Who You Know

by Theresa Alan

  They grilled me for forty-five more minutes and told me I’d either get a rejection letter or a phone call in the coming weeks. I thanked them profusely for the opportunity to meet with them. I couldn’t face Jen and Avery after failing so miserably, so I left without stopping by their office. The fake smile I’d had plastered on all morning melted from my face the moment I left the building.

  On the drive home I reviewed every stupid thing I’d said. The emptiness I felt in my stomach and chest swelled into an uneasy nausea.

  Small Victories

  In the dark weeks of unemployment, I often thought that my life was like decaffeinated coffee: utterly pointless. Then I’d think of that thirteen-year-old girl who weighed 680 pounds and died of a heart attack in front of the television she never left. Her body was covered in bedsores and there was feces caught between the folds of her flesh because sometimes it was too difficult for her to haul herself to the bathroom. Her story was a sad one, no question. But sometimes I’d think to myself that, you know, even on my worst days, damn, at least I wasn’t trapped in front of the television shitting on myself; at least I didn’t go around with shit caught in my flabs of fat.

  It’s important to celebrate the small victories in life.

  Feigning Nymphomania

  As soon as I got home I peeled off my constricting interview suit and got into my beloved, battered sweats. I had just started making dinner when Greg came home.

  “Hey, beautiful,” he said, wrapping his arms around me and kissing my neck. “This is what I like to see. The wife in the kitchen making my dinner.” He smiled his goofy, lopsided grin that had forced me to fall in love with him.

  “Soon-to-be wife and don’t get used to it.” I said it lightly, but I wasn’t kidding about that last part. Since we’d moved in together, Greg had been busy with classes (he’d had to finish a pre-rec this summer, so three days after we got here in June, he’d become nothing more than a blur of textbooks and notebooks and calculators), and I’d been bored and unemployed, so I’d taken to doing most of the cooking and cleaning. It was important that Greg realized that once I finally got a job, he’d have to start doing a much bigger share of domestic duties.

  “How’d the interview go?”

  I groaned. “Let’s just say I no longer feel above doing temp work.”

  “You’re going to find something soon, don’t worry. What are you making?”

  “Chili and cornbread and salad. Wanna cut salad ingredients?”

  “Salad?” Greg whined. He was not a fan of vegetables.

  “Some of us need to lose weight so we don’t look repugnant in our wedding dresses.”

  “I don’t want there to be an ounce less of you in the world.”

  “You won’t love me if I’m skinny?”

  “I’ll always love you.”

  “Good. Cut the carrots.” I chopped the garlic and onions for the chili. I wasn’t much of a cook, but I had a few simple recipes that I was capable of making. I would have liked to have made vegetarian chili to cut down on calories, but Greg firmly believed in red meat at every meal. So I compromised with low-fat ground beef, which was wickedly expensive.

  Watching Greg cut carrots made me smile. He looked so cute, concentrating so intently. Greg had kind hazel eyes and, compared to me, was a giant at six-foot-two. He was thin, too, all elbows and angles.

  “Greg, what are you doing?” I asked. He was chopping the carrots into huge pieces. “Do the words bite size mean anything to you?”

  “Are you dissing my carrot-cutting abilities? Were you aware that Gourmet magazine has offered to pay me thousands of dollars to photograph my exquisitely shorn carrots for their cover?”

  “Really? That’s fabulous. When do we see the dough?”

  “Oh, well, I turned them down of course. I didn’t want to sell out. My carrots are only for the eyes of my beloved.”

  “Oh no, please, sell out. I’m ready to sell my plasma and root through strangers’ garbage for aluminum cans to recycle. At five cents a can, we could be out of debt, who knows, maybe before our eighty-sixth birthdays. So what do you want to do tonight?” I asked.

  “I have to go back to campus. We have a group project to work on.”

  “Oh,” I groaned. “We never spend time together anymore. We never have time for sex these days.” Since Greg started grad school, we were down to having sex only once or twice a week. It wasn’t like I was starving for it: In the long, dull hours of unemployment, I was up to masturbating approximately fourteen times a day. While I still appreciated Greg’s gentle caresses, the efficiency of the Magic Wand was astonishing and reliable, and I was growing increasingly dependant on its ferociously intense, insistent throb. I needed to get a job soon, if only to keep my relationship with Greg intact. Greg’s friends had warned him not to move in with me. They said women never wanted to have sex post-cohabitation. I loathed Greg’s friends and would feign nymphomania to prove them wrong.

  I pretended to pout.

  “Guess we’d better do something about that.” He set the knife down, put his hand behind my neck, and pulled my lips to his. The kiss was delicious, but I was really hungry and not at all horny. Although the pertinent region of my anatomy was nearly callused from overuse, I didn’t feel I could say no when Greg took my hand and led me to the bedroom.

  We quickly got out of our clothes, as mechanically as if we were getting ready for a doctor’s examination. I lay on the bed on my back and Greg practically leapt on me, kissing and groping me with puppy-like eagerness. I clenched my jaw and willed myself not to shout, “Oh, just get on with it already, I’m starving!”

  Greg’s attempts to arouse me were thorough, if ineffective. “Come inside me,” I whispered in the most vixenish voice I could muster.

  “You’re not ready.”

  When we’d first started dating, I’d loved how we could engage in foreplay for hours, and he never seemed the slightest bit bored or put out by it. But right now, my stomach was growling, time was of the essence, and I’d already given myself three orgasms that day (far fewer than usual as I’d been busy with the job interview). I could do without for one evening.

  I wondered if McKenna Marketing would call. Maybe I was being too hard on myself. Maybe I had done better than I thought.

  God, I was so hungry I was even salivating over the thought of the dinner salad awaiting me just a few short feet away. Oh Christ, we hadn’t eaten the vegetables I bought for that ratatouille recipe I’d meant to cook last week. Nuts. We did not have the money to squander on wasted food, and yet week after week I replaced clear plastic bags of gelatinous murk with clear plastic bags of fresh produce. It was a vicious cycle of good intentions. I knew I should eat more fresh . . .

  Just then, something strange happened. Greg’s urgent fingers had managed to find just the right spot, and my worries about the day suddenly vanished. All I could think about was how good his fingers felt. I let out a little moan. Greg smiled. To him, a moan was the equivalent of a standing ovation. He continued on, thus encouraged, and I applauded his efforts.

  Bravo, bravo! I thought, as Greg kindly inspired the day’s fourth orgasm.

  AVERY

  Possibility

  Driving home from work, I studied the people in the cars beside me. The woman with her outreached arm, a cigarette dangling from her fingertips; the teenage boy who looked so young, his entire future ahead of him, a gamut of possibilities; a good-looking guy in his early thirties. I imagined what would happen if he rear-ended me—gently of course. We’d get out of our cars. He’d be all concerned. I’d say, “Don’t worry, what’s one more scratch. There is no need to get the insurance agencies involved.” He’d be so moved by my kindness that he’d say, “Let me at least take you to dinner.” I’d agree, and we’d go to a fabulous restaurant where we’d laugh, I’d say witty things, he’d say intelligent and sweet things, and we’d live happily ever after. He wouldn’t be rich, merely comfortably wealthy. He’d have a nice home and car an
d like to travel. He’d tell me I was beautiful.

  Or maybe a tire on my car would blow and I’d be stranded along the side of the road. He’d pull over to help me. He’d be a professional of some sort, but despite his white collar, he’d know how to fix my car because mechanics was his hobby as a teenager (maybe he paid his way through college working at a garage during the summer). While he worked on my car, we’d talk. It would turn out we had a lot in common. We’d laugh. I would be struck by his amazing smile. He’d ask me out. He’d take me on a picnic by a creek in a forest. We’d drink wine and eat grapes, Brie and bread, and gourmet chocolate. We’d live happily ever after.

  Gideon was not the man for me; it just took me a few years to figure that out. There were lots of single men out there. There was a world of possibility.

  Now I just needed a date.

  The story of Gideon and me might sound very romantic if you didn’t know the ending.

  We met five years ago when I was helping facilitate a focus group. Participants earned forty dollars for an hour of their time. They watched a twenty-minute pilot of a sitcom, discussed what they liked or didn’t like for thirty minutes, and then filled out a profile of themselves.

  It was unusual for a lowly teleresearcher to assist with a focus group, but my manager at the time thought I had potential. (Unfortunately, she was fired under mysterious circumstances, and with her went all my chances for advancement.)

  When gorgeous Gideon walked in, I stared at him with the fawning gaze of a groupie meeting her rock star idol for the first time. Then I dropped the entire stack of handouts I’d been holding. Fifteen years of dance training and in the presence of a good-looking guy, every shred of grace I’d developed vanished. The papers billowed out around me and I scrambled to collect them. Gideon helped me pick them up.

  “Here you go,” he said. He had long, dark hair and a disarmingly sexy smile.

  “Thank you,” I mumbled.

  While the pilot was shown, there was blessedly little I could do to further embarrass myself. I sat in my corner behind the focus group members, trying to hide my smile. It had been such a long time since a man had gotten my heart racing, and I rather liked it.

  During the discussion portion, when it was his turn to comment on the program, he talked about how the women in the sitcom were simpering idiots and Hollywood needed to come up with some stronger roles for women characters. He was sick of women in TV shows always being young and pretty and stupid.

  Not only was he gorgeous and considerate, he also noticed how women in television were objectified. He was a perfect, perfect man.

  From the profile he’d filled out at the end of the discussion, I learned that Gideon was Single/Never Married and twenty-four years old, which was a year younger than I was at the time. It surprised me to see that he hadn’t gotten past high school. He spoke so eloquently I thought he must have had at least a master’s degree in something esoteric and highly intellectual.

  The profile said he worked at an art boutique and as a part-time model, and under hobbies and activities, he listed jogging and watching movies.

  The form also contained his address. He lived in my neighborhood, not far from me.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about him. Over the next few weeks, I started visiting all the art boutiques I knew of in Boulder. At first, I wasn’t conscious of what I was doing, but then I began going to boutiques as deliberately as a spy on a reconnaissance mission. In three weeks I’d covered all of them but hadn’t found him. It occurred to me that I might have gone to the boutique where he worked but on a day or at a time he wasn’t on the schedule. So I went to them all again, on different days at different times. I felt vaguely like a stalker, but I couldn’t help myself. For all I knew he could have had a girlfriend or been gay, but I hadn’t been so attracted to someone in a long time and visiting art galleries wasn’t a bad way to spend my time, so who was it hurting? Except I never did run into him.

  So then I got extreme.

  I devised a plan that involved me jogging in our neighborhood at different times of day, hoping to run into him. This plan had many flaws. For one thing, what were the chances I was going to run into him? For another thing, I hated jogging. I found it a monotonous way to work out.

  I began by jogging two miles a day, very slowly. I made sure I looked casually adorable whenever I jogged. For the first few weeks I kept looking for him and expecting to see him. Soon though, I stopped worrying so much about meeting Gideon, and I began to actually get into the running. I enjoyed feeling my endurance improve, and I began to push myself more and more. I hadn’t pushed myself physically like that since I’d danced in college. I had grown complacent with my yoga workouts, doing the same routine day after day, and I loved that I had found a workout that excited me again after such a long exercise rut.

  Three months after I first met Gideon, I almost never thought about him anymore. Then one Saturday I saw a man with long, shampoo-commercial beautiful hair jog past me. I sped up to get a better look—it was him!

  If I’d bumped into him right away after I’d begun jogging, I probably would have been too nervous to talk to him, but now I wasn’t particularly invested in getting to know him, and I didn’t feel any shyness. “You’re Gideon? Right?”

  He nodded.

  “Maybe you don’t remember me. I work at McKenna Marketing.”

  “Yeah, sure, I remember you.”

  “So you live around here?”

  He nodded again.

  “I’m Avery.”

  He gave me the slightest smile.

  We jogged in silence for a while. I was in decent shape, but keeping up with him wasn’t easy. Finally he stopped at a drinking fountain in the park. I waited, worrying that if I had kept on going that would have been rude, and worrying that waiting for him was presumptuous.

  “You’re a dancer,” he said.

  “I was a dancer. Wait, how did you know that?”

  He pointed to my feet, which had gone to third position out of habit. “You carry yourself well. You’re very graceful.”

  “Thank you.” I was suddenly very conscious of how I was standing. I shifted my feet awkwardly.

  “Ballet?”

  “Years of it, but I was never that great at it. I was more into modern and jazz.”

  “Cool.”

  I nodded. I nodded some more. “Well, I guess I should get going. Maybe I’ll see you around.”

  “Yeah.” We looked at each other, then the ground, then each other. We nodded and smiled. I was just about to turn to leave when he said, “Hey, do you have plans for tonight?”

  “Not really.”

  “I was going to make spaghetti for dinner. Would you like to join me? I live just a few blocks from here.”

  I couldn’t believe it. After all my scheming and plotting to meet him, not only had we finally met, but he’d asked me out for a date. It was fate. We were meant to be. “That sounds great.” I turned to go, then turned back. “I’m . . . I’m a vegetarian so if you could leave the meatballs out of mine, that would be great.” I braced myself for him to say, “Oh, why are you a vegetarian?” or make some kind of smart-alecky comment. I’d been veggie since I was thirteen and I’d spent most of my lifetime defending what was apparently a very threatening alternative dietary lifestyle to some people. But all he said was “Cool.”

  I was in love.

  For us to meet like that—what were the chances if destiny didn’t mean for us to be together?

  My heart soared all afternoon with the knowledge that I had found my soul mate.

  The gods of destiny weren’t around to help me make the right decisions about what to wear, however. As soon as I got to his place, I wanted to run home and change. He opened the door in a blue silk shirt, meticulously pressed black pants, and expensive black leather shoes; I was wearing a long loose cotton skirt and blouse. He looked like he belonged on a runway in Milan, and I looked like I belonged in the parking lot of a Dead concert selling beads.


  Gideon didn’t say much over dinner. I asked him a lot of questions, and he told me that, just like me, he’d grown up in Colorado and had lived in New York for a while. He was there for nine months before going broke. He’d gone there to make it as a model, but it wasn’t until he came back to Colorado that he started getting any work. He did mostly ads for local department stores. Even so, the pay, he explained, was unsteady, and he’d taken a job at the boutique. He didn’t know anything about art, and he didn’t have any experience in sales, but the owner of the boutique thought he had the right look.

  “Do you like it, working at the boutique?” I asked.

  “Yeah it’s okay. Rich people, you know, they’re a trip. They think nothing about dropping seventy grand on a canvas with some scribbles on it. The opening nights are fun. Afterward, I get to help Glenda, that’s the owner, finish up all the wine and finger foods. That’s my favorite part.”

  I spent the entire evening staring at him dreamily, awed by his beautiful, delicate grace.

  “Why are you smiling? You’ve been grinning like, all night.”

  I couldn’t tell him that it was because I was just so happy. “It must be the wine,” I said.

  “Well, have some more.” He grabbed the bottle and filled my glass. “Your smile is beautiful.”

  One year later we went to a justice of the peace and vowed we’d be together till death do us part. Two years after that, we got quietly divorced. There was no fighting, no arguing over who got what. In fact, we never argued during our marriage. But then we never really talked, either. My marriage with Gideon was a marriage of silence. I would’ve welcomed fighting; I would’ve welcomed any kind of communication at all. I’d never felt so lonely as when I moved in with him. I was so lonely in my marriage that making the transition from being married to being single was easy. I don’t know exactly when it happened, if there was one exact moment or a gradual decline, but at some point, when I tried to talk to him about my work, my dreams, my day, he would look so bored and uninterested that I would cut my story short. After a while, I rarely talked at all. How had I managed to marry such a stranger?