12.29.03
Girl
I suppose the beginning of the end was Monday; and even so, I am only saying this because I can only remember Monday, and only snatches of the other days. I think today is Friday, but I’m only judging by the trash-pickup trucks that came rumbling and roaring down the street an hour ago.
At any rate, I can’t keep track of the days. After all, how are you supposed to when they keep changing? Just like people. You think you can trust someone and then BAM! And they go and do something cruel and stupid (well, not necessarily stupid) like leaving you in the hotel room with the bill on the counter, unpaid, or stand you up in front of a restaurant. And not just any restaurant; one of those fancy ones with valets and everything. And he doesn’t even come, and you’re standing there in the parking lot in your brand-new scarlet velvet dress and wearing those good high heels—black stilettos, too, brand-new from Robinson’s May and you paid $70 something dollars for them—with your hair all done and those pearl earrings that match with that necklace that you had to fork over three weeks’ paycheck to buy. Then it starts to rain, and then one of the valets goes and tries to be nice and offers to bring your car back around and you can’t even say anything because you can’t breathe and the whole world is melting away. And then you run—run into the parking lots blindly, and your heel breaks and you trip and fall and there goes that dress and those shoes! And you stand up and get blinded again when some jerk—drunk, maybe, or just out to have some fun—jams on his breaks right in front of you. So I ran, all the way to my car, got in, and floored it the whole way home. And now I just want to sleep, and sleep, and never, ever get up again.
My alarm clock says 3:00. It looks like the afternoon, but I don’t think it’s three o’clock. My alarm clock is never right. The neighbors are all gone and the old lady across the street’s dog is going berserk in the backyard. I think he smells a cat. The sky isn’t even blue, but this funny gray—like it wants to rain, but it’s too dry. I feel that way, and I know exactly how the clouds feel, all thin and wrung out and clinging to the horizon even as it runs away from them. They don’t realize it just yet but they can never, ever catch the horizon. That’s like a rock buried six feet underground catching a bird flying over the ocean.
The doorbell just rang. I don’t want to get up; the floor is cold, and I spilled my water last night and haven’t wiped it up yet. So I think I’ll just stay here, and lie down, and pretend I didn’t hear anything.
Boy
Damn! Stella won’t answer her door. I hope she hasn’t done anything too stupid—or that anything too horrible hasn’t happened to her. She shouldn’t have gone out with Roy in the first place. Someone like him—sports cars (what seems like a new one every week) designer suits and always smelling like a perfume shop—that’s right, perfume—I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him, which, needless to say, isn’t very far. He’s straight, I’m sure; every time I see him without Stella he’s got some poor half-dressed thing/creature hanging off of him. I don’t think she knows. Or, if she does know, she must not care; you’d think she’d see through him but she doesn’t. Stella must be blind.
It doesn’t take a genius to know he’s cheating! And all he ever says when she brings the subject up is, “Oh, well Whitney and I never discussed any of our ex’s…” or something along those lines. Something to throw her; and when he does, he jumps on the conversation faster than you can look up and say, “Uncle!” and steers it down some other, more pleasant road. Preferably one that doesn’t involve any real thought. It makes me sick. And watching the two of them! He’s so…so…plastic! He’s a patronizing jerk one moment, perfect gentleman the next, chauvinist pig the next. She has to notice the mood changes, and there has to be a reason—so why doesn’t she see? And everything he does has some higher reason, some ulterior motive, some greater cause that she never seems to catch on to. I wonder what it is, and sometimes it does keep me awake at night, but I can never quite guess what it is.
And so here I am now, sitting by myself in this little no-name café, or on rather its extended porch underneath a tall red-and-yellow-striped tiki umbrella, and looking out over the crystal blue waters of a fake beach. When I say fake, I don’t use this term loosely: the sand was probably bleached, and the café’s owner probably got the water from a surplus at the Evian factory. There’s a little plaster-and-concrete island in the ‘ocean’s’ center, with two plastic palm trees and a Barbie on it. The Barbie is sun-bleached and the paint is peeling off the palm trees and the island. I think the Barbie once belonged to some little girl who decided to have her go for a swim, and then realized at the last second that you couldn’t go out and get her. I’ll bet she bawled her eyes out.
My fries are cold. I ate the burger in a few second, no big deal there. For a skinny guy everyone says I can pack away the food and never gain a pound. Fast metabolism, you get the idea. So, here I am, all alone, as usual; all dressed up and nowhere to go.