Now I stepped out to the street in my fur stole and crash helmet, drank off my malt forty. That’s when I saw her, Rosalie, standing there in radiant slut-majesty beneath a urine-stained awning. She was talking to a tiny lady who might, in a period of categorical leniency, have passed for dwarf. This lady was selling syringes from a paper bag. I was waiting for her to recognize me, an occasional customer. Rosalie crouched in her pumps, as though smalling herself for some kind of progressive-minded field work with the dwarf. Or maybe she had finally found somebody who, as she tended to put it, really, really made sense. I smashed my bottle on a nearby sculpture, this hideous tinwork someone had dragged to the curb, maybe the second-to-last act of its agonized maker.
“The show’s started, bitch,” I said.
Rosalie wheeled.
I figured she was looking for someone to talk to her that way.
It was a good guess.
We bought an old Merc with turquoise-tipped window handles, drove past green fields and shimmering phallocracies of silo to see her bi-polar brother in Pittsburgh, PA. Going over a river I had a shudder, a sense of the terrible that would not be mine. We checked into a Super 8 motel with a bottle of Maker’s Mark bourbon and a running conversation about trust. I said for her to say a secret. She confessed she had never undertaken a proper bowel movement, that only on the rarest of days, fecal baubles, marble-sized things, pressed and shiny, worried themselves through her.
This is something between us now, and I can’t say it doesn’t affect me on the job. I suffer from lackey bitterness. Treachery is an easy sideways step.
“You should see the woman try to take a dump,” I’ll tell the design team, looking to comfort them after some venomous memo from Rosalie detailing their failure to achieve a “totalizing space for commerce and dialog.”
And here’s the other thing: I can’t remember the secret I told Rosalie. I must have told her something.
That’s how that works, right?
So, what’s the story?
What the hell is wrong with me?
Where the hell is my inner soul?
When it looked like our band was going to be the next great revolution in popular idiocy, I broke it off with Rosalie. A teenage industry groomsman took us out for transexuallyserved gnocchi and told us our time had come. The only thing we needed to do now was concoct some version of music. With all the speedballs and blowjobs coming my way, I figured there’d be little of me left over for some version of Rosalie.
Our double-album debut, Barbecue Pork Class Suicide, was snubbed by the mainstream and reviled by the underground. Or maybe it was the reverse. Either way, I can tell you it hurt. When the spiteful alcoholics you have always depended on for uplift turn their backs, it’s time to call it a nice post-college try.
Once in a while, though, in the elevator at work, someone will stop me, a man my age with a cell phone, a portfolio case. He will ask me if I am who I am, recall with wonder something I did on stage with safety razors, mayonnaise. Maybe it’s some dim gift I’ve given him, some phony idea that he’s reached into danger long enough for one life. Now he can make some calls, do some deals. But neither of us knows what danger is. Neither of us is sinking fast through lake weeds.
Tonight, Rosalie wants to have a drink after work. She sent me e-mail about it from a few desks away. She says she has an errand to run, that she will meet me at this new bar I keep walking past but avoiding, one of those places where they pay slinky women with nose gold to sip peanut-butter martinis and approximate feeling. The errand must be a ruse. Probably Rosalie doesn’t want the staff to see us leave together, which, after all the rumor I’ve spewed, is fine by me.
We sit in bean bags in a low bright room. This is one of those theme bars. Maybe the theme is childhood in suburbia. It doesn’t matter, the theme is always the same. The theme is we’re not black, after all. Everything is a variation on this theme.
Rosalie calls over the waitress and they talk for a while about somebody’s new art gallery. The waitress is famous for a piece where she served Bloody Marys mixed with her menstrual blood. Word had it she overdid the tabasco.
I wait for the moment when our waitress stops being a notorious trangressor of social mores and becomes our waitress again, look for it in her eyes, that sad blink, and order a beer.
“So,” says Rosalie, poking through a bowl of Swedish fish, “how are you?”
“Man, those shelves are really coming along. It’s a very exciting time.”
“You’re funny. But forget work. I don’t want to talk about work. That’s all I do now. Meetings. Meetings. Value triangles.”
“The pressure, the pressure.”
“No, really. I mean, it’s great, but what the hell happened? Who is this woman talking to you right now? Do you know this woman? Does she bear any resemblance to the little twit who used to follow you around, hang on your every word?”
“I miss that little twit.”
“I don’t,” says Rosalie. “And fuck you, you miss her. I don’t miss her at all.”
“What?”
“What what? Did you think I was going to spend my whole life trailing you around, soaking up your bullshit? Worshipping you? That was a dark time for me. I learned a lot though, I can say that.”
“And your pussy ran like a river,” I say.
“True,” says Rosalie. “How’s Glenda?” She sticks her tits out when she says this. This is what I’ve always loved about Rosalie. She makes the obvious subtle somehow. This is her art. Or maybe I’ve just always been smitten by her tits.
“Glenda’s in bad shape,” I say.
“Oh my God, what happened?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I say.
“I know, I know. I can’t talk about Kyle and it’s a year later.”
“So,” I say, “are we going to have a commiseration fuck, or what? I have shelves to build.”
I have no subtlety when it comes to Rosalie. It’s what I’ve always counted on her loving about me.
We do that thing of lying in bed and touching each other softly like we’re brother and sister on a naughty expedition. We do that thing of falling asleep feeling all sad and superior to fools who fuck. I’ve never been too keen on this particular activity, but it’s good to do once in a while, keeps you sharp for the day you may rejoin the human species. It’s a nice dense lull in the thin-seeming quick. The only thing is, Rosalie falls asleep before I do, and now I’m up on an elbow studying one of her tits, the way it slinks off and gathers at her top rib, the skin smoothed out on her chest bone. I pull on myself, wonder how I can get my teeth on her nip without violating this cuddle paradigm we’ve got going, and also without enacting that babyman suckle which would probably sicken us both, not to mention Shrike, the dog, who’s heaped near us, brooding on his usurpation. Rosalie turns over and I see those prayer-wheel spokes sticking out past her panties. The swirls have begun to fade.
Next thing there’s light in the room and Rosalie’s sitting up. I guess she dresses, but somehow I miss it. The dog is doing his big dumb click dance on the hardwood.
“See you at work,” she says.
“Wait,” I say, “did this happen or not happen?”
“Nothing happened,” she says. “So I don’t care if it happened or not.”
“We can talk about it later,” I say.
“Or not,” says Rosalie.