Gloria leads me to bed. I make no effort to try to fuck her and she strokes my head, lying in her lap like a kitten, murmuring over and over, “I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what to do.”
I have no idea what she’s talking about. I fall asleep because the stroking is nice.
22
IN THE MIDDLE OF SUMMER, GLORIA TALKS ABOUT TAKING a break again – this time it seems that she has made a decision and wants some kind of a plan in place.
I remain passive, my contribution contained mostly to sympathetic – and hopefully guilty-enough-looking – nods.
Gloria says we should “reflect” in August and “regroup” in September to discuss further. Talk about our goals and hopes then. My hope is for Gloria to feel terribly wounded by my continued lack of fight while she’s doing her portion of reflecting. My hope is for her to feel so wounded that she will, for example, go to Poland to spite me and reclaim the count who was once in love with her.
“I need more from you,” she says.
“Yes.”
“I need you to be more present. If you want this to work out, I need you to make the effort. Do you want this to work out?”
“Of course,” I say.
“I don’t want things to be the way they are. I want us to evolve,” she says.
“Me too.”
I wish I could tell her why she is wrong about relationships having to move a certain way. It could free her. I always thought she had the potential to avoid succumbing to convention, the way she lives as if she doesn’t care about fitting in too much: jet-setting, dating Polish counts, not breaking into my email account to check if I am being unfaithful – stuff like that.
It would help her to realize that she doesn’t have to subscribe to the commonly accepted belief that once a couple, we’re supposed to move in stages as if we’re working for a corporation: giving each other performance reviews (really good in bed, always calls when he’s running late), expecting bonuses (surprise birthday parties, surprise blow jobs), climbing steadily up the ladder of coupledom (attending weddings, wedding).
I wish I could share with Gloria why it seems so bleak, advancing in this particular corporation – starting with the first weekend together and ending in a shared cemetery plot. How impossible it is to have to remain excited, or at least grateful, or at least not homicidal about the fact that we have to spend most of our adult lives trying to understand a human being that ultimately is just too different to ever understand, the way all the human beings who are not us are.
Then again, we could tell ourselves it is all worth it – it is romantic and natural and even practical. And if we are indeed so lucky to achieve the pinnacle of any respectable couple-corporation, a child, it is okay to die because our work is done. Although, before we go, it is important to instill similar values in our child, teaching her that the only point of her life is to, essentially, pair up with someone, birth something and then die too.
And is modern marriage about love? The love evolving, maturing like some kind of alcohol as it sits in the barrel of disillusionment and misfortune, disease and ephemeral joy? The love maturing so much that it is prone to forgetting that it originated in desire, demanding the same desire to succumb to exclusivity, monogamy? And desire, this chronic viral condition, torturing monogamy with its lips and hips, its swagger and smell, its eye contact, its hands everywhere?
Then, at home, the desire resting next to the wife’s sleeping cheek as the husband masturbates in the darkness, quietly, hideously. He is an evolved man, a man who evolved so much that he married, respected and observed the rules of modern society. And later on, his wife locks herself in the bathroom with her secret stash of Fifty Shades of Grey or some other romance fable and fantasizes about being mounted by someone else, the neighbour.Anyone but her husband, whom she finds repulsive now, after years of marriage.
I wish I could talk to Gloria about my own parents, stuck in their monogamy. I would tell her about seeing my mother with our neighbour Karl and how they panted at each other, how my father didn’t seem to understand – or if he did, never acknowledged it – that his own wife, his soulmate, the love of his life, was separated from her sexual freedom by a metal fence. Then again, if he were to have let her go, he would never have done it to appease her desire – he would’ve done it to feel smug about it. If anything, he would’ve done it so that he’d have his own freedom, the freedom to call her a whore for the rest of his life.
It seems to me that the most loving thing to do is to set someone free. Therefore, breaking up with Gloria is a loving thing to do. I have no intention of this being temporary; this is for good.
I lie to her, tell her I’m looking forward to September, when I’ll next see her, and she must know that I’m lying because when she leaves my place with her final suitcase, she holds my head in her hands and presses her forehead against mine and says, “Don’t ever let a good thing go.”
It sounds familiar and it sounds like a threat.
23
I CAN ALMOST SMELL IT. THE WATER AND SAND, THE COCONUT oil and sweat and beer breath. I see the beach in the distance: the whiteness of the shore, the candy-blue of the ocean, the candy-blue of the sky. The freedom expands inside me, along with the salty air. I cannot wait to meet them, all the girls with their wobbly flesh, the straight waists and straight legs and hair fried from home dye jobs. Despite what happened with Dolores, I haven’t given up on my passion. I’m still the universal dream boyfriend, and I’m even stronger and more refined this year. I’ve prepared. In my non-professional life, besides being Gloria’s boyfriend, I’ve also become a secret, late-night teenage-Internet-forum reader, a Facebook commenter, a Twitter subscriber who’s been following every rant a plain girl has to post, everything she has to say to the world that makes her mad and invisible. And so now I know even more about boys not returning affections, and how hard it is to find bleach that will work on a moustache without making it stand out if you get a tan. I know more about how impossible it is when dumb hos and bitches steal boys who have been spoken for, how spiteful skinny girls can be, how diets never actually work unless you turn them into an eating disorder.
I know even more about how it would be nice to have someone to care for you, to cuddle with, someone other than the jerks who fuck you and leave you and you have to pretend that you don’t care but really you do.
I pull into the driveway of the beach house and turn off the engine and sit in the car with the windows open. In my head, I hear all those voices from the Internet – the squeaky whispers, the whining, the rants – complaining, explaining, asking.
I watch the house, the lifeguard chair in front of it. I want to go and climb it and take in the beach right away, see if I can spot any of them, the actual girls. But then the front door opens and Jason steps out with his new girlfriend with messy tattoos up and down her arms. The ex he was thinking of bringing with him has disappeared. Number disconnected, no emails back. She’s probably busy modelling for Faces of Meth, or maybe she’s dead.
I am impressed with Jason finding a replacement so quickly. Perhaps those PUA meetings have helped him after all, but it was me, more likely, who provided the right inspiration.
Jason found the new girl while giving a workshop to a short-film class at a community college. Candace – Candi – waited for him after the workshop in order to show him a video she filmed in high school. It was about her aunt dying of cancer.
“It was extremely profound,” Jason said on the phone. There were long takes of the aunt napping. It was uncomfortable to watch her for that long. “Her face twisted, you could tell she was in pain.” He said he almost cried at the end of the film. He couldn’t wait to talk to Candi, tell her that she was a genius. He felt an incredible pull toward her, like she was his – like she belonged to him, he said. And it was strange, he said, because he hadn’t even touched her at that point. He was in love with her brain before he was in love with her body. Once, he ran into Candi shopping with her mot
her at the market. And even seeing the mother didn’t stop him, he said.
“What was wrong with her mother?”
“Everything. She was huge. But that’s the least of it.”
“Genetics. Well, you’re going fully into it then.”
“One of those haircuts, short on top. And she was rude. That was the worst. She acted like I was some asshole bothering her daughter. They both smoke. Candi and her.”
He only mentioned the mother so that I would remind him of genes. He was hoping that hearing it from me would make him reconsider what he already knew: he was about to embark on a miserable journey to a white-trash nirvana.
At the time of the film workshop, Candi had a boyfriend who was a filmmaker himself. It turned out later that both the aunt and the film were his. But at that point it didn’t matter. Jason loved Candi. Candi left her boyfriend. And now she is here, looking at me, eyes narrowing as if we had history – a complicated kind of history.
“So good to see you, buddy.” Jason trots over. “Meet Candace.”
“Hi, Candace. I’ve heard so much about you.”
“Candi. It’s Candi. What did he say?”
“Only good things.”
“Really,” she says. “I haven’t heard anything about you.”
She reminds me of someone. She starts chewing on her finger. There was a pretty girl in my high school, Melissa or Missy. She slept with everyone. I didn’t sleep with her.
“Yes, you have, baby,” Jason says. He’s speaking loudly, his enthusiasm put on. There must’ve been a fight before I showed up. “Candi, this is the guy I told you about. God’s gift to women, ha ha.”
Candi doesn’t smile. She propels herself off the door frame and slinks toward us. I stare back at her. I can’t figure out her stare, if it’s flirtatious, murderous, indifferent.
Jason meets her halfway and brushes something off her shirt. It’s a strangely pathetic gesture. I have an urge to pull him off of her and slap him once, hard, to snap him out of this shameful behaviour, but I know he’d never understand that it’s for his own good.
“God’s gift to women, eh?” Candi says, extending her tattooed hand: T-R-U-T-H on her knuckles. She winks at me. Jason laughs nervously again.
“Jason is a joker,” I say.
“He is?”
Jason fusses beside me, picking up and dropping my bags. He finally settles on a small suitcase, which he carries fussily into the house. I follow him. “Come, Candace,” I say.
“Candi,” she says.
I don’t look to see if she’s following me; she is.
Inside, the house is spotless, quiet – perfect, save for the ashtray filled with cigarette butts. The house doesn’t smell of cigarettes, so I don’t say anything, but I will never invite Jason to stay here ever again.
I don’t have a lot of energy left after my long drive. I’m hoping that the lovebirds will leave soon, but I politely sit through Jason’s detailed listing of everything that is or isn’t working in the house. “We had a lovely time. Got bitten by a wasp when we first got here, but she’s tough. She’s not allergic – right, Candi?”
“Glad you’re not allergic, Candace,” I say and she says nothing.
I try to imagine what it would be like to spend three weeks with her, with her overt scorn, those bloodshot eyes. I really don’t understand Jason at all. Perhaps he’s one of those people who like to be in pain so they know they’re alive. A masochist.
Jason prattles on. Candace stretches, her top rising to show another tattoo sneaking out of her cut-off shorts. Flowers or birds, hard to tell.
As they leave, I consider saying something to Jason about getting away from her. But I refuse to act extreme, especially when it comes to sentiments instead of facts. And he would never, anyway. He’s smitten.
***
My phone rings late in the evening.
“Hi,” Candi says on the other end.
“Hi.”
“He told me all kinds of stories about you,” she says.
“I can imagine.” There’s nothing more intriguing to a woman than finding out a guy is popular with other women. It’s a challenge. An opportunity for a woman to teach me a lesson because, of course, she is different than all of them. She is the one who will destroy me, who will make me fall.
“What can I help you with, Candi?”
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe there’s something?”
“You wouldn’t do that to a friend,” she says in a voice stretching like honey. Teasing.
“No, you’re right. I wouldn’t,” I say. I try to stifle a yawn, but it comes out anyway and when it does, I think how it’s a good thing. It will help things along.
“Do you want to meet at Neon?” she asks. “Jason has a headache. He doesn’t want to take me dancing. I feel like dancing.”
I picture myself going with her to Neon, a new beach bar that’s opened this year. Walking there, she is stumbling because she’s already had a lot to drink, and she smells of cigarettes.
We dance, or she dances – she’s grinding her skinny ass into me, aggressively; she’s laughing with her mouth opened monstrously wide. Soon, she attacks: a combination of aggressive flirting and mocking me for stealing her, my friend’s girlfriend. She’d say something crude: You’d do anything for a pretty pussy, wouldn’t you? Betray your best friend, would you?
And so on. I’ve never fallen for this kind of thing before. Why would I even bother? Why would I risk my friendship?
I think of Jason sitting in those PUA basements all those years, trying to learn to be an asshole and failing at it. Before Candi, the best part of his day was the part when he’d unwittingly touch himself in his sleep. Once, I saw him approach a set of two women, trying to manoeuvre his body so he’d block one of the girls, focus on the other, the less fat one.
I couldn’t hear his lines, but I watched the blocked girl – a hipster in big glasses with a curtain of dark hair desperately trying to cover her massive jaw – grow more and more indignant, her body shifting as if to tackle him. Her friend, a forty-year-old-looking blond-brunette in her twenties, folded her arms, one eyebrow pointed at Jason. He was oblivious. He reached out to touch her and she backed away with such disgust and force that he almost fell forward. He turned, looked at me, eyes big and hurt like a child’s.
I loved him in that moment, fiercely, like he was my brother. I walked up to the group, eyes on the blond-brunette. The eyebrow pointed at me now. Then it softened. “Give me your number,” I said to the blond-brunette.
There was the typical pretend indignation: Why should I? Why would I? etcetera.
“Because you want to,” I said. I didn’t try hard. She wanted to, of course.
Her friend stared, lips twisted in a ridiculously bright knot. “I like your lipstick,” I said on walking away with the blond-brunette’s number written on a piece of paper.
I walked up to Jason, standing in the parking lot, watching all of this the way I was watching him before. I threw the piece of paper on the ground. I didn’t look back. Jason laughed, and it almost sounded like he wasn’t faking it.
“Candace, go to bed,” I say into the phone. “I won’t tell Jason about this. And if you’re smart, you’ll make sure he doesn’t figure out that he can do better than you.” I hang up.
The phone rings a few times, then stops.
The next day, I do my workouts according to my routine of squat variations. I eat a healthy breakfast of porridge with berries, a perfect square of old cheddar on whole-grain toast. I erase Candi’s shouty message without listening to the words.
Outside, Dog slaps his tail against the walkway in front of the house. His face is stretched out in an imitation of a smile. I call for him, and we leave for our morning walk.
I don’t believe in animals having much personality or character, but I’m sure there is something in Dog that, if he were capable of judgment, would be able to favourably compare being here to being at home with Gloria wear
ing a pair of Prada booties.
***
The beach is just starting to fill up with bodies, and it’s nice to be here before it gets too crowded. I take in the surroundings, the endless blue ocean and the horizon of palm trees at the far end of the shore.
I think about Dolores. I think about what it was like walking here with her, how I had missed all the signs of her instability. I think about her body, the way she shuffled even when she tried to run. How excited she was to see the waterfall beside the beach house, how she took her shirt off and freed her pretty breasts triumphantly, on the balcony overlooking the waterfall, for all the world to see. She was so submissive and open, so ready to be liberated from her obscurity, so ready to have the most wonderful adventure of her life and then live her life a little better, in a more enlightened way, having been touched by beauty and luck. Instead, she succumbed to a delusion.
A shiver runs through my body, a vein flash-freezing all the way from my neck down to my groin. Yet this is a perfectly warm, pleasant morning.
I promise myself to be more careful when picking out a girl this time. I don’t know how I will guard against failure, but I’ll have to keep all of my senses sharp – any indication of insanity and I’m out, no matter how great the challenge, no matter how promising the result.
As I walk, the beach fills with people, and I try to figure out what the summer trends are this year, if there’s anything that I could get fixated on, anything specific like the colourful string bracelets of last season or the cut-off jean shorts before that. So far, nothing pleasant like that. But like everywhere else, there’s one prominent girl trend: shaved heads. Ribbonheads. Named after the two heroines of the tumour campaign vlogs, they are girls whose look announces their solidarity with their idol, $isi, and her triumph as a cancer survivor.
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