The Dictionary of Failed Relationships

by Meredith Broussard

  I called June and told her I brought up the “M” word with Ben. That I started it. I told her I couldn’t help it. I told her, “Off the record, I think I’m out of the game for good. Call it a sports-related injury.”

  In August, my first month in New York, June called and told me about her date with a short, heavyset stockbroker who had no neck. “Just head and shoulders, honey,” she giggled. “Nothing in between.” It was a blind date, a setup. She met him at a bar in downtown Cleveland. “He said he had to ‘tinkle.’ He actually used that word.” June spit the words. “He was gone twenty minutes. I went to call a cab, and there’s No-Neck in the corner with the waitress, his hands all over her fishnets.”

  Five points for June. Me, zero.

  “So,” she barked into the phone, “how’s New York?”

  “So far, it’s just quiet. I go to work. I come home and sleep.”

  In August, I wasn’t saying things June didn’t want to hear. She had been thrilled when I had been promoted at work. I had listened closely when she said, “You have to take this. Move to New York. Think of your career. Don’t stay in Chicago for any reason other than yourself.”

  So I let my boss ship me out to New York. Ben, he came with me. For one week only. Limited engagement. I told him that I couldn’t lose him. I told him that it was only temporary. That we’d breeze in, get the job done in six months, be back for New Year’s if not Christmas. I was lying, and he knew it.

  Still, he said, “I can wait. I’ll hate it, but I can wait. We’ve got days in our future,” he said while he touched my hair. “I’m going to see you when you’re seventy. I’ll know you when you’re a wrinkled mess, pruney even. We’ve got so much time, you don’t have to worry.”

  To some people, maybe this doesn’t sound like much. But I’m twenty-four, and listening to Ben talk, it’s like learning a new language. It’s like going to Paris and watching people eat brains. You can’t help but say, “I’ve heard about people doing this, but I never thought I’d see it.”

  In New York, Ben carried my boxes into my new apartment. He put together my furniture. He stayed for one week, and we ate out every night as if we were celebrating. Like these were good times.

  I drove him to JFK and cried as if somebody were dying. This old lady saw us boo-hooing for an hour and smiled at us. Like it was love, like she wished she had it. I wanted to knock her down and take her purse. I let Ben go at the terminal. Put my hand across my face all the way out of the airport. I don’t remember anything but watching my feet walking. These big, black, ugly, expensive shoes.

  The day after you’ve been kissed by a boy for the first time, you feel a little thin around the edges. Kind of like part of your skin’s been rubbed off, like maybe there’s less of you there. I always walk around my apartment with my hand to my face. Stepping very quietly. I wait a little while till I can call him up and ask him to come over and kiss me again.

  The day after you’ve been kissed by a boy who’s not your boyfriend, you try not to think really, really hard. By the time you sleep with the boy who’s not your boyfriend, you’ve got this stone in your mouth, and you’re not speaking. You let your pebble hold down your tongue, and you stop asking yourself questions that you can’t answer. You find the trick is to keep very, very busy. Keep moving, keep walking, keep going in and out of doors all day long till the night comes out. Till you can go and get in the boy who’s not your boyfriend’s bed. Hold your stone and don’t say a word.

  June says I’m falling drastically behind on the Contest. She says, “I know you’ve got your Mr. Right and that everything is perfect. But doesn’t he do one thing wrong? Don’t you have one thing you can tell me to get you back up on the board?”

  “Don’t you get sick of talking to me long distance?” I ask her. “Don’t you sometimes wish we could just meet each other at a bar and have a beer? How long have we been doing this? Five years?” I twirl the cord with my fingers. “Five years since freshman year of sitting home in our dirty pajamas, racking up the phone bill like we’re made of money, giggling cross-country instead of sitting down and having a good time?” I listen to June breathing.

  “I’m twenty-five years old. You’re twenty-four,” she says real slow, like maybe I’m hard of hearing or just plain stupid. “I haven’t made one girlfriend like you since I left school. I go to work and have lunch with the ladies. We get along real nice and ask each other about our days. But if I’m feeling lonely and like there’s nobody on the planet who speaks my language, I don’t call them up late nights. I call you. I call you, and we talk, and we make each other feel decent for a while. At this point, hon, I take all the good things I can get. I don’t wish for things I can’t have.”

  “My long-distance bill came today,” I tell her. “Do you know how much it is?” I pick it up off the table and hold it out. Like I can give it to her, like I can show her something. “Four hundred dollars, June. Four hundred dollars could buy me a lot of nights out at a bar, laughing and talking and having a good time, instead of sitting here at home, yakking on the phone all the time.”

  “Please,” June exhales. “Bring it down a notch, sister.”

  “I told Ben I want to see other people.”

  “What did he say?”

  “ ‘I won’t hold my breath for you.’ That’s what he said.”

  “Smart boy.”

  “I just want one local call, June. Just one.”

  I dial long distance after eight P.M., after the rates drop low. Ben answers and asks me what I’m going to do. I tell him I don’t know. I skirt around the issue as long as I can. I even ask him about the weather.

  “Do you know anything about trains?” he asks me. “Do you know what happens when the engineer sees a suicide, just a crazy fucking guy, lying across the tracks? Do you know what that engineer has to do? He has to speed up. He speeds up the train. Because that’s all he can do.”

  So I tell Ben that I don’t love him. I tell him he’s lousy in bed. I tell him he’s a whiner and a loser and that there’s no way in hell I’m putting that noose around my neck for the rest of my life. I tell him that I lied during that whole time in Chicago, that I was lonely and my bed was cold. That he was the easiest one to fill it. I tell him he does nothing for me, that he never did, that I just didn’t want to hurt his feelings. I tell him I needed help moving all my boxes and that’s why I didn’t cut him loose sooner. I tell him I’m seeing somebody new, have been for weeks. That my new man is five times the man Ben will ever be. I pull out every single low-down, nasty, god-awful thing any guy has ever said to me before. I pull them all out plus add some of my own. I knock my love out at the knees.

  When I’m done Ben says, “Well.”

  I call up June and tell her I can beat her bug story.

  MUAY THAI

  By Rachel Resnick

  mu·ay thai ’myü- t noun [origin unknown] 1: a style of kick-boxing; specifically, a martial art of Thailand. Incoprorates elbow and knee strikes as well as punches and kicks. 2: spectator sport that can provide an answer to the question, “Exactly how gay is my boyfriend?”

  When we make our entrance—Walker with his shaved head, youthful bodybuilder stride, and illustrated arm, and me with my five-alarm red hair, pert tits, and skimpy tropical getup— Lumpini Stadium is already packed to capacity. Lights are low over the thronging crowd as we muscle our way toward the front, the circus roar swelling in our wake. When we pass, all eyes are on us. We’ve been tripping on each other for a crazy sleepless week, so the honeymoon heat comes off us in waves, blending with the humid, smoky air. I couldn’t care less that Walker’s got almost two decades on me with his half century. Everything’s underworldly. The walls are dark and stained compared to the sanitized, super-clean supersports arenas of the States. Here, cigarettes glower their Cyclopean red eyes. The mood is carnivalesque. Drenched by the ring lights, some spectators at ringside wear shades, looking vaguely nefarious. Others sport garish gold-accented suits and jackets, sandals,
and jewelry. Silver is considered second class. In the cheap bleachers, plainer-dressed Thais are standing, stamping, waving their arms, chanting, eyes egg-white shiny, even though the first preliminary is just beginning. There will be eight fights following. Eight fights, eight limbs fighting—hands and feet, elbows and knees. Weapons come in pairs.

  My thighs are still humming from the motorcycle ride over from the cut-rate River City Guest House. As I wrapped my arms tentatively around the driver’s waist, I saw Walker do the same, almost engulfing the slender Thai motorcycle driver. Arms around strangers, rice burners snarling between our legs, we were paramecia split and re-paired. Now we are seated at ringside, rejoined, our thighs thrumming, dizzy from smog and the titillation of the ride—everything is titillating in the state of heightened arousal that we are in, a week into round-the-clock sex and sightseeing.

  Our VIP seats cost a whopping 880 baht. I pay my own way—a macho gesture, since Walker flew me over and has paid for pretty much everything. I figured what the fuck—free ticket, Southeast Asian adventure—even though I hardly know him. So here I am in Bangkok, a thirty-something in a strappy tank and sarong, my ass already sweat-suctioned to the creaky wooden seat. Everything is pleasantly sore from our elaborate couplings. My arms, forehead, even upper lip, are coated in a fine sheen of perspiration, as if I had just rolled out of bed.

  “This is the shit, Blaise.”

  “It’s wild.”

  “I ever tell you how puny I was as a kid? Sickly. Got picked on all the time. I was a foot shorter than the rest of the class up until high school, when I just got real tall and skinny with these big-ass eyes. Shaved my head before anyone even thought of it. Caused a minor scandal. But I played no sports. Barely went to school. Never finished. Junior year, I started working at the old porno theater on Sunset. The weights, the steroids, they came later. I was still trying to learn how to be a man. Here, they still teach that. There’s a certain kind of toughness . . . the Thais, they have this . . . it’s about the generations before. The masters, the fathers. How things get handed down. Ancestry. That’s gone to shit in the States. The fathers? They’re expendable. Dickless. Walking wallets, sperm donors, dogs. As a boy there, you might fight, you might even win, sure, but you are no warrior. You get me?”

  I nod, run a finger down Walker’s back, where sweat has already stained his white guayabera shirt, and the thrill of contact is like a seizure, but Walker is already tensed, studying the program, absorbed by the spectators and the ring only six seats away. We are close enough to see the talc rising from the canvas like miniature smoke signals.

  “May I sit here?”

  I hardly hear the man’s voice over the pitched roar of the crowd as he gestures to the seat next to mine with his ticket, flashing some perfect bone-white teeth. Rather than try to speak, I incline my head toward the seat and smile back. If the seat is his, there was no need for the Thai to ask, so he’s either being polite, as is the custom, or he’s flirting.

  I take Walker’s arm, trace the deeply inked tattoo of the koi. Its green-gold fish body surges up through the frothing Japanese surf into Walker’s elbow, covering old track marks. As usual, I avoid touching the sky demon, whose clawed foot steps rudely and permanently on the koi’s majestic head. The demon’s insanely muscular body torques over Walker’s shoulder as if he owns it. I hate this guy, but it’s his face that disturbs me the most—those bugged-out, malevolent eyes and the evil curled grin. The tat is such good quality that even after several decades, it’s barely faded. Unlike Walker’s fame as an avant-garde playwright and director, which reached its peak some years ago, then shrank a little more each year until he moved it with him to Bangkok.

  “Excuse me . . .” The Thai is still standing. Waiting for my response.

  “Help yourself,” I say shortly. He’s tall for a Thai, and dressed sharply in a knockoff Italian suit. Fine face, full mouth. Striking, and he knows it. Eyes completely obscured behind wraparound sunglasses. With no trace of sweat on his face, he sits, brushing my leg with his. No way am I going there; I have too much respect for Walker—besides which, the guy bugs me. I look at Walker, whose head gleams like a strangely formed egg about to hatch. Would Athena spring forth, brandishing arms, or some monstrous Caliban creature? I marvel again at how long his eyelashes are, like a girl’s, when the rest of him is all square-jawed and buff in the manner of a thick-necked bull. He reeks of testosterone, that rarest and most desirable of perfumes. It is his formidable brain, however, that knits all the manly pieces together and makes him so magnetic. I am a sucker for self-made men, men who’ve shaped themselves out of the very mud.

  “You are American?” the Thai hunk says in exquisite English, leaning close as if we have already been intimate. Horny bastard. Is he sniffing out après-sex? He himself smells of an expensive jungly cologne, and Singha beer. Instead of responding, I nod yes curtly, give a polite half-smile, then shut it down like a garage door. That should do it.

  “Showtime,” Walker whispers in my ear, but does not nibble it. So I drink in the way he inhabits the stadium, adopt his uncompromising focus, and rake my eyes over the scene as he does. Inhale. Incense chokes the air. Also beer, smoke, sweat, hair grease, peanuts, fried spicy beef. In the bleachers are energetic crowds, lots of shouts and gesticulations, fingers flying, bookies everywhere with books out in the open. There’s a betting frenzy. Bits of colored baht exchange hands, waved in the air like small flags or secreted into hidden pockets. The music is haunting. Pervasive. A siren song to gamblers and fighters. Used to be they played live, Walker told me before we arrived, but now it is canned music, repeated over and over—a field of heartbeat percussion snared on top by a grinding, nasally flute and oboe blend. The top layer must be how fraying nerves sound, how adrenaline juices its high-pitched song into the bloodstream. Already I am tingling with anticipation. No man has ever taken me to the fights before, or fucked me so well.

  While we watch the fighters do Muay Ram, the prefight ceremony, I feed Walker from a plastic bag full of beef satay. Stab the satay, dip it into another fat plastic bag full of peanut sauce, and then into another with cucumbers, onions, and tiny disks of red pepper, then spill the stuff into Walker’s mouth, which looks so edibly red under the hyperlights. After a few mouthfuls, he holds his hands up to stop, and it hits me. In the past week, I have received his constant kisses. Now, the absence of his complete attention strikes at my core like a ball peen hammer, and I realize I have become accustomed. Or addicted.

  “Toothpick?” The Thai hunk on my left holds out a flat, wooden stick with a sharp point in the center of his palm.

  “What?” I say and shake my head no impatiently, but automatically check my teeth for food.

  His gaze on my hair—which is flame-shiny under the lights and must stand out in the sea of dark heads—and then his gaze on my chest is somehow full of moisture and suggestion. I turn away abruptly, aware of his breath lingering on my bare arm. Thai women do not use toothpicks.

  Up there on the stage, incense smoke sprouts from each of the four ring pillars, which are done up like mini-altars, hung heavy with flowers and garlands. There are garlands around the fighters’ necks, and hanging from their heads are circlets that jut out in a sharp point behind so that the garlands dangle down their backs. Their tight, sculpted bodies are greased. Lascivious and lethal, lean. Each muscle articulated. The trunks are flashy and bright, silky and scrabbled with Thai words that look almost cabalistic under the heat lights. I think about the woman warrior—in Uganda, was it? Who mesmerized her hill-people army and told them to smear their bodies with some secret unguent so that arrows would not pierce them, nor bullets. They all believed. They all died.

  Muay Thai was originally a war strategy, Walker tells me, for times when close combat made spears and clubs useless. The fighters’ arms bobble as if they are dancing. Way back before they used Western-style gloves, they would simply wrap their wrists in soft bandages, then with rope, then soak the rope in tree resin
, then, if both opponents agreed, coat the rope with bits of crushed glass. The winner would be the first to draw blood. I press my leg against Walker’s, ignoring the Thai, who, I see out of the corner of my eye, is poking the toothpick at his front incisors. Walker uses envelopes to pick his teeth, a habit I find both uncouth and fascinating.

  Already, the fighter in acid-green trunks has delivered enough bone-crushing low kicks that the other fighter’s shins are purple with hemorrhaging and almost match his grape-colored trunks. The flower garlands are of marigolds and orchids, woven together with necklaces of peach and pink ribbon, with drugstore rose bows in matching colors—all these have been removed from the fighters and hang lushly from the corner altars, wilting in the heat of the fight. The bloom on the weaker fighter’s shins is the color of those deepest colored orchids. What does it take to make the blood burst the skin? I wonder then if I am in the early stages of blood lust, and whether Walker is as moved by the violence.

  “It’s like they’re floating,” I say. They are so solid on their bare feet, and light at the same time. “Why does everything float in Thailand? You’ve got wing beans, floating ghost maidens, floating markets, floating sleeves in that Chinese opera.”

  “Floating sleaze? Is that what you said?”

  Walker’s wide-set eyes are on the ring. He doesn’t even notice my bemused look at his mishearing. The two fighters and the whole stadium are rocketing with testosterone. The hypnotic, vaguely annoying music reminds me of snake charmer music— the whining, insistent ducking and feinting of the flute, twining and untwining teasingly over the drums like a sonic bullwhip. The Thai hunk shifts in his seat, once again managing to get his leg near mine. Probably thinks all American women are whores. I wish Walker would notice.