Chapter 20 #2
“So, we get together and he bites me like a lot…. Like a lot. And the next day I’m dizzy and my roommate is like omigod, Virginia, your neck is turning blue.
So, he picks me up…I don’t weigh that much but it was still so sweet…
.” Her roommate was a guy, and all her stories are like this, full of men who touch her as if I’ll catch the drift and follow suit and WHY THE FUCKING FUCK DID I LEAVE YOU?
The window is closed. I can feel it. If I did call now, you would tell me to piss off. Right?
Vagina points to her neck. No scar. No hickey. Nothing to see here, folks. “Right there,” she says. “Peter-Patrick bit me so hard that he clogged an artery. I mean, he almost killed me, Joey.”
That’s what you did. You killed me. You bit me. And then I hear my name. “Joseph!”
I trudge to the back of the shop—I will live and die in Mooney’s, I really will—and he scowls again at my love bite. “This is a bookstore.”
“I know. I can get a scarf.” Not a red one, though. Not a scarf like your scarf.
“Do you not own a turtleneck?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry, Joseph. Consider Virginia. That sort of scar makes a lady uncomfortable.” My jaw hits the floor. “Stop it,” he seethes. “You are in no position to judge, boy.”
“I know.”
“What is it that you know?”
“I know I should’ve worn a turtleneck.”
He motions for me to sit down, and that’s unusual.
Lately, he doesn’t talk to me so much, but then again, lately I pun around in starched white button-down shirts.
I don’t know who I am, Vail. I don’t know a devil’s doorbell.
It’s like Samantha when she says she caught monogamy from you people.
I caught something from you. Self-doubt.
Stupidity. ’Scuse me while I kiss this guy.
Speaking of which…still can’t read. I’m like the model in season 1 who brags about reading a whole magazine cover to cover.
Mooney glares. I forgot where I was. “Well?”
I missed it. Same way I miss a lot of things these past couple of days. “Could you repeat?”
“Have you really gone that soft, Joseph? Do you think I have nothing better to do than repeat myself?”
“No.”
“Go home.”
“I need the hours.”
“Oh, you do?”
“I’ve been spending a little too much lately….”
He kicks back in his chair. It swivels. I used to sit in that chair when I first started coming in here. I loved that thing. We didn’t have anything that swiveled at home or in school. Once, I asked him to spin me around. He said no. I never asked again.
“Joseph,” he says. “In Israel, all teenagers go to war before they go to college.”
“Okay.”
“Meaning you’re eighteen years old, boy.”
Seventeen, but who cares. “Okay.”
“When I was your age, I had my own apartment. I was a father. I was a man.”
True, but his kid died in childbirth, so does that even count? Fuck him. This is my life. Our life. “Bet you also knew what to do with a devil’s doorbell.”
He looks through me. “Did you ever read the Neil Postman as I suggested?”
No. “Of course.”
“Then you know that childhood and adolescence are invented concepts.”
I nod the way I do with Dick, and I wonder if this is it for me.
Maybe I’ll never become my own Big and will live out my days turning to others for advice, to guys who don’t even know each other, guys who would fucking hate each other if they met.
Something is missing inside of me, and there’s almost no family on Sex and the City.
Carrie never calls her mother. She almost never talks about her dad. Is that why I’m like this, like her?
“I’ve had it up to here with your fluctuations of late, Joseph. The haircut, that shirt.”
“I know.”
“No, you don’t know.”
“Sorry.”
He pounds the desk, and I’m an idiot. Can’t even delete the s-word from my fucking vocabulary. “Don’t be sorry, goddamn it. Be a man. Call it a fucking clitoris.”
—
Three minutes and two hours later, I’m in the basement with Our Bodies, Ourselves.
I’m doing a skim read and a deep clean and did I ring your devil’s doorbell?
Did I touch your…Still not used to that c-word and I want to cry but I don’t cry.
Boys don’t cry and when Carrie asks Big if he cried while they were apart, he says no.
But I sure did listen to a lot of Sinatra.
I stab the floor with my broom. This is what I am.
I don’t have my own thoughts. I used to live in books, and now I live in Sex.
It’s all the same. Mooney is right. I’m not a man.
I’m a mug. Empty. Real men pour their knowledge into my empty head but I trip on my own two feet and burn myself, then I’m empty again. Thirsty.
Footsteps above and the door opens. I wipe the tears away. Fucking crying. Didn’t I just say I wasn’t gonna do that?
The lights switch off and on, and that’s Mooney code for get the hell up here.
I trudge up the stairs like a child. I remember when I had that Beck song in my head.
I thought I was a loser. Little did I know that I was about to become a Sex fiend who can’t even make a woman come.
I button up my shirt. It doesn’t hide the hickey.
And it’s not a love bite if you don’t love me, which you don’t because how could you love me?
There is no me to love. I make promises in my head.
No more quoting Carrie and the girls. Or their men.
No more coffee at Dick’s.
No more letting Mr. Mooney treat me like shit.
I’m gonna get another job. A real job.
I’m gonna get my own place. Somewhere on the East Side. Or the West Side.
I’m gonna take a break from people.
I’m gonna read until my eyes bleed out and the right novel tells me where to go, who to be, what to do with all these white fucking shirts.
I reach for the doorknob, and it’s the worst thing about love, about you.
The second I feel charged up about becoming my own fucking person and figuring out who I am, all I see for myself at the end of the road is, well, you.
It’s like Mikey in Swingers. You are the pot at the end of the rainbow.
But I won’t get near the pot until I forget about you, you and your naked dress and your six-toed left foot.
Carrie never got this dark or morbid, and here it comes again, the words that feel like truth.
There is no me to love. Never was.
On I go, dragging my feet into the deserted floor of the shop.
Too bright, too dusty. A mother reads Strawberry Shortcake and the Winter That Would Not End to her mini-me little girl.
I feel a sneeze coming on, and it’s a relief, to lose myself for a second, to sneeze and come a little close to death.
“God bless you, babe.”
I turn around and YES! “Vail!”
You’re laughing at me—I am loud—and fuck yes, I am loud.
I don’t need Our Bodies, Ourselves or Dick the Damaged or Mr. Fucking Mooney to know that this is it.
You’re here. And you wouldn’t have come if you hadn’t come.
I did it. I rang your devil’s doorbell, and you’re holding two hot Greek cups of coffee and one of them is for me.
You came. You’re here. I take the cups and put them down and I pick you up and I do not put you down.
I will never let go, never again. You hold me tight as eyelids on eyeballs.
It is you. You. We stay like that, wrapped up as one, and I take it all back, Vail.
Every last word. Especially the worst part, the part where I said that you can’t love me because there is no me.
I was wrong. I am a person. You do love me. And God bless Sex and the Motherfucking City. God bless Dick.
“I missed you, Cusack.”
“Me too.”
“Ahem.”
I put you down and uh-oh…It’s Vagina. You mad dog her in a way that proves Dick is a genius. The jealousy trap…It worked. I make introductions. Short and sweet. Vagina, Vail. Vail, Vagina.
“Huh,” you say. “I didn’t realize there were two of you on the floor.”
That sound in your voice, that heat in it, you don’t just like me. You need me. I did make you come. “Yeah,” I say. “Mr. Mooney wants two of us because of shoplifters and stuff.”
“Aw,” Vagina coos. “Am I your little secret, Joey?”
You didn’t just not like that. You fucking hated it and you might haul off and smack her.
The look on your face—Carrie Bradshaw would never—and you take a deep breath like an orderly is coming at you with a syringe.
“Quite a dress,” you say. “It’s so rare that you see an LBD in the middle of the day. ”
Vagina pulls at her spaghetti straps and touches her body all over, and I wonder if you’re going to kill her. “I know, right? Poor Joey, though, it is a bit distracting….”
Your body is trembling, and you don’t blame me, you blame her.
I didn’t know a jealousy trap would work, let alone work like this and the bookstore is a boxing ring and it’s the best day of my life.
You two spar. A verbal catfight, a duel between two women gunning for me and my Portnoy, and the digs just keep coming.
Vagina says your boots are cute and look so, so comfortable and you say that when you worked in retail you never wore stilettos and Vagina says she’s a dancer so she’s used to being elegant in heels and you say it’s a shame that dancing alone doesn’t pay the bills—meow—and she says that you have a little spinach in your teeth and you say you didn’t eat any spinach today and she says it must have been something you ate last night, as if you don’t brush your fucking teeth and I wish I had this on tape, Vail.
You sigh. She sighs.
She picks up the cup of coffee that you brought for me and oh boy, oh shit.
That’s an illegal hit. She sips your coffee, and she’s the trampy younger barmaid who had eyes for Aidan and you are the calm, cool, semi-collected Carrie.
But then she spits that coffee out and wipes her full glossy lips with the back of her hand. “Ew.”
I hope you don’t kill her, Vail. I don’t want to visit you in prison.
Vagina shudders and hands me the coffee as if sipping from this cup won’t get me killed. “Fair warning, babe…” Suddenly, I am babe. “Your little friend forgot the Equal.”
You huff, and you puff, and you blow her house down. “Joe hates Equal.”
Vagina fixes her eyes on me like you’re some idiot customer.
She says it’s adorable that I didn’t mention I was dating anyone and you say that I’m a classic gentleman who didn’t want to make Vagina feel ill at ease.
The two of you are going to cut me in half with your talons and your tongues, and I am home.
This is home. I feel new pathways forming in my brain.
I am loved. Treasured. Hunted. I had faith in Dick and Tom Cruise and I had faith in you, didn’t I, Vail?
I wrap an arm around you—I can’t keep you in that jealousy trap forever—and you stroke my arm—you won this round, you did—and the doorbell chimes—it’s a customer—and Vagina leads the way to the front of the shop.
I can feel you hating her for the way she feels up her hips to scratch a make-believe itch.
You elbow me. Whore.
I smile at you. Madonna.
The customer’s a browser and he doesn’t want our help, and Vagina grabs the Voice and rolls it up and smacks my ass.
Again, you might kill her. Again, I dread the idea of you in a cage.
Vagina tries to make you jealous. She talks about our day, how she was helping me look at apartments. You are so green, so flustered and is that…Is that smoke steaming out of your nostrils?
She looks at me, not you. “You gotta see this place I found in the Voice.”
I’ve never seen you like this, Vail. Reduced to little noises. High-pitched yelps that reveal how much you missed me, how much you want me. “Whoa,” you say. “The Voice…Old-school.”
Vagina looks at me like it’s us against you. “Aw,” she says. “It’s the only way to find a good place in this city.”
“Huh,” you say. “I actually do better with Craigslist. That’s where I found Joe. Right, babe?”
And just like that, we’re back.