Guy

by Jowita Bydlowska

  “Come on, sweetie,” I shout, and don’t even choke over the sweetie, which is not a word I use. I can’t say princess out loud, not in front of Gloria.

  Dolores looks down. We lock eyes. Come on, Princess, I mouth. She nods once. Then she’s moving. She takes the first hesitant step, her foot landing on the nearest metal rod below her.

  Gloria squeezes my arm. She asks me something about Dolores: Is she a friend? How do I know her?

  I watch Dolores. A few feet above the ground, she loses her footing and tumbles down, heavily, ungracefully; there is a funny noise as she lands. I am close enough now to hear it, and I notice her face, those round eyes full of surprise.

  The paramedics and the firefighters rush to her side, there’s more shouting, the men in black are running, someone pushes me away.

  ***

  Three hours later, we’re at the hospital in the waiting room. It was Gloria’s idea to come here, and I don’t know why I agreed, but I did. We could’ve just gone home. But Gloria insisted that it was our obligation to at least show up at the hospital until someone from Dolores’ family could come. The family is miles and hours away and the earliest anyone can come is tomorrow afternoon. I don’t plan on sitting here until tomorrow afternoon, and I certainly don’t plan to talk to Dolores when she wakes up, but I sit here because Gloria has asked me to.

  There’s a social worker coming to see Dolores when she wakes up, and there are two police officers sitting in the waiting room with us. They leave us alone, though I have to give them a call later, I am told, which is fine with me.

  ***

  I fall in and out of nervous bleeps of sleep lasting a second or two; eventually, I give up and force myself to watch a short segment on home renovations on the TV.

  I don’t know how long Gloria wants to sit here and wait. The update is that Dolores knocked herself unconscious when she fell, and they’re monitoring her for signs of concussion. She has also broken an ankle. She’s not unconscious right now, but is sleeping thanks to a sedative they’ve given her. I wish they’d give me a sedative.

  “Isn’t it funny?” Gloria says when she sees me awake.

  “What’s funny?”

  “Well, I just think how this is funny, how it feels like we’re sitting here like we’re her parents or something.”

  “Parents. I’m exhausted.”

  “I know. I really feel for her,” she says.

  “Well, yes, she is very disturbed. But that has nothing to do with us. She’s just one of those mentally ill superfans. Anything to get to $isi. It’s scary, but it’s not uncommon.”

  “I feel responsible. We saw her climb that tower, we witnessed it.”

  “The police seem to be okay with us leaving.”

  “I know. But we’re connected by that experience, all of us.”

  “Maybe you could adopt her.”

  “Very funny,” Gloria says. She looks at me like she is sad. She may be sad.

  “I’m sorry.”

  She closes her eyes and slumps in her chair. Her party dress is a bit filthy, dust and grease, as if it was she who’d been climbing on things. Her updo is in place, but it seems like a wig now in its perfect form that clashes with the rest of her. In the hospital light, her skin has a pale green shade to it, the powder, or whatever makeup stuff she’s wearing on her face, visible in tiny, uniform specks, some of it more concentrated in the skin’s ridges where the wrinkles are.

  I enjoy seeing her so unguarded and imperfect.

  An older woman can be as fascinating as a younger one. But some have been too dulled by disappointment, by the resentment of having youthful dreams disappear, and then later on, that disappointment hardens like a scar. The skin is thinner and everything hurts: getting passed over for promotion, watching her best friend get married to her crush, or getting married and watching her husband stroke the remote control with more fondness than he’d have for her breast. And then even later, troubled children, divorces, funerals. Other ex-wives at funerals; what to wear to funerals with other ex-wives present.

  I can’t really offer an older woman anything in terms of experience; there isn’t a lot I can open her to. I can give her a lightning of romance, a wild weekend in the country where we explore her unloved vagina and talk about her failed relationship with the last married man she met at her work Christmas party, but that’s about it.

  I think about Mildred. How she wrapped herself around the unmoving shoulders of the man at the club. How it made me tired just watching this.

  But Gloria is relatively untouched, not bitter, and perhaps this is what attracts me to her – that I can still find a certain innocence to her, that her eyes still widen; the world still surprises her. She was a princess, she had princes, she was on the cover of a magazine – all of her dreams came true. She’s like a girl who seems overgrown, a girl who seems to have aged by accident, who has found herself in this older woman’s body one Alice-in-Wonderland morning.

  I appreciate Gloria. And now, in this washed-out green hospital hallway at three a.m., I feel that there’s nothing wrong with trying to have her in my life a little more – there will be no unpredictability of the sort I’ve had with $isi and Dolores. There’s safety, a notion that I’ve landed somewhere dull but beautiful: a five-star resort in a politically unchallenged country.

  And I need a vacation.

  I take her hand in mine and give it a quick squeeze and let go. She leans into me, rests her face on my shoulder. Her tiredness spills all over me, and I pull her close, drape my arm around her wide shoulders. And then these words come out of my mouth: “Let’s just go. Let’s go to my place.”

  She stirs and sits up, looks up at me, her eyes scanning my face, and I close my eyes once to affirm, show her that I mean it, that I really want her to come over to my place, stay the night, god, maybe even stay a couple of nights, stay many nights if that’s what it’ll take to get her out of here and if that’s what it’ll take for me to get some peace of mind.

  PART II

  Why is it a surprise to find that people

  other than ourselves are able to tell lies?

  – Alice Munro, “The Spanish Lady”

  20

  I SURVIVE THE SPRING AND SUMMER AND FINALLY GET TO the end of it.

  There isn’t a lot to tell – or there is. Gloria and I become exclusive at her insistence. This, ultimately, means that we somehow own each other – each other’s genitals and actions and possibly even thoughts.

  In my adult life, I have never had a long-term exclusive relationship like this, so I am not entirely sure what to expect. There is some residual part of me, a ghost of my childhood naïveté, that keeps insisting this kind of arrangement is for something – that there is a huge prize at the end of it all, an endurance prize, a Lifetime Achievement Award – but this idea is absurd. If I were to use one of Gloria’s adages: it just doesn’t feel like me. I only go along with it because I have no mind or energy to argue it. I have reserves of it, energy, that I need for my work, and my mind is anaesthetized by the predictability that a serious – what a romantic word that is, serious – relationship brings.

  Being with Gloria is similar to the time in college when I swore off sleeping with women, except that I am sleeping with a woman – I’m majoring in one woman. Whatever I’m doing with my major should count as some kind of homework – the routine of intimate dinners, the long walks with Dog, the cinema on Fridays, the small cocktail parties for PR friends, the grocery shopping trips that are only slightly less interesting than cocktail parties.

  The sex. How quickly the regular sex is dismissed, then taken up to another level because of Gloria’s initiative to keep me happy.

  I don’t have a problem with kinky, but what we do doesn’t seem organic, there’s no spontaneity – it is forced, like a list of activities that we must get through – homework, again, or a prescription from a chick mag, a check mark beside each item:

  • The Magic Fingertip Trick

 
• The Start-Stop-Start Technique

  • A Wild New Use for Your Loofah

  • Foreplay Men Crave: Touch His Secret Erotic Spot (Surprise: It Doesn’t Rhyme with Shmenis).

  I am passive – not in bed, but in going along with the list, in letting Cosmopolitan and dildos direct my life. The wooden Dalmarko trunk that Gloria buys at a designer showroom sale accumulates a variety of rubber, silicone, plastic, leather and combo-material sex toys that we use dutifully on each other, short-circuiting each other’s genitals till orgasm. We spend months rubbing and prodding, tugging and kneading and clamping.

  There are a few weeks when there is none of that stuff at all – no sex – as Gloria goes through different product launches, festival preparations. One time, when she leaves for a week, I take her torture trunk and shove it deep inside my walk-in closet, then I change my mind and drive the whole shebang to a dump and leave it there.

  When she comes back, I tell her about the trunk. She shouts at me, but then I suggest we experiment with her ass – the place that she had never used sexually – which makes her forget about being angry, and about the trunk. After weeks of lube and butt plugs and anal beads and, finally, intercourse, ass fun also manages to turn dull and repetitive.

  ***

  The Tumour vlog series is becoming more and more popular, raking in hundreds of thousands of viewers. People finally figure out the answer to the WTF strategy, and when it’s discovered that it was a tumour that drove the whole enterprise, we get exposure that doubles and triples the currency of $isi’s fame. From hundreds of thousands of viewers, we go to millions. There are articles being written about the tumour and $isi and the vlogs; there are essays in Personality magazine, and Salon is talking about the idea of making a chronic illness cool: It’s a part of human experience!

  There are photo spreads where the models’ heads are shaved, where they look straight into cameras, unsmiling, daring. The colour grey becomes the It colour of the fall season – fashion weeks all over the Western world look like communism.

  Then there’s the first controversy – a big interview and a photo spread with baby-faced $isi, the tumour girl herself. The photo spread is in LOVE magazine – with photographs of various Baldwins and other kids of celebrities – where $isi poses with her chin defiant, her head bald. In one photo she lights up a cigarette – this photo is accompanied by a pull quote in which she announces that her tumour is dead and she no longer fears death. The interview makes the news. There are essays written about $isi being controversial or $isi being brave or $isi exploiting her disease or $isi being irresponsible and a bad example to stupid girls everywhere.

  $isi does another interview where she denounces smoking.

  It’s an old publicity trick: sin, repent. Gloria’s PR team is trying to prove they’re better at spinning than Piglet was; $isi is their first major celebrity client.

  I’m pleased.

  ***

  $isi becomes a proper celebrity. She starts getting spotted with various famous dipshits with greasy hair and surfer bods. She is photographed leaving Chateau Marmont early in the morning; five minutes later, James Franco skulks out in a wife-beater, hiding under a toque.

  We start to receive movie scripts and hundreds of pitches for products. Products get released. The products are, in order: a fashion line of hats, a M.A.C. grey-ribbon makeup line, sneakers, grey push-up bras, lululemon Walking Cure pants and, eventually, the top achievement for anyone in the music business – a fragrance launch. The perfume is called Grey, naturally, and according to the press release, it incorporates “Mutsu apple, nectarine, bergamot, rose, amber, blond wood and hot sand.” Gloria doesn’t find my this is what cancer smells like joke funny, but that’s what I think whenever I get a whiff of it on the street.

  21

  MEANWHILE, AS I BECOME MORE AND MORE ABSORBED WITH the campaign, trying to wrap it all up before my contract with $isi is officially up, Gloria decides to say that she’s pregnant. She refuses to take the test to prove it, yet insists on an imaginary bulge in her belly. I try not to show my anxiety. Once, I scream into a pillow like a crazy lady in a movie. I want to remind Gloria that she’s past forty, but I know that would be insensitive of me, so I keep quiet and pent up. Then, when Gloria gets her period, I try not to show my relief. To celebrate, I go out that evening all by myself and pay a stripper to not rub against my new Paul Smith suit while I stare at her tits for the duration of two songs.

  The stripper reminds me of Dolores – she is small and much prettier, but she is a mouth-breather and has the same round eyes.

  “Can I call you Dolores?” I ask.

  “Whatever you’d like, honey,” she coos. Her breath smells faintly of alcohol. I don’t call her anything. I do nothing when song number three starts.

  ***

  After the fake pregnancy, Gloria subscribes to inspirational podcasts telling her to live in the now. She dyes her hair even lighter to further resemble her favourite celebrity, Gwyneth Paltrow. She cooks food from Gwyneth Paltrow books; every morning, she swirls coconut oil in her mouth. She becomes allergic to gluten.

  She starts doing yoga more diligently, and I often wake up in the morning to the bed empty and sounds of whispery plinking coming from the living room, where she twists her body, her ass in the air, her legs spread, her red face hanging between her legs.

  I let her hang a framed quote in the kitchen: Life is the dancer and you are the dance. I pirouette in front of it once and bang my shin against the counter.

  “Let me tap your leg,” she says when I come into the bedroom limping and explain what happened.

  I roll up my pants. She taps my leg. “Everything is made out of energy, out of molecules interacting with each other,” she says as she taps, her head bent down, hair brushing against my leg. With the desperate new blond shade, her roots seem to be growing out faster – there are many grey hairs among her natural muddy blond. I’m curious about what she’d look like if she were not to dye her hair. I would probably find her aging look exotic – the oldest woman I’ve been with is Mildred, but she dyes her hair orange.

  Right now, Gloria goes on about “the quantum theory of matter and energy being aspects of the same reality” and “life energies flowing through us via a series of paths, known as the meridian system, that are mapped out by four hundred acupressure points located on the body,” one of them on my shin. Her soft voice, along with the tapping, lulls me to sleep.

  When I wake up, it’s dark in the room. Gloria is gone. There’s a note on the kitchen table that says to try the chickpea salad in the fridge, and she’ll be back after her tea-appreciation class.

  ***

  Gloria gets a therapist whose job – I hope – is to dissuade her of the notion that there is ever going to be a baby. As she starts to make peace with the idea, she focuses more on Dog. I have to sign forms that allow him to join such extraordinary activities as Dog & Mommy and Urban Dog School classes, as well as Dog Yoga.

  An enormous monogrammed Marc Jacobs dog crate is ordered online. Gloria buys Dog outfits made by Prada.

  But Dog isn’t enough to keep her occupied, and she insists there is still more of herself to be found. She signs up for various meditation groups. Her favourite is mindful meditation, where people learn how to pay attention to their breathing and focus on chewing a single raisin – everything can be combined with reflection; there is wisdom to be found even in bricks that your fingers brush against. Bricks speak to people as do trees and pigeons, and dreams are a source of wisdom. You can go inside your head and find peace there, a haven from what was outside your head; the inside of your head can be an oasis.

  There is also a group that Gloria starts attending where she sits in the circle with other women who talk about not having children but wanting them and about not being able to have children, period. Non-moms.

  I don’t think the group is a good idea – it seems Gloria only comes back sadder and more distressed from it – but I am never asked for my
opinion, so I don’t give it.

  I watch her get smaller and gloomier, collapsing inside herself like those raisins she chews mindfully. I can’t get through; the walls of her are yielding but remain impenetrable. There are many mornings when I say, “Is everything okay?” like I’m reciting lines in a movie, and like in a movie, she sighs and looks away and says, “Everything is fine.”

  One day, I come across a piece of paper where she has written about me, about how much it hurt her to see me moving on with my life after the pregnancy. She calls me “callous, insensitive”; the non-pregnancy is deemed “a tragedy.”

  I want to say something to her about it, about how there has to be an actual event – an actual lost pregnancy – for it to be a tragedy, but I’m not cruel, not callous, not insensitive.

  ***

  I feel panic, then relief when her Non-moms group and her therapist decide that it is time for Gloria to take a break from me because I’m an awful man; a man who is insensitive. There is a part of me that wants to convince her that it’s not true, that she and her group are wrong about everything, but I know that my motivations for trying to convince her are only so I could prove to myself that she loves me – that I’m still the kind of man that women love. After the months I’ve spent focusing solely on Gloria, the weight of her pronouncements seems more significant, dangerous even, to my identity, and I have to remind myself that she is only one woman. And her feelings toward me don’t represent how other women feel toward me.

  “You’re not even going to defend yourself,” she says when I say nothing about her calling me names and talking about taking breaks. I am too exhausted by her, by all of this; I am a shell of my former self, to paraphrase a cliché.

  “I don’t even know who you are anymore,” she says.

  “Me neither,” I sigh, and she must be mistaking my reply for weakness because she comes up to me and puts her arms around me. The image of Caroline, the girl I lost my virginity to, wrapping herself around me to keep me flashes in my mind and I shudder.