Chapter 32
I didn’t sleep. Lasted in the bed about five minutes and went back into your living room and found your bleach. I did your floors, same way you did Dick. I am atoning…but also, I am testing you.
Things always look a little clearer in the morning, and yeah…You should’ve been stronger. Carrie resisted the caterer slash artist. You should’ve had faith.
You emerge from your chambers. Sleepy-eyed and soft in my mother’s Nirvana T-shirt. You rub your eyes, you sniff. “My oh my, what did you do?”
I didn’t blow Dick on my birthday. “Nothing. I couldn’t sleep.”
You ooh and you aah and you are bashful like you don’t deserve a guy like me, a guy who pulls an all-nighter turning the house you’ve lived in for a long-ass time into a home. You are amazed by your squeaky-clean apartment. You prance around like a princess and you call me the best. I go with it.
“Well, it’s for me too. I like a clean house. I told you. I couldn’t sleep.”
You pick at a hole in my mom’s shirt. “Ah. So this is just like…You just were antsy.”
Watching your heart break a little is a thing that breaks mine.
I might hate it, the way your sadness wins.
Without even deciding to go to you, I do it.
Love love love love crazy love doesn’t allow me to stay mad at either one of us.
I put my hands on your shoulders. “No,” I say. “This was for you, Vail. Just for you.”
It works. You perk up and pour expired pre-ground coffee into the machine that needs to be cleaned.
You tell me stories about the way you used to be so neat, so obsessive with your Cabbage Patch Kids, lining them up and making everything just right.
“Something happens when you get to college, you know?”
No, I don’t know, and you should know that, but maybe you don’t carry me the way I carry you. “Sure.”
You go on, and I am not on your radar, not right now. “It’s probably a form of rebellion or something. This fear that if I go into happy homemaker mode, I’ll get stuck crocheting a bath mat or something and never figure out what I really want to do, you know?”
OR MAYBE YOU’RE JUST A LAZY AND SPOILED COMPULSIVE FUCKING DICK-EATER. Sorry. I didn’t mean it. Soft as a butter knife: “Do you have an ice pick, Vail?”
You gawk at me. “An ice pick? Like in Basic Instinct?”
I am not going to let one drunk blow job get the best of me. But I am also not gonna put up with any more fucking movie references at this moment in our life. “Yes.”
You don’t have an ice pick, and I need to get away from you, from the bleach.
I leave.
Outside, the air is fresh. No hot dogs to smell, not just yet.
I walk to Third Avenue, and Dick is somewhere in this city.
Dick whose dick was in your mouth. I enter the nearest hardware store, and I can’t help but wonder…
Did he enter you later that night? Would he defrost your freezer while you were sleeping? I buy an ice pick.
The flirty clerk who’s pushing fifty smiles at me. “I love that movie.”
Maybe all women are all part girls giggling over dirty movies. Maybe they all see a young guy like me as a toy. Maybe they never grow up, not fully. Does it matter? Do you love me?
I walk back to your place and climb the stairs. Full-blown Best Boyfriend Ever. I climb like Dick isn’t in there, exposed for all eternity under your filthy fleabag of a sofa.
You open the door. Are you blushing? “I should give you a key.”
YOU SHOULD GIVE ME YOUR HEART. “Yeah, cool.”
You are you. Too nervous to ask me what’s wrong, choosing instead to babble about Basic Instinct and erotic scenes and Al Pacino in Sea of Love and some story about how Sharon Stone is a genius and some bullshit you read about in Entertainment Weekly.
I am an idiot. A tool. But at least I am a tool with a tool. I tune you out.
I open the freezer and toss the expired frozen things into your kitchen sink.
And then I begin the real work. There’s nothing like that moment the ice finally weakens and an actual chunk of it hits the floor of the freezer.
A war is a bunch of battles, and I am in it.
An all-day fucking endeavor. You go to your sofa, sitting like a princess perched in her electric chair, and you do God knows what on your laptop. Soon enough, the noise bothers you.
“I feel so Carrie when Aidan was doing her floors, you know?”
That is your way of trying to tell me that you know I’m mad, that you’re trying to reconnect with me through Sex.
“Sorry, but there’s no way around it. Defrosting a freezer that’s been neglected for this long is a loud and long endeavor.”
You rub your eleven toes. You’re still in my mother’s Nirvana shirt like you know I might leave you. “Well,” you say. “You don’t have to do it, Cusack. You already did so much.”
“That’s me, though. I started. I have to finish.”
You tell me you don’t know what you did to deserve me, but the words are carnations that die the day you get them. You peck me on the cheek. “Back soon.”
You’re off to a coffee shop or maybe to suck Dick’s schlong. No. That was one time. One night. It’s better like this. Alone on your turf. Breaking what can be broken. Stabbing ice so I don’t stab Dick. The more I sweat, the smaller the pictures feel. A one-off accident you would erase if you could.
“Fuck.”
My hand slipped off the ice pick because my grip was too firm.
Not so tight, okay? I cut my knuckles on the cold wall, and my blood is hot.
It stings like Pop Rocks on my Portnoy, and you’re not here to wash my wound.
I drive the pick into the wall of white.
I sweat and I stab and I bleed as minutes turn into seconds into the word for something smaller than a second.
It hurts to be alive. I stab because the ice is still there, because you are still there with Dick in my mind.
My arm is thumping and sore, but on I go like a machine.
A robot. Sometimes I am stabbing Dick. Sometimes I am stabbing Cynthia, the one who makes sucking dick in a bathroom seem like a good thing to do.
And then what a joke, right? I am the tool with a tool. Sometimes I am stabbing myself.
The thing is, there is one person I am never stabbing.
You.
Love is a brick wall. A block of ice. You are not the problem.
The ice is the problem. Dick is the problem.
Implacable. The way he’s fucking out there, lodged behind the counter of that Beanery.
Heartless. No dog (tag) in this fight, in any fucking fight.
I know, Vail. He shouldn’t have messed with us.
Especially you, vulnerable you. All the times you sat in there talking to him, all the times I sat in there talking to him, being his friend, taking his advice.
I know what he would say to me were I to get him in a choke hold. (Could I?)
It was one night, Goldbitch. And I warned you about that girl.
She told you she’s not your girlfriend, kid, and who cares?
No pain, no gain. Bottom line is, son…You got what you want.
You locked it down. Girls do shit like this.
Think of me as her bachelorette party. Be here now.
You Seduced. You Destroyed. It’s always good when they hate themselves a little for doing you dirty.
It means they wanna get clean for you. Also, she was wasted. She might not even remember it, kid.
Weird, how I don’t need him anymore because it’s reached that point where I know what he’s going to say before he says it.
Your freezer is like new, and I did that. Not him. I wash my hands with hot water (you need to buy soap) and I reach under the sofa. I take the pictures. Mine now. Not yours. Mine.
I call you and you answer. First ring. Is that guilt? Boredom? Love? Is there any fucking difference? “Hey, you. I miss you.”
“I’m done. Your freezer is a freezer again.”
“Aw, you’re my hero. Thank you, Joe!”
You were too perky. Too polite. “Are you alone?”
“Me? Of course.”
“Beanery?”
“Nah, I’m kind of sick of that place. I’m just around the corner and I just…I still can’t get over it. My place has never been so clean and you just…You gave me a freezer!”
“I guess I did.”
“I want to do something for you. Wanna eat?”
You ate Dick’s dick. “Maybe.”
“Pick a place. Anywhere you want. It’s on me. I mean, me and Cyn have been swearing we’re gonna deal with the freezer for months and, like, I owe you.”
I don’t want you to owe me. I want you to love me. I can feel some guy listening to your side of the conversation, some random dude thinking we have the best relationship ever. Do we? Is this as good as it gets? Is this the best you can do?
“You there, babe?”
“I’m here. And it’s really not a big deal, Vail. I did this to our freezer growing up all the time.”
“Aaah.”
Girls: All they want is history. Ammo. Insight. “Anyway, Jeremy and Sarah had a fight.”
You gasp like a girl who doesn’t suck Dick’s dick in a dirty bathroom bar. “Oh no.”
“Apparently, she’s been stepping out with some guy. He’s pretty down, so you know…”
“Joe, no, this is awful. I love Sarah and…Are you serious? She cheated?”
“He’s pretty rattled, so I gotta be there for him.”
Your voice is lower now. “Of course you do, because you’re the best.”
Yesterday that would have meant something. Today it just makes the Dick pics hurt even more. “Look,” you say. “I know you don’t need my help here, you’re so smart about stuff….”
I am the stupidest man alive. A tool with a tool. “Okay…”
“Well, it’s just, I barely know them, and I know you know them way better.”
They don’t exist. “Uh-huh.”
“But I felt that instant kind of…Well, please tell Jeremy that I said that Sarah does love him.”
“Okay.”
“Joe, she raved about him. And if she messed up…”
She did not suck Dick’s dick. She never would, but is that just because she isn’t real? Because true love is a thing you can rent but never own? “Okay…”