Glit

Fiction, Mary Elis Tharin

The canvases lean against a bare section of living room wall. Most are placemat or doormat-sized, a few bigger, all of them white, like the wall. Practically invisible. I might have forgotten about them if Tina hadn’t started with the comments. Things like “I can’t wait to see what you make out of these,” and “How do you come up with your ideas?” and “The creative process is so fascinating!” 

But today Tina wants to clean. Her friend is coming to visit, and could I take the canvases up to my room? She sounds apologetic, but she should not be. I bought the canvases for a warehouse exhibition, and it is tomorrow. Twenty hours from now. 

It takes three trips to bring canvases up to my loft. I prop them against the furniture—bright white rectangles, they censor the dresser, lamp, hamper. All from Craigslist. When I drove down from the Bay, I took only what fit in my Civic: clothes, two potted succulents, a stuffed giraffe named Dragon. None of my paintings. The smaller ones are in my dad’s garage. I took the big one to the dump, where it cost three hundred dollars to throw away. 

I flop on the bed and fold myself into my phone. New match on my dating app. Simon’s profile is minimalist: one photo, his half-shadowed face against the sky. I send him my opening question—Dream job/actual job?—then switch to the news. A photo of a man on an escalator. He’s running for President. The article says the escalator is made of gold. But it can’t be. Even an alloy would be too heavy, too soft. Surely they just mean the color of the finish. Why don’t they say that? 

Simon has responded: Screenwriter/line cook. You? 

I put down the phone.

At the luxury grocery store where I work, I slice fruit. Pineapples, kiwis, watermelons; I strip off their rinds, reduce what’s left to cubes or wedges, seal the exposed flesh inside clear plastic tubs. This morning, the last mango wasn’t ripe. It slid under my fingers, slippery with tannin. I twisted the blade under the seed and it split apart, blitzing a halo of juice around the cutting board. It will taste astringent, but that’s not my problem. I had a box to fill. 

Tina gets her fruit delivered. Gorgeous pears and persimmons wrapped in foil and nestled into padded boxes. It’s not clear to me whether this is special fruit or if all mail-order fruit is treated with such care. Tina could buy special fruit if she wanted to. She works in an office where people wear pencil skirts. She can almost afford the mortgage on this Silver Lake townhouse. Tina is living the dream. 

I write back to Simon: So you can cook ;) 

My final project for art school—the one I took to the dump—was a twelve-by-twelve-foot grid of women’s faces. I pulled them from social media and screen printed them over acrylic color blocks in teal and violet and gold. I explained it as a twenty-first-century reimagining of Warhol’s Monroe: now anyone could be Marilyn. 

It took up an entire wall of the industrial-chic gallery space my school rented for our graduate showcase. I was standing in the middle of the gallery, in a protective clump with other grads, when I noticed the couple. Both had silver hair and wore glasses with thick, angular frames. The woman’s paisley shawl looked smooth enough to drip through a funnel. They moved with the calm command of people who’d walked through hundreds of museums. They reminded me of what my parents must have been like before I knew them. 

In the early eighties, my parents bought a brown-shingled cottage in Half Moon Bay. They set up a ceramics studio, then bought a screen press, then drained the last of their savings refurbishing a loom. They divorced when I was ten and my mother moved to the dry side of Oregon. My dad got a professional degree and a job in IT. I can still hear the note of defeat in his voice when I told him I’d decided on art school. 

My parents were not at the showcase. My father had developed a phobia of driving over water and never crossed the Bay. I’d told my mother we weren’t allowed guests.  

The paisley woman was holding one of the disposable champagne flutes that my classmates and I had assembled that morning—the stems making bright, plasticine squeaks as we twisted them on. She stepped up to my piece and said, “Lovely technique.” 

The man mumbled something. 

The woman nodded. “Too bad it’s been done a million times.” 

Three glasses of bottom-shelf prosecco later, I realized this woman was the most important person who’d ever stepped through my life. A messenger sent to tell me the shining truth: I was not an artist. I was a joke. Too bad all that loan money was gone. 

I felt oddly buoyant. Giving up, it turns out, can feel like floating. 

The afterparty was at a vaguely Western-themed SOMA dive bar. A taxidermied rattlesnake hung over the entrance. All the graduates ordered Fernet and Cokes, and we cracked our glasses together. Everyone was talking about the future: fellowships and graphic design internships and residencies in France. I drained my drink, went to the bar, and slid onto a velvet green stool. 

“Rough night?” The woman beside me smiled. I smiled back. She ordered two tequila shots and put one down in front of me. “Cheers.” 

The woman could tell I wanted to talk. Her earrings dazzled: gold loops connected to bigger loops with tiny loops in between. She could feel my aura, she said. I was born to create. She said other things, too. I don’t remember how many more tequilas we had, tapping lines of salt onto our hands and licking them off with relish. I stopped registering the burn as they went down. 

She must have introduced the man, but all I remember was his sudden appearance behind us, one hand on her shoulder and the other on my lower back. Then: the dark interior of a car, a living room filled with mismatched furniture. My reflection in a mirrored closet door, two bodies standing behind me. Slicing my tongue between milk white thighs. Doing what I was told. It was easy, not to think. A relief. 

In the morning, I woke up to find the man, still nameless, wide awake. His hand was wrapped around my ankle, holding up my leg. Pillows on either side of my head clipped my vision like blinders, and I stared at the toes I’d painted teal weeks before. They were moving, but I was not making them move. It was someone else’s leg. It was a prop on a movie set. 

The woman was asleep next to us. Pretending to sleep. As soon as the man finished, she got up, put on a robe, and offered to call me an Uber. 

Simon is making us dinner. When he invites me over, it crosses my mind that he could murder me, but the likelihood doesn’t seem high enough to turn down a free meal. Plus, I am pretty sure the dating app photo isn’t doing him justice, and I am proven right as soon as he opens the door. The light makes a halo on his thick auburn hair. His forest green t-shirt sleeves hug his arms. 

He makes us broiled chicken thighs in a citrus reduction. I offer to help, and he has me cut up figs and dates for a salad. I’m comforted by the knife, the clean press of it under my hand.

Simon tells me about the restaurant where he works: the kind of place with hand-glazed tile on the walls, where the server sets down a tiny bowl of unexpected food—a cubed strawberry or fish mousse—before the real meal begins. Simon works the fry station. He shows me the burns on his hands and up his forearms, where they mingle with freckles and veins. One looks like Ohio. 

After dinner, we take turns cracking a bar of chocolate along shallow indentations. I tell him the meal was good, and he says it’s because I sliced the figs for the salad. I tell him I cut fruit for a living. He says it shows. Then a gap yawns open in the conversation, and in my desperation to fill it, I ask him what he’s working on.

Immediately, I regret it. No one wants this question. 

“A pilot,” he says. His voice has a hesitant edge that makes me want to cup his stubbled chin in my hands. “It’s for a series about a guy who pretends to be an alcoholic and joins AA to get with the girl he likes.” 

“Sounds pretty fucked up.” 

His laugh is sharp and ends too quickly. “Yeah, hopefully in a funny way though.”

“I’m sure it is.” I smile and swirl the wine that I picked up at the end of my shift. It isn’t as good as I’d hoped from the label. “Seems like you’d have to know a lot about AA to make that work.” 

“Yeah.” He pauses for a beat. “I do.”

In the silence that follows, I notice his wine glass: three-fourths full, exactly as I poured it. “Shit, sorry.” I set down my glass.    

“Don’t be. Seriously. Drink as much as you want.”

But I don’t touch my glass again. We come up with ideas for his show (An awkward run-in with his sponsor at a bar! A staged relapse and intervention!), then talk about places we’d like to visit, many of which overlap (Vietnam, Morocco, Norway). Simon’s eyes curve up at the corners each time he smiles. He keeps sweeping a dark crescent of hair off his forehead. By the fourth time, I can’t stop myself, I reach up and run my own hand through it. 

Before I can retract my hand, his fingers wrap around my wrist. He leans close. 

A scrap of fig skin is lodged between my right bottom molars. I smush my face into his neck and race my tongue along my teeth. He tries to kiss me again. I pull back. 

“You have a bed, right?”

He smiles, surprised. “How did you know?”

“Lucky guess.” 

I follow him down the hall, tongue humming in my mouth until the fig bit dislodges. In the bedroom, he flicks on a dim bedside lamp and hastily unbuttons his shirt. I pull my turtleneck over my head. I consider laying it flat on the desk behind me so it won’t wrinkle, but that seems too bold somehow, so I just drop it in a heap on the floor. 

I position my body on Simon’s oatmeal comforter: up on my elbows, back curved. I bend one leg, point the other toe. Unpoint it. I am completely sober. 

He falls over me, knees denting the bedding. His smell turns sharp, like brine. He wrinkles his eyes at me, and I smile back because he is fucking gorgeous. He slides a hand up my back, unhooks my bra, tosses it aside. The bra was expensive, and I wish he’d said something about it, or at least waited a little longer to take it off. I lie back and stare down my torso to where my legs part around him. I see my body the way he must see it, smooth and erotic, supple and tactile and easily contorted, like the women from those porn sites where I first learned about sex when I was twelve and the internet was sort of new. But I was never brave enough to click the button saying I was over eighteen, so I never got the full lesson. By the time I was actually eighteen, I figured I knew enough. 

Or maybe Simon sees me in some other way. Impossible to know. 

He pulls down the zipper of my jeans so slowly that I feel the uncoupling of each pair of teeth. I take a shallow breath. This is fine. His hand slides around the elastic seam of my underwear. Completely normal. His touch is not unexpected, not unwanted, not at all forceful. But my chest constricts, my shoulders seize, muscles clamping around my breath. 

Simon pulls away. I’ve scared him. “Sorry,” he says.  

“It’s fine.” 

“Are you sure?” He wants me to feel good. I can tell from the way he looks at me, unsure in the soft light. He’s made other women feel good—great, phenomenal—by doing this exact thing. 

“Keep going,” I say.

He puts his hand back, cautiously, and I stare at the ceiling, white as the canvases that stand guard in my room. I breathe, massaging hisses into sighs. I tell myself this is good. That I can relax. But my body does not believe, and when I make a sound that no one could mistake for pleasure, Simon snaps his hand back like he’s been stung. 

I’m off the bed, on my feet. I’ve found my bra and am trying to hook it; it’s much more difficult to put on than it was to take off. 

“What happened?” The confusion in his voice is laced with worry, not anger. He wants to know what he’s done wrong. He hasn’t done a thing wrong. I want to tell him, but instead I say: “What if he’s not after a girl?” 

His confusion, now, is complete. “What?”

“The guy in your show. What if he’s not trying to get laid? What if he just wants to sit with people and talk and know they’re listening? Just—” 

My hands are up in front of my face, twisting on my wrists. 

“—like—”  

Or maybe they’re trembling. 

“—connection.” 

Simon blinks. “He does want that.” 

My hands drop. He doesn’t get it. Or I’m not saying it right. I scoop up my crumpled sweater and pull it over my head.

It’s morning. I’ve been assigned a grey plastic table in a poorly-lit corner of the warehouse, near the emergency exit. I line up my paintings on the table. The smallest one is gold. But not really—acrylic gold paint is actually powdered aluminum or mica, sometimes bronze. Late last night, I pulled the tube at random out of the shoebox where I keep my paints. Small and plump, like a ripe plum in my hand. I pulled the cap off and squeezed the paint onto the canvas. The cold shine pooled under my nails, running out the sides as I scratched jagged rivulets up then down. The second canvas I drenched in yellow and ochre, tapping round marks with my fingertips. The third is magenta, with two circles dug out like snow angels. The fourth is teal with no pattern at all. 

I have nothing to prop the canvases up with. Nor did I think to bring title cards. I dig around in my bag for a pen or scrap of paper, but there’s nothing useful in there—wallet, keys, a Twix wrapper, seven hair ties, Tina’s paring knife. I close my fist around the handle, just for a second. I hope she hasn’t noticed it missing. 

The artist next to me makes neon sculptures. He’s off mingling and has asked me to keep an eye on his pieces. They emit soft metallic screams while their light falls on my table, tinting one side pink. People stop to appraise the glowing outlines of skulls and breasts with conical nipples. They nod their silent approval. A few even ask for a price. I tell them, they walk away. They want something, but this isn’t it. 

The warehouse hums with their wants. The whole city throbs with them, layer upon layer, the air made thick. To be seen, to be wanted back. To be known, felt. Sometimes I feel the press of it when I’m driving on the freeway, this suffocating web of desire. The only thing holding this city together. 

“Hey, roomie!” 

Tina is walking up to my table. She’s waving and smiling. Beside her is the friend whose name I learned yesterday and instantly forgot. I told Tina about the show only to explain why I couldn’t hang out. I stand up. “You came.” 

“This is awesome!” She waves a hand around. “Thanks for telling me about it.” 

I brace myself against the table. Tina’s eyes land on the magenta canvas. It’s covered in small cuts, lined up in neat rows. I watch her eyes move to the ochre, with its five long parallel gashes. Then to the teal, with its single slash that runs from corner to corner.

“Wow,” she says. “These are so—” A pause. Then: “dynamic!” 

Tina’s friend says nothing as she takes my gold painting in her hands. It was the first to go under the knife. It’s so mangled that the canvas flops in places, almost disconnecting. Tina’s friend traces a finger across a severed glob of paint, her touch light but searching. 

Tina looks at it, then at me. “What inspired this painting?”

“You can’t ask an artist that,” says the friend, not unkindly. “It’s cheating.” 

I want to thank her, shake her hand, or something. Then, urgently, I want to tell Tina’s friend everything. About the punctures and the blankness and the pain buried in my body, so poorly hidden.

“Does it have a name?” she asks me. 

I say the first thing that comes to mind. “Glit.” 

She holds the painting closer to study a detail I can’t see. “How much are you asking?” 

“Oh.” I quickly do the math, adding up the cost of the canvas and paint. “Forty?” 

I wait for her to smile meekly and put the painting down. Instead, I find myself holding two crisp bills. I have nowhere to put them, so I just stare at them, folded in my fist.

“Do you have something to wrap it in?” she asks. 

I slowly turn these words over. “Like gift wrap?”

“No, just something to protect it.”

“Oh.” It hadn’t occurred to me. “One second.” I toss the money into my bag. Take out the knife, tucking the handle into my sleeve because I don’t want Tina to see. But she isn’t looking; she has turned to inspect the neon nipples. 

I duck under neon guy’s table, where he has a thick roll of bubble wrap. I slice off a piece that emits a series of rapid pops, then floats up behind my hand like a veil. I spread it over the table. The friend sets my painting—now her painting—down in the center of the cushioned square. 

Holly, I remember then. Her name is Holly. 

I fold, spin, fold again. I have no tape. Holly doesn’t seem to mind. She lifts the loose bundle delicately, clutches it against her chest. We look at each other, and neither of us feels the need to smile, or say anything at all.

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Mary Elis Tharin is a California native who now lives in Italy, where she teaches English and writes. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Antioch University Los Angeles, and her short fiction has appeared in Sixfold, Five on the Fifth, and Collective Realms Magazine. She’s currently at work on a novel about a coding-prodigy-turned-tech-entrepreneur named Alice who reanimates the dead as digital ghosts. You can find more about her work at www.marytharin.com.