Chapter 12
Tristan texted me later that night:
Tristan: We’re prbly gonna have to c each other when jay’s here could we just tlk?
Me: no
Tristan: cool I’ll be at Tryst doing work tm. Come whenever
Me: ew u meant irl?
Tristan: -_-
Tristan: as much as I wanna keep texting a woman w/ whom i’ve already had multiple misunderstandings my thumbs hurt
Me: omg “w/ whom” is sending meeeeeee. Harvard is calllingggg.
Tristan disliked “omg ‘w/ whom’ is sending meeeeeee. Harvard is calllingggg.”
The tables at Tryst were tight together.
A sea of people staring at their laptops, clunky white coffee mugs floating to their lips.
Tristan was sitting in the back corner on his laptop.
He didn’t see me. I felt less self-assured than I had over text.
Maybe I shouldn’t have joked about Harvard calling.
Instead of going up to him, I agonized over the chalkboard menu items, fiddling with my coat buttons. The purple-haired barista said, “Can I help you?”
“Could I get the lavender hot chocolate and—”
Someone touched my shoulder. “Hey.” It was Tristan.
“Hi.”
The barista asked, “Anything else?”
“I’ll take an apple-cinnamon muffin.”
Tristan handed the woman his card. I pulled out a ball of dirty crumpled cash and held it out to the barista. “Stop being nice to me.”
“I’m not being nice. I’m being sorry.”
The barista looked between us.
I said, “You can put it on his card.”
There were reams of lined paper with terrible handwriting on the table, as well as worn philosophy paperbacks, a black MacBook. “You can move all that over,” Tristan said.
I hung my bag on the back of the chair. “What’re you working on?”
“This moral philosophy paper. I’m also researching this dissertation idea… We don’t start it until like the third year but it takes me a while to get my thoughts together so…”
“What’s the idea?”
“It’s rough, but it’s sort of like how agency isn’t an individual issue, like, your decisions are made inside a system.
That doesn’t mean you don’t have responsibility for your actions, but what does that do to your self-esteem when your actions are pit against structures designed to dilute them?
Like, slaves who didn’t run away. Technically, they could physically leave but that decision is attached to a violent context that makes it an impossible decision.
I wanna look at the connection between agency and depression because that’s depression, right?
Feeling like what you do won’t matter in the end, like your actions have no meaning. ”
A hole gaped inside me, and a thought of my father slipped through.
We didn’t say the word “depression,” but what else did you call the hours strapped to his armchair, drowning in blue light?
I often got the tragic sense that he was no one without alcohol, despite his drinking days living on mainly as a fragment of memories: loud footsteps, bumbling about, eyelids moving like sandbags tied to them.
He quit when I was twelve, after nearly three decades.
Part of me still believed there was nothing real inside the shell he refused to shed after getting sober, just a wisp of smoke forever falling through my fingers.
I touched the handle of my mug, remembering it in front of me. “Can I read your dissertation?”
“You’re gonna wait six years for it?”
“Why not?”
Tristan’s eyes scraped over me. Feeling cornered by his gaze, I fumbled for the book in my bag just to give my hands something to do.
“What’s that?”
I held up the cover. He read it aloud. “Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art. Art monster?”
“It’s like someone who puts their art over everything and how women rarely are art monsters because their spouses don’t do shit around the house. Instead, great artists are men who lead elaborate sex-trafficking rings.”
“Hm. Woman inspires horror in man: the horror of his own carnal contingence that he projects on her.”
“What?”
“De Beauvoir.”
“Stop trying to impress me.”
“I can’t be nice to you. I can’t impress you. What can I do?”
“Nothing. Isn’t that what your whole dissertation is about?” Then, because I couldn’t help myself: “She and Sartre had an open relationship, you know.” I needed to convince him. I was dissatisfied with anything less than complete understanding, a challenge that both incensed and thrilled me.
He leaned back in his chair, unconvinced. “It was more complicated than that.”
“When is it ever not more complicated?”
“It wasn’t all sunshine and roses, especially for her. Just saying.”
I pressed my lips together. “Okay, Mr. Philosopher, how come there’s no other relationship in our lives where we’re forced to choose? No one is like, you need to choose between your parents, or you can only have one friend or one kid.”
“You could only have one child in China for years, so. And you’re not sleeping with those people. It’s different.”
“So, you’ve never slept with any of your friends?”
His mouth twitched.
“Anyway, I don’t even think you believe what you’re saying. Jay says you just like to be contrarian.”
He broke into a big smile, and all of me went soft. “Jay might be onto something.” Picking up the book, palming the cover, “But I do believe what I’m saying. Cool cover.”
“I know, right?”
It was a photograph of artist Hannah Wilke, ass out in sheer tights, one boot planted on a chair while she’s angled over her desk.
“See.” Tristan ducked to catch my eyes. “We don’t always have to disagree.”
I held my breath. “There’s this part where the author writes about Artemisia Gentileschi. She did that famous painting of the two women holding down the man?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, at her rape trial she was forced to put her fingers in this torture machine to prove she was telling the truth, which, of course, could’ve ruined her fingers and ended her painting career.
She had to say it over and over: It’s true, it’s true, it’s true.
And back then rape was considered disrespectful to the men in the girl’s life—it wasn’t about the violence of the act—and girls got married off to their rapists to protect their father’s name… ”
I trailed off, flustered. I’d been struggling to relate this story to something I’d read in college about a young enslaved woman who set her master on fire after he raped her.
Her enslaved boyfriend dumped her because he didn’t want to “share” her with their owner.
The author argued it was the power of Black love that gave the slave woman the strength to set her master on fire so she could be with the man she really loved.
I remembered reading that and thinking, Why is this the love story I’m being given?
Why wasn’t her boyfriend more concerned with the safety of her body rather than being the only man who touched it?
How did this have anything to do with love?
It felt related to Artemisia, and both felt related to me, but I couldn’t cement this relationship in language. That was why I needed to write.
I half expected to look up and see Tristan on his phone.
The last time I told this story to a man, it was shortly after opening my relationship.
He, like most men I dated then, was more interested in what he considered the sexual promise of polyamory than any philosophy behind it.
It was just another sphere for him to exert power, to be a man, to get off.
But Tristan said, “I want you to finish.”
I touched my now-cold hot chocolate, biting my lip to stop from smiling but couldn’t, so I looked at the table, embarrassed by my giddiness. “There’s this part I love when the author talks about the origin of monster. In Latin, monstrare, to show, derives from monere, to warn.”
He leaned forward. “So, what are you here to show us, Catherine St. Clair?”
“I can’t even clean the crumbs off my laptop properly so probably nothing.”
He laughed. “Maybe the book about your parents is it.”
I didn’t remember telling him about this.
“What made you wanna write about them anyway?”
I paused. “I think at first, I was trying to understand what went wrong with me.”
He touched my hand. My brain dulled the sensation; I felt only the weight of his fingers. I wondered what Jay would think if he saw us. Maybe we were just getting along.
“You know, ‘wrong’ used to mean to turn, to bend, even to weave together,” he said. “Being wrong isn’t so bad if you think of it like that.”
I didn’t know how long we’d been talking until my stomach groaned, and I saw five hours had passed. Even then, outside on the wind-whipped sidewalk, we talked about leaving but neither of us left.
Tristan tugged on his bracelet, this time a simple silver chain. “I didn’t think you were gonna come.”
“Me neither,” I lied.
Shoving his hands in his pockets, he said, “Listen, I shouldn’t have berated you on the street.
That was stupid. I am protective of Jay.
He’s been there for me my whole life almost. And maybe I have some feelings about nonmonogamy that are…
they’re not about you as a person, okay.
” He stopped. I waited for him to continue.
He studied the contents of the coffee shop through the lit-up window.
“What did you mean when you said you didn’t think I trusted myself? ”
I tried to swallow my spit, but my mouth was a desert. “I don’t know, I just said it.”
He watched me for a long time with those dark, bottomless eyes, like he was waiting for something to happen. “Did you mean I don’t trust myself with you?”
The context for anything romantic between us was all wrong. We were a vision of ideological incompatibility. I didn’t care though. At this moment, I remembered why ideals always floundered under the weight of real-world feelings.
Stumbling forward, I closed the space between us, sensing the heat from his chest. I was too afraid to look up, to see his confused expression, so I stared at the white words on his shirt.
Then, a hooked finger tipped my chin up.
He didn’t look confused but nervous, like he wasn’t sure what was meant to happen next.
A pained breath escaped me. My mouth found his with embarrassing need.
He didn’t draw back, looping an arm around me and crushing me against him.
With one hand, I clutched the fabric of his shirt.
With the other, I touched the back of his neck, the strong skull bone, the soft little curls, such a vulnerable place.
He felt different from Jay and the same. They both felt inevitable.
Tristan broke away with a gasp. The sound of the city returned, an abrasive clamor. He avoided my eyes, backing away on his heels. Then he picked up his pace and disappeared down the street.