Im a fan a novel, p.1
I'm a Fan: a Novel, page 1
I’M A FAN
I’M A FAN
A NOVEL
SHEENA PATEL
Graywolf Press
Copyright © 2022 by Sheena Patel
First published in 2022 in the United Kingdom by Rough Trade Books.
The author and Graywolf Press have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify Graywolf Press at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.
This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund. Significant support has also been provided by the McKnight Foundation, the Amazon Literary Partnership, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.
Published by Graywolf Press
212 Third Avenue North, Suite 485
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401
All rights reserved.
www.graywolfpress.org
Published in the United States of America
ISBN 978-1-64445-245-5 (paperback)
ISBN 978-1-64445-246-2 (ebook)
2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1
First Graywolf Printing, 2023
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022924045
Cover design: Carlos Esparza
I’M A FAN
do i
I stalk a woman on the internet who is sleeping with the same man as I am. Sometimes when I am too quick to look at her stories, I block her temporarily so she doesn’t know I absent-mindedly refresh her page fifteen times a minute while Netflix plays in the background on my laptop, my stomach flipping sick with delight when her profile picture is ringed red. She has tens of thousands of followers, is verified, and is the daughter of someone famous in America. An endless stream of white people fawn in the comments under her posts. She has opinions about household objects which I have never given a thought to before; firm taste in the types of beeswax candles to burn, lays exquisite cloth on her table in anticipation of dinner, knows where to buy limited edition pottery from well-regarded potters, she will happily spend $300 on a vase where she displays really, really organic fennel flowers, by which she says there is organic and then organic, buys a $500 ring for herself during a time of financial strife for the rest of the world and shows it off in a selfie. She uses a filter on Instagram which burns up her flaws, it thins down her cheeks and radioactively erases the two thick lines shaped like spooning ‘v’s which are carved in her forehead and erupt from her face more prominently when she raises her eyebrows. A sick sense of satisfaction rips through me when I see them. She orders take-out from the right restaurants, seems to know everyone in the higher echelons of society, is accepted into the kind of circles which seem out of reach to me. Sometimes I wonder if I ever met her, what would I say to her, would I tell her of our connection? Would I tell her I know where she lives, would I tell her how I guessed that she broke up with her boyfriend. Will I tell her I know why the tone of her stories changed because the man we are both sleeping with, the man I want to be with, shamed her for exploiting her privacy the last time they saw one another. Would I tell her that I know who her ex-husband is, I’ve seen his new family and he seems happy now, happier than the photos I’ve seen of the two of them, would I tell her I know who all her friends are and I watch their stories too, would I tell her I screenshot the photos she takes of herself and study her face so intently sometimes I fear I’ve picked up some facial expressions or tonal inflections from her because I listen to her speaking with her father on YouTube over and over before I go to sleep. Would I move in closer to smell her and feel what he felt when he felt her—would I taste the inside of your mouth to find out what was so compelling, would I press into you, I want to know exactly how your body moves when you are turned on—to know for myself why he cancelled fucking me to fuck you.
tell me what i want
I refresh, refresh, refresh, refresh. The woman I am obsessed with usually posts around this time. I’m half-watching Gilmore Girls on my laptop. I refresh again and suddenly on the ninth refresh, the squares shuffle to the right, go white, quickly blink back into colour and there’s a new post—a selection of the products she sells from a web-shop she owns called Terroir. It may or may not make a profit but regardless of this minor inconvenience, it seems that being a founder of an independent web-shop is the new rich kid thing to do. All her friends have variations of this curated online presence where they push a skincare line or expensive household furniture, or cookware—objects which have been taken outside of their cultural contexts to be placed artfully in your home to make you appear more interesting. I’ve learnt about mid-century furniture this way. I think of my parents’ generic in-built wardrobes in fake wood that I’m sure is veneered plastic which they proudly picked out of the company magazine from a wholesaler warehouse in Sudbury.
I know the woman I am obsessed with has many of these tastemaker friends, where the acquisition of beauty seems to fuel them as much as food. One of these friends posts notable artists’ interiors like she does. I know this as I stalk him too in case he posts photos of her because I like to know what she wears every day, which makes me feel shit but then makes me feel like I’ve achieved something when I know but really, I lose a tiny part of myself every time I screenshot a photo of her or her new studio flat in Marfa now she’s single or her previous flat she shared with her ex-boyfriend or her father’s house where I try to map the geography of the rooms. I save these screenshots to the Album in my phone which, when I scroll through, looks deceptively like I have a very good friend whose life I celebrate, as if I want to treasure her memories alongside my own. I don’t have any opinions about furniture. If I was to ever have a home I’m not sure what I would fill it with. I don’t own anything that would tell other people how much of a tastemaker I am, how much of a grown-up. I fit into spaces which already exist and contort myself to fit a shape which has been allocated for me. I don’t own anything. The thought of antique shopping for each individual item is exhausting and exhilarating and expensive. I click through to the shops the woman I am obsessed with tags in her posts, who she thanks, the painters she recommends on her stories, helpfully including a link to buy one for yourself. I look up the price of a painting she angles into the sun, on top of her brightly coloured mantlepiece with the hashtags of the architect who built it and the painter who painted the painting. I google the artist’s name and ‘price’ and he’s dead and his work costs between fifteen and twenty thousand dollars and my jaw swings open and I want to own it too but how and where do you go to buy paintings? Or perhaps what I want is the disposable cash to be able to buy a painting but actually what I want is something much harder to attain which is to know what paintings are worth buying in the first place combined with the innate belief I deserve to be in surroundings that need paintings on the walls before I am able to feel at home. I read the caption on the new post and it says, meet us at our pop-up at a friend’s house in Notting Hill, dm for details. The post is a graphic amalgamation of the items Terroir sells, the objects hung disembodied on a white background. The uniqueness of her business is that she is a daughter of someone who is famous for being aesthetically rigorous and if you part with a minimum of $500 you might be able to buy into this upbringing too. I think—this is my chance.
aesthetics of front doors
I check the address and Maps guides me past the high-rises to a leafy street ten minutes’ walk from Notting Hill Gate station. It’s the kind of street where there are no ‘for sale’ signs because everyone here knows they have a good thing, the kind of street where each door is painted the same tone of a different colour, to tell you—there’s community here, we talk to our neighbours and think about things like the aesthetics of front doors. Their front doors are not the white plastic doors which I’ve been brought up looking at—the ones which replicate like a DNA sequence right through Kingsbury, where passing the first threshold you are led to a small, intermediate space to kick off your shoes before passing another white plastic door which brings you into the bulk of the house. These doors are bespoke doors, grand-looking one-offs from antique fairs or else original features which come with the listed house, painted in poetically branded Farrow & Ball colours. There aren’t just red and white and brilliant white, they don’t have names like ‘brave beige’ and ‘mermaid sheen’, no, these colours announce themselves like a discreet sommelier at a nice restaurant who murmurs excellent choice. Here, beige is split into bone, pigeon, tallow, wevet—beige is not beige in this kind of taste-country, it is rustically referenced to make you believe you are cleverer than you are and you deserve to be gently handled.
I walk over to a particularly lovely house, off-set from the pavement by an ornately patterned tiled drive with a crescent shaped rose bush that affords a semblance of privacy to the large bay windows. It is an indulgent and imposing family home that swishes its generational wealth-tail. There is jewelled stained glass above a wide door that is footed by three steps in a half moon. A clapped-out Citroën in the drive only serves to amplify the river of money that I sense cascades over the house. I hold the doorknob in my hand. It is brass and reassuringly heavy. I breathe deeply. Am I really about to do this? I’ve decided to wear the closest things to designer bran
ds that I own but to look slightly edgy, I cap my outfit with gleaming white Nike Air Force Ones that I baby wipe after each use to keep them box fresh, second-hand Ganni tracksuit bottoms, a Stüssy sports bra with a crumpled, second hand designer shirt that I button once at the centre revealing my doughy middle. I throw a glance at the Citroën. I wonder if my crumpled is the same as a rich person’s crumpled. I hold the brass knocker in my hand.
dick from someone who doesn’t care if you live or die
The man I want to be with is play-fighting with me in the park. He pushes my head down into the grass, sits on my back and tickles me. I wriggle out from under him, throw him off and stand crouched, my hands out in front of me, my fingers spread in the air like ten worms emerging from the earth. I trap him in a headlock. He tickles me again and trips me, guiding me down to the ground. When I stand up, I am so overexcited I drool and saliva globs out from my mouth and it shines on the back of my hand. I am suddenly aware of the parameters of my body slammed against his body. This is the most physical contact he allows. He says the sex is too intense between us which is why we don’t do it anymore. He has a beautiful cock—straight and thick and very long. When he used to let me fuck him, he would be so deep inside me I could map the edges of my cervix, I had to ask him to go very slow as my eyes rolled back to moan. Even the memory of it makes my knickers sticky and I’ve just accidentally-on-purpose brushed my hand against his trousers to check if he’s hard and he is. He’s hard but he won’t fuck me and I’m so turned on I know I will have to resort to going through our very old emails to unearth his unsolicited dick pics and wank to those when I am home.
I ask him if he’s heard from the woman I am obsessed with and he says no. I say, her book has come out, she’s doing tons of interviews. He says, I know, someone I’m friends with in America sent me a link to one of them and it’s cringe, I can’t bear to look at it. I don’t tell him how I’ve been monitoring her book release like I’m planning a drone strike. Over time, I’ve learnt I need to ask very specific questions because the truth fractures in his mouth. He tells me a version by omission, which puts the responsibility onto me to ask the right questions in just the right way, almost as if I am a lawyer grilling a witness in court. However, he will often disarm me by giving me too much information and so if I am hurt, he says, well it’s because you asked, and if I find out later that something was different to how he told me it is, he says, well you didn’t ask the right question. He says, she received a $350,000 advance for her book, and I gasp and my hand flies to my mouth, and he says, she’ll get an extra $50,000 if it hits the bestseller list, and I gape, I ask, has she hit it, and he says, I don’t know, so we google it and scan through the previous lists but we can’t find it anywhere. Soon enough, he is distracted. I watch his fingers automatically check his email, his Instagram, his WhatsApp, back to his email again, his Instagram, the news. I look at him absorbed inside his phone. To regain his attention, I pounce on him and push him down so his back is flat against the grass and I sit on top of him, his phone tumbling out of his hand. I place the centre of my cunt on the bottom of his cock. It’s so nice sitting on the heft of him even through our clothes, but he won’t let me have him naked I know this. I start by laughing, like, look at me, oh I’m so light-hearted and fun and kaa-ray-zee! I pin his arms back over his head and I laugh because this is a light-hearted jovial waterboarding. I ask him if he’s going to be with me. He tries to throw me off with his legs but I clamp down to secure myself. Are you going to be with me? I repeat, say yes or no. I laugh so he knows this could be a joke. He laughs back nervously but is wriggling from under me. I sense my creeping desperation—say yes or no, the words brittle through my gritted teeth. I put more weight into my hands, we’re still having fun, this is still fun isn’t it. He screws up his face and says, you’re hurting my hands. My head lowers down in front of his and I snarl, I want you to say no for fuck’s sake, I want you to tell me no. He throws me off because he is stronger than me, panting with the effort because I am bigger than him. We glare at one another. I have to go home, he says as he looks towards the sky now stained orange and pink. He looks back at me and says, it’s getting late. My chest is creaking. I silently start to pack the picnic I brought back into my bag looking down trying to think of a last-ditch way to turn this around in my favour and force him to profess his undying love for me and give me the promise I need which is his hand in marriage. I know he has to leave because he has to be home with his wife before dinner. We rise and I pick the blanket up which I laid down for us, to show him I can leave him quite abruptly, I am not clingy, here I am able to leave him.
He stands in front of me. I want to hurt him. Are we building to a future? I ask. He is petrified as if suddenly aware of a predator. I press on: are you using our meet-ups as fact-finding missions to make a decision or is this enough for you? I abandon the folding of the blanket into nice, neat edges and hold it chaotically in my arms. He becomes very focused as he tips dregs of tea out of my flask, spots his phone on the ground and slips it back into his pocket. He keeps his head down and says, I can’t answer that question in that way, I can see a future with you but it’s too specific a question. A buzzing erupts in my ears. I beat the grass off the blanket to drown out the sound. Sometimes I wonder are you the main relationship in my life, he says tipping his head up to absorb the weakening sun. I narrow my eyes and curl my lips in disdain, and I say, of course I’m the main relationship in your life. The man I want to be with walks towards me. He reaches his hand out to take some grass out of my hair but I smack him off me and push his shoulder sharply to jerk him back. He rocks on his heels, tries to regain his balance. I focus on a tiny tree in the distance to steady me. If I stare hard enough maybe I can disappear it. I sense a tingling in my abdomen, like teeth sprouting out of gums in my stomach, little headstones marking out every injury.
The glob of saliva starts to crust on my hand in the sun.
openings
The man I want to be with does not offer up his number at the beginning and so I do not ask. He emails which is clunky and cumbersome but there is an unspoken understanding he does not want to be easily contactable by me. We have short bursts of intense contact which I increasingly have to initiate and then nothing for weeks in between. He is in Hydra in Greece installing a joint show of work with his wife. I’m not supposed to know about this show but I do (cos Instagram), and in our scant messages, I pretend I don’t know who he is with or where, because upon his return this coming weekend we will be meeting again. I am at work in a darkened studio when I see his name flash on my phone, I open the email eagerly but as I scan the words I start to lose my balance. He tells me he won’t be able to make the dick appointment he’s made with me, a recent ex has asked to see him and the only time he is available is when we have arranged to meet. He writes, it is quite inconvenient she wants to see him as currently he and his wife are getting along quite well however, it is torturous between him and this woman, the physical relationship is addictive and heady. They have started talking again and I realise this is why it has been particularly hard to hold his attention lately. He tells me he’s not sure he’d be up for having sex with me if he sees me afterwards so it’s best to cancel our meeting. It seems he cannot let go of her—you can’t get rid of love, he says wetly. The email is a confession, an unburdening from him to me. He tells me they ran into each other a couple of months ago at a private view at the Royal Academy but he was so distressed he walked out. She texted him and asked him why he left and he replied, it was too much for him to see her. I realise many things very quickly. She is better in bed than me. She has his number which means he wants to be easily contactable by her. I am not embarking on the start of a love affair which gets me out of my relationship and into one with him where my real life can begin. Even though he is cheating on his wife and I am cheating on my boyfriend and that means neither of us is trustworthy, he is already in love with someone outside of this equilibrium of entanglements and feels no loyalty to me, which then also reveals I expect special treatment from him of some kind, a selflessness no one in this web is giving anyone else. She is more important to him than I am, and I have made no real impression on him. There is a whole other storyline unfolding with two main characters and I am merely the short subplot to aid the trajectory of their love story. I am not a main character in this ensemble romcom of betrayal, I am a supporting act. He is in no danger of falling in love with me. I am usurpable in my own life. I am on a lower social stratum to the two of them and in this way they are equals and are better matched. No one would think to invite me to a private view at the Royal Academy—I am no one. I’m a fan and because of this, I can be cut out.
