I keep thinking I see her when I don’t. Amid the floating mass of bodies, every blonde head is hers until it isn’t.
It had been like this with Calliope, and it makes me sad to think about how nothing ever changes.
Shivering as I scan the wide, palatial terrace overlooking the city, I can’t shake the sensation that I shouldn’t be here. An influencer’s book release party at a mansion in the Hollywood Hills—it’s the kind of thing I avoid, but not tonight. Tonight, I was pulled here by an unquiet magnetism. I could feel its vibrations thrumming on the summer winds like deceitful music.
A hand on my arm, a voice—not hers—saying my name. I turn toward it, clutching my tumbler of grapefruit juice and tonic water as if it could save me. It takes me a second or two longer than it should to recognize the girl standing there. Her face is too similar to those of so many forgotten others.
“Did you know I would be here?” she asks.
I glance around the terrace, searching. “I’m just passing through,” I tell the girl. “I’m not really here.”
“Are you ever?”
“Am I ever what,” I ask, distracted, my eyes still scanning behind the dark lenses of my sunglasses. I’m vaguely cognizant of “Girls” by The Dare playing from a speaker somewhere unseen.
“I mean you’re never really anywhere.”
It takes effort to refocus my attention on the girl. I light a cigarette, and I can’t stop the first exhalation from coming out as an irritated sigh. “Is there something you want to say to me,” I ask her.
Her face contorts unflatteringly. “There used to be,” she says. “A lot of it I already said in those voicemails.” She stares at me hard. I can feel her probing for something she isn’t going to find. “Did you even listen to them?” she asks.
I can’t give her an answer because I can’t remember if I listened to them, and I don’t want to lie to her.
She averts her eyes and says, “I guess it doesn’t matter.”
“The beauty of it is that nothing matters.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes.”
“I started seeing someone, you know.” She sips her drink. Some neon-blue concoction in a martini glass. Her eyes look through me. “I like how he treats me. I like his motorcycle and how none of his clothes cost more than a hundred dollars. He calls me Miss Spiritual Tramp of 2023 because of my lower back tattoo, and I like that, also.”
I blink at her. Idly swirl the juice in my glass. “He sounds like the real deal,” I say.
“He is. He’s real. It’s a nice change of pace for me.”
“Am I not real,” I ask, because I know she wants me to.
“No,” she says. “You’re something else.”
“It’s almost like you’re trying to hurt my feelings.”
“Please. As if anyone could hurt whatever feelings you do have.”
“Are we done here.”
“We never even started,” she says, raising her glass to me and smirking. I don’t watch her as she walks away.
She’s quickly replaced by this frail, dazed-looking girl who vacantly introduces herself as Mina and asks me if I want her to test my blood sugar.
“Why would I want you to test my blood sugar.”
A shrug of her narrow shoulders causes one strap of her dress to slide down her bony bicep. She fixes it and says, “I’m diabetic. Type 1.”
“Which one is that.”
“The skinny one. The hot one.”
“Do I look like I need my blood sugar tested.”
She studies me for a few moments, or at least stares in my direction; her empty eyes are on me, but they don’t seem to register my presence. “You have a sickness,” she says. “I don’t think it has anything to do with your blood. It’s somewhere else.”
“Where is it.”
“I can’t help you. Probably no one can.” She shakes her head and shuts her eyes. Looks away.
“Is it contagious.”
Her hollow, Manson-girl eyes fix on me once more and she says, “People like you are always such casual disappointments.” She shakes her head again and shuffles off, her bare feet leaving only the faintest imprints on the Astroturf.
How I finally end up spotting Melpomene is I follow the gazes of other men. She likes to be watched and she knows how to fashion herself into the focal point in any given crowd. The men’s doggedly lupine stares form a series of spokes which converge on the blonde girl standing by the pool. She’s holding a White Claw and talking to a group of girls who might be beautiful if she weren’t among them. Purple ribbons trail from the twin braids framing the heartbreak of her face. Her tennis skirt stops mid-thigh on white legs so painfully long and slender they call to mind tragedy and despair. Her socks reach her knees, clinging to her calves as I once did in the darkened bedroom of my haunted memories.
I don’t know how to write about her, I’d told Summer Priestly. The critics will call her a male fantasy figure.
But that’s what she is. She’s a fantasy. If she were real, I wouldn’t be here tonight.
Something in her face shifts when her eyes land on me. Even with my sunglasses on, she knows I’m looking at her because she’s so accustomed to being looked at; the alternative isn’t something she’d consider. I can see her trying to figure out what to do. The preoccupied disconcertion is evident on her face as she nods along to whatever her friend is saying.
The muscles in my neck become rigid when she excuses herself and crosses the terrace toward me. I watch the cold breeze tease the ruffles on the sleeves of her schoolgirl blouse. Her legs are like twin blades on a butterfly knife, flicking with precise lethality beneath the almost-scandalous switching of her skirt. A summery song by Portugal the Man segues into My Ruin’s cover of “Tainted Love.”
Standing before me, her smile is at first tight and forced before correcting itself into an easy amicability. She gives me a brief hug that’s nothing like her past embraces. I catch the scent of her, and it makes me weak. For too long after it was over, I wouldn’t sleep in my bed because I didn’t want to snuff out the aroma of her body lingering in my sheets.
When the hug ends and our torsos part, I wonder vaguely if I’ve ever felt so cold and alone.
There’s an indistinct hesitancy in her voice when she tells me it’s nice to see me, and then she asks what I’m doing here.
“Well, Colette is a friend, so.” I try to make my voice sound casual.
When she asks if I read Colette’s new book, I tell her I did and that I blurbed it. She says that was nice of me, and then she gestures at my cigarette and asks if I have another. The glitter beneath her eyes glints in the glow of the flame when I light it for her.
She takes a long drag, watching me with uneasy reticence. She asks what I’ve been up to.
“This and that,” I say, hating how pathetic it sounds. “The other thing.”
She cocks her head and asks what the other thing is. I tell her it’s just something people say.
Someone nearby calls her name. A little part of me dies when she looks away from me in its direction. To feel the soothing heat of her eyes and have it snatched away feels like it always did. Like being shut out in the cold.
I shouldn’t have come here.
I tell myself I’m moving of my own volition when she takes my wrist and pulls me over to the person who called her name. I tell myself free will is still something I believe in.
She introduces me to a blandly corpulent guy named Bosie who holds his cigarette with limp-wristed coquettishness and fucks me with his hooded eyes. There’s some kind of stain on his T-shirt, which I can only guess is from Target or maybe even Walmart.
“Melpomene and I went to high school together,” Bosie says. His small, recessive eyes flit between the two of us, lingering on me. “How do you two know each other?”
I glance at Melpomene, trying to grasp the vibe and failing to find it. She answers for me, telling Bosie we met on Twitter, that we sort of dated briefly.
Hearing her phrase it like that has a constricting effect on my throat. As though the Dresden bombing had been a contained blaze. Nagasaki experienced rapid oxidation. Vietnam was temporarily engaged in foreign interference.
Or maybe I’m just dramatic.
Bosie’s smirk is reptilian. “Ah, yes, okay,” he says. “Things are clicking.” He tosses his cigarette aside and asks Melpomene if she has another. She’s tapping out a text and she shakes her head absently. Bosie looks at me and raises a thin eyebrow. I take my cigarettes from my jacket and hand him one. He asks for a lighter and I hand him that, too; he brushes his cold, thick fingers against mine with clumsy deliberation when he passes it back to me.
The Fratellis’ “Chelsea Dagger” bursts from the speakers and Melpomene squeals. She runs off to dance with a group of girls on a square of lit tiles flanked by ornately potted bonsai trees.
Bosie squints at me in the darkness. “Hold on. Take off your sunglasses.”
Sighing, exhausted, I oblige.
His round face pulls inward with smug self-satisfaction. “Oh, yes. You’re the writer. She told me about you. She showed me pictures.” A dull twinkle flashes beneath the drunken sheen encasing his eyes. “You’re cuter in person.”
I put my sunglasses back on.
“She told me she ended things with you,” Bosie says after a few minutes of awkward silence. He’s grinning a little.
“Did she tell you why.”
“She did not.”
I search his face, but I can’t tell if he’s lying. It doesn’t matter. “She didn’t tell me, either,” I say.
“Well, you know how it is. Mel is a good time gal.”
“What does that mean.”
He gives me the sort of indulgent smile people typically reserve for naïve children. “It means she has a lot of boyfriends, honey.”
I stare across the terrace at Melpomene, who’s laughing in the center of three men. Her hand is on the arm of this club promoter named Larry Glick who’s always sniffing around her even though he’s allegedly engaged to some playwright. I don’t recognize the other two. They’re leaning toward her with a haze of dumb lust in their lazily bloodshot eyes. A song by Low drifts through the dark. An unholy prayer.
“Trust me, doll,” Bosie says, “you dodged a mean bullet. She’s evil. She’s insane.”
I frown at him, raising an eyebrow.
He turns his palms up and lifts his shoulders. “Sure, hey, we’re friends or whatever. I mean, I guess. We’ve known each other a really long time. But we sort of hate each other. She’s so awful. The worst.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Yeah, because she bewitched you. With her hateful slit.”
“Jesus.”
“Please, you can’t think her whole manic-pixie-dream-girl-slash-BPD-art-ho thing is real. She constructed her whole personality from Pinterest mood boards and Sofia Coppola movies and fucking Red Scare Reddit threads. Don’t tell me you fell for it. You’re smarter than that.”
“I guess I’m not.” And then, “You don’t know anything about me.”
“Maybe I don’t. But I think I’m starting to.”
I disengage from him and wander around the party for a while, chain-smoking and thinking bad thoughts about myself, about the world. I run into Summer Priestly at some point, who tells me I look too thin. When I tell her I’ve started running, she stares at me with eyes like cold scalpels and says, “From what?”
Shivering with my cigarette beneath a miniature palm tree, I survey the crowd and I’m struck by how pathetic the whole scene is. I’ve been to this same party so many times, with the same characters and only slightly different backdrops. It’s a pale, leprous imitation of the New York literature scene cultivated by the girls who run Eternity Mag, both of whom probably—justifiably—laugh in secret about this bleakly charmless offshoot of their niche subculture. I suppose it was doomed from the start; Los Angeles isn’t a literary place. It’s where art goes to die. No one here has anything to say. All that matters is that you look like you do.
I should silently leave like the ghost I am, but I find myself searching again for Melpomene, yearning for one last exchange. I’ll get nothing from it. If anything, I will only lose more of myself, but maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe I can whittle myself down into something perfect.
She’s talking to another writer I sort of know tangentially, an old guy who goes by the name Tasty Burritos. The stories he posts on his blog are exclusively about sad, misogynistic beta men trying to get laid. All the egirls love him.
He's not even a bad guy, all things considered. But seeing him standing so close to Melpomene paints him a certain way. Swap him with Gandhi and I’d still want to douse him in kerosene.
I’m approaching the two of them before I realize what I’m doing. They both turn to look at me. TB’s hand moves to the small of Melpomene’s back. Whatever is left of my soul dies a little more. I’m dying all the time and I wonder if they can smell the rot on me beneath my cologne.
TB glances between me and Melpomene. A flicker of amused comprehension passes over his face. “I’ll give you two kids a minute,” he says.
Melpomene touches his lapel and tells him not to go far.
“I think I’m gonna take off,” I tell her when he’s gone.
She asks why so soon, but she’s smiling like it’s a joke.
“I feel like I’ve been here a long time,” I say. “It feels like it’s been too long.”
She laughs drunkenly and says she doesn’t even know what time it is.
I know this is the point I should turn and go, but I don’t. I can’t. I take off my sunglasses and say, “I have to know what happened. Everything seemed good until it didn’t. What did I do wrong.” The words sound far away as they tumble from my throat. I’m somewhere beneath the earth, looking up at this husk of a person as he pleads with a pretty girl, desperate for her to tell him why he isn’t enough even though he already knows.
I’d kill him if I could, and it would be an act of mercy.
Melpomene doesn’t answer. Something else happens. The surrounding noises of the party go quiet, and the air becomes charged. She changes. Reduces drastically in height. Her blonde hair darkens to black. The features of her face rearrange themselves. A white ribbon appears around her neck.
“You,” I hear myself say, taking a step back. “Always you.”
“You didn’t do anything,” Calliope says. “You’re just too weird. You’re too much of a freak.” Her harsh, cruel laughter is frostbite on my skin. “God, don’t be such a fucking girl about it.”
There’s nothing left for me to do but flee.
I don’t get why you’re so hung up on Calliope, my friend Enrique said to me once. I mean, she’s pretty mid. Everything about her is mid. She looks mid, her music is mid. Her whole fake persona she’s created...it’s mid at best. He’d stroked his mustache like a supervillain and said, I mean, I’ve seen some of the other girls you’ve been with. I bet if you lined them all up, she wouldn’t even crack the top ten.
Yeah, man, our friend Simon had agreed. I mean, here’s how it is—you’re a romantic. I respect that. But you have absolutely no chill when it comes to these sadistic, fake-ass bitches with personality disorders. You keep falling for the same type of girl and they’re obviously not good for you. Let’s be honest, they’re probably not good for anyone. That’s why we gotta get you racing. We’ll get you an ultra-healthy marathon runner chick. Let’s fucking go.
Another friend, Holly, had said, Melpomene, Calliope, that married lady—they’re all the same, aren’t they? It’s the same woman with a different face. You keep finding her. You’re searching for her, always. You crave her because she validates everything you hate about yourself. You only love her because she’ll never love you. So, in the end, it’s not really about them, or her...it’s about you. You and your need to suffer.
These words swirl in my head as I sit fully clothed in my shower with the steaming water pelting me. Veins of moisture run down the fogged lenses of my sunglasses. I use the toe of my boot to turn the shower dial all the way to the left, increasing the temperature to near-scalding, and still I am cold. The ice in my bones is a solace because I know it, and it belongs there.
You’re just too weird.
You’re too much of a freak.
Don’t be such a fucking girl about it.
Me. Me and my need to suffer. Maybe Holly is right. Maybe that’s all this has ever been about. Maybe it’s all anything has ever been about.
You have a sickness. I can’t help you. Probably no one can.
Getting out of the shower, I stagger to my mirror and stand before it, water dripping like percussive gunshots onto the cold linoleum. My clothes cling to my skin. Locks of sopping hair hang over the lenses of my sunglasses.
“This is you,” I say to my reflection. “This is what you are.”
Don’t be such a fucking girl about it.
And I wonder why I’m always so cold.