Page 51 of Dirty Diana
I pick up the one with a mushroom for a hat.
“Is that the Mario Cart guy?” Alicia asks.
“I think…” I squint harder. “I think it’s Barry?”
She leans in to get a better look and sees the teeny white platform sneakers. “Oh. I loooove him!”
I cup him in my palm and make a lap around the room. I’ve never felt so relieved by the weight of something, the figurine heavy in my hand. I think of Barry checking in on my work and reminding me to always be making something, no matter what it is. When he said this, I’d think,just like you,and I’d picture him cooking, the artist in his kitchen. But the figurines have a different kind of permanence. I wonder if he had always made them or only started after getting sick. Did he know we’d all be desperate for a piece of him to carry with us?
On Barry’s dresser, I find a few framed photographs. One is of him and Nancy and their parents; there’s another of Barry with his three aunts, at what looks like his culinary school graduation. And beside the frames, there’s a weathered copy of the book I made so many years ago. When I open it, a Polaroid falls out—the three of us, me, Barry, and Alicia, posing in our aprons in front of Barry’s van.
My eyes fill with tears, blurring our photographed faces, and I feel Alicia’s hand on my shoulder.
“I have an idea,” she says.
“What’s that?”
“Let’s get really stoned.”
—
We lie on Barry’s bed side by side, the windows wide open to air out the smoke. Nico is downstairs with Elvis. He’d shooed us away after we set out the buffet. “Have fun.”
“You’re the best,” Alicia told him. I watched as she kissed him. I tried to remember the last time I kissed Oliver that way.
Now I’m stoned and my defenses are depleted. I bite my lip and turn my face up to the ceiling fan. “Alicia, can I tell you something?”
“I already know what you’re going to say.” She props herself up on an elbow and peers down at me. “You’re getting a divorce.”
“What? No! Why would you even say that?”
“I don’t know, you just seem…secretive? Like you’re hiding something. And you’re not talking about Oliver. At all.”
“Okay, well, maybe, but that’s not why. I’ve been wanting to make something new, but I don’t know what it is. And I’m scared. I’ve let so much time pass since I’ve really made anything. But now I feel disconnected, and just, off. Like I’ve lost something, but maybe it was never really mine?” I drape my arm across my face, hiding in its crook. “And then I found these old tapes and I keep thinking, what if I talk to women, the way I used to, about love and sex, but maybe different this time.” The weed has made my mouth dry and my head fuzzy. “Like I’ve started wondering, maybe if I could live in someone else’s place for a while, in their desire, I could find my own. Does that make sense? I don’t know. I can’t figure it out, exactly. What it could be.”
Alicia is so quiet I worry that perhaps, in combination, the weed and I have put her to sleep.
But then she says, “Oh thank god.”
“What?”
“You always do your best work when you have no idea what you’re making. Remember when you tried to make those creepy nightmare dioramas? Those were wild.”
“That was so so long ago.”
“Who cares what this thing will become? Maybe that’s not for you to know yet. Love and sex and desire…” She lets it roll over in her mind. “You’ve always been fascinated by how squeamish we all are about sex. That was the whole idea of our point system.”
“That wasyouridea,” I say.
“No.” She shakes her head. “No, I told you the story about the frat boys who were bragging about it, but it wasyouridea for us to do it.”
Suddenly I know she’s right—I hadn’t remembered it that way at all, but she’s right. “Okay, but you were better at it than I was. Bolder—”
“No, I was havingmoresex than you, maybe. In more interesting places, probably. And with hotter people…”
I roll my eyes and Alicia smiles.
“I just thought, the more sex I have, the more chance I’ll get to what feels right. I liked to try things out. I still do. Oh my god—” She bolts up in bed. “Ask Nico about how we bought him a cock ring to try out. It said ‘one-size-fits all’ but it didn’t fit his balls!”
