Dick.
Leah’s relatives treated me with such understanding that when I said I needed some time to myself, they gave me those wet, commiserating beagle eyes. Instead of being home in the den, weeping over albums filled with photos of Leah, I was in a twenty-second-floor waterfront apartment doing a three-way with two young women in third-year engineering, Gina and Andrea. It was the first time I had ever let something, anything, be put up my butt, and I have to tell you, the experience opened a lot of doors for me. Don’t judge what you haven’t tried.
I guess it’s just that I had a life—Leah and I had a life—that we’d built over the years: young, successful and loving couple about to have kids…and then cancer. But even before the cancer, I knew that I was not meant to be Mr. Successful Guy with a Wife. I was at the age when it had just dawned on me that this life was the only one I was going to get. Man, did that chill me. So what does a guy who looks like me do? I started sleeping around.
When it got close to the end, I started reading the obituaries. I’d never done that before, but I needed to see how obituaries are written—how long they usually are and what they’re supposed to say. Most of them ran with a photo, sometimes of an old person when they were young, or of a sick person when they were well. I figured that was what I would do for Leah. I even checked out the cost so I’d be prepared, and found out that because obituaries are one of the few remaining items newspapers make money on, they charge an insane amount of money.
Once I got started, though, I got sucked into the archives, going back years and years. Every so often I’d see one for the mom or dad of a high school friend, or a random acquaintance from earlier in my life. Every time I dipped in, it would take me a little while to realize that I’d already seen some of the obits. Face it, a lot of old people look very similar, especially old white guys. Usually it would take something like a weird haircut or an emotional opening line to remind me that I’d already read about the person.
And then came the day when Leah, who I truly did love, chose to say goodbye. My state doesn’t have Death with Dignity laws, so Matteo, her palliative care worker, said I needed an alibi for where I was at the time of Leah’s departure. He told me to drive across town and buy something small in a store that has a lot of surveillance cameras, to establish date and time. I picked up the weirdest feeling from him, like he was happy I wouldn’t be there when he helped Leah die. Anyway, so there I was across town in some store’s lineup, looking on my phone at the faces of potential online hookups, many of whom I’d swiped past hundreds of times already. And then it hit me that scanning their faces was like scrolling through the online obituaries every morning and trying to remember if I’d already seen a dead person’s photo.
What makes a person memorable? Beauty? Age? Good lighting? A winning smile? A bad sweater? Ugliness?
Too late. The moment I made that connection, my libido died. I haven’t had sex since.
14
Lego
ONE DAY THE PRINCIPAL called me and my best friend, Dylan, into his office. “The school fair is coming up and I want the two of you involved in it,” he said. “You only have four months to go before we release you out into the universe and, down the road, I want you to at least have one fun memory of this place.”
Dylan said the school fair sounded kind of hokey and I hemmed and hawed.
“Humor me,” the principal said.
He was basically guilting us into doing something we really didn’t want to do, but it was nice that he at least treated us like grown-ups, and so we caved.
“What do you want us to do?” I asked.
He reached into his desk drawer and removed a huge pile of Starbucks cards. “I can see your eyes lighting up. You vegan kids always love coffee.”
We certainly do, and we were talking five-dollar cards here. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad.
“Okay, so the deal with Starbucks is that we give the cards away as people come into the fair, but each person has to do something before you give them a card.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t care. Ask them a skill-testing question. Just make sure no one dies and nothing sexual happens. I want you here at the school at five p.m. tomorrow, when the fair starts. And I forgot to say, you can keep a few of the cards for yourself.”
I admit that Dylan and I left the office a bit drunk with the power of having all of that loot to divvy out. I guess this is how corruption starts, though we actually gave it our all trying to think of something truly cool people could do to get their card. We tossed ideas around all the way to the mall, where Dylan wanted to use a new stop-frame app on his phone to photograph people moving around like ants, which is kind of cliché, but the app really did make the end product look more professional.
Just as we were wrapping up, this kid, maybe nine, came out of a toy store screaming at his mother like an overindulged junior asshole in the making. He grabbed the bag his mom was holding and yelled, “This is the worst present ever! I can’t believe you did this to me!”
The world’s worst present turned out to be a huge box of off-brand Lego-like plastic bricks. The kid hucked the box onto the floor and ran off. His mother looked at the box, then at us, shrugged and went off to deal with the rest of her life.
Dylan picked up the fake Lego box and said, “I have an idea.”
After school the next day, we used red duct tape to tape off a rectangle maybe twelve steps long on the concrete outside the front door, and filled it with the plastic blocks. Then we made a big sign that read THE LEGO WALK OF FIRE! TAKE THE DARE AND WIN BIG! The deal was that you had to take your shoes off and walk the walk, and at the end you got the five-dollar Starbucks card. Just before the fair started, the principal came by to tell us we were rock stars and he knew we’d go far in life if we kept trying this hard.
People loved it, and we were handing out cards like mad, so we decided to make it harder. I made the genius observation (thank you) that it would be a lot more painful to do the Lego Walk of Fire if there were fewer bricks, so we paused operations to remove a strategic two-thirds of them. So much pain! As people did the walk, wincing in their sock feet, we’d shout encouraging things like “Pretend it’s three in the morning and you are so sleepy you can’t keep your eyes open, but you have to go pee.” People seem to like pain. Lots of them did it a few times, even though we could only give them one card.
Then this guy showed up who looked a little bit like he lived in his car—or maybe worse. He said he’d graduated from the school in 2013 and wanted to see what it looked like these days. He stood for awhile watching people do the walk of fire and was pretty mellow, but then he started doing this weird tuneless whistling.
Why do people whistle tunelessly? It makes you look so guilty and up to no good. Of course, when he started up with that, Dylan had to be a smartass and said, “Sounds to me like someone here got molested by their football coach.” The guy’s sunburned face turned white. He stopped whistling, stared at us for a long moment, then walked away. Soon after, we ran out of Starbucks cards, picked up our blocks, balled up the duct tape and shut down our special event.
Cut to three hours later. Dylan and I were at my place, watching Princess Mononoke in frame-by-frame mode, when the doorbell rang. Mom answered it and then she called us down and there were a couple of cops in the doorway who wanted to know what we’d said to the homeless guy.
I said, “Wait. What’s going on here?”
It turns out that, after he walked away from us, Mr. Class of 2013 headed to a nearby suburb, where he climbed over the fence and into the backyard of the house where his old high school coach lived. He grabbed some tiki torches from by the pool and ran inside and attacked him, yelling that at last someone had believed him, that the two kids running the walk of fire at the school knew the truth. The coach, a big guy, was strong enough to fight him off, and didn’t suffer even a scratch. The drifter
guy got a huge gash in his leg and ran off leaking blood.
“What do you know that can help us? Anything that might help us find him?” asked one of the cops.
I thought about it. “Maybe Starbucks?”
15
Resting Bitch Face
DO WE BECOME OUR FACE, or does our face eventually reflect who we are? I’ve never thought of myself as being unattractive, but ever since kindergarten I’ve noticed that people tend to be wary and suspicious when they need to deal with me. It’s as if they expect something to go wrong. There’s maybe a hint of dread in there too. When I went out trick-or-treating with the other kids, everyone else got a smile with their treat, but I got a blank face. And even now everybody expects me to be the mean girl. At what point did I take on this role? Which came first, the bitch or the face? I am not the mean girl.
Recently I went to my dentist, Vaughn, who, after installing a crown (I had tried to eat a toffee apple at a Halloween party), pulled up a chair. “Kim,” he asked, “how do you feel about your smile?”
“My smile? Great, I guess.” We’d just finished an astonishingly expensive two-year journey of invisible braces and near-total dental reconstruction. “It’s been a long haul, but it’s been worth it.”
“Right. Good.”
“Vaughn, there’s something you’re not saying, isn’t there? Please tell me no more braces—I don’t think I could take more braces.”
A small laugh. “Braces? No. You’re great that way.”
“Great that way? In what ways am I not great?”
“Well…”
“Well?”
“If I gave you a piece of advice, would you consider it?”
“Advice? From you? Of course.”
“It’s nothing major. Please, don’t worry. It’s just that…”
“Just what?”
“Some of my patients have had excellent results using targeted muscle deactivation.”
“Wait—you mean Botox?”
“Yes.”
To be honest, it felt kind of glamorous to be discussing Botox, like my life had been upgraded, but why? “I have my mother’s Irish skin,” I said. “I don’t think there are that many wrinkles to tweak.”
“Well, it’s not so much wrinkles.”
[Awkward silence]
“Vaughn, you’re not telling me something. What are you not telling me?”
“Kim, relax. I just think that if a few select locations on your face were properly targeted, it could alter your overall…aura considerably.”
“Vaughn, stop pussy-footing around!”
“Okay, okay. It’s just that you have RBF—resting bitch face—and you could fix that.”
Time froze. The room surrounding me became a painting: I saw myself semi-reclined on a reclining vinyl seat the color of all human skin tones averaged out; MSNBC on a screen up near the ceiling on mute, with its endless numerical monetary crawl on the bottom; the sound and smell of someone else’s molars being drilled one station over from mine. It was the medical equivalent of an airport bar.
Finally I got it out. “You think I look like a bitch?”
“We both know that’s not what I’m saying.”
“But it is. Why else would you call it resting bitch face?”
“Because that’s what it is.”
“You say that like you’re describing freckles or eye color.”
“We’ve only been able to isolate it as a medical condition recently.”
“It’s a medical condition?”
“Bad term on my part. I meant a condition in general. Something that, once pointed out, can never again be unnoticed, but that can also be rectified.”
“Is ugliness a condition too?”
Vaughn was getting exasperated. Frankly, good for me for putting him in that position. “Kim, I really didn’t want you to take it as an insult, because it’s not.”
“Just that I’m a bitch, is all.”
“It’s just that when you let your face slip into neutral, you do look a bit aggressive. I mean, Kim, this is stuff they discuss on Ellen and Oprah. That stupid TV is on for half of my waking life. I know you’ve heard of resting bitch face before. Don’t shoot the messenger.”
“Okay, okay.” And I remembered all the guys I liked who never asked me to dance, and every time I heard girls call me “Clenchy” behind my back: You know, you could stick a pencil between Kim’s butt cheeks and it’d stay there all day.
And then I had to recognize the kindness of my dentist for naming the beast—and offering a way to kill it. The glamor of Botox.
I asked, “So, which muscles would you temporarily deactivate in order to make me not look like a bitch?”
“It’s kind of amazing what we can do these days. Let me show you some case studies.” And voilà, as if from nowhere, he produced an album filled with RBF before and after shots.
Honestly, if the glass-block walls had pulled back to reveal a studio audience, I would not have been surprised. Who doesn’t love a good makeover?
“Ooh, look at her. In that first shot she looks like she’d key your car if she thought you took her parking spot. And here she looks like she bakes cookies for the poor sick kids you see on telethons.”
“Amazing, right?”
“And her! She went from mug shot to red carpet.”
“Ta-da! I do think some injections would change your life, Kim.”
“I’d look more approachable, basically.”
“Yes, and, you know, uh, I think I might even ask you out.”
“Wait. You’re asking me out?”
“Well, sort of.”
“But only if I get Botox?”
“It’s not that cut-and-dried.”
“You’re an asshole.”
16
Lurking Account
IF A WOMAN EVER PAUSES in the middle of her day and asks herself, Hmmm…I wonder if my husband is having an affair, then the answer is yes. There are a trillion signals that may have made you wonder—nature built you that way—but yes, he is. When you ask that question, you already know the answer.
This is all to say that I’ve got cancer and I don’t have much longer to live. My husband’s been fucking around like crazy since this all began. He thinks I don’t know, but I do, and I actually don’t mind—not because I’m a saint, but because I’m in love with Matteo, a nurse here at the hospice.
When Duncan shows up, he does put on a good grieving show, but it’s total horseshit. My mom thinks he’s a saint, but she doesn’t have any of those unholy hook-up apps on her phone. Matteo and I have fun going through my phone in lurk mode to see how Duncan’s pimping himself that day: I love nature and long hikes. I’d like nothing more than to hand-stain a premium cedar shingle roof over the course of a week, with a cooler full of Bud and a friendly lady with me to watch the stain dry while the sun sets.
Oh, Duncan, you are embarrassing.
Matteo gets in bed with me the moment the coast is clear. You’re maybe thinking, Yuck! Making it with a scrawny cancer lady! But you’re wrong. I have a non-wasting cancer, like the cancer that actors on TV shows get when their character has to die but they still need to look good. Matteo is fucking hot. I can say that—I can say anything since I’ll be dead in two weeks—but yeah, Matteo is insanely hot.
When Duncan comes in and does his brave husband routine, I lie there trying not to laugh. He’ll have spent the day bonking desperate women and then he brings me a teddy bear and my mother thinks he’s God. In some weird way, I guess, he and I are both getting exactly what we want, and our mutual duplicity makes our actions feel less like betrayal to me. Duncan’s not a bad guy. He’s handsome enough, and, I mean, I did marry him. But he’s not an old soul.
Matteo is an old soul who also happens to have a beer-can dick. I’m about to die and I’m having the
best sex of my life. How does that make sense? But it does. People look at me lying here smiling and think, She’s so brave. I’m actually not brave. Death scares the shit out of me like it scares most people, except the universe handed me Matteo to see me through. I’d love to die while we are making it, but I know that won’t happen. I’m the first death in my family, so they are all going to be standing around looking grim and wondering what my last moment will look like. Maybe they expect to see a cartoon ghost float out of my chest. No, that’s too old-fashioned. Maybe I’ll reboot like a video game. I don’t care. I’ll be gone.
My decision right now is whether to tell Duncan that I know he’s been sleeping around, and that I have too. He could have been slightly more respectful, given my situation, but who am I to judge? While Matteo was giving me a foot massage this morning, the nurses who passed by all smiled. They think Matteo’s gay.
Is there anything to be gained by letting Duncan know? Not really. Will it change who he is as a human being? Definitely not. All those nights he came home with his hands smelling like gasoline—I read in Cosmopolitan ages ago that it’s a cheater’s number one way of concealing incriminating odors. Or maybe it was online somewhere. Google it.
The one thing that genuinely surprises me in all of this is that I did need to tell someone about Matteo. If I didn’t, I thought I’d explode. But who? Someone in my family? Noooooo way. My lawyer? Yawn. Girlfriends? They wouldn’t understand. Weirdly, I ended up calling this guy I worked with at the Gap a million years ago. Erik is the only nonjudgmental human being I’ve ever known. I’d lost track of him, but a mutual acquaintance gave me his number, and he actually phoned me back when I texted him. When we said hello, it was as if no time had passed. He was at the hospice within an hour.
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