【by Birdie Stark】

I came to London in August and very nearly got excited about it.

Getting intrigued was easy enough, but the mustering of excitement took some knuckle cracking and a few shots of vinegar in my system. In any case, I was quitting one place to go someplace else. This was good news.

My mother had enrolled me in an acting school there, a famous one, with several excellent programs for film and theater and pantomime. I was a damn good liar, she said, and would fit right in.

Well, acting school was alright. It wasn’t quite the wind beneath my wings, but it was just the sort of place a fellow could get used to. Easy, at the very least. I had felt rather inspired at first, the way most artists do at the grand thought of being known. A fire of creative promise
was lit beneath me, one galvanizing enough to memorize my lines and stroll up and down the West End at dusk with my lips peeled back in the smile of an American innocent.

Within the first month or so, an old professor by the name of Mr. Peabody took me aside and told me I was quite the handsome fellow. He had not been coming onto me, only speaking in the matter-of-fact sort of way that well-groomed husbands draped in cashmere speak of their glamorous wives. I said that I sort of knew I was handsome, and he called that a shame.

“Boy,” he said, “The moment a promising young man understands his potential, I’m afraid all hope disappears.”

I said oh, and his colossal head nodded in a sympathetic sort of way. Next morning he pulled me aside once more and asked if I had given any thought to the modeling industry. I said hardly any, and this answer pleased him. I was three inches too short, he said, and my jawline a bit too soft.

I spent the next couple months sitting cross legged in my apartment mirror, cracking my knuckles and flexing the muscles in my neck to make them tighten and thaw. Experimentally, I spent some months going to bars and bringing women home with me. They were lovely young ladies with eyes that blinked slowly and did not leave my face. I was sweet to them, they said, and very handsome. Sometimes in the hour before the sun would rise, I would pull them closer to me in bed and ask what they really thought of me. My jawline, abdomen, the veins on my arms. They would giggle and say it was all quite nice, and I guess that was alright. As they drifted off to sleep I would peer up at the ceiling, letting its cracks and whorls twist into the shape of Mr. Peabody’s frowning face.

One night in a dingy bar I made the acquaintance of a bright young woman with only one eye. The other was glass, round and brown and stagnant in its socket. She scooped it out, showing the concrete way it sat in her palm as the gaping pink crater in her face stared back at me. I was rather charmed by this, and as we climbed the stairs up to my apartment that night she told me that she was a poet. Here I paused on one creaky step, turning back around to see the very private way she was looking at me. My mother, I said, is also a poet.

She smiled at me. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

This young woman’s name was Jane or perhaps Josephine. In any case I was quite fond of her, and we spent several months lounging around each other’s apartments. She wrote poetry, and I sat frog-legged on her floor pretending to study scripts. Sometimes she would light a cigarette and speak to me about her tragic addiction. I said yeah yeah yeah and she smiled privately.

Autumn came and went quickly, and winter passed at a glacial pace. A few snowfalls graced our city—I went out to study the frozen droplets on a drooping clothesline—and some afternoons I went strolling along a bike path just north of my apartment complex. On Saturdays there came a young girl who bicycled around on purple training wheels, lapping me once or twice before coasting to a picnic bench where her brother was waiting. She came back week after week, though the training wheels never came off.

One day as I sat still in the low boughs of a tree, I watched her brother lean down and carefully remove the training wheels from her bicycle. He lunged back and forth on the grass, stretching out his legs before pushing her bike to the top of a great hill. He wore a cap, I remember, that he held clamped to the top of his head as the icy wind blew the trees all about. With trepidation he counted down from five, flew down the slippery grass in a flurry of momentum, and landed violently on his bottom in a lump of shrubbery below. I leaned forward, nearly falling off my branch, to try and see the look on his face. He wore only a simple smile as he sat squatting in the bush, and his sister laughed shortly before running over to help him up. Something about this display sickened me, and I took a while walking home.

In December my mother called to ask about the trajectory of my career. Things were looking up, I told her, and I was likely to win a big role soon. She asked if I liked London. Yes, I said. I’m sure I do. There was silence on the phone line, then she said my name in a gentle sort of way.

“I’m very tired,” said my mother, “and I don’t think I will keep on writing.”

Two nights ago she’d attended a poetry reading at which she was meant to speak, and they had forgotten to print her name in the program. They promised that later in the night they would squeeze her in. They could not afford to mess up the order of the first four sets. As the night went by, she tapped her feet dully onto the floor. She watched the clock and studied her writing. With an hour left until she was meant to have a turn at the podium, she crumpled up her papers and walked softly home.

I woke up the next morning with crust around my eyes, turning over in bed to watch a mouse scurry to and fro along the clothesline that stretched out from my apartment to the crooked iron pole stuck into the concrete outside. Its fur was tufted, covered in sickly white spots like parmesan cheese. Mange, I think.

I was humming a small song, leaning off the edge of my bed to watch the mouse, when a coagulated mass came flying squarely at my windowpane. It collided with the glass, oozing gloomily south. I stood up to examine the intrusion, which was golden and limpid. Egg yolk.

Down on the street below was Mr. Peabody, wrapped up in a scarf and waving up at me like I was a creature he could not believe. Flurries of snow whirled around him, alighting on his bushy eyebrows and drifting all about. He was coughing.

That morning in lecture Mr. Peabody spoke about scrutiny. He winked at me and said that the first time an egg is thrown at your window, you may rest assured you’ve begun to win at something. Everyone began to scribble furiously at the sound of this, and he asked me afterwards how I thought I was doing in the class.

“Good,” I said.

“Perhaps even great?”

“Perhaps.”

“Do you feel you are well-liked in this class?”

“Yes, I believe I’ve made several friends here.”

“Then you cannot be great.”

Christmas passed, and the months went on. I had begun to lose any sort of hope that I would ever amass even an ounce of ambition for the theater, and the beautiful girl with the glass eye made me feel no better.

“If it does not keep you up at night,” she said, “then you ought to find something that does. Your art must drive you to a point of insanity.”

“But nothing keeps me up at night,” I said.

She shrugged. “Then you have nothing.”

Jane-or-Josephine had begun to experiment with visual art, and I spent some hours posing nude in her kitchen dangling a great bunch of grapes above my chin. She painted in acrylics, using her thumb to blur the peachy lines just around my pubic bone. I had a wonderful jawline, she said, and a very sharp abdomen. Several of her pieces were rather impressive, and a local art institute had offered to put three paintings up in their gallery. They would remain there for two months before being sold at an auction.

One of her paintings she’d kept secret from me. It was a depiction of a photograph I had once shown her of my parents. In it my father held a red umbrella over my mother’s head, squinting his eyes and grinning wide like a dog. Papa’s hand was at her lower back, and my mother was craning her chin backwards in a great contagious laugh. The image was blurry. I liked to imagine the photographer, too, had been laughing when he clicked the shutter. When I showed Jane-or-Josephine the photograph, her eyes grew wide, and she reached out with the instinct of a child to hold it in her slender hands.

On the day of the unveiling at the institute, Jane-or-Josephine could not go. She had caught some horrid disease—perhaps mono—and was stuck home wallowing beneath her sheets. She told me to go see the paintings for myself then give her a ring to let her know what I thought. I took my time walking, pausing for a bit outside the institute to look up through the branches of a great apple tree. The sky was typical. I picked a perfect apple from a low-hanging branch.

There were several people inside, women in scarves and old men with clipboards. They were smiling and tilting their heads from side to side, sipping tea with tight lips. I weaved between them all—nodding pleasantly to the women—and found myself face to face with her first painting. The edges of the piece were blurred, gray bits of cobblestone that bled into the center. There in the middle of the canvas was a clot of scarlet, underneath which stood my parents.

Only they were not my parents, and I stepped closer to see. Jane-or-Josephine had gotten the picture all wrong. In the painting my mother had a tight grip around Papa’s bicep. She was leaning heavily on him, and her face was tired. Papa watched her with a serious face, squinting so his black eyebrows folded down into their sockets. My mother was not laughing, and her hair had turned a stale shade of gray. Their faces, I saw, were droopy. The title of the piece was “What We Become.”

I shoved my hands deep in my pockets and marched through the gallery, between the lofty women and past the magnificent painting of my bare, chiseled chest with the grapes hanging just above. How ridiculous, I muttered. How absolutely ridiculous.

I rounded a corner, pressing my back into an empty wall and sliding down until I sat squarely on the floor. There was the apple in my hands. I tore into it, clutching it desperately, filling my throat with chunks of juice and flesh and skin. A young boy walked past, stopping just in front of me to tilt his head to the side, putting his hands up to his neck and screwing up his eyes in a worried sort of way. It was terrible. I knew I was a filthy animal, but still I peeled back my lips, squinting at him with fear and anguish and hardly guilt. The boy, I saw, wore laced up shoes and a backpack. He began to weep, and I was sorry, and I did not stop. I finished the apple within a minute, nibbling with misery at the core, eating the seeds and then the stem. I looked up and he was gone. The gallery was nearly empty. I coughed up into the air.

When I had belched a little and began to feel better, I left the institute, stepping outside into a phone booth and calling home. My mother picked up the phone, and I could hear on the line that she was laughing. I smiled a little at this, but then she started coughing into the receiver and I told her I would call back.

I stood still for some minutes until a young girl parked her bike outside the phone booth. I could not tell if it was the same kid from the winter. In any case, the purple training wheels were gone. I stepped out of the phone booth and called out to her. Hey kid, you got an older brother?

The kid placed one foot on the pavement and said what’s it to you. Her little white sneaker kept balance on the ground and she was frowning. I didn’t know what it was to me, so I nodded in a serious sort of way and said forget it. The rain was coming on, and as I walked back to the apartment, I scribbled out a letter to Mr. Peabody.

I’ve decided to withdraw from acting school, I wrote. Really, I am no good. I’m beginning to think of going into modeling, and perhaps you’ll see me in a toothpaste advert some day. In any case, I never did scrub that egg stain off my window and I don’t intend to. I hope you can forgive me.