Early Work

by Andrew Martin

  And so with an inexplicably clear head and a stomach churning with tiny meals and bourbon, I asked him, in my best imitation of a man in a baseball cap, how things were with his girl.

  “Like you don’t know,” he said.

  “I’ve heard glimmers,” I said. “Soundings.”

  “Well, she doesn’t like me,” Brian said, not whining. “I’ve kind of looked down every hallway of this thing, and there’s maybe just not that much more to it. I don’t think she enjoys being around me anymore.”

  “You do something?” I said. “Tell the truth.”

  “I think about it all the time, and I’ve come up with a couple of things. I clogged the toilet a couple of months ago and had to go to work before I could fix it. That was bad. I waited until the last minute for her birthday and bought her this really expensive and ugly necklace that I knew she wouldn’t like. She wears it all the time, to fuck with me I think. God, it’s so ugly. There’s more stuff like that.”

  “From what I can tell,” I said, “Leslie is one of those people who needs to be honest with herself. Like, the self-deception, even when it happens, is pretty close to the surface.”

  “You’re either describing yourself or you’ve been thinking about this a lot,” Brian said. Not a complete moron, whatever his obvious downsides.

  “Or talking out of my ass,” I said, and theatrically drained my drink. “Can I buy you something?”

  “I’m good,” he said. “I’ve got the feeling I’m going to be driving you home.”

  “I’m walking,” I said. I fished my car key out of my pocket, along with some receipts and more crumpled money. I spun the key toward him on the bar.

  “Well, when the time comes, I’ll drop you off,” he said. He put the key in his pocket.

  “I’m a man fancies a stroll come closing time,” I said. “’Twas and ’twill be ever so.”

  “Sure,” he said skeptically.

  “Me and Julia, we’re really good,” I said. “Maybe you should follow our lead. We do this thing where we lean into our socially assigned gender roles in a really graphic way. That’s how we maintain equilibrium in the modern world. Like, I’ll come home, for one example, and she’ll be naked in an apron baking cookies, and I’ll lick all of the cookie dough off of her fingers while she mixes us martinis.”

  “Wait, what are you talking about?” Brian said.

  “Yeah, I’ll just be like, this house is a fucking mess, and the next thing I know she’s on her knees scrubbing and breathing in all this supertoxic shit, and I’m outside building a tree house for the kid we don’t have and burning like hundreds of fucking leaves on the barbecue grill. And then when the sun starts setting, she comes out with all these cookies and martinis and we just have sex in the yard and get bit to shit by mosquitoes while the hamburgers cook, with the neighbors and their dogs just like waving at us and smiling the whole time.”

  “Right.”

  “I’m saying that’s what a successful relationship looks like. It’s got to be super fucked-up and private. Shit you wouldn’t tell anybody because they’d never understand. That’s the only way it works.”

  He shook his head and smiled, eyes on the dull, waning basketball game. He’d decided to be amused.

  “I think, actually, that a more conventional metric might apply here,” Brian said. “Basic chemistry, life goals. I just want her to be happy. But I don’t think that’s what she wants.”

  “What does she want, do you think.”

  “Exactly,” Brian said. “Exactly.”

  I signaled extravagantly for another drink, like a person drowning. The bartender, the big dude with blond heavy-metal hair and a despairing Nordic face, looked me in the eye and ignored me.

  “Leslie is a beautiful person,” I ventured. “She … well, you, I guess. You should do whatever it takes to make it work.”

  “You don’t get it,” Brian said. “I mean, I don’t expect you to. It’s just really hard when you’ve got something, and you think something is going to happen next, and then it’s taken away from you. It’s one thing when you don’t know what you’re losing, but to have it, and understand how precious it is, and still lose it … It fucking sucks.”

  The bartender warily set another drink down in front of me. A single, but still.

  “I’ve had breakups,” I said.

  “I’m sure.”

  This would have been the perfect moment to reveal that I was having sex with his fiancée, and frequently, but I wasn’t a killer like that. It wasn’t my job. I mostly felt sad, sad for us, and for Julia and Leslie.

  We sat in silence, staring at the TV screen. The moment I finished my drink—he had good peripheral vision, I guess, and decent manners—Brian gave a fake yawn and said, “I should really get back to Les, figure this shit out.” My company had proved even less hospitable than hers.

  “Gonna finish the game,” I said, though it had long ceased to be competitive.

  “Do you seriously want me to take your car?” Brian said. “How are you going to get it back?”

  I flapped my wrist dismissively.

  “Les can drive it into town sometime, or I’ll go out there with Julia. My coche es tu coche. My phone is my shepherd, I shall not want.”

  “Okay, man,” Brian said. He left a twenty on the bar, overpaying, and dismounted his stool. “This was fun. Hope it happens again.”

  “Remember what I told you,” I said. “Outmoded gender roles, plus exhibitionist sex.”

  “Get home safe,” he said. He clapped me on the shoulder, a little harder than necessary, and walked out.

  “That was my stepdad,” I said to the bartender. “Fucking bastard.”

  “We’re closing up soon,” he said.

  “Game’s still got like eight minutes left.”

  “C’mon, man,” the bartender said. “Drink some water and go home.”

  He was a guy I usually liked, always decent to me. He’d told me the last time I was there that his wife had just had a baby daughter, their first, and I imagined he wanted to get home to them.

  “Did you ever have the problem where you don’t want to go where you’re supposed to be, but you can’t go where you want to be?” I said.

  “Man, seriously, I don’t know how you think you’ve earned any bartender advice,” he said. “Go home to your wife, or girlfriend, or boyfriend, and try to be as quiet as you can getting into bed. Then you can talk about your stupid feelings in the morning.”

  “Was that so hard?” I said.

  There was nobody on the street outside, and I didn’t want to go home, which was at least a half hour away if I walked straight there. My phone was nearly dead, but I checked the progress of the basketball game repeatedly on it until it succumbed fully. That was what I wanted: some goddamn quiet.

  Okay, my earlier claim of consistent clarity was a lie—the drinks always kick in when you least expect them to, and in this case it was in the fairly crucial period of remembering which way I needed to walk to get home. Mind you, this is a small city that I’d lived in for two years. If I know me, my thought process was that I’d take “the long way,” which meant taking a bunch of turns through neighborhoods I didn’t know. I probably realized I had no idea where I was, and followed the sounds of cars until I reached the highway, which I at least recognized. I have flashes of interaction preserved—being honked at by cars as I wandered along the shoulder of the road, being asked if I needed help by a homeless couple camped out by the trees—but when I came to full awareness a few hours later, there were traces of light in the sky, and I was on a quiet hilly road that I vaguely recognized, but didn’t know which way I was walking on it. I trudged up a hill and realized how much my legs hurt. There was, in what looked like the near distance, a man sitting in a truck with the light on along the side of the road. After what felt like a day and a half, I reached him and looked in the window. He was masturbating to a picture of a large-breasted black woman in what appeared to be a vintage pornographic
magazine. He looked up and saw me, pure terror in his eyes.

  “Can you give me a ride into town?” I yelled.

  “I am calling the police!” he yelled back, or something to that effect, from behind the window. He kept staring at me, fright and embarrassment shining in his dark eyes. “I am calling the police right now.” He didn’t move. Then he turned off the light in the cab. I stood there for another few seconds, then kept walking.

  I’d gotten sober enough to realize I was in a bad situation. I wasn’t going to die or anything, but I was at least a few miles from the house, with a dead phone, and Julia was going to be very unhappy with me. I suspected that I was walking in the wrong direction, but I did not have the fortitude to walk back in the direction from which I’d come. I mostly wished I could disappear, or wake up, but it turned out this was something that was actually happening.

  With the sky brightening to dawn, I saw a silver Camry (that’s what all midsize cars are to me, I guess) heading in the direction I thought I needed to go. I stuck my thumb out, standing nearly in the middle of the road, and he stopped.

  “I’m really sorry,” I said, “Can you take me into town by any chance?”

  “You having some trouble?” he said.

  “I walked farther than I meant to,” I said. “Got kind of turned around.”

  “Don’t shit a shitter, man.”

  “I may also have been slightly overserved.”

  “Get in if you don’t mind hearing some about our Lord and Savior.”

  He talked about Jesus while I tried not to fall asleep in relief. We really weren’t very far from town, and we were on a road that I’d driven many times before. He insisted on taking me to my front door, and would not accept the money I tried to hand him.

  “Just think of this as God talking to you,” he said. “I’ve been where you’re at. You’ve got to let that stuff go. Look at this, you’ve got a nice house, dog in the window there. You want to lose all this?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Well, God knows that’s not what you really want. He wants you to love Him, and love yourself. Yeah, I know, you don’t want to listen to this rednecks-for-Jesus stuff. I forgive you.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “I’ll pass it on.”

  “Do what it takes to get right,” he said. “Start with God.”

  When he drove away, I realized that Julia’s car wasn’t in front of the house, which was a very bad sign. Kiki was less affectionate than usual when I walked in, cringing away from my hand like I was a stranger. I plugged my phone in, waited for the battery picture to say “5%,” and turned it on. I had a panicked voicemail from Julia, asking where I was, then a second one, in which she was in tears, pleading with me to call her back. Then I had one from Leslie. She sounded pissed. “Where are you, dude? Julia’s freaking out. Whatever you’re doing, it’s not cool. Call me and tell me you’re alive, please.” I called Julia. “Where the fuck are you?” she said, on the verge of tears. “Home,” I said. I hung up before she could respond. I turned off my phone again, and crawled into bed to wait for her return.

  * * *

  I waited a week, until I was reasonably sure Brian was gone, to email Leslie:

  “Hey,” I wrote,

  hope you had a good time with your out-of-towner. I hope I didn’t cause too much trouble with him, or with anything else, due to my bad behavior. I think you understand, so I won’t overexplain myself, but getting so drunk and ridiculous really was just an accident, one that I’m pretty embarrassed about. Would really love to see you, but understand if you’d rather not for whatever reason. Either way, be in touch.

  Truly etc,

  etc.

  She didn’t respond for twenty-four hours, which freaked me out, but when she did, I understood the delay.

  “Hey,” she wrote.

  Resurrection update: Brian and I are officially done. It was an ugly scene, and I ended up telling him I was seeing someone else to get it to finally stop, but don’t worry, I didn’t out you specifically. The one upside to you acting like such an idiot the other night is that he probably wouldn’t suspect I’m involved with somebody who’s such a mess. I hope Julia isn’t too pissed at you. I have the feeling she’ll get over it, if she’s gotten over dealing with you in general.

  Just to be clear, I certainly didn’t leave Brian “for you” or anything like that, and I’ve gotten the impression that you’re relatively happy with Julia, despite our whatever. I really don’t want to be the person that fucked up your life. Anyway, you want to get together and chat some of this out? Not that it needs to be a super heavy conversation. But it would be good to know where we’re at.

  Yrs,

  L.

  Molly, majestic in her amorality, agreed to let Leslie and me meet up at her house on a night when she was planning to stay over with Gil, with whom she was “spending time” again.

  “No sex in my bed, though,” she said over the phone. “Seriously. That’s my one rule.”

  “That’s not what this is,” I said. “You have nothing to fear.”

  “You can have sex literally anywhere else,” she said. “I just really really don’t like other people in my bed without me present.”

  I brought half a bottle of bourbon, not clear on the plan. Julia had her writing group that night, a loose coalition of local poets and memoirists across a wide age range that met every month to read their latest work and offer supportive criticism. It gave her a reason to finish things. Plus there was usually dessert.

  When I got to Molly’s, Leslie’s car was already parked out front. I found her in the kitchen, slouched over the counter drinking a beer and reading a big, splayed-open hardcover.

  “There’s the man,” she said.

  “Hey there,” I said.

  I moved toward her, planning on a stiff, awkward embrace, but she leaned into it, pulled me toward herself tightly.

  “I feel like such a shit,” she said, her chin heavy on my shoulder.

  “About Brian?” I said.

  “Just everything,” she said.

  She stepped back and looked me over appraisingly.

  “You look skinny,” she said.

  “Yeah, right,” I said. “It’s really good to see you.”

  “I know,” she said. “Do you have any, uh, Salinger on you?”

  I fished the vaporizer out of my pocket and gave it to her. She took a pull from it and contemplated the ceiling.

  “The Brian thing…” she said, gathering her thoughts. “I pretty much knew at first sight. That it wasn’t going to happen, I mean. But I felt like I couldn’t just tell him to turn around, you know? I guess that might’ve been the adult thing to do. He’s really mad at me, which is fair. At least he got a little more sex out of it? Though I feel pretty ambivalent about that, too. It’s probably the most I’ve ever felt like an actual whore. Just, like, fucking somebody because I felt like it was my job. Not a lot of fun, I have to say.”

  I felt light-headed, and unreasonably hurt.

  “Did you … come?” I said.

  “What?” she said. “I mean … yeah. I did. Is that not allowed? It was still pleasurable. Physically. Just not ideal.”

  “Sorry, that was a kind of fucked-up thing to ask,” I said.

  “I mean, I don’t ask you about what you and Julia do.”

  “It’s not that interesting.”

  “Of course it is. It’s just that I’d rather not know about it. I realize I can seem kind of glib about this shit, but I’m very capable of being hurt by it, too. I don’t want you to think that’s not the case.”

  “I get it,” I said. “What do you want me to do?”

  She raised her eyebrows as she took a long sip of beer.

  “What I want and what’s possible aren’t necessarily compatible.”

  She fixed me with her eyes. I felt myself vulnerable to her in a way that was different from Julia. In Leslie’s presence, I felt a constant calling to be different from myself, n
ot better, but more, to rack my brain for a more interesting thing to say, to find some new way to please.

  “I want to be whatever you want me to be,” I said deliberately. “I can live with whatever that is.”

  I hadn’t expected to say that, and now that I had, I wondered if it was true. It sounded true.

  “That’s … well, that’s good to know,” Leslie said.

  The thrill of submission was heady. Better than the booze. Or, good mixed with the booze.

  “I don’t even like most people,” she said, exasperated. “And here I am wasting all my time with you. But I want you to be sure about things. You’re not actually sure unless you’re sure. Like, you can’t be just a little bit pregnant.”

  “You’re not pregnant, right?” I said. I smiled like a monkey.

  “Christ, I sure fucking hope not. No offense to either of you.”

  “So … what now, then?”

  “Well,” she said.

  “Molly said to stay out of her bed,” I said.

  “Don’t have a peasant mentality,” Leslie said.

  We fucked on the couch, more abruptly and desperately than usual, mostly clothed. There was something different in how we treated each other now. When you first have sex with someone, especially when they’re otherwise committed, there’s both a performativity and a withholding, a contradictory set of impulses to demonstrate one’s value as a performer and to not commit fully to the emotional experience commensurate with great sex, lest your feelings prove an embarrassment. That night at Molly’s, Leslie and I got past compatibility, to that place where you surprise yourself with how badly you want to stay in that liminal pocket together, how desperate and unattractive you’re willing to be to experience uncompromised joy.

  When we were finished, we lay on our backs on the rough rug.