You

29

I’LL tell you something about suicide, Beck. If I were going to off myself with a handgun or a noose or a permanent swim, which I’m not, now would be the time to do it. You have dismissed me and it’s been five hours and eleven days since you took your love away and all of our songs sound bad because they will never see us standing from such great heights and no, you will not still love me tomorrow because you never loved me at all. I’m not Bobby Short or (the real) Beck and you don’t want to defy the logic of all sex laws with me and you are not in love again and you do not love, love, love it. I made it inside of you and you don’t want me back. Nothing is fun anymore, not even coming up with tweaked-out Benji tweets:

Coke. Because I’ll sleep when I’m dead. #cocacola #hahaha

“Excuse me but can you stop with your phone and look at me,” an uppity old broad squawks. I hit TWEET and offer my assistance.

The bitch barks, “I said I don’t need a bag. I brought my own.”

“Good for you,” I snap and crumple the paper bag and throw it in the trash just to let her know who’s boss and Ethan sighs and apologizes to her and pulls the bag out of the trash and this is what my life has come to: me, Ethan, and a bunch of book-buying assholes.

I spend day after day with Ethan and getting to know him is no easy thing especially now that I don’t get to tell you about him. You complained about the loud fan in the employee restroom and pushed me to replace it as anyone would; Ethan calls it a “sound machine” and claims it doesn’t bother him. He’s almost like a hermaphrodite, this kid, in a CK One asexual cologne 1992 sort of way. Without asking I can tell you that he knows all the words to “Gonna Make You Sweat” and he’d be at home on a dance floor sidestepping, clapping, and counting. Out loud. He’s aggressive in all the wrong ways and he was born too late and he looks tired at forty-one from years of hunting for a color-blocked, Rick Dees–narrated way of life. You can either feel bad for the guy or jump him and steal his wallet. He’s a litmus test of a person and half the customers meet his smile and the other half glare at him and I tell him all the time that he should work in an old folks home and I mean it. He could deejay dance parties for people in wheelchairs, on life support. People with crooked, chamomile-scented dicks and lazy, warped vaginas would spark to his total, complete, and tragically inherent want for a time long gone.

“Have a good one, ma’am!”

“Ethan, you don’t have to call everybody ‘ma’am,’ ” I say. “Some people, some people you just wave or leave it at ‘you’re welcome.’ ”

He won’t listen or learn or bend and I’m losing patience with him, with life, with humans. I have nothing left to crave and dream about anymore. I feel queasy when I look at him because he’s so fucking nice that he doesn’t mention you at all. He doesn’t lord his relationship over me and he says as little as possible about Blythe, which makes me like a pity case. All I have is a shitty memory of our quick sexual congress, your eight seconds as a monkey locked to my dick. Every day, the hotness in Macy’s seems cooler and the sex memories are like all memories, doomed to tarnish and weaken with time. You told Chana:

I just got too deep, too fast . . . again.

The again hurt and it’s all perpetually downhill. My days begin with stale Frosted Flakes and newly ripped jeans I forgot to wash, won’t wash; you were on them. I ride the train to work and I don’t care about the books because you’re not touching them. I check your e-mail ferociously. You go on with your life and you don’t write to me. I pick at the scab on my burnt finger. I don’t want it to heal and I want this pain and I tear at my finger that you liked so much that night in the horse-drawn carriage. My finger oozes pus and blood and pain like everything else in my life. If Ethan tells me one more fucking time that I ought to go get my finger checked out and sue the maker of the coffee pot—I had to think fast, you can’t tell the new kid on the register that you lit up your finger when you got dumped—well, if Ethan doesn’t shut his face he’s gonna get hit in the face, pus and all.

And even though you only worked here a short while, you were a permanent marker on this place. And somehow, it feels vicious that Ethan now stands in your place. He likes new things, crisp Gap “merch”—“What a great sale!” he exclaims as if I want to know the story of how he got his discount denim—and his button-down shirts—“On Tuesdays, everything in the clearance section at the Gap is an additional forty percent off!” he informs me, as if to mark my calendar, as if I asked—and every day he’s in a good fucking mood and clean shaven and tragically, pathetically hopeful that more good things are going to happen for him. Having Blythe has made him feel like a winner and he plays the lottery now. “Hey, Joe, maybe we can go in on a ticket together, you know, like you read about in the paper, those guys that work together and win together!” Every day he raves about his coffee—as if this is something that needs to be pointed out, that coffee tastes like coffee—and when it’s January, the most universally reviled month of the year, and it’s sleeting and the sky looks like acid washed jeans and the store has to be mopped three times a day because of slobs in their boots and slobs with their umbrellas, and he’s got to fucking sing out, “Don’t you love a gray day?” and when the sun does shine to mock us cuz it’s thirty-two degrees he’s got to sing out again, “Nothing like a winter sun, am I right?”

And the worst part is that he won’t hate me, Beck. I can ignore him and bark at him and he’s my dog, smiling every time I walk into the shop. He’d never kill himself either, even if he missed a 75 percent off sale at the Gap. He’s too mild. One day, when he first started, he showed up with a bag from Bed Bath & Beyond. When he went to take a shit—he eats too much bran, worries about his colon—I peeked in the bag. Do you know what was in there? I’ll tell you what was in there: a collapsible tray table. Is there any sadder purchase in this fucking world? Maybe a CD of C+C Music Factory’s Greatest Hits, but that’s about it. And I remember thinking, Ethan is gonna go home from the shop and make fiber for dinner and put the dinner on his new tray and watch network sitcoms and think about how funny The Big Bang Theory is. He will literally lick the plate clean and fold his tray table and put it in the place where he will put it every night for the rest of his painfully lonely, fibrous, organized life. But then he got Blythe. And I know they are together; I’m not an idiot. And now it feels like I’m the one with the fucking collapsible table and the world is upside down. You should be here, telling me what Blythe says about him in her stories. I need you. I need levity.

I hate Ethan. I hate him for having Blythe. When we broke up, they should have broken up and I try to be normal. I ask him what’s up with them, but he feeds me bullshit: “We don’t want to rush into anything and we both value our independence, so we’re taking it nice and slow, you know?”

No, I don’t know because I don’t value my independence. I value your pussy. If I were in his Reeboks—divorced, coupon-hoarding, slow—I would have put a bullet in my head. These are the darkest days in the history of the world and I’m losing it. And as if that’s not enough, he is trying to learn Spanish from listening to Enrique Iglesias songs and he asks if he can put some on right now.

“Sure,” I say. I don’t care anymore. I’m so dead that I’m deaf.

“I don’t have to listen to it right now.” He panders. “Want me to play something else? I have a ton of playlists on here. I have club music and rock music and jazz music.”

“Ethan, it’s not ‘jazz music.’ It’s just ‘jazz.’ ”

“Joe, you know so much about everything,” he says and he always finds a reason to smile. If I gave him a bloody nose he’d find a reason to thank me. “I feel like I’m learning more every day!”

I go downstairs and lock the door and check your e-mail. There is a lot of junk about school, some financial bickering with your parents, your dad is helping you “a little” and you’re pity-partying with Lynn and Chana about “the Januaries.” You are trying to keep busy, buying all kinds of shit online, putting it on Daddy’s credit card, then promising Daddy you’ll return it. There’s no way around it anymore. You are gone, shopping, and I peel the new skin off my burn and watch the pus ooze. I am not healing. I refuse to get over you. Then you write to Chana:

I am so sorry but I am not gonna be able to go to that show with you next week. It’s just, well, I miss Joe.

If I had a folding TV dinner tray I would hurl it at the window and pound my chest like a barbarian, like a thick-dicked alpha gorilla. Yes! You miss me! It’s true! You do! The countdown to the apocalypse is canceled and you miss me and I blow on my finger and I love life and C+C Music Factory and maybe Ethan really will learn Spanish and I read on:

I don’t know if it’s him per se or what we had. But I keep thinking about him and I keep almost calling and I am going to call if I don’t get out of here. So I am gonna go to Peach’s place in Little Compton and just kind of decompress.

And now I’m pacing because you love me so much you have to leave New York. It’s official. You are obsessed and you go on:

So, again, SO sorry to bail. But Peach says you are welcome to join if you want!

Chana’s response is epic and I love her and I love the world. She is succinct:

? Um, ok, Beck. You miss Joe so you’re running off to a deserted beach house in the dead of winter with Peach?

You: I need space.

Chana: Well, no offense but I don’t think of a Peach pit as “space.” See you when you’re back.

You miss me and you miss me and there’s an e-mail from Peach:

Beckalicious, you rule. I know you were on the verge of calling Joseph last night and I am SO PROUD OF YOU for not caving. You are so talented and you’re in school. Of course that has to come first. And Joseph above anyone would want you to do what’s best for you. Don’t be so hard on yourself, B. Anywho . . . we’re going to have a blast in LC. Oh. Before I forget, it turns out that most of the bedrooms are mid-renovation. I hate to do this but can you actually not invite C&L? Thanks!

Bedrooms are under construction but there is always room for one more. It’s vacation time! And before you can vacate you need to prepare! Everyone knows that! I bolt up the stairs and tell Ethan I’m going to the Gap.

“Don’t even look at anything in the front!” he advises. “Plow right on through to the back!”

“You’re a good man, Ethan,” I say and I mean it. “You’ll be speaking Spanish in no time!”

“Thanks, Joe! Or should I say . . . Gracias! And remember, it’s Tuesday!”

“I know,” I say. “All clearance items are forty percent off.”

“You know it, Joe!”

And I do. I can’t wait to get new things. I like old things but you like new things and maybe there’s something to be said for new things. You miss me and that’s new, and that’s good.