You need protein, some inner voice tells him. And so he hits the nearest diner and devours an enormous burger, ordered rare. He feels a little more stable with some blood in his mouth. He gets his pen and a napkin. Okay, he tells himself, with the greatest calm he can muster. You’re going to make a list. A list of all of your problems. And then, underneath each item on the list, you’re going to list one Action Item that you can do to address that problem. This seems reasonable.
Your first problem, he thinks, is that you’re a coward.
And dutifully, he writes down:
COWARD
Then, on something of a roll, he writes:
FUCK-UP
“No,” he says. This is not going to work. He draws an X through each word. Even then the thing is a little depressing to look at: he looks around for a garbage can. Finding none, he folds the note into quarters and sticks it in his pocket.
Action Items. He has a goddamn Action Item: Flaubert’s advice. Be fierce and original. He pulls the accordion file out of his backpack and starts spreading possible reading pieces out on the table. If he can just find some piece in there that demonstrates his ferocity and originality—that would show everyone. The desire for revenge rises within him, resplendent and gauche, like the phoenix on the hood of a Trans Am. He just needs to find the right piece. If not the novel then maybe the short stories?
After two minutes of reading what he thought was his best shot—a story with no characters at all, told from the point of view of various apartments that had been inhabited by characters—he’s back to the problem he was having this morning. There is no right piece. Nothing he has written in the last decade is good enough to justify the personality flaws that he’d been justifying by telling everyone that he was a writer.
Fuck it. He downs a third cup of coffee. He sweeps everything back into the file. He has an idea. He’s going to wing it. He’s going to get up there on stage and ad-lib. He can tell a story that way, just by getting up there and opening up the fecund little grotto that houses his creative unconscious. He knows he can do it. He’s a fucking storyteller and that’s the kind of shit that storytellers do: they tell goddamn stories. He will be bold and daring; he will confirm that he is not a coward and not a fuck-up; he will be epiphany-level good. And maybe the world won’t end.
Billy pays the bill and heads north toward Union Square, and jumps on the L, heading toward Williamsburg.
The reading’s not supposed to happen until seven, and the train will put him at Bedford just before five. From there it’s like a ten-minute walk to Barometer, so he’ll be early. But that’s okay. He figures he’ll sit at the bar, have a shot or two to keep the courage going, center himself, and do a little more preliminary thinking on his plan. Like: Will he tell a real-life anecdote or try to make up something fictional?
He surfaces at Bedford. It’s not yet five but it’s cold and dark already: fucking November. He pulls his army jacket tighter around him, but it’s too thin to do much.
He hurries to the bar, and when he gets there he is greeted by an impassive rolling gate, corrugated metal, pulled all the way down.
“You gotta be kidding me,” he says, out loud.
“I think they open at six,” says a young woman who is standing off to the side. Billy looks over but can’t really see her face, as it is hidden by wild coils of long black hair springing out from under the constraint of a fur-lined aviator hat.
“Six?” Billy says. “What about people who want a drink right after they get off from work?”
“I think this place makes their money more off the nightlife kind of crowd,” says the woman. She taps a cigarette out of her pack and lights it off of one that she’s already got going.
“Nightlife!” Billy says, mock-contemptuous. “What about people who need a drink in the middle of the day? Someone needs to think about the high-functioning alcoholics.”
The woman releases breath in a way that’s almost a laugh. He gives another look over as she leans her head back to take another drag. It’s the lips that grab him: they’re full without being cartoonish, and she’s got a little rhinestone punched right where a beauty spot might normally be. A piece of flash, designed to draw attention—in his heart, Billy knows this, but he’s never seen the harm in letting himself be drawn wherever women want to lead him. She catches him looking, though, and shoots him an impatient glare. He admires her sleepy eyes, smearily made up, before he looks away, flustered. He stares at his shoes for a second and then something clicks. He actually snaps his fingers.
“You’re the poet,” he says. “Mastic. Elisa Mastic.”
She looks at him again, less impatient this time. Takes a three-second drag on her cigarette, holds it, exhales. “Oh my God,” she says, a little drily. “I just got street-recognized. That’s the first time that’s ever happened to me.”
“Yeah, I saw—” Billy begins. He wants to say your author site but then he realizes it might sound a little stalkery. He doesn’t want her to know that he looked her up online, even if he could pass it off as being in a strictly professional capacity. “I’m Billy Ridgeway,” he says, extending his hand. “I’m the, uh, the fiction writer of the evening.”
“Well,” she says, “okay.” She gives his hand a squeeze, meets his eyes, and smiles. Something stirs in Billy for a second, and then she lets go and it’s gone.
“I like being street-recognized,” she says. “It feels good! As a poet, you know, you’re not sure that you’re ever going to get that.”
“You know what they say,” Billy says, absently, still spinning a bit. “In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.”
“That’s good,” Elisa says. “I like that. Anyway, you made me feel better about the—the thing.” She turns her hand in the air.
“The thing?”
“You know,” Elisa says. “The fuckwit.”
“The Bladed Hyacinth—”
“Yes,” she says. “Don’t even say it. I can’t even stand the name of the thing.”
“So you saw it.”
“Yeah,” she says. “I saw it. I didn’t feel great about it—”
“No,” Billy says. “Me either.” Neither?
“Well, anyway,” she says. “Point is: you helped me to feel better.”
“Glad to be of service,” Billy says, and for a minute they stand there in the cold, wind snapping around them, neither one of them looking at the other or saying anything. Billy doesn’t want to let the conversation die, though. He wants to be daring and bold. By this point, conveniently, he’s forgotten that Flaubert was talking about the work.
“I read one of your poems, you know,” he hazards. “On—your author site.”
“Which poem?” Elisa asks. Her eyes are on him, suspicion awakened in them.
“Uh,” Billy says. “The first one? I can’t remember the name? But there was a line in it that I liked. About the deleted world.”
“Oh please,” Elisa says. “That one—ugh, it’s the worst one. I keep begging my press to put any other poem up there.”
“Pshaw,” Billy says, and then realizes with horror that he’s saying stuff like pshaw. He forges on, though: “I liked it.”
Elisa pauses. “You didn’t read a second one, though, did you?” she asks.
“I did not,” Billy admits, freely.
“Well. At least you’re honest.”
She walks to the edge of the sidewalk, cranes her head out into the street like she’s looking for a cab.
“I see a bar,” she says. “You’ll be glad to know that it looks open. You want to get out of this cold?”
Of course he does.
They each have a shot and then they each order a second one. Talk thereupon quickly returns to the gripe they have in common, the Hyacinth piece.
“It got me so shook up,” Billy says, “that I don’t actually want to read, like, any of my preexisting work.”
“I know,” says Elisa. “I was up half the night writing six new poe
ms. They could be good, they could be crap, I don’t even know anymore. But I figure, fuck it. It’s something different.”
“Exactly,” Billy says. “Something different. That’s the key. I’m half thinking that I’m not going to read anything at all but instead do like a piece of, I don’t know, oral storytelling.”
“Well, if it’s good enough for The Moth, it’ll work here.”
“Oh yeah,” Billy says. He’d forgotten about The Moth. Somehow that shakes his confidence in the violent originality of his idea. A bit. Just a bit.
They seem to have exhausted this line of conversation. She looks at him and he at her. The second round of shots arrives.
“Cheers,” she says, and they down them with all due haste.
Seconds pass. She looks at him. He can see the intelligence in her eyes at work, making some set of complex assessments. She leans in incrementally and her nostrils flare once: Billy would swear that she was sniffing him, if there was a way that that made any sense at all.
She leans back. “Okay,” she says. “I don’t know you well, Billy Ridgeway, but you seem like an honest guy, and I like that.”
“Thank you,” Billy says, and as he says it he realizes that he’s starting to yearn for Elisa Mastic. Maybe this breakup with Denver—for that is how he is now thinking of it—doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Maybe it’s a piece of good luck. Maybe it’ll be an opportunity: a chance to start over with someone who doesn’t know all his flaws.
“I’m going to ask you a question,” she says. “And I want you to answer honestly.”
“Okay,” Billy says. “Is this a test?”
“This is a test,” Elisa says.
“I’m ready,” Billy says. This is normally the kind of thing that would make him nervous, but the bourbon is helping.
“The question is: What is the worst thing you ever did?”
Billy blinks. He doesn’t want to think about whatever might be the worst thing he ever did. And whatever it is, he’s certain it’s bad, and he doesn’t want to let his bad side enter into full display. Absolutely not. The whole point, the whole goddamn point of this conversation is to showcase only his good side: to be charming and funny and charismatic. He looks around for a story that will highlight those aspects of himself but also maybe seem a little mean or over-the-top. It takes him a minute to find something that qualifies; during that time Elisa calmly examines her hand, all five fingers extended in front of her.
“So I had this girl over,” Billy says. This is a Denver story, which gives him a queasy feeling, but he needs something. Elisa raises her eyebrows in a way that conveys a very guarded species of interest.
“We’d been out,” he says, “out at some restaurant or having drinks or something, after what had already been a pretty long day, and then we got back to my place, totally exhausted, and I remembered that I didn’t have any clean laundry for the next day, and instead of just saying screw it I insisted that we go out to the Laundromat. This girl just wanted to lie on the couch and I made her get up and come with me because I wanted the company. I even made her carry a bag with the sheets and pillowcases.”
A thin smile from Elisa.
“And so we’re at the Laundromat, and it just seems like it’s taking forever, it’s like time has just slowed to a crawl. A fucking crawl. And then after we’ve spent like a year there we have to move everything over to the dryer. Bam, another year gone. We’re not even talking to one another we’re so tired. And so finally everything’s clean, and we go back to my place, and she immediately goes up to the loft and curls up on my bed. Just like direct on the mattress: the sheets are still all in the laundry bag. And I’m like come on, come on, we need to make the bed and she just, like, grunts. So, thinking I’m funny, I get the fitted sheet out and I just pull it over top of her and tuck it in on all four sides. She starts to giggle a little, so I figure it’s okay. So then I put the next sheet on over top of that, and then finally the comforter, and by this point I think she wants to get out, she starts kind of squirming but she’s really too tired to figure out how to make her way out of it, and then I start poking her. Like, index finger, right in the ribs. And she says stop it but she’s laughing at the same time, so I don’t stop right away, I poke her a couple more times, and she starts to shriek, cause it tickles her, right?, and finally she starts to thrash her way out of the sheets and she gets her head out at last, and I’m laughing, and even she’s laughing a little bit, but then it just tips somehow and she starts crying. These big, hot, frustrated, tired tears. And—that’s it.”
Elisa watches him until finally he raises both palms, as if revealing the absence of more to tell.
“What did it feel like?” she asks, softly.
“It felt bad,” he says. “I don’t like making people cry.”
“No, before that.”
“Before what?”
“Before she started to cry. When you had her under the sheet and were poking her. What did that feel like?”
“I don’t know,” Billy says. “I thought I was being funny, I guess. I was just playing around.”
“The woman in the story. Are you bigger than her?” Elisa asks.
“Yes,” Billy says.
“Are you stronger than her?”
Billy doesn’t think of himself as strong, exactly, but is he stronger than Denver? “Yes.”
“And what did that feel like?”
“Being bigger and stronger, you mean?”
“Being bigger and stronger. Exerting power. Using it to scare someone.”
“I don’t think she was scared, exactly.”
“Let me tell you something,” Elisa says. “If you say stop it to someone who is bigger than you? And stronger than you? And they don’t stop whatever it is that they’re doing? It’s scary. Trust me.”
“Okay,” Billy says. “What are you trying to say here?”
“What I’m trying to say, Billy, is that you seem like a gentle, peaceful guy, a real nice guy, and I think you’ve worked hard to come across that way, but I think there’s a part of you, and maybe it’s a part that you don’t look at all that closely, that wants to be powerful and that doesn’t give a good goddamn about anything else.”
Something inside Billy twinges. A flinch moves through his face. Elisa’s eyes change character again, communicating some faint satisfaction, an approval, almost, at seeing Billy hit upon something inside himself that may be true.
Billy turns his empty shot glass with his fingers, tries to reflect upon the part of him that likes being bigger and stronger, that likes being powerful. Elisa is right: that part is there. It moves inside him like an animal, cloaked by shadows. He can kind of glimpse its outlines but it moves away from his inspection, not wanting to be fully perceived.
“Thoughts,” Elisa says.
“None,” Billy says, and he expends some willpower to ensure that that’s true.
“All right then.”
The third round of shots lands on the table. They raise them.
“To thoughtlessness,” Elisa says, and tosses hers back.
“To thoughtlessness,” Billy answers, and he does the same.
“You want to know the worst thing I ever did?” she says, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.
“Sure.”
“Don’t give me that sure. Either you want to know or you don’t. I’ll tell you if you want to know. But you have to understand that this isn’t some hipster game for me.”
“Okay,” Billy says. “I get it. I want to know.”
Elisa regards him suspiciously.
Billy puts on his most earnest face despite a sinking certainty that it actually makes him look totally goofy and insincere. “You can trust me,” he says.
“No, I can’t. But I’m going to tell you anyway, as a gesture of my good faith.”
“Okay,” Billy says.
“I killed a man,” Elisa says.
“What?”
“I killed a man,” she says again. “It
was an accident.” She takes a deep breath. “I killed a man,” she repeats, like it’s something she has to say to herself regularly, “and I was never caught.”
Billy scans her face for some sign that she’s making a joke, or just fronting like a badass. But she’s wearing that same implacable calm. Wow, he thinks.
“What were—what were the circumstances?”
Elisa looks away sharply, glancing down at her watch, a heavy beveled thing that looks like you could crack open a nut with it. “It’s ten past six,” she says.
“Yeah, so?”
“So we should get back over there.”
“What? You’re gonna just—leave me hanging? You can’t do that.”
She gives him a look, one which adequately communicates Don’t think you can start telling me what I can and can’t do. “I’ll tell you what,” she says. “I’ll tell you the circumstances the next time we meet.”
“Oh,” Billy says. He grins. “You think there’s going to be a second time?”
“No,” Elisa says. “But one should always plan for the unexpected.”
A lesser species of disappointment emerges within him, but he says, “I accept these terms.”
“You say this,” Elisa says, “like you had a choice.”
He settles the tab for both of them even though he still doesn’t know how he’s going to make rent. When he does this, as nonchalant as anything, he can detect her, out of the corner of his eye, watching him.
This could be good, Billy tells himself, as they cross the street. Just don’t fuck it up. Let it be easy. He doesn’t raise the question of whether it’s a good idea to get involved with someone who has killed a man.
They reach Barometer’s heavy set of doors. He holds one of them open for her in a showy display of half-ironic gallantry, his motions a little broad from the buzz he has going.
See? he thinks. You can be charming when the situation calls for it. He watches her enter, permitting himself a glance at the segment of black panty hose he can spot between the hem of her red tartan coat and the top of her boots. Maybe it’s more than a glance; maybe it borders on a leer. But he feels like it’s the quickest, most subtle leer he can possibly manage with three shots of bourbon floating around in his circulatory system. Still, a little embarrassing.
The Weirdness Page 8
