Self-Portrait, Resting
Grace Fabbri
I saw you out on the street today and I really thought for a second that against my will my mouth was going to open, and a scream was going to come out. I wished I was driving in my car and you were walking in the crosswalk so I could hit the gas, press it all the way to the floor, and then I would hit you with the car and your body would make a dull thunk as it rolled across the hood and up over the windshield, and then you would finally be dead. But what actually happened was that I was walking home from the drugstore with a box of Plan B in my hand, trying to make a point of not hiding it in my bag because I wanted to stop feeling weird about the fact that I was maybe pregnant, and also just about the fact that I was having sex at all—especially since I was having sex with somebody whose baby I didn’t consider wanting for even a second, which meant that the sex was the gross, bad, P-in-V-porno kind and not the normal, slightly blurry, PG-13-loving kind. And that meant I was a bad person, or at the very least an abnormal person, and everybody standing on the street corner saw me with that purple box and knew it, that I was bad and abnormal—and then you were suddenly there, across the street. You looked at me and looked away and then the light changed and we walked right past each other, and you didn’t say anything, didn’t even acknowledge me, and I started seriously considering trying to kill myself again.
I don’t know if you saw the Plan B, because you were looking very pointedly at the walk signal, and then leaning up on your toes to check and make sure no cars were coming and then looking at your shoes as you crossed the street. I was staring hard at the side of your face and trying to psychically beam my thoughts into your head, as if I tried hard enough, I could make you turn towards me again—but it was like I was emitting some kind of reverse-gravitational field and you were looking everywhere except at me. And that should really have been a relief, I guess, but it didn’t feel like one, because you were close enough to reach out and touch; close enough to see the little pills of felt coming off your coat, close enough to see the plastic ends of your shoelaces, to see your individual dark curls of hair. I was starting to think about how I used to be this close to you and it didn’t feel significant or out of the ordinary because at the time I was allowed to be there, near you; and then I started to think about how improbable it was that you wouldn’t look, not even for a second, not even out of surprise, on accident. Finally, it occurred to me that maybe you couldn’t see me at all anymore, and that was why you weren’t looking. I’d stopped in the middle of the street at that point, planted myself right on the divider, and nobody was honking or pushing up against me or saying anything. It was just the normal mid-morning traffic noise and the El rumbling overhead and me, my left foot in a puddle, in the middle of everything, invisible.
I spent a little while standing there, not sure what to do. You were disappearing down the street, the long, dark back of your coat already half obscured by the people coming down the station steps—and none of them were looking at me strangely either or even looking at me at all. I considered just staying there, the stream of foot traffic parting around me, everyone moving all at once; but after a while it started to make me feel a little unsettled, all the people and the cars and the noise. So, I stepped off the divider and started to walk, following behind you, keeping my eyes on the back of your head. We were a few blocks west of the art museum, and it looked like that was where you were headed—out of the crowd of buildings and towards the park, the stone- gray lake, the twin green lions. We’d been there together before, maybe half a year earlier. You’d held my hand as we walked around, drinking espresso from small ceramic cups and sitting in the courtyard with our feet tangled together, our faces tipped upwards towards the sun. When we took the train home I leaned on your shoulder, and you smelled warm and like sweat and I was so aware of my body that I felt like I could’ve exploded out of it. That was when you were still living in Rogers Park before you moved. This time, though, the weather was gray and cold, the threat of rain, or snow, hung in the air. I was following maybe ten feet behind you, still very aware of my body but this time in a bad way, like I was stuck inside a hard shell or a small room that I couldn’t get out of. You walked across Michigan Avenue, jogged up the stairs, took out your card, and showed it to the attendant at the door, and I just walked through after you. Nobody asked me what I was doing or if we were together. I was outside and then I was inside and that was it.
The whole trying to kill myself thing happened about five months ago, in July. I don’t think anybody would’ve told you about that. It was the kind of stupid, ineffectual suicide attempt that makes people think you weren’t trying that hard, or that maybe you didn’t even want to die in the first place. But I actually did want to die, is the thing. I just didn’t want to make a big deal out of it. I kept thinking about my mom and how she would be seriously crushed if I did something like throw myself off a bridge, but that maybe she’d be able to get over it a little easier if there were some kind of plausible deniability surrounding the whole thing, like maybe I just went to sleep and didn’t wake back up again. But what ended up happening was I took a bunch of sleeping pills, threw up so hard I burst a blood vessel in my eye, and then got really scared and called an ambulance, and they made sure I lived. Then, for the next couple of months, they made sure I was planning on continuing to live, which I honestly was because the whole experience freaked me out pretty badly, but also because I was feeling a lot less depressed at that point. It wasn’t about you, or anything like that. I’d started to feel like my head was full of sand all the time, and the sand was making it impossible for me to think about anything except maybe what it would mean to not feel like that anymore, how to stop feeling like that. I would’ve done anything, I think.
If you could’ve seen me, I would’ve maybe told you that. But you couldn’t. So, I didn’t say anything even though I was thinking about it still. You walked through the museum, and I kept following you, stopping when you stopped, then moving on when you moved on. It was fun, almost. Like being taken on a guided tour. We went past Paris Street; Rainy Day, and A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, and we both leaned in close, the painting dissolving into a thousand tiny dots of color. I kept thinking of things to say to you and then remembering I had to be quiet, because you didn’t know I was there. I thought of going to the bathroom and calling you or doubling back and pretending to run into you but I wasn’t sure how long I was going to be invisible, whether this was something I’d be dealing with for weeks, or forever, or just for the rest of the day. So, I kept walking, and I kept being quiet, and we slowly made our way through the museum together.
Then you stopped in front of Resting, the Mancini painting of a young woman lying in bed, and you stood there for a while. You were looking at it kind of slack-jawed, your expression almost a mirror of the woman’s – distant, a little empty. Your hands were hanging at your sides. You weren’t fidgeting. I looked at you, and I looked at the painting, really looked at it, you know, trying to put myself in your shoes to figure out what you were thinking, what about it had stopped you, why you stood there for so long. I liked impressionism but didn’t know very much about Mancini. The painting was a stippled collection of suggestive colors, except for the woman’s sleepy, vaguely apathetic face, which was painted in close detail—everything spiraling out from that getting less and less specific. The woman’s blanket was rumpled, and her breast was exposed and, even though the medium itself had acted as a kind of warped window with the brushstrokes just suggesting that a breast was there, I felt like I ought to look away. She was staring intently at something off to the right side of the frame as if she were thinking very hard, unaware that she was being watched. I thought I understood, then, why the painting had stopped you. The startling humanness of her expression, the almost unbelievable nuance in it; discomfort was part of it, that feeling complicit in something shared between painter and viewer. And something shared between viewer and subject, too. Something tired and sad and distracting reminding me of myself lying in a hospital bed trying to explain to my parents how I felt and not being able to find the words for it.
I looked at you. I wanted to see the expression on your face—to see if I’d been right, if I’d correctly predicted your reaction. I looked at the ridge of your brow, at the slight tilt of your head, signs of careful consideration, I thought. Standing there it was easy to remember all the things about you that I liked. Your sensitivity, your intelligence, the fact that you were the type of person to go to an art museum alone. How it felt to have your attention, to be looked at by you. How it made me think of myself more kindly, because I had less to prove, or because I had proven something already. Sitting on the El with my head on your shoulder. An exploding soda can, a firework. The words my boyfriend clicking around in my mouth like a piece of hard candy. I thought, again, about calling you—wondering what you’d do if I did, if you’d want to see me again, even just over coffee, as friends, to catch up.
You shifted your weight onto your left leg, and your coat fell open just slightly. I looked down and then startled backwards because, somehow, you were hard, looking at the painting. You were standing in the middle of the Art Institute looking at her exposed breast – which was barely even a breast, the suggestion of a breast, a breast covered by a layer of rippling water—and you were hard. It wasn’t even a question, your hardness. It was the opposite of an impressionist painting; it was hyper-realism. It was the only thing I could focus on. I suddenly remembered a dream I’d had a few nights before in which I’d seen you at a bowling alley, and you were so tall that your head had broken through the ceiling, and I’d barely been able to recognize you at all. I felt like that again, then. You were the shape of a person, but you were missing the details of one. You were looking at that resting woman’s apathetic face and her single breast, and you were hard and you were nobody I’d ever known before in my entire life.
I stepped back. The rubber sole of my boot squeaked on the hardwood floor. You turned to look at me.
“Jesus,” you said. “Hi. How long have you been standing there?”
After you broke up with me, I went around my apartment and gathered up all the things you’d left behind, and I put all those things into a box. We’d agreed to meet, to talk, and I was going to bring you your things, and you were going to bring me mine. I sat on the floor folding everything, getting more and more nervous as time went on, and more and more sad, too, because as I was putting everything away into that box I felt like I was burying something. I sat sadly on the floor and folded all your clothes and put them very carefully into a box and I felt like I was burying something that I had killed. And then you never actually showed up.
So, I didn’t say anything. You stared at me, startled and maybe a little embarrassed, Resting just behind your shoulder. The woman in the painting looked out past the right side of the frame. You said my name then, just once, and I looked at you, and I saw you looking at me, and I saw the painting looking at nothing and I wondered who she was to Mancini, that girl. What she’d been thinking about, lying in bed, and being painted. Then I turned and walked away. I went to the cafe, and I got a cup of coffee and a bottle of water, and I took the Plan B right there in front of everybody. Nobody said anything or looked at me once and I stopped being maybe pregnant right then, like a little flame going out. I swallowed the pill, and I thought about the baby and the man whose baby it might’ve been. Then I sat and thought about the weather for a while instead. Lake Michigan, gray and choppy. The air like metal, like rain, or maybe snow. I sat and thought about that for a while. The snow, and the smell of it. I sat by myself, and drank my coffee, and I thought about it on purpose.
About the Author
Grace Fabbri works as an editor and is the manager of an independent bookstore in Metro Detroit. She holds a degree in English and Creative Writing from the University of Michigan, where she received several undergraduate writing awards. "Self-Portrait, Resting" is her first published short story.