by
C.J. Hauser
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Since having people I loved in the house made it feel better, I decided I might try love again. I let myself fall for a funny, handsome man I’d had a crush on for many years, since the first moment I saw him, really, even though I knew he lived abroad. I went and found him in Paris and we climbed all the steps of Montmartre to hang out in Moroccan bars, and eavesdrop on the singing inside the Lapin Agile, and to sit outside the Metro station sipping beers, watching the tides of people coming and going. When he came to stay with me in my house it was midwinter, and it snowed so hard there was nothing for us to do, and I worried about how my house was not as good as Paris. But the snow bucketed down and we played guitar and had sex all day and it was perfect. And then my house was a house where I had feelings again, where I had sex again. And after he left, I cried, but a house where you have cried over multiple heartbreaks is infinitely better than a house where you’ve only cried over one, defining, bad thing.
<3
That my body is for me, is mine, that my body does not have to please others, has been a hard thing to understand. It is a thing I’ve been working on for a long time. My piercings and tattoos have helped. They are little flags I use to settle the land of my body. To claim it for myself. Mine, I say. I do with you what I please. Mine, and I don’t care what someone else thinks of this. Someone who sees me tomorrow. Some imaginary someone someday. This has nothing to do with them. I plant a flag. Another. This is mine.
same
After the insemination, she tells Brynn to lie still for about ten minutes. Then she asks Brynn if she wants to keep the vial.
“Yes?” Brynn says.
“I forgot to keep all my kids’ stuff,” the nurse says, “and now they ask where it is.” She leaves.
“No one asked me that the last times,” Brynn says, still lying on the table. “About the vial.”
“You could turn it into a Christmas ornament,” I say. “Hang it on the tree every year and reminisce.”
Brynn laughs. “Or I could keep it in a drawer somewhere and take it out when they want to do anything and say, ‘Why don’t you ask your father about that?’ ”
I am wheezing I am laughing so hard.
Ross Sutherland is a poet and playwright and an all-around gorgeous madman. He has this podcast called Imaginary Advice and the “Sutherland Dunthorne Luck Index” is my favorite episode. There’s a running gag among his friend group that whenever something good happens to his friend fellow writer Joe Dunthorne, something bad happens to Ross. And so they devise a test to determine whether this is true. They go to a casino together. And sure enough, Joe wins some money and Ross loses all of his money. Theory proved! But then they talk about what happened in the casino. Ross asks Joe why he cashed out when he did, and Joe says it was because he’d won some money. He cashed out not because he was financially prudent but because he’d achieved a sort of narrative completeness: man goes to casino, plays cards, wins money, the end. Ross, on the other hand, had been up and down throughout the night, too, but he didn’t stop playing. Not because he loved gambling but because, he sort of realizes as he’s talking about this, the story of the night couldn’t quite seem over to him until he’d lost all his money.
It had nothing to do with luck. It had to do with what kind of story expectations they were carrying around inside them. For Joe, the story he was in didn’t feel over until something good had happened. For Ross, only losing everything could feel like the end.
I told Lindsay because she was beautiful and kind and patient and loved good things like birds and I wondered what she would say back to me. What would every good person I knew say to me when I told them that the wedding to which they’d RSVP’d was off and that the life I’d been building for three years was going to be unstitched and repurposed?
Lindsay said it was brave not to do a thing just because everyone expected you to do it.
Jeff was sitting outside, in front of the cabin with Warren, as Lindsay and I talked, tilting the sighting scope so it pointed toward the moon. The screen door was open and I knew he’d heard me, but he never said anything about my confession.
What he did do was let me drive the boat.
The next day it was just him and me and Lindsay on the water. We were cruising fast and loud. “You drive,” Jeff shouted over the motor. Lindsay grinned and nodded. I had never driven a boat before. “What do I do?” I shouted. Jeff shrugged. I took the wheel. We cruised past small islands, families of pink roseate spoonbills, garbage tankers swarmed by seagulls, blowing fields of grass and wolfberries, and I realized it was not that remarkable for a person to understand what another person needed.
“You’re too sensitive.” Yeah, there was so much else she ought to be saying also, but this was what came out. It was true, anyway. For a couple years he’d been a used car salesman and so hyperaware of what that profession had come to mean that working hours were exquisite torture to him. Mucho shaved his upper lip every morning three times with, three times against the grain to remove any remotest breath of a moustache, new blades he drew blood invariably but kept at it; bought all natural-shoulder suits, then went to a tailor to have the lapels made yet more abnormally narrow, on his hair used only water, combing it like Jack Lemmon to throw them further off. The sight of sawdust, even pencil shavings, made him wince, his own kind being known to use it for hushing sick transmissions, and though he dieted he could still not as Oedipa did use honey to sweeten his coffee for like all things viscous it distressed him, recalling too poignantly what is often mixed with motor oil to ooze dishonest into gaps between piston and cylinder wall. He walked out of a party one night because somebody used the word “creampuff,” it seemed maliciously, in his hearing. The man was a refugee Hungarian pastry cook talking shop, but there was your Mucho: thin-skinned.
“But our beauty lies,” explained Metzger, “in this extended capacity for convolution. A lawyer in a courtroom, in front of any jury, becomes an actor, right? Raymond Burr is an actor, impersonating a lawyer, who in front of a jury becomes an actor. Me, I’m a former actor who became a lawyer. They’ve done the pilot film of a TV series, in fact, based loosely on my career, starring my friend Manny Di Presso, a one-time lawyer who quit his firm to become an actor. Who in this pilot plays me, an actor become a lawyer reverting periodically to being an actor. The film is in an air-conditioned vault at one of the Hollywood studios, light can’t fatigue it, it can be repeated endlessly.”
“What do you want to bet, then?” She knew. Stubborn, they watched each other’s eyes for what seemed five minutes. She heard commercials chasing one another into and out of the speaker of the TV. She grew more and more angry, perhaps juiced, perhaps only impatient for the movie to come back on.
lol familiar
Much worse, to Fallopian’s mind. After the confrontation, appalled at what had to be some military alliance between abolitionist Russia (Nicholas having freed the serfs in 1861) and a Union that paid lip-service to abolition while it kept its own industrial laborers in a kind of wage-slavery, Peter Pinguid stayed in his cabin for weeks, brooding.
“But that sounds,” objected Metzger, “like he was against industrial capitalism. Wouldn’t that disqualify him as any kind of anti-Communist figure?”
“You think like a Bircher,” Fallopian said. “Good guys and bad guys. You never get to any of the underlying truth. Sure he was against industrial capitalism. So are we. Didn’t it lead, inevitably, to Marxism? Underneath, both are part of the same creeping horror.”
“Industrial anything,” hazarded Metzger.
“There you go,” nodded Fallopian.
lol
“Sure this Koteks is part of some underground,” he told her a few days later, “an underground of the unbalanced, possibly, but then how can you blame them for being maybe a little bitter? Look what’s happening to them. In school they got brainwashed, like all of us, into believing the Myth of the American Inventor—Morse and his telegraph, Bell and his telephone, Edison and his light bulb, Tom Swift and his this or that. Only one man per invention. Then when they grew up they found they had to sign over all their rights to a monster like Yoyodyne; got stuck on some ‘project’ or ‘task force’ or ‘team’ and started being ground into anonymity. Nobody wanted them to invent—only perform their little role in a design ritual, already set down for them in some procedures handbook. What’s it like, Oedipa, being all alone in a nightmare like that? Of course they stick together, they keep in touch. They can always tell when they come on another of their kind. Maybe it only happens once every five years, but still, immediately, they know.”
Metzger, who’d come along to The Scope that evening, wanted to argue. “You’re so right-wing you’re left-wing,” he protested. “How can you be against a corporation that wants a worker to waive his patent rights. That sounds like the surplus value theory to me, fella, and you sound like a Marxist.” As they got drunker this typical Southern California dialogue degenerated further. Oedipa sat alone and gloomy. She’d decided to come tonight to The Scope not only because of the encounter with Stanley Koteks, but also because of other revelations; because it seemed that a pattern was beginning to emerge, having to do with the mail and how it was delivered.
lol