Except that that’s not going to be the case.
I don’t say this to Jason. I found out a long time ago that there’s no point in talking people out of stupid things they want to do. Most of us never mature past the age of four. I tell him I hope it works out.
“What do you mean, you hope? Of course it’ll work out,” Jason says.
“I liked you better when you were a PUA,” I say. “Do you remember staying at my place with your knapsack and all you had inside were rubbers?”
“I don’t remember that.”
“Okay. Send me the name of your trainer.”
We hang up.
Despite my stoicism on the phone, internally I am disturbed. I have to come up with a couple of calming thoughts (the nice run this morning, last night’s first successful soufflé of the season) to quell the anxiety and ignore the image of the beach house destroyed in some druggy rage – or worse, turned into a meth den.
I think about how Jason is the opposite of me. He falls for girls who don’t match him. He pines after strippers and waitresses and girls who ruffle his hair like he’s a puppy or a younger brother. Girls with low self-esteem but high self-regard. Girls who fuck him because they had a fight with their boyfriend or girls who are waiting for the guy who doesn’t want to commit to call back. Jason pines after the kind of girls I could easily have. Back in university, I would get middle-of-the-night emails, sloppy drunken come-ons from his girlfriends at parties – I know there’s something between us, I’ve always thought you were so handsome – as if I needed to be told that, as if that were some kind of a prize for me, Jason’s girlfriend.
I wish there was something I could do or say to rescue Jason from his taste, but I know he’s delusional. He represents the worst-case scenario of what may happen to some of my conquests: chasing after people who are like me for the rest of their lives, or expecting their actual lovers to measure up to a fantasy.
So it is not my place to say anything to Jason about his tastes and delusions. And I have to admit, it’s somewhat entertaining to watch him struggle so much in the name of desire. It’s foreign to me, his struggle.
***
After the beach house is cleaned and tidied up, I spend most of my time taking Dog for long walks and watching television.
I look at girls on the beach, taking in all the imperfections. I don’t approach anyone and no one approaches me. I keep my distance. But I see everything. I revel in the bellies and thighs of the big girls as much as the gawky flatness of the skinny ones and the shapelessness of those who are neither. I can smell them without smelling them, and many of them smell like Dolores – and $isi too – milk and spit and chemical sweetness, sun and sand. Sometimes there’s a boyfriend or boys around those girls, and sometimes as I fuck a girl in my mind, I imagine myself to be one of those boys, my flat hand slapping her sloppy ass, Good girl.
One morning, I notice a couple on the beach. I order Dog to sit, and we sit in the shadow of the dunes, watching. They are splayed out in camping chairs beside a big blue cooler, most likely filled with beer for him and chips for her. The guy is pale and skinny with a pregnant belly and a haircut that hasn’t seen a decent shape since childhood. The girl is not skinny. She is rectangle-like in a one-piece bathing suit with cutouts meant to suggest curves. It fails: the bottom is cupping her flat ass so that the beginning of her crack is visible above it. Her hair hangs like a cheap curtain, convulsing here and there in random waves of yellow streaks.
As she gets up, it’s obvious that she’s not terribly confident about the bathing suit. This is what intrigues me – the way she attempts to hide inside it, trying to make it seem like no big deal, as if the suit hasn’t been designed to specifically accentuate her sexiness. I imagine a scene from whatever horrible town they’re from: an over-lit change room at Target, some girlfriend of hers encouraging her to get this suit because it would be a crime not to since it makes you look so totally, like, hot.
I watch the girl shuffle through the sand and into the water, submerging carefully, lifelessly. She stays in the water for a short time, as if this was a duty she had to perform, then comes out dripping wet, walking with her eyes cast down. My hard-on pushes against my shorts. Dog stirs beside me, probably sensing my excitement, probably mistaking it for the desire to get going.
As the sun comes out from behind a cloud, for a split moment, the black contours of the bathing suit are all I see, the girl’s white rectangular shape washed out in the light and white sand. In the light, she becomes the impossibly, cartoonishly defined woman-body that the suit promised she would be. So funny. I snap out of my little fantasy of walking up to her, bending her over the blue cooler and having her right there in front of the boyfriend.
I suddenly find the beach oppressive, as if the ruined illusion of the girl actually, physically burst inside me, hurled me toward some sort of limit I had and broke through, exposing me to my surroundings. I become aware of how the beach crowd resembles a mob, the people growing sweaty and tense from the sun. They are frying their brains right out in the open, shovelling junk food into their endless mouths, the shouty radio commercials everywhere. Everyone is too fat or too weak or too crazy to escape, at least till the evening, when it gets cooler.
“Let’s go,” I say to Dog, and we walk on, both of us done with the beach and ready to go home, back to prepare for winter in Toronto. I motivate myself to walk faster. I conjure a fantasy of being followed by a mob of hungry fatsos, snapping their jaws behind me like I’m a bag of chips. I don’t turn around.
11
NOTHING HAPPENS FOR ALMOST A WEEK AFTER I GET BACK and then, in less than twenty-four hours, there are twenty-one emails from Dolores in my professional email inbox at my agency. Some of the subject lines are: Hello, Its [sic.] just me!, At last [sic.] let me know if your [sic.] alive, I cant [sic.] believe it and Read this 1 before the last 1 PLS!!!! [sic. sic. sic.]
I fire my remote Mexican assistant for not monitoring my professional email account diligently enough. I don’t spend a lot of energy on trying to figure out how she got my email address. I’m no match for an eager young woman who grew up thinking psychopathic behaviour such as stalking is nothing more than your right to keep in touch.
I’m alarmed by how much such a little thing disturbs me. It’s as if something has entered my home, a dark presence like a ghost. On the night of the emails, I am unable to sleep, so I leave my apartment and walk around the city with Dog for hours until we both get tired and go back and pass out on the couch.
Before passing out, I block Dolores’ email and send an email blast to my contacts about updating my address. I hire a more expensive Mexican assistant to monitor my email account.
I disable my Twitter and my Facebook page.
***
I book a weekend in Montreal to meet with $isi, who is back from rehab, which she, predictably, cut short because she was not allowed to use her new iPhone. I refuse to go to her hotel, and this puts her in a bad mood right away. I don’t justify my refusal with anything other than reminding her that this is a professional meeting, not a personal one. She snorts. “Of course it’s professional. My manager is coming.”
“Speaking of Mark, he’s gotten a little chubby, no?” I say.
$isi hangs up on me.
I send her a text with the hotel address and the time. She doesn’t text back.
Not texting me back is intentional. It makes me pace across the lobby until a conventionally pretty (symmetrical, straight-haired) girl in a slick black hotel uniform clicks across the marble floor and asks if I’d like to take a seat at the bar. I take a seat at the bar and order a drink.
***
$isi walks in alone. She’s always been small, but now she looks crushed under the weight of her massive sunglasses, the heavy-looking hardware that doubles as a necklace and the big white-and-black raccoon hair. She’s wobbly in Lucite stripper platforms. When she sits down at the bar, she shakes once, briefly, like an old lady – I want to pu
t my hand on her shoulder to steady her, but I don’t want her to misread the signal.
She takes off her sunglasses to show me her makeup – a uniform black smudge across her face where her eyes are. “How is this even Montreal? I fucking hate that I can’t smoke in here,” she says.
“How are you?”
She looks at me, her green eyes electric against the black.
“I’m good,” I say. “Thanks for asking. Here’s the list with all the venues, times and dates, as well as some contact numbers and other information. I want you to look at this printout with me here so that I can actually witness you acknowledging it.”
“Whatever.”
“This has been going on for too long.”
She looks up. “You know what you are? You’re practically a pedophile. I’ve been reading about men like you. You sleep with young chicks like me because we won’t confront you and because we don’t know any better.”
I smile at the pretty hotel girl as she walks by. She smiles back.
“$isi, please.” I use the most caring yet detached tone I can manage. “If I hear a reference to our sleeping together ever again, I’m going to spread the word that you are consistently difficult. I know some people will still be eager to work with you, but I will also see to it that we release some of your demo tapes. You won’t need to pay a dominatrix anymore to tell you that you suck, that you’re a worm. So, be polite.”
Most of what I say is bullshit. $isi can easily find another good agent, but she’s young and stupid and weak right now, battling all her addictions, getting caught necking with pimply-faced groupies in skid row bathrooms, rolling and smoking joints and eating at McDonald’s. I know there’s an old video, too, of her smoking what looks like a glass pipe, and there’s a recording of a nasty message she left her assistant. I hope she recalls all of this as clearly as I do right now. “I hate being so harsh, $isi,” I say. “But like a good parent, I sometimes have to be. Tough love. I like the new look, by the way. The hair.”
“So you my daddy now?”
“Your hair really suits you.”
“It’s just hair.”
“It looks nice.”
$isi stretches her mouth into an unsuccessful smile. She looks like a demon. “Daddy. So. Are you still with that old lady?” she says.
I don’t answer. Gloria is coming back from Bali soon, and it would be nice to see her for a drama-free weekend when I feel like being around people again.
“Hello,” Mark says somewhere behind me. As always, he is sweating slightly, as if he ran here. Maybe he did run here. He can be calm on the phone, but he’s one of those people who looks like he’s got a live monkey attached to him, the way he’s always crumpled and bug-eyed.
He gives $isi a close squeeze, molesting her thin back for a second too long, and I wonder if they’ve slept together. Maybe to get back at me, hoping that I’d care. She doesn’t hug him back, and he stands awkwardly next to our bar stools until I suggest we all sit at one of the tables and move on with our meeting.
“You’ve lost some weight, Mark,” I say.
“Thanks,” he says. “I don’t think so.”
“No, definitely,” I say.
“Yoga,” he says, shyly.
“I love yoga,” I say.
As we walk away from the bar, $isi moves closer to me and quickly whispers in my ear, “I hate you so much,” which would be a great title for a new song she could write. I make a mental note to bring that up in our meeting. She leaves her vodka, untouched, on the bar.
***
$isi comes back to my hotel in the middle of the night. She rings me from the lobby. She’s sitting in a chair, and her face is small, makeup-free. She looks older and younger than herself, somehow, at the same time. I don’t know which drug did this to her, or if it’s just drunkenness.
She sees me and gets up, stumbling a bit. There it is again: that jerkiness to her movement, as if someone were pulling on strings. “I had some time to think about things.”
“Drink about things?”
“Now that’s a brilliant dad joke!”
“$isi, you’re tired. Let’s get you in bed.”
“Great idea. Let’s get me in bed.”
“Wait here.” I go up to the front desk to ask for a separate room for her. I don’t have any other ideas this late at night. I want to go back to bed.
“Is she okay? Would you like me to call someone?” the desk girl says. I don’t know if she’s the same girl as before. Same hair, same uniform. Same pretty.
“She’s very tired. She travelled and lost her luggage. We’re looking into it,” I say.
The girl smiles. I sign the bill. “Let me know if there’s anything else,” she says. Suck my dick. I smile and shake my head. “No, that’s all. Thank you.”
I pull $isi to her feet and we walk, slowly, jerkily, toward the elevator. “I’m firing you,” she says.
“Okay. We’ll talk tomorrow.”
We get on the elevator. Our image is a blur in the smoky glass. She looks like a thing someone squiggled. I drag-walk her to her room. She immediately curls up in the large reading chair.
I grab a blanket to put over her, but she pushes it down and mumbles something about being too hot. I walk back to my room.
I fall into my bed, fall asleep immediately and dream of being chased by a bear, then drowning in the pond where I try to hide from it.
12
THE NEXT MORNING, I ORDER ROOM SERVICE, AND A YOUNG man shows up wheeling a little cart with my breakfast on it. I’ve ordered a grapefruit and a Montreal bagel with cream cheese, and fresh orange juice and coffee. The bagel is too dry, the cream cheese cold and hard but with a film of grease.
After breakfast, I walk over to $isi’s room and knock on her door; no one answers. I slip the key card in the slot and walk inside. The bed hasn’t been slept in. I notice $isi on the floor, on the other side of the bed, by the window. She’s on her back. She is very white with a punch of red for lips. Right away, I picture a gurney with her tiny form laid out on it being wheeled out of the hotel. The camera flashes, the microphones, Mark showing up sweaty and crazed (his invisible monkey pinching him frantically), blubbering.
I crouch down to see her. She’s breathing. There’s a wet spot underneath her. I bend down to smell it. Urine.
“I fell out of the bed,” she croaks and opens her eyes.
My relief is quickly followed by a twinge of disappointment. Dead rock stars can bring in a lot of revenue. I may not care that much about money, but I am not completely indifferent to it.
“I fall out of bed all the time. There’s something wrong with me.”
“Is it drugs?”
“It’s not fucking drugs. I’m done with that. I don’t even drink now,” she sighs. She closes her eyes.
I bend down to lift her. There’s a feeling to her – a feeling I remember from when I was a child visiting my dying grandmother. It was the way her hands were, like her bones were spilled matches, like whatever she was had died a long time ago. This is what $isi feels like, like she’s not quite there.
I gently lower her onto the bed. She’s not saying anything. I have a hard time believing that I fucked this little body; that I opened it, and it was wet and soft and full of redness and life.
***
Mark shows up with his assistant, a hipster with a T-shirt advertising Camp Abilities 1975. They talk in loud whispers, asking me what happened, looking at the stain of pee, hovering above $isi to listen to her steady, strong breath. It is decided that they will take her to the emergency room. Some phone calls have to be made to arrange this as discreetly as possible.
I know that it will still get out to the press, so we call Piglet/Jennifer to update her on everything and make sure she’s got some answers ready when the news gets out. She wants to know what $isi has taken to get so ill, but none of us has any idea.
“It just looks like she’s really, really tired,” Mark says. “I don’t think it’s drug
s,” he says, and I laugh.
$isi opens her eyes. “What’s so fucking funny?”
***
When Mark calls me with the news, he sounds shaky. The buzz of my anxiety shoots from the bottom of my throat, and I feel like throwing up in my mouth on hearing his quiet Howareyou?
“I’m excellent,” I say in an attempt to contaminate him with my positive attitude.
“Are you sitting down?”
“I’m sitting down.” I spring up from my couch. I walk over to the window. If the news is really bad, I’ll jump. I’m kidding.
“A tumour.”
A tumour. It seems impossible. It seems impossible that even a small sick-looking creature like $isi would be capable of housing anything so rotten. “Jesus.”
“I’m talking to Jennifer later on. We’ll need to figure out a strategy. It’s going to get out sooner rather than later. She’s going for treatments.”
“What kind of tumour? Is it bad?” I say, trying to remember what it was that my grandmother died of. Something humiliating, requiring a catheter and a bag, pelvis bones breaking and her insides just melting into a toxic mass before she passed on.
“It’s operable. It’s in her brain. It apparently runs in her family.”
“We should have genetic testing before we sign them up,” I say and then quickly add, “Mark, I’m just kidding. I’m just in shock,” before Mark has a chance to say something or, worse, hang up.
“I’m in shock, too. She’s a young girl.”
“Practically a child,” I say. Then I have a brilliant idea. I frequently have brilliant ideas in the morning. “We need to use this,” I say.
“Use what?”
“The cancer. It’s an opportunity. Cancer kills, I know, but obscurity is a mass killer. We’ll send her on a tour – something smaller, you know, more intimate setups – but we’ll attach the tumour to it all. This could be a Thing. It’s better than drugs.”
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