I’m not sorry this relationship ended. I am sorry that I won’t get to have this wedding.
Now wearing his pastel pink collar only half-popped, the last loser slouches out of the bar and, wet-lipping the cork-colored filter of a fresh-lit cigarette for which I’ve been pining all night, I rush after him toward the front door, kick the chipped glossy paint of its frame, hip check its plexiglass window to hold it against the brisk wind, and spin its big brass lock clockwise before any of his idiot kin can stumble in, in search of a later last call: Then it’s just the two of us. A lifetime spent in restaurants, cleaning up quick-clotting blood, vomit in which I can readily identify elements of an entrée I’ve served, still-hot piss, excrement, syringes, not to mention chewed bits of food, and even I can say her place looks lousy, like tonight terrorists hit it: The black floors are not really black, were this morning almond-colored, and only over the course of the day were they paved with an ebon macadam of textured filth that feels to fingertips like Pop Rocks in glitter glue; in other places, those floors are alternately gummy and sharp from spilled drinks and invisible pin-thin splinters of the many crystalline vessels in which noxious mixed liquors were carried; inexplicably, there are shredded men’s clothes (shirt and pants) holding open the bathroom door; several empty cardboard Marlboro boxes sit vertically on small surfaces, and each is filled with dark Skoal spit which will dribble onto one’s fingers if the receptacle is clutched too carelessly on the way to the trash can; under the relatively empty coat rack are scattered saffron paper slips, numbered, belonging to drunk couples who will have to cab it home, having lost the one which belonged to them and was supposed to have been traded to a valet in exchange for car keys and curbside service; and down the center of the room, like a confetti carpet, are hundreds of rose petals—red and yellow—which, with the thorny, bloomless stalks upside down near a front booth, naked and sad like the wireless frame of an old umbrella, are remnant of one lover’s unsuccessful attempt at a public apology which, for the sadists present, was the high point of the evening—She had beaten Him relentlessly with the opulent bouquet, using it like a baseball bat, bashing him back in the direction of the street, as all the while she screamed, “My fucking sister?!”
My girlfriend tells me to take off my blazer and stay awhile; I ask her for a broom, but she waves me away, tells me about the commissary corps paid to deal with this mess in the morning; she slides a glass of scotch Cocktail-style down the bar and into my hands, then sidles up with a fishbowl-sized glass of red wine, sighing, settling in the next seat and, shrugging her shoulders ’til her own blazer slips off enough to slide her arms out, and then falls inside out onto the back of her stool; smiling, she suggests we spend a while here, in her restaurant, so she might decompress. Formal suit jackets, scotch and red wine, a dimly lit after-hours bistro-slash-bar on a hip city street: I feel finally grown-up, as if I’ve at last done something right, achieved a measure of success, well-symbolized, perhaps, by the fact that we are different people than we were before we coupled up, and are now, as those New and Improved folks, (after a row of overdoses, I’m again over drugs; she’s at the helm of her own restaurant; and we’re just past a pregnancy scare which made us a much better bonded pair) sitting in the same seats we occupied months back on what has come to be recalled as our First Official Date: After both our shifts were finished, at last call, we met already well-acquainted, but in person for just the second time, having arranged this intersection after six weeks of involvement through internet correspondence as participants in a self-designed Curiosity Game—each of us honestly answered three questions asked of us then, never repeating any given inquisition, posed our own probing trio to the other; halfway through, we stopped and started stepping backwards, answering our own questions, a sensible move, we had agreed, knowing that what we asked was equally revealing as how we answered.
Sans jacket (skin an intense, almost digital white where it’s lost pigment due to a genetic condition), she looks so beautiful, shoulders like carved soap nakedly displayed beneath the stem-thin straps of a black cotton camisole, as she ravels, furls—puts her hair up, pulls delicate silver-rimmed glasses from her pocket and pushes them onto her nose—and I tell her so; I tell her how I thought so on that First Official Date and before that, too, on the night we met, when I wouldn’t've had the stomach to speak to someone so striking if it wasn’t for a fistful of Vicodin swimming like little albified fish in the golden pond of pricey scotch that was my stomach; I tell her I couldn’t believe that evening, even as we exchanged quick introductions, that she was wasting her time with me, that I flat-out thought it a lie when our mutual friend told me the next day that she’d been called by the woman by whom I’d been struck dumb for the express purpose of asking after me in order to track me down; and I tell her that I was right to be struck dumb, that what I felt was love and not lust, proven time and again by the fact that there was intellect, ambition, and wit waiting behind the face and figure I had once coveted from across the room and still couldn’t help but crave; she takes my hand and says, “I just couldn’t believe that I’d finally found someone kind and cute who seemed to understand me—I think it was about ten questions into our game that I decided you were absolutely going to be mine, goddamn it.” We finish our drinks, tall and stiff, but she says she still needs to unwind, so she asks me to put new music on while she takes her glasses back off, removes her heeled shoes, and begins to stretch as if she were prepping for the sort of recreational gymnastics session she laments no longer being able to attend; she explains that I’ll find in the PC’s iTunes library the mix I made for her, romantic songs by indie artists of whom she’d never heard, because last night the place was booked for a private party—a rehearsal dinner for which the bride and groom had both forgotten to bring their own music and so, consummate hostess, she’d lent them her personal twelve-song collection, the quite suitable one I’d assembled for her, to use as they saw fit, because they found the house selection (loaded with old-school rap and techno) inappropriate, but she’d made them swear not to dance to the final song, claiming it was earmarked for her own upcoming nuptials—and when she ends her recitation, she ignores my warnings about shattered glass on the floor and begins to do handsprings across the room, to and fro, ending a lap in my direction by stopping close, catching her breath, and saying, “You know the one, that last song, I forget who it is, but I wanted to save it for us, because I can’t quit thinking that we really should just get married.”
The conversation is not new, but always unnerves me a little (ever the pessimist, waiting for Other Shoes), and every time I try to defuse it with defensive humor of the brutally honest sort—I confess my agenda for my fantasy wedding as if it were farce—if she objects, I can claim I was simply kidding and then close off my heart—but the farther out I get, the more earnestly enthusiastic she seems: I tell her it’s got to be godless and ask, “Can we have it on Halloween, like in The Crow?/ in that burnt out church down deep in the city?/ with explicit provisions on the invitations that no one below eleven years old be allowed?”; and she says yes, yes, yes, every fucking time until against my better judgment, I am excited. And while I’m excited, I am in my heart hesitant, and the mix isn’t helping: Despite my best attempt, song after song appears to have ended up after all multireferential, many of them remind me of the last woman I loved; snippets of lyrics, as if I’d written them, could only refer to her (“Sweet on a green-eyed girl, all fiery Irish clip and curl” goes number four; number five is, now that I think about it, decidedly not right for a collection in celebration of a new relationship, and its singer mourns, “I’m never gonna know you now, but I’m gonna love you anyhow”; on song seven, a plaintive voice claims, “We might kiss when we are alone, when nobody’s watching I might take you home,” and I can’t believe I ever thought I could hear this song and associate it with anyone else but that other, the green-eyed girl); yes, unfortunately, the more I listen, the less it seems that any of these songs can or will have meaning to me outside of how they relate to the last woman I loved despite the obvious truth that we (that last and I) are forever over, despite the ample evidence that this woman loves me, that she will treat me right, that she respects me and has never once tried to hide what we are—a couple—from prying eyes; no, this new affair is nothing like my last, not half as passionate, I never lose weight from forgetting to eat or feel stoned because of it, but, I begin to think as the singer of track ten says, “I said goodbye to someone that I love…and it was hard, like coming off the pills that you take to stay happy,” That may be a good thing, a great thing—look at how the other ordeal ended; maybe I’m finally making a grown-up decision.
It’s about the time the digital blips of the second-to-last song kick in that she takes a break, quits cavorting for a minute, and I think she’s listening to the singer sing something appropriately optimistic and applicable—”we’ll cut our bodies free from the tethers of this scene, start a brand new colony where everything will change, we’ll give ourselves new names”—but then I rise from lying on the bar, ready to begin again the debate over what those new names should be (we’d decided to ditch both of our deadbeat dads’ last names in favor of something new, neutral, and totally our own), when I catch sight of her standing twenty paces away, having cut herself in a dozen places, unsteady and a little drunk, she sucks blood from her thumbs and I can see her palms run red, little rivulets trickling down her wrists; she giggles as she examines her hands, sees me sitting up, shows me her gory digits, says, “Look: Stigmata,” and I laugh along with her as she rubs her hands together until she claps (I imagine spatter accompanying the sound), and shouts, ”Hey, if you’re still going to wear a white tux like the suicide guy we watched online, I bet my mom will make me a black dress—how cool would that be?”
She doesn’t wait for an answer, but enters into another complex procession of round-offs and handsprings and backflips, until she arrives sweating in front of me, now unraveled again, unfurled, tangled hair down, pants twisted, and pale, blanched limbs bloodied, just in time to press pause on the PC-jukebox before the mix’s final song begins, explaining that we should keep it sacred, save it, in case we decide to act on our ideas and do it, really do it, really start ourselves over, get hitched; I notice that she leaves not only a bloody print on the mouse, but a shredded rose petal—her mangled, sticky skin is, in fact, stuck with them (even the yellow ones now red)—but this doesn’t stop her, maybe more than a little drunk, from pulling me down from the countertop and closer, closer; balanced on her tiptoes, she takes my face between her palms and kisses me more passionately than she ever has, as we stand in the dead silence, under overhead lights the color of cracked red pepper, and I can feel simultaneously the warm, wet grit of her dirty, damaged hands, and the damp silk of the petals.
