Guy

by Jowita Bydlowska

  I phone Gloria and we make plans to meet at Bibliothèque the next evening.

  18

  GLORIA SHOWS UP AT BIBLIOTHÈQUE WITH HER NEW ASSISTANT. Gloria is a human origami in her white panelled dress.

  I introduce everyone, Patrick to Gloria and the new assistant, Trish, who is very blond and not pretty but not plain either. A Five. “My friend said they had this awesome fish tank here,” she says, looking around.

  “Not anymore,” I say like I’m sad.

  “Kerry is an account manager now,” Gloria explains when I don’t ask what happened to her original assistant.

  Patrick talks fast like he’s on cocaine. Maybe he’s on cocaine. He is here to show us the first vlog on his iPad – the just-released vlog that’s already got more than ten thousand views, though Patrick says that more than half of these are buy-ins. That means they are subscribers to the newsletters from other products’ websites that Kolektiv has worked on.

  “Is that legal? To buy out subscriber lists?” Trish, the new assistant, says. No one answers. She pulls her hair out of a ponytail and then immediately puts it back into a ponytail. No roots showing. She’s probably blond all over.

  Patrick opens the first video. On the shiny little screen, two girls with shaved heads sit wide shoulder to wide shoulder. They’re both wearing too-big grey T-shirts with low cut-out necks – plain, but looking hot on them. The girl on the right has a tiny grey ribbon pinned to her shirt. They have little or no makeup; I can’t decipher.They giggle, touch, whisper and laugh with toothy, wide-open mouths, long necks stretched out.

  Their banter is funny, not too scripted, and you can tell that they remember only some of the lines because the conversation veers in unexpected directions. Or perhaps Kolektiv are such geniuses that they make it seem completely unscripted. Either way, it looks authentic, intriguing: Who are these girls and why are they doing this?

  The topic of the conversation is guys wearing flip-flops in the city. It seems to be an issue with them, guys and flip-flops and how gross it is.

  Throughout the video there’s a song playing in the distance, very faintly but, to me, instantly recognizable: $isi’s new song. It has a great beat to it, a slightly dreamy synthesizer sequence that makes one think of an enchanted forest, at least according to the producer’s note. The song comes on after some distant radio static. It’s as if there was something else going on in another room and the song just happens to be playing at the moment. The video ends with the girl on the right, the one with the ribbon, moving toward the screen, turning off the camera.

  “Who are they?” Trish says. She’s got teeth like a bunch of piano keys squeezed into a small box.

  Gloria is staring at me. I smile at Gloria. No one answers Trish. Patrick stares at Gloria. He leans back in his chair like he’s cool.

  I have no way of telling whether Gloria liked the vlog or not, but her eyes are sharp. They go all cloudy if stuff bores her. I want Gloria’s company to take on the Tumour Thing since Piglet doesn’t seem to be working out.

  “I love it,” Gloria says, and Patrick’s relaxed pose relaxes even more.

  “I don’t know, guys. I don’t get it,” Trish says, and all three of us turn to look at her.

  “But do you like it?” Patrick says.

  “I don’t know. Yes.”

  Gloria says in a gentle voice, “Would you watch them again?”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I see Mildred at the bar, talking to a man who is ignoring her. She leans into him, her frizzy head touching his shoulder, but he just sits there, unmoving, like a stand-in for a man, lifeless. I touch my ear, close my eyes briefly to recall her – her teeth clamping onto my earlobe.

  “You okay, honey?” Gloria says. “You’re making faces.”

  “I’m fine. So, would you watch the vlogs,” I say, looking at Trish.

  “Yeah, for sure. I guess there’s something about it.”

  “You don’t know what it is, but you like it,” Patrick says.

  “Yeah. I think?”

  Gloria’s smile is tight. I grab her hand under the table and squeeze it quickly. I’ve never done such a thing. She blinks a few times, hard. I look forward to unzipping her dress later, peeling her out of its white panels, running my hands over her muscled, slim body. I can almost taste the saltiness that isn’t there, is never there. Which is, I suppose, why I desire her as strongly as I do – for the saltiness that is never there but should be there. The promise of it, or perhaps the disillusionment when I miss it.

  “Excellent,” Patrick says and looks at his watch.

  After Patrick leaves, we order a tray of finger foods. Root vegetable chips, prosciutto-wrapped breadsticks with fig dip and asiago slivers with a tray of Gaeta olives.

  Trish pops an olive into her shiny pink mouth. She sees me watching and blushes, looks down. The waiter comes back, refills Trish’s glass of white, brings some Perrier for me and a martini for Gloria.

  “I thought that was so interesting,” Gloria says, and Trish nods, taking a big gulp of her wine.

  “It was,” I say. I remember the flip-flops and bring them up.

  “Oh, women hate them. But it’s also because of that article in GQ,” Gloria says. “It was somebody’s manifesto, about how we need to get rid of all the flip-flops in order to improve the economy and just generally raise standards. It was about our standards. About our standards being low and about us having low expectations and not buying good products and good products not being produced. Everybody just wearing one-dollar Chinaswag that make your feet dirty and disgusting, especially in the city.”

  “So the girls were talking about that too?” Trish says. There’s something wrong with her shirt, I notice now. It has a little stain on it, pale brown. It’s between her breasts. I imagine her pinching herself there, a drop of blood staining the shirt before she noticed.

  Gloria says, “Yes.”

  I say, “Did you notice the grey ribbon?”

  “For sure. I was totally gonna ask him about that,” Trish says.

  “It’s part of the cancer – The Grey Campaign.”

  “Oh, that makes sense, cool,” Trish says. I look at the stain on her shirt again. Force myself to look away.

  Gloria says, “So I’ll see you tomorrow?”

  Trish’s eyes go wide; she smiles brightly, “For sure.” She grabs her iPad and inserts it into a pink Hello Kitty case. Her purse is pink snakeskin. “It was so nice to meet you,” she says to me. Those cute fucked-up teeth sparkle in the dimmed light. Our eyes meet. I would tell her to leave her cheap little pink bra on, but I would ask her to pull her small tits out of it. With the underwire supporting them, they’d point right at me. One nipple would be slightly bigger than the other. There would be a red mark between the tits, the spot that drew blood. She’d scratch at it with her fingernail, without thinking. It would turn out she’d forgotten to shave. She would be obscenely blond between her legs.

  “Thank you, honey.” Gloria stands up and hugs Trish briefly. Trish breaks the hug first. She clicks away, her ass jiggling left to right. Big ass but small tits.

  Gloria doesn’t say anything for a while. I get distracted by Mildred at the bar again. She is now even more intimately wrapped around the unmoving shoulders next to her.

  “Oh, Guy,” Gloria says.

  “What?”

  “Seriously,” she laughs. “That bitch is old. And Trish is a baby.”

  “I wasn’t –”

  She laughs harder. I join in, laugh with her and think about Trish’s stained top, the teeth, the way she wobbled away on her high heels. I pull Gloria close, her body hot with remains of laughter. My fantasy Trish bouncing up and down, up and down. Mildred biting my ear. It was strange, teenage-like, her teeth on my ear. She said she loved my energy. Her son was only ten years younger than me, she said. I said I didn’t believe it. I told her if I could I would put her ass in a frame and hang it on the wall in my office. That’s what you say to women her age. They like
hearing that their asses are worth hanging on walls in frames. It makes them feel like they are better than the women my age, women much younger than they are. They like hearing, too, that they couldn’t possibly be mothers, not with those asses.

  I pull Gloria’s face close to mine and I kiss her. “Let’s get out of here,” I say after her tongue leaves my mouth. I need a body to relieve myself into.

  19

  I’M NOT A FAN OF AWARD CEREMONIES. TOO LOUD. TOO many peasants. Your face hurts from smiling – cameras flashing and people screaming at you, and you always end up looking like a lonely tampon against all those red backdrops. But it’s good for me to go out to these things occasionally, to make nice with people from the industry.

  Gloria is excited because she rarely goes to parties where she doesn’t have to promote something.

  Tonight, she’s wearing a powder-blue dress with a cinched waist and a full skirt, very 1950s. It’s unusual for Gloria, who prefers simple, straight-line clothing. She does her hair in a sort of layered bun; it looks very nice. I’m proud of her looking so glamorous.

  I match her in my charcoal Tiger of Sweden suit, a purple-almost-black Paul Smith tie and white Thomas Pink shirt. I’m wearing handmade John Lobb shoes, which are the biggest fashion extravagance I’ve ever allowed myself.

  I’ve hired a consultant on a few occasions and we’ve gone shopping together. Henri. We’ve had many intimate moments: Henri adjusting my shoulders, straightening my trousers, running his hand over my butt. Henri with his arms folded, an eyebrow cocked. Henri with his hand to his mouth. Henri watching me emerge from the vaginal folds of heavy curtains in the change room at Bloomingdales, strutting around in my winter charcoal greys, my summer light greys, my wild-card shiny stripes. All for him. Then, later on, the two of us arguing playfully over the width of tie, the shade of pink. Henri holding my foot briefly before passing it to the shoemaker, who took measure of my feet. “You have such high arches,” Henri said, dreamily, once.

  ***

  Before the awards, I sit on Gloria’s balcony and drink my sparkling wine. I move my toes in my shoes, which hold them tightly, lovingly, as if they were Henri’s hands. Gloria’s apartment, similarly to mine, overlooks a cluster of towers with mole rats in every single available compartment.

  She joins me and we click our glasses, a gentle click like a nod. “I’m sorry about the other day,” she says.

  I don’t know what she’s talking about. There’s nothing to be sorry for, I want to tell her, but maybe there is something to be sorry for.

  “I’ll be thirty-nine next month,” she says.

  “Yes,” I say, even though her math is off.

  “It’s crazy, no?” she says. “It feels like I’m running out of time.”

  “Running out of time? We’re all running out of time. What’s crazy?” I know what’s crazy. Maybe that’s what she’s sorry for. Children. Talking about children. She’s been bringing up children, hinting at children. Perhaps she should adopt, after all. I try to recall the conversation we had with Jason in the summer. Gloria adopting a child to provide inspiration for a book she wanted to write? I can’t recall the details.

  “I didn’t mean to get all serious,” she says, which only makes this more serious. I wish we could just call a car now and get to the awards. But there’s still a bit of time to kill.

  I think about my mother and father; my mother and father having their little fights right before they’d be due to go somewhere, where they’d have to pretend that nothing had happened. Hating each other politely the whole evening. At parties, they were probably surrounded by others who had committed similar offences before going out, all of them in the same room. Rooms full of offenders and the offended.

  “Anyway. I think it would be great if $isi won, don’t you?”

  “She’s okay.”

  “You can be such a dick,” Gloria says, affectionately, but there’s a tiny tremble in her voice, which tells me that she means it, too. I let it go. I’m not going to have a fight. Tonight is going to be good. There will be no fights tonight.

  We stay on the balcony for a dull eternity, and she talks about TV shows and books and clothes and other things, and I say hmm and right and I know, and then it’s time to call the car.

  ***

  At the awards, we’re seated near the stage. There are many painfully scripted introductions and even more painful performances. $isi doesn’t win for best song or best video, which draws some boos from the back of the room. There are hordes of teenagers with hand-drawn posters – $isi, we love you! and Black to Grey! – in the back of the room.

  Gloria, next to me, is mostly silent throughout the evening, save for some words of encouragement when $isi’s name is read out for the third time. And for the third time, $isi doesn’t win.

  It’s a good thing she’s not attending the event. According to Mark, she’s in Europe with her mother, relaxing in an infinity pool in Spain.

  I picture her mother sitting angrily in the shade, smoking cigarettes and watching the new-and-improved $isi swimming laps, her bald head bobbing above the water like a pool toy.

  Near the end of the awards, there’s a dull segment honouring Fatima, the recently deceased musician who often took breaks from her career due to exhaustion. Then the awards are over.

  ***

  Coming out of the theatre, there’s a riot of camera lights. Flash. Flash. Flash. Demands to pose this way or that.

  I have no “bad side.” I’m okay with the cameras showing up wherever they happen to be, but Gloria, the former model, keeps manoeuvring me around, trying to expose her right half-profile to all the flashes.

  There are people screaming everywhere. Mostly they just scream the names of all the stars that come out of the building, but there are a few screams shouting my name as well. I don’t know how kids find out these things, but they do.

  Despite all this chaos, I isolate an especially frantic movement to my right, out of the corner of my eye. Somebody is running in my direction.

  I hear my name – Guy, Guy, Guy – and I let go of Gloria. Next, a body is throwing herself at me, face covered with hair. I can’t get a good look. I stand there as she lands on me heavily, like a mattress. I sway but don’t fall.

  I see a massive guy in black running toward us, shouting into his headset. The crowds are screaming behind the red line. A couple more people seem to be breaking through, running. More guys in black start showing up, running after them.

  The woman has wrapped her arms around me. I can smell her – her smell is familiar. And then her body, her body, too, feels familiar, although it seems bigger now, more dangerous.

  I can hear Gloria shouting something, to me or to the security guy who starts peeling Dolores off me. Dolores is holding onto my neck. It’s very unpleasant, all this tugging and moving. Now, I’m pushing her off, too. She only clings harder. Her strength seems to have doubled from the resistance. Another guy in black runs up and tries to help peel her off. Finally, she falls through their hands to the ground, where she crashes, a sack filled with hefty bones.

  At this point Gloria is pulling me away, back to the exit where they’re ushering all of the people who are still on the red carpet.

  I look at where Dolores was lying on the ground, except she’s not on the ground anymore. She’s running toward one of the scaffolding towers holding the enormous spotlights that shine onto the carpet. She starts scaling the scaffolding fast, like an enormous ape.

  People are shouting even more, now. There are more men in black with headsets. The entire red carpet seems to be filled with them. Someone is urging us to keep moving, keep moving, but I want to see. I stand in one spot, not moving, no one paying attention to me at all, except Gloria, who is pulling on my arm.

  She stops pulling on my arm. We stand still. We are watching Dolores climb higher, at last stopping about twelve feet above the ground.

  The crowd is taking pictures, shouting at her, shouting at the guys in black, jus
t shouting anything they can think to shout: Get down, come down, get down, get her… blah blah blah.

  I should maybe talk to Patrick about this, see if Kolektiv could stage something like this with our tumour campaign. Some kind of an event where one of the bald models could do a drastic public stunt. I don’t know what exactly – a similar scaffold climb?

  I watch Dolores, with her wild hair and a blouse that seems to have ripped slightly on the side, revealing a stack of two soft, fleshy folds – she’s gotten a little larger since the summer – and I feel excited, even turned on.

  Gloria’s talking but it’s all just noise; I’m too distracted to listen. An absurd thought, perhaps from shock: My girl. That’s my girl.

  “Oh my god, I think she’s trying to jump,” Gloria’s faint voice suddenly forms itself into a coherent whole in my head. Once she says that, I know she’s right. And I also know that I have to do something about that. It’s in my best interest, as there might be some kind of a consequence, maybe already is, something like a blog post somewhere, some kind of lunatic tragic-romantic rant posted on Facebook.

  The guys in black are talking to Dolores, telling her to get down. The lights at the top of the scaffold get turned off so the tower is dark, but the other lights illuminate her still. An ambulance arrives along with a fire truck amidst a blast of sirens. A police car, then another one, lights flashing everywhere. The street becomes a techno show.

  Please.

  She’s not climbing any higher, but she’s not climbing down either. I could ask her to come down. She would listen to me. Please come down, Princess.

  I think of all the future talks I may have to have with Gloria and possibly the police and maybe even the press – how bothersome it will all be – but I know it’s going to be better than Dolores climbing to the top, jumping off and possibly leaving incriminating proof of our connection with each other.

  “Dolores, please come down,” I say as loudly as I can. I can’t see her face well, can’t see her eyes at all, but I know she is watching me.The noise around us seems to quiet down, or I tune it out. All I hear is some soft whimpers from above.