Door matt

“THANK GOD,” LEDA THOUGHT, when Matt finally leaned in and kissed her.

It was almost two, the bar about to close. It was kind of obvious this would be the night. But she was getting so sleepy waiting for it to happen. Making conversation, talking about their jobs, their families. All the stuff you talk about while you wait to be drunk enough for someone to make the move.

Leda wasn’t sure she was into Matt. His name was a bad sign, to begin with. She’d already been dated two other guys named Matt, plus most of her friends had boyfriends or gay best friends or coworkers or bosses named Matt. It got confusing, so all the Matts had special designations. Lara’s Matt. Freddie’s Matt. Suzannah P.’s Matt. And for Matts who didn’t clearly belong to anyone, there were other names. Bat Matt: goth. Phat Matt: weed dealer. Frat Matt: you get the picture.

Leda’s two previous Matts were Stat Matt who was a data analyst and Rat Matt who worked in a lab. This new one was from the gym where Leda ran on the treadmill a couple times a week. Leda called him Door Matt because he always chatted her up in the entry of the gym. Which would normally annoy her, but for some reason she didn’t mind talking to him. He was kind of normal, more normal than anyone she hung out with. But he was nice, funny, didn’t seem too needy. Some kind of tech job. And most notably, he was really good-looking, like an actor. Which wasn’t really Leda’s thing, but all her friends were into it.

“You should totally date Door Matt,” Alisha had been telling Leda for weeks, ever since Leda showed her a picture of him. “He looks like Zac Effron.”

It was almost two years that Alisha had been dating Mo, and Leda had been single that whole time. Alisha kept harassing her to date somebody, like if Alisha was bored out of her mind, everyone else had to be, too.

“Do you want to come to my place?” Matt asked.

He held her hand as they left the bar. Drunk and a little stumbly, it was nice to be guided through the stale beer smell, the stragglers making their final slurred pitches for a hook-up, to feel protected and wanted and spoken for.

She was supposed to get up early and meet her drawing group, but it was already kind of late for that to happen. Every Sunday from eight to ten, they took over the communal table at the coffee shop near her house, Leda and three ladies in their forties. Leda had met them one morning when she was drawing in her sketchbook at the table next them, and they invited her over. Leda loved that they were so old and serious, never talking about dumb shit like makeup or their weight, always about what they were drawing or what books they were reading, or a great show they saw at the museum.

It felt like a stretch to even be asked to join them, such real, serious, grown-up artists. Two of them were art teachers and Annelie, the organizer, was a graphic designer, and they all showed their work in the small galleries in downtown Oakland. Leda was just a kid who worked in an office and shared her drawings on Instagram. On Sunday mornings, she filled her sketchbooks with drawing of crazy animals, wild imaginary creatures, girls on roller skates and boys dancing in tutus. She tried her best to be a grown-up around them, to not make them sorry for inviting her.  

She hated cancelling on them. But in the Uber to Matt’s apartment, she texted Annelie and told her she wasn’t going to make it.

Just this week, she wrote. Be back next Sunday!

She couldn’t sleep that night, as he held her close, breathing near her ear. The strangeness of a new room, a new bed, a new person’s naked skin pressed against her. She wanted a t-shirt, wanted her own bed, wanted to give herself the orgasm she couldn’t bring herself to have with this man she didn’t really know all that well. Wanted her cats—they must be worried where she was. She lay awake thinking of them, wondered whether they were sitting at the door, waiting for her to come home, or if they were passed out in their normal spots on the bed, oblivious to her absence.

He opened his eyes at dawn, saw her staring at the ceiling.

“How did you sleep?” he asked.

“Good,” she said.

“It’s nice with someone in the bed, isn’t it,” he said, pulling her against him. “I could get used to this.”

She snuggled against him, trying to absorb his warmth into her icy skin. It was sort of nice being wrapped in his arms, less cold at least, cradled against the broad muscles of his chest. She liked his chest, his arms, how strong and masculine they looked. How protected she felt when they enclosed her, how small she felt in his grasp.

A couple days after they hooked up, Leda texted Matt to invite him to a movie. She didn’t actually like movies, but he did. He’d been telling her about this movie she should totally see at the bar on Saturday, a movie he’d already seen once but would totally watch it again. A comedy starring famously eccentric actor Shandy Jones, who was pretending to go insane while everyone around him had to cater to all his whims because he was so famous. Leda couldn’t figure out from Matt’s description whether the other people in the movie were real or actors.

“It’s really meta,” Matt had said.

Do you want to maybe catch that Shandy Jones movie on Saturday? Leda texted.

Maybe, Matt texted back. I’ll call you.

But on Saturday morning, he still hadn’t called. Leda texted him—movie?—but no response. He wasn’t at the gym on the days she went. It was like he had just disappeared.

You aren’t even that into him, Leda reminded herself.

But then she thought of about his arms around her, the broadness of his chest. His breath in her ear. Felt herself small and dainty like an adorable tiny rabbit.

Alisha messaged Leda in the afternoon to see if she wanted to meet up for dinner. Mo was out of town, so Alisha was a free woman.

Sure, sounds good, Leda texted.

It was ten minutes later that Matt texted. He wanted her to come over for dinner. No mention of the movie, no apology for taking so long.

Leda texted Alisha.

I hooked up with Door Matt last weekend. He wants me to come over tonight.

Half of Leda wanted Alisha to write back: Too bad you’re busy with me!

But she didn’t. She responded the way the other half of Leda wanted her to.

What? You didn’t tell me! Go see him and call me tomorrow with the details!!!

He cooked her a heavy curry that made her stomach hurt, spooned it over rice. They ate out of tan-colored bowls from Ikea, drank red wine from glasses designed to look like mason jars, sat on the leather couch watching some movie from the Seventies on his wall-mounted TV.

“This is a classic,” he said, through giant gulps of curry, which he ate with a soup spoon. “One of Jack Nicholson’s most underappreciated films.”

Leda looked at the fresh paint on the walls, the wood floors, the ski equipment mounted to the wall on hooks in the corner. It was nothing like Leda’s apartment, the brown couch with the sunken cushions and cat-scratched arms, boxy old TV in the corner, still attached to a DVD player she never used but hadn’t bothered to get rid of yet. She wondered if he could even come to her apartment, whether he would dissolve from the indignity of the old carpet and stained bathtub enamel.

“I really feel comfortable with you,” he said, coming back with seconds on curry, intertwining his legs with hers. “It’s kind of like we’ve been friends forever.”

She studied his face, his startlingly square jawline, the dark stubble on his cheeks. He looked like some kind of bird, she thought. Like a hawk, all angles and high breeding, surveying the landscape with calm, assessing eyes.

He cooked curry a lot, it turned out, in an instant pot, with rice from another, smaller instant pot. Her stomach got used to the heaviness. They made rules about what movies they could watch. Documentaries, comedies. No dramas, nothing too serious that would make her feel sad and lonely, sitting with her bowl, cuddled against the guy who was now her boyfriend. Otherwise, it was going to drive her crazy, all this movie-watching, this curry-eating.

One night, she dreamed that she was single. In the dream, her real life seemed like a dream.

I thought I was dating an extremely attractive man with a good job and a nice apartment, she told herself in the dream. I wonder where I would get an idea like that.

She woke up, saw Matt lying next to her. He looked so peaceful, tamed, his shoulder muscles slack, his lips soft.

See, he’s real, she told herself. She felt something like relieved.

He opened his eyes, as though he could feel her watching him, connecting his gaze with hers. For a moment, his face was sweet. Then his eyebrows wrinkled, a problem spreading across his face, lips bending into a frown.

“The bed is wet,” he said. “Fuck.”

Leda felt around with her hand, found one of the mason jar glasses overturned between the pillows. She had drank half of it before she fell asleep, balanced it on the bed frame thinking she would finish the rest.

“I’m sorry,” she said, holding up the glass. “It’s just water.”

He kept frowning, looked at the glass, then at Leda. Then his face broke into a laugh. His cheeks widened, his forehead relaxed. He tussled her hair.

“You could have put it on the side table,” he said. But it was on his side of the bed, so she’d have to climb over him.

“I know,” she said.

He looked at her for a minute, lips spread in a half-smile like he wanted to tell her something.

“I used to wet the bed,” he said. “Like all the way through high school.”

“What?”

It wasn’t the right response, but it just seemed so unlike him. Everything in his life was perfect and neat, and nothing was messy.

“Yeah,” he said. “It was so embarrassing. I couldn’t go to camp or sleep over at people’s houses or anything. It’s why I feel insecure with women.”

He smiled at Leda, a sad smile. Leda hadn’t realized he felt insecure with women.

“Hey, can I show you something?”

He didn’t wait for her to answer, just got up from the bed, opened his dresser drawer in the dark. He came back with a small, brown teddy bear, handed it to her.

“This is Mr. Bear,” he said. “I slept with him every night until I went to college.”

Leda held the bear in both hands, her thumbs on the matted fur of his little brown belly, studied his black beady eyes. She tried to imagine high school Matt, a Matt without the big arms and broad chest and tidy, appliance-filled apartment. Skinny Matt who wet the bed and was scared of girls and slept with a stuffed bear.

“I don’t usually tell people,” he said. “I just feel really comfortable with you.”

He pulled Leda into a kiss, and she kissed him back.

She usually still made it to drawing group, but not always. It was hard to get herself to leave the sweetness of a warm bed, a sleeping man, and she usually hadn’t slept well.

“Honey, don’t worry about us,” Annelie said, whenever Leda apologized for missing so much. “You be young and have fun.”

There was no apologizing for how bad her drawing was getting, though. She could never figure out what she wanted to draw. Before, she was a faucet, ideas pouring out one after the other, so that the difficult part was capturing each one before the next one wiped it away.

Now all she could think to draw was Matt. Not him as a whole person, but different parts of his body. His shoulders, so broad and square. His calves, wiry and lean, tapering into surprisingly dainty ankles that she wasn’t allowed to call skinny because that word upset him. The meaty area where his pectoral muscle ran into his armpit. Sometimes she drew his body onto rabbits and squirrels, put them in  sailor outfits, police uniforms, long slinky nightclub dresses. But however she disguised them, they were still his body parts. His bulky shoulder, his narrow hips. It made her angry, how hungry and empty she felt when she looked at them, how they took over parts of her brain she needed for other, more important things.

“Show us what you’re working on,” Annelie would ask, but Leda was too embarrassed. She wasn’t sure what secret she was hiding—something like a drinking problem, bulimia, something dark and shameful—except she wasn’t even sure what it was.

The movies made Leda feel trapped, stuck like a bad dream in a narrative she didn’t want to be part of. Lately she’d been closing her eyes, letting the actors’ voices wash over her, enjoying the gentle dullness of wine and curry, blankets, a warm body to cuddle against. When Matt laughed, she laughed, too. And if he reacted to a character’s bad choice with, “Aw, see, that was a mistake,” Leda would mm-hmm in corroboration.

Tonight’s movie was in Italian with subtitles. Leda closed her eyes, leaned her cheek into the crook of Matt’s arm, his full biceps. She tried to guess what was going on from the actors’ tone of voice, the way the music tremored ominously or swelled in tearful intensity.

“Ugh, this guy,” Matt said.

Leda opened her eyes, saw one guy saying something in Italian to another guy. They looked almost like twins, tall and dark-haired and generically attractive, except one had stubble and the other one was clean shaven.

She closed her eyes again. The music got louder; some sort of tension.

“I think,” Leda said, trying out an idea. “I think I’m going to go to bed.”

She’d never thought of it before. No reason to wait through the movie when Matt’s bed was just one room over, the cool white sheets that always felt like a hotel, the gray bedspread with the burlap texture. She could make some tea, turn on the lamp, read the book she’d been carrying around in her backpack for the last four months. Cuddle with Mr. Bear, who now lived on the bed, until the movie was over.

“Oh, but babe.” He dropped his arm from under her face, put it around her, pulled her in close to his chest. “There’s only like thirty minutes left. Don’t you want to see what happens?”

Leda closed her eyes again, let her face fall into his ribcage. His arm was a heavy weight over her waist. His t-shirt was blocking her view now, so she didn’t need to close her eyes.

“Okay, babe,” she murmured into his t-shirt. “You’re right.”

“I need to meet him,” Alisha kept saying.

Which was valid. Leda wasn’t sure why she had been keeping all the parts of her life separate, just some instinct that the situation with Matt was fragile, unformed, not yet ready to collide with other social dynamics.

Leda arranged a double-date. A low-pressure brunch with Alisha and Mo at the Elvis Diner. It was Alisha’s favorite place for brunch, plus it had a big vegan menu which was good for Mo. They sat at a booth decorated with black pleather and silver sequins, ordered a tray of peanut-butter and banana sandwiches for the table and various individual egg or tofu scrambles.

Everyone but Leda worked in tech—Matt in mapping and GPS, Alisha for a food delivery app, and Mo in monetization—so they had a lot to talk about. Leda had been worried he’d come off as too preppy in his checkered shirt, his functional fleece vest, that he’d fuck up Mo’s pronouns. But no, he did great, perfect. Charming, sweet. Alisha obviously like him, was more happy and relaxed by the minute. Leda could tell by the way she rested her hand on Mo’s forearm, her appreciative eyebrow-raise when Matt made a point that was evidently clever, even if Leda didn’t know what any of them were talking about. Tacit approval had been granted.

Leda imagined them having regular get-togethers like this, meeting up for brunch. Eating hash browns and chitchatting about tech. Until someday they would buy houses and have babies, and they could chitchat about all that. The neatness of it made her queasy, made her eggs taste like dishwater.

Alisha looked over, smiled at Leda to apologize for leaving her out. Her smile turned conspiratorial in a way that made Leda nervous.

“So Matt, how did you know,” Alisha said. “That Leda was the one.”

Leda spit a bite of dishwater eggs into her napkin.   

Matt looked a little annoyed, but game, like he was answering a tricky question at a job interview. He chewed his hashbrowns and thought.

“Well,” he said. “Leda’s not bossy. That’s my favorite thing about her. Plus, when I met her at the gym, I thought she looked like Lucy Liu.”

“I love Lucy Liu,” Mo said.  

“Do you like her drawings?” Alisha asked.  

“I’ve seen a couple of them.” Matt smiled at Leda, reassuring, put his hand on her shoulder. “They’re cute.”

Leda had the impulse to say something horrible back to him. She wasn’t sure what, exactly. Something to shut him up, to shut all of them up, to prove to everyone that she wasn’t cute, wasn’t not bossy. Wasn’t the one.

Instead, she smiled back, small and weak.

“That’s sweet, babe,” she said.

Leda decided she was going to draw instead of watch movies. She’d sit with Matt for the first half hour, eat her curry, excuse herself to the bedroom.

“I’m going to draw,” she’d say. Hard emphasis on the last word, to make it clear: she was not a movie-watcher. She was an art-maker.

He started letting her go without protest. 

“Enjoy,” he’d tell her, like she was on her way to a tropical vacation instead of sketching on the bed.

But she didn’t make art. Instead, she’d go to the kitchen, wash her bowl and Matt’s, the other dishes from cooking. She’d dry them with a towel, slowly, put them back on their proper shelves.

Only when was nothing left to clean, she’d go to the bedroom. Lie on the bed, sketch book in front of her. If she felt lonely, she’d set up Mr. Bear as a drawing partner with his own little piece of paper and a colored pencil.

Then she would drag her hand across the page of her sketchbook, trying to make something happen. Sometimes she drew squiggles, or traced the same circle again and again, trying to make it perfectly round. Sometimes she studied the texture of the paper, shading it with the side of the pencil, watching the blank whiteness become a tapestry of tiny fibers. There was an energy behind the paper, she felt, something writhing and alive and begging to emerge, if only the lines of her pencil could find it.

They went to Friendsgiving hosted by a couple from his job, Trent and Diane. They lived in a two-story town house in a part of the city Leda never went to. Everything in their house was white or clear or oat-colored, lots of baskets and woven rugs, walls hung with abstract paintings in organic neutrals.

They sat around a long table in the dining room. Trent and Diane had made turkey and stuffing, and everyone else had brought sides and desserts. Leda and Matt brought two pies, apple and pumpkin from a bakery near Matt’s apartment.

There was a lot of wine, and it was expensive. Every time Trent opened a bottle, he explained where it was from, the vineyard, the region and type of grapes, the year. Leda had three glasses before the turkey was even served.

“What do you do?” Diane asked Leda.

“Like for work?” Leda asked. “I work in an office. I just, you know, manage the schedule and the filing.”

Diane chewed her bite of stuffing and kept looking at Leda, like she hadn’t finished answering.

“Oh,” she said finally. “Well, that sounds relaxing.”

“Also I’m an artist,” Leda said, even though she didn’t feel like an artist at the moment, hadn’t drawn anything worth showing anyone in months.

Trent had been talking to the guy on the other side of him, but he turned towards Leda, abandoning the guy in the middle of a sentence.

“What kind of art?” he asked. “We’re actually collectors.”

He smiled at Diane, like it made him happy to refer to them that way.

“Mostly drawings,” Leda said.

“Oh, too bad,” Trent said. “We mostly collect paintings and sculpture. A lot of it is upstairs, but you probably saw some on the way in.”

“What galleries do you show in?” Diane asked.

Leda looked over to Matt for support, but he was talking to a loud woman named Regina on the other side of the table. She was wearing a low-cut pirate blouse with a leather vest, hair up dramatically, lots of eye makeup. Every time she laughed, she reached across the table to grab Matt’s hand like it belonged to her. He was wearing his gray cashmere sweater. Leda remembered how he looked like Zac Effron. Leda was wearing a polite dress, meant to be classy for his friends, but it just felt big, too much fabric hanging off her curry-bloated body like a kaftan.

“I don’t have a gallery,” Leda said. “I mean, not yet. I’m on Instagram.”

“Oh, that’s nice,” Diane said.

Trent turned back to the guy next to him, who just went back to making his point like he wasn’t pissed-off about the earlier interruption. Diane was still looking at her, face blank and expectant like she was sure Leda would say something more to her liking at any second.

Leda reached for her glass. Her fingers missed the stem, knocking it over in a broad, arcing motion. Expensive red wine splashed all across the white tablecloth.

Everyone gasped, Regina loudest of all, a dramatic inhale that sounded distinctly sexual. 

Diane grabbed her cloth napkin and two more from the people next to her and started mopping the wine.

“It happens,” she said, even though Leda hadn’t apologized yet.  

“Leda’s always spilling things.” Matt smiled, like this was something cute about her. “She’s kind of a klutz.”

Leda looked at Regina’s hand, still pinning Matt’s to the table. Purple nail polish, long, slender fingers, too many silver rings.

“At least I never wet the bed,” Leda said.

Matt pulled his hand back, hard. Regina’s hand was knocked out of the way, flew backward. It hit Trent’s glass, which made a loud cracking noise as it tipped onto the table. More expensive wine on the tablecloth, plus tiny shards of thin, delicate glassware.

Matt was staring at Leda. His smile was frozen and confused, cold, eyes assessing her.

Then he broke into a laugh, bold and reckless like he was in the middle of an awesome party.

“What an asshole,” he said.

On the one hand, he might have been talking about himself. On the other hand, it was completely clear who he meant. Who had started all of this, who had ruined Friendsgiving.

Everyone laughed, especially Regina, like this was a really funny joke and everyone was having so much fun.  

She apologized of course, a hundred times before they went to bed that night.

“It’s fine,” Matt said, but it obviously wasn’t.

Leda couldn’t figure out why she’d even done it.

“Do you want me to go home?” she asked. She was already wearing the oversized t-shirt she kept at his place to sleep in, had brushed her teeth and washed her eye makeup off.

He sat on his bed, held Mr. Bear in his lap. Looked up at her, something hateful in his eyes.

“Okay,” he said.

“Okay,” she said back.

She hadn’t expected him to take up the offer. The whole time she was changing back into her frumpy dress, she waited for him to change his mind, to tell her to stay. To tell her that he shouldn’t have introduced her to those horrible people, their snooty taste, shouldn’t have let the pirate-woman grab his hand again and again. To fill the cold silence with words, with forgiveness, to rewrite this narrative where she had ruined Thanksgiving and ruined everything and now she had to drive home at midnight in the rain.

But he didn’t say anything. Just sat on the bed in his boxers and t-shirt and bear, waiting until she packed her bag and walked wordlessly out the front door.

Leda didn’t go back to the drawing group for a month. Mostly she lay around her apartment curled up with the cats, reading comic books, trying not to stare at her phone. Staring at her phone a lot.

It took Matt a week to text her, and when he did, it was just, we need to talk.

She typed into her phone: Okay, when?

She waited to send it. She didn’t want it to be obvious that the phone had been in front of her face the moment his text came through. While she waited,  she thought about the talk. Where would they have it? At his house, over curry? Or someplace like a bar?

She wondered if he was planning to break up with her. She didn’t want to get broken up with at a bar. Or his apartment.

Actually, she couldn’t think of anyplace where she wanted to get broken up with.

She erased her message. Instead, she wrote:

Are you going to break up with me?

Then she held her breath. Watched the phone screen, hand shaking, until the response had come.

Yes.

Okay cool, Leda texted back. And that was it. The last text.

She thought about calling him, decided not to. Instead she went straight to Alisha’s and stayed there for two days, getting fed and taken care of.

“That guy is such a dick,” Mo said. “He doesn’t even appreciate your drawing.”

“He’s the worst,” Alisha said. “I hate him.”

“He broke up with you on a text?” Mo said.

“Well, sort of,” Leda said, but no one was listening to her. “Not exactly.”

“He’s the worst,” Alisha said again.

None of it was necessary, this performative anger, but Leda didn’t know how to tell them that, how to convince them that he wasn’t an asshole, hadn’t even done anything wrong. All of it was her fault. So wasn’t angry, just exhausted.

She’d been exhausted for a long time, hadn’t she? She couldn’t tell if she was imagining it, the way, when you’re depressed, you think you’ve been depressed your entire life.

“You’re back!” said Annelie.

She had two plastic water cups on the table in front of her, one clear, one cloudy. Her sketchpad had a pencil drawing, a nude that she must have done at her live-drawing session. She was painting gouache onto it, delicate robin’s egg blue and vibrant magenta.

“I’m so sorry.” Leda had forced herself to get up, walked from her apartment wearing the sweatpants and t-shirt she’d been sleeping in. “I know it’s been forever.”

“Nothing to be sorry about,” Annelie said. “Sometimes other things are more important than drawing.”  

“No,” Leda said, “Seriously, they really aren’t.”

Annelie looked up from her work. She was like a little elf, Leda thought: silver-brown hair circling her head in a braid like a crown, her eyes the same robin’s egg color as her drawing, twinkling like a smile even though her mouth wasn’t smiling.   

“Well,” she said. “You have to try to find out.”

Leda sat down and opened her sketchbook. It was filled with the artifacts of nine distracted months. Squiggles, circles, lines intersecting without meaning. Bits of Matt’s body: arm, foot, chest.

She chose one: a flexed biceps. It was sketched in a tentative hand, faint pencil strokes that her college art professor would have hated. She ran her pencil over it, adjusted the shading, added a bit of definition up where the shoulder should be.

Then she turned her pencil sideways and drew a long, broad stroke across the page, cleaving Matt’s arm in half.

The stroke was a back. Long and fluid, ready for movement. She drew a small round tale, long ears. A rabbit. She gave it a sword, a shield, a mighty grimace on its scrunched bunny face.

Next to the rabbit, she drew Mr. Bear, as well as she could remember him. Cute round nose, piercing dark eyes, mouth sad like he knew he was just a teddy bear and destined to be outgrown and hidden in a drawer.

Somehow, these two were going to be best friends. The warrior rabbit, the bed-wetting bear. She was both these things, needed both these things, but she didn’t understand how. So she drew and drew, filling the page. When that page was done, she kept going, filling five more pages with rabbits and bears before drawing group was over.

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