by Chris Vola
It was what you did.
But there would never be any hangover bagels, she realized a few months in, no brunches, no hot air balloon rides upstate (“Scared of heights and wicker,” he’d deadpanned during a particularly gruesome afternoon-after when all the inside Gchat jokes she’d cultivated had started to fall flat). They would only exist together in the non-ironic dive bars he always seemed to veer towards when they broke off from their respective after-hours posses. Or in the parched darkness of beds whose pleasure had been replaced more often than not by a discomfort that came out of nowhere and seeped everywhere.
But that was okay, too. There was coffee scheduled with the parole officer and former fireman who was also heir to her parents’ favorite Cuban restaurant back in Poughkeepsie, and who had been described by her mother as “your classic door-holder and seat-helper, Pierce Brosnan meets Joe the Plumber.” There were more impending dates with Ryan, an analyst at Bank of America whom she’d met on Happn or J-Date or somewhere and who, even though he was tighter than the shirt buttons he never seemed to want to unfasten (not that she wanted him to unfasten them just yet), was kind of endearing in a way that satisfied what she imagined as her settled, future-tense self. And Ryan always magically seemed to take her to places that coincided with her foodie and booze bucket lists. The ebbs and flows of “possibilities” were why she moved to the city. Duh. It-was-what-you-did.
As expected, the late-night hookup voicemails and later, slurrier texts trickled to nothing a week or three after she stopped responding. She blocked his status updates from her news feed. She stopped reading electronic dance music blogs. He would recede into the post-college murk, a soggy-yet-necessary learning tool.
Then, last night. The phone in a constant state of seizure on the coffee table as she changed into sweatpants and a wifebeater and waited for the Bagel Bites to heat up. She assumed it was Ryan, trying to apologize for the awkwardness an hour earlier at a new fois gras and grilled cheese bistro in Hell’s Kitchen. She’d refused, for maybe the sixth time in as many dinners, Ryan’s suggestion that they take a car to his condo in Jersey to check out his makeshift closet/cellar filled with “like three out of the top five most full-bodied Argentinean reds,” but instead of the usual sad-puppy grimace and fumble for a conciliatory make-out before parting, she had been backhanded by the harder slap of disinterested silence.
After wiping the perspiration from his peach-fuzz scalp, Ryan had carefully peeled the requisite cash from his money clip and dropped it on the open check folder with mechanized poise. He’d waited a beat for a response that never came, then rose and headed for the exit, recalibrating, prowl-ready for a new investment.
The phone kept vibrating and blinking. She picked it up, braced.
Seven texts, twice as many missed calls, four voicemails. Before she could start sorting through the data blast, he called again. She let the Daft Punk ringtone play a while, instinctively looking for an excuse not to pick up: the cheese-sopped aroma of the almost-done Bagel Bites; that Johnny had probably been “team-building” with his fellow bar employees until the Cuervo tequila his stereotypically coked-out manager allotted them had run dry; the need to be at least caffeine-coherent in the morning.
But streaming over everything in monolithic all-caps like the stock quotes that must have flowed on every elevator TV in the Bank of America Tower were two words: FUCK IT. And she had sort of pulled a protracted Ryan-esque move on him, albeit not as douchey. She might as well see what he wanted.
“What’s up. Did you just get off your –”
“HEY! Uhhh, I miss you…” Breaths and dead space. The lilt of tequila, of more than a few key bumps.
“You sound –”
“LISTEN! Are you home I need to come up, need to give you…”
“Where are you?”
Giggles. “Listen, I hope you’re not going to take this the…I’m outside your building, across the street,” then, faux-ominous, “looking in.”
“What are you going to give me?”
“A, uh, so you are home? I promise it will be quick. I just want to see you and give you, uhh –”
“Do you know where to find the buzzer or do you need directions?”
Huffing from the five-story walk-up, Johnny shimmied around the door she’d left cracked. His bouncer gear – a rumpled sports jacket and slacks that didn’t really match in a way that she always thought of as cutely post-fraternal. He shoved an overstuffed, moisture-starved bouquet of red, white, and yellow flowers into her chest and shuffled into the kitchen without speaking. He’d bought them at one of the cat-piss delis around the corner, the $9.99 sticker half torn from the plastic covering. He emerged from the kitchen, cockeyed and grinning with Bagel Bite residue on his chin, clutching the giant pink commemorative cup that had One Last Ride for THE BRIDE embellished with stupid green and blue curly-cues, a bachelorette party souvenir now sloshing with tap water.
“They’ll fit in here,” he said, impressed with his ingenuity.
Her smile crinkled, and his eyes – though booze-wobbled, bloodshot – returned it, matching his lippy smirk. Which for the first time didn’t feel like a smirk but something warmer, reciprocal, need and want intertwining in a way that would have seemed facetious a month ago. And still kind of did – he was shitfaced.
She wouldn’t let herself get carried away but she would lead him to the bed, plop him and the flowers down simultaneously, and hand him a bottle of Café Patron that she’d taken from the opening of a high-end, Mexican-owned eyebrow threading spa her company had curated. She would go to the bathroom and when she came back he would still be struggling to take his shoes off but would perk up when she sat next to him. Instead of another no-interruption rant about the validity of a gray-matter apocalypse brought on by faulty nanomachines, he would ask her how she’d been doing or something equally innocuous (but pleasant) and she wouldn’t remember her response but she would notice how his eyes followed her in between tidy and infrequent slugs from the bottle and how he seemed content to just sit there next to her and she wouldn’t stiffen up when he scooted closer or when he placed the bottle into her lap and she could taste pizza sauce when she took a sip and he would sit there listening and this would seem like something that might make sense again and he would lift the bottle out of her hand but hesitate and smile again and she would fall back and pull him in and he would start at her neck and work his way down and she would stare at the stucco pre-war ceiling tiles that had always struck her as tacky and stagnant but which would now pulsate, pupil-quick.
And he would pass out while struggling to take her sweatpants off, mid-tug, faceplanting softly into her pelvis.
After several immobile minutes she reached over to check her phone. The oldest text was a reminder about a deadline for a press release she hadn’t begun to think about. The rest, him. The first two were stellar examples of the jitter-whacked mobile word-rendering – “Leathery O’the fracking apartment!!#=” – she had come to know well. She grinned, mussed his dirty blond hair and he grunted in agreeable semi-consciousness.
Then, the third text: YOU ARE BEING A CUNT.
That he’d been able to figure out the caps lock and managed to spell each word right – not to mention the syntax and the period – when his previous attempts were a garble of autocorrect backwash, seemed impossible. It had to be a kind of fucked up butt-dial situation, a dickism meant for one of his friends.
The remaining half-dozen or so texts were no less precise, the letters separated by bruising, intentional dashes:
C-U-N-T
C-U-N-T
C-U-N-T
C-U-N-T
C-U-N-T
C-U-N-T
C-U-N-T
The open-palmed half-thwack to his temple seemed weak in comparison to most of the cinematic examples she’d tried to emulate, but when his neck went slack she almost felt sorry for doing it. Until he sort of woke up and resumed trying to shimmy her pants off. The knee to his solar plexus was sharper,
air-knocking. He crumbled backward, cartoon-splayed, wheeling around the room, incapable of balance, finding the loveseat and sprawling across it, gagging. She cocooned herself under a blanket and pillow until she heard his breathing slow, the ruffle of shoes and a staggering to the door, probably leaving handprints where he’d used the air-conditioner-misted window for support.
She emailed her manager to tell her she wouldn’t be coming in and tried to sleep and kept half-imagining someone who looked like Ryan seated across from her in a vague approximation of the indigenous Peruvian gastro pub they’d been to last week, picking at a roasted Guinea pig thigh, wearing a neon tank-top under his suit jacket, scalp covered in thorns, mouth silently mouthing You’re being a, you’re being a, his nutcracker jaw disengaging with the rest of his face and bursting into thousands of plastic seed pods blinking in the well-lit, manufactured ambiance.
*
She took the stem out of her mouth and checked her phone. Work emails, none urgent. A text from Brenda, her desk-mate: “If you’re feeling better later, let’s do lunch :)” accompanied by a link to a Thrillist article about Krispy Kreme Sloppy Joes. The drone of the air conditioner muddled the post-morning-rush quiet. She noticed a river of yoga tights and work blouses overflowing the closet door. She inhaled something percolating in the kitchen nook that wasn’t quite gag-worthy yet, but still gross.
She would start with the carnations. Sweep the already-wilting petals into a manageable pile with her hands, toss the desiccated stems into the cup, scoop the fallen remnants from the floor. She stood up to find the dustpan but stopped when she remembered someone posting pictures on Pinterest that featured the garden of a woman who would, on occasion, manicure and plant her flower beds in such a way that the flowers, when in bloom, formed words. SMILE DEAR made out of marigolds for when her daughter came to visit after a particularly harsh round of chemo, BETTER THAN EVER with chrysanthemums for when her great nephew learned to walk on the carbon fiber legs for which he’d been fitted and they’d found a combination of PTSD meds that seemed to work. PURRRFECT on her cat’s birthday.
Carly sat back down, started dividing the petals into smaller piles by color, trying to recall what her company’s creative director had told her was the most appealing way to arrange primary colors when she’d helped him revamp the logo of a popular online handbag aggregator. She brainstormed, sketched an idea in her head, a slogan – take his flowers, make them yours. The design phase was tedious but she remained focused for the better part of the morning, ignoring intermittent phone spasms and the festering cold of the apartment, carefully placing the petals in alternating color and letter patterns and implementing severed pieces of stems when necessary. After several botched attempts, she finally got the arrangement right. She stood up and examined, impressed with her creativity. She took pictures with her phone from several angles, manipulating the shot she liked best with a filter that was supposed to make the image “lively, spritely and more saturated.” She wasn’t sure if that was quite right, but regardless, the work was done:
C-U-N-T
C-U-N-T C-U-N-T
C-U-N-T C-U-N-T C-U-N-T
C-U-N-T C-U-N-T
C-U-N-T
It was what you did.
She posted the picture on Instagram and got several likes in the first minute or so.
Picture Frame
1.
Cal says he’s sorry for keeping you in that box for so long, knowing how dark and lonely it must have been. But you have to understand that Mrs. Warren hates it when he leaves, even if it’s just to go down the street to the Dollar Tree. She’s very unreasonable. If she knew he stole her keys and made the hole in her fence, there’s no telling what she would do to both of you!
The important thing is that you are here in Cal’s room now, safe with him. When he saw you tucked away on the shelf behind the shampoos and the decorative glassware, he could almost feel your sadness. A filthy shelf of low-end merchandise is no place for something so perfectly and beautifully made. He even took the time to wrap you up in two pieces of jaundiced newspaper and held you like a delicate child the entire walk home. He would have tried to find a bigger box, but he had to get back before Mrs. Warren woke up. She’s always disagreeable after a long rest.
Cal thinks he’ll place you high up on the wall facing north. Yes, just so. He’s sorry to defile you with his clumsy hands. He will not touch you again. Now you can see the rest of Cal’s room. He admits that it has seen better days. The wallpaper has started to brown and peel and his little bed table has faded in the sunlight. And that smell! The false hospital cleaner Mrs. Warren sprays when Cal is asleep to kill the cockroaches and remove the odors she says he creates. He cannot complain, though. The house is in a nice, quiet neighborhood that has been nice and quiet for as long as Cal can remember. And the rent is next to nothing.
That’s Wife over there on the bed. She’s still pretty for her age. If you are quiet and do exactly as Cal says, she may not even notice you. She sleeps most of the time. When she’s not sleeping she stares at the growing crack on the ceiling. The crack grows every hour, just like Cal’s love for you.
2.
Mrs. Warren is the fattest, ugliest woman Cal has ever known. She eats lard like air and bathes in gasoline. Her thinning hair smells of rabbit musk. The food she slides through the panel in his door is always wrapped in the morning’s newspaper and resembles the crusty shrunken heads of cannibals. Cal gives half the food to Wife and throws the rest out the window. He takes the dull plastic forks that Mrs. Warren brings with his food and uses them to make a sculpture. He chews and files down the handles of the forks until they are sharp enough to cut, sharp enough to be of use. Cal wouldn’t tell you this, but he’s making the sculpture for you, to place it on the wall next to you when it’s done. Not even Wife knows.
When it comes to Mrs. Warren, there are two things you must understand. One: be very quiet at all times. Mrs. Warren has feral ears, attuned to wavelengths not even Cal can detect. She lives downstairs in the Forbidden Room, but if you make even one squeak, she’ll know. Before you could make another sound it would be too late. Two: never look her straight in the eye. Cal says that they are pitch black and fling shards of coal if you stare into them. That may not be true, but it’s best not to take any chances.
Last night Cal had a dream. Mrs. Warren and an old man wearing a blue plastic jacket were standing over his bed. The old man held a blue box while Mrs. Warren spread paste on both sides of his head. The paste felt like a raw clam’s insides. He couldn’t move his arms to stop Mrs. Warren. She took two metal chords connected to the box and placed them in the paste, directly above Cal’s temples. The old man turned a red knob on the box, and blasts of deep pink, orange, and magenta ignited the growing crack on the ceiling. Mrs. Warren’s thinning hair turned into black fire that spread to the old man and to the newspapers on the floor. Then he woke up sweating in the darkness and heard Wife’s snoring and saw her drooling face on the pillow next to him. Cal felt the wind rushing through the bars outside the window.
The next time you see Mrs. Warren and an old man standing by the bed, open your eyes quickly because it is only an elaborate illusion created by your brain. It is only a dream.
3.
Cal wouldn’t tell you this, but the fork sculpture he’s making for you is now almost two feet high. He’s been hiding it under the bed where Wife will never look. In order to make the sculpture, he rips up old newspapers and chews the pieces until they are pulpy. He folds the wet pieces around the sharpened fork handles until the forks are sticky, too. Then he presses the forks together. Sometimes they don’t stick together so Cal needs to chew more newspapers. So far the sculpture is comprised of five forks and almost four fully chewed-up newspapers. Just today, he chewed the entire Metro sections of two newspapers dated September 24, 2003 and December 1, 1997.
Sometimes Cal makes the sticky pieces of newspaper into balls and throws them against the east wall. It is nearly covered in
spit and letters. Don’t you think it looks better than the peeling brown wallpaper?
Cal hears Mrs. Warren’s ugly feet stomping up the stairs. He hears the muffled clinking of glass and metal on his food tray. He must hide your sculpture quickly. If Mrs. Warren knew about it, everything would be ruined.
4.
Wife hasn’t noticed you. At least she doesn’t act like it – she’s so stupid sometimes. Look at her red mouth, how it hangs open! Can you see the puddle of drool collecting on her chin? But still, she is Wife, so Cal must try to keep her happy. To keep Wife happy, Cal makes love to her every other afternoon. Sometimes she’s asleep so he props her back against the headboard, pulls down the covers, and slowly moves back and forth until Wife is pleased.