Guy

by Jowita Bydlowska

  “The crème de la crème,” he says, clicking the mouse to close the folders.

  “Who fucking says that? Crème de la crème?”

  He blinks at me. I’ve offended him. Good.

  There’s construction being done on my building. New windows being installed. I fantasize about Jason leaving my house and a glass panel falling down from a great height, cutting his head off.

  I wave for him to go on. “Don’t sulk.”

  “Okay. Okay. ACAs. I just clean up there. They’ve got these eyes,” Jason’s manicured eyebrows form into a worry arch. “Whether they’re about to cry or not, they always look like this. You should go. They’re really eager to please, it’s astonishing. The older ones especially.”

  “Who?”

  “ACAs. Adult Children of Alcoholics. The meetings I go to.”

  “That’s disgusting.”

  “Is it?” he says. He looks at me, the eyebrows rearranged on his face, one raised.

  “Right,” I say. I’m the one who’s at home awaiting trial for assaulting a young, vulnerable woman.

  “Fuck. I miss that bitch so much sometimes,” he sighs.

  I pat him on the back. The bitch, Candi of the messy tattoos, has gotten back together with her filmmaker boyfriend. They’re now making a documentary about the difficult lives of public relations professionals. Jason said they interviewed Gloria.

  (On the day of the interview, Gloria was running on three hours of sleep and had a meltdown in front of the camera. The night before, one of her visiting clients, a broken-nosed actor known for playing bad-boy love interests in rom-coms, called her before midnight, high on coke. He wanted to jam and had forgotten his guitar, so Gloria had to locate the owner of a music store that carried his favourite brand of a semi-acoustic. She managed to get the guitar! I can’t say I didn’t feel impressed and proud when Jason told me about it.)

  “Maybe it’s a mommy thing for you? With these children of alcoholics?” I say. But I’ve lost him. He’s back to talking about Candi. How she betrayed him, how she had terrible taste in TV shows, how her new boyfriend will have to put up with her poor hygiene – I didn’t want to pry but I wanted to ask about that; I didn’t ask – and how, how, how –

  He can’t possibly think that this is interesting. He’s torturing me because he can. There must be a sense of retribution in being in charge of the person who has always made him feel insecure, to be my surety, to have that power over me.

  I never confront him about his reasons for agreeing to bail me out, but I suppose I’m grateful. It really doesn’t matter.

  In the past few weeks since my arrest, I’ve resigned myself to various humiliations, big and small. The big ones are losing my job, not being able to leave Canada – where I rarely feel at home anyway; not that I feel at home anywhere, really – having to put the beach house up for sale to pay for my legal fees, putting Dog in the kennel and getting an email from Gloria suggesting that I get in touch with Celia Stone from Personality magazine to do an interview “to help your cause!!!”

  ***

  The smaller humiliations are Gloria taking Dog from the kennel and fostering him and me agreeing to it because I had no choice and because it was the right thing to do.

  Another small humiliation: Writing to Gloria and asking her to forget it after: would you like to come for a drink? And Gloria writing back, Very funny! This was followed by an invitation to a party celebrating Gloria’s engagement to the Polish count.

  I buy black curtains on the Internet and same-day courier them to my address. I hang them up. I close the curtains. I disappear. The only time I act human is when Jason comes over. Other than that, who is there to perform for anyway?

  I’ve given up on my workouts. I pace enough.

  I’ve given up cooking. I order food from restaurants that I find online. There’s sugar in everything. None of the places are actually what they claim to be: a Korean shows up with food from a Thai place, the pasta sauce on pizza tastes like it comes from a can, the sushi restaurant has Chinese owners. Once, I try an Indian restaurant that actually manages to serve Indian food, but the apartment smells of armpits for days afterwards.

  When he comes over to check on me, Jason brings bread and milk and the plainest cereal. Tomatoes, for some reason, but no good cheese. No pâté, no fish. Jason is uninterested in food. He knows how much I enjoy a good meal. I don’t say anything about the groceries to him. I won’t give him the satisfaction.

  ***

  All the time, I think about Em. I know it’s not technically doing something, but it feels like it, something pleasurable, like going on a little trip. It’s my meditation; I can sit still for it. I can rewind the tape in my head a hundred times, analyze every little thing, like the way the light would expose the soft peach fuzz above her lip.

  I don’t spend too much time on our last encounter, with her sitting on the picnic bench. That’s done now, and anyway, there’s really not that much of her in it. At least, I don’t see how that could possibly be her. She was possessed. A demon with the face of a saint.

  At the same time, I understand why she did what she did. I do understand it, on a level where everything makes sense once you add the facts together. The rest is complicated: How do I feel about it?

  I rewind the tape of us together, happy, and watch it again. There are hundreds of artifacts to unpack, recall: every inch, every move, every pose, every twitch. I zoom in on her lips, that peach fuzz, things she said. Now a close-up on her breathing, her head on my pillow: my eyes are open in the darkness, watching her.

  ***

  My first court appearance occurs somewhere in an alternate universe where people bother with such things.

  I sit on a wooden bench. A middle-aged woman with blond hair sits to the left of the judge’s bench, transcribing. She looks hefty, German; the hair is sculpted into an old-fashioned wave. Something from the forties, something that Hitler would probably find attractive. I imagine she’s wearing a garter belt over a massive pair of panties. See-through hose. Why can’t you be present for once, says Gloria’s voice in my head. I don’t need to be present, Gloria, I say back in my head.

  My lawyer is a fat, sweaty guy named Thomas. He is supposed to be good. He was recommended by my entertainment lawyer. He could’ve recommended a rubber chicken and I’d have taken him up on it. Thomas has won many cases. You won’t win mine, I think when he tells me about the many cases he’s won.

  As we leave the courtroom, I try to catch Hitler’s lover’s eye, but she’s absorbed in her little machine and doesn’t look up. I have thirty-five days before the next court date.

  33

  MY ZEGNA SHOES. MY NEW CHARCOAL VARVATOS SUIT. MY TIE.

  No.

  No tie.

  A McQ T-shirt with an X-ray of a skull on it. Not my style, but I feel murderous. And this is as close as I can get to clubwear. I’m going to a place where all the women try to be Nines – they all have shiny hair and tanned, bouncy breasts. Inside, it will be neon blue or red-and-black, slick. There will be bar stools like stems, and perfect asses sitting on top like flowers. There will be long fingers holding olives on a pick. A curl of yellow garnish swimming in vodka. And fast, brutal club music like a speeding train. Like a train crash.

  I open the safe behind my Keep Calm and Carry On poster. I pull out a small sandwich bag. I got it when I started dating Gloria. For guests.

  No guests now. I don’t care for drugs. But it’s that kind of night. I’m bored. I want to die. I don’t want to die. I’m too bored to die. I want to go out to a bouncy place with bouncy breasts. I pour a tiny amount of the powder onto the surface of my Pedrera coffee table. I wipe the straw with Kleenex, look inside it to make sure it’s not clogged. It’s not. I break the powder and chop. I’m reminded of cooking.

  I separate the powder into five lines. I snort. The bleach hits the back of my throat almost instantly.

  I pace around, speeding and rewinding through my Em movie.

&n
bsp; I snort another line. Pace. Snort. Repeat. Repeat.

  I call a taxi. I ask the driver to stop at the first club with a big lineup and a velvet rope. We find one. I get out. I shake hands with the bouncer. He unclicks the rope, twenty dollars richer.

  I’m patted up and down by a big, young Indian woman, a Four, looking for drugs or perhaps just wanting to pat me down – it seems her touching goes on a bit too long and there’s longing in it, too.

  Inside the place, there’s a smell. This is an older club. Ghost of cigarette smoke. But fresh shampoo, and the rotting sweetness of alcohol. Cologne mixed with body odours, vanilla-cherry-chocolate Chap Stick. I cut through the crowd, my cocaine body big, smug.

  I lock eyes with one of the bartenders. She’s got tattooed arms, too much makeup. A heap of black curls above her face. Out of a corner of my eye, I see a blond across the bar smile and look down.

  I ask the bartender to send the blond a drink. I ignore the bartender’s pissed-off clinking bracelets as she scoops the tip.

  ***

  Later on that night, I fuck the bartender in her loft. She rents the place with her ex-boyfriend, she says. Ex. The ex-boyfriend is away on a tour with his band. She wants to play me their record after I let it slip about what it is that I do, help records be born, but I pull her onto the bed and flip her over onto her back and start biting the insides of her thighs gently, insistently, like the little fuck-critter that I am. She murmurs something about how the record is shit anyway.

  In the morning, she makes me poached eggs. They are barely edible but I’m hungry and hungover, so I eat what’s on the plate.

  She doesn’t touch her food. She sits in the window overlooking a brick wall. She lights a cigarette. She starts talking about her mother, who’s a bitch.

  “I completely forgot,” I say, wiping my mouth. The cigarette smoke makes me nauseous. Or maybe it’s the eggs. Either way.

  “What?” She looks at me, startled. Without makeup, she looks prettier, younger. I don’t tell her this.

  I kiss her in the doorway. Her cigarette mouth. She texts me later: How did it go at the bank? I don’t text her back.

  ***

  I go fuck the blond from the bar in her cute uptown townhouse she shares with her boyfriend. The boyfriend is away on a business trip. He had asked her to marry him. She said she needed some time to think about it. She is thinking about it. She says, “I guess this is my last hurrah,” to my dick.

  “Hurrah,” I say, and she giggles.

  ***

  Jenny, Kayla or Kelly, Michelle, Tamika, Julia or July, Kathy with a K and Cathy with a C, Alicia, Lakshmi, another Jen, Mimi, Some Redhead, a Chinese girl, etcetera. For three weeks, I go from Thursday to Sunday: Varvatos suits, McQ shirts, clubs, clear drinks, pink drinks, amber drinks. Ice cubes. Hot, smooth hands, soft tongues, spit, eyelids, goosebumps, fumbling with the keys, unleashed breasts, legs thrown over my shoulders. Hair spilled all over pillows all over town.

  I’m a fucking machine, fucking. Trying to out-fuck what’s in my head. My head is full of her: her twisting body like a small white wave in the darkness. Her phantom laughter. It cuts through all the noise. It cuts through the yelping and squealing and moaning and whimpering and grunting and slurping. Her ha ha ha.

  ***

  “What’s wrong?” This one has plump lips, big lips. Her former lovers probably describe them as cock-sucking lips. I can’t confirm. My dick refuses to cooperate. I don’t care for it to cooperate. I’m exhausted. The dick is exhausted, too full of cocaine. Her breasts try to jump out of a too-small bra. I’m sure she knows that the bra is too small. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. She sits back against the wall of pillows. So many pillows propped at the head of her bed. Why does she need so many pillows? Her hair is brown. Unravelling curls that must’ve taken an hour or more to sculpt. Club-ready hair.

  “Are you okay?”

  She doesn’t ask Is it me? the way a plain girl would. A plain girl gone pretty. A Four but a Seven. Someone got to her long before I did. Someone built her up, convinced her she could make all of her confused parts work. Make herself into a whole that would be coherent, attractive. I’ve nothing to give her. Besides, I don’t care to give anyone anything. There’s nothing left.

  “Not really,” I say.

  “Does this happen –”

  “I’m afraid so,” I say.

  “Oh, dude, I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. It’s not you.”

  “I know that. Shit, that came out totally wrong. You’re great. Babe, you’re God’s gift to women,” she squeals. “Just look at you!”

  I look at her. She smiles like I’m a child who has just shat his pants but it’s okay because I’m adorable anyway. I’m God’s gift to women

  She is the last girl I fuck. Well, try to fuck.

  ***

  I spend the last week of my freedom in my apartment.

  Jason comes over every day now.

  I order groceries online. I cook us elaborate meals. Everything from soufflés to lobster bisque. Beef Wellington.

  The last thing I make as a free man is a lemon meringue pie.

  I pull the pie out of the oven. Serve it. Then I collapse on my leather sectional, racked by short but powerful, staccato sobs. It’s an unexpected outburst. Some dark cellar at my core.

  “It must be a comedown from the cocaine,” I tell Jason. The fork with sticky meringue is suspended an inch from his open mouth. “A serotonin crash.”

  “It’s just that – I’ve never seen you cry.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  “For what?” he says.

  “I’m going to plead guilty.”

  “I know.”

  “Good.”

  “Do you want me to talk you out of it?” he says.

  “Absolutely not.”

  “I wouldn’t know how to anyway.”

  “Good.”

  34

  “HEY,” SHE SAYS.

  I don’t recognize her, and then I do, and I’m not sure which is worse. I hope my face stays neutral; I hope it doesn’t show that I don’t know how to react. Her hair is full of soft, messy curls, light brown. Her eyebrows are massive and there’s dark fuzz above her lip. Hollow cheeks. She was always thin, but this thinness is different; it’s unintentional. Too many things are unintentional with her now, except maybe her name.

  She no longer calls herself $isi.

  “Hey. I like the hair,” I say.

  “Thanks. It got all curly. Weird.” $isi – Sylvia – sits down.

  “Thanks for meeting with me. I really appreciate it,” I say. “I might be away for some time. A year. Maybe more.”

  She’s not dressed in black; that’s different about her too. I can make out the dark shade of her nipples through the white cotton of her blouse. I wonder if it’s on purpose. Probably. She hasn’t gone entirely granola on me.

  “Well. I feel very honoured to be your last date ever. And don’t be so dramatic. I’ve got at least a few years,” she laughs. “But maybe more.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean –”

  “It’s okay. Just teasing you. I’m trying not to worry. You know, keeping my hopes up. Being in denial and all that. I was thinking of writing a blog about it, but that’s like really admitting it,” she says. “Anyway. I’m starting a new treatment in a month. I had to wait for all these tests. I haven’t been eating very well. I had fluid building up in my abdomen and I was throwing up a lot, so they thought it was something serious. But it’s getting better. I’m getting better.”

  “You’re so young,” I say even though I don’t mean to say it. Such a cliché. I’m overwhelmed by fear. Not compassion. Fear. It’s too unnatural to be so close to dying this early in life. It could happen to anybody, including me.

  “What’s your point?”

  “You shouldn’t have to be going through this,” I say quickly.

  “Aw, thanks.You’re such a sweetie pie. I’m feeling better than
I have in a really long time. So I’m ready to get back to active treatment.”

  “And then?”

  “And then we’ll see. I didn’t think it would come back. But you learn how to deal with things. I suppose the only difference between me and everyone else is that I have a vague idea of when I might be kicking the bucket. But, you know, those things are.”

  “I know many people who –”

  “Yes. I know. Everyone knows many people,” she says. “Do you, really?”

  “No. I don’t. I just don’t know what to say.”

  “It’s not about you. Don’t worry about it. It’s nice to see you,” she says. “And I know that you didn’t do it. That’s why I’m here, right? To absolve you of your sins!”

  I feel myself blush. I phoned her deep into the night a few nights ago. I’m not close with anyone. There’s Jason, but there’s only so much bro I can take. I needed a girl, and not Gloria. Someone less bitter, someone younger, more open. And $isi and I have history. Sylvia.

  I phoned and asked her if I was possibly losing my mind, if maybe I actually was the violent guy that Em said I was. A guy who could hurt women. I was not that guy. But I got myself into a state where I started to doubt reality. Sylvia didn’t hang up. “You’re a fucking jerk. But yeah, you’re not that kind of guy,” she said.

  “I wanted to find out how you were doing too,” I say, now.

  “I’m doing better. I’m doing really well,” she sighs.

  A waitress shows up to take our orders. She has a pretty face, big, trusting eyes that make you imagine her sliding down your stomach, looking up at you. A freckled nose. No waist and small breasts, but a nice butt. A Four.

  Sylvia says, “That’s the worst thing about it. Knowing when you might die.”

  “You’re not going to die.”

  “Sure I am.You are too. But you’re better off not knowing.”

  I think how absurd it is for her to suggest that I’m going to die, but it’s more absurd of me to think that that’s absurd.

  The waitress comes back with our food. A salad for Sylvia and a burger for me. The fries are too greasy, and the bun is dry. The pickle looks exhausted. I think about ordering a beer but decide against it. The waitress looks at me for a moment too long.