Apotheosis

by Joshua Edward Smith

  Her heart beat fast. Now what? She wanted to message him, but she didn’t know what to say. Definitely not “Hey, baby.” She thought a moment, swallowed hard, and sent him a message. “You look so familiar. Do I know you from someplace?”

  She stuck out her lower lip and nodded as she re-read it. It was a great opening. Kind of a spin on a bar pickup line, but since she knew his face was in ads all over the place, probably something he heard a lot. Enough to open a conversation, but not enough to seem too forward. She awaited his reply. Nothing.

  She picked up her wine and took a swallow. She wondered if there was a way to delete messages. She wanted to try a different tack, but she didn’t even know if that was possible. Eventually he replied, “I get that a lot.”

  She looked at the reply. Her heart was racing. I am talking to the man from my dreams! She was flummoxed. It was her turn to say something, but she didn’t know what to say. She was back in high school, the day the football captain picked up the book she dropped, and she stared at him, and maybe drooled a little. Ugh. You’re a grown woman. Woman-up! she scolded herself. “Maybe on TV or something?” she wrote.

  “I do a little modeling now and then,” he replied. “It’s probably from that. An ad for dog food or something ridiculous.”

  “Feminine hygiene products? LOL” she wrote. She nearly swallowed her tongue. Oh my God! What the fuck is wrong with you Cynthia? He’s going to think you’re an idiot!

  There was a delay before he replied. That’s it. He’s going to block me. I blew it. I was that close, and I blew it. “Hahahaha! You’re funny!” he finally sent back.

  Cynthia let out the breath she didn’t realize she had been holding. Crisis averted. “Yikes. I can’t believe I wrote that. I’m SO sorry.”

  “Why are you sorry? I thought it was funny. Honestly, I probably have. There’s this one picture and it’s fucking everywhere, excuse my language. I got paid like a couple hundred bucks for the shoot, and I see it everywhere. It’s embarrassing, tbqh.”

  She puzzled a moment over the initials. She knew “tbh” was “to be honest.” So maybe “to be quite honest”? Sure, that made sense. Kind of a formal Internet slang. She liked it.

  “I’ve never seen the q in tbh before. I like it,” she wrote.

  “Oh, I picked that up someplace. I like it better for some reason.”

  “Me too, tbqh,” she wrote.

  “You’re a pill! So you know my big secret, what’s yours?” he asked.

  She thought a moment. He was her big secret, but she couldn’t tell him that, obviously. “I’m new here, and I have no idea what the fuck I am doing.”

  “You seem to be doing okay,” he replied. “Not many followers yet, but you are doing everything right. You look very attractive in that swimsuit.”

  Cynthia felt herself blushing and was so glad for a moment that this was a text chat and not in person. “Thank you,” she replied.

  “So are you a full-time model?” she asked, knowing the answer. She congratulated herself on her subterfuge skills.

  “No, I’m a doctor. I just do a little modeling on the side for a friend of mine. She makes a lot of money off my face. I get squat. But she introduces me to models, so there’s that.”

  “Tough life you have there, mister. Are you really a doctor, or is that just what you tell the girls on Twitter so they show you their tits?”

  “Hahaha! No, I’m really a doctor. I actually see more than my fair share of tits in my job. If a girl did send me a picture of hers, I’d probably just want to turn it into a consult.”

  “Are you a plastic surgeon or something?” she asked.

  “Guilty as charged. Please don’t hate me,” he replied.

  “Why would I hate you?”

  “A lot of women take issue with the profession. They see what I do as anti-feminist.”

  “I see. Don’t worry. I’m a feminist, but I have no issue with women doing whatever the fuck they want with their bodies, for whatever fucking reason they want. It’s none of my business,” she wrote.

  “I like the way you think,” he replied. “Listen, it was really nice meeting you, but I have to go now. Have a great night.”

  “You too!” she wrote. Then she added, “Goodnight.”

  Cynthia breathed deeply and drained her wine glass. That went pretty well, she thought. Then she scrolled back to the top and re-read the whole conversation. Twice.

  ¤

  Cynthia awoke the next morning to a collection of new come-ons from random men in her Twitter messages, which she deleted without response. But nothing from the one man that mattered. Should I send a good morning? Is that too forward? Too desperate? Oh, fuck it. “Good morning, Mr. Doctor/Model.”

  She grinned to herself. It was a good tone, she thought. Somewhat of a tease. There was no immediate response, so she spent a little time scrolling her feed. She noticed that a lot of people posted “Throwback Thursday” pictures, like they did on Instagram, so she dug around in her photo library to find something sexy. A shot of her in a flapper costume from a Halloween party in the ’90s seemed perfect. She tweeted it with the appropriate hashtags and the comment, “I bet this costume would still fit, just not the same way.” She recognized that she was engaging in a humble-brag, but that’s what everyone did with these pictures.

  Her notifications immediately lit up, as both men and women liked the tweet. Someone retweeted it, which she thought was odd. Logically, she knew showing her picture to a bunch of strangers who followed her was no different than showing it to a bunch of other strangers who didn’t. Nonetheless, it felt like a violation. Twitter is weird, she reminded herself. Just roll with it.

  She finished her morning routine and didn’t look at her phone again until her first break at the office. She updated the bio in her profile to say, “Please do not retweet my pictures.” That made her feel a little better. Then she looked at her direct messages, and there was a response from Evan. Just a simple, “Good morning.”

  “Sleep well?” she asked, as she walked to the kitchen to get another cup of coffee.

  “I did. That’s a nice picture of you,” he replied.

  “Thank you. Busy day ahead?”

  “I have several appointments, yes. I don’t get much chance to look at Twitter during the day, tbQh,” he wrote.

  Cynthia smiled at his subtle reference to their earlier conversation. “Me neither, tbQh,” she wrote, adding a winking emoji.

  “Have a good day. Maybe we can talk after work,” he wrote.

  “Sounds good.”

  Cynthia walked back to her cube with the coffee. Alice looked up at her as she passed. “What’s that smile mean?” she asked.

  Ugh. Busted. “Oh nothing. I just like this new coffee flavor they got.”

  “Bullshit,” Alice replied. “You have exactly the look on your face that Sally gets when she looks at Linus. I can practically see the hearts wiggling around your head.”

  Cynthia blushed. “It’s really good coffee,” she said with a wink. She got comfortable in her chair and went back to her emails.

  Alice rolled her chair around the partition. “You’re not going to get off that easy. I can read you like a book. Who’s the guy? Dish.”

  Cynthia sighed and spun her chair toward Alice. “It’s early and I don’t want to jinx it.”

  Alice narrowed her eyes. “Well okay. But I’m going to bug you every day until you tell me.”

  “Super,” Cynthia replied, rolling her eyes and spinning back to her computer screen.

  Alice laughed as she rolled back to her side of the partition.

  Cynthia liked Alice. They didn’t hang out together or anything, but they had been to the bar after work plenty of times. Doing essentially the same job gave them a lot to talk about. Cynthia, however, was intent on never being Alice. She did not want to end up alone in a cat menagerie. She did not want to settle or give up. She liked the company of men and she wanted that. Except for all the parts she didn’t.


  Men were a pain in the ass. They were needy. They never gave you space when you wanted it, and they gave you too much space at all the wrong times. They didn’t know how to listen. They didn’t know how to clean up after themselves. They drank too much and they cheated on you and got some hot little idiot pregnant. Well maybe not all men. But Cynthia had nothing to draw on but her experience, and that was her experience.

  She knew Evan was different. She knew it the first moment she laid eyes on him, lying in bed, listening to his stories. He was the man who could redeem all men in her eyes. She adored him, and she was excited to get another chance to chat with him that night. It was like they were dating, except he probably didn’t know it yet. He’d figure it out soon enough.

  FIVE

  Cynthia settled into her spot on the couch with her wine and opened the Twitter app. She noticed that she could turn on notifications so she would see right away if Evan tweeted anything. She turned that on and for good measure, she hopped over to her browser and set up a Google alert for any news including his name. She browsed her feed awhile, hoping that he would make the first move. After all, it had been he who suggested they could talk after work. She checked the time. Seven. That qualifies as after work, she thought.

  A half hour passed and no message, so she decided to go ahead. “How was your day?” she wrote.

  There was no immediate response, so to pass the time she decided to search for him on the web. She had done this all before, of course, but she figured there might have been something she missed. She noticed that he was mentioned in photo captions sometimes, when he was out with someone famous. It wasn’t frequent, but now and then he’d be mentioned with a model, b-list actress, or other minor celebrity. He always looked amazing. She was looking at one such picture when she had a thought.

  She popped back over to Twitter and looked through his pictures there. Sure enough, one of the pictures he had tweeted was this exact picture, except he had cropped it so that the model wasn’t there. She went back to her browser and did an image search and found a few more pictures that fit that mold. In fact, she was starting to think that the only pictures of him on Twitter were pictures he had cropped other women out of.

  As she pondered why he might do this, a reply to her message arrived. “My day was busy. I’m beat. How about yours?”

  She smiled. He was so polite. “Same. My work never lets up. I am always pretty tired by the end of the day.”

  “What do you do to unwind?” he asked.

  “Drink heavily,” she replied.

  “Hahahaha! You are so funny!”

  “Haha, I’m just kidding. I like doing yoga, actually.”

  “Oh, me too!” he replied.

  “Do you go to a class, or do it at home?” she asked.

  “I go to a class first thing every morning, actually. I don’t need a class. I’ve been doing it a long time. But if I try to do it at home, I lose my motivation. And it’s good for me,” he explained. “What about you?”

  “I have a scratchy old VHS tape that I’ve been using since back when they still made VHS tapes.”

  “Really? VHS?”

  “You were expecting Betamax, maybe?” she joked.

  “Stop. It. You are so funny. So you do the same yoga routine every day? And you’ve been doing it for like a decade?”

  “More like two decades. Yeah. I’m a creature of habit.”

  “Wow. I can’t imagine. So what do you do for work?” he asked.

  “People yell at me. I’m yelled-at for a living, basically.”

  “I’m picturing you sitting at a desk and someone is yelling at you, and you’re sipping your coffee, saying ‘This is nice.’”

  “Hahaha! Yes! That’s it exactly! Have you been spying on me? Do I need to put a piece of tape over the camera in my computer monitor?”

  “Yes. Yes I have,” he wrote. “And yes you do.”

  “Hey, can I ask you a kind of personal question?” she asked.

  “You can ask. Don’t know if I’ll answer,” he replied, including a wink emoji.

  “I don’t see any women in your pictures here. But some of the pictures look like maybe there was someone else there you cropped out.”

  “Oh. Yeah. I do that. It’s not my place to put pictures of other people on social media. I just don’t feel comfortable doing that,” he explained.

  “I like that. That’s very considerate of you. So is there someone special?”

  “I mean, I date. But there isn’t like a steady girlfriend or anything.”

  “That southern California hookup culture I’ve read about?”

  “Not so much. I’m pushing fifty. I’m not really interested in sleeping around anymore. That’s a young man’s game. How’d you know I live in SoCal?”

  Cynthia’s heart skipped a beat. Fuck, fuck, fuck! Think! “I guess I just assumed because you said you were a plastic surgeon, and the scenery in your pictures and stuff. Plus we are in the same time zone. I’m up near Portland.” She sent the message and held her breath.

  “You’re a regular detective,” he wrote.

  Cynthia exhaled. She needed to be more careful. Nobody falls in love with a stalker. Oh fuck. I’m a stalker. The thought hadn’t even occurred to her up until that point. She was only curious about him, trying to learn more. But in that moment she realized she was totally stalking this poor man. She stared at the screen of her phone, unsure about how to proceed. She suddenly felt extremely guilty.

  “This is nice.”

  “What’s nice?” she asked.

  “Chatting with you. I don’t connect with people on Twitter very often.”

  Cynthia smiled. “I agree. It is nice. I should go do my yoga now.”

  “Be kind. Please rewind,” he wrote.

  Cynthia laughed. “I will! You have a great night, okay?”

  “I’ll do my best,” he replied. “Goodnight C.”

  “Goodnight E.”

  Cynthia took a long sip of her wine. She had no intention of doing yoga. But her head had gone to a weird place, and she thought it was best to escape the conversation before she said something stupid. She scrolled to the top of their chat, all the way up to when they first started chatting. She was surprised Twitter kept so much history. She liked it. She read it all again.

  ¤

  “Quitting time! Hope we can chat in a couple hours,” Cynthia texted as she left the office the next day. She shoved her phone in her pocket and consciously avoided looking at it until she was home, fed, and settled on the couch for the night. She took a deep breath and looked to see if he had responded.

  “Sounds good,” was the reply, sent about an hour after her message.

  “What shall we discuss tonight?” she messaged. She then looked through her notifications and tried to think of something to tweet. She came up empty, so she turned her attention to her wine.

  “How about your relationship status,” he replied after a little while.

  “I have none. Next topic?” she wrote.

  “Hahaha. Ever been married?”

  “Yes.”

  “How long?”

  “About 15 years. It ended a couple years ago.”

  “You must have married very young,” he wrote.

  “You must be full of shit,” she replied.

  “Hahaha. I just mean—you look pretty young in your pictures.”

  “I know what you meant. You are a very gracious liar. I’m 45.”

  “No way!”

  “Way.”

  “Hahaha. Okay, so married late twenties. Any kids?” he asked.

  “Nope. We always figured if it happens, it happens. And it didn’t happen.”

  “Does that bother you?”

  “Not really. I never really had a super strong urge to raise kids. I like them just fine, but my body apparently didn’t think it was a good idea. And I listen to my body.”

  “That’s a good outlook,” he replied.

  “Yes. Like my body decided a couple years ag
o that it doesn’t want me consuming dairy anymore. So instead of taking those pills, I just switched to non-dairy stuff. Bailey’s makes an almond milk version now, so that’s sorted.”

  “Bailey’s being the only reason one would consume dairy?”

  “Right.”

  “Bailey’s on your Cheerios?” he asked.

  “Yup. And in my coffee. Or just straight from the bottle, really.”

  “Hahaha. Okay then.”

  “I’m just joking,” she wrote.

  “Sure you are,” he replied. “So can I ask why the marriage ended?”

  “My husband had a baby.”

  “Oh! But not with you?”

  “Exactamundo.”

  “I can see how that might be an issue.”

  “Yes. If I had known about the girl, that would have been an issue even without the bambino. But I wasn’t paying attention. I was mostly avoiding him at the end anyway, because he was drunk all the time.”

  “Was he abusive?”

  “No. Nothing like that. Just stupid and annoying.”

  “Gotcha.”

  “How about you? Ever been married?” she asked.

  “No,” he replied. “I had a close call once or twice, but mostly I’ve been up to my elbows in liposuction and fake boobs. No time for that stuff.”

  Cynthia smiled. “Lovely image,” she wrote.

  “Sorry. Anyway, I just mean med school and residency and getting established. That stuff doesn’t lend itself to stable long-term relationships.”

  “That makes sense,” she said. “Do you want a relationship like that now?”

  There was a pause. Cynthia thought she might have accidentally struck a nerve. “I guess I don’t know.”

  Sensing that it was a sensitive topic she shouldn’t press further on, she switched subjects. “Any pets?” she asked.

  “No. You?”

  “Nope. Every now and then I think about getting a cat, but it’s a slippery slope,” she wrote.

  “To what?”

  “To having a lot of cats.”

  “Oh. I see. Yes, that does happen,” he wrote.

  “It does. So what’s on your agenda tonight?” she asked.

  “Well the naked model in my bedroom is probably starting to wonder what I’m doing out here.”