Chapter 76
Korgy finds a loft apartment on the second floor of a building downtown, and we move him in on a Saturday afternoon. The place is small. A kitchenette attached to the living room, shoebox bathroom in the corner, cramped bedroom with a reach-in closet up the narrow metal staircase.
“Good thing I’m allowed to paint,” he chuckles, nodding at the walls.
He’s insecure about the place. It’s strange, seeing him insecure in this way.
I’ve seen him insecure in the past but it’s been the kind that feels performative, the kind where he’s being cute with his insecurity, amplifying it to seek reassurance.
Like when he calls himself over-the-hill just so I’ll tell him that he isn’t.
But this kind is different. There’s nothing performative about it.
It’s the kind of insecurity you try to hide. The real kind.
We haul the boxes up to Korgy’s place and finish with the mattress, reorienting it on our shoulders several times to get it through the front door. We unpack Korgy’s books first, lining them up on a built-in shelf in the living room as we go.
“Ohmygod, you have to read this,” he says as he places a beat-up old copy of Don Quixote on the shelf. “Greatest novel ever written. Seminal.”
He shakes his head with a self-important reverence, like loving a piece of art is the same as creating it himself.
“Ooh, David Foster Wallace too,” he says, picking up his copy of Infinite Jest. “Though he can get heady.” He shows off another, This Side of Paradise. “This one’s got its moments. I actually think it’s better than Gatsby, though Fitzgerald might be a bit flowery for you…”
“Yeah, he’s not for me. What’s that saying? ‘The simplest explanation is almost always the best—’ ”
“Occam’s razor.” Korgy puffs out his chest like an arrogant schoolboy, proud to know the technical term.
“Sure,” I nod. “Occam’s razor. That’s how I feel about writing.
I like writing that’s simple. Plainly stated observations, no fluff.
I don’t wanna hear, ‘It was the kind of gray morning with air so frigid that it makes your bones wail like a creaking staircase. I wanna hear: ‘It was a cold Tuesday. My bones hurt.’ Get to the point, you know?”
“Mmm. Then yeah, Fitzgerald’s not for you.”
We finish unpacking his books and his postage stamp collection and his toiletries. I pause when I get to his bottle of Jean Paul Gaultier and run my thumb along the pecs of the bottle. Look how far I’ve come.
We order Chinese food and devour it—green beans with garlic, honey chicken, beef lo mein, and egg rolls—then we fuck on the mattress with our garlic breath and I almost ask him to brush his teeth but think it would ruin the moment so I say nothing.
Afterward, we unpack all of Korgy’s clothes and end the night with his movie posters, all curled into rolls and popping out of an ill-fitting box.
“God, I’m so glad I’m finally getting to hang up my Clockwork Orange,” he says, unfurling the poster and splaying it out on the wall. “Gwen never let me. Said it didn’t go with the decor.”
“Luckily there’s no decor in here for it to go with…”
Korgy laughs, then hangs the poster on the wall, frameless, with dots of wall putty. The top right corner of it won’t stay put and keeps flapping over itself. Korgy smacks it with his hand. It finally stays.
“I love that you let me be who I am,” he says, looking deep into my soul. I smile, praying he can’t see the fear behind my eyes. The top corner of the poster flaps over again.