Show Them a Good Time

by Nicole Flattery

  Afterwards, as we lay in bed, he asked, ‘What do you want more than anything?’

  ‘To be loved,’ I said, just like that. Lately, I had become weary of the whole act I’d been cultivating. It was pathetic. ‘You know, in Ireland,’ I said, ‘I wasn’t well.’

  Day to day he let me pretend to be whoever I wanted to be, a singular kindness. He had several versions of his own past; all that remained consistent was how he had overcome. In every version was the track and his mother staring blank-eyed beyond him into space. If he recognised any similarities between us, he didn’t acknowledge them. I realised I didn’t really know how this went. I hadn’t had many boyfriends. Most of the boys I knew at home were terrified of me, though if I slept with them, they were briefly satisfied. I remembered the boy I was seeing when it happened, carting me around as if I was on loan, glamorous but refundable.

  ‘Has that gone away now?’ my boyfriend asked.

  He wasn’t dumb but he was coddled. He was like a man with a thousand relentless wives. He had people who designed his food, sourced his conversational material. They cut up his food, cut up his words. All that was left to do was open his mouth wide.

  ‘Maybe,’ I replied. ‘I think I’m scared of death.’

  ‘Depth?’

  I considered. ‘Both.’

  We listened to the track together until dawn – the curtains closed, the darkness making our bodies indistinguishable shapes. It felt like intimacy, or as close to intimacy as we could get. The track had a sedative effect on him, steering him out of his manic period. I ran my fingers through his hair, soothed him, promised it was normal, that anyone would do it if they had the equipment. This was what he wanted more than anything, more than sex, more than love – to be told he was normal, to feel normal. As the sun came up, he encouraged me to read aloud online comments about him, bizarre and unflattering posts that implied he was past it. While I recited he looked bemused, like he was hearing outlandish conspiracy theories. At eight in the morning, I whispered him to sleep, kissed his eyelids. It wasn’t something I would usually do. It was a gesture I didn’t know I was capable of. In Ireland I would have dismissed it as sentimental but here, like entire days of solitude, dinners of pressed juice, it seemed fitting.

  As the day his show returned closed in, he became increasingly agitated and his insomnia worsened. I didn’t sleep well either and we wandered the apartment separately, moving in and out of rooms, ignoring each other like strangers. When I was sure he was asleep I got up and had a glass of terrible wine, wine that redeemed itself only by being alcoholic. I told myself I was okay, the best okay I’d ever been, but it was hard to believe it any more.

  *

  The night his show aired I got dressed up as I normally did. Even getting dressed had become a source of confusion for me. The comedian told me to display my body but that felt wrong to me – some small-town hangover. I wore an impersonal costume. I felt like I had ordered myself from a store window.

  The dinner table rang with ugly laughter. My boyfriend was in public form. The desperation darted across his face, clawed up his cheeks. It was him but it wasn’t. It was like walking into your house after it has been discreetly burgled. To his left was a young man in his early thirties, who talked constantly about wanting to learn a new language. Everyone at the table agreed that this was an excellent idea, self-betterment, refusing to allow dust into the brain.

  ‘Get a foreign girlfriend,’ my boyfriend advised, ‘that’s the only way you’ll learn.’

  ‘What language are you learning from her?’

  This was something that happened. They discussed me in front of me. I looked the other way, pretended to be obsessed with the tablecloth.

  ‘Poverty,’ my boyfriend smirked.

  He went easy on me – I sensed that others had suffered more – but this wasn’t for my benefit. He was maybe scared he might disturb some beloved image of him I might have preserved from my girlhood when he was at the height of his fame. In truth, there was nothing – just a single blurry scene of him falling over, an amalgamation of gurning expressions. When we got back to the apartment, he watched the episode alone as if to punish me for some imagined slight. I wanted to apologise but I couldn’t physically say the word, ‘Sorry.’ I hadn’t slept in days.

  When he locked himself in his bedroom, looping the laughter over and over, I logged onto the forum that followed my boyfriend’s career. I scrolled through early, stand-up photos of him – long-haired, pretend bashful – accompanied by his most caustic one-liners, scrawled across the screen. Before I noticed my fingers moving, before I recognised the words, I’d left a detailed post where I declared the comedian not funny, suggested that he had never been funny and that hopefully, God willing, his show would be cancelled and he wouldn’t inflict himself on us any more. I drew attention to his deteriorating appearance. I might have made a remark about his mental capabilities, which was out of character for me. I posted the diatribe under his mother’s name and took two sleeping tablets. I passed out on the couch then, soothed by my own ugliness.

  In the morning, after scouring reviews of his show, disturbed, he read the post back to me.

  ‘Unbelievable.’

  I made my eyes wide, saint-like.

  ‘An extremely difficult person.’

  ‘A sicko,’ he said. ‘Issues.’

  ‘Oh for sure,’ I agreed. ‘Many issues. No doubt.’

  *

  Only once did the comedian notice my reticence at these gatherings. While his friends spoke about shows – who was on what show, the ratings of that show, a seemingly endless amount of shows – I enjoyed fantasies of being at the airport, walking uninterrupted through the departure gates, browsing through the duty-free, doing various breathing exercises at the carousel, watching a beautiful tide of bags tumbling out. They weren’t imaginative visions. They wouldn’t have received high ratings on any network. Still, it was impressive what was going on in my head – my own personal airport reality experience, complete with a one-way ticket.

  ‘You’re an odd little ghost person,’ the comedian said, confrontationally, in the cab on the way home. It was late autumn and we’d been together for five months. I’d been feeling the sharp deterioration of our love for some time. I wasn’t helping by staying up all night, leaving long, anonymous messages on the forum that hated my boyfriend. I’d established a lot of friendships on there, made meaningful connections. There were some nice people.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I replied.

  ‘Every dinner you don’t say a word.’

  ‘I say it all with my eyes.’

  ‘Tell me one opinion you have.’

  We fell into silence.

  Back at the apartment he listed out the systems he’d organised so he wouldn’t be able to listen to the track. Then he locked himself in the bathroom, ran the taps and listened to the track.

  I knew he’d been talking to other women online. Deleting his browser history was something he just wasn’t interested in. To pass the time, I rummaged through his clothes. He had them delivered from a company that dressed the modern man. It was all decided by filling out an oblique questionnaire about your childhood, when you lost your illusions, et cetera. He tried to get me into it. ‘How was your childhood?’ ‘Not good,’ I scrawled and handed the questionnaire back to him. He said I didn’t deserve clothes and he was probably correct.

  In the wardrobe I found his favourite coat and slipped in a printout of the most horrific post on the forum. I also included my fortune from the fortune cookies we had eaten earlier. I guess I still wanted us to have open communication. I couldn’t let go. I could never let go. I didn’t know how. A part of me was disgusted by how he treated me and another part was profoundly grateful.

  Every day, there were two versions of me. The one who stayed and watched him with other women, leaning in, laughing – and then afterwards in cabs: listening to him object, argue, tell me I was a lot of work, a lot of hard
fucking work. The me who had dreams where I climbed high, took a single breath and hit the ground like a shirt made of the cheapest, thinnest material. Then the other me – walking fast, with purpose, down the shaded street.

  *

  It was a cold winter and I stayed inside the apartment most days. I did my make-up and observed myself in the mirror, fearfully, as if I was an animal capable of bizarre and impulsive movements. I practised my accents so the neighbours would think there was a flurry of people who lived next door, a cultural mix, instead of just a comedian’s girlfriend. I started watching the show, which, to my boyfriend’s fury, had been moved to a daytime slot. Onscreen he played a professor – his waistcoat ill-buttoned, his face clouded with grief for the modern world, all his actions, romantic or otherwise, hilarious and large-hearted. The dialogue was bad and it bothered me to hear him say those lines. I felt implicated in a way, like a woman who sends her husband to war without even a kind word.

  My boyfriend was king of a small and ineffectual country. He gestured to the scenery as if he had positioned it. If he questioned the morals of a character, in the next episode they would prove themselves to be loose, unworthy. When he pointed to the sky and said, ‘Sure looks like snow!’ snow fell immediately and coated the ground he stood on.

  One afternoon, because of the painfulness of the show, I hid in the hall cupboard. I wanted to experience what it felt like to be closed away so I just climbed right in. It wasn’t so bad in the cupboard. It was definitely the best place for me. The comedian had fired our permanent maid for what he claimed was ‘sinister tampering with the track’ so we had irregular replacements – trains of twenty-something women who trooped in and immediately out, distressed by the apartment.

  We lived in immovable filth. It wasn’t immovable exactly – we kicked it around – but we never completely rid ourselves of it. That day, the day of the cupboard hiding, the latest maid found me, swinging the door open and then shrugging her shoulders as if to say, ‘Here we go, another rich wacko.’ I didn’t correct her. I didn’t tell her I was poor with a decent personality, a fine personality, which I displayed to almost nobody. Her conviction that I was a wacko seemed to give her strength.

  Before I came to the city, I’d never seen a maid. It wasn’t something I grew up with. I imagined them all as fusty and evangelical, but this one was overweight, elderly and looked like she didn’t give two true hoots about tidiness. I disliked the idea of her going through our things, hoisting out bags of our private rubbish, touching the spines of the empty books that lined the shelves.

  I’m not a slow person but it took me several minutes of close monitoring to understand the connection between the maid and the street psychic. I recognised her faraway stare of other worldliness and her thick, veined ankles.

  ‘You’re not a maid,’ I said, my hand thrusting in and out of a bag of Cheetos, ‘you’re a psychic.’

  She just looked at me.

  ‘Is it hard living a double life?’

  I wanted her to say something supernatural like: ‘You tell me,’ or ‘We all live double lives.’

  There was a heavy sort of silence. ‘Please rate me on the website,’ she said, finally. That night, on the website, I picked the five-star option and gold stars flooded the screen one by one.

  When my boyfriend returned I was seated in my usual place at the window, studying the opposite people, their dark and impossible lives.

  ‘Did you have windows in that place?’ he asked me cautiously.

  ‘Not as clean,’ I replied, smacking two fingers on the lower pane of glass. ‘Smaller.’

  The week after our encounter, I walked past the psychic’s office at least twice a day. She looked sullenly ahead, chewing gum, flicking idly between cards, casually discarding fortunes on her foldable table. It was as if there had been no contact, no five-star review. She never once acknowledged me.

  *

  When we went out, I enjoyed the flickers of concern that passed over his rotating friends’ faces. Should we know this one? I adjusted my skirt and watched incuriously, flatly, as my features blurred into the women before me. ‘I’m new,’ I said, like I was standing in front of a classroom. Those nights we monetised my normalcy until it became hard currency.

  ‘She’s so regular,’ I heard him repeat, ‘that’s what I like about her.’ So I said nothing about the week I spent on a ward unable to recognise my own face, a week when I felt it was possible I would never speak to another regular human being again. In every restaurant, they sat us right up front and if the comedian demanded snow, snow fell from the ceiling.

  *

  Over time, the stuff my boyfriend did became sort of predictable – staying out late, or not coming home, or coming home reeking of downtown places. If I’d ever once spoken on the phone to my mother, I know she would have referred to this as ‘evidence’. She would have used the phrase ‘cheap women’. Like anybody, she had phrases she used frequently. I wanted to ask him, ‘Are you going to downtown places?’ but I didn’t exactly know where the downtown places were. They could have been downtown or they could have been uptown. They might have been in the middle. Then again, anywhere is seedy if you want it to be.

  He also moved the track into our bedroom and forced me to sleep on the couch. He said it comforted him to hear the laughter at night. It improved his routine.

  ‘What routine?’ I asked.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, piling up blankets and pillows.

  I saw a doctor for my sleep problems. It was necessary. She shone a light under my tongue and performed other technicalities. A week later, I was informed I had several STDs, some of the minor ones, but also some of the major ones. I inquired whether I got them all at once, or at different times. The doctor said she couldn’t tell, her education only went so far. She awarded me prescriptions and a lollipop.

  When I asked my boyfriend about it, he just ignored me, made me shower twice a day, repeated the weak jokes he told his mother at her lowest. If I mentioned the track, how the laughter scared me at night, he whispered, ‘We will not survive without that machine,’ and closed his eyes tightly.

  I felt an uncontrollable terror on that couch, as if my life were speeding away from me, slipping and sliding, like a visual gag. I drew a rough sketch of the apartment and mailed it back to my mother with a note that said, ‘I’m very happy here.’ In many ways, I missed her, her way of looking at the world. She would have referred to my stint on the couch as ‘a little holiday’.

  The evenings my boyfriend disappeared, I went to the pharmacy and picked up things. American things that made me happy: teeth-whitening strips, colourful candy, painkillers, sleeping tablets. On the street, not far from the psychic’s office, was a store shaped like a large barn that had everything I needed. I spent shameful hours in the yellow light. The sight of a mustard bottle and a ketchup bottle side by side often moved me to tears. It seemed so wholly patriotic, like the flag that billowed from the comedian’s fake university.

  One quiet evening, as she scanned through my items, I spoke to the counter-girl. She was young and I wondered if she went to college, had a father who mocked her intelligence, a boyfriend who picked her up from work. I went on like this for a while before I said, ‘I like this store.’

  ‘It’s okay.’ She examined my tablets, eyeing the amount and dosage carefully. ‘Are you taking a long and nervous journey?’

  I thought of my walk from the television to the cupboard.

  ‘Yes.’

  She continued scanning. I looked at her.

  ‘You probably want to be famous,’ I said. ‘All young girls do, but let me tell you, my boyfriend’s famous and it’s not worth a damn.’

  She took in my tatty coat, my unwashed hair. People can be very critical with their eyes.

  ‘He has some trouble on the internet,’ I continued, ‘it’s nasty on there.’

  Any space between us closed up.

  ‘Who is he?’

  I told her his name.

/>   ‘Don’t get excited,’ I said. ‘He listens to a laugh track at night, he’s going very weird. He believes it keeps him funny. It’s a fantasy. He’s a fantasist.’ I rolled my eyes in an exaggerated way. ‘He has a lot of things wrong with him, deep in his soul. Have you ever met anyone like that? And I think he’s sleeping with other women. You could be one of those women if you liked? I mean if that’s something you wanted to do – sleep with someone famous and tell your friends about it?’

  She was quiet for a while. ‘No thanks.’

  ‘Cool,’ I said. ‘Thank you for your service.’ I breezed into the open air with my plastic bag of new belongings. Out on the street I paused and thought: I will not be a person who abandons others. No, that’s simply not me. I walked back into the store and confronted the counter-girl.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘Do you have anybody to walk you home? This is a dangerous neighbourhood.’

  She looked up. ‘This is probably the best, maybe second best, street in the entire city.’

  ‘I see,’ I said thoughtfully, considerate. ‘I’m sorry. I really don’t know where anything is.’

  On my journey back I thought of that girl selling her story to the ravenous tabloids, getting a small bit of tawdry cash, taking her friends out for drinks, saying a few words in my honour. In the kitchen I unpacked and divided the tablets into ones I would take now, ones I would take later and ones I would take in a relaxation emergency.

  I took the track out of the comedian’s bedroom and examined it. I’d never been alone with it before. The laughter was a solid sound, the mirth of an old-time audience who meant it. I considered ripping its guts out and leaving the entrails on the kitchen table. I wanted to know how that would sit with me. But I didn’t destroy anybody that evening. I turned off the track and slithered around on the couch for a while.

  At two AM, the intercom buzzed. I wasn’t sure what I expected. A soft comforting voice on the other end telling me not to be scared? Someone to have an emotional moment with? God himself? ‘Hello,’ I said. I recognised the breathy tones of the psychic immediately. And she told me everything that would happen to me. It wasn’t terrible but it was empty. It was one long flash of emptiness. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Over that intercom, into the early morning, the psychic and I lamented and cried and offered the sincerest condolences to my life.