The Weirdness (11 page)

Elisa pauses. “You didn’t read a second one, though, did you?” she asks.

“I did not,” Billy admits, freely.

“Well. At least you’re honest.”

She walks to the edge of the sidewalk, cranes her head out into the street like she’s looking for a cab.

“I see a bar,” she says. “You’ll be glad to know that it looks open. You want to get out of this cold?”

Of course he does.

They each have a shot and then they each order a second one. Talk thereupon quickly returns to the gripe they have in common, the Hyacinth piece.

“It got me so shook up,” Billy says, “that I don’t actually want to read, like,
any
of my preexisting work.”

“I know,” says Elisa. “I was up half the night writing six new poems. They could be good, they could be crap, I don’t even know anymore. But I figure, fuck it. It’s something different.”

“Exactly,” Billy says. “Something different. That’s the key. I’m half thinking that I’m not going to read anything at all but instead do like a piece of, I don’t know, oral storytelling.”

“Well, if it’s good enough for The Moth, it’ll work here.”

“Oh yeah,” Billy says. He’d forgotten about The Moth. Somehow that shakes his confidence in the violent originality of his idea. A bit. Just a bit.

They seem to have exhausted this line of conversation. She looks at him and he at her. The second round of shots arrives.

“Cheers,” she says, and they down them with all due haste.

Seconds pass. She looks at him. He can see the intelligence in her eyes at work, making some set of complex assessments. She leans in incrementally and her nostrils flare once: Billy would swear that she was sniffing him, if there was a way that that made any sense at all.

She leans back. “Okay,” she says. “I don’t know you well, Billy Ridgeway, but you seem like an honest guy, and I like that.”

“Thank you,” Billy says, and as he says it he realizes that he’s starting to
yearn
for Elisa Mastic. Maybe this breakup with Denver—for that is how he is now thinking of it—doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Maybe it’s a piece of good luck. Maybe it’ll be an opportunity: a chance to start over with someone who doesn’t know all his flaws.

“I’m going to ask you a question,” she says. “And I want you to answer honestly.”

“Okay,” Billy says. “Is this a test?”

“This is a test,” Elisa says.

“I’m ready,” Billy says. This is normally the kind of thing that would make him nervous, but the bourbon is helping.

“The question is: What is the worst thing you ever did?”

Billy blinks. He doesn’t want to think about whatever might be the worst thing he ever did. And whatever it is, he’s certain it’s bad, and he doesn’t want to let his bad side enter into full display. Absolutely not. The whole point, the whole goddamn
point
of this conversation is to showcase only his
good
side: to be charming and funny and charismatic. He looks around for a story that will highlight those aspects of himself but also maybe seem a little mean or over-the-top. It takes him a minute to find something that qualifies; during that time Elisa calmly examines her hand, all five fingers extended in front of her.

“So I had this girl over,” Billy says. This is a Denver story, which gives him a queasy feeling, but he needs something. Elisa raises her eyebrows in a way that conveys a very guarded species of interest.

“We’d been out,” he says, “out at some restaurant or having drinks or something, after what had already been a pretty long day, and then we got back to my place, totally exhausted, and I remembered that I didn’t have any clean laundry for the next day, and instead of just saying
screw it
I insisted that we go out to the Laundromat. This girl just wanted to lie on the couch and I made her get up and come with me because I wanted the company. I even made her carry a bag with the sheets and pillowcases.”

A thin smile from Elisa.

“And so we’re at the Laundromat, and it just seems like it’s taking
forever
, it’s like time has just slowed to a crawl. A fucking
crawl.
And then after we’ve spent like a
year
there we have to move everything over to the dryer.
Bam
, another year gone. We’re not even talking to one another we’re so tired. And so finally everything’s clean, and we go back to my place, and she immediately goes up to the loft and curls up on my bed. Just like direct on the mattress: the sheets are still all in the laundry bag. And I’m like
come on, come on, we need to make the bed
and she just, like, grunts. So, thinking I’m funny, I get the fitted sheet out and I just pull it over top of her and tuck it in on all four sides. She starts to giggle a little, so I figure it’s okay. So then I put the next sheet on over top of that, and then finally the comforter, and by this point I think she wants to get out, she starts kind of squirming but she’s really too tired to figure out how to make her way out of it, and then I start poking her. Like, index finger, right in the ribs. And she says
stop it
but she’s laughing at the same time, so I don’t stop right away, I poke her a couple more times, and she starts to shriek, cause it tickles her, right?, and finally she starts to thrash her way out of the sheets and she gets her head out at last, and I’m laughing, and even
she’s
laughing a little bit, but then it just
tips
somehow and she starts crying. These big, hot, frustrated, tired tears. And—that’s it.”

Elisa watches him until finally he raises both palms, as if revealing the absence of more to tell.

“What did it feel like?” she asks, softly.

“It felt bad,” he says. “I don’t like making people cry.”

“No, before that.”

“Before what?”

“Before she started to cry. When you had her under the sheet and were poking her. What did
that
feel like?”

“I don’t know,” Billy says. “I thought I was being funny, I guess. I was just playing around.”

“The woman in the story. Are you bigger than her?” Elisa asks.

“Yes,” Billy says.

“Are you stronger than her?”

Billy doesn’t think of himself as
strong
, exactly, but is he stronger than Denver? “Yes.”

“And what did
that
feel like?”

“Being bigger and stronger, you mean?”

“Being bigger and stronger. Exerting power. Using it to scare someone.”

“I don’t think she was scared, exactly.”

“Let me tell you something,” Elisa says. “If you say
stop it
to someone who is bigger than you? And stronger than you? And they don’t stop whatever it is that they’re doing? It’s scary. Trust me.”

“Okay,” Billy says. “What are you trying to say here?”

“What I’m trying to say, Billy, is that you seem like a gentle, peaceful guy, a real nice guy, and I think you’ve worked hard to come across that way, but I think there’s a part of you, and maybe it’s a part that you don’t look at all that closely, that wants to be powerful and that doesn’t give a good goddamn about anything else.”

Something inside Billy twinges. A flinch moves through his face. Elisa’s eyes change character again, communicating some faint satisfaction, an approval, almost, at seeing Billy hit upon something inside himself that may be true.

Billy turns his empty shot glass with his fingers, tries to reflect upon the part of him that likes being bigger and stronger, that likes being powerful. Elisa is right: that part is there. It moves inside him like an animal, cloaked by shadows. He can kind of glimpse its outlines but it moves away from his inspection, not wanting to be fully perceived.

“Thoughts,” Elisa says.

“None,” Billy says, and he expends some willpower to ensure that that’s true.

“All right then.”

The third round of shots lands on the table. They raise them.

“To thoughtlessness,” Elisa says, and tosses hers back.

“To thoughtlessness,” Billy answers, and he does the same.

“You want to know the worst thing
I
ever did?” she says, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.

“Sure.”

“Don’t give me that
sure
. Either you want to know or you don’t. I’ll tell you if you want to know. But you have to understand that this isn’t some hipster
game
for me.”

“Okay,” Billy says. “I get it. I want to know.”

Elisa regards him suspiciously.

Billy puts on his most earnest face despite a sinking certainty that it actually makes him look totally goofy and insincere. “You can trust me,” he says.

“No, I can’t. But I’m going to tell you anyway, as a gesture of my good faith.”

“Okay,” Billy says.

“I killed a man,” Elisa says.

“What?”

“I killed a man,” she says again. “It was an accident.” She takes a deep breath. “I killed a man,” she repeats, like it’s something she has to say to herself regularly, “and I was never caught.”

Billy scans her face for some sign that she’s making a joke, or just fronting like a badass. But she’s wearing that same implacable calm.
Wow
, he thinks.

“What were—what were the circumstances?”

Elisa looks away sharply, glancing down at her watch, a heavy beveled thing that looks like you could crack open a nut with it. “It’s ten past six,” she says.

“Yeah, so?”

“So we should get back over there.”

“What? You’re gonna just—leave me hanging? You can’t do that.”

She gives him a look, one which adequately communicates
Don’t think you can start telling me what I can and can’t do
. “I’ll tell you what,” she says. “I’ll tell you the circumstances the next time we meet.”

“Oh,” Billy says. He grins. “You think there’s going to be a second time?”

“No,” Elisa says. “But one should always plan for the unexpected.”

A lesser species of disappointment emerges within him, but he says, “I accept these terms.”

“You say this,” Elisa says, “like you had a choice.”

He settles the tab for both of them even though he still doesn’t know how he’s going to make rent. When he does this, as nonchalant as anything, he can detect her, out of the corner of his eye, watching him.

This could be good
, Billy tells himself, as they cross the street.
Just don’t fuck it up. Let it be easy
. He doesn’t raise the question of whether it’s a good idea to get involved with someone who has killed a man.

They reach Barometer’s heavy set of doors. He holds one of them open for her in a showy display of half-ironic gallantry, his motions a little broad from the buzz he has going.

See?
he thinks.
You can be charming when the situation calls
for it
. He watches her enter, permitting himself a glance at the segment of black panty hose he can spot between the hem of her red tartan coat and the top of her boots. Maybe it’s more than a glance; maybe it borders on a leer. But he feels like it’s the quickest, most subtle leer he can possibly manage with three shots of bourbon floating around in his circulatory system. Still, a little embarrassing.

Don’t worry about it
, he tells himself,
nobody noticed
, but even as he tells himself this he feels the prickling sensation of disapproving eyes on him, and he tracks over to the source of the sensation, and that’s when he sees her, alone at a table for two: Denver.

IMMANENCE • AMBIGUOUS INTRODUCTIONS • I’M NOT SAYING
BUDDY
• TOTAL FAILURE OF CHARACTER • ABSOLUTE CORPOREALITY • KAFKA TELLS A JOKE • FAMOUS LITERARY BRAWLS • A STORY ABOUT SOME THINGS • SOULS • STOUT • RHETORIC

There had been a night, at the tail end of summer, when Billy and Denver had gone out for drinks with Bingxin Ying, a petite gallery owner with violet lipstick, an asymmetrical haircut, and an intense manner of aggressively probing the air while she spoke. The outing was in celebration of the closing of a deal: Bingxin was putting together a new show,
Eidetics
, to run at her gallery for the next three months, and she’d acquired five of Denver’s early shorts. The conversation, half conducted in art-speak, quickly went over Billy’s head, but he’d been content to lurk in the back of the booth, eat the skewered selection of fruits that had come with his drink, and watch Denver glow in reception of what he guessed was a rather abstract form of effusive praise.

Content for a while, anyway. Then came a moment when Bingxin made a vigorous stabbing motion with both of her hands and, over the music, had shouted “What impresses me the most about your work is its commitment to immanentization of the ephemeral.” Billy had watched Denver beam, had watched her say “Thank you” with a real sincerity that he wasn’t sure he’d ever
successfully invoked, and he actually felt a little jealous. No, more than a little: straight-up capital-J Jealous. He made a mental note of the phrase.
Immanentization of the ephemeral
?

Later that night, in bed, Billy tried it out. “The immanentization of the ephemeral,” he said, apropos of nothing.