Objects of Desire Read online

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2021 by Clare Sestanovich

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Sestanovich, Clare, 1991– author.

  Title: Objects of desire: stories / Clare Sestanovich.

  Description: First edition. | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2021.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020036263 (print) | LCCN 2020036264 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593318096 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593318102 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Women—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3619.E83 O25 2021 (print) | LCC PS3619.E83 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020036263

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020036264

  Ebook ISBN 9780593318102

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design by John Gall

  ep_prh_5.7.0_c0_r1

  For my mother and her mother

  CONTENTS

  Annunciation

  By Design

  Terms of Agreement

  Objects of Desire

  Old Hope

  Security Questions

  Make Believe

  Wants and Needs

  Brenda

  Now You Know

  Separation

  Acknowledgments

  ANNUNCIATION

  .

  The first time she flies home for the holidays, Iris makes two friends. She is seated between a married couple, because the man prefers the window and the woman prefers the aisle, and they are the kind of people, she discovers quickly, with strong preferences. In general, Iris is the kind of person with mild preferences—preferences that can be painlessly ceded to someone else’s. When the man clambers over her to use the bathroom, Iris presses her chin against her neck, closes her eyes, doesn’t mind at all. The woman follows him a few minutes later, and then Iris is alone in the middle of the row.

  She is eighteen, living half a country away from her parents. The college she attends is not large and not cheap. It doesn’t have a communications major or a business major or a football team. Her parents agree—and they agree on so little—that this is not their idea of an education.

  The man climbs back into his seat in time to decline a meal from the flight attendant. While Iris is peeling back the foil on the various components of her dinner—lasagna, green beans, half a dozen mandarin orange segments swimming in liquid—the woman returns and announces she’s pregnant. She reaches across Iris’s lap, her sleeve dangling perilously close to an uncovered dish of chocolate mousse, and waves a plastic stick in front of her husband.

  “The plus sign!” she says.

  “Fuck yeah!” he says.

  He covers her hand with his hand, so that they’re both holding the stick. Eventually, he lets go and she leans back in her seat. She beams blankly at the postcard-size screen in front of her, where a plane is making slow progress across a map.

  “Congratulations,” Iris says politely, sawing the green beans in half with a plastic knife.

  The husband has brought them both burritos from a famous restaurant in the city they have just departed. Iris has seen pictures of the burritos, because no one goes to the restaurant without documenting them. In real life, they aren’t that impressive—overstuffed and milky with sour cream. Black-bean juice dribbles down the wife’s hand.

  They tell her they’ve been trying for months. They tell her they like ancient names.

  “Theodora.”

  “Cicero.”

  They offer her guacamole.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to sit together?”

  Iris chews a tortilla chip as quietly as possible. She wonders if the crunching is really as loud as it sounds in her head.

  “Honey,” the wife says, “you’re part of our moment.”

  “Marcus,” the husband says, wiping salsa from the edge of his mouth. “Or just Aurelius.”

  Iris’s mother meets her at the airport. She’s wearing an elegant coat and boots with flower-stem heels, because she disapproves of people who travel in pajamas. The husband and wife tell Iris not to leave without saying goodbye, but she walks away while they’re waiting at baggage claim. She looks back once, the wheels of her suitcase clicking in time with her mother’s shoes, and she is surprised, seeing them standing together for the first time, that the woman is taller than the man. His arm is wrapped around her waist and she leans in to him, her head resting gently on the top of his.

  In the car, Iris tells her mother about the couple. She does not call them her friends, and this feels like losing something—like removing a pebble from her shoe and missing the discomfort. To put the pebble back in would be crazy.

  She mentions the baby just as a plane passes overhead, so close she can make out the wheels.

  “What?” her mother says over the roaring.

  Iris repeats herself.

  “They never should have told you that.”

  The car reaches the top of the ramp onto the highway. The traffic passes them in loud whooshes, and it seems impossible to Iris that they will be able to merge into the stream.

  “They shouldn’t tell anyone for at least three months. That baby”—her mother says this in the voice she reserves for words she does not trust: the newspaper, the forecast, your father—“could be gone tomorrow.” The car nears the end of the acceleration lane, and for a moment it seems they will have nowhere left to go. Then, Iris can’t say how, they are part of the stream. In the mirror, another car has appeared at the top of the ramp, and then it, too, has slipped into the anonymous rush. They speed past unchanging scenery, concrete barriers and spindly trees and a blue tarp in the wind, and Iris feels certain that her mother’s words have killed the baby. The car changes lanes. Tomorrow the wife will wake up with a feeling she can’t describe, and the husband will tell her it’s nothing, it’s good, it’s all good, and Iris, of course, will never see them again.

  * * *

  —

  When Iris is about to graduate from college, she dates a virgin. Exams are over, and no one has anything left to do except go to parties and throw things away. On the sidewalk, there are lamps without lampshades and posters without frames. Iris pushes her bed out the window because it doesn’t fit through the door in one piece. She and her friends start drinking in the middle of the day, and by the afternoon, they’re half asleep, surrounded by containers of crusted-over hummus and watermelon rinds—cheap ideas of being festive.

  The virgin is a boy named Ben.

  “But he’s rich,” Iris’s best friend says while they look at him across someone else’s backyard.

  Charlotte is the first best friend she has ever had. They didn’t meet on the first day of school, like some best friends. There was a whole year that Iris endured alone. Charlotte, like Ben, is from Manhattan, where she learned about music and alcohol and deciphering all the signs that money leaves behind. She is the one who told Iris to wear black and white, or else autumnal colors; to drink vinegary brine afte
r shots of vodka; to eat burgers and bagels and bacon—there was nothing, she said, as powerful as eating masculine foods with feminine grace—but to avoid dairy. To wear bras with lace and without flowers, to buy a vibrator, to be grateful, all in all, that she had never been fingered by a teenage boy.

  The first kiss with Ben is too cinematic. The sprinklers on the lawn behind them come on the moment his lips touch hers.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” she says.

  “Like what?”

  Their shoes are getting sprayed. Her socks are damp.

  “Like, we’re dancing in the moonlight.”

  He seems a little wounded, and this, somehow, is reassuring.

  “Like, this is meant to be.”

  He closes his eyes for a few seconds and Iris can tell that he is hoping to be someone else—to look, at least, like someone else—when he opens them. She resists the urge to touch his hand, or the smooth skin above his hip.

  By the time she meets Ben, Iris has had a lot of sex. Some of it is good and some of it is bad, and she has taught herself not to care too much about the difference. In general, not caring requires studiousness. She gives herself assignments: eat peanut butter straight from the jar, steal ChapStick from CVS. She has dropped acid and skipped class and let a boy lick circles around her asshole. There are dozens of tubes of ChapStick in her sock drawer now, and sometimes she takes them out just to look.

  Iris tries to figure out the reason for Ben’s virginity, but can’t. He is handsome and nice enough. He has accepted most of the other intermediary vices that Iris has learned men like: drinking and smoking and enthusing about oral sex. For a few days, they kiss in places they will one day reminisce about. The library, the quad, the roof of the chapel, where no one is supposed to go and everyone does. She wonders why there isn’t a word for the anticipation of nostalgia.

  “Do you think I’m cheesy?”

  He shakes his head.

  The night before graduation, they are naked on Iris’s mattress for the first time. She has already packed her sheets and thrown away her pillowcases, which were an embarrassing shade of yellow.

  She closes her eyes when he comes, but when she opens them his face is still twisted in the shape of pain and pleasure mixed together. His mouth is open. In the morning, they put on their gowns, and Iris can’t find her cap. Her mother will be in the crowd and her father will not and the only pictures she will be in are the ones taken by other people’s grandparents.

  “Here, take mine,” Ben says.

  If she had slept well, if she had eaten properly, if she hadn’t seen his face in its unknowing shape, she tells herself that this wouldn’t have made her cry. He puts his arm around her. She looks at the thumbtack holes in the wall, the pieces of tape she gave up trying to peel away, instead of looking at him. When they say goodbye, what they say is congratulations.

  * * *

  —

  Charlotte teaches her to laugh about it: Iris is pregnant.

  “A one-night stand with a virgin,” she says. “The movie writes itself.”

  “It wasn’t a one-night stand.” Iris sounds more defensive than she’d like.

  “You know what I mean.”

  They’re living together in Charlotte’s childhood bedroom, because they don’t have any plans or any money. Until Iris pays a library fee, she doesn’t even have a diploma.

  “Okay, what’s the moral of the story?”

  “Abstinence!”

  Charlotte’s diploma is already on the wall. Beside it, her parents have arranged her school pictures—thirteen years of them—from start to finish. Her bangs grow, her face narrows. Glasses appear and disappear. What Iris likes best is that Charlotte’s smile is never the same. She is tight-lipped, then open-mouthed. One year she fakes it and the next year she frowns. She reveals her braces, neon rubber bands and clumps of spit. In the very last one, she wears lipstick the color of an open wound.

  Charlotte has a long-distance boyfriend and a metal device in her uterus, both of which require certain stretches of the imagination.

  “How can you be sure it’s working?” Iris asks.

  Her parents leave her favorite foods in the fridge. Her cat scratches the door if she sleeps too late. It’s never been hard, she tells Iris, to trust what’s real.

  “Oh no,” Charlotte says, because Iris is crying again.

  “My mom doesn’t know what my favorite foods are.”

  “You don’t have to laugh about it now.” Charlotte rubs Iris’s back. “We can laugh about it later.”

  Ben texts her occasionally. Unpunctuated questions, late at night. What’s up. How’s life. She doesn’t respond, because the acceptable answers to these questions have nothing to do with her, or with anyone. Good or Okay or OK.

  Iris makes herself stop crying, because she isn’t exactly sure what she’s crying about, and she has vowed, in this new phase of life, to be nothing if not precise.

  “I don’t even know what my favorite foods are.”

  * * *

  —

  She pays back Charlotte’s parents for the abortion in installments, even though they insist she doesn’t have to. She applies for a job because the listing says it requires attention to detail. Mostly, she fixes errors in other people’s spreadsheets. When it’s time to order lunch for the office, Iris is the one to specify which condiments must go on the side and who is allergic to avocados. Nine months after graduation, she texts Ben—Hey—even though she knows she shouldn’t. It would be embarrassing to tell Charlotte she’s been counting. Ben doesn’t respond for two days, and Iris has convinced herself he never will, which makes it possible—easy—to pretend that the text doesn’t really exist.

  In May, her mother says she’s cleaning out the house. She wants the drains snaked, the windows clear enough to fool the birds. Iris’s bedroom will be turned into the guest bedroom. The garage will contain nothing but the car.

  “You could come home,” she says, which is not quite an invitation. “You could help.”

  Iris doesn’t say that it’s been years since there were any guests in the house. She arrives with a half-full suitcase and wears the same dress every day. The dress is plain. Blue—almost black.

  “You’re so pale,” her mother says. “Don’t wear such dark colors.”

  The house is the only house Iris has ever lived in. It’s a small box on a street with other small boxes. There are minor differences between them, made to carry the significance of major ones. The shrubs are kempt or unkempt, the Christmas lights come down in January or stay up all year, the metal siding is white or grey or faded yellow. Custard, her mother calls it.

  She says elegance is a state of mind, Iris texts Charlotte, who lives in California now.

  The house is not exactly empty—the furniture is not gone, the walls are not bare—but there is something stale about it, like returning from a long trip, all the usual evidence of wear turned into something ominous: signs of life. Had the tile floor always been this cold?

  Behind the house, there’s a pool with no water and big, prehistoric-seeming cracks along the bottom. Soon, her mother says, she’s going to fill the pool with concrete. When Iris was a kid, she didn’t like the pool as much as she was supposed to. Her hair turned green and her fingertips shriveled. But she had been good enough at pretending to enjoy it that now—her feet dangling into nothing, the sun burning the backs of her ears—it’s almost possible to believe she really had. She’s thirsty. Her skin will soon be pink, tender. It seems, for a moment, like a religious thought: that light is also heat.

  Iris calls until Charlotte picks up.

  “Something happened with her and a man,” Iris says.

  “She said that?”

  “Of course not.”

  Her mother has never spoken about romance directly. Over the years, the
re has been a pediatrician and a personal-injury lawyer and a handful of men with big ideas. She never uses the word boyfriend. She has sworn never to reveal their ideas.

  “The messier her love life, the cleaner her house,” Iris explains.

  It’s barely noon in Los Angeles, but Charlotte is already in a crowd. There are restaurant sounds in the background. The kind of brunch that comes with cocktails. She’s there to meet people who are there to meet famous people. It’s gauche, she says, to go straight for the top. Iris never says gauche because she always forgets how it’s pronounced.

  “You’re being very fatalistic,” Charlotte says, sipping something loudly.

  Iris lowers herself into the pool. The deep end, but only six or seven feet. Someone says Charlotte’s name, cajoling her. Then several people are saying her name, and she’s laughing. She has to go.

  When Iris hangs up, the phone is covered in sweat. In the middle of the bright white pool, the sun is blinding. There are no leaves on the bottom, no dirt, no mold, no ghostly stains where rain has been. The cracks, when she looks closely, have been scrubbed clean.

  Her mother calls from the house, and for a moment Iris feels like a child, hiding. She calls again and a dog barks somewhere in response. The pool is too bright and hot for hiding.

  In the evening, they eat a well-balanced meal. Something green and something brown and chicken. Iris’s nose is already peeling. She considers the things she might reveal to her mother. The roommate who doesn’t believe in monogamy; the coworker who sells cocaine and casts spells; the astrologer who forecast marriage, or usury; the boy who stood above her bed, his eyes closed, still dreaming, and peed all over her sheets. She considers what sort of pro her mother is. Choice, life. The options almost make her laugh.

  Instead she says, “Are you still dating the entrepreneur?”

  Her mother slides a garnish to the edge of her plate. A cherry tomato—for color.

  “No, he didn’t have his act together.”