by Siel Ju
“A part of me thinks I’m still running away from my problems,” I said, “but I’ve been back in LA for a while now and still nothing’s holding me here.”
He was quiet for a minute, then said, “Are you saying I’m a problem?”
I was surprised by this. “Of course not,” I said. “This has nothing to do with you.” I paused. “Haven’t you ever wanted to live anywhere besides LA?”
“I traveled all last year,” he said.
I was about to say that wasn’t the same thing as living somewhere else, but I didn’t think he’d be willing to acknowledge the difference. He wouldn’t understand it. “That’s true,” I said. “You did.” I shrugged, my shoulder nuzzling against his chest. “It’s just a fantasy I have when I’m feeling bored with work.”
This seemed to satisfy him. He collected my hair into a loose ponytail in his left hand, then massaged my shoulders. I turned my head and we kissed deeply. We kept kissing, him running his hands over my arms.
“This feels good,” I said, and meant it. “It was never like this with my ex.”
He stiffened. “What was it like?”
“Different,” I said. “This is better. Like college, but better.”
“What do you mean?” He laughed nervously. “How like college?”
I leaned in again but he pulled back, still smiling. “You owe me a story. You promised,” he said. I rolled my eyes. I turned my face forward, away from him. He started caressing my arms again. “Tell me,” he said.
I hesitated, but then started in. “My ex—he was really more of a fuck buddy if I’m being really honest about it,” I said. “He worked at a financial firm, always busy, so we’d basically just meet up to have sex.”
Already, his hands felt more rigid.
“He lived in this condo in Venice, fourth floor, overlooking the beach. This one time when I walked in he was on the balcony, clipping his nails. So we did it there. He didn’t even take off his jacket, like he didn’t have the time. It was dark but there were these surfer kids by the water that I thought were watching us. I told him we were going to end up on YouTube but he said people couldn’t see if the lights were off.”
“Were they?”
I couldn’t tell if his tone was anxious or angry. “My point is, it wasn’t a good relationship, or even a relationship. We barely talked and when we did it was like we were just trying to one-up each other. The sex was like that too. By the end, anyway.”
He was quiet. He’d stopped moving his hands. They were folded neatly, one on top of the other, just above my belly button.
“Hey,” I said. I turned my body and burrowed my face into the crevice of his neck. “Are you okay?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
I propped myself up on an elbow. His face was a scrabble of antipathy and dejection, though I could tell a small part of him was still struggling to shrug it off. He shifted his eyes to look at me. I kissed him and he kissed me back, reluctantly, then forcefully.
His manner changed. He turned so I was beneath him on the couch. He was simulating a sudden passion but I could feel a violence beneath it. Suddenly, I could taste his teeth. His body seemed bonier, pressing down on me like a dull weapon. He shoved his hand down my pants. His fingers felt cold and severe. He turned his hand and roughly ground his knuckles into me. “Ow,” I said. “Careful.” He said sorry under his breath, then unzipped my pants and did it again, a bit more gently. He tugged at my hair, gripping it near the roots; the pull wasn’t hard, but I found myself growing afraid.
“Matt, stop,” I said.
“What’s wrong?” he said. I pushed his chest and he sat up. He scraped his hands through his hair then exhaled, a loose sigh. He turned his head to look at me.
The space between us felt precarious. “You were hurting me,” I said.
“Really?”
His expression was hard but uncertain, like he was trying to decide whether to be apologetic or angry. He watched me zip up and straighten my clothes. Then he took my hand. I let it hang limply in his palm.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought we were having fun.”
I got up and took the deli containers to the kitchen, then stayed there for a minute, breathing deeply.
When I came back Matt was still in the same position, seated with his feet on the floor, his left hand extended to where he’d been holding mine. “Are we fighting?” he said.
“No.” I stood there, on the other side of the coffee table. “I don’t know.”
“I thought it was what you wanted.”
I looked down at my feet. The nail polish on my left big toe was slightly chipped, had been since the coffee shop date with Blake. He’d pointed this out as soon as he saw it, when I’d finished the latte and we’d stood up to leave. “If you can’t even paint them properly, what’s the fucking point?” he’d said. “Why draw attention to something ugly?” He’d stomped out in front of me, his expensive loafers doing their confident heel-toe heel-toe away. It was then that I first noticed the coarseness of my feet, their pudgy stubbiness. The discovery was painful, but also had a cleansing, illuminating quality. I marveled at how I’d never noticed this before, how no one else had had the blunt honesty to point out this obvious fact about my feet to me. That was when, I think, I finally began to accept it wouldn’t ever happen with Blake, that it was time to give up on my self-improvement project. I could lose some weight and repaint my toes, sure. But I’d never be able to change the shape of my feet.
I realized Matt had said something but that I hadn’t heard it. I looked up. “What?” I said.
“It feels like you want me to leave.”
I looked at my feet again, curling my toes under. “It’s not that,” I said. I could feel his eyes on me, though I didn’t look at him. He sat there, breathing audibly. I remembered the way his slack, sleeping body had looked, swaddled in sheets. The memory was so exact I could tilt and shift it in my mind, examine it from different angles. There was something about his splayed posture that looked like yearning, even in its helplessness, that hinted at some tangible pleasure between us, even if incoherent and messy.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m not good at telling stories.”
I met his eyes. The curtains shivered. The chilled breeze was uncomfortable, but consoling too, how it prickled the skin in its predictable way.
Holiday Love Scarf
My friend Matt was a Sagittarius. For his twenty-fifth birthday, he invited everyone he knew on Facebook to a comedy show at Largo, followed by drinks. Per Matt’s insistence, I ended up carpooling from Santa Monica with two friends of his I hadn’t met before—Christian, a recent grad school dropout who drove with his angular face set in self-absorbed silence, and Danielle, a project coordinator for a national environmental nonprofit. Danielle was a young, heavy girl whose angry brown eyes contradicted the childlike lilt of her voice. For most of the drive, she spoke urgently about the harmful effects of BPA on human reproduction, occasionally dropping her voice to make jarring sexual innuendos about sperm motility. She acted horrified at the mini bottle of Aquafina in my purse. “All those plastic toxins—It’s really not something you can afford to do to your body, at your age,” she said, then quickly added, “Our age, I mean.”
I was thirty-two. “It’s okay,” I said. “The planet could use fewer kids.”
Danielle took a big inhale, but Christian preempted her by pulling into the parking lot. He offered to pay but we both handed him fivers.
The comedy show was a strange mix of droll and slapstick humor. It went by quickly, and the crowd walked en masse to the dim, speakeasy-style bar next door known for its complicated and expensive cocktails. I started a conversation with the woman next to me, Natalie, who said she was going to visit her mother in San Diego for the holidays, but that she wasn’t looking forward to it.
“My boyfriend got me a book, Codependent No More,” she said. “It’s not that my mom’s ever forced me to do anything, but I’ve always
felt obligated.”
She sounded vaguely wistful. I told her that my mother used to pepper me with small, passive-aggressive insults about my appearance when I saw her, but that things were easier now that she’d remarried and moved back to Korea.
“I miss her sometimes, but I have to admit I’m happier during the holidays,” I said.
Danielle, who I didn’t realize had been listening, piped in. “So what are you doing for Christmas?”
“This kind of stuff,” I said, gesturing in a circle to signify the evening.
“Don’t you have any other family?” There was her horrified tone again.
I ignored her. “I’ll be back,” I said to Natalie. “I’m going to buy the birthday boy a drink.”
Matt and I had dated briefly when we’d first met a few years before. It hadn’t worked out, but due mostly to his good nature we’d unexpectedly become pretty good friends, the kind that shared dating woes. He’d recently had a couple brief affairs with married women. The experiences had left him feeling jilted, though he’d been the one to end things. The women had seemed too glad to see him go.
“You said they weren’t really your type physically and had too much emotional baggage,” I said.
“It’s that they never even considered leaving,” he said. “Not even on a fantasy level.”
“Can’t you ever just have fun?”
Matt always went for strong, independent women, a commendable trait, but after landing one he’d glom onto her in a cloying, wheedling way until she inevitably decided she was better off alone. Then he’d call me to rehash what happened, cataloguing the timeline of the relationship in the listless tone of existential writers before starting to whine self-pityingly. Whenever he did this I’d want to slap him and tell him to grow a pair, then would feel guilty and suggest going out for ice cream. His favorite flavor was mint chocolate chip.
This night Matt was at the center of a dozen or so of his coworkers who’d formed a possessive circle around him, busy rehashing the show. I saw Matt was holding a full drink already, and so made my way to the bar to get a drink just for myself.
People ebbed and flowed, ignoring me. After a while, Natalie came to stand by the bar too. “I wasn’t going to come when my boyfriend canceled,” she said. “But I’m glad I did. I liked what you said about your mother.”
“You mean we’re both codependent?” I said, aggrieved.
“No, no,” she said. “I have this friend who just had a baby. She moved to Simi Valley, had no one to talk to, so I drove up to visit her just to be nice. Then when I got there, she started making fun of the way some people dress, and halfway through, I realized she was talking about me.”
“Did you say something?”
“No, but I wish I had.” She sighed. “It’s a process. Baby steps.”
Her expression was more resigned than hopeful. I noticed she was dressed very chicly, with expensive leather boots and an oversized knitted scarf. I asked her where she’d gotten the scarf and she said she sold it at her boutique in Santa Monica. “We’re neighbors,” I said, and she gave me a ride home.
The next afternoon, driving, I called Matt. I hadn’t gotten to talk to him much at the bar, and had left early, which I felt guilty about; he tended to take little things personally. But he sounded happy to hear from me.
“So what did you think?” he said.
“He was funny,” I said. “I liked the joke about the paleo—”
“No, no, I mean, about Christian. He’s wanted to meet you since he saw that picture of you on Facebook. The one from Halloween, where you’re hitting me with a ruler.”
I’d dressed up as a sexy school teacher—tight blouse, cat-eye glasses, and a flashy copy of Flesh Unlimited. The ruler had been my bookmark. “Really?” I said. “He barely said anything to me.”
“He can be a little shy until you get to know him. He’s really smart. He remembers everything, and he speaks French. In grad school he was studying this crazy photographer, Hippolyte—”
“Is he unemployed?”
“He has a second interview at this architecture firm.”
I agreed to go out with him, then hanging up, felt disgruntled that the one guy interested in me was jobless, lost and floundering in his thirties. I tried to remember what Christian looked like in more detail. When he’d smiled I’d noticed his nice teeth, and in my memory the angularity of his face grew more definite until his expression turned confident, knowing. An architecture firm sounded cool, I thought.
I parked at a meter and went into Chado Tea Room. I was there for a writers and publicists roundtable; the idea was to bring the two sides together to talk out how to help each other. It was an informal thing organized by the editor of a health newsletter that I wrote for regularly. As I’d expected, the meeting was all women, a dozen of them, the PR agents dressed smartly, the writers more dowdily in bulky jeans. I sat down and ordered a maple scone. The two women near me introduced themselves, then went back to talking about a male restaurateur they despised.
“And then he told my friend he would’ve gone home with me if he wasn’t already seeing someone.”
“Seriously?”
“It’s like he can’t conceive of the idea that I might not be attracted to him.”
“He’s so handsy too.”
I tried to join in. “I knew a guy like that,” I said. “I always wanted to tell him off, but when you do, they think you’re flirting with them.”
“So what did you do?” The first one asked curiously.
“Nothing,” I said.
“But then they’ll go around telling people you’re into them.”
“They’ll do that regardless.”
“True.” The woman looked vexed and thoughtful; her eyes were filled with angry idealism. She was in her early twenties, the baby fat on her cheeks adorable against the serious set of her jaw. It felt sweet that she thought this wrong could somehow be righted. In fact, her mood was infectious. By the time I was on my way home, I found myself twitchy with a vague sense of agency, that if I thought about it hard enough, I could find a way to tweak the world a little for the better. It was rush hour. Dejected drivers were changing lanes too often, further stalling the traffic. I imagined opening my windows and yelling out, “Don’t you see what you’re doing?” then let the thought slowly dissipate, along with the empowered mood. The phone rang.
“I wasn’t sure when would be a good time to call.” It was Christian. “Matt said you work sporadically.”
He sounded different than I remembered, calmer, which made me unexpectedly nervous. I felt as if we were riding up an escalator, he a step above me and looking down while I craned my neck up suppliantly. I wanted to bring us back into equilibrium.
“Matt said you liked that picture of me hitting him,” I said.
“Huh?” he said, then laughed briefly. “Well, it’s the first picture I saw of you. Look, I know it’s a little weird. I was going to say something last night but that Danielle girl talked our ears off, and then I turned around and you were gone.” His tone turned gentle. “I’m really not a creepy person. Matt can vouch for me.”
I tried to match his tone, but it came out petulant and warbly. The anxious part of me still wanted to make him uncomfortable. “I don’t know anything about you,” I said. “What kind of work do you do?”
“Actually, I just got a new job,” he said quickly, “starting Monday. I mean, I still have to call them back, but they’ve made the offer.” He breathed in sharply. “I thought maybe I could take you out this weekend and we could celebrate.”
I found the slight nervous pause in his speech charming. I immediately accepted. This seemed to have the effect of either repelling or disorienting him; he got off the phone quickly, saying he’d text with the details. His sudden desertion turned me morose and apathetic. I drove glumly, resigned to the traffic, resentful that the guys I met showed only cold arrogance and flaccid inhibition, never anything in between.
I decided to
call my friend Erin at work. Usually, Erin was my favorite wingwoman, though I’d known better than to ask her to go to Matt’s party. Erin disliked Matt. The night I’d met him, I’d left the bar with him, abandoning Erin. In my defense she’d been busy making out with a guy that she ended up taking home that night too. But that guy had never called Erin again, while Matt had stuck around. For that, she was bitter, and she took it out on Matt, though she wasn’t really a vengeful person, just glum of late. When she picked up, she seemed glad for the interruption; her voice had that efficient, workplace tone, tempered with a brooding angst. I could see her in her plastic office at the bank, her hair pinned efficiently away from her face, her feet shifting slightly in her heels as she powered through her files. She said her work always felt satisfying when she was in it, but hollow when dissected in retrospect. To cheer her up I suggested that she leave work early and we go holiday shopping, just for ourselves. I gave her the address of Natalie’s boutique.
The boutique was a cute, little place on Montana Avenue, an upscale shopping street. Several slim, well-heeled women browsed, their faces grim and determined, as if from the effort of keeping their weight down through middle age. When we walked in, Erin and Natalie took to each other immediately. They quickly began bemoaning the dating scene in LA. Natalie said she’d met her boyfriend through OKCupid, and encouraged us to try it too.
“I’ve had to retrain myself completely,” she said, “to actually make this relationship work.”
