Willa & Hesper Read online

  * * *

  FIRST: WE HAD PANCAKES. We shared a plate, thick with berries and lightly browned. We patted them with little rectangles of butter, spread them with a glowing layer of jam and syrup. Then we took the 1 train to a crosstown bus, and for a minute I forgot that I’d ever mentioned loving the Neue Galerie to Hesper directly; I thought it must have been a result of our connectedness. Sitting in the carpeted seats of the bus, Hesper cupped my knee. “I love how you have a uniform,” Hesper said, fumbling with a button over a non-functional pocket of her jacket.

  “I just like a V-neck,” I said. “And…stretch. The occasional cardigan.” I resisted the word comfortable.

  “It’s perfect on you,” Hesper said. The bus squeezed slowly through traffic. Rows of red brake lights throbbed as the cars stopped, started, swooped between lanes. As we whirred through Central Park, Hesper’s hair looked particularly tinged with red, and I found myself smiling for no reason, for every reason.

  We went inside. The museum was resplendent, both exterior and interior. We clipped little tags onto the collars of our shirts. I pointed out all of my favorite things: the clock in the first room on the second floor with all of its gold discs, the contrast of gold wallpaper near the crown molding and the diffuse, airy gray color of the walls.

  “This one,” I said, stopping in front of Adele Bloch Bauer. A thicket of tourists lingered around the painting, too, with their cell phones zoomed in on Adele’s impassive, doughy face. “I know it’s a pretty common favorite painting,” I said. It was, at least, better than The Kiss, which every freshman had push-pinned over their bed at college. Hesper leaned close to the portrait of Adele with a curious expression, the same tentative look that she had when she approached a sleeping Tibby. “But I love what she’s doing with her hands, like she’s trying to fold inside of herself.”

  “She’s so uncomfortable,” Hesper said.

  “Yeah, but all the gold leaf is so elegant and lavish, at first that’s all you see. It’s like…she’s at the fanciest occasion of her life, wearing her finest jewelry and clothes, but she’s still in this cloud of anxiety.” I took a few steps to the left, angled to properly examine the metallic sheen in the light. I crouched, scrutinized. “I love how the gold shines in person, how you can see the light move right over it.”

  “She looks a little like you,” Hesper said.

  “We both look really Ashkenazi Jewish,” I replied, with a little laugh. “Is that what you mean?”

  Hesper said, “Um…I don’t know. I didn’t mean it like—”

  “Oh, no, no,” I said. “I know. I just mean…people can tell. Looking at me.” Everyone could; I was the picture of Ashkenazi Jewishness. My dad’s mother, Grandma Joan, who’d died in 2003, had said, You can’t wash your star off, Willa, when I’d tried to straighten my hair every day before school. The smell of my hair, burnt, burning, with those unreachable waves in the back that gave me away. I stopped eventually.

  Hesper buttoned and unbuttoned her jacket. “It seems so weird to me that people could glance over at another person and think to himself, ‘Oh, that person is Jewish.’ I just…I didn’t realize it could be overt, like that.”

  “Because you don’t know a lot of Jews or anti-Semites?” I suggested. I tried to keep my voice light. Full of air.

  Hesper kept her eyes on the painting. “Maybe,” she said. “This sold for a hundred thirty-five million dollars?”

  I shrugged. I thought of the Nazis, slipping this into their collection of ransacked art, hanging Adele’s nervous, dead face in a museum somewhere. She’d been lucky, I remembered from my last visit and ensuing Wikipedia deep-dive, to have died from meningitis in 1925. “It’s the perfect painting,” I said. “Don’t you think? It has beauty but also it makes you feel…like you’re witnessing this private, painful moment of her life. Do you see it?” I asked, getting close enough to Hesper so that the presence of her body rippled like a wave against mine.

  Hesper, ever so slightly, relaxed against my arm. “I see it,” she said, quiet.

  * * *

  IN THE CAFE DOWNSTAIRS, we ordered coffees with blankets of whipped cream on top and three slices of cake to share. Hesper kept her fork extended in midair, unsure whether to try the raspberry or the chocolate hazelnut or the kirschtorte first. She slurped the whipped cream from her coffee until it coated her whole mouth and I thought about later, how inevitably the end of Willa Greenberg day would be sex, wouldn’t it? But I tried to keep my face still, inscrutable besides a love of cake. Cake love was acceptable to express.

  “Oh my God,” Hesper said, covering her mouth. “That hazelnut thing is unbelievable.”

  “I know,” I said, smiling. “It’s the best. That’s why it’s a main ingredient in my perfect day.”

  “You have excellent taste,” Hesper said. “This is almost as good as dessert in Paris.”

  “I’ve never been.”

  “That’s right! You’re an airplane travel virgin. Paris is, you know, it sounds cliché at this point, but it’s magical. I remember, the first time we were there, Ada was obsessed with this one bus route. The Seventy-Two. It went right past the Louvre, to the Eiffel Tower, and once they let us ride for free and we were so excited. And pistachio ice cream! Pistachio ice cream everywhere.” Hesper unleashed a packet of sugar into her murky coffee. “I just can’t believe you’ve never been. There are all these pictures of me at my most awkward, middle-school phase, giving Ada bunny ears at the Pompidou while my dad harangued us about ruining our future memories.

  “We’ll have to go,” she said. She said it the same way as she might say, “I need contact solution.”

  I tried to busy myself with my fork, creeping closer to the torte’s marzipan layer. “You know,” Hesper said, lifting the fork from my hand, “you’re really cute when you’re trying to play it cool, Willa. You could be a living example of the phrase I wear my heart on my sleeve.”

  “I know,” I sighed.

  * * *

  HESPER TRIUMPHANTLY RETRIEVED THE last bite of the hazelnut torte. “Hey. What animal would you be?”

  I tried to think. What animal would I be, not what animal would I want to be, I puzzled. I knew exactly what I’d want to be: a gazelle, so fast that by the time you realized you’d seen it, it was already gone. Fast enough to run from anything.

  “Probably a bird?” I said tentatively. “My mom says I used to chirp myself to sleep, as a baby. What about you?”

  Hesper scraped her fork against the plate. “Aw,” she said, and cupped her free hand over my shoulder. “A little parakeet. I could definitely see that. You hold on so tight.” She twisted her fingers into talons. “I’d be a koala bear.”

  “Why a koala bear?”

  “Because they love eucalyptus leaves,” she said. “The best, most Californian smell there is. And all they do is sit in trees and sleep, which is ideal.”

  I hadn’t known that about koalas. What I remembered, exclusively, was that even though they looked adorable, they could turn violent without any notice. Sharp teeth, sharp claws.

  “What about— What do you want to be when you grow up?”

  I laughed. “That’s cute.”

  It had been such a long time since anyone had asked me that. I’d been the first person to declare an English major in my year at college. After graduation, I’d taken the first job I could find, annihilating unnecessary commas in educational media catalogues in a silent office in a converted church on the Upper West Side. So quiet you could hear someone crank open a seltzer bottle, the hiss of it, as loud as a car engine turning over.

  “In my dreamworld, I’d want to write the kind of book that people quoted and had lines tattooed over their hearts. I’d be a literary celebrity, I guess. As famous as Zadie Smith—recognizable, coveted to teach at fancy conferences in the summer, my choice of university for tenure. I’d be the answer to a question at a trivia night.” I felt Hesper’s foot tap against the tiled floor. “What about you?”

 
“I don’t know,” Hesper said.

  “Come on. I just admitted my trivia night dream.”

  “No, I mean, I really have no idea. The future just seems…far away.” Hesper picked a jammy corner of her mouth away with her fingernail. “In class, with so many people that are like, full-fledged adults, it’s just…it’s noticeable. People with little children and jobs that pay for their cars to the airport. To me, the idea of having a kid is like talking about colonizing Mars. To produce a child,” she said, in bewilderment.

  “Without the additional complications of spacesuits.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Everybody feels that way when they’re twenty-two,” I said, trying very hard not to ask the question But do you want to have kids of your own, someday, when it isn’t as opaque and ungraspable as a Mars colony? “It’s mandatory. It’s the emotional equivalent of getting your wisdom teeth removed.”

  Her sad mood was fleeting. I felt it disappear. She twisted her hair into a donut.

  Hesper touched her jaw. “I still have mine!” she exclaimed. “How do I know when it’s time?”

  “You’ll feel them starting to break through and it’ll hurt…badly.”

  “Maybe they never will. Maybe I’ll be the first person whose wisdom teeth never crown, and my life will arrange in perfect little boxes without any exhaustive introspection.” Hesper motioned for me to finish the last of the cake pieces. Trails of jam and crumbs looped across the surface of the plate. “Maybe this is the first day of my new life. What do you think?”

  “It’s possible,” I said. “It’s definitely possible.”

  “I have more plans for your day. Are you ready?”

  * * *

  WE WALKED THROUGH CENTRAL Park, looping around the reservoir with the tourists and their selfie sticks capturing the slate-gray water, peppered with little mallard ducks and miscellaneous plants. A woman in pink suede heels scolded her unruly terrier: “Not now, Buttercup!” with such seriousness and volume that we started laughing and couldn’t stop. Each time our laughter came to a plateau, one of us repeated the line and it was still so absurd, so funny. I slipped my arm through Hesper’s, my eyes wet from laughing with my whole body. Accidentally I started to sing aloud, instead of in my head: “Why do you build me up, buttercup, baby?”

  It had been a long time since I heard myself sing.

  Hesper joined in right away, not leaving me a pause to be self-conscious. “I need you! I need you!” she sang, off-pitch but jubilant. It didn’t even seem possible to be self-conscious, though we were singing loudly in front of a steady stream of strangers. It seemed easy. “So build me up, buttercup, don’t break my heart,” we finished, fingers interlaced.

  Visions of the rest of my life floated gently up to me. Buying Hesper a package of blackberries that I’d found at a supermarket. Ticking the box that said married on my W-9. Fireplaces, thunderstorms, Tibby sleeping over my toes like a blanket. We twisted through the rest of the park—the spot where the waffle truck parked, the bridge leading back up toward Morningside. We swung up my block, that indomitable incline with its newly repainted blue buildings.

  I watched her, Hesper, that casual charm of her expression and her hands as she talked, the way she hooked her thumbs underneath the straps of her backpack as if we were embarking on a great journey, and I wondered if she was leading me back to my apartment. I thought of it: the rush of kissing, knowing that kissing would lead forward, forward, breathing sex into my body, and: that I wanted, wanted, but was also afraid. I thought of her fingers trailing the path between my knees and my collarbones. Her breath hot in my ear. Then I thought of the boy. His thumbprint on my arm, underneath my right breast, my rib cage where he’d pressed, the scaly tree. I was going to kiss it right out of my system; a reboot.

  “You’re probably wondering where we’re going.”

  “I’m maybe wondering.”

  “There’s this restaurant near where I live that’s super romantic and cozy. Picture this,” Hesper said, and I closed my eyes. “Candlelight, checked tablecloths. We’re surrounded by bookcases and spaghetti. Okay, the bookcases are actually wallpaper, now that I think of it. But the vibe is like being in a cute Italian grandmother’s kitchen.”

  The dinner was as quaint and lovely as she’d described. We shared two bowls of pasta, rich with butter, freshly grated Parmesan like a snowfall over the long twirls of each spinach-y green noodle. Hesper swept her bread in the puddled remains of sauce and I wondered how I’d never thought to do that before, how my uneaten sauce sat, untouched, at the bottom of every bowl I’d ever had.

  As I pulled one sleeve onto my shoulder, I thought: I’m in love, I’m totally in love, and wondered how I would wait the interminable wait between when you know you love someone and when you say it to the object of your love, how would I wait, how would I even be able to finish slipping my other arm into the cardigan’s sleeve space? And in the middle of my wondering, gallantly, Hesper leaned across the table to hold my cardigan open so I could snake my arm in and smiled.

  Then, Hesper’s apartment. She closed the door behind us. Put her lips on mine.

  It was a dance: her arm moved and my arm rose to meet her arm. I took a step backward against the wall and she took a step closer to me so I was there, tucked in the corner between the bookcase and the floor lamp and I felt safe there; surrounded completely by Hesper’s body and the furniture, I felt as if nothing could find me that I couldn’t see already. Hesper tucked her hand behind my head so it wouldn’t hurt against the wall and the love I felt was even more acute, it had ballooned. I opened my mouth wider. I was kissing her tirelessly; maybe I would never feel tired again. I had never thought the word kiss so often in my own consciousness; it was like an echo of my thoughts building toward a crescendo, a crescendo of kissing. Hesper’s fingers trailed down the front of my body, irrepressible as she whispered: “Is this okay?” and I said: “Let me go first,” tilting my mouth to meet her neck, her clavicle, the slant of her bones. I couldn’t tell her that I loved her with my words so I told her with my hands on her chest, her stomach, the handle of her hips. I told her and told her, I slithered my fingers down the front of her silk pants. I was delicate and slow until I wasn’t slow anymore at all, and Hesper exhaled, breathy, the beginnings of what her sounds were, the sounds that I would memorize and think of as I walked alone to the gym or the florist or the pancake special, that sputter of Hesper as she got close, closer.

  * * *

  “BE CAREFUL,” SHE SAID. Leading me toward her bedroom, she asked, “Do you want me to turn off the light?”

  “No,” I said. “I want to see you.”

  I did—of course I did, but I also wanted to see everything around me; every trinket and notebook and light fixture and coffee-ringed cup; I wanted to see if there were an intruder that emerged behind Hesper’s beautiful head so that I would at least know what was about to happen, so that I wouldn’t be surprised, this time. Don’t do this, I thought. Don’t think of it; don’t think of him. Don’t think at all. And I reached for Hesper, I wanted to feel her uncalloused hands traipsing over my body; I wanted to watch the expression in her face change from self-conscious to sultry. “Careful,” Hesper said again, cradling the back of my head as it came down against her bedspread, and then I felt invigorated with energy I didn’t realize I had. I’m not fragile, I thought, and my un-fragileness slashed through our kissing, in my motions, a kind of vehemence, or maybe it was violence. I couldn’t kiss her fast enough or emphatically enough. I wanted those kisses to say: I’m unbreakable. I’m unbroken. But when I got closer, I had to shut my eyes anyway, and then I was alone in that writhing dark lull before it happened, and when I came it was spasmodic, like I was a puppet whose master had dropped the strings.

  I pulled my knees to my chin and let Hesper stroke my scalp. I held my breath. What was the thing that I felt? It was the return of the old flutter, the return of knowing I wasn’t alone. It breathed in me, a wobble of certainty. You were
right here, I thought, and I didn’t know whether I was talking to God, or Hesper, or both.

  “You know what you wrote in your letter?” I said. “That you couldn’t stop thinking of me?”

  Hesper blinked dreamily. “Yeah?”

  “I can’t stop thinking of you either,” I said.

  “I told my mom about you,” Hesper said quietly.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. Although my sister definitely told her first, because she had a pretty mellow response.” Hesper laughed a little. “It was like, ‘Oh, I heard your good news, Lemon. Send me a picture of you girls having fun!’”

  “But she didn’t know you were”—I paused, trying not to identify Hesper’s sexual orientation for her—“interested in women, right? She just rolled with it?”

  “I guess I outsourced my coming out story to Ada.”

  “And she was okay with it?”

  “We’re from San Francisco,” Hesper said. But I was from the New York metropolitan area, I thought. I’d been able to taste the dust from 9/11 in my lungs, and it hadn’t meant anything when it came to my mom’s response about dating women. You, at least, could make things easy for me, Willa, she’d said. And what else was there to say? After five years, when it came up in conversation, she politely asked questions the way you might to an annoying loquacious neighbor. It was the best I could hope for.

  She tucked her fingers in the space between my breasts. “Did you like Willa Greenberg day?”