The Encyclopedia of Exes Page 22

  I slept awhile and when I woke I took my clothes off. Ethan had already done the same and he was asleep on the sheets in his underwear. I was still drunk, but I didn’t feel sick and I looked out the sliding windows to the lake and I thought of waking Ethan and telling him we should go swimming. He woke on his own and I can still remember him turning his head to look at me and by accident his foot touched my leg and then the accident got bigger and we held one another. I had never touched another person, I had never kissed a girl, and Ethan rolled us over and lay on top of me. For a moment I did nothing. I wondered why I was on the bottom, but then it seemed to make sense, Ethan had always been bigger than me, and I put my arms around my friend’s back, I put my face into his neck.

  The next day we were hung over and tried to sweat it out by playing basketball. We had woken in the morning and said almost nothing. After one game of basketball we sat in the shade near his driveway and I was going to ask him if we could go inside and try it again, I wanted to. But before I spoke he did, he said, “Let’s forget what happened last night. We were drunk and it was a bad mistake. Don’t ever tell anybody. I had thought about it before, about trying it, but now I know I don’t like it, it’ll be a lot better with girls.”

  I didn’t say anything to Ethan and we played another game of basketball and we never talked about it again. Our friendship returned to just about normal, except I wish that we had never found beer, because we really didn’t have to talk anymore. All we did together was drink and wait till we’d got our licenses and make plans about what we’d do with our cars. And for those two years of waiting I was always trying to work up the courage to ask him if I could touch him, but I was always too scared, and then I started getting a girlfriend here and there and it wasn’t on my mind as much.

  Ethan was the first to get his license and his parents bought him a beautiful new car. We were seventeen and everything was supposed to start happening for us, but that’s when Ethan began to leave me. It started slow and it was never spoken, but he never called me first anymore and he didn’t return all my calls, I was the one always phoning him. And I’d be walking to his house sometimes and he’d be pulling out of his driveway and the car would be full with people that I didn’t know and I’d turn around like I’d forgot something and pray that he wouldn’t see me in his rearview mirror. Somehow fourteen years of friendship could die in just one moment and I didn’t know how to ask him why.

  He would see me every now and then and he would act as if nothing was wrong and I couldn’t believe that he didn’t notice. And then this one time when we did go out, early in the night he said he was tired and wanted to go home. He dropped me off and I smiled like I always did at him, like we were still best friends, but I knew he was lying. I went into my house and I tried to sleep, but it was no good. And I couldn’t tell my parents what was happening, I was embarrassed and scared to tell anyone that I was losing my best friend. So I got my bike out that night, I had destroyed the car I could use, and I cycled the half block to Ethan’s house and his car wasn’t there, and I knew where he was. I had seen this one boy with him just once and I didn’t trust him and I knew where he lived and I rode my bike there. It was a few miles away and when I found the house Ethan’s car was in front. I hid myself in the shadows of a tree and I wanted to break the car’s windshield, I wanted to smash every shiny panel, I wanted to cut apart the insides with a knife, and I wanted to sit in that car till Ethan came out, and I wanted him to like me again. And too I wanted to go in the boy’s house and take a baseball bat to the whole thing (I often wanted to do that to my own house) and I wanted to look at Ethan’s face and I wanted to yell at him, “I knew you were lying.” But all I did was turn around on my bike and swallow everything and seal it inside me. All over my body, in my lower back, in my hands, in my stomach, along the shelf of my hips, in my arms, are bags and boxes of hates and angers, and that night in front of the boy’s house is down there somewhere, making little cancers maybe, but it’s closed tight for now. Though that first night it leaked a little while I rode my bike and punished my legs on the hills and hated my town and hated all the ugly houses.

  TRIANGLE

  Gary Shteyngart

  (trī’ăng’gəl) n 1: a: the plane figure formed by connecting three points not in a straight line by straight line segments; a three-sided polygon b: Something shaped like such a figure: a triangle of land 2: Music. A percussion instrument consisting of a piece of metal in the shape of a triangle open at one angle 3: a relationship involving three people, especially a ménage à trois

  She had two bodies. An aristocratic upper half that my St. Petersburg ancestry probably would have termed cultured: diminutive shoulders that fit into the hollows of my palms, a well-proportioned Anglo face (here the straight stalk of a nose, there a minimalist attempt at ears), the whole pleasant affair crowned by twenty inches of flaxen hair. But by candlelight a second body revealed itself, as foamy and real as our country’s interior: strong, large feet that conquered the hills of Brooklyn with ease; hips wide enough to give birth to the tribe of Joseph; a backside in which one could lose oneself—a scalloped, ridged white-pink ode to the uncomplicated side of lust. And when she propelled this second half out of a pair of tight jeans, I was torn between the biological and the refined, the erect and the ethereal, an endless permutation that left me speechless: Do I grab the ass or kiss her nubbin of a nose? Do I weep between the part of her golden crown or plunge between the obvious promise of her thighs? After knowing her a few weeks, after falling thoroughly in love, I was, I thought to myself, caught in a love triangle.

  And then it got really complicated. She told me she had another boyfriend.

  He was a thirty-year-old poet who lived with his parents in New Jersey, dropped dubious verses about the Greek gods and weekly crashed at my sweetheart’s home in Brooklyn. (They had coupled for the better part of a decade; the phone bill was in his name.) In photographs he looked like a Greek god himself, a dark hipster god assigned by Zeus to some minor precinct—Trendios, the god of Williamsburg. He enjoyed working with wood and spoke with a fake accent, as if he belonged to mid-Atlantic noblesse. Despite this inclination, he had not had sex with my baby doll for six months.

  That was my job. I lived on the Lower East Side in a tenement apartment off Delancey Street that measured maybe ten feet by twenty feet, next to another studio that was home to a couple so loud one could graph their hourly orgasms in a series of parabolas and bell curves. My time-share girlfriend would get competitive with the neighbors. She would holler during lovemaking, as if the building were on fire (frequently it was), urging me to do the same. “Let’s show them where the real fun is,” she’d say. And we’d show them. When we were on top of each other, pawing away with demented anger at our imperfect bodies, my two-hundred-square-foot pad was suffused with an equatorial heat; even the water bugs scuttling across the ceiling seemed dazed and unsure of their final destination. When it was over, while I toweled myself off or watched my toes with disinterest, she would call her other boyfriend and make sure his parents knew she was coming over to New Jersey for the weekend, her tone quiet, familial, obedient, surreptitiously postcoital.

  We were awful together. We took two difficult lives and made them impossible. We competed for the title of Most Marginalized: I was an unsure immigrant from Russia; she was of working-class origin from one of the less important states. Our natural role models were middle-class native-born Wasps and Jews. Her other boyfriend belonged to the latter category, my college ex-girlfriend to the former. Both of us wanted to be writers, and we were sure, for different reasons, that the world didn’t want to hear from our kind. In a way, her other boyfriend, the homebound New Jersey poet, was the nexus where our aspirations met. Whether it was her love for him, my hatred for him, or a sampling of both, he kept us going.

  The average moderately unhealthy love triangle can go on for about a year, two years maximum, and ours lasted somewhere between the two. Our fights grew spectacular.
Taking a break from my day job as a peace-loving grant writer, I would lock my office door and scream the most vile and belligerent ultimatums into the phone, demanding that she choose between us. Her other boyfriend, the sexless one, followed suit. She told me she felt as if we were both pointing guns at her head. Yes, I wanted to tell her, but only mine was loaded and cocked.

  The phallic imagery is appropriate, because it was around this time that I checked into the New York Psychoanalytic Institute for a much-needed tune-up. My analyst came forth with the traditional theory that a love triangle in some ways represents the participants’ desire to reprise the family structure: mother, father, child. The mention of the word family was the beginning of the end for our little isosceles. I had had enough. When she told me grudgingly that she had broken off with my rival and was now ready for a traditional two-person relationship, I looked into her tired, pretty face and knew it would not be possible. Retreating to my two-hundred-square-foot apartment to spend my nights contemplating the sounds of the couple next door, their breathless squawks and triumphant panting, I was filled less with loneliness or jealousy than with wonder. What did it take to love only one person and not hate another?

  UNAMBIGUOUS

  Ben Schrank

  (ŭn’ăm-bĭg’yōōəs) adj 1: having or exhibiting a single clearly defined meaning; “As a horror, apartheid . . . is absolutely unambiguous”—Mario Vargas Llosa [ant: ambiguous] 2: admitting of no doubt or misunderstanding; having only one meaning or interpretation and leading to only one conclusion

  Sylvain Fusco grew up in Lyon, in the south of France. He was the seventh of ten children. Sylvain’s father, Antoine, was a wood sculptor. Sylvain was strikingly bashful. He rarely spoke to anyone outside his family. At thirteen, he left school and went to work for his father. He built mirror frames in the evenings. He sketched flowers and field mice at play. It was 1915. Life, though difficult, was not suffused with hardship for Sylvain. His family was invariably grim, but they didn’t go hungry.

  At seventeen, Sylvain’s face was long, with a deep, teardrop-shaped philtrum that joined his bulbous nose to his lips and cried out for the cover of a moustache he could not yet grow. His eyes were big and round, and his pupils were brown. His thick black hair resembled that of his ancestors, who had come from Tunisia. Sylvain avoided girls. Even his youngest sister, Marithe, frightened him.

  Though he was shy, Sylvain loved to dance. He became a habitué of provincial low life. At a dance party, he met Clothilde and fell in love with her. Clothilde was known to have loose morals. She worked as a prostitute. She had sex with Sylvain in the wheat fields behind the hall where dances were held. A grudging love grew between them. Clothilde had a great round face, brown eyes, black hair, and red lips that seemed to float, small and puffed, in the middle of her powdered pink skin. Clothilde was often mean to Sylvain. When he came to look for her at the home she shared with some cousins, she was with other men. She refused to be ashamed of her promiscuity. But at the same time, the couple entered into a fragile, common law marriage. They had a child together, called Therese, who died some months after her birth.

  One afternoon in the fall, Sylvain went to the dance hall with a cheap revolver that he’d been asked to bring to Clothilde’s brother-in-law. He’d wrapped it up in his shirt. To his surprise, he was confronted by the brother-in-law’s mistress, who had been fucking a mandolin player from the north. The woman suspected that Sylvain carried the gun that was meant to kill her. She rushed at Sylvain. She jabbed her fingers at his eyes and mouth. Sylvain shot her twice in the chest before running off to cry in the fields. The woman died two days later. Sylvain was arrested. He awaited trial. Clothilde’s only visit ended in loud recriminations. Sylvain did not accept guilt. He believed he hadn’t aimed the gun. An overwhelming antipathy grew in him.

  Sylvain was sentenced to two years in the Foreign Legion, instead of jail, because of his youth. He went down to Algeria on a boat with the Bat d’Afs, an army division that was really a sort of military penitentiary, whose ranks were well known for their churlishness. Sylvain was tortured by the other troops. They stole his belongings. They stuffed old blanket bits in his shoes. He was accused of collusion and locked in a cell. There, he entered a blind rage because of the injustice of his condition and the profound loss of his beloved Clothilde. He ended all written and spoken communication and slipped into a state of seemingly impenetrable isolation. After only a few months, he became unable to fulfill his soldierly duties and was discharged.

  Antoine, Sylvain’s brother, found him wandering on the Place du Pont in Lyon. Sylvain was returned to the family home, where he stayed in a small room off the kitchen. Clothilde had vanished entirely. Sylvain alternately tore apart the furnishings and spent weeks in bed. After six months his mother felt he must be interned at the Bron Asylum. Orderlies from the hospital arrived. Sylvain resisted them. A torchlit struggle was witnessed by over a hundred people.

  Sylvain was interned at the Pavilion for the Agitated at the Bron Asylum in the spring of 1928. He wore the costume of an inmate and received little attention from the staff. It was known that his muteness was not a medical condition, but its persistence put off even the kindest doctors. After seven years of inactivity, Sylvain began to sporadically draw pornographic graffiti on the walls and ceiling of his cell.

  In early 1935, a new doctor, called Andre Requet, became fascinated with Sylvain. Requet furtively observed Sylvain while he drew. Sylvain made enormous wall drawings of women’s genitalia, rendered in white, red, and black pastes that Sylvain made by hand. These straining, complex images were detailed with butterflies and human faces that peeked out from the folds of flesh. Requet gave him crayons and paper, but Sylvain threw the materials into the courtyard, where inmates gathered them up.

  Sylvain made pictures with white, black, red, green, even purple. He made the green with tree leaves. Additional colors came from pieces of rock he found in the yard. He eventually began to accept materials and drew pictures in a frenzy, using pastel, paper, and easel.

  He painted great pink and red faces, with black hair piled high, dense eyelashes, small, velvet red lips, and great bosoms, as round and large as the faces themselves. The women sometimes floated in space like clouds. Dr. Requet took the images and saved them. In his memoir, Requet writes that Sylvain looked up at him once while making a drawing, and said, “C’est joli, ça,” or “That’s pretty?” Sylvain worked constantly through 1938. He then became despondent and stopped making pictures altogether.

  Dr. Requet was called to serve in the army. Sylvain, unproductive, lay on his bunk or stood in a corner of the yard, a thin man with a bristly moustache and clownish, droopy eyes.

  Because of shortages related to the end of the Second World War, the French government stopped supplying food to the asylum at Lyon. The bewildered inmates grew agitated, and disorder reigned. In December 1940, Sylvain Fusco had the distinction of being the first inmate to starve to death because of this governmental decision. He was thirty-seven.

  VIRGINITY

  Neal Pollack

  (vər-jĭn’ĭ-tē) n 1: the quality or condition of being a virgin 2: the state of being pure, unsullied, or untouched

  One night mid-June, my friend John and I waited in line for an hour to get into a club. I didn’t know the club’s name, or why we were waiting. I didn’t even know the exact neighborhood. To this day, I don’t know. But I was drunk, I was twenty, it was Manhattan, and it was 1990.

  “I don’t believe this shit,” I said.

  “Just relax,” John said.

  “Why should I stand in line to go anywhere?” I said.

  I thought about where I’d waited before. Space Mountain came to mind. Then there was that Keith Richards concert in Chicago, where two guys from the dorm and I had squatted in an alley, rolling dice and drinking from a flask. But we had tickets. We knew that eventually, the doors would open and we’d be able to feel our toes again. Frostbite wouldn’t be a problem now, but admitt
ance would.

  “Forget it,” I said. “I’m not waiting anymore.”

  I’d come to New York propelled by the usual fuel of youth: rootless ambition and excessive horniness. The first, I’d slaked somewhat by securing a less-than-glamorous internship at CBS This Morning, where I retrieved clips from the video library and sorted through Paula Zahn’s mail. The second still churned without an object. No one kept me from a good time! This would be my magical summer!

  Totally ignorant of the history of New York nightlife, and of my own worthless status in the world’s social pecking order, I stormed out of line. John had to follow.

  “Who the hell do they think they are,” I said. “Trying to control who gets into their club? It was insulting. It was . . . an insult!”

  “That’s just the way things work here,” said John.

  “Well,” I said. “The way things work here sucks!”

  I grumbled down the street, furious at another night lost. John followed, but not in a rage. A house key nearly struck me in the forehead. It hung from a window by a string.

  “What the hell is this?” I said.

  “Probably so you can open the door,” John said.

  “Why?”

  “Probably because there’s a party upstairs.”

  Until then, my social life in New York had consisted of smoking pot with my roommate and walking around the East Village. I’d also attended several movies at the St. Marks Playhouse and a Dave Brubeck concert with my father’s seventy-five-year-old cousin. This key held the secret to my New York nightlife.

  “Let’s go,” I said.