Fiction (fiction)

She sat across the table from her roommate and said, “This summer has sucked.” Her roommate, thoughtfully not ordering a drink at the bar, looked at her plainly and said, “Why’s that?” Leaning back in her chair, she stared at her roommate, sure she must be joking, and waited for the punch line. But her roommate said nothing else as she plunked another potato chip in her mouth and chewed. So she cleared her throat and said, “Excuse me? Why’s that?” Her roommate shrugged. “Not sure if you were talking about the weather.” Laughable. The weather. The long days of lazy sunshine were the only thing that saved her life. Her roommate knew that. Her roommate knew everything and was tired of it all, no doubt. She couldn’t blame her. She was tired of it, too, tired of rehashing the same stale drama, tired of choking on the same bile, regurgitating the same sad facts until her internal intonation ruptured.

But there they were. And there was something new to infect the wound.

Her roommate knew her well, better than most, but she didn’t know everything about her. There were things she couldn’t understand. There were things that she, herself, didn’t understand, so it was only fair. But when it came to the man, this man, her roommate had never understood. It was like she had on blinders, refused to remember the good times, refused to register the suffocating happiness that he had spun around her. So if her roommate couldn’t understand the good times, there was no way she could comprehend the bad times. All she could do was see her friend hurt and hate the cause: him. The man. This man. But she -- but she... She needed another response. She needed another opinion. She needed her roommate to get it, finally, what she was talking about.

The man was an ex, she guessed, for lack of a better term. She was the only person she knew who had so many ex’s with so few boyfriends. No, she liked to skirt the trappings of relationships for a “friendship-plus.” She liked to be close to a man without feeling obligated to spend all her free time with him, canceling her plans girlfriends, concentrating all her emotional forces on him. In a “friendship-plus,” she could have the secret rendezvous, the covert lunches, the flirtatious phone calls, the too-long embraces with the man of the hour and it fulfilled her quest to Be a Woman without causing her to lose herself to some three-legged dog. Yes, this was a game she’d played before, the “friend-plus” game, and it always defeated her and left her alone, and every time she lost, it was a little worse than the time before, but she liked the game, when it was new, and was used to shrugging after the last hoorah and saying, well, that was fun, even though it wasn’t, and not knowing how to refer to the man -- a friend? a boyfriend? -- and simply resorted to calling him an ex. That seemed to say what she wanted. An ex.

But the latest example of this treachery, well, she’d made the mistake of actually dating him, not just as a friend-plus, but as a potential mate, and it had worked out well enough, she supposed, until she realized what she was doing: giving herself up for a man. This man. And she didn’t like that and it didn’t feel right and she was choking on every minute she was spending with him, away from her intended freedom and indebted to him or, more specifically, them, together. So she did what any reasonable woman in her position would do: she pushed and she ran. And he chased her, half-heartedly, and he kept up the intrigue and the game even after he found another woman to be steady. When she found out about this other woman, she was half elated and half disgusted, but, regardless, her “friend-plus” game was back on with him, although considerably more dangerous a game than normal since they had a different background, a non-friend background, a stronger-bonds background.

And, oh, things went so terribly wrong.

She stared at her roommate and took a long swig of her own cocktail, raspberry vodka and Sprite, and thought about the disaster of the last few months, the crashing down of a year-long dysfunction that left her emotionally crippled, paralyzed, and cracked. In the span of a few blinks of the eye, he’d turned thirty-three, quit his job, and moved back in with his parents. She thought that made him reckless, fearless, stupid, and brave. But he did all of that after he scalded her sensibilities with the biggest fuck you his passive-aggressive mentality could muster. Fuck you, you stupid bitch. He didn’t say that, not exactly, but close enough, she thought, and she breathed as though her lungs were punctured and she walked as though her bones were broken.

Today he’d come back from the dead and left a fresh hand print across her face. This was what she was trying to tell her roommate. She didn’t know if it was coming across, this new jab.

It’s not really possible to tell their story completely, nuances intact, but let’s say it began in the spring, as all good love affairs do. They met because of serendipity, in his apartment, a fluke, as a group of writers, her core, lounged around reading their work, other’s work. His roommate hosted the weekly festivities in their Cambridge apartment, this group of pot-smoking, wine-loving students who spent their time outside of their office jobs, their stints in Starbucks aprons, and their mundane existences writing poetry and screenplays. She was the token fiction writer who spent her days in retail management; he was the computer programmer with the fortune of having an artistic roommate. This is where she stumbled into his arms, by accident, and this is how they ended up finding their way out onto the streets together.

“Fiction,” she’d later tell her friends. “If I told you how I met him, you’d say it was fiction.” It was actually not how they met, they’d been introduced before, but, rather, how she allowed her mind to skip the “friend-plus” scenario and go straight to the oh, god, oh god binding of her internal sensibilities. They’d been sitting around the apartment, a steady group of maybe eight, all contemplating drunkenness, she only a quarter drunk as she would get that night, and they were waiting for a drifty poet to find some vague story by Borges (something about mazes, perhaps?) in a thick volume. Meanwhile, she tapped the edge of her wine glass and patiently awaited her turn to pull the worn yellow cover concealing pages full of her favorite writing out of her bag. Waiting. Waiting. Wha-ate-ing. When all of the sudden, he, sitting to her right, said, “Read the story about that drowned man who lands on the beach and the moronic village people bring him to their city and claim him... What’s that story? Isn’t that Borges?” He grinned, as only he was capable of doing, and she almost fell off the couch. No, it wasn’t Borges, but it was the very story she’d been wha-ate-ing to read. “Gabriel García Márquez,” she corrected him, thumbing through the pages until she found it. “‘The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World,’” she added.

What are the odds? “What are the odds?” she’d later ask her friends, both in good and bad times with him. What are the odds? That he would pick that story. “Fiction!” she’d say, sometimes her face round with light, other times bitterly, her face drawn tight.

Oh, and there were other odd hijinks that would slip into the fiction! category, like him being born on the seventh of a month, just like her, him being a twin and she a Gemini, each of them living at house number 18 on their respective streets, each with an identical can of Whoop Ass at their disposal. And then there was him guessing her middle name on the first try only to find out later that her middle name is the same as that of a main character in his favorite novel. Of course, another major character also bore the same name as his ex-girlfriend. “She might as well be his current girlfriend for all I hear about her,” she’d complain to friends. “I know more about her than I do about him.” And this became her excuse to back away from him, even though they had fun together and liked the same movies and were obsessed with the same grammar rules.

He had to go away, anyway. He told her at the last moment, almost no notice, that he was going off to fulfill a young man’s dream, his own, that is, and that he didn’t know when he’d back but he’d keep her posted. “Oh. Bye,” she’d said. Off you go! She needed him to leave, and when he came back, defeated, three weeks later, she tiptoed around his phone calls and refused to touch his broken spirit. “He wants me to be her,” she told friends. “His ex. And I’m not her nor do I want to be.” She wondered if she’d missed him while he was gone and decided that she had not. She’d been relieved, instead, that she didn’t have to plan nights out or nights in, that she could flirt without her friends raising an eyebrow at her. She was happy she didn’t have to answer or return his phone calls, dodge him while he Instant Messaged her from work.

But once he was back, back for good, she did start to wish that they hadn’t had that time apart, that they were still working at being an item, that she didn’t look at him and think “friend-plus”! She did like him, after all, quite a lot, and she thought there could be something there, maybe. While she was thinking, though, he was moving, moving on, to another woman who didn’t mind hearing about his ex, who didn’t mind his obnoxious habits, the way he was more attractive when he wasn’t smiling, the whiny nasal accent of his voice, his inability to open a door for her. And by the time she found out this other woman existed, she was already doomed, prepared to offer him what he’d sought from the moment they met: her, body and soul.

“Fiction,” she told her friends. “This doesn’t happen to real people.”

What she meant, this time, was that she found out about this other woman by accident, during the heat of an intense Game 7, Red Sox versus Yankees, as the tide was turning, as the Red Sox were losing their precious lead, their grandiose feet-first slide into the World Series. That night, she’d sat in a bar with his roommate and the core of their writer-friends when one of them mentioned, ever-so-casually, that he’d seen him, the man, out and about. With a woman. His roommate nodded dramatically, said, “Well, he is ‘seeing someone.’”

Bam. Yankees win the game. The underdogs are out. Curse of the Babe. Don’t trade a winner, that’s the lesson, sportsfans.

She took the news in the gut, churned it in the stinging sweetness of her amaretto sour, and gulped. These people, what did they know? Even after that night, she pretended like she didn’t know anything, continued talking to him, waited for him to re-negotiate his position in her life, swivel from man-friend to friend-friend, and then drop off her radar all together. But that didn’t happen. Not for weeks. In the meantime, it was business as usual between them, and it amazed her. Finally, she couldn’t take it anymore, waited until she had a good weekend without him, and made him confess the fun he’d had without her. And when he did, she drew a sharp breath and said, “We’ve hit a brick wall.” He was feeble. “Look, we’ve moved right through it,” he said.

But they hadn’t. All this time she’d worried about his ex and now. And now! Who was this new woman and how had she slunk in the door? She didn’t know. She never found out. All she knew was nothing ever changed with him. They carried on the same as before, and the new woman almost never came up. “It’s strange,” she’d tell her friends. “I still hear more about the ex than I do about the current chick.” It was strange, also, that as the fall chilled into early winter that he asked her to accompany him to his office Christmas party, not the new woman, and that he got tense when he found out she was going to her own holiday party without him. “Who’s your date?” he asked, not forcefully, not casually. “Who’s going to be there?” She was going alone, that’s what she told him, and she declined his invitation to his party in the same breath. But not because she didn’t want to go -- she wasn’t going to be in town. “Does that make me a bad person?” she asked her friends. “That I would have gone with him?” Her friends stared at her, either wide-eyed or annoyed, astonished or agitated. Most of her friends liked the game she was playing, enjoyed hearing the latest in the drama. “It’s better than fiction!” they said.

After the holidays, especially, the drama percolated. More and more, they were drawn into long periods of stony silence. They didn’t have time for each other, saw each other less and less, forgot the sound of each other’s voices, and in the meantime, she thought more and more about his ex and less and less about his current girlfriend, especially when he found out he didn’t spend Valentine’s Day with his current girlfriend and especially when both women’s birthdays rolled around, less than a week apart. He almost forgot his current girlfriend’s birthday; he took his ex out to cozy restaurant of her choosing a few days after escorting her to a hockey game. “The ex gets a weekend extravaganza,” she told her friends. “The other one gets an ‘oops, guess it’s your birthday’ nothing.”

And in the meantime, what? What was she doing with this man, this man who was too old to be juggling so many women with such illicit intentions? What, indeed? But by then she was too hooked to walk away. Plus, she was eight years younger than the rest of them, and if youth isn’t on your side, what is? And plus, what else was there to do? And plus, it gave her something to write about. “Something is wrong,” she told him. “Something is wrong.” She needed him to understand. But he said, “You’re the writer. Bring what bothers you to life. Write the ones who’ve wronged you as weak, pathetic characters in your stories.” But she was writing about him. She was writing about this. It was like fuel, like air, like faith. He didn’t understand, she thought. He didn’t understand his role.

She simply wanted him to be more important to her than he was.

So she kept writing, and they slipped into spring with the grace of a rusted out jalopy. It was all so awkward, these strange off-ramps and in-roads and broken tire jacks. And what about the air pressure? And what about the gages and the meters and the excess of fluids, the excess of XX-chromosomes. “Because,” she told her friends. “Even if he broke up with what’s-her-name, there’s still the ex. The reason I’m not with him hasn’t changed.” Even as he seemed to thaw with the weather, as he stood closer and closer to her for heat. Oh, she wanted him, wanted him to want her, wanted him to want her more than he wanted either of the others. She wanted to wake up in his bed, in his arms, with her picture on the side table, her name on his lips.

But he wanted. He wanted something she couldn’t understand. “Fiction,” she’s say quietly to her friends. “A bad romantic comedy where no one laughs, where people avert their eyes because these people are clearly...” But she never finished the sentence. She never did. She just let her voice drop off and no one ever pressed her to go on. Instead, she settled with meeting him for lunch, leaving sarcastic text messages on his phone, chatting with him on Instant Messenger while she wrote fake lesson plans at her apartment and he untangled real network security problems at his office. Even though it never felt good and it never felt right, that he continued to prop her up against his taut body, invite her into the cavernous sponge of his mind, that he would wink and flee whenever she mentioned his girlfriend.

Except when he told her about the book he bought his girlfriend that he insisted she would love. “So why didn’t you buy me a copy?” she asked prettily. “Because you don’t put out,” he said thickly.

Oh.

Things were getting out of control. Talk spiraled around the perfection of her breasts and the tightness of his ass. “We need some time together,” she said on repeat. In mute, so it seemed. Because he was afraid, maybe, and so was she, maybe, that they cared too much about each other, more than they should and that they were saying things that were bad. She would say things like, “I’m tired of it all. Wanna run away with me?” And he’d laugh and say, “But where would we go? And could we ever get away from it?” That became her focus, her mantra, her wake-up call, her first step towards emotional death. After all, this man, this man had not one, not two, but three women that he was juggling -- that she knew of, at least -- and she thought too much of herself to be one of those women. Because they -- we -- could not get away from it.

And the last time she saw him was wonderful. They embraced, they smiled, they did the things that they always did. But before he released her back into the New England wilderness, he cocked his head in a malevolent way and said, “You like strange things.” She had shrugged, buoyantly, pleasantly, and bounced away from him. Not stranger than fiction, she thought. Anything but that.

And then. And then. Exactly one week later, a homeless man dressed like the Cat in the Hat on the Boston Common stopped her and announced in a booming voice, “The Bruins are gonna win tonight, 2-1.” Pleased with the oddity, she sent him a text message with the news -- Cat in the Hat said... -- and disappeared into academia for the evening.

But then. But then. She re-emerged to find a reply message from him. Well, no. Her caller ID identified him as the sender, but the message, the message was not from him.

It said: “Please stop texting my boyfriend. He is busy going down on me.”

And when she read that, she choked on a ball of air. He is busy. As she slunk towards the T, she felt threatened. Going down. She felt hunted. On me. The girlfriend. The girlfriend! The two women had never even met. “Fiction,” she told her friends. “It’s worse than fiction. I wish it was fiction.” She actually put her hand to her face and felt for the evidence of scratch marks or a spattering of phlegm. Oh god, she thought. Oh, god.

She suddenly wished she’d paid more attention when he’d talked about his girlfriend, wished that he’d talked about her more, so she could feel like this woman was a real person, not just a stick figure, a puppet, forgotten in the corner. Because she was not prepared for this sort of attack. Up until that moment, she thought the girlfriend was weak-willed, a push-over, a fool. She’d just been gunned down by a complacent village idiot! Over the Cat in the Hat! In a town full of morons!

And when she called him at work the next day, he confirmed the sender, though he claimed he didn’t know the message. And when she told him what it said, her voice prickly and strained, he laughed. Laughed! Laughed as their lives flashed before their eyes. “I think she was joking,” he said. Ha ha, big fuckin’ joke. Her fury leapt up in her throat at that moment and resulted in a kamikaze barrage of foul language. How dare she... How dare he... What the fuck makes her think... What the fuck makes it OK... I don’t even fuckin’ know her... “Who the fuck does she think I am?” she demanded. “A friend,” he squeaked. And off she went again. Fuck fuck fuck. Because, clearly, this woman knew enough about her to know that she was either a threat or a joke, because, clearly, women don’t mark their territory in a friendly, noncombatant sort of way. The girlfriend, she wasn’t joking.

And neither was she, on the phone, yelling for six solid minutes before he used her name and said, “I don’t appreciate you telling me my girlfriend is fucked up.” Which is not what she said. She said what his girlfriend did was fucked up. But all he ever heard was the wrong thing. And that’s how it ended.

Eventually. They bumbled along, scabbed and alien, for another couple of weeks before they exchanged succinctly written, rigid emails about how passive-aggressive he was and how demanding and selfish she was, and she spent a long night locked in her room, sobbing, exactly one year after he had rubbed her thigh and guessed her middle name. “Fiction,” she told her friends. “What he wrote to me was fiction.” That it wasn’t her right to judge his girlfriend’s sense of humor and that their casual friendship was simply not something he could fit into his lifestyle. All of this because she was insisting that they needed to sit down and talk about what happened, what had been happening between them for a year. But he chose to blame her, erect a stern finger in her direction and say you you you. “I guess we’re done being neighbors now,” she replied. Hit send. Hit end.

And so things had stayed for months, until his birthday, a few weeks after she learned from his roommate that he’d quit his job to spend his summer in the sun, and she decided to wish him a Happy 33rd Year, left him another sarcastic message, and, within minutes got a casual, “Hey, thanks” response. Hey thanks. It angered her, this response, at once flip and clueless. “Only a man!” she said to her friends. Only a man would have added the “hey.”

And then a few weeks later, she sent him another message, this one asking if he was still not talking to her, just curious. His response? “I was never ‘not talking’ to you. Just feel our ‘friendship’ is less than friendly.” Feel. Present tense.

Feel. Present tense.

“Fiction,” she muttered to herself. “Only in fiction would it make sense for this man to use present tense.” Only in fiction would a character be dumb enough to say that three months of cold-turkey silence doesn’t equate to not talking.

This is what she had to tell her roommate at the bar. This is the latest. This is what has renewed her vow that the summer had sucked. And when she told her roommate the story, rehashed all the details that can never be understood by those who weren’t there to witness, her roommate sighed and said nothing until she pressed, “Well? What do you think about all of this?” And her roommate, without hesitation, said, “He’s bad for you.” And her roommate was right. But when she closed her eyes, she could still see his face, and when she tried, she could feel the ghost of his hand custom-pressed against the small of her back.

“Fiction,” she said. “This whole nightmare is fiction.” So close the book, her roommate’s eyes begged. But she couldn’t. Not as a woman, but especially not as a writer. No, she was still waiting for another story arch.