My anxiety is a little bird stuck in my throat, fluttering, fluttering. I swallow, swallow, hoping to drown the fluttering fucker, push it down, make it disappear.
“Wanna come back to bed?” I say, and she nods and walks up to me, naked and sweaty and smelling of sex with a hint of mental illness.
I try not to think how I wanted her to say she does own me. I, too, am possibly smelling of mental illness. I just can’t smell it on myself.
I lift her chin and kiss her, still not entirely done with the bird in my throat. Perhaps it’s not worth it? My dick has a different idea as it pushes insistently against her thigh, and she presses herself against it and says, “Okay, let’s go.”
26
WHEN SHE FINALLY GOES HOME, BRIDE DOESN’T LET ME drive her but instead calls a guy who she says owns a tattoo shop on the boardwalk. He must be a zombie subordinate from Bride’s zombie compound judging by the level of his barely open-eyed indifference to anything around him, including Bride. I wonder if they’re lovers, but Bride ignores him too.
I nap the entire day away as if sleeping off a hangover.
Humans are unpredictable. I’m unpredictable – especially to myself lately. It’s not that my personality has changed. Personality is not supposed to be fluid. It has relatively fixed enduring features, enduring traits, traits such as neuroticism or extraversion. What has changed is my preference, which I thought would stay unchangeable, like my personality. And with my preference, my mission to be a plain girl’s prince has changed as well. Or I should say, there’s no way I’m going to be able to be a prince with Bride. She doesn’t need a prince. She’s crept up on me, her dead eyes mocking me, fixing me in place like an animal being hunted.
But I’m supposed to be the hunter. I am the hunter. But not with her. Am I already stripped of my control after ten passive months with Gloria? Was it $isi, her illness, or was it Dolores and her roses, the fact that she found me, that it was so easy to find me? Can anyone find me? Can anyone hunt me?
In order to regain some control, I decide not to contact Bride right away. It’s an old trick to make a girl think you don’t care about her. I’ve never had to use it because I’ve never cared before, but it comes naturally to me, pretending not to care. I simply decide not to think about her. I’m optimistic about this. Girls respond to being ignored and tend to fall even deeper for you. So that’s what I do.
I start preparing a salad for later. Spinach leaves, peppers. A boiled egg. Bacon, crumbled into chunks. Blue cheese.
I take my time. I’m methodical, meditative. I think of Gloria’s raisin chewing. I allow myself to not worry about time.
Bride told me she was working at the smoothie shack all summer, though she’s not a local girl. She said home was close to the Canadian border; there was a Canadian boyfriend that she lived with for a few months.
The tip of my knife breaks. I think of the kid who sold me the set of the knives – a little pimply twat who knocked on the door of my beach house, and who proceeded to lie about the knives’ magical powers, their indestructibility, their lifetime guarantee. The kid joked that the knives should last till the end of the world. Upstairs, Gloria waited for me in the bedroom, naked. The kid prattled on and I told him okay, okay and took the box of knives from his hands and signed my name on a piece of paper.
Bride said she’s twenty.
“Fuck,” I say. I look at the knife. The world will end now.
I throw the knife in the trash.
Bride said she loves $isi and has shaved her head to show her devotion. She owns all of Charlie’s albums, even the ones before they went electronic. She didn’t say anything about how and if she was impressed with my representing pop stars.
I rummage in the cupboard and find an eight-inch Shun knife that I bought in Tokyo. Nothing will break now. Only the Japanese truly know how to live. I chop. Bride said my other protégé, eighteen-year-old Fifi, is boring but her younger sister listens to her, which is exactly as it should be. Fifi’s specifically designed to appeal to thirteen-year-olds; it would trouble me if Bride herself was into her. Her mother likes Fifi, too, which is fine. Mothers are often undiscerning when it comes to music. This is because it’s been a while since they cared about anything besides lunch boxes.
The bacon is crumbled. I cut up the egg.
Bride loves movies, especially violent movies. She hates sweatpants.
And now I am going to really stop thinking about her.
Celia Stone of Elle magazine calls and says in a breathless voice that she’s been researching the Grey Campaign and is surprised we haven’t–
“Mmmhmm.”
“So, can you tell me a little bit about the campaign?”
I consider hanging up on her, but I’m bored, having spent my whole day working out, napping and watching reruns of The Sopranos. I’ve even slacked off on eating my lovely salad today. Instead of finishing it, eating it, I consumed a tower of guacamole and arugula with egg on crackers, which is not a terrible snack except that I added too much cumin.
“Guy, is this a bad time?”
“Not really. If you’re having fun.” I picture her: middle-aged, wide-bodied, carefully outlined makeup, too much of it, kooky haircut (diagonal bangs, multicoloured highlights, that sort of thing).
She coos, “What made you so in tune with people, with what they’re going through? The stigma of being the brain tumour victim or the cancer survivor – I mean, we only have these terms with negative connotations, but now there’s this new slew of young people who are fighters, who don’t pity themselves just because they’re sick or their friends are – I mean, you must feel some kind of responsibility for this. I mean, in a sense, this is a great triumph.”
“A triumph?”
“Yes.”
“Like I won something in a contest? What’s behind door number three? A tumour!”
“Sorry?”
“Never mind. Look, there were no noble motives behind this. For me. It’s just my job. Money.”
Her voice goes a little higher. “You did the campaign because it was your job? Because you get paid?”
“Of course. What else? It’s just something that we had to deal with. And I had an idea.”
“It’s a calculated move, not some calling that you’ve had?”
“Leading question.”
“I’m just making sure I understand correctly. And Gloria said you’re very modest. She said you’d dispute that you felt this great social responsibility.”
I laugh. It’s funny. It’s funny she would say that. But it’s predictable she would say that, too, try to make me into a fantasy. “Gloria’s delusional.”
Celia Stone goes on and on and I say, “Okay,” and hang up to check the voice mail. There is a message, but it’s from Mark. I delete it.
The next few days are a mechanical fulfillment of tasks: workouts, meals, naps, walks with Dog, The Sopranos, reading business emails but not replying to them, sleeping – or not sleeping but trying to sleep.
I finish watching The Sopranos. It’s an interesting show. I can’t relate to any of the characters but I like their mumbled talk, their flashiness, their foreignness. The themes of the show are mostly loyalty and revenge. A character named Ralph kills the protagonist’s horse. The protagonist kills Ralph. The protagonist’s nephew helps to dispose of the body. The whole show follows this pattern: something happens, someone dies because of it, someone kills someone who caused the death, someone else kills the someone who killed the someone who killed the first someone.