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, recalclass="underline" 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.
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.