Caca Dolce

by Chelsea Martin

  “Don’t leave!” I said. “Stay here with me forever!”

  He smiled.

  My roommates enthusiastically agreed to let him stay longer—everyone still couldn’t get enough Jeppe—but Shannon said he would have to start sleeping in my bed with me instead of a mattress on our bedroom floor. Which was fine, because now we were, like, together, or something.

  We had sex the next night, and I found out that Jeppe actually did have a character flaw: sexual urgency.

  “I like touching your body,” Jeppe said. It was one of those very hot summer days that makes you feel like time stopped mattering a long time ago and you’re just now realizing how little it ever really meant. We were lying on my bed, both facing the window.

  “I like it too,” I said.

  “You like me touching your body?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It seems like the perfect body. But it’s not. Nothing’s perfect.”

  I turned to face him, trying to will myself to feel either upset that he thought my body was less than perfect or flattered because he thought my body was close to perfect. I felt neither.

  Jeppe actually had the perfect body. Like a mannequin. And the perfect personality, just the right ratios of humor, seriousness, intellect, and compassion. And great hair and teeth and skin. A nice laugh and charming mannerisms and a pleasant way of being. I looked at him the way I looked at a reproduction of a painting by Michelangelo or a large, exquisite rose garden. He was so wonderful that he became an abstraction. His features seemed more like representations of features than features themselves.

  “Is this dating?” Jeppe said. “I don’t understand American rules of dating. Is this it?”

  “I guess so. I feel kind of detached because I know you’re going to go back to Denmark soon.”

  “Like detached arms and legs?” he said, referring to something I had written in a poem that had struck a chord with him for some reason and that he kept bringing up.

  “Um, I guess, in that that is a correct usage of the word detached.”

  “I don’t want you to feel detached.”

  “I feel happy,” I said. I smiled.

  I felt really detached. I felt as if I were experiencing the memory of a relationship after it had already been over for years. I wasn’t putting myself through any of the difficult aspects of being with somebody because I knew how and approximately when it would end. I didn’t have to figure out how to best communicate with him, or to bother with jealousy, or worry about whether we were enough or right for each other. We had a simple, pleasant relationship, one that didn’t require any of my heart.

  “What do you believe in?” I said.

  “Evolution. Maybe death. I think I believe in death,” Jeppe said.

  “Like you just die and disappear and then nothing?”

  “Yes. You just die and that’s it.”

  “Me too,” I said.

  I invited Ian over to hang out with me and Jeppe. I was feeling confident because I was with Jeppe, and therefore there could be no weirdness or ambiguity between me and Ian. Ian came over and the three of us sat in my living room, drinking beers.

  “I’m never having kids,” I said. It wasn’t something I felt strongly about, but I was just seeing how it felt to say it.

  “Don’t want to ruin your beautiful vagina?” Ian said.

  I let the word vagina sit in the air for a few seconds to let it enjoy its moment as the topic of conversation.

  “I once had a doctor tell me I have a beautiful cervix,” I said.

  “I always think about that, how your doctor said you have a beautiful vagina,” Ian said.

  “I don’t remember ever telling you that story,” I said. “Also, my doctor said I have a beautiful cervix, not vagina.”

  “Oh,” Ian said.

  Ian doesn’t know the difference between a cervix and a vagina, I thought.

  “No one has ever said my vagina was beautiful,” I said.

  Jeppe excused himself to the bathroom and Ian said, “Why did you invite me here tonight?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I just haven’t seen you in a while.”

  “Oh,” he said. “I got your text message and I was like, Oh wow! But I guess you always project your own desires.”

  “Yeah, well,” I said.

  After two months of living with me, Jeppe decided it was time to leave Oakland for real. He would travel to Portland and Seattle on his way to Vancouver, and he invited me to go with him for the first two cities.

  We got a ride through Craigslist from a guy who drove a promotional energy drink truck. We stopped periodically at different cities along the way and helped him hand out energy drinks. The guy was like an energy drink personified, telling loud stories and laughing at his own jokes and finding all kinds of creative opportunities to exclaim, “Right on!” and “Right on, dude!”

  I made Jeppe sit in the front seat. For the first time, he was annoying to me. His enthusiasm for helping out this weird energy drink guy seemed fake and excessive. Either that, or he was actually getting genuinely hyped from being around this guy, which was worse.

  I began looking forward to the trip being over before we even made it to Portland. This trip seemed to be ruining the easiness and casualness of our relationship. Knowing that my time with Jeppe was coming to an end made everything seem more serious, and I couldn’t enjoy being around him.

  My friend Cody had set me up with his dentist friend in Portland, who offered to give me a really good deal on a partial denture I needed replaced, so each day I got up early and commuted to the dentist by myself to do the necessary impressions and fittings. Jeppe didn’t have a phone, so meeting up with him was an annoying process that involved deciding where exactly to meet in a city neither of us was familiar with, and then finding that spot and staying there until the other person arrived. I would always be annoyed and grumpy by the time we found each other, and Jeppe would be relaxed in his I’m-just-a-foreigner-on-a-months-long-vacation way, which annoyed me further.

  On our final day, an hour before our bus to Seattle, Jeppe told me he wanted to stay in Portland longer.

  “Well, my flight back to Oakland is from Seattle tomorrow,” I said. “I have to go.”

  “I know,” he said.

  I felt bad. I felt that I had betrayed my annoyance somehow, and that he knew that I wanted to get leaving him over with.

  “I think I’m going to stay in Portland for a few more days,” he said again.

  “Okay.”

  “Or what? What should I do?” he said. I could tell he wanted me to beg him to come with me to Seattle, say something like We only have one day left together, and tell him how much I’d grown to love him.

  “You should do whatever you want to do,” I said.

  “Tell me what to do.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Maybe I’ll stay in Portland.”

  “All right.”

  We walked around until my bus’s departure time. We made shallow little observations about the scenery, and how beautiful Portland was, and how great their public transportation was.

  “What are you going to do without me?” I said when we were nearing the bus station again.

  “Replace you. You’re the replaceable kind.”

  “You’re lucky.”

  “No, just kidding. Whenever I say goodbye to someone I think that I’ll never find anyone like her. And I never do. But I always find someone else.”

  •

  “What will happen with you and Jeppe?” Ian said. I was back in Oakland, and had asked him to walk around Lake Merritt and drink forties with me.

  “Well,” I said, “I’ll probably never see him again.”

  “Are you sad?”

  “Not really,” I said. “Not right now. We didn’t have a great t
ime in Portland. I kind of wish I hadn’t gone. It seemed like just a little too much.”

  It felt good to be hanging out alone with Ian. I wasn’t trying to read into his every word, looking for secret messages about his feelings about me. I liked him and I was enjoying his company. Maybe it didn’t need to be a big deal.

  “I didn’t think he was that great,” Ian said.

  “Why?”

  “It was very transparent the ways he’d try to impress you. Like that song he sang about you in that video you showed me.”

  “I liked that song,” I said.

  “Of course you did. Because it was flattery.”

  “Yeah. I was flattered. I don’t know. I didn’t think of it that way. It seemed genuine. He was really, genuinely charming.”

  “Yeah,” Ian said. “He was very charming.”

  Ian looked at his phone and then showed me a text that said, “I know why you didn’t come out tonight and it’s lame.”

  “Who sent that?”

  “Shannon,” Ian said. “She wanted me to go to some show she and Cody were seeing tonight. She thinks I need to do more extracurricular stuff with the band. But it shouldn’t upset her that I want to hang out with you.”

  I knew that Shannon knew I had a crush on Ian, because she had been making meaningful eye contact with me whenever Ian was brought up, and when I asked our roommate Laurel, who I had confided in about my crush, if she had told Shannon, Laurel just said, “What kind of meaningful eye contact? When?” and never answered my question.

  “Yeah, I don’t know why she would be upset.”

  “She sometimes has trouble when people don’t want to hang out with her all the time. She knows I like you. I’ve talked to her about it.”

  She knows he likes me? I thought. Like, likes-me-likes-me? I was embarrassed of my brain for thinking the phrase likes-me-likes-me. Was this his way of telling me that he liked me? Or was I just misunderstanding his way of talking? Maybe he was saying it in a way I could misinterpret on purpose so that I would feel confused and my confusion would give him power somehow. Was I supposed to respond to that comment or were we still talking about Shannon?

  “You’re really confusing,” I said.

  “I feel like a pond without a square,” he said after a long silence.

  “A pond without a square,” I said, trying to find meaning in his words.

  “Pawn,” he said.

  “Oh. What?”

  “Just like, I don’t really know which way to move because things seem uncertain.”

  “Oh.”

  “Like I’m afraid to make moves.”

  “You’re making some kind of move right now,” I said. “Although I don’t know what it is.”

  He drank the rest of his beer and left the bottle on top of a garbage bin for a homeless person to recycle. I saw that I still had half a beer left. I took one slow sip.

  “You’re very masculine in some ways,” Ian said.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Just that you’re very independent. Nothing else, really.”

  I felt helpless with my feelings.

  •

  The next day, Ian left to tour with the band for two weeks. It was almost a relief for him to be away, to put him out of my mind. I worked shifts at the chocolate café, went out to bars with my coworkers, and made dinner with my roommates. On my days off I wrote long prose poems about wanting things that were within reach yet never grabbing them, perfectly content and comforted by the fact that they were there within reach in case I ever decided to reach for them.

  I talked to Ian on the phone once while he was gone, a few days before Halloween. I had been carving pumpkins the night before with some of my coworkers.

  “Well, not carving,” I said. “I was cleaning them out for other people to carve because I don’t like carving them. But the spoon was hurting my hand so I started using my nails to scratch the pumpkin walls and my nails all separated from my nail beds because that was a bad idea.”

  “That’s something I really like about you,” Ian said. “Everything you choose to do you have this strong focus on it and you give it all your energy. It’s very attractive.”

  “So now all my fingertips hurt, which is a really strange feeling,” I said.

  “Our relationship is really confusing,” he said.

  “Yeah, I’m confused by it, too.”

  “Ask me anything,” he said. “I won’t necessarily answer, but you can ask.”

  “No thanks,” I said.

  My roommates and I threw a big party at our apartment. It was a group birthday party for a couple of our friends, and a welcome home for the band, who were back from tour. We played music in the living room, and the party spilled into the kitchen, all the bedrooms, and into our long driveway.

  As usual, I got very drunk very quickly, and started dancing with and sort of kissing a guy named Andrew who I had peed in front of in an alley the year before but who I otherwise never talked to.

  At the end of a song, I left Andrew to see if there was any beer in our fridge. Ian was standing behind me when I closed the fridge. He asked me to follow him to our back porch, and I did.

  We stood on the porch together, and I waited for Ian to say something. He led me to the porch, I thought, and it was his responsibility to guide this conversation.

  Through the window of the kitchen door, we saw Andrew heading to the back porch.

  “Here comes trouble,” Ian said. He took my hand and led me down the back stairs and into the detached garage my roommates had converted into an art studio and called Spider World.

  I hated Spider World because it was filled with spiders. I normally refused to go in there. It was damp and musty, with boxes of our landlord’s old shit stacked precariously against the back wall, likely filled with spiders.

  “Remember that time at your and William’s first apartment, when Max and his two friends were over, and I was there making Rorschachs in your kitchen all night?” Ian said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Why was I doing that?”

  “I don’t know.” I laughed.

  “Why haven’t we ever gone out, Chelsea?” Ian said.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “But you want to, eh?”

  “I think you’re really great.”

  “I like you because I like your brain,” he said. “I like what

  you say.”

  “I like what you say too. I think you’re one of the most emotional people I know.”

  “Really? I think of myself as being very cold and distant.”

  “I guess that’s true.”

  “I think if we dated we would both change in ways that we liked,” he said.

  I hugged him, and he held me tight. He was a lot taller than I was, and my head sat centered on his chest. When I looked up at him he was looking down, and we kissed. We kissed for a couple of minutes, holding each other in dark, awful Spider World.

  I was too drunk to fully appreciate the moment. It seemed like an experience separate from the reality of my life, something I wanted and anticipated but knew wasn’t real, like a lucid dream.

  Somebody opened the door, looked at us briefly, and then left.

  “Do you want to take a walk?” Ian said.

  We ran out of Spider World and onto the street. I wasn’t sure what kind of walk we were taking, if it was a walk to the liquor store or a walk to a private alley to kiss more, and I didn’t want to presume incorrectly so I waited for Ian to lead. Ian led us to his band’s van that was parked a block away, and we sat in the backseat and kissed and held each other’s hands.

  I began feeling pangs of doubt. We were both drunk and this was not good. I didn’t want to kiss Ian drunk, and I didn’t want to be kissed by him drunk. Kissing drunk was something I did with people
I didn’t care about. Kissing drunk didn’t prove that we liked each other. Even while we were still kissing, I began to feel rejected. I imagined his regret tomorrow, his worrying about how to tell me that he wasn’t interested, that it was just a dumb, drunk mistake, that he hoped we could still be friends, that my friendship meant a lot to him.

  “We should go back to the party,” I said. I ran out of the van before him and back into my apartment.

  Shannon stopped me at the front door and said, “Were you and Ian smooching?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Yes, you were. I know that you were.”

  “We absolutely weren’t.”

  “You just came from Spider World together and then went out front alone for a really long time. I’m not stupid.”

  “Well,” I said. “Can we talk about it later?”

  It was getting really late and I was really tired, but there were still a lot of people in my house. They were all drunk, and a lot of them were in my bedroom.

  “We could go to Cody’s,” Ian said. “I’m going to sleep there tonight.”

  “Yeah,” I said. It startled me that Ian was being so forward all of a sudden. I had taken his awkwardness and hesitance with me as symbolic of his real feelings and his fear about being rejected. Maybe I had misread him, or done something tonight that made him reevaluate his feelings for me. Maybe he wasn’t interested in me seriously, but thought that since we were drunk and making out, we might as well sleep together.

  “Do you want to go now?” he said.

  “Maybe,” I said. “I’m not sure. I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”

  “It’s not like that. I just thought you were tired and weren’t going to be able to sleep for a while if you stayed here.”

  “Okay. I think I’m just going to stay here anyway.”

  Ian rode his bike to Cody’s, and I stayed up for hours while the partiers slowly left or passed out in various awkward spots around the apartment.

  I tried not to think about Ian in the days that followed. I did my best to cherish the blissfully ignorant days between finally kissing Ian and inevitably finding out that his feelings for me were merely friendly. I tried to ignore my feelings of doubt and desperation, doing nothing to assuage or discourage them, just letting them lie in the back of my mind undisturbed. I was trying to cultivate a kind of dolce far niente, enjoying the sweetness of doing nothing, because moving in any direction would be too painful. I wanted to live forever in my state of ignorance. In fact, I wished that I had never kissed him, so that the possibility of kissing him remained in my future, something to work toward and look forward to.