Exclusive – Cara Benedetto's erotic novel 'Burning Blue': Part Two

Part Two: New York Doesn’t Know

She stepped off the bustling platform and onto the packed subway car. It was too hot for September. The L train turned into a swampy freezer. People smelled like hot desperation. Josey never grew tired of the scent. She enjoyed watching women develop nonchalant strategies to cover their brightly lit skin. Her breasts tingled as she eyed the pretty bobbing chests and moist necklines. Josey was at the end of summer and felt happy to be home. Her body told her so.

After her return, Asher had been on his best behavior. He was proud of his wife, happy to have her back. He declared his love to her frequently, often speaking in the third person to do so. He admitted to Josey that he loved her more than his own life, that he was impossibly happy waking up next to her every morning, and that he had missed her when she was gone.

Josey enjoyed the rare attentions and met Asher with growing warmth. They settled into an old routine. Asher and Josey had been together fifteen years and their physical relationship had become nonexistent. They had become more like two people sharing an out of body experience, connected by the single silver cord known as Tax Breaks. They were best friends and lived in parallel.

They didn’t need drama to remind them that they were important to one another. At least Josey didn’t think they did. She’d take care of her own needs as they made themselves known. Sometimes she questioned if she was a fool to think that two people could live together, in this way, forever. Maybe, she thought, but maybe not.

She’d never cheated on her husband before and felt a strange alienation from him that gave her a high she knew came from the taboo. They’d known each other so well that she didn’t even feel guilty for cheating. She felt that he would understand, because he loved her unconditionally. Therefore she felt no need to tell him anything. What happened to her simply belonged to her.

Her body also felt different since her return. The bleeding ebbed and she felt life without a monthly period in a new way. She didn’t need it anymore. Her sentences became paragraphs—no stops, no pauses, no reminders of fertility. Although her thermometer was broken, she felt fresh and warm in this new state. She was refreshingly mortal and the only thing she sometimes missed, in this new life, was the long, lean body belonging to Trish. And with this mortality she changed her palette from red to blue. A color that was pre-oxygen, and pre-lingual.

The show at MoMA was called Women Who Love Too Much. Josey was ready, dressed in a perfect shade of red. Her hair was low-lit and her eyebrows threaded. She had made it. Her proud husband was at her side as she greeted all the men and women from her past and present.

“Oh my God, Josey. You must be so excited! You’ve finally arrived, after all these years!”
“Good for you!”
“You deserve this more than anyone! What’s next?”
“There’s so much work! Poor Asher must have been sooooooo lonely!”
“Your husband is so handsome, so wonderful, you’re so lucky.”
“Your gallerist has really done wonders for you, Jo. We should do something for him. Let’s send him something tomorrow!”

Voices of support streamed in around her. She didn’t care that most of the comments were in some way passive aggressive and full of sordid envy. She was thrilled. The night was perfect and her work glistened like sapphires. Things felt whole and complete in a way Josey had only read about. Her life had become images from Artforum’s “Scene & Herd.”

Josey eyed her best friend working the room. Ryan looked great in an expensive tux. Making his way over, he laid a warm and loving arm around her waist and made a dirty joke about the pool boy. Ryan knew all her secrets. She laughed casually and repressed the thread of thoughts leading to her one true love, the love of her life, Trish.

She couldn’t help but think of Trish when she looked at her paintings. They were drenched in a moody pool color, feminine figures pushing at the canvas’ surface. Josey knew that they were her best work, that they were all portraits of Trish. That it was her love for her that made them strong.

The women in the paintings had a strength that went beyond their materiality. With oversized toes and painted nails, they struggled against their frames, pushing thick thighs to the side, kicking edges, peeling skins. They clawed and scratched in sexate frenzies.

They ate invisible fruits and sucked invisible strands of honey with pushed out and puffy lips. Their mouths wore money signs because they named their own value. They ate like they looked like they fucked, in a deep blue ocean’s heat.

She watched the women dance around her in a sea storm. The lack was gone. There was only abundance, of body, of liquid, of saturated everything. Each canvas wore a lake and each painting was a siren that sang a silent song only the ears of a loved one could hear.

Mira Dancy, Rape Flower, 2015

When the New York Times journalist asked her who her muse had been, Josey’s response was to turn a deep shade of eggplant and clam up.Trish was her secret and no one, not even the art world, would take that from her. She felt protective of Trish, as if she were her own sister, daughter, or even as if she were a younger version of Josey herself. What the world got to see was just a fragment of the love she felt for Trish. She loved her even more when she was away from her.

Things felt good, until the week before her show closed. Artforum wrote a negative review and her gallerist still hadn’t sold a thing. They’re just too lesbian…too blue…too sexy…not sexy enough…not queer enough…

“Things will be okay, babe.” Asher was doing his best to make her feel better, but Josey was inconsolable. She had shown the world her deepest secret, and in return the world slapped her in the face.
“Nothing is okay, Ash. Nothing has been okay for some time now,” she barked back.
“What is that supposed to mean?” he said in a near whisper.

She looked at Asher, who seemed genuinely confused. But how could he know? she thought bitterly. She never told him anything; he was too busy with himself. She stared into his bright brown eyes. His handsome face had only gotten more so with age.

She remembered when they met, on the street outside of a house party in Bushwick. He had just broken up with his girlfriend and Josey was on one of her routine binges, the goal being to kill something deep inside of herself. He was candid and hilarious and called her out on the futil
ity of her self-destructive behavior.

“How long have you been at it?” he had asked her cryptically.
Cryptic questions were Josey’s specialty. “Long enough. Besides, anything worth doing is worth doing slowly.” She looked away, bored.
“You don’t strike me as the kind of woman who waits around long enough to know the effect you have on others, least of all yourself,” he retorted. She stopped and gave him a wry look.
“You’re a lawyer, aren’t you?”
“If you’re on the case, I certainly am.” She smiled and he shot back with a grin.

That night Asher had told her who she was, and she needed that. She needed someone to steal her from herself. Being a public defense attorney, Asher knew how to feed a mouth that bites. He wrapped his arms around her and took her home to give her a long, hot bath.

Lost in memory, Josey felt overwhelmed with love for her husband, but she also felt something else. She felt intense guilt and pity—but not for him. She felt it for herself. All these years she was lying about who she was and how she could give. She needed to be with Asher because she was afraid to be alone.

“What do you mean, Josey?” This time his voice was tense and his eyes were dark, ominous and red with clouds. In the following moments Josey confessed everything to her husband. The right secrets spilled in the wrong way, and far too late.

When Asher found out about the extent of her feelings for Trish, not to mention all the other members of Josey’s lustful play, he finally began to understand how much he didn’t know about his wife. He was even cheated out of a broken heart, as he realized that what he thought he had lost, he never actually had in the first place.

He walked up to her and placed his frowning lips on her pretty mouth for the last time. Gently placing a hand behind her head, he let their foreheads touch in a gesture of calmness and care. Josey took a breath and closed her eyes. He then stated in the coolest of tones, “Your self-destruction is boring me to death, Josey. I can’t save you.” These were his last words.

After Asher left, Josey cried non-stop for two weeks. When the flood subsided, her sadness turned into anger and then a logical self-hatred took hold, moving into a kind of self-pity that looked like wet cereal for dinner. What Josey couldn’t prepare for was how intensely and utterly free she would soon feel. For the first time in a long time, Josey was alone.

And in this loneliness, feelings of responsibility washed over her, but she was without the ability to respond. She sat in her studio with the sound of a broken fan, surrounded by all the paintings of Trish that had seemed so promising just six months before. Josey realized that she missed the person. That she never should have left Trish.

She tried to remember how she’d gotten from A to B in a matter of one year. She remembered the blood. She wanted it back. She missed those murderous dreams and blank red screens. Josey realized that, ironically, she’d never even told Asher about the blood, one of the signs that marked this time in her life. But then again, she thought to herself, everyone seemed to sense it, even him. From this and certain emergency room experiences Josey deduced that people generally preferred bleeding people to leave the room.

She was appointed adjunct professor at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan and kept on painting. Her routine was quiet and unfeeling. She was tired but couldn’t sleep. Her anxiety morphed into a constant state of emergency. Her eyes settled back into her skull. Her shoulders fell. She became thinner. Sometimes she believed she was getting smaller so that she could get closer to the sky. She had a new face, one that was both younger and older than her original mask. And her paintings showed it too. The brushstrokes had flattened, and the women she made stared straight into a mirror, into themselves. Her color palette changed. Josey no longer used red or blue; she didn’t need them. All she could see was black.

I still think about you.

The fifth instalment follows next week..

Read the third instalment here