Made for Love Read online

  She hadn’t been. But then he was upon her with hot, delicate lips that seemed to insist she needn’t notice him kissing her—it was the kiss equivalent of a late-night waiter discreetly sweeping up around the table as guests finished eating. For just a second her mouth flowered open and his wet tongue slid its width across hers, and then she was being guided from the room, suddenly in the arms of the escort. So quick was this transfer, she asked the handler just to verify. “I kissed Byron a moment ago, right? Not you?” She also wanted to ask, What about dinner?

  “We did not kiss,” the woman said, urging Hazel down into the car parked out front. “Byron will be in touch.” And he was.

  The Hub later came to seem like more of an allegation than a residence to Hazel. Not because they didn’t spend a lot of time there—they did. Hazel hardly ever left, in fact, and though Byron spent most of his days a few minutes away at the central office, he equated travel with risk and kept his off-premises trips limited. He came home to sleep every night around ten with the regularity of a programmed machine.

  But even on that first visit, “living” felt like a generous term for what happened inside The Hub. Yes, it was an impressive, sprawling structure. It was sleek and spotless and clinical; every wall of every room was sentient with touch and recognition technology. It didn’t seem real to her then, and never started to. One of Hazel’s only hobbies in their marriage was walking through the house very open-eyed and just slightly openmouthed. She was a little convinced that The Hub was a holding tank for death, an exact replica of the place where souls go immediately after departure. She never mailed a physical letter during the tenure of their marriage, but if she had, in the space reserved for a return address she would’ve written something to the effect of, “Where I live is where the deceased go to cool down to the afterlife’s new room temperature.”

  SIX MONTHS LATER TO THE DAY, BYRON PROPOSED AND HAZEL’S mother was dead. Most of Hazel’s ideas of marriage had more or less imploded on her last visit home prior to her mother’s passing. “Where’s Mom?” she’d asked her father, not expecting his answer to be traumatic.

  “She’s at Bernie’s,” he’d said. Bernie was one of her parents’ widower friends who lived nearby. “She’s been sleeping with him for a couple of weeks now. It’s one of the things she wanted to do before dying. A few rolls in the hay with other partners. We were virgins when we married, you know.”

  Hazel did not know, and thinking about her mother having sex was like thinking about a refrigerator having sex, or a stove. It seemed to Hazel that beneath her clothing, her mother didn’t have genitals so much as a central heating coil or an evaporator fan.

  “She’s having an affair?”

  Her father propped his glasses a centimeter more upright on his nose, turned the page of his newspaper, resumed his wince. He couldn’t read anything without making a severe cringing expression that implied he was bracing for impact, like a driver about to have a deer come through the windshield of his pickup. “Don’t be silly. It’s just intercourse. This is bucket-list stuff.”

  “But doesn’t that bother you?” Hazel paused, unsure of how far to take the conversation. She supposed, though, that she wanted to have some idea of just how weird things were getting. Was it time to cut off all contact? “Are you . . . taking on other partners too?” She steadied herself against the countertop, held her stomach. Her parents’ prudishness was like a natural law she’d taken to be a fundamental aspect of existence, one of the cohesive forces of the universe. Now Hazel felt the curtain of order slipping, primal chaos beginning to rumble forward. “Are you swingers?”

  “Jesus, Hazel.” Her father put the paper down, sipped his coffee. “I’m not a communist. No, there’s no reason for me to fool around now. I’m not in any hurry. Plenty of time to sleep with other women once she dies.”

  Hazel took a seat at the table. “It doesn’t seem like a betrayal?” She opened up a package of cookies and started stress eating then realized they were shortbread laxative biscuits. Laxatives and extramarital sex—that was the summary of what was going on with her parents.

  “Eh, she feels shortchanged by the cancer thing. If it softens the blow, so be it. It’s free and doesn’t put a single demand on my time. Honestly, I feel lucky that her final wishes have been so cheap. When Jim’s wife got cancer, he had to take her on a European cruise. I could tell you stories all day about friends’ wives who turned into greedy leprechauns when they began dying. Suddenly they’re obsessed with gold! They want gold this and gold that. Caleb’s late wife, after her first round of chemo, she couldn’t get enough gold. Then she wrote into her will that she wanted to be buried wearing all her jewelry. He couldn’t pawn a single piece of it after she croaked.”

  Hazel’s bowels gurgled. “Are you sad Mom’s dying?” she asked.

  Her father nodded. “You know I don’t like change.”

  IN HINDSIGHT, OF COURSE HER COURTSHIP AND UNION WITH BYRON was suspect. Now she could admit she knew on some level that she shouldn’t have gone along with Byron’s proposal and acted like she wanted to marry him. He was just so successful, though. And he found Hazel to be such a pleasant curiosity. At least the Hazel she pretended to be with him—universally cheerful, up for anything, with no preferences of her own. It was easy to get along with him because she acted like a mood ring, always agreeing with what he found great and what he found intolerable.

  She’d once heard a news story about a man who’d kept a secret family locked inside his basement, a second wife whom he’d kidnapped and three children she’d birthed and raised in captivity. All while his first wife and their children lived upstairs. Hazel could imagine, somewhat, the possibility that maybe the upstairs children didn’t know. But the upstairs wife? The case came up in one of her psychology classes, and the general consensus was how could she not know? There were some holdouts—maybe the wife was just a really trusting person and so on, and wasn’t it plausible that she believed he kept the basement triple padlocked for boring reasons, like being super protective of his carpentry hobby space? Other students piped up with stories about the wives of prolific serial-rapist torture murderers. When their husbands were finally caught and found to have murdered dozens of women, often over a series of decades, some wives claimed to have never suspected a thing. But weren’t these husbands probably great liars? her classmate friend wondered. Their professor cast his own vote. He looked a little like a Beethoven/Einstein hybrid, the latter’s wild hair with the former’s serious gravity. Everything he said sounded prophetic and metaphorically dimensional; a statement like Please shut the door because I can smell the lunchroom and do not wish to seemed a rumination on the greater impossibilities of privacy. He’d looked at them and said, “Everyone knows everything all the time.” Huh? they’d all thought at first. But yeah, okay, Hazel later reasoned. Maybe not all the time, maybe not everything, but on certain levels, subconscious and whatnot, she gathered that people did probably know a lot more than they let themselves acknowledge.

  Which now seemed applicable to her own situation. Sure she’d wanted to believe the narrative that she was inexplicably lovable: one encounter with her and a calculating, domineering technology genius was swept off his feet. No strings attached. She did believe he’d been fascinated by her; maybe he still was, a little bit. But he’d assumed that choosing her meant she would perform feats of active gratitude on his behalf for the rest of her life. Which actually, Hazel was fine admitting, was probably a fair thing for him to expect, given who he was. So many women would’ve been able to fall under his spell. Hazel saw them all the time—his assistant, Fiffany, was the clearest example—and had assumed that she too would eventually fall. Why wouldn’t she? She’d accomplished nothing, and was in the midst of a few life pickles. Hastily leaping into something new was her preference. Byron also likely found it great that in terms of science and engineering, she did not have a clue. He wanted someone he could astonish. And use.

  This was the secret gut
knowledge that she’d had and didn’t listen to. She should’ve bowed out the day of the engagement. Her ring had several nano computer chips embedded between layers of the band. One was actually placed into the center of the diamond itself—for Hazel’s “safety” the diamond’s interior housed a GPS and various other internal monitors. Immediately after he’d slipped it onto her finger, she’d gotten a text message from the ring’s sensors explaining that her heart rate was too rapid; it instructed her to sit down, place her head between her knees, and begin slow, deep breaths. “You should,” Byron insisted, and she had. “I’m just so happy,” she’d said. But not really. It was a panic attack.

  Her life was going to be so different from what she’d thought. This had felt sad and she wasn’t sure why, because she’d always planned on having a terrible life. But familiar terrors: loneliness, paycheck-to-paycheck ennui, unsatisfying dates with people a lot like her whom she wouldn’t enjoy because she did not enjoy herself. In a life with Byron she had no idea what to expect. But Hazel reasoned that Byron’s proposal was a phew, that was close! situation. She’d found a loophole to all the warnings her parents had ever badgered her with, their insistence that she’d have to clean up her messes. Her student loan and credit card debt felt crippling to her, but it was an inconsequential amount to Byron—he’d pay it. She’d partied too much, been lazy, and was about to flunk out of college. Readmission would be a long and tough road. But college was silly to Byron. “I dropped out to devote myself to my start-up full-time,” he told her. “Wouldn’t you say I’m doing okay?” Her mother had just died, and now, instead of having to move back home at a time when her father would be even more emotionally unpleasant than usual, she was going to be moving into a futuristic mansion the size of a small village. Maybe her father would even be forced to stop disapproving of her on all accounts since she’d landed such a successful husband. “You rescued me,” she’d joked to Byron, and he’d replied, “You rescued me too. You’re the first and only woman I ever thought of marrying.”

  “Same,” Hazel said, but marriage with all sorts of people had long been one of her most obsessive thoughts. The first person to actually ask her had been the mechanic at the oil-change place when she was fifteen. He’d proposed to her on the spot after a ten-minute conversation and she’d felt that she liked him enough: he had a thin scar on his cheek that looked like a cat whisker, and though the stitched name on his uniform said “Jake,” he assured her that was not actually his name. As for his real name? I haven’t totally decided, he’d said, but he promised to pick one before the wedding so he’d have a name to put on the certificate. In the meantime he told her to call him Been-Jake, if she wanted to, or said she could come up with her own name for him. Hazel had loved this because she’d never named anything before.

  ONCE, AS A CHILD, HAZEL HAD TRIED TO NAME THE FAMILY CHRISTMAS tree, but she was overruled. She’d gone into the kitchen to tell her parents (“I named the tree! Piney!”) and found them both at the table weeping. A woman named Phyllis had just died; she was a friend of theirs Hazel had never met who lived several states away in a region of the country Hazel had never traveled to.

  “Well, if we’re naming the tree this year,” her mother had sobbed, “we’re going to name it Phyllis!” This had caused a fresh round of vocal grief on her father’s part, which in turn triggered another from her mother. “I love that idea,” Hazel lied.

  The tree’s namesake status proved to be a deflating element of that year’s holiday—it wasn’t right to have celebratory lighting and ornaments strewn all over Phyllis, her mother insisted; it was not okay to place presents below her branches that weren’t direct offerings for the departed. The bulbs and ornaments were removed and a black linen scarf was draped in their stead. On Christmas morning, rather than open up gifts, they prepared a meat loaf and put it beneath the tree, along with a can of Dr Pepper and a TV Guide opened up to the “Cheers ’n Jeers” page: a few of Phyllis’s favorite things. Then they’d sat on the sofa together as a family and watched the steam of the meat loaf dissipate. When it appeared to have cooled down, her mother said, “I feel like we just saw Phyllis’s spirit leave the earth and ascend up to heaven.”

  “Are we going to eat?” Hazel asked.

  Her mother sighed. “After seeing that, I’m really not hungry. The symbolic transition from life into death reenacted before us, wow. Now that’s a true Christmas gift. Just a very solemn one. I think I’m going to go lie down.” Her father had agreed, and after they’d left the room, Hazel did something she knew would be frowned upon but also didn’t see the harm in—she went up to the tree and ran her finger along the ketchupy spine of the loaf’s top then tasted it. It was candy sweet. She started to go in for another, but felt something on the back of her neck: the energy in the room had shifted from neutral to judgmental. She spun around and saw her father standing in the doorway, eyeing her in disgust, shaking his head. But then he left, and she tasted another bite anyway. The meat loaf was present; his scorn had left the room.

  4

  MAY 2018

  IT HAD NOT BEEN ONE OF HIS MORE SUCCESSFUL BREAKUPS, THOUGH it had been a successful payday. Elizabeth, sweet mole-covered Elizabeth (this had been Jasper’s secret name for her, Moley Elizabeth), had recently written him a check for $38,000, the entirety of her current 401k, allegedly to be put toward Jasper’s first year of medical school. It was a safe bet, he’d convinced her: when he graduated and became a doctor, he’d be able to pay her back with interest, though it wouldn’t be of any real consequence at that point, his money versus her money, because of course they’d be married by then—I don’t want to propose until I can properly provide for you; otherwise I’d ask this very second! It had cleared; the money was officially his; the breakup text was sent; the cell phone destroyed; a new cell phone purchased. Moley E. was rather resourceful though, he had to admit—she had somehow (no use in thinking about how, though she had probably called in a favor to her very boring friend Dana, who worked for one of Gogol’s data-research divisions) found not just the motel he was staying in but also his actual room.

  Now she was repeatedly thumping against his window with energetic commitment; the thumps were not simple fists against glass, which he could have ignored, but wall-shaking slams. In fact she was hurling her full body against the window again and again, and had been doing so for such an extended period of time (two entire episodes of Law & Order!) as to seem indefatigable. From previous close calls with other women, in earlier years before he’d fully mastered what he was doing, Jasper knew how the fuel of heartbreak and rage could turn an average body into a superhuman engine. Finally, he moved the curtain back to watch her run from the balcony to the glass of his window, which she did some three or four times before she noticed him watching her through the protective layer of glass. His gaze had the air of a disinterested psychiatrist looking in at a mental patient locked in an isolation room.

  She did look pretty insane at the moment because she was sweaty and disheveled and blood was drizzling across her face from a small gash near her scalp. Plus she was so angry. Her eyes seemed enormous and helium-filled. She had jettisoned the weighty cargo of logic and reason. Moley E. was flying high.

  “You sociopath,” she began. “Give me back my money or I’m calling the cops.”

  It was best to stay calm, unaggressive, at this point. This was easy because he knew things were going to play out just fine for him no matter how big a scene Liz chose to make. Although he never appreciated police involvement, it didn’t concern him the way all the women, the way Moley E., thought it might. “It’s not illegal for me to break up with you, Liz,” he said through the window.

  This was when their mental gears began to shift; he could literally watch the realization occur. First they looked away and down, thinking. Then all the taut muscles in their faces began to slacken and drop, and not all at once—it was like watching a large tent be disassembled, the structure regressing into formlessness as pole after pole
was removed. The money had been given in a single wire transfer. Gifted. There’d been no false guarantee of investment, no paperwork trail of a scam. Elizabeth began to weep. Jasper closed the curtain.

  “You’d better look over your shoulder for me your whole fucking life,” she screamed. Now she was crying, and that was for the best—she would probably prefer to cry in her car than outside his motel room, and her sadness was an indicator that she’d soon begin processing the grief. Thinking of how he’d never again be running his tongue along her mole-speed-bumped torso. How the only reason he’d done it in the first place was to get her money.

  Not that it had been a horrible experience for him. Jasper didn’t know how to feel about the fact that he liked having sex with these women, with nearly any woman—he always enjoyed it. He kind of didn’t want to enjoy it so much. He wanted it to feel more like work, like what he did was closer to prostitution than to fraud. But the sex with them was effortless; he never had to fake arousal. He liked to consider himself a feminist in this way. Though he understood he didn’t fully align with what he considered to be their set of ideals, he knew they were all about body acceptance, and he had always accepted every body. He had a talent for getting turned on. This was the gift he’d been given in life. And it was silly for people not to make a living off what came easiest to them.

  He also, due to his wavy, Greek, shoulder-length hair and goatee, strongly resembled a European Jesus, which was an asset. When people stopped him in pharmacies or at the gas station and said, “Who do you remind me of?” he’d answer, “God’s only son, perhaps?” and at first they’d laugh but then they’d nod and grow excited. This sense of him feeling familiar was key in his line of work. The trustworthiness factor was everything.

  A romantic relationship in which he didn’t have a secret agenda held little appeal. In fact, the thought of vulnerability disgusted him. The grief of his father’s multiple divorces had warped the man, like water damage to wood—he was still the same person, essentially, just blurrier. Not quite level. In any given situation, there was always a danger now that emotion could get the best of him. He could bend and give way without notice.