cat, walking the pitbull mix around a depressingly suburban neighborhood deep in Queens, texting her friends New Years wishes for a year filled with love and laughter. Jackie texted Grace jokingly on New Year’s day that the cat had peed on the floor because she was too late with his breakfast, and that he was an spirit guide telling her to make a resolution to wake up earlier.
“Hehehe and I was like, ‘oh so the message is to express your needs unapologetically’” Grace replied.
“Express my needs?! As if anyone would fulfill them but me?? Let’s not be silly,” Jackie texted back, and Grace replied by sending the skeptical emoji with the monocle.
School started up again and Jackie got into the rhythm of going to work, procrastinating online, working on her writing, and nothing else. There were two or three preschool dads, who when they came to pick up their children, Jackie would make eye contact with them and the magnetism would startle her in its intensity—it wasn’t something she was inviting or intending to pursue, it was just there for a beat, inescapable, she knew it wasn’t because she was special, that was just what married men did with their eyes—it was what they could get away with and still maintain a relatively clear conscience—but it reminded her, annoyingly, that lust still existed within her, that it was something she was actively repressing, managing to avoid.
Grace invited her to go to the Cloisters, the museum on the far upper west side of Manhattan, and so she sat on the long train ride attempting to hide her phone screen from the other passengers as she tried to type a poem about how it felt to be on a new train instead of an old train, reaching for a metaphor about how it was like the world’s attraction to teenage girls.
The Cloisters was hosting a special exhibit called “The Spectrum of Desire: Love, Sex, and Gender in the Middle Ages.” By the time Jackie arrived, a little late, Grace had opted to go on a tour of the general collection, so Jackie sat in the cafe, continuing to tinker with her poem, while intermittently staring at the courtyard, where snow had started to fall heavily on the barren trees, strange ones she didn’t know the name of whose arms seemed to reach up and then explode into bunches of long skinny fingers pointing at the sky, and Jackie thought she didn’t really even need to see any art. Twice young men asked if the other chair at her table was taken, and she mumbled no, and they looked confused, unable to hear her, timidly sitting. Each time she hadn’t had the presence of mind to size them up, and so she sat, typing about how she was wondering if each successive guy was cute, and how they viewed her—whether they thought she was cute, or rather just a plain older woman they could sit near without incident.
Grace found her and they found the exhibit, which occupied one room under a high arched ceiling. The wall text said the show encouraged the viewer to work against “the limits of contemporary categories and presumptions—an approach sometimes described as queering the past.” There were saints who changed gender, a woman riding Aristotle like a horse. Depictions of spiritual ecstasy, sex with God. A prayer book featuring a close-up of Christ’s side wound that looked exactly like a vulva. There were some leaps, like a statue of Mary and her cousin both pregnant, and touching hands, the wall text pondering whether there was sexual tension between them. And then there were depictions of sexual violence used to serve as an example of what could happen if a man’s advances were refused.
While walking through the show, Jackie began to feel faint and nauseous, but she tried to force her stomach to settle, tried to breathe into the pain. Maybe, she thought, this is how people think about Jesus, they think about the pain he endured and it makes their pain easier to suffer. She had never understood Jesus, what it meant for someone to have died for her sins. What it meant to let him into her heart. Her parents were devotees of a dead Tibetan Buddhist guru, and Buddhism generally made sense to her. Sure, some guy sat there, and let go of desire. That’s simple. But Jesus? The Holy Trinity? All of it? It had once made sense to her, on a large dose of ketamine, reading the Wikipedia page for ‘Mocking of Jesus’ alone in her room. She had thought, I’m intuitively understanding Jesus’s pain. But mostly Christianity frightened her. And it bothered her that she didn’t understand; it made her feel stupid. She thought she could at least understand the sex with God thing, though. She had certainly writhed in her bed on psilocybin mushrooms before, had felt unbearable lust while meditating as if some spirit was toying with her, like foreplay for death, like a mysterious reminder that the real source of desire was beyond the body. Maybe she didn’t need to map it all onto some existing story.
As she rode home on the train, someone’s lime green shirt reminded her that the night before she’d dreamt of Grace posing in a lime green dress in the middle of the street, gracefully and magically lying down so that cars could drive over her without touching her, but then her arm got injured and Jackie was struggling to locate the nearest hospital on Google maps.
Jackie had published a poem by a new poet on the scene in the online literary magazine she helped edit. The poet had a voice of her own; Jackie rarely even liked or understood poetry but her poems were like wild stories cascading down the side of a hill on a deserted highway, or something. She was young and from the south, but she lived in the city and she had asked Jackie whether she wanted to get a drink. Lisa said she wanted to come too so they made plans to meet at a bar after work one day. Jackie got home from work and felt nauseous, so she lay down for a few minutes, made herself eat some chicken, then tried to create an outfit that would signal both good taste and not giving a shit to the young women. It was freezing but she wore her trendy, lighter coat, running down the street so as not to be too late.
She was the last to arrive, and they’d left a seat in between them, making her feel important, the respected elder. The bar she’d picked was one she thought of as cozy and intimate, but it was Friday night and disco lights were revolving and the bar was packed and loud. Eventually they managed to move from the bar to a table and shyly asked each other questions. Lisa and the poet, Caroline, who was 27, discovered that they’d both had run-ins with the same online magazine editor and book publisher. Lisa had hooked up with him a couple times, and then he’d yelled at her when she broke it off. Caroline had met up with him not knowing it was a date, and he’d shown up to the ambush-date wearing a giant Cross necklace (she gestured to indicate that it was about eight inches long.) He was a Catholic, but he was always pursuing the young women he published on his website, it seemed. When she politely turned him down after he tried to kiss her, and then left the date due to a well-timed actual emergency in her family, he unfollowed her on all social media. Recently he’d posted ramblings about the intolerance of liberals, and the possible need for fascism.
“I was really hoping he was trolling,” Jackie said. The two young women shook their heads gravely.
Lisa, like Jackie, had recently decided to be sober, and was drinking seltzer, while Jackie drank a non-alcoholic beer and Caroline drank a draft. Lisa and Jackie were sharing a nicotine vape. Although Jackie and Lisa had been texting frequently in the past few months since their friendship began, they’d only met in person a few times, and each time, Lisa had been drunk or on the journey there, commanding her audience of friends, moving from one person to the next, leaving one location abruptly to scope out another. Now, she was timid and mostly quiet. She’d invited another friend, who showed up with her girlfriend, and they joined the table. But she seemed shy around them too. She was trying to get rid of t-shirts, and had brought three Jackie had requested from Lisa’s photo of available shirts, including one that said “My art does not suck” and another that said, in spiky rock-band letters, ANNIE ERNAUX. As the other women talked, Lisa murmured to Jackie that she wanted to leave.
“I don’t know how to exist as a sober person,” she said.
“Me neither,” Jackie reassured her.
“But you’re so composed,” Lisa said.
“Inwardly I’m not.” She was surprised that Lisa thought she was composed, because each time she spoke, she felt like she was doing weird things with her hands, failing to make equal or adequate eye contact among the conversation participants, and adding irrelevant details to whatever she was saying.
She liked Lisa’s sober personality. But Lisa decided to take off. So Caroline and Jackie were left making stilted conversation with Lisa’s friends, who soon enough left themselves. Then the conversation between Lisa and Caroline flowed surprisingly well. Caroline was gorgeous, with long dirty blonde hair and bright blue eyes, a youthful girl-next-door look with some spicy flair, like her camo hat that said “Don’t ask me for shit.” They talked about the toxicity of the NYC writing scene, all the men with allegations, how Caroline had noticed that they only liked her writing when it was about sex, how it seemed like people were obsessed with writing about sex because it was a way to release all their pent up emotional energy that they had nowhere to put. She said before she’d met her boyfriend recently, she’d wanted to move somewhere and become a farmer, having been in the city for a few years.
“The men are farming the women when they should be farming,” Jackie said, and Caroline agreed. Jackie said Caroline should start a farming cult, that she’d be her assistant, and they could save everyone and make them write about farming, or something. “You have to be the cult leader because you have the long hair,” Jackie said. But it was more than that—she had a charisma and a confidence that Jackie had recognized in others before, a way of making Jackie—and Jackie imagined she made everyone she felt like turning her energy toward feel it—feel like she was special. She realized at the same time that they were talking about nothing. But it was nice to be talking to someone with dreamy anarchist ideas like herself, someone not embedded in the prevailing threads of either alt-right fascism, bohemian nihilism, or spiritualized individualism. Caroline said she had always been polyamorous, but was torn because her boyfriend had always been monogamous and she also wanted a baby and to get married.
They talked for a while—Caroline had a second beer and Jackie a second fake beer, and Jackie really needed to pee but didn’t want to stop the conversation. Finally she did, when Caroline was saying something about the Bible, about how she could get different meaning from the different stories in it at different times, and Jackie wanted to ask her about it, to ask her about Christianity, to get her to explain it, but then she finally went to pee and by the time she’d gotten back she’d forgotten to ask.
