Among Rooms and Other Arrangements

by Nathaniel Eddy

unknown (late 1700s-early 1800s)

Mitchell appeared at my door like one of those summer storms that blows in swift, unexpected. Dark clothing, hair like a blanket of slanting rainfall. I had taken the day to stay home and practice self-care which meant I’d remained in bed looking at the internet. News headlines and social media feeds, articles about moon bathing, intentionality, the endless therapy memes. I had been watching a video about breathing techniques when Mitchell knocked and told me that Francine had asked him to leave. He said this in the way of someone under anesthesia: thick, determined. One, one, two, two, three, three, four, four. Still standing in the doorway, we listened as a woman exhaled sharply, little wisps, the distant sound of her from my laptop like the rise and fall of beating cicadas. 

I lived in a small apartment in a building of other small apartments, the structure a collection of thin walls and late-night voices, deadbolts sliding into locks, smells of curry spices frying in oil. Mitchell took up temporary residence on the sofa. I had a few blankets, some brightly patterned afghans, and lying there that first night he looked as if swaddled in layers of frosting, a box cake left half-eaten on a table. He had brought with him a duffle bag of clothing, some toiletries in one of those quilted packs with monogrammed initials. In the bathroom I studied his belongings, the deodorant and razor, his toothbrush next to mine, its plastic head gunked with paste, the dull looking bristles. I wondered if Francine had ever used his brush, if they had been that type of couple. The easy sharing of things, of feelings. Mitchell in her underwear after weeks of neglecting his wash.  

I had last seen them together at a party, a friend of a friend, the hostess throwing one last hurrah before moving abroad. They had been standing around an island in the kitchen, the remains of picked over cheese and broken crackers, empty bottles of beer. Francine had been leaning against his shoulder and I’d made some remark about the number of Chads in attendance, motioning toward a pair I’d met at the door. Each wore a blazer over fitted shirts, selvedge denim cuffed just-so-right at the ankles. 

-I’m picturing finance, I said. Commodities, high interest loans. Glassy looking buildings. 

-Just imagine what they can do with a spreadsheet, Mitchell said. 

Francine pouted her lips. 

-I do have a thing for pivot tables, she cooed. She scratched at his neck, nibbled on his ear. 

-So that’s the formula, huh? 

-Oh, that’s clever. My little comedian, she said. 

-Have you noticed their faces? Mitchell asked. 

I scanned the room, everything ordinary, seemingly in place. 

-Their skin is perfect. 

I checked again and picked up on their profiles, the look of alabaster and polish. 

-Maybe it’s the lighting, I said. Luminescence. You should see me in a department store. I only date in retail, now. 

-Moisturizer, Francine said. Nightly routines.  

She described to us the amount of time she spent in front of the mirror. The peptide infused serums and toners. Creams circled lightly to her skin. She said that recently she had been exercising her neck, tightening the muscles. She demonstrated by tensing her jaw, slowly opening and closing her mouth. She did this a number of times, the movement like a beached fish desperate for water.  

Later in the evening I noticed her sitting alone in a corner, Mitchell having left earlier. Leather chair, a floor lamp rising above her shoulder. Someone had covered the shade with a scarf and light filtered softly through the fabric in a haze of magenta. I studied her posture, the way her bangs draped like a curtain to a stage, the self-possession of her performance. Watching her, she reminded me of a river, a sheet of current, quietly pitching toward a fall. 

Some mornings I would join Mitchell in his search for a new place to rest his head. We would walk the neighborhoods, visit the open houses. This was late autumn, the city a death march of graphite-looking buildings under cement-colored skies and everywhere the skittering husks of leaves, wind downed branches. We wandered in and out of studio apartments and rooms for rent, picking through the interior lives of others as if witnesses to a crime. Later, we would recall the small details. The kitchen whose radiator doubled as a table, a slab of plywood set with candle holders, plates. 

–Did you notice the doilies? I asked him. The stitching had been impeccable. 

Pornography streamed in the common area of a third-floor walk-up, the room all hardwood floors and crown molding, the sound of skin slapping into skin. 

-A catastrophe, I said. 

And then the couple who had referred to each other as my darling pet. The man who refused to use the internet, ranting to us about Wi-Fi signals and wavelengths and claiming he could chew up frequencies like Tic Tacs. A new diet, he told us, soon to be all the rage. There had been so many aquariums. 

But most mornings, I would find Mitchell already gone, the sunken look of the sofa, cushions dented from where he had slept, a small trace of a reminder. It felt like being with vapor, like nothing at all. A spoon left in the sink. Containers of takeout on the counter. Pellets of hardened rice dropped to the floor. 

At night, if he was around, we might sit out on the fire escape and share sips of wine, stare off into the grid of street lamps. We never really talked much, instead took in the breeze and restlessness of traffic. Pigeons cooing their mating calls. This was before we had slipped into those other arrangements. Though looking back now, I wonder if we had already started to turn, an unnoticed thing, the gentleness of fruit overripening in a bowl. 

I was introduced to Mitchell through Francine, who I first met on a dating app. I spent some time with her, evenings out for dinner, pitchers of beer, and afterward we would stumble into bed with the bitter taste of the others’ mascara on our lips. In the morning I would make us a pot of tea and scramble some eggs and afterward we would curl to the other like cats warming in the sun. I named this time the summer of Francine and think of it now as one of those desert mirages, of crawling toward the hallucination of an oasis.

Eventually this intimacy shifted to a loose friendship, the occasional meetup to gossip about our lives. And it was during one of these time she told me about Mitchell, the boy she had recently started seeing. We were sitting in the window of a small cafe, the space all natural light, plants in macrame hangers. She told me he had a thing for French New Wave cinema and showtunes. Locks of hair thick as taffy.  

-He sings to me in bed. Send in the Clowns, Frank Mills, the standards.  

I told her about someone I once dated who could only fall asleep after being read to.

-We got really into this fantasy series about demigods and shapeshifters. Otherworldly shit, you know? It was all I could think about.  

-If only I had known. She smiled, pinching my elbow. I do love my fantasies, she said. 

-I’ve got nothing on your crooner. 

-Isn’t it rich? Aren’t we a pair? she sang, clutching her heart. 

I waved her song away, told her that we had waited for the final book in the series to drop, that we had done nothing but sit around for weeks talking about character development and story arcs. 

-And of course, we split up just before the release. He said I’d become uninteresting, that I’d never live up to the heroine we’d been following along with. She’s not afraid of taking risks, he had said. 

I told Francine that I hadn’t read anything since. 

-The bastard, she said.

-Agreed.

-And here you are.

-And here I am. 

One day Mitchell told me he was having trouble being. We had been lounging around, the sound of rain, jazz playing on the radio. He told me it had to do with Francine, his struggle to identify without her. 

-Dysphoria of the self, he said. He said he had been reading about it on some forums, that people everywhere were suffering.   

-Our entire time together I was like a moth circling, he said, crashing numbly into her light. 

I thought back to the times I had seen them together, the way she could chew up a room, and Mitchell beside her serving as accoutrement, flair.

Later that afternoon I tried on a wig that I sometimes wore out dancing or to parties, trimming it to a bob in the mirror. Acrylic strands of chestnut collected in the sink and scattered to the floor. I combed out the bangs and drew them flat just below my brows, the look of dusk in winter. I recalled that Francine often wore a blouse and from the closet found a V-neck that plunged deep into the valley of my chest. Pastel florals bloomed from each shoulder, a pattern of vines roping the fabric. I pulled on jeans, tucked in my top and applied a thin trace of red to my lips.  

I found Mitchell on the sofa swiping at his phone. He was locked in, not paying attention. I walked the room, straightening shelves, their objects. Potted cacti, some ceramic vases. An ashtray holding the slim remains of a joint. I pinched the roll between my fingers, waving it in his direction. 

-You get high, pretty boy? I asked in my best attempt at Francine, drawing my voice a bit lower, swampy. 

Mitchell turned to me, his expression like stumbling upon the remains of an unbreathing cat, the shock of death. I held out my hands. 

-Wait. Just hear me out. I told him I thought he needed to process, to come to grips about

Francine. I said this as myself, not in character. I told him that we could use this as a type of transference, a way to unpack his relationship. I spoke words I had read about online—intentional and enmeshed, self-care. 

-It’s just an arrangement, I said. We’re rearranging. A different rug for the floor, new colors on the walls.   

We scheduled our first session for a weeknight and I arrived home early from work, dressing in the wig and outfit I’d worn before. In the living room I dimmed the lights, set the mood with scented candles. Everything about this had the feel of long-distance travel, of being a tourist. Mitchell had cleared his things from the sofa earlier. He had told me he wanted to start at the very beginning.

-We’ve just met, he said. We’re not even together. 

He returned with takeout, the smell of fried chicken, biscuits drizzled with honey, and we ate in front of the television watching something by Varda. Black and white shots of cafes, Paris interiors, cigarettes nestled between lips. Sitting next to him in the dark I took notice of things: the dry whistle of air from a nostril, his way of crossing and then uncrossing his legs. The wet sound of him chewing. We were new, a discovery, and I leaned into his shoulder, my eyes heavy against the night, against the tang of his breath. 

Things remained placid, easy. We cooked dinners, talked about our days, about Francine. I shared the story about the time I’d first met her in person at one of those cramped Chinatown places, the smell of scallions and pork fat, a row of glistening ducks hanging in the window. The meal itself had been brightly lit, the hardness of fluorescence and linoleum tile, the scalding bite from a soup dumpling blistering my tongue. Francine, alarmed, had called the waiter, placing an order for a salad of cold jellyfish. The foreignness of that cool flesh against my own like the unfamiliarity of being watched over. 

We had gone back to her place and drank glasses of tequila while sitting on her living room floor, palo santo burning between us, traces of musk, of pine. She’d wrapped cubes of ice in cheesecloth and instructed me to place my head in her lap, to show her my tongue. She tsked at the burn. I watched her move over me, a smudge, hair falling and scaffolding her face. I explained to Mitchell that I had never been more relaxed. 

-It was like one of those ASMR videos. The soothing sounds of pattering rain, murmuring whispers. 

-Have you seen the woman who slices away bars of soap with a razor? he asked. He said that watching her made him drowsy in the way of sorting clothes warmed from a dryer. 

-She does have a certain je ne sais quoi, I said. Francine, you know? 

He told me that he had once tried to break things off with her. This had been early in their relationship, at a time when he felt that to commit would mean giving away something he was not ready to part with. 

-And of course I didn’t say anything. Just tried to disappear. Vanish. 

-I’m imagining one of those milk-carton kids from the eighties, I said. Grainy looking photo, stats about height and weight and hobbies. 

-5’10’’, 170 pounds. In his spare time enjoys relational reenactments. 

-Last seen breaking hearts, I said. 

-As if. 

He told me he’d taken her out for Lebanese, some place with thick looking waiters. 

-Their arms had been extraordinary, he said. Turgid, almost inflated with muscle. Each of them running around with what seemed like an entire kitchen of plates. 

He described their meal as mostly silent, of just observing the staff, the other tables of diners. He said that at some point Francine had caught his eye, nodding toward a couple buried in their phones over a platter of shawarma. She smiled, a bit of malice there. Let’s never become that, dear. 

-I remember the man as having a smear of hummus on his chin and the woman glancing at him, expressionless. She never said a thing. It was devastating. 

He told me it had struck him that he had the possibility of destination with Francine, a place where they might both arrive together. 

-And look at you now, I said. Playing make believe with her shadow. 

I began going out alone as Francine. I would wear the wig to the little bodega, flirt with whoever was working the counter, and tell myself they had no clue. I would find a little club to go dancing, one of those hidden places burrowed below the street. Thrumming beats and spastic lights, quick spaces of darkness. I would sing my name to strangers. Francine, I’d say, Francine. I was very believable. One night, I thought I saw her among the crowd on the dance floor and reached out to her, into the pulse of bodies, only to find myself reaching back from a mirror. She looked so beautiful, ecstatic.  

Mitchell grew suspicious and started asking questions. Where I had been, what I had been up to. He did this only during our sessions, as if somehow the duality of my betrayal rested completely with my other. I told him lies, of course. That I had gotten together with friends, colleagues. A glass of wine after work. Never mind the married man who had asked me to suck the ring from his finger. The other who took me to his bed, the dull rocking of springs, the feel of his legs pushing into me from behind. There had been the one who’d left my neck looking pelted, bruised. A week of scarves. Another so pretty I had wanted nothing but to trace the ellipse of their jaw again and again, as if the bone itself was an oracle holding magic.

I slept with Mitchell only once. Early March, a bitter feeling, dirty puddles of snowmelt, the remains of salt chalking the carapace of the city. We were in my bedroom working on one of those thousand-piece puzzles, these jigsaws and other games having once been a phase in their relationship. It was ocean themed, featuring schools of fish and bright looking coral. I had been searching out the tiles to complete an octopus when Mitchell told me they had been talking. 

-We’re going to try again, he said. 

I wasn’t sure who he was referring to. 

-Who’s trying what, again? I asked. 

-We’re getting back together, Francine and me, the former, the original. On a trial basis.

I found a piece that matched a tentacle, one of the suction cups, and snapped together the blanks and tabs. I felt suckered. I stood and walked to the dresser, listening to Mitchell ramble behind me. He was theorizing how things might turn out, the different scenarios. I removed the wig, slid off what I was wearing. My skin rose against the cold of the room, indignant, chattering.

I was struck by the swiftness of his presumption, the tenacity of his hand on my wrist. Lying with him on the covers of the bed there was only ceiling, flatness, the blemish of a stain above us, tea colored and spilling to one corner. I imagined this as the residue of dreams and tried to recall if this blight had been there all along or was in fact something new. I wondered if I was only noticing now so as not to notice the friction of being rocked, of being cast adrift from the shores of these rooms and other arrangements. 

Within a week he was gone, the apartment suddenly larger, the look of cloud-swept skies. At night I would sit alone with the sounds of the neighbors, the gentle prattling of their lives soothing in the way of falling asleep to music. Sometimes I would rewatch one of the movies Mitchell had first introduced to me and pretend I was Francine. I would wrap my arms around a sofa pillow, imagining it was me she was holding.   

Once I saw them together at one of the neighborhood groceries. They had been standing in the bread aisle, Francine reading aloud the ingredients from a label. Riboflavin, soy lecithin. The sound of her voice a bird flushing in the wild. I had moved on by then, was in a relationship with someone that had the feel of a familiar room, comfortable, unsurprising. I pushed my cart towards them and we exchanged quick hellos, what-are-you-doing-here’s. I felt the pressure of her eyes, questioning. I told them I didn’t shop in this section often, that I had given up on gluten. 

-You look good, she said. She said it couldn’t have been easy. 

-Pasta’s been a bitch, I told them. 

-And what about him? she nodded toward Mitchell. He can be a bit doughy, tough to get a proper rise sometimes.

-You know I’m right here, right?

Mitchell did a little wave, rocking on his heels. She pinched his side. 

-We did our best, I said. 

-So I heard. A role of a lifetime. 

She reached for my hair, twisting  a few strands as if loosening petals from a stem. She loves me, she loves me not, she loves me. There were new rings on her fingers that I had not noticed before, sterling, and I wondered if I had anything at home that was similar. Something chunky to catch the light. Muzak played from speakers set into the ceiling, the notes distant, familiar. We stood there, the three of us together, listening. 

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