FICTION | Lucy Faye Rosenthal Neither Here nor There

FICTION

Neither Here nor There

By Lucy Faye Rosenthal

I met Devin in a basement in Tivoli, between walls of pink fiberglass and a concrete floor that was sticky with spilled Genesee. We were watching a three-piece local band sweating and playing simple, spirited punk music beneath the cool glow of a work lamp. They looked like they were around my age, early twenties, and so did Devin. He was standing near me in the small crowd. I noticed his t-shirt first and his tattoo second. The shirt was vertically-striped — mint green and salmon and white — and the tattoo was just below the inner ditch of his elbow — a line of text rendered in hand-poked dots of black ink: Nobody broke your heart.

I leaned into him, gesturing toward his forearm. “You broke your own, ‘cause you can’t finish what you start?” He smiled and nodded.

After the band packed it up, Devin and I drank upstairs in the kitchen until it got late, and I walked him out to his car. It was an old navy-blue Volvo slathered in bumper stickers — I Stand with Planned Parenthood and No Farms No Food and Radio Catskill — and when he kissed me, he held me as if he were

about to tumble off the face of the earth.

I was working as a gallery attendant at a modern art museum that was a thirty-minute Metro North ride away from my apartment in Poughkeepsie. It was a large brick building overlooking the Hudson River that had once been a cardboard factory in the 1930s, and it exhibited the type of art that made people want to come up from New York City just to stand in front of it and take pictures of themselves. Neon sculptures made of plastic tubes filled with lime and periwinkle and pomegranate-colored gas, labyrinthine arrangements of sheet metal that stood over thirty feet tall and folded in on themselves like perverted Fibonacci spirals. I wore an all-black uniform and an ID badge and a walkie talkie, and I roamed through the building, standing at watch, for eight hours a day. The museum’s visitors were always fashionable and beautiful and clean. I liked studying their outfits. I also liked studying which pieces they took the most photos of, and which ones they walked right by without stopping.

On my first day of work, I had been assigned to watch over a cherry-colored Chevrolet pickup truck parked in the center gallery. The truck itself was the piece of art, and my job was to make sure that nobody touched it, or even took pictures of it, as per the artist’s dying wishes to never have any of his work be photographed. It had something to do with the phenomenology of the in-person viewing experience. I also had to watch for visitors standing too close to the truck, because apparently human breath and body heat would melt the red paint. There were so many ways that I needed to be scrutinizing other people that I had never before thought possible. All day long, in every room of the museum, I overheard the other gallery attendants

approach visitors with the same warnings — You’re too close. Please step back. Please don’t touch. Sometimes a polite whisper, sometimes a desperate shout, echoing throughout the airy, concrete atria across which we were all stationed at various posts. Imposing this sort of capricious order onto the bodies of strangers was the crux of the job, and I was very, very bad at it. I was soft-spoken, slow to react, and I hated telling other people what to do. The managers would call me over my walkie talkie to chastise me about some visitor’s infraction that I had failed to call out, like somebody’s sneaker edging too close to a piece and breaking the invisible three-foot distance that I had to make sure everybody constantly maintained. It made sense to me that nobody was allowed to touch the art, but I never understood why it mattered if someone stood even an inch too close. Every piece was enormous; the human bodies were easily the smallest things in the building. How was it that the big, unfeeling objects were so vulnerable, and the tiny, alive ones such a liability? What was the true danger of warm breath on car paint? On that first day, when I was walking past the truck exhibit on my way to another post, I saw an old man with his hands clasped behind his back, standing nose to nose with the driver’s side window of the red Chevy — squaring up, staring down its insides — and nobody said a word.

Devin had pierced ears and painted nails, and though he spoke about his childhood with humility, almost shyness, I got the sense that he had already lived a really big life. Manhattan prep school, friends with famous people’s kids, everything. I went over to his house on the first unbearably hot day of the summer. It was a big A-frame cottage in Woodstock, with mahogany floors and high, vaulted ceilings. We walked to the

Hannaford’s down the street to pick up pasta and tomatoes and basil for dinner, and as the AC nipped our bare ankles, I thought about how strolling through a grocery store with someone really made me feel like I was really with them.

It was a nice grocery store; I had never been there before. Devin said that it had been here for a while, nine years, although he remembered the locals staged a protest before it was built. “They stood in the lot holding signs that said Can’t Afford Hannaford’s,” he said.

“Wow.” I watched Devin ponder the wall of LaCroix in front of us. “You were here nine years ago? Didn’t you say you grew up in Manhattan?” His mother was a painter, he had told me, and a successful one at that, I had gleaned for myself once I Googled her name. She had raised Devin and his little brother on the Upper West Side. His father didn’t seem to be in the picture, but Devin hadn’t told me anything about that.

“I did,” he said. “But we’ve been coming up to Woodstock since I was a little kid.”

I inferred, then, with a wonderment at why I hadn’t realized it sooner, that the house he invited me to was his family’s vacation house. I didn’t voice this realization, because I knew that would have been embarrassing, though I couldn’t tell if I would have felt more embarrassed for myself or for him. At the checkout, Devin suddenly and clumsily divided the groceries into two halves, wordlessly implying that I was to pay for one of them. Of course, I hadn’t assumed that Devin was going to pay for everything just because he was a man and I was a woman and we were probably going to have sex within the next few hours. But I always maintained an unspoken, This is my treat, you can get the next one sort of quid-pro-quo with all of my friends, and now I worried that this mindset of mine was simply a working-

person’s thing that Devin didn’t understand. I felt uneasy as we walked out of the store with our paper bags, into the dusty, humid sun, but there was a certain hierarchy to the concerns that lay in front of me in that moment, and I decided that the boy wanting to fuck me was at the top of it.

I cooked for us back at his place, stirring onions with one hand and drinking white wine straight from the bottle with the other. Devin turned on the surround-sound speakers. I swayed tipsily to the music until he came over and took the bottle from my hand, luring me away from the stove. I followed him to the middle of the living room, and we kissed and stumbled on top of the carpet and tripped over his cat. All of the blinds were up; nobody’s eyes to hide from. Just woods and darkness and little stars for miles in every direction.

Afterward, pressed together in his twin-sized bed, I stared at his pale forearm, bluish in the darkness of his bedroom. He had ended up being a little too gentle with me, but it was less like tenderness and more like terror. Every time I got on top of him, he would smile and say something that alluded towards intimacy and ownership — There she is, or that’s my girl — but I could see the fear and the distance in his eyes, even with all of the lights shut off, the look on his face that screamed, This is it from me. What more do you want?

I preferred my weekday shifts at the museum. Especially the mornings, when I could stand in a gallery alone, or with the few polite retirees who happened to walk through, and watch the early golden light drip down the cold metal limbs of the sculptures, quiet and serene. The weekend shifts were chaotic — full of tourists, minor celebrities, families with strollers and screaming children — and the managers put extra pressure on

us to sell memberships and solicit donations. Weekends also meant group tours. The tour guides were on staff too, but they only came in to give their twenty-minute Saturday tour, get paid a hundred dollars for it, and leave.

I was stationed in one of the front galleries when a notoriously eccentric tour guide, a middle-aged French man in a seersucker suit, brought a group through. He stopped them in front of one of the more popular sculptures: a row of glowing white halogen light tubes stacked next to one another in a line of ascending height.

“What is it?” a visitor said. I had heard these same words, with varying degrees of desperation, thousands of times already, about every piece of work in the museum.

“Great question,” the guide said. “But instead of wondering what it is, what if we considered how it is what it is?” Years from now, I would learn that this tour guide had lifted this line of questioning straight from Susan Sontag. But I didn’t know that now. Now, I was enrapt.

“But how do we know how it is what it is if we don’t know what it is?” another visitor said.

“Well, the sculpture is called Monument,” the tour guide said. “What do we think the monument is?”

Silence. The visitors stared at the guide, waiting for an answer. Admittedly, it didn’t look like anything, monumental or not. I could try to pull out some of the art history jargon I had amassed over the past few years, but I was tired from standing all day. I just wanted to stare at it and see a pretty light.

“Time,” the guide said. “It’s a monument to time itself. To the time between when these lights were first assembled and when they will inevitably burn out. To every time these bulbs have had to be replaced. To the day, in the very near future,

actually, when there will be no bulbs left to replace them. Not a lot of factories produce halogen lights anymore.”

I looked for reactions on the faces of the visitors, but I couldn’t glean any. A few people had already peeled off from the pack and had started wandering the museum themselves.

“Time is the cathedral we are building here,” the tour guide said, as he led the group out of the gallery and into the next one. I watched them funnel out and thought about how I could probably fall in love with someone just by watching them wordlessly walk away from a tour group, because I would never, ever have that type of audacity.

Devin and I had been seeing each other for about a month when he told me that he was going to take a road trip, by himself. We were in his backyard, drinking IPAs in front of a bonfire. I was sitting on his lap, and he was sitting on a bright red Adirondack chair. He wanted to drive out west, go camping for a few weeks. He wanted to see the Grand Canyon.

“What about your job?” I said. Devin waited tables at a vegan restaurant downtown. Just for the fun of it, I supposed.

“I quit,” he said.

“Why? I thought you loved it there.”

He shrugged. “I didn’t want to have any more responsibilities.”

I looked into the leaping flames, not sure what this meant. “What about us?” My eyes hurt.

“I feel good about us,” he said. “But I wouldn’t want to hold you back while I’m gone, or anything. Like, live your life, you know?”

He asked me if I wanted to spend the night. It was nearly two in the morning, and I had a forty-minute drive back, but I suddenly wanted to be alone, so I left. When I got home, I

ran a bath that was much too hot and screamed like an animal when I sat down in the tub, the water burning my skin, the sound of my own voice shocking me. My reaction, maybe, was out of surprise more than out of pain. I didn’t think it would hurt so much.

Devin drove out to the desert and I went back to work. I tried to talk more with the visitors when they walked by me. The long shifts went by faster when I could fill them with conversation, and I felt sick and wrong inside when visitors avoided me as if I were wallpaper. Here I was, living my life. The other gallery attendants tried to warn me about not letting visitors push me around, but I sort of liked it when they pushed me around. Not in the exact way that my coworkers were talking about, but in the way that the visitors could use me, make me into whatever they wanted me to be for the sake of their experience. I could be one of the things that they could touch.

I was stationed in the center gallery at some point in the middle of the day. I didn’t know exactly what time it was; I had gotten into the habit of leaving my phone in my staff room all day so that I wasn’t waiting to feel it buzz in my pocket. It made the day go by faster. I walked around the perimeter of the big center room, inspecting the long, color-blocked painting that stretched around all four of its walls. A group of visitors sat down on the soft gray couch and stretched out, taking in the glorious expanse of the painting. My legs ached with jealousy. I wanted to feel what it must’ve felt like to collapse onto that couch. Watching other people’s tired bodies felt like being let in on a secret. I was definitely starting to know and see too much.

At the end of the workday, I took my phone out of my locker and checked it. No messages from Devin, but he had posted

a picture of the Grand Canyon on Instagram. It had already been two weeks. I wasn’t sure when he was coming back, so I called him and asked.

“I don’t want to bother you,” I said, not really knowing why. “But I miss you.”

Devin said he didn’t know when he would be home. I told him it was hard for me to know what to do, or how to feel about him, if he couldn’t give me an answer. Then he got upset.

“I just had to quit a job that I actually really enjoyed, and that was hard for me,” he said. “I could use some sympathy from you.”

I felt a sharp pain, somewhere between my stomach and lower chest. “Nobody forced you to quit.” This happened a lot when I talked to Devin, where I got so confused that it left me at a loss for words. “It’s a huge privilege that you could quit, to just go on indefinite vacation.” When I felt lost for words, I usually defaulted to harsh ones. Devin didn’t have a response. He was tired, he had spotty service, and he needed to pitch his tent before the sun set. We said goodbye.

A crew of machines came and started construction on the east side of the museum. Power drills and hammering and scraping — ceaseless, and impossibly loud. I asked my favorite coworker Tyler what the construction was for, and he said they were replacing the mortar between every single brick on the entire east wall. I couldn’t tell if he was joking or not. It sounded like the most ridiculous and time-consuming task in the world, but given the way things were at this place — the painstaking lengths to which we all had to go to preserve minutiae at the expense of our sanity — I wouldn’t have been surprised if he was being serious.

“How often do they do that?” I asked.

“Only once every like, fifty years,” Tyler said. His eyes were wide.

After the closing announcement rang over my walkie talkie that day, I walked through the eastern gallery on my way back to the staff room. I wanted to see the Mary Corse pieces again before I went home. I had seen the same exhibit of hers a couple of years ago at the Whitney, long before it arrived at our museum. It was a collection of paintings that were varnished with a layer of microbeads. From a distance, they all looked like plain white canvases, but when you got up close, you could see that the museum lights were casting the shadow of your own body onto the beads, creating an iridescent halo of light that moved with you. There was also a dark corner room, with a white lightbox plugged into the wall, so small and cloaked in shadow that it made you feel like you had it all to yourself. I felt different standing in front of the glowing white prism alone and in my work uniform. I stared at it, letting the light burn my eyes because there was nobody there to stop me from doing so. On one of my first days of work, Tyler had shown me this little room and asked if I noticed the charred, noxious smell. I had. The year before there had been an electrical problem with the prism and the room had caught fire. They had to evacuate the museum. Even though the smell was still there, we weren’t supposed to tell any visitors that something like that had ever happened. When I stood in the little room now, I was boxed in with the sculpture so tightly that I could feel it radiating heat onto my skin. It was clear to me how easily it could catch fire again, if any one small thing were to go wrong, and I knew, then, that Devin in the tent in the desert did not feel the same way about me that Devin in the A-frame house in the woods did. They felt

to me like two different people — they talked differently, treated me differently, had different levels of patience for me and my inane questions, my infantile wants. The one solace that I held onto, as this realization sunk heavily onto my upper chest, was that I, no matter where I was in space, remained the same. This room would be my cathedral, I decided. In front of the white light, I could see the truth, and the things that the light was showing me were things that stung.

On my walk from the museum to the train station, Devin called. He asked me if I was happy.

“I am,” I said. But it sounded desperate. “I mean, I think I am. Aren’t you?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I feel a lot of animosity coming from you. It doesn’t feel good.”

His voice felt far away. The train pulled in, dredging up a cold wind. “I have to get this train,” I said, wanting to back out of this conversation and never return to it. He told me to call him back when I got home. I boarded the train, sat down, and curled my arms around my knees, trying to make myself as small as possible. It was a disgusting type of summer day, the air heavy and wet. I kept picturing myself calling Devin back and hearing him say that he was on his way home after all, that we could give things a real shot once he got back to New York. But I didn’t believe that, not really. The train heaved alongside the river; the distant buildings shielded by fog. I had never seen the Hudson look that ugly before.

By the time I arrived home, the sun was back out. The honeythick golden hour sun was melting over the brick buildings, but I knew it was too late. I sat on the back steps of my apartment, not wanting to go inside and have to say hello to my roommates.

I was in a strange position, one wherein I had the chance to delay the inevitable, where I could choose the exact moment when I wanted this to happen.

I thought about what it would be like when I finally dialed Devin’s number and heard his voice. From my end he would be able to hear car horns and unruly shouts from the street. On his end, I would only hear birds chirping. Crystal-clear, as if they were perched on his shoulder or flitting around in his lap. I pictured him sitting in his backyard, in the red Adirondack chair, his grass more lush than mine, his house emptier and quieter and cleaner, with the speakers and the smell of firewood. He would take painfully long pauses between his words, and the pauses would just give me even more time to focus on those birds. He would tell me I couldn’t be angry at him for things he couldn’t control, and that my anger made him very, very uncomfortable. Then, I would start to get, ironically, very angry, not so much at the things he would say, but at that slow gentleness with which he would say them. As if his being soft and vague could render this whole disappointment entirely imperceptible; could render me, by contrast, a maniac. And so, I would stay quiet. I could give Devin that much — he was always so good at shutting me up. The loudest thing of all, by far, would be the birds.