We were talking about this aspect of human behavior via Susan’s miserable experiences complying with the social mores of East Barnstock; that being the virtual and physical worlds of dating.
“ Marriages are what they are” Susan observed, spitting a tomato seed onto the counter, “Little , hallacious marriages that last throughout the hour ,or the afternoon , or however long it is we have to play at this crap mating .Which it isn’t , obviously” I held my head at the angle of perceptive listening, wetting my lips every now and then, as if readying myself for speech as she plowed through her monologue. “ ‘The focus of our attentions oughta always be on the debt we owe to our parents…’” She threw her head back and shocked the drowsy luncheonette with a shriek of laughter. “ Can you imagine ? ‘For God and Jesus , and the boys in Iraq ,also’”, she went on . “ I ‘ve met that one. The neo-Christian lesbian with a wicked bone to pick with the rest of the brood. And she decides on a progressive dating service as the milieu for the advancement of that particular agenda. Over drinks, she’s eyeballing my legs and whispering conservative rhetoric like she’s Marlena Dietrich . I felt like a drone shoved up next to the biggest, scariest queen of all time and all I’m good for is nodding and saying Yeah, that’s interesting lady. How true lady. Lady! ,she screams,doing Jerry Lewis, terrifying a group of adorably dressed pre-schoolers having a big girl lunch with their grandmother.
“I’m not into love like it’s something otherworldly, a fix-all. The long driveway that takes you a year to shovel. The Zen calendar in the pantry and reading Dr Seuss to our adopted aborigine. You know how I see it. Like with us. Big romance, yes ?”
“Quick romance” I adjusted.
“O.k, sure.” She laughed. “ You poor thing”
“ No, I just want to be helpful. You say romance and that’s a way of looking at it.” I took a drink of water ,watching her closely so as to hold her attention. “ But how long , a couple of days?”
“Still romance”
“Fuck fest”
“Whatever, it’s my constitutional mandate. A girl’s gotta get the gettin’, right?”
“You’re a nut, Suzie” I said for the record.
We’d been having this discussion really since before we’d met, messaging each other through Lovelonging.com. She sent me pictures of herself in an orange day-glo thong. I sent her a poem about the stock market crash. It was exciting ,simultaneously thoughtless and witty, full of ambient secrecy and innuendo. After four days of this we moved to meet at a gas station at a half way point. We bought candles and a bottle of Jamesson’s and went to a motel. Two days later we were still there, but sapped . I lay next to her lighting cigarettes off cigarettes, listening to her diatribe about the Puritan work ethic. She told me that she was the product of old fashioned episcopalian values and the corrosive influence of Marin County. She told me she was more often than not not a lesbian. I said I didn’t really care one way or the other, and that I wasn’t, for whatever reason, provoked by the idea of women getting naked with each other. She didn’t believe that was true, but said if it was then she didn’t want to go on hanging out with me because I was proably spiritually bankrupt, or some kind of a sally. And that marked the end of our romantic trajectory.
Which was fine, really. Probably better than fine. I was beginning to see how there was a lot of anxiety available to me that I was no longer in need of. Suzie was a great example. I was pretty sure one day she’d begin carrying on like this and find she was simply unable to stop. Whoever she had with her at that point, and I prayed -not me ,would have to harden themselves against her, and walk away, maybe even run, to free themselves of that scene. To be romantically attached to someone like that is as good as having an adjacent head screaming in your ear.Well that was no longer on the table.
She drummed her hands on the linoleum and stuck out her tongue. She winked in the manner of Sarah Palin, rolled her eyes back feigning orgasm or satanic possession. The room after a while became inured to her antics and turned cautiously back to its business.
“I’m like the old bitch who lives in a shoe, except it’s Lucy, Buckminister, Crumbles and Mac Mc Furr Ball instead of kids, and I smell forever like kibble. Do I?” She sniffed around on her sweater ”With scratches all over me , not from rough sex, of course, but the misplaced affections of my litter” She held her fingers up to look like ears which she did whenever she talked about her cats.
“You’re like Mother Theresa to them, Suzie” I said, but I had lost track of the conversation enough so I couldn’t say for sure if my tone was appropriate, or not. She’d put her foot up on the table to re-tie one of her high top sneakers which was covered in Japanese anime stickers, and weird messages written in purple and gold glitter. One of them said ” Give it up, yo” with a remarkably detailed face peering out through the “o”, whose mental anguish reminded me of Bosch. I wondered if there were a room in the Smithsonian for ornamented basketball sneakers. Probably.
Suzie had a friend named Ollie who’d recently called me out of the blue asking if I thought she was a threat to herself. I didn’t know how to answer him, and said so. He said she had been acting strange lately. He said she’d been drawing on her walls.
“Is that new?” I asked.
He said he thought it was ,but he hadn’t known her all that long. In the background I could hear frantic voices ,calling out like you would associate with a fast food kitchen, or a triage unit. The racket grew louder and soon he was yelling. I started yelling , also.
“If you haven’t known her very long what makes you think she’s in crisis” I hollared.
“I have a sixth sense for this kind of thing.” There was a deafening bell and then it grew quiet. I envisioned a game of musical chairs being played by grown men in old style knickers and women in flapper outfits with peacock feathers tucked in their hair. He lowered his voice again. ” I haven’t known her very long, but I feel very connected to her. Like we’re intrinsically bound. A distant twin. Someone you survive an airplane crash with.” Not likely, I thought. But he had a point about her making you feel like you’d survived something. Even if it was her you were surviving.
