A Touch of Jen Read online

  A woman waiting next to them is eating a banana and Remy says, “I read that bananas are going extinct. Like honeybees.”

  Alicia’s eyes fill with tears.

  “Jesus Christ,” he says.

  “I’m sorry!”

  “It’s going to be fine. They can put robots into people’s bloodstreams now. I’m sure they can figure out the banana situation.”

  Alicia excuses her tears by boring him with a complicated explanation about when her menstrual hormones kick in. Even a cursory analysis would reveal that the timing doesn’t make mathematical sense.

  The movie start time comes and passes while they’re still waiting for the train, and Remy has to pretend he’s not irritated. Alicia continues to apologize abjectly, her face slimy with tears.

  Eventually they stop waiting for the train and go aboveground, trying to figure out what to do now that they’ve missed the movie. They go into a thrift store, both agreeing not to spend any money unless they find a shirt for Remy, which he needs. The store is small and no music plays. The clothing-insulated quality of the silence makes it more bearable not to talk for a while.

  Eventually, Alicia holds up a crocheted halter-top. “Doesn’t this top look like the one Jen was wearing?”

  Remy knows which top she’s talking about. He’s actually seen it in person. He remembers Jen working the patio and then coming back inside with sweat in her cleavage, asking the barback can she please eat another cocktail garnish because she’s absolutely starving. He tells Alicia this.

  “It’s strange how much I’ve forgotten her.” He’s transfixed by the halter-top. It’s not exactly the same, but close enough. He can almost visualize Jen in front of him—almost. Alicia pets the top while she listens to him, as if trying to wake it up. “There’s a difference between being reminded of someone from their pictures and viscerally remembering them,” he says. “One thing I forget is how her face moves. Now when I picture her face moving, it’s just a blank space attached to a ponytail.”

  “I can put it on,” says Alicia. She goes to the fitting room and puts on the top. She moves around for his benefit and for the mirrors. She tells him to bring her something else.

  Remy looks around the store, picking out items that Jen might wear. Some sort of shiny tunic. A weird Dust Bowl–era dress. Something eighties. Alicia reads aloud the brand names on the tags, which mean nothing to Remy. The project makes him feel stupid, but it’s better than not connecting to Jen at all.

  “I’m Jen and I’m headed to a yoga retreat,” says Alicia, stepping in front of the dressing room curtain and turning in front of the mirror. “I’m Jen and I’m allergic to synthetic fabrics.” This makes Remy laugh.

  The other customers stare intensely into the clothing racks or their phones. Alicia puts on a dress and does a wholesome milkmaid spin. Remy squints his eyes and looks at the outfit. To the best of his ability, he erases Alicia. Perhaps it’s the close, woolen atmosphere of the shop that makes him so suggestible.

  “Ah!” he says, batting his hand in front of his eyes. “That was so weird. It’s like she’s close or something.”

  “Sometimes you talk like she’s dead.”

  “I remembered the specific intervals of the rings on her fingers. Not the rings themselves, but the spacing. I don’t know why, but it sort of did it for me. Like, brought her to life.” It’s been two years and seven months since he’s seen her.

  “Do you want me to wear rings?” says Alicia.

  He analyzes the mechanics of this. Alicia’s hands aren’t like Jen’s and the rings wouldn’t look right. Jen has stopped even wearing rings, at least as far as he can tell from her recent posts.

  He buys the top for Alicia to wear, on the condition that she only wear it at home.

  “It wasn’t so much that you reminded me of Jen,” he says as they walk back to the train, “as that I was able to superimpose my memory of her on you.” He holds her shoulders. He asks if that makes sense.

  Alicia says, “The things I do for love!” Then, to push this charged word out of the air, she says, “It’s been a long time since you’ve seen her. Maybe we could invite her over.” They both walk down the street with the overwhelming sense that they could bump into her at any second.

  “No,” he says, smiling in a way that implies he could be persuaded. “No, no.”

  They watch an episode of the spy show and then lie awake in the dark, predicting what the evil scientist’s punishment will be. The show’s punishments reveal a creative, often biblical sensibility not evident in any other aspects of the show’s writing.

  Alicia says that since the evil scientist has so much plastic surgery, she should be subjected to a nose job without anesthetic. “You know,” she says, her voice eerie and sourceless in the dark, “that with a nose job, the doctor has to pull the skin up over your eyeballs. So maybe she could just be, you know, peeled apart and then left like that.”

  “You know so much about nose jobs.”

  “I’d do it if I had the money. But I don’t really need it. Honestly, all I want is eight thousand dollars.” Alicia’s always talking about eight thousand dollars. “Eight thousand dollars would really set me up. I could quit the Hungry Goat. I could just chill for a while.”

  The room is filled with cold light. They sit up. They’ve each received a notification that Jen posted a new photo. They laugh at the simultaneity of their movements.

  “God,” he says, “you know we have a mystical connection.”

  Alicia laughs, and the pleasure on her face is so naked that he’s embarrassed for her.

  “I mean…me and Jen. Not you and me.”

  “What?”

  “Just kidding,” he says. “Kidding!”

  “Ah,” says Alicia.

  “Still thinking about the coffee in Reykjavík!” says Jen’s caption.

  Remy gets up for work before Alicia and sees the halter-top slung over the side of the bed. He feels quieter. He notices this quiet feeling, but doesn’t interrogate it for fear of disturbing it.

  He works at a health food restaurant with a casual atmosphere but high-maintenance clientele. Jessica Alba came in once. Everyone on staff made a big show to each other about how they didn’t care (except for Inez, who kept fanning herself with her hands).

  During brunch, he’s surprised to find that he isn’t bothered by the low buzz of anxiety he normally experiences at work. A woman comes in, alone, undulating her arms like Isadora Duncan. He doesn’t think he’s seen her before, but Inez tells him that she’s a regular and that she always does that—never stops moving.

  “Don’t be alarmed,” says the woman when she sees how he looks at her, holding his notepad. “Movement keeps you young. I’m a holistic doctor. I know what I’m talking about.”

  “…Okay,” says Remy.

  “Movement is the essence of life. No one tells you that. Right now I’m adding years to my life.”

  He recites the specials to her. She raises her arms above her head and asks if the rice in the vegan pilaf contains arsenic. He informs her, with a phrasing that has become more practiced and scientific over time, “All rice contains arsenic on a molecular level. But it’s not present in harmful quantities.”

  “That’s incorrect. There’s a difference between organic and inorganic arsenic levels, and it varies by region. Do you know whence the rice is derived?”

  Remy watches her movements for his opening, like the spy from the TV show, who times his jump off a road bridge so impeccably that he lands in the villain’s convertible. When rhythmically permissible, Remy suggests the tartine.

  Normally this interaction would make him cranky, but as he leaves her table to input the order, he enjoys the sensation that he’s pulled something off and that if he were being filmed, he would appear confident. There are times—when he’s not too hungover—when the monotonous rhythm of food service gives Remy a druggy sense of satisfaction, as if he’s slipped into some preordained stream of motion in which his decisions aren’t made but assigned to him.

  As he navigates each wave of diners, keeping track of the tables in his section and vaguely enjoying his own long-developed intuition about how and when to give each of them his attention, and as he weaves through the tables, balancing plates, sensitive to every aspect of his surroundings (the different quality of chatter as he moves from the kitchen to the dining area, the water droplets trembling on plates fresh from the dishwasher), he feels so capable that he forgets that this repetitive churning goes nowhere, except towards the end of the day.

  The holistic doctor waltzes to the bathroom, lightly touching bars and booths as she passes. He punches her order into a POS system petaled with fingerprints and he can almost hallucinate Jen right next to him, a few inches lower, tying the tacky apron that was part of the Belasco’s uniform—one day around two years and seven months ago, before Belasco’s closed.

  He gets the chance to check his phone and sees that Alicia has sent him a long string of superstitious texts. She says, not for the first time, that she’s getting “vibes” from the apartment. That the TV remote started working again, although she thought the batteries were dead. That the showerhead isn’t making its usual gothic moans, and that she fried an egg for dinner and it had two yolks.

  Alicia: I have the best feeling. Like something momentous is about to happen.

  In a slow moment, Remy complains to Inez about Alicia’s superstitions. He tells her that none of Alicia’s predictions ever come true, and when they don’t, she finds a way to blame it on her period, “which half the time is imaginary, and never comes when she says it will.”

  Inez says that he needs to stop being “so negative.” Remy can’t help looking at Inez’s boobs as she lectures him.

  “What’s your necklace for?” he says. Inez’s necklaces always mean something.

  The stone bobs in the marsupial indent of her cleavage while Inez tells him that moss agate promises abundance in love and money. She gives him a technical explanation that makes the stone move around a lot.

  “Well, I have abundant love for you,” says Remy.

  Inez makes an aww sound identical to the one she directs at children small enough to require booster seats.

  After the brunch shift is over, Remy overhears several of the waitstaff talking about getting a drink and choreographs a movement close by, plausibly as part of a work-related task. He approaches and then retreats, but never elicits an invitation.

  “Remy, why do you keep grabbing napkins?” says Rocco on the third attempt.

  Remy stares at the napkins in his hand and then says that he’s afraid he has a nosebleed.

  “Look at me,” says Inez.

  Remy looks at her.

  “You don’t have a nosebleed.”

  “Sometimes I can feel them coming.”

  “You were just complaining that Alicia had imaginary periods. And now you’re complaining about imaginary bleeding.”

  The fact that Rocco turns his head to laugh informs Remy that this joke doesn’t include him. Maybe it’s part of an ongoing narrative between Inez and Rocco about him. He still doesn’t get an invitation, and they leave. He could be remembering things wrong, but he’s sure he wasn’t this awkward before he started dating Alicia.

  Remy is invited to the house party of a friend from school with whom he’s not particularly close. Neither of them wants to go, but Alicia keeps saying that something momentous is about to occur.

  Remy treats this as a joke but has started to get the same feeling, no matter how irrational it is. Yes, something momentous might occur. Maybe he’ll see someone he hasn’t seen in a long time.

  The party is in an expensively renovated brownstone, the front door bracketed with security cameras that don’t attempt to blend into the prewar moldings.

  “Isn’t it crazy? I’m house-sitting!” says the friend. He gestures at the chandelier, the artwork, and a shaggy little dog. The dog flips down the staircase towards them like a hairdo. The friend scoops up the dog and aims it at them in a way that demands compliments. They compliment the dog.

  “I love showering here,” says the friend. “I had to look up some of the shampoos online. Each bottle is like sixty dollars.” He tells them about other expensive items in the house. He gives them an update on how his career is doing and then disappears for the rest of the evening.

  Remy and Alicia wander around with plastic cups. They don’t know anyone except an old coworker that Remy doesn’t feel like talking to.

  Alicia says, “We should just be friendly! We never go out.”

  “I’m sure we’ll know some other people here.”

  Remy walks systematically through each room, onto the patio, then back into the house. He doesn’t look back to check that Alicia’s following him, since he knows she will.

  They wander into the kitchen, near the alcohol, and examine the greeting cards on the refrigerator. One of them has a picture of a donut on the front and says, I donut know how to thank you enough! Another one says, Out of all the faces in the world, yours is my absolute favorite!

  “What a weird card,” says Remy.

  “Yeah. It sounds like this person wants to peel off your face and wear it.”

  “Haha!” says a strange girl, trying to participate in the conversation. “Yeah, that’s exactly what it sounds like! Weird!”

  Alicia looks at the stranger with frightened eyes. The girl’s face is made up into try-hard brilliance. Remy and Alicia adjust their bodies to shut her out.

  “I thought,” he says to Alicia, “when I was walking through the rooms just now…I thought for one second that maybe there was a chance, you know…”

  “She might come later.”

  “She’s been posting pictures of jewelry, so I don’t think she’s traveling.”

  They refill their cups. Out of boredom, they do shots of vodka.

  “Woo!” says Alicia, after her second shot. The strange girl claps confusedly.

  They stay for an hour, but don’t see anyone else they know.

  The next day, Remy finally has the time to deal with the broken fan in his laptop, and he and Alicia go to the Apple Store. There, they run into Jen.

  Remy, shell-shocked, introduces Alicia and then monitors Jen’s face for a reaction when he refers to her as “my girlfriend.” Alicia monitors Jen’s face too.

  “Jen was another server at Belasco’s before it closed,” he says.

  “Oh really?” says Alicia. He and Alicia both use exaggerated gestures of goodwill and surprise in order to appear casual, as if meeting her there affects them in no way and is just the sort of unremarkable accident one can expect in day-to-day urban life. It makes them both look very wild, they realize afterwards.

  Jen smells strongly of body odor. She shakes Alicia’s hand and hugs Remy with a total lack of self-consciousness about how she smells. Remy finds this terrifying. “Remy, I wish you would come out with us sometime,” says Jen. “You know, everyone else has really stayed connected.”

  “I’m sure you’re not really connected,” he says. He hears his own laugh as if from a distance. It’s deranged.

  He turns to Alicia and explains, pretending that he’s never told her this before: “Jen and I hated those people. We really bonded because Belasco’s was such a freakshow.”

  Jen says, “I don’t remember us hating them. I thought it was a great crew.”

  “Allie and her phobia about chewing gum!” says Remy. “And what’s-his-name, the oyster-shucking guy. That you were always avoiding! And”—Remy looks heavenward before naming the greatest hit—“Harry the Homophobe. What did he always used to say? ‘Don’t be so open-minded that your brain falls out’?”

  “Aw, those were such fun times,” says Jen. She doesn’t take up the old, mean line of conversation. “I’ve really missed you!”

  Alicia notices how Jen’s boobs are large enough to make her stomach—as round and well-hydrated as a yoga instructor’s—seem smaller by comparison. She glows with health and well-being. Her upper lip catches on her adult braces. She’s real. She’s right there. “Actually, I think you’ll know some of the people I’m going to surf with in July. We’re going to this amazing place in the Hamptons. You should come. You should both come.”

  They say that they don’t know how to surf, and Jen says that beginners are perfectly fine—that several other people coming don’t have much experience at all.

  Their close, attentive grouping around her suggests that Jen is an Apple Store employee, and several customers approach and then back away once they realize that she doesn’t wear a lanyard. Other customers linger nearby, sensing a dramatically charged quality to the atmosphere.

  Jen tells them about her latest trip, in Indonesia, and Remy tells her about his computer fan. Jen’s body language remains attentive while he talks, but he can sense that he’s boring her. In order to appear unaffected, Remy doesn’t stop talking about his computer fan. Then he overcorrects and becomes hostile. “I cannot fucking believe how these companies train you to be dependent on their unethically assembled products, and then when they break, the world stops, and they get to squeeze a few more dollars out of you.”

  “Yeah,” says Alicia. She’s trying to help. She’s sweating.

  “Yeah,” says Jen. “Totally.”

  After Jen leaves, they give her a fifteen-minute head start, even though they have no reason to stay. They watch the demo animation on the iPads—a multicolored line twisting on a black background. They can’t see Jen anymore, but they know that right now, she’s making a similarly bright path through space, somewhere. Always, in fact.

  His hostility about the computer fan was completely manufactured, but Remy still feels hostile an hour later. He doesn’t talk about what happened. Alicia doesn’t say anything until he does.

  “How did you like those earrings?” he says, finally.