Caca Dolce

by Chelsea Martin

  “Get your own,” he said, and walked away from me.

  I followed him out of the campus café and to the cement retaining wall that students used as a bench, the one Ian had criticized me for repainting too slowly during our time together in Facilities. He adjusted something in his bag and then got up and walked away again.

  “Where are you going?” I said.

  “The painting studio,” he said.

  “Okay, I’ll come with you. I have an hour before my class starts.”

  I walked beside but slightly behind Ian to the painting studio, where he sat at a table, opened a textbook, and started reading.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “Reading an essay about Man Ray for class.”

  “That’s cool,” I said.

  I stood there for a minute, knowing I was going to leave but not wanting to leave too abruptly, which might indicate that something was wrong, and then, after what seemed like a normal amount of time to stand looking at someone reading, I left.

  I compiled a list of the things I liked about Ian, as if I were collecting evidence.

  He was smart and was always prepared for class and read books for pleasure. He was weird, even for art school. But he wasn’t ironic or self-deprecating for the sake of being ironic or self-deprecating, and didn’t have any of the pointless, self-conscious affectations that people develop to be seen as cool. He didn’t seem embarrassed about himself. He was cute and manly and tall. He had beautiful and

  interesting hands. He was funny and laughed easily and had a way of making people feel comfortable. He held me accountable for having a poor work ethic at Facilities.

  But I hadn’t wanted to be held accountable, I reminded myself. It was a dumb work-study job that nobody took seriously except for him. I hated him that summer.

  Then why had I put it on my list of his positive traits? Did I secretly relish being told I wasn’t putting forth the effort I could have? That putting effort into menial work reinforces the drive to put effort into the work you care about? Did I subconsciously interpret his criticism as a sign that he cared about me and wanted me to do well in all aspects of my life?

  I looked over my list carefully, to see if I had been fully honest. Everything checked out.

  It was official, I conceded. I was in love with Ian. I ripped the list up into hundreds of pieces and placed the pieces in different trash cans around the apartment so they could never be placed together again.

  I had been living with William for three years, and I normally told him everything, especially the things that most made me look sad and pathetic. Being sad and pathetic was something I had grown to be very good at, and William helped me cultivate being sad and pathetic into something I found funny and worthwhile, but for some reason I couldn’t tell him that I was in love with Ian. I didn’t want to be taken for sad and pathetic in this instance, when I felt that those words applied to me more perfectly than ever before.

  It had been so long since I had romantically pursued anyone that I had no idea what to do. I decided to call Ian on the phone, which was something I rarely inflicted on people. I would ask him to hang out, and then, when he realized that I meant hang out just the two of us, he would realize I had feelings for him. It was bold, it was assertive, and it was direct. Not as bold, assertive, and direct as telling him what my feelings were, but a very close second.

  “Hey, what’s up?” he said.

  “Oh, nothing. I was just seeing what you were doing and if you wanted to hang out.”

  “I’m on a bus to Los Angeles for the weekend. One of my classes is going to a show there, but I’m going early to hang out with some family who lives nearby.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  “How is your senior project coming along?”

  We talked for twenty minutes, as if there were nothing unusual about the two of us talking on the phone together. The call was suddenly dropped and I took the phone away from my ear and stared at it, unsure of what to do. Ian texted me ten minutes later, saying that his bus had gone through a tunnel and his phone dropped the call, and that he would see me next week.

  William was consumed with finishing art for his senior show, as were most of my friends. As an Individualized Major, I was not officially part of any department, so department graduation requirements didn’t apply to me. I had finished the Writing Department’s fifty-page thesis requirement months before (voluntarily), and had performed a reading early in the semester for my senior show (also not technically required of me), so for the rest of the year I spent most of my time alone in my bedroom, writing for pleasure while waiting to graduate.

  It was odd, waiting for graduation. I wanted it to come quickly, so that my friends would not be stressed out and busy anymore, so that we could all start the careers and easy, art-filled lives we thought would present themselves to us. But I also wanted the end of school to never come. I was afraid of the responsibility of deciding what my life would be, and didn’t want to face the future I’d set up for myself.

  •

  On a gloomy Monday after ten hours of studio time on campus, I found a plastic flower stuck between the brake cables of my bike. I always parked my bike on a side street away from campus where other bikes were rarely parked. I picked up the flower. It was dirty and looked like it had been run over.

  Who would do this? A secret admirer? Ian? Maybe it was a random act of kindness performed by a stranger walking by. Maybe it was Ian.

  I tried to put Ian out of my mind. I recognized this kind of thought process. These were the kinds of thoughts that would quickly lead to an unhealthy obsession, which would make it impossible to see Ian clearly, which would pollute my relationship with him before the relationship even had a chance to occur.

  This is just what would happen in a romantic comedy, I thought. So does that make it less likely that Ian is responsible for the plastic flower, because real life is never like the movies? Or does it make it more likely, because life imitates art, and just the fact that I’m comparing my life to romantic comedies makes it more likely that I would unconsciously fabricate a situation like this for myself?

  I began to find small toys or colorful garbage stuck between my brake cables or wrapped around my handlebars a few times a week. This wasn’t my imagination running away with itself. This wasn’t happening to other bikes in the area. I was being singled out by someone who knew that I liked tiny useless things.

  “I found this on my bike,” I said to William, showing him the toy deer whose legs had fit perfectly around my handlebars, being as nonchalant as possible so as to not embarrass myself if it turned out that William had been responsible for the toys the whole time.

  “Oh, weird,” he said.

  “Are you doing this?” I said. “I find things on my bike all the time.”

  “No. Oh my god, I would never think to do something like that.”

  •

  Ian was in a band called Shannon and the Clams with our other friends Cody and Shannon. I started going to all their shows. It was the easiest and most natural way to be around Ian without it seeming obvious that I was interested in him. As the drummer, Ian was always the most preoccupied with setting up and breaking down and watching over band equipment, so he wasn’t always available to hang out before or after they played.

  “Cool show,” I’d usually manage to say.

  “Thanks for coming out,” he’d say.

  “I love you,” I said one night. I was very drunk, and Ian was trying to pick me up off the ground.

  “I really do,” I said, unintentionally falling into his body.

  “I love you, too,” he said, and laughed.

  “Last night when I was really drunk, I told Ian I loved him,” I later told William. It was my first attempt to tell William I had a crush on Ian.

  “Wow, that’s really embarrassing.”

&nb
sp; “I’m going to become the kind of drunk person who tells everyone I love them.”

  “No, you shouldn’t do that anymore,” William said.

  “I can’t control myself when I’m drunk.”

  “Oh, you can, too,” he said.

  I was pathetic, but that was a fact I had accepted years before, that I had moved past, that then slowly had begun to bother me again, which I talked about with my closest friends in a tone that implied I was actually too self-aware to be pathetic, that I then explored through writing, and finally fully embraced. I was pathetic! It opened me up to carrying out all kinds of inadvisable but exciting behavior, like telling the person I loved that I loved him while very drunk.

  “You’re not going to like this,” William said, “but I think I’m going to move back to South Dakota after school ends.”

  “Finally, no more roommate drama,” I said sarcastically. We’d had one serious fight in the three years we lived together. There was never any drama between us. However, we had shared our apartment with a rotating cast of third roommates, who we never put our minds to liking and therefore never got along with, always passive-aggressively pushing them into other living situations within a year. We seemed to only be able to live with each other.

  “Who am I going to live with?” I said.

  “You’re going to have to figure that out.”

  “I don’t know how to be a person without you.”

  The opening for Ian’s senior show was on the San Francisco campus of our college at a time when I would already be there for class. He was presenting a series of large layered polymer cutouts in reds and flesh tones splattered with gray and blue. Some of them resembled internal organs, and some resembled mutants whose faces resembled a vagina and whose entrails seemed to be escaping from their necks. I looked at the pieces briefly during a class break, and then more carefully after class. I had not seen much of Ian’s art before this show. I had seen him working in his studio, when the cutouts were not pieced together yet and were just abstract shapes.

  “What do you think?” Ian said.

  “It’s really gruesome and weird,” I said.

  “Too weird for you?”

  “I’m not saying that.”

  I got the feeling we might not be talking about his art anymore, that our conversation had turned into a metaphor for our relationship.

  “I thought you liked weird things.”

  “Sometimes. Usually,” I said. “I like this show. I didn’t know what to expect. Your treatment of the polymer is really beautiful.”

  I ate some of the crackers and cheese Ian had put out while he talked to other people. I realized that the shuttle back to Oakland, where we both lived, was leaving in ten minutes, but Ian didn’t seem prepared to leave.

  “Are you going back on the shuttle?” I asked.

  “I think Cody is coming and I’ll get a ride back with him.”

  “Oh, do you think I could get a ride too?” I wanted to keep hanging out. Now that school was almost over I didn’t know if I would get to see him much, other than at his shows, where it was so hard to hang out with him.

  “Probably.”

  “Do you think I should stay and find out?”

  “I don’t know. You can if you want.”

  Discouraged by Ian’s lack of interest in my staying, I left and caught the shuttle back to Oakland.

  “I want a dog really bad,” I said. We were drinking whiskey in a crappy bar after one of his shows.

  “Really?” Ian said. “You want a dog?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Really bad.”

  I had the feeling, again, that we were not talking about what we were talking about. “The dog” was a relationship, and we were using this code to talk about our feelings for each other, my desire to be with him, and his understanding of my feelings.

  “What would you do with a dog?” he said.

  Embarrassed to be talking about our relationship so plainly, I tried to confuse things so I couldn’t be held responsible for what I was or wasn’t saying.

  “Neglect it,” I said.

  The only thing standing between me and Ian was a lifetime of convincing myself that I didn’t want the things I wanted most.

  This is much better than a relationship, I would tell myself, gesturing to the debris around my bedroom: books half read and abandoned in the crevice between my bed and the wall, laundry that was neither clean nor dirty, the coffee cup I had used for a month without washing, a large box of expired condoms that were of no use to me but that I had carried from my last apartment to this one hoping they would start to mean something to me artistically. Because this is real life. Life is a constant longing for something else. Longing is superior to love, and is also superior to pain, the inevitable feeling that would come from the inevitable rejection if my feelings about Ian became

  clear to him.

  “William is moving out at the end of the semester,” I said, “in case you’re looking for a new apartment.”

  “I do have to move out of my apartment,” Ian said. He looked at me suspiciously, the way someone might look at a toddler who has just lied about pooping her pants.

  “I don’t think it would be a good idea,” he said.

  “Why? You don’t like me?”

  “No, it’s not that. I just wouldn’t want to risk ruining our friendship.”

  “Please don’t move,” I said to William. “Just continue living with me until we’re old and miserable.”

  “I wish I could,” he said.

  “So don’t go. I’ll help you unpack. I’ll tell our landlord we are staying after all.”

  “Okay. Can you also get someone to pay my rent and buy me food and art supplies?”

  “Yes.”

  Without William, I would be just one free-floating person, attached to nothing and nobody. Without William or school, why stay in Oakland? What did I have there anymore? But then why move anywhere else? Where else in the world was there anything for me?

  “Don’t be so dramatic,” William said. “It’s not like I’m going to live in South Dakota forever.”

  “I know,” I said.

  But I didn’t know anything.

  One day, very close to the end of the semester, instead of a toy or flower, I found a note on my bike.

  “I want to meet U yes I’m lonly,” it read. It was written in thick black marker in strange, alien-like handwriting on the back of a Safeway receipt for the purchase of a mini carton of milk and an unidentified bakery item made earlier that same day.

  I want to meet U. I turned the phrase over in my head, trying to glean alternative meaning. Did someone want to meet me based on the appearance of my bike? Or was it someone who had seen me with my bike? Yes I’m lonly. So did this person want to meet me because they were lonely? That didn’t seem like a very promising introduction.

  The handwriting was odd. At first I interpreted it as contrived to intentionally disguise itself, but now, looking closer at it, it seemed familiar.

  I biked home quickly and opened my box of treasured belongings to find the letter Ian had sent me the year before when he was studying abroad in Sweden.

  The extra loop in the a was a perfect match to any of the numerous a’s in his letter. The airiness of the w’s were identical. The whole note had the appearance of having been written backwards and upside-down. The pressure of the penmanship seemed to match.

  It was Ian’s handwriting for sure.

  “Did you enjoy your milk and bakery item today?” I texted.

  “What,” Ian texted back.

  “You wrote your note on the back of a receipt.”

  “Oh yeah. Did you like it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I spelled a word wrong, though.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “Yeah, I did.
The word lonely is supposed to have an ‘e.’”

  “You can drop the ‘e’ if you want.”

  “No, it’s supposed to have an ‘e.’”

  I didn’t see Ian again until graduation. I approached him, initiated a hug, congratulated him on his achievement, accepted congratulations for my own achievement, and then we stood awkwardly among our peers.

  “Are your parents here?” I said.

  “Yeah,” Ian said. “Want to meet them?”

  “Yeah, actually I do,” I said. “I have something important to ask them.”

  I was joking, but Ian called over his parents who were a few feet away, introduced us, and told them I wanted to ask them a question.

  “Oh no, I don’t have a question,” I said, and excused myself, explaining that I desperately needed water before the ceremony started.

  After the ceremony I texted Ian asking if he was going to the party that a lot of our friends were going to.

  “The band has a show tonight,” he said. “But maybe we will all come to the party afterwards.”

  My cousin Alana had come to see me graduate, and since she was underage we couldn’t go to the show. I took her to the party and texted Ian several times from there, and he kept replying that maybe they would come, but they never did, and I didn’t talk to him again until his next show.

  Despite Ian’s having seemingly admitted his feelings for me in the note, and my addressing those feelings by text, nothing changed between us. He didn’t text me more frequently or with any sense of urgency. He neither approached me nor avoided me at his shows, but treated me like the friend I had been for five years, who he would probably talk to at some point in the night but who was not an immediate priority.

  I resigned myself to the fact that I was not the protagonist in a romantic comedy. There was no romantic comedy. Any sign that indicated to me that there might have been was a sad fabrication. I was wrong about what the note had meant.

  The day after graduation, William and I climbed out of his bedroom window and onto our roof. It was a mildly warm summer day in Oakland. One could choose to wear denim jeans and a light sweater or tiny shorts and a tank top and feel comfortable either way. We drank daiquiris and talked about nothing, looked out on our scenic view of a few parked cars, the corner of a liquor store, and thick blooming vines growing around a trellis.