The Cloaca

by Andrew Hood

  This peeking is weird, but she knows he wouldn’t have a problem if he found out. This woman wonders about how into it he’d be. Worries as much as wonders.

  With no job for the summer yet, this woman’s hands are a mess with time. Though her parents are covering her costs during the school year, they refuse to support her during the summer. Her options were to either get a job in the city or come back home, move back into her high school bedroom for a few months. Part of her trusts, though, that the support won’t be cut off.

  June days in the city are heavy as a wet sweater, and leaving her apartment with no clear purpose has lately required unprecedented gumption on her part. After JB and after this man on the subway she didn’t know from Adam—if there even was a man—this woman spends her mornings trolling the obits for announcements where the cause of death isn’t mentioned. There are scores of them, and she imagines every single one is a suicide. Like when she found all those maggots in the apartment. The act of discovering the first one seemed to spawn a crawling, writhing heap of others. And now, all of a sudden, the world is full of people killing themselves.

  Instead of working on her painting or looking for work, this woman reads on the computer about dolphins in captivity who dash their brains to mush against the walls of their tank. It goes that a dolphin named Kathy swam up to her trainer one day, looked at him in a meaningful way, and then dove back down for good. Dolphins lack the involuntary breathing reflex that humans have, that matter-over-mind pull that would have forced a man to surface in this case. Kathy the dolphin stayed at the bottom of her container and died without a fuss or shiver.

  JB worked with a dolphin on SeaQuest. Could there be a connection?

  This woman feels like she could cry, but doesn’t make it there.

  She watches him in rented movies. Ladybugs, Sidekicks, The Neverending Story II. They aren’t as good as she remembers them. In Sidekicks, JB overcomes his asthma through martial arts. How is this possible? Even under the redheaded tutelage of Chuck Norris.

  Pausing the movie, squatting before the TV, she searches his angular, adorable face for some explanation. This woman can’t get over how girly JB was, how beautiful. His dirty blonde hair, his popsicle-stained lips, a blush to his cheeks like he has just come in from the cold. This isn’t attraction, only the memory of attraction, which, in itself, is stirring.

  As she did not that long ago with pictures torn carefully from her teenybopper magazines, this woman plants one on the frozen frame.

  How bad could things have gotten?

  In the dust on the screen, the blotch of her smooch is not at all in the shape of her lips.

  On the internet she finds a quote from Schopenhauer. “It will generally be found,” he said, “that where the terrors of life come to outweigh the terrors of death a man will put an end to his life.”

  “You have a fine body,” he says over breakfast. All morning her boyfriend has been goading her into being naked with him. The muggy day is on his side. “What’s the big stink?”

  On most Sundays, when he stays for the morning, he won’t dress at all. Naked when he makes breakfast, naked when he reads The Star on the couch, naked when he does the dishes. She wears underwear to weigh herself even is the sort of woman this woman is.

  She has seen old pictures and for his whole life he has been attractive, whereas her features are something she had to grow into, make the best of, and will eventually grow out of. That airy gap between her front teeth, that pike of a neck, those lucent eyebrows, those papercut lips. Bangs were a revelation, curtains she could draw over a pimpled forehead that some girls in her high school had called an eighthead. But in bed with him, when he’s astride her, those bangs can’t help but fall to the side, which wouldn’t be a problem if he didn’t always have his eyes wide open as he fucks her. In a perfect world, she would be on top and her hair would cover her face, except this woman has trouble moving up there, can only really shift around like in an uncomfortable easy chair, and also hates the way her breasts dangle and the way her stomach bunches. In a perfect world he would be blindfolded, or they would do it with a sheet between them, or she would just feel good about herself. In a perfect world JB would not be dead.

  “You have it better than most people,” she says.

  “Better how?” Wet cereal falls from his mouth and into his naked lap, and even this doesn’t strike her as at all slovenly.

  “You’ve never been ugly,” she says.

  “That’s not fair to say.”

  Months ago—nearly seven of them—he approached her as if she was put there for him to take is how they got together. It matters very much that he chose her at his vernissage, that his work was what was being held up to where the light could get at it that night. She still hasn’t asked him about the women in the show’s paintings, their bared bodies all perfect in their specificity, or at least perfect in his renderings. She worries about being seen as a worrier. One body was hulkingly obese, another delicately emaciated, the next scarred by an appendectomy, still another so pregnant that the belly hung over her crotch so that it appeared to have an evil goatee. Whoever those women were, or had been, it was only their bodies, after all. Her boyfriend had replaced their heads with a cat head, an elephant head, a chimp head, a dolphin head, to roaring success. All the women at the show agreed.

  It matters very much that he was being followed that night by all the other young first-year, moody-looking artist girls, with their bangs like hers, and their glasses like hers, and their layers of sweaters like hers, who were saying vernissage for the first time in their lives too, and who had also helped themselves to a few too many second glasses of the complimentary wine. It matters a stinking ass-load that he had and will always have seven years on her. It matters that he is muscular without having to try, and that his teeth were never askew enough to need braces, and that he had a fading black eye at the time. And though things are going well enough between them now, this woman can’t forget that she began—looking back—in such a detestable position of flighty girlyness. All of this matters more than she wants it to.

  “Why are you on about this anyway? What’s it to you if I’m nude or not?”

  “Because being the only one naked feels silly.”

  “Then put some pants on for fucks sake.”

  “The Shrew’s Dilemma” is what this one’s called. This woman’s boyfriend warns her about naming a painting before she’s finished, let alone even begun. But it’s basically all done in her head. She sees a series. Big canvases, loads of blood. This woman has never painted blood before, and can’t wait. All the reds, browns and purples to mix: rufous, sangria, rust, sinopia, Tyrian—maybe even a squidge of her own life stuff in there. She thinks that from now on gore might be her thing.

  The story goes that three shrews are placed under an overturned tumbler. Shrews have a metabolism that leaves them always needing to eat, so the shrew lives his entire life in search of food, making him—regardless and in spite of his size—one of the most terrible predators when you’re talking mammals. And somehow three of these guys get trapped beneath a tumbler. Two of them waste no time eating up the third. A few hours pass and, without batting a beady eye, the hungrier of the remaining two turns on his friend. This final captive is observed proudly cleaning his whiskers afterwards is how few scruples he has with cannibalism. In no time the last man standing is hungry again and gets an eyeful of his own tail. Starting there, the shrew is supposed to eat himself to death.

  “What do you think?” she asks him. This morning she is trying to make the three shrews trapped beneath the tumbler adorable enough without anthropomorphizing them, but still can’t quite.

  He is sitting in just his underwear on the windowsill, his legs dangling out, clipping his toenails into the alley below. “Well, what are you trying to say with it?”

  “I guess it’s a comment about life,” she says.

&
nbsp; “What about life?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well,” says her boyfriend, swinging around to straddle the sill. “There’s your problem.”

  “So Jonathan Brandis is dead,” this woman tells a friend over lunch, a girlfriend, who laughs. This girlfriend has a government grant to make a short film that Rick Moranis has apparently expressed interest in coming out of retirement to do and so is paying for the meal. “He hanged himself.”

  “You mean the teenybopper guy? Are you serious? I used to love that guy. That’s hilarious.”

  When she was tacking pictures of Jonathan Brandis to her walls her older sister was pinning up Kurt Cobain. Cobain seemed then to this woman an older, uglier, more morose version of Jonathan Brandis. When Cobain opened the back of his skull with a shotgun, her sister carved Kurt into her own arm. She laughs about it now, this woman’s sister does, how dramatic she had been, but there must have been some legitimate wound left, even if it was misguided or put on. In as much as she was capable of love at that age, she loved Kurt Cobain. When her sister laughs she must be laughing at herself, like when this woman sees a photo from when she was ten, wearing a pink tracksuit that she loved, and can’t help but titter, nervously.

  “Why’s that hilarious?” this woman hazards to ask her friend. Like her boyfriend, this friend is a few years older than her. This woman fell in with this older community all on account of him. Months now, and she has not exactly gotten over the certainty that they make fun of her behind her back and that a split with her boyfriend will mean a split from everyone.

  “It’s hilarious because it’s Jonathan Brandis, I guess.”

  “But you loved him.”

  “Maybe not like you did.”

  “You said ‘love.’”

  “Puppy love.”

  This woman chews on it, watches a soiled man with a green beard stagger past the window, his eyes wide and amazed. She hasn’t been in the city long enough to look past the homeless. She has no urge to help, just can’t help but ogle them.

  “And the way you love now is different,” she comes around to say.

  “I’ve grown up,” the friend says.

  “And you’ll keep on doing that.”

  “Like how?”

  “Like laughing at the way you were kind of says that you’re, you know, above that now, right?”

  Her friend tucks a curl of hair behind her ear and picks at her plate. “Fine.”

  “So someday you’ll move on to laugh at everything that means the world to you at this instant. Everything you love.”

  “This Jonathan Brandis killing himself thing really got to you, huh?”

  “You know my father committed suicide,” this woman says.

  Cheek puffed out with empanada, her friend pauses, this hollow look of horror in her eyes.

  “Jesus,” she says, the wet mess of her meal gawking out of her mouth. “Fuck. I’m sorry, Emma. I didn’t know.”

  Of course this woman’s father never killed himself and she suspects that this friend of hers was the one with the cat head, the one with the appendectomy scar, the painting fawned over by every viewer the night of his show. The number her boyfriend will sometimes call from her place.

  “Help me help you,” she whispers in the dark, attempting to somehow sound sexy in this desperate position, holding him uncertainly, with a mannequin’s grip.

  “Don’t worry about me,” he says, reaching again between her legs as if for a bowling ball. “Getting you off gets me off.”

  Maybe her boyfriend is a little too good at all this sex stuff. He flips over her cover page with the aplomb of a student who can’t wait to ace a test, whereas this woman hasn’t got a clue what she’s doing, stares dreadfully at the questions put before her.

  Working away at her, he moans more than she does, is more out of breath than this woman is after she has come. Though his is a different sort of pleasure, she is sure.

  She wakes up later that night having to piss. Already his rambunctiousness has given her two urinary tract infections. His side of the bed is empty and the ensuite bathroom glows at its cracks. With an ear to the door this woman hears the sound of one hand clapping. She climbs back into bed, still having to pee.

  Having sex with JB never crossed her mind. As a girl, she dreamt of going to dinner and a movie with him, of having her mom drive her to the mall and drop her off there, where she would meet with JB by the fountain. And then marriage, eventually. There wasn’t one salty drop of prurience to that attraction. This woman never thought about having JB sweat on her, or having him scrape her calf with a toenail, or having him wake her up in the mornings with a harmless erection jabbing her in the hip. She never imagined having conversations with JB. What would they have talked about? JB had been no different than a baby doll that wets itself, something girls coddle and care for to prepare themselves for the real thing. He had been a tool, an aid: light, stiff, plastic and unkillable.

  When her boyfriend returns to bed, she rolls into him, thinking to broach the problem, only he reads this as her asking, and so graciously lays once more into her. Lord only knows how many minutes later, this woman is exhausted, doesn’t know what’s what and has to pee worse than before.

  “Thanks,” she exhales, dumbly combing her hair back over her forehead.

  With her windows closed, the rain outside is only the crinkling and snapping sounds of a campfire left to burn itself out. In the crotchy heat of her apartment this woman removes everything but a light dress shirt he has left there, which smells of cigarettes, and sweat, and boy. She stretches out on her couch and looks at “The Shrew’s Dilemma” across the room from her, still unfinished after a month. With one eye closed, she gropes for it with her toes. Tonight is too hot for anything. All July has been too hot for jack fucking shit.

  When she was a girl, this woman was taught to treat life like a gift, and she has done her best. For others, though, this gift must be no better than a gaudy sweater too long in the arms, knit for them by some doddering relative they can’t recall ever actually meeting. Some will wear that gift dutifully, with the fear that that old relative will stop by unannounced one of these days. They don’t want to be rude, so they feign appreciation always, in case. The others—those that dump themselves in front of subway trains, those that loop nylon rope around their necks—they return that gift to the sender, with a note that says, You don’t know me at all.

  Only JB didn’t leave a note. This woman read on the internet that he didn’t.

  A few times she phones her boyfriend and every time hangs up before the machine. His message always tricks her in to thinking he has picked up and said Hello, and every time she feels stupid, like he’s making fun of her.

  You can’t help but imagine life before you live it, she thinks. For her first two decades she played out the rest of her life in her head. How she would move to the city, study art, make enough money making sandwiches in a collectively owned vegan café to rent a loft but not enough to fully furnish or heat it, be thought of as a marvelous painter for her age, become strong and independent so as to survive turbulent, passionate relationships with brilliant and troubled men who grow full beards and write poetry as sarcastic as it is beautiful. Why else would you strike out into the world if you hadn’t first considered what you might find out there, and how amazing all of it would be? No one is born stupid enough to knowingly enter a hard and hurtful fate. You have to trick yourself into getting out and into it, or be tricked.

  The days following his opening this woman imagined the two of them staying inside for entire weekends, painting, being so involved in the work that neither would notice when one side of a mixtape ran out, passing by each other’s work spaces sometimes and smiling. There would be parties at his place on weeknights, with red wine and organic food, and someone’s homemade ice cream. Parties that weren’t planned but that happened
as each person stopped by unannounced, until his kitchen, living room and balcony became a tumult of opinions, one overlapping over the other: highfalutin, overly intellectual, but still informed by a very honest and relevant curiosity. They would plan sex, but become busy with other things, fucking instead in unexpected bursts and unexpected places. Maybe some public hand jobs. They would cut each other’s hair. They would expect nothing of each other and get everything

  Since the winter he hasn’t worked on anything that she knows about. He eats fast food without apology and never invites her over, preferring instead to show up unannounced at her place, which, hardly a loft, is beginning to feel more tank-like the less she goes out. Sex is a given and expected. And she is smarter than him. He once insisted that Charles Dickens was the author of Don Quixote. Sunday afternoons he disappears and she only just found out that he is classically trained on the guitar.

  She calls her friend—the one from the café—who does not pick up and who does not have a machine. Maybe she is meeting with Rick Moranis. Maybe she’s fucking Rick Moranis.

  You can only ever have an idea of another person, a sort of surrogate you create in your imagination, or your heart, or whatever stupid place. Feelings of betrayal come when that person wanders outside the parameters you gave them. This woman admits to herself that she can never know her boyfriend, but only harbor an idea of him. To be with anyone for a stretch of time, to do anything for any significant duration, to live happily, demands a readiness for surprises and constant, willing revision.

  Life is not hard, she thinks, staring across the room at “The Shrew’s Dilemma,” straining her toes to touch it, life is only life. Hardships are bred by our expectations.

  “Hardships are bred by our expectations,” this woman says out loud. So what is suicide, then, but the consequence of a broken-down imagination? An inability to put a happy, hopeful face on any and all situations.