(In Progress) A Taste of Vowels

This is it, she must have thought as she’d thought on many other occasions. Always focusing on the is and never the isn’t. “You have to jump before you think too much about it and lose your nerve,” she would have said in any other circumstance.

I slid my hand back out of her reach. “Are you sure?” I mumbled in a tone she probably pegged as self-conscious.

“He asked. I said yes. What’s done is done.”

Now I could get all nostalgic and talk about how when I met her she was a different person, and about how she changed and now this person, sitting across from me in this coffee shop I’d never be caught dead in under normal circumstances, was not that new person but the one I’d first met, but I won’t. It’s not that I didn’t have the right. I had every right to call her out. Of all people. But she was expecting me to. To catch her in mid fall. Ha, not now, sweetie, not this time. That rock on your finger would drag us both down.

“Well, congratulations or best wishes or whatever people in this situation are supposed to say.”

“You should know,” she said daring me to jump in after her. “He picked it out himself. Can you believe that?”

“I can actually.”

“It amazes me,” she said, “that everything that’s happened in my life has led me here.” She looked at the ring.

I looked at her face. I couldn’t tell how happy she was. She was purposely concealing it from me. She was making that much obvious, she wanted me to ask.

“You’ll do good with whatever you try. You always have,” I said.

“That’s not true.” Another trap.

“I have to go. I’m supposed to meet Jane for dinner.”

Of course, you know it, I know it, I didn’t have to go right then. But the feeling overcame me. And maybe it was obvious. To her.

I did meet Jane for dinner. When she asked what I’d done that day I told her every detail from morning masturbation to cleaning behind my ears. And, “Oh, yeah. Ann’s getting married.” The last thing I needed was another interrogation.

“I bet that’s a relief?” she said.

“Huh?”

“You won’t have to worry about her pestering you anymore.”

“Yeah.” I have to admit I was surprised Jane wasn’t all over me with her psych degree. “I’m totally fine with it,” I said.

“I know,” Jane said.

And then the nostalgia crept back in and I thought about how everything in my life had lead to this.

“She seems happy,” I said.

Jane was engrossed in the menu. “What are you having?”

I looked over the menu I’d seen so many times before. I almost knew it by heart. “I don’t know. You?”

“The Greek chicken.”

“Of course.”

“Hey, I know what’s good.”

I don’t have to spell it out. She always ordered the Greek chicken, no olives. And me, I’d tried I few different items.

When the waitress came, I order a cup of coffee.

“Didn’t you just have coffee?”

Then I explained how one could never have too much coffee and that she should know that about me by now and that not everything was up for shrinking. “Sometimes a man just wants a cup of coffee.”

“Alright, alright. I’m not trying to start an argument,” she said.

“All right.”

I was on my third cup and Jane had a pile of Kalamata olives sitting on the side of her plate. I popped one into my mouth. Studied the smooth texture, the meaty flesh, the abundance of vowels. The salt. “They’re actually really good. Have you even ever tried one?”

“I tried one once. I didn’t like it,” she said, a child’s response.

“You have to taste it like you have no idea what it should taste like.”

“I know what it tastes like, and I don’t like it.”

She continued to dig at the hummus with a slice of pita and with the tip of her finger she dabbed tabouli on top. She took a drink of water on top of it all. A drop dripped down her chin.

“I didn’t even know you were going to see her,” she said without breaking concentration on her plate.

“She called me this morning while I was at work. She told me she had something important to tell me.”

“Another one of her ‘stories’ eh?” Jane laughed.

“I guess.”

Ann did that. She’d call or text and only say one thing, “I have stories!” At first her stories were all about me in disguise. She’d tell me about how she met a boy and he instantly fell in love with her, after sleeping with her of course. And I knew she meant that I should have. Through these stories I saw her change. They stopped being allegories for my benefit and started being about her. Advice she needed. And I dispensed it willingly and honestly.

“Did it end with, ‘and they lived happily ever after,’ this time?” Jane asked.

“I guess we’ll see.”

“I doubt it,” she said.

“Why do you say that?”

“Marriage. It takes up all your time. You should know.”

For the second time that day, I’d had my nose rubbed in the fact that I, me of all people, had been married.

“I’m glad it’s not for us,” she said.

Not for us, but for them. Ann and Joseph. Not for me and Jane. We have better things to do with our time than marriage. Who wants to waste their time in that?

“You don’t think about it sometimes?” I said.

“What? Marriage?”

“Sure.”

“Sure. Sometimes. I know you though,” Jane said.

So it was not not for us. It was not for me. Singular.

“Check please.”

What Girls Do

It’s the oldest cliche in the book, but they’re animals. Clawing, fighting for their pray. They dance after the music stops. And I realize that everything I’ve never wanted to be in a relationship, I’m not. I’ve never just gone along. I’ve always spoke my mind.

Tonight’s an experiment. I answer every question with, “Sure.” I don’t say no. Especially to the questions that have two options. I say, “Sure,” and he takes what he wants. I smile. I think it looks fake but he doesn’t. Or else he’s too drunk to tell. When he asks how I am, I say, “Fine.” he asks me if I’m telling the truth and I don’t respond. But its taken him so long to ask it that he’s forgotten the question. My unanswer is answer enough. I know I should feel something about this but I don’t.

We’re going to Courtney’s house. A girl he used to fuck. I’ve been there before. He always takes the long way. I think it’s because he savors taking me there, but secretly know it’s because he hasn’t considered the easy way. I once pointed this out to him, but now, in his drunkenness, he’s forgotten. Like an over excited child. And though I’m writing this now, in his car, on my phone, in 256 characters, he’s too afraid to ask me what I’m really doing. He thinks I’m texting an ex. I tell him I’m not.

He says he feels like he’s dragging me somewhere I don’t want to go, but he doesn’t turn around. He calls her and she says, “Who’s this?” He says, “Mike.” I know him as Michael. I don’t know this Mike.

The truth is I’m doing this because I didn’t eat today. Or I’m bored. Or I really just want to fight because at least in a fight you know what side you’re on. In this relationship, I have no clue. Am I for it or against it? And you’ll hold me in contempt and tell me I’m the same kind of cunt. But that just makes you the same kind of dick. Mike or whoever. Someone I know too well.

I know what to expect from. And this is it. This is what I expect. Why would I expect anything else? I guess I hope that it’d be different. That I’d taught him better. Yes, I’m that kind of cunt, too. Fuck me I don’t deserve to live. Not this life with these dancers. If I was lucky, I might get cast as an extra, a bar tender. But even that would feel forced--at this point.

For some reason I can’t imagine. He wants to be part of this group. I imagine them referring to themselves as a tribe. Like there was something vested other than alcohol and--well I’m sure they could come up with more than one commonality. He says he’s a watcher, but now that I’ve told him what I’m doing here on my phone, he doesn’t understand the exaggeration or the nuance.

I’ve read him this while we’re parked, waiting for Courtney to get home from the bar. He doesn’t know what to think. “Are you sure you want to be here?”

“Sure,” I say.

He doesn’t want to leave while she’s just pulling in. He thinks it’d be rude. Or that it’d hurt her feelings. My feeling are sacrificed, culled for the greater good--the tribe I’m not a part of. Better me who he has to explain himself to later.

We go in and she stands while we sit. She talks with her hands with a lot of pointing and looking off to the distance. She knows that we share a very close history although we hardly know each other. I try to feel bad for her like she lost some game. I only feel bad for myself. I act normal if not a little less talkative than I’d normally be. I’m still playing this game of sure and fine. And now Michael knows it.

At 4am I start nudging him to leave. At 4:30am, we leave. There’s little speaking on the way home and I’m no longer writing this, having lost the edge of my buzz.

We get back to my house and he now wants to know why. “What’s wrong.”

“Nothing,” I say and smile. He says he knows something’s wrong because I’ve told him in what I’ve written. I’m playing a game. He thinks two games. Not only the game of sure and fine, but also the game of telling him he’s an asshole through writing. I tell him I’m not that type of girl. That I say what I mean. He agrees but says, “That’s what girls do.” I remind him that I didn’t want to go out in the first place. I didn’t want to go to the bar. I remind him that I said it was a compromise on my part to see him. He remembers but stays silent. I tell him compromise is the name of the sure and fine game.