Exes

by Max Winter

  _____________

  If I’m being honest, I guess I always knew that it could also work with women, too, my fake Judge. And it did. Once, and by accident, I swear. I mean, I’m not proud, but I’m not gonna lie either. We were both having a hard time, but her hard time was worse. I tell myself we would’ve hooked up anyway, and maybe we would’ve. She came up to me.

  But what do I know? With me, it always felt like an accident. Nothing was ever anyone’s fault. I only know this time was different, that Alix was different.

  Say her name with a couple of e’s in the middle and an x that sounds like s, then a silent e. She told me she was from Rhode Island—someplace I knew only from maps and jokes—and that she didn’t know where she was headed. Alaska, maybe. Idaho?

  Alix had a birthmark on her right hip in the shape of the s-sounding x, and she said that even though that’s how she got her name, it now meant more than that—the x—namely, her self-imposed exile from home. But also her soul, which had always been silently searching for a spot to mark. She told me this at the bar, but that’s not how our conversation started. It started with her putting a can of housepaint on the seat next to mine and saying, “I feel like I know you from somewhere.”

  “I’m Judge Reinhold,” I said, not really thinking but also thinking that was what she wanted to hear. She laughed. And I winked. I couldn’t help myself.

  “I’m Alix,” she said, and I pictured it with different letters. Then she told me she had no bra on. She picked her breasts up and let them go to show me, and I watched them rise and fall as best I could beneath her flannel.

  “Gonna do some painting?” I said, nodding at the can of paint.

  “Found it in the parking lot,” she said. Then she undid her belt to show me the birthmark. It looked smooth, her hip.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I said, and just like that, we did. It felt like old times. Easy.

  On the other hip, it turned out, was a constellation of freckles and moles in the rough shape of a star. I bit her ass like an apple and she said yes.

  The next morning, I got up before her to take a piss, and saw her wallet next to the sink. I went through it, not to find out her first name, but to learn her last. She didn’t have any ID, but she did have a hunting license in the name of some dude and a tiny laminated black-and-white drawing of a house on a rock in a bay.

  “Who’s the hunter?” I asked, back in bed, not thinking how weird a question it was, but for whatever reason—maybe even the same reason: being distracted and abstracted by loss—she didn’t think it was weird.

  “My ex,” she said. And she went on to tell me how she had just left him for good, just like how his old man had up and split, too. And then how, growing up, kids used to call her ex Caspar and faggot and how he would call her rich girl, even though they were both broke. And once, in bed, he told her, “I wish you had a tiny dick and would fuck me with it.”

  “But I don’t know why I’m talking about my ex all of a sudden,” she said. Then she told me how, when she was a kid, she used to hear all of a sudden like some guy’s name—Oliver Sudden. She thought he was this creep who’d just show up when you least expected or wanted, like in a folktale: a tricky little middle-of-the-night dickhead like Rumpelstiltskin or Jack Frost. “Jesus,” she said, “why can’t I stop talking.”

  I slid down and looked up at her as if to say I’m here to help, and parted the nappy terrycloth curtain of the robe she had borrowed on her way to the can, and I couldn’t get it up, so I ate her pussy with as much gusto as my well-whiskey belly would allow, which wasn’t much, I’m afraid. But she tasted clean, like rain on steel. “That was intimate,” she said afterward. Then I told her I’d gone through her wallet in the bathroom. She lay beside me, her robe open and her downy lady fuzz goldening in the morning light.

  “And I’m not Judge Reinhold,” I said. “I’m just some guy.”

  “I wasn’t expecting much,” she said, “but you seem like someone.”

  “I’m Vince Vincent.”

  “See? You’re honest.”

  “I told you I was someone I’m not,” I said.

  “I didn’t believe you. Besides, no one’s who they say they are,” she said, adding that if you looked up Rhode Island in the 1987 Encyclopædia Britannica you would find the same drawing of that house from her wallet. It was where she spent her summers, growing up, and this was reason enough to leave home. “But I drank from the fountain,” she said.

  I had no idea what she meant, but even so, it got to me because it sounded sad and she looked sad when she said it, so I told her my old man used to laminate all kinds of things—report cards, ticket stubs, fall leaves. Then I tried once more to get inside her, and again it didn’t work so well, and when I gave up she looked away, walked her fingers through my hair, scratching my scalp like we’d known each other longer. It felt nice. Intimate, like she said. She told me that her ex had just OD’d. They had broken up, a while back, and he had backslid. She told me she’d kissed his dead forehead four days ago in a morgue and it had felt like marble against her lips. “But that’s just how dead skin feels against your lips,” she said. “It’s something I know. Something I already knew, I mean. I knew it then.”

  Because this was the second ex she’d lost that month. They died two weeks apart.

  “Oh,” I said. “Wow.”

  “Wow?”

  “I mean. How are you?”

  She laughed and stopped. “I cry all the time,” she said, then did, just like that.

  I didn’t know what to do. “Is there anything I can do?” I asked.

  She looked down at my crotch, which looked like napping puppies. “Apparently not,” she said.

  “Oh.”

  “I’m sort of kidding.”

  “Ha,” I said.

  She snorted her tears. “It’s not about me. I just want to think about something else. I want to move my body forward through time and space.”

  “Like a car,” I said, disliking myself.

  “I can’t even say his name without falling apart. I’ve lost two people. Everything happens twice. I want to forget and I want to remember. You know, Vince? You look more like a Judge to me.”

  “I should’ve been.”

  “What are you trying to say?”

  “I was supposed to have his career. I should have got that part. I wouldn’t have wound up like this,” I said, gesturing at my apartment with my free hand—and maybe accidentally including her in my gesture.

  She pulled her arm out from under my back and got out of bed. “Lying to me is one thing,” she said. She let my robe fall to the floor, stood nude for a moment above me in its dirty terrycloth pool, then stepped out of it and into her jeans and shirt. “But lying to yourself will fuck you up,” she said. She grabbed her wallet but left the can of paint.

  If I ever see Alix again I’ll tell her sorry—tell her that I am sorry—even though she likely won’t remember me or care. I promise this to myself whenever I remember her, which these days is more and more. That essy x haunts me still. Same with those two dead exes in as many weeks. And her lighting out for wherever. That’s how our movies used to end, with the hero leaving home, lighting out for the territories. Now he returns, like in Europe or Iran. Our lives no longer form long, steady arcs that go someplace else—they jerk back and forth and back again; they freeze and fail to track.

  But maybe she’ll watch Fast Times and remember. You can see where they cut me out, if you look for it. Somewhere in between Brad getting fired from All-American Burger and quitting Captain Hook’s.

  _____________

  On my last night in L.A., I was biking home when I turned the corner at Pico onto Vermont and everything got cool and dark and quiet, the way it will in places where no one wants to live under anyone else and wants a yard or at least a driveway.

  Farther down the block a car crept alongside a young woman who walked with her head down and her arms wr
apped around her chest. Meaty dudes inside the car smacked their lips and talked at her. I pedaled faster and wedged my bike between her and the car.

  “Why so cold, baby, why so cold—”

  “Leave her alone,” I said.

  “What’s your deal, man!”

  “Leave her alone, right now,” I said more loudly, and took a deep, cheap-seats breath.

  “No you should—”

  “You should leave alone girls out alone at night,” I yelled, and brought my fist down on the roof of the car, denting it half as deep as my fist, and again just as deep, and a third time twice as deep, bringing the headliner down onto the fat ball-capped head of the talking fucking talker.

  “Dude, what the fuck—”

  “I WILL PUKE YOU!”

  “Drive!” someone inside said, and they sped off to cruise Wilshire or Hollywood, or head back to Eagle Rock. Probably I was more trouble than she was worth to them. Turns out we do still do math after high school after all.

  “Are you okay?” I asked the woman, mellow as possible, which wasn’t as mellow as I would’ve liked. I only have a voice for mics and sound booths, not stages or streets. It gets a little tight when I need to be heard under imperfect conditions. My face was doing what it’s always doing, which is nothing. My face had frozen like that a while back.

  She kept walking, head down, boot heels clicking concrete. I coasted beside her, my gears spinning.

  “Are you all right?”

  No answer, just click, click, click, click.

  “Those guys were pricks.”

  She walked faster, and I quit coasting and started pedaling again.

  “My name is Vince.”

  Nothing.

  “You don’t know me from anywhere.”

  But she had turned sharply down an alley, and I didn’t follow. I didn’t want to scare her any more than she already was. I braked and watched her disappear down the alley. It lit up with security lights as she walked.

  When I got to my apartment, I pried open Alix’s paint can with six take-out chopsticks and dumped it all into my plugged-up tub. It looked thick and blue. “Look how blue,” I said, realizing how quiet it was. “Hello!” I said, a little louder. I opened the blinds and took off my shoes and socks and pants and shirt and stepped into the paint. My feet were in, then my balls were in, the backs of my knees. I rolled over and coated my front. I got out and walked, bluely dripping, to the living room, took a breath, and ran toward the far wall full bore, smacking painted junk and belly against the cool white, leaving behind a blue smear of fat blue gut and nuts: a thickly splattered middle-of-a-man shape. Then, beneath it, with a wet blue finger, I wrote “I WAS HERE” for my landlord or super to find when I finally broke my lease and lit out for somewhere a little closer to home.

  (. . . etc. . . .)

  Clay Blackall III

  Is this you?: I like to see where I’m going, and am not alone in this. Or so an especially kindly intake shrink once assured me. As a child I refused to enter submarines and Ground Rounds* alike.

  *Est. 1969, a date of which they are now Pround. Back in my day, the regional restaurant chain was a kind of proto-Applebee’s or Chuck E. Cheese’s, albeit with neither the colonized appetizers of the former nor the latter’s redemption games and anthropomorphic hosts. Instead Ground Round screened Cat v. Mouse cartoons and not only allowed but encouraged its preteen party guests to discard their spent peanut shells directly onto the floor. Eli’s last birthday party* was held at their North Main location, across from the hole that used to be Sears.

  *At his fifth, our old man had thrown a knife into the kiddie pool, so next year Eli got to pick the spot. Eli also chose the invitations, which pictured Harold Lloyd spanking a woman with her shoe. We pulled into the Ground Round parking lot, and that’s when I saw the front door. It looked like the entrance to a crypt. My jaw clenched, my knees locked, and sweat bit my eyes. Ignoring her husband’s oh-for-fuck-sakes, Mother stayed behind while, in the backseat, I farted and pretended to read The Indigestible MAD. The car next to us tilted from the weight of old newspapers and the large man to whom they meant something. “Just think of it as a castle you’ve been invited to,” Mother said. “For a ball!” She made a vaguely regal gesture with her hand and cracked the windows. Her sunglasses were on, and her voice was smaller than normal. The night before, she had fallen down the stairs.* “Fine,” she said. “See where this gets you.” I looked up from Don Martin’s Jekyll and Hyde long enough to catch my mother asking the parking lot where she’d gone wrong, then disappearing behind that heavy wooden door.**

  *It had been a long night for all of us. My father spent it playing the piano that his father still insisted he couldn’t play and that his wife wished he wouldn’t. At some point Mother came into my room to check on me and said, “It’s okay, Clay. Your father has his garden and I have mine. We all have our own gardens.”

  **Next year Mother and Father would be dead, and that was that for a lot of things, but especially anniversaries.

  Judge Reinhold: Pauline Kael called him “a young man with an old man’s name,” even though these days I’d bet he feels the other way around.

  [L.A.] is neither here nor there: In Providence, where one experiences many different times at the same time, we have too much of both. Once, while walking past a downtown strip club, I caught myself thinking, I remember when that place used to be a strip club. Now, for the second or third time, it’s a hotel again. Turns out time is neither straight nor shapeless; it is instead like coral: whorled, fragile, and made of skeletons.

  Window: At every opportunity my college literature professor, Vseslav Botkin, would celebrate the humble window—“the solace of first-person literature throughout the ages.” But by the time I wound up in his classroom (Fall ’83), the always eccentric Dr. Botkin was like a nautilus that had lost its spiral. Upon failing to locate the first of all those numbered index cards stashed in his many jacket pockets, professor would go off book. After asking the first few rows questions they couldn’t answer—such as where, for instance, the samovar sat in his childhood home, or how many dolls it took to get to the last of his babu’s matyroshkas—he’d proceed to upbraid the entire class. Above all else, he despised our mediocre desires, which, much to his dismay, we took to mean career goals. “Therapist? Critic!” He spat nothing and made what amounted to a fist. “These are your souls . . . Look! I crush them like ants!”

  All these years and Phoebe’s still our fantasy: Okay, but how about Jennifer Jason Leigh? And Molly and Lea and Ally? Though they might not have got under our skin like Ms. Cates, they still hold a special place in our hearts. Plus, the ever-touching Jennifer Jason has taken off her top in damn near every film in which she has appeared.* As for Ally, well, I wouldn’t kick her out of bed for being crackers. The winter after I graduated from Brown, on the drive back from the Seekonk Showcase, Eli and I had what might have been our last argument about her Breakfast Club character. Eli was midway through his freshman year at my alma mater—our legacy once again causing as many problems as it solved. It was movie night for the Hafkins, and we were damned if we were going to see The Purple Rose of Cairo with the grandfolks. And so, on the way home, Eli and I argued about whether or not the problem was that Sheedy had presented a grotesque caricature of the high school outcast—call it dorksploitation or pizzaface—or just that she had sold out for a fucking jock, who we both knew was really Repo Man. While we bickered in the backseat, a distracted Grandpa Ike nearly hit the parking lot cop and did hit the parade barricade erected to calm Friday-night traffic. We shunpiked it home in silence, our one working headlight winking into the night. Our last movie night. And now I can’t remember which sides we even took. They both sound like me. Him, too. Eli loved Ally Sheedy for real. But our agreements had more question marks and exclamation points in them than most people’s arguments, so who’s to say? Point being, we mostly left each other alone for a reason.

  *And
then there’s the matter of her actor-father getting killed for real in a remake of a TV show—a sudden, horrific, and pointless event to which I can and do relate. From Flesh & Blood on, Jennifer Jason Leigh burns through the screen, trying with all her might to make it all mean something real, this make-believe life into which she was born. We could soothe each other, Jennifer—Jen? Jenn? Surely not Jenny . . . JJ?—and mumble our troubles into each other’s ears. I lost my dad, too, you know, and my mother. Brother, also. My sister has never liked me. You could pretend it was all a movie. Jennifer.

  Rhode Island: I’ve long held that the motto of our Union’s smallest, most densely populated state should be “Small But Dense.” But up until twelve I thought Connecticut was the Construction State and that Vagina Is for Lovers.* I also thought that Providence was Washington, D.C., and that Nixon lived in the State House, which I thought was our nation’s Capitol Building, which I thought was the White House.** The Internet-savvy reader, meanwhile, knows Rhode Island only as the most difficult state upon which to click.

  *I’d also always read Episcopal as Epi-social, which, like most of the mistakes you make as a kid, makes a lot of sense in retrospect, like wearing a milestone around your neck or ending something in one fail swoop. I also used to think that we call it Indian giving because white men “gave” the Indians land that had already belonged to them, then took it back again. What else could it mean?

  **A common mistake, I’d imagine, given all the shared white marble clichés and despite the State House’s window A/C units. But to further confuse matters, my father’s genitals, on frequent household display—Pa made the creaky morning trek from master bedroom to toilet in a threadbare and barely hiked-down wife-beater—looked, to my brother and me, an awful lot like our thirty-seventh president:

  Only knew from . . . jokes: Now that I think of it, maybe our motto should be “The Punch Line State.” Two that have stuck with me: