Project

An ex did an art project, and he’s displaying it at our college. He painted a campus map on a slab of plywood, and in each spot where he’s had sex (according to the placard), he hammered a nail wrapped in pubic hair he’d torn out by hand.

There are a lot of nails.

In the corner of the room, my ex pours wine into a plastic cup and looks at me and my friend Lauren, the only two attendees. He pours too much. It spills. This is a sort of senior showcase.

“So you’re a nail?” Lauren says. She ducks down to get close. “That’s dehumanizing.”

She never liked my ex. She found him leery, said everything he did was suffused with, like, a want, you know, and it was so desperate, yet seemingly frightening to him, which made it feel like lust even when he was, like, asking for a pencil because he forgot to bring one to chem.

I say, “I guess I’m a nail.” But what hurts me about the nails is that I’m not.

Hundreds of nails should be hammered into my dorm, but there are none.

I don’t know how to take this.

Maybe the nails represent places where my ex has had public sex, but he didn’t nail the spot where we once had sex outdoors. Maybe the nails signify pain, and thus the places we fucked would be excluded because those experiences brought my ex only joy, but this is untrue. Cruel words spoken during sex once reduced him to tears. Maybe they mean physical pain? No. That too would include our sex.

I rub some knotted pubic hair. I’m not sure if touching is allowed, but he doesn’t say stop. I trace the splintery black walking trails with my pointer finger.

The campus is beautiful: collegiate gothic towers and rose gardens that workers maintain through the warm months and benches with placards memorializing dead alums. Distant dates mark their long lives. My ex keeps a list of death ages.

“Try and find the bench of someone who’d died young,” he’s said. “You can’t.” The benches made him mad. He said people who go to this college do not die young, not by virtue of having gone here, but by virtue of the privilege that allowed them to come.

“Isn’t financial aid a privilege?” I asked him once.

He took a deep breath and said, “I can’t right now.”

When he complained about the benches, he was complaining about me. He resented everything about me that I couldn’t change—my white skin and my white friends (Lauren, Mara, Clare etc.), my childhood home with a heated pool, the dinner fork and salad fork, the soup spoon and dessert spoon, which he misused when he visited my family once. He said my mom had laid them out like a trap, a chance to correct and embarrass him.

Still, my ex and I fucked on one of those benches once, and if any sex I’ve ever had was pure, a total synthesis of love and desire, it was that night’s sex. Beneath the commemoration on the placard, there was an Elizabeth Bishop quote that I only noticed days later. It said, “Change alone can kill . . . Not these earthly things.”

My ex didn’t know who Elizabeth Bishop was, and when I showed him a poem of hers, he called it “impractical.” That’s not a critique, I said. Poetry shouldn’t be practical. It should liberate us from practicalities.

It felt good to critique him because he excelled so easily in both politicized art and sciences I couldn’t grasp. His art once persuaded the college to revise its admissions procedures. He’d helped sequence the genome of a species of yeast.

Lauren has wandered toward another art major’s piece, a kneeling body welded from parts of military drones that (according to the placard) the art major’s father’s company made.

“Why is he staring at us?” I text her. “Like I kno why but whyyyyyy.”

Lauren is a drama major, all she likes is being watched, but not by my ex.

The room is starting to fill, which annoys me, but the crowd congregates around the cheap wine and cheap crackers and my ex, so I’m alone with the nails.

It’s not strange that I came. I’m the arts editor for the school paper. It’s my job to review the show. Maybe it’s strange that I haven’t acknowledged my ex, but how can I after the nails, which are either about me or not about me, and which is worse?

Did he have this sex while together with me? Certainly not before, unless he’d done a spectacular job of feigning inexperience. And after? All this sex in just two months? I imagine the men, how gross they must’ve been, like older versions of my ex, wanting and wanting.

The thing about my ex is not that he looked. A lot of people look, and they have their glances returned. It’s that he doesn’t look like he deserves to look. Not that he’s unattractive—he is, traditionally so—but you’d only know if you saw him sleeping. Awake, he’s jittery and huddled into himself while his eyes dart back and forth, like he’s afraid someone will accuse him of having something stolen under his shirt. On several occasions, he’s been stopped by campus security and asked for identification, which he believed was because his skin is browner than expected for our school, but I don’t think that’s it, not entirely.

“It’s his disposition,” I explained to Lauren. “He just looks guilty.”

“I mean, I guess it’s not really his fault,” she said and paused. “Like, he can’t help how he was raised, but don’t tell him I said that.”

The campus is nice, but my ex ruined it for me. He said it was designed like a panopticon, its buildings modeled after insane asylums. But if that’s true, why are the walls on the edge of campus decorative, small enough to hop over, barely even a border?

“Like, he can’t help how he was raised, but don’t tell him I said that.” 

“That’s the point,” my ex said. “What looks pretty to someone like you can be a threat to someone who looks like me.”

The more I look at the board and the embedded nails, the more I start to see a body in the contours of our campus, a body cut at the neck: Is the body his or mine?

“No flash, please,” my ex says. He’s speaking to Lauren, who’s taking pictures of the drone statue, who’s only doing her job (arts photographer). The way he says it makes me miss his quiet sincerity, how he’d look you in the eyes and even his most urgent demands had in their tenor an implied if that’s ok with you, which I never considered submission but compassion, a selflessness I admired.

Now he doesn’t look at me.

I feel both invisible and entirely seen—no, not seen, surveilled—like he’s making a tape of me in his peripheral vision. Later, he’ll fast forward to the unflattering scenes.

Creepcreepcreepcreepcreep, I whisper in the rhythm of a kid’s taunt while I wrap my fingers around the head of a nail. The first nail slides out easily. The second isn’t much tighter, but the third is stuck and rusty.

One time, he cried after sex and said, “I don’t feel entirely safe with you,” though he didn’t list any reasons why. This sent me unpleasantly inward, of course, because where else can you go when your body is a threat? When I left him a few days later, he didn’t want me to leave and said you’re taking part of me.

I pull and pull.

I ended the relationship as a Hot Pocket finished spinning in his microwave. He stood to get it.

I cut my fingers on the nail. My fingers bleed.

He burned his hand touching the food too fast—that’s how he grabbed a Hot Pocket, his whole hand around the sleeve it cooks in. I can’t be blamed for that.

Now he sips his wine, meets my gaze, and laughs as I wipe my bloody finger around the perimeter of his map.

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