Editor’s Note: Joseph Aisenberg, author of the book Brian De Palma’s Carrie: Studies In The Horror Film, now gives us his novella High Definition. As Mr. Aisenberg notes, readers may find this tale unique for being a rare gay story with a heterosexual subtext.

 By Joseph Aisenberg

HIGH DEFINITION

1

Though embarrassing, it is pretty funny, and I did achieve my goal, which is the point of any good story. 

It started when Billy and me broke up. Well, Billy did the breaking up if I’m being 100% honest. Just one of those things, as nobody has ever said. What Billy did say was: “It’s not you sweetie, it’s me.” Also, “This gal just is not ready to settle down yet. I’ve really gained weight since we moved in together, which I’m pretty sure means I must be unhappy.” Muddling his spiel with yet more degraded discourse he went on to say that “things” had come about as “a perfect, unpredictable storm”, I think to suggest he somehow wasn’t responsible for the breakup. 

Also, he was in the process of changing jobs. His office had suffered historic losses the previous year and he’d been let loose in a holocaust of layoffs. Also Billy’s parents split. Also he started getting into Buddhism and had been annoying everybody with how “present” he felt all the goddamn time. Don’t worry, I’m coming to the point. In the middle of so much “personal growth” he’d run into an “old friend,” some fag named Brad, at the store, and the two hit it off and got lattes a couple evenings later when I thought Billy was at work, cleaning the crap out of his desk; things, one might say, started up. Anyway, those storm clouds gathering behind my back burst three weeks later, leaving me alone with an apartment I couldn’t afford. 

That in particular I found galling. I hadn’t wanted this place to begin with. Renting and decorating the thing was entirely Billy’s idea. He never ceased shopping up chotchkies with which to clutter it from one end of our relationship to the other, probably because such projects constituted the only practical means he had for fixing the much bigger problem that was Us. He’d worry different decorating schemes for each room. I would find him balancing precariously on ladders or chairs, pasting up ceiling borders, talking about plans to foist on our non-existent guests a series of hues and textures as they moved from living room to bedroom to bathroom and back again, inducing in them certain fecund moods. Real Feng Shui shit. My response to all this was a shrug. I mean, I like a nice picture hanging around, sure, but plain old white walls are fine. Billy took my lack of taste as a personal affront.

I know, if you’re gay you’re supposed to love shopping, home improvement, exotic food, shoes. And these are fine things, but I’m far too lazy and preoccupied to expend effort on such stuff. Plus I hate stores. Plus I hate families. Plus I hate the soft music wafting through eerie mall corridors—like a tacky fun-park version of that hotel in Last Year At Marienbad—not to mention the weird security systems those places have. I am for some reason able to sense their electronic buzzing and become terribly nervous. But mostly I hate feeling like I’m just another husband standing around having his pocket picked by his spendthrift mate until he can finally go home and beer-out. And don’t even get me started on the rest of our finances! 

Anyway, almost 18 months after Billy and I moved in together his new twink Love Interest (cute, blonde, smooth, well-toned, that’s right, Brad)—arrived at our flat and helped him to pack his junk and take it where his heart now legally resided. I thought all I’d be left with when these two squawking vultures finished devouring my carcass was the television, my recliner, the bed and most of the books. After going through the apartment, though, the only things missing were Billy’s clothes—hollowing out both louvered closets and most of the dresser drawers. He did take a few fancy cooking utensils as well as two floor lamps Brad thought “stylish,” but everything else was abandoned with priss and superciliousness. 

Oh yeah, that’s what I was trying to say before. It really steamed me how much time, money and effort Billy had wrenched out of me, decking this hole out the most faggot way possible only to watch him dismiss it with condescension, giving the new lover to understand that none of this tacky crap had to do with him if you please. Also enraging, he’d made a point of leaving behind all my romantic gifts to him, even the letters I wrote him on that business trip last summer. These I tore up and flushed.

 I felt like crying, but decided that was bullshit. I despise weepy gay men. Got drunk instead then started crying. What’s so idiotic about these kinds of wallowing bouts is the fake way they start out being about how you think you’ve lost the only person you ever loved. I drunk-dialed Leigh (this hilarious girl I work with, though more about her later; in fact, all about her). I told Leigh I could still smell Billy as if this were the purest expression of broken-heartedness anyone ever came out with. Eventually I wound up saying I felt I was an unlovable, unattractive shitheel whom nobody would ever again want, which was my way of trying to lever out of Leigh a few compliments. But she’d already given at the office and ignored my prompts. Afterward I sat on the toilet, drinking. I sobbed aloud the equivalent of, “Poor me! What’s going to happen to me when I’m so great and wonderful and no one recognizes how terrific I am? Billy’ll never find anyone as great as me again. Fuck Brad!” Etc, etc. 

Funny thing is I didn’t expend much energy on all the wonderful things I’d miss about Billy. We’d disagreed on most everything if I’m being a hundred percent honest. We were both Democrats, but he was one only because he was gay and figured he had to be. He loved saccharine-sweet romances and horror flicks while I held out for documentaries, foreign films and absurdist comedies which, even though they weren’t any dumber than most of the movies he enjoyed, weren’t to his taste because, get this, they were dumb. Music: techno-dance-bliss-out-inanities enveloped Billy’s well-moussed soul. When I declared my contempt for the radio Divas Billy loved, he suggested the only way I could possibly dislike anyone as great as, say, Madonna, was if I were self-loathing. On the other hand, he enjoyed going to baseball games, which I thought was about the most boring straight-ism ever. I told him sports were anti-gay (I didn’t really think this). His response: “What are you talking about? The guys are wearing tight pants.” The only thing we ever fully agreed on was the horror camp-goddess Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. And wonderful though she certainly is, that’s just not enough to base a lasting relationship on. 

Still, I liked his brown eyes. I liked his hair, that sweet smile. It switched right on when he tilted his head, to indicate careful listening. Made me feel kind of protective because it made him seem so open, boyishly vulnerable. Also, it was nice having access to semi-regular sex. Once he’d gone, having shed the snake skin of whatever self he’d been performing while we were a pair, I was suddenly alone and miserable. If that whining, gaudy, wannabe interior designer I’d lived with a year and a half was a put-on I couldn’t help thinking our whole relationship must have been some kind of hostile reaction for him all along.

I already mentioned one thing you do when your partner jumps ship is drink. The other, once you’ve decided you’re not going to read that Shakespeare play or you’ve tired of culling great thinkers for great things to think about, and you’re fed up listening to all your favorite bitter love-songs—is plop down in front of the TV with chips, candy, ice-cream. Course it did occur to me that the best way to get over one man might be getting under another, an enticing thought, but that would have required dressing up, smelling nice, being nice, smiling; laughing at stuff that wasn’t funny. To do that I’d have needed to drink like, a lot more, and if I did I’d have just spent the whole goddamn time bitching about Billy and making thoughtlessly rude comments, which doesn’t tend to be seductive. 

So I stayed home instead. Watched television. I hadn’t done a lot of that lately, because I was so busy being above it in arguments with Billy—he was addicted to celebrity gossip and supernatural dramas—I hadn’t dared take so much as a peek for fear of being called a giant-assed hypocrite. But that’s neither here, there nor in Timbuktu. God, these awful turns of phrase. Billy, you’re with me still! Anyway, I soon discovered how right I’d been raising my ironic brow at the boob tube’s dull countenance and was having a high ole time being totally disgusted with American culture, which frankly has got to be stopped. 

The absolute waste-land of cable television was breathtaking. You had reruns of bad shows, premiers of bad movies, the chatter of tacky talk shows; the would-be steam of racy reality programs. Far and away the funniest gunk was the glut of info-mercials clogging the cloaca of America’s airwaves. Pots, pans and utensils would be deftly demonstrated to audiences feigning awed interest. Hot porn-model types would explain how no man could ever be truly confident unless his penis was larger; or else these same women would sit having patiently explained to them, by a man presumably well endowed, the sexy ins and erotic outs of property-flipping, I believe it was. Worse even than those, though, were the endless ads featuring gorgeous, possibly bi-curious females assuring us the only thing they liked to do all night long every night was talk dirty to men they’d met by phone. 

I make a point of describing this dreck, which any lonely late-night viewer is familiar with, so as to bring one into the atmosphere of a life comically, economically wrecked. And because as my friend Leigh once wisely noted in response to existentialism and the films of Ingmar Bergman: nobody can be truly alienated in the modern era since there’s always the suckiness of TV to talk about. If I’m being a hundred percent honest, and I always am, bad TV is how I discovered “Speak, Television.”  

2

“Speak, Television” is a weekly forum collecting readers’ various Rorschach reactions to TV-related “issues.” It appears in Fanfare magazine, which is part of the “entertainment” supplement they cram in the Sunday papers. You’ve seen it. On the cover each week some plucky, has-been starlet smiles bravely beneath an inspirational quote: “If it hadn’t been for the love my mother instilled in me I never would have MADE IT.” And under that: “Sheila Sheldon (of TV’s The Last Straw) tells how she transcended addiction after a daughter’s death showed her life is for the living.” Along with such enlightening crap one finds also Hollywood-themed cross-word puzzles, profiles of the latest shows, squibs about what’s happening to old ones; they dish up the infighting said to be going on between the sleek “hotties” on that primetime soap we all love so much. This is leavened both, with diet tips and recipes for unhealthy desserts, a Marxist contradiction caused by capitalism’s vertical integration of incentives. And in the middle of that, three or four tissuey page-turns in you will come across “Speak, Television”, representing the total democratization of media long before the internets came about. 

To get oneself printed in it all one need do is phone a toll-free number and share one’s “thoughts” with the voicemail service. If selected, these magnificent utterances are printed naked for the world’s perusal, though occasional “where-are-they-now” questions do get answered in discreet brackets, perfect models of editorial economy I assure you. For years I avoided Fanfare when reading the Sunday papers, back in the days when we actually read papers, because the pictures of all those desperate celebs on the covers creeped me out. 

Until the weekend I visited my parents and became a passionate convert! 

One of the great things about being gay is that when your relationship goes south no one in your family cares. They didn’t even ask where Billy was. In the past he’d insisted on coming with me to every family function out of some queer-pride thing which eluded me since my standard issue father, lounging about in dark slacks and tee shirts; and my dull mother, encased always in one of three house dresses—not to mention my weirdo brother, though I do have to mention him—could have bored the political correctness out of the sternest Graduate Student. Still, I was surprised they didn’t mention his absence at all. Especially since we were just sitting around the cluttered kitchen table giving each other bored looks. 

Since our private lives seemed to be impermissible topics of conversation—and not just my gay “lifestyle” either (I think dad was having an affair)—I took Leigh’s advice and started talking about terrible TV shows. My mother’s mouth contracted as if she’d tasted spoiled milk; said these days she couldn’t watch anything but the old movie channel or religious programming, which was bananas since my mom had never been a regular churchgoer and, I am sure, never dreamt of trying to save anybody! I think, though, the idea we were probably living in “the end times” and that an unpleasant God was due to put in an appearance and shake the Bejesus out of the populace maybe gave her an odd thrill. My cheating father, like most fathers, even faithful ones, was addicted to history and nature shows which made him feel that he was learning marvelous useful things, not frittering away time on fake stories that, I take it, he viewed as hopelessly feminine. 

Dad therefore stared at the sink when I brought up a particularly awful elimination-based reality show I’d discovered called People in Glass Houses. The premise: tan, attention-hungry super-models seal themselves into a giant glass penthouse where they act out the progressively tasteless dares posed them on the internet. By successfully completing these “challenges” the contestants remained stationed within the transparent structure week to week, with a big cash prize waiting for the last dumbass standing at the end. Over the course of two months contestants hooked up with and sabotaged one another while shrilly and eagerly desecrating their beautiful flesh for viewers’ pleasure, as long as they were guaranteed more screen-time. They confessed their trite hopes and fears about audience-challenges in a pink curtained room. The whole thing was, in its complete spiritual bankruptcy, utterly fascinating and rather enjoyable. My mother didn’t care for that one, though. She was far more disturbed by shows where people willingly submitted to gory cosmetic surgeries or ate disgusting bugs, the patheticness of which somehow reminded her of that movie starring Barbarella, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? This reference to Jane Fonda’s great film impressed me.

My somber brother, who still lived with my parents at the age of 35, then spoke up from the blank spot he occupied at the table. “Yeah,” he said, “but the movie wasn’t as good as the Horace McCoy book it’s based on. All this TV talk reminds me of something I read in ‘Speak, Television’ recently.”

“What now?” I asked 

“You know—that column thingie in Fanfare Magazine.”

I shrugged indifferently, hoping to end this portion of the discussion.

“It comes in the paper Eddie,” mom quietly explained. She was always chiming in to help my brother communicate with the world. That’s my name by the way, Ed. Edmund Waters. Height: 5.10. Weight: 160. Hair color: dark brown. Eye color: dark brown. Life Style: dark brown. At least these days.

After more awkward explanations I realized what they were talking about and my brother insisted we go to his room, down a short hall off the kitchen, so he could show me. 

The way he waddles combined with a strange lack of emotional affect often gives people the impression he’s slow despite his brilliance, which my mother always pridefully notes when telling people about him. It’s a thing. A terrible thing. He developed all these mental problems in his teens which thwarted his potential, though in my mind he gave up without much effort. The truth is I’d nearly grown to hate him over the years. Awful, I know, but he was sucking my parents dry. Now here they were getting older and I was sure his being such a dead weight around their necks would put them in the grave all the faster. Then what? I refused to think about it. At least my parents hadn’t let themselves ask me to take him over. 

His room was clean, neat, dominated by various books he’d arranged with crazy precision on four sets of shelves and in milk crates lining any free wall-space. Several boxes sat at the end of his bed too. On a night table three flattened, blue plastic grocery bags had been piled with various treats: Reese’s Pieces, bits of Graham cracker, mint Life Savers and mini Butterfingers. In a rat-like fashion he’d nibble at them throughout the day. His reading tastes were peculiar: true crime, biographies, romance and high lit running the gamut, and his bookshelves, from George Eliot to James Joyce. The whole thing was made stranger by his freakish passion for that Fanfare garbage. But he’d always had a peculiar sense of humor. Also, he probably was hot for some of the has-been starlets on its covers, one of which, quite yellowed, had been tacked up to his wall beside a print of Jesus tending a flock of fluffy lambs alongside a black and white photo starkly depicting a child having its brains blown out. Don’t worry I shall now slowly back away from pondering too thoroughly my poor brother’s mixed up libido. 

He knelt beside his bed, looking particularly pudgy in a baggy brown shirt that made my heart sick for him at the same time it made me want to give him a swift kick in the ass. He slid a plastic organizer from under his bed and removed a smooth copy of an ancient Fanfare. Carefully flipping pages he showed me the famous “Speak, Television” forum, a devious smile on his face, like it was a secret initiation. Anyway, it was just a boxed-in section of quotes without any context. “Whenever I watch People in Glass Houses,” someone had called in to say, “I can’t help wondering what the parents of the contestants must think. I’d be embarrassed if my daughter used language like Tanya does. Shameful.” The bland pointlessness of this and the other comments, especially from those who somehow thought “Speak, Television’s” editors personally controlled what was on TV was astounding—shameful even—and I couldn’t help laughing. “These people are fucking morons.”

My brother (there’s not much use bothering with his name at this stage) gave me an approving look, as if I’d passed a test. “Yeah,” he said, “it’s ridiculous. Sometimes the things people say, are so idiotic I think they must be jokes.” He directed my attention to something about a terrible “dramedy” called Thick ‘N Thin. The show concerned the hilarious misadventures of a “fat”/ugly Latino girl (actually a stone cold fox) employed in a large bright colored office with her best friend, a thin, i.e. “beautiful”, sharp tongued white girl who looked like Heather Locklear. While a number of amusing things resulted from their occasional bouts of jealousy, the two girls’ deep sisters-in-the-soul rapport had always gotten them over the rough spots; through thick and thin, as the show was aptly named, they weathered bad boyfriends and worse fashion choices. Anyway, someone in “Speak, Television” had said of the show, “I don’t believe fat and thin people can really be close. There is just too much of a divide in our current culturr for that. Also it’s disgusting because it teaches the obese they’re all right as they are.”

“I thought of making that exact crack myself,” my brother said laughing in his mentally ill way. He pulled his hands up to his mouth and covered it as if he were being especially devious. 

A couple weeks later he went out for a late night walk, sat on the train tracks a few blocks from my parent’s house, near the park where we used to play as children, and was killed by a two a.m. train, leaving me an only child, so to speak. His body, I gather, had required some reassembly for identification … but then he was never in one piece to begin with. 

If I sound glib it’s because he’d attempted suicide a few times before. The first resulted in my dad purging the household of guns (he was an avid hunter); the second required a violent, messy stomach-pumping which ended in a lot of recriminations from my brother, demanding to know why everyone kept trying to make him stick around when nothing was going to happen for him in this life. Frankly, I was sympathetic, but thought if he’d truly wished to off himself there were millions of ways he could have done so, assuming the drama wasn’t mere attention-seeking. Obviously, now I know he actually was serious. I only go into this stuff about my poor brother because he’s what got my stupid “Speak Television” obsession started.

3

“Well, your brother wasn’t exactly wrong,” Leigh said, flicking cigarette ash at the walkway outside the building we worked in. It was a bright cool day several weeks after my brother killed himself.

“What do you mean?”

Leigh shrugged. “If things aren’t going anywhere, why shouldn’t you be allowed to get off this little sorry-go-round of ours?”

“Oh, boo-hoo,” I said. “Life sucks, so let’s take the easy way out. He probably thought someone would show up and stop him again.” I stamped my cigarette out on the slick side of the building, and dropped the butt and moodily crammed my hands in my pockets.

“Doesn’t seem easy to me,” said Leigh, leaning against the building, pale face taut, unreadable, Sphinxian. “Feels like it’s us, taking the path of least resistance, just waiting for death to happen. I never did get all the hand wringing and raving about …whatever this is [listless shrug]. None of it really amounts to much. If you think about it, the sick little thing we have going here at the office is as good as it gets.”

“Downer much? If that’s how you feel, why not follow my brother’s lead?”

“Too crude.” Leigh shrugged. “As Miss Peggy Lee noted, when one confronts that Final Disappointment, sure as shit you’ll just wind up asking, is that all there is to death?”

“Anywho,” I said, bringing us back to topic, “my brother dying was like, a whole entire month ago so, you know, over it. I only brought it up to ask if you’d seen that weekly Fanfare thing.”

“Sorry.” Leigh exhaled smoke and gave me a cute look. “I forgot we were talking about what dumb assholes think about TV. Not the TV shit itself, mind you, just what these fucks say about it.”

“Right.” I said, making a Well duh face. “Don’t act like I’m all insensitive ‘cause I’m not broken up about my brother. He was always a basket case, so lost a cause I’m not sure there was anything much to find. And you’re way worse than I am, you know. I ain’t the one who has a ringtone of his mom flipping out about calling the police over spousal abuse.”

Exhaling dully, Leigh stepped from the hard glossy building and tossed her still smoldering cigarette over a shoulder. She patted her black pony-tailed hair. “You shouldn’t persist in trying to fuck with me, Ed. I’m better at it than you.”

I laughed, but knew she really would pay me back for my shitty remark. Part of our game; Leigh kept score. What you have to remember about Leigh is she’s not only drop dead gorgeous but a brilliant, evil monster. She often struck people as coarse, bitchy; she was coarse and bitchy. She’s also a flawless dresser with a totally professional air of morose, neo-liberal glamour. 

I probably should have described her before. Generously proportioned Leigh wore a variety of well-fitting, satiny black blouses, skirts and dresses. She made most women around the office look dowdy. Her lips were a vivid slash of red, emphasizing the extreme pallor of her “translucent complexion” as better writers would describe it. Her jet black hair, with its deep sheen, she wore in a sharp, whiplike ponytail. “And it absolutely is not my natural color,” she loved pointing out.

I followed Leigh’s black heels and dark-stockinged legs into the building. They clicked across the gleaming floor of the lobby, echoing off its dark marbled walls as she headed toward the two black security guys at the front desk. Projected on the wall behind them was a futuristic looking commercial, which endlessly demonstrated how “high-tech” and forward thinking our company, Lavern Inc. was. The security guys, brusque and businesslike with us males, would obsequiously chat up each woman who entered, recklessly eyeballing them by the dozens. It was some kind of joke to them, enjoyably corny. Leigh, on their wavelength humor-wise, and ironically proud of “The Girls,” as she referred to her breasts, always made sure her ID badge was stuck to the side of one when checking in. 

The guy who’d been on desk longest, a smooth-headed smoothie named Chester, whom Leigh often played chess with, reminded her as always that she needed to fix him up with Wanda, an assistant in Human Resources, she of the fierce, ever-evolving hairdo. Wanda (one of Leigh’s other work-friends, quite standoffish with me because I was too “sarcastic,” meaning gay), had her sights set on far bigger game than Chester, Lavern’s recently acquired black CEO. “I’ll put in a good word for you man,” Leigh told him, “but you know Wanda. Power to the people anyway,” she said blandly and fist-bumped him.

Beyond security we boarded an elevator and reverently watched the silent television monitor over the button panel. It was so nice of our corporate overlords to have made sure we had two or three fewer TV-less minutes a day. On our floor, one turned either right toward the executive’s suite of soul-sucking private offices or, like Leigh and I, went left down the pale hall where one entered a soul-crushing world of cubicles familiar to viewers of commercials and sitcoms, where the rat-race takes place in a rat-maze. 

Leigh’s funest, Morticia Adams-esque beauty (Carolyn Jones edition), complete with cut glass cheekbones, made her look always out of place in her plasticized cubicle, not far from my more appropriate cell. Since she was smart, bitchy; since the schmos around the office found her intimidating as hell, she’d settled into being one of the guys in a way I never had. I asked if they ever bothered or harassed her. “Oh sweetie,” she said, rolling her eyes. “My dick’s bigger than 99% of the pussies around here.” She played pool and poker with them. She went to bars and strip clubs. Leigh even bet on football games, claiming she loved to watch huge guys take each other down. 

“Most men just hate me,” she said. I’d brought the subject up having noticed the number and variety who kept stopping by her prison cube, to be dispatched on errands for coffee, bottled water, sandwiches, paper towels, pens and paperclips. “The sort of guys I do attract are total opposites, thin, spindle-wristed arty dipshits who think I’m all dark and full of problems or else these aggressive, buff, middle-aged married fuckers that smoke cigars and drag me to boxing matches. Funnily, the arty ones only ever want to fuck me while the he-men eventually break down crying in a puddle of midlife-crises, declaring their undying love.” She laughed, shook her head. “It’s so annoying. One of those married dolts said he loved me because I was a real no-bullshit, no-judgment dame. Can you imagine? I mean like, I’ll fuck you if you’re married but I’m not gonna marry you, too. Jeez Louise! Also, I am judgmental.” I asked her a question. “Oh, he died last year,” she answered. “I felt sorry for his wife and kid.” 

Re: the “Jeez Louise” thing. It was something both of us started saying in honor of a recurring character on Saturday Night Live. Leigh was always doing that, coming up with little tricks. Like she would drop a weird conversation-killing comment into things and pivot on her heels, turning completely around, and float away. 

“What I’m looking for,” she said on the subject of men, “is some beach bum surfer who doesn’t give a fuck and can fix my shit [meaning repair her appliances]. If I could find a guy like that well … I’d buy some furniture and give the cat a name.” Leigh didn’t have a cat.

“What’s that from?” 

“Old movie I saw over the weekend, Tiffany’s Brunch or something. The point is if I did find a guy like that maybe it’d finally shut up the carping, unhappily married cunts around here so worried I don’t envy their empty family lives.”

“They’re not that fucking bad.”

“They are. Women are horrible!”

I don’t remember exactly how our friendship started. One of us must have heard the other being sarcastic around the office and realized he or she was objectively superior to the standard-brained creeps populating the place and that we should team up to fight the madding crowd. Now, friendships foisted on one at work “trend,” as statisticians and philistine tastemakers say, toward peculiarities singular to the environments which foster them. In our case, a kind of friendly sparring; to liven things up we’d have these fake battles. I’d say something bitchy, like when I brought up that crazy ringtone Leigh has of her mother freaking out; she’d strike back and things would escalate. 

One time Leigh called my extension using a nasally voice and quickly had me convinced she was some angry higher up at Laverne, displeased with a mistake I hadn’t made. I came back from the bathroom one day to find everything on my desk rearranged. This got under my sensitive, well moisturized skin because I’m very specific about how pics and personalized items are distributed about my work area; where the cringe Laughboosters should be hung on the cubicle’s plastic walls, so I can look at them for ironic shits and giggles throughout the day. There are toys, writing utensils, cups; the printed worksheets I am currently working on versus those I will be working on. If all isn’t correctly placed left or right of my computer monitor I lose my bearings, which Leigh thinks is insane.

The most elaborate prank she pulled on me involved my pet coffee mug. Leigh had hidden it in the bottom drawer of my desk along with a photo of an underwear hunk (I was not officially “out” at the office), but in order to find it I first had to follow a trail of post-it notes scribbled with elaborate directions. They led me through the office on a scavenger hunt, which included ducking into the cubicles of confused coworkers busy online shopping; who probably knew I liked to suck dick in any case—my coffee mug was pink with strawberries covering it after all. 

Eventually, though, tables would turn and I became the joker. I put a smelly tuna can in her trash. I hid a nude picture of a hugely pregnant woman in her desk. The model had been posed with legs lusciously spread, biting a hand whose ring finger had chipped green nail polish (a detail Leigh found nightmarish). She put it in the trash; I fished it back out. I did this again and again the next couple days, so that the swollen-bellied model kept springing out at her over and over—in her desk, lunches, purse, the front seat of her car, until she finally shredded it. I made sure she received annoying mail from strange religious and political groups, as well as trial subscriptions to girly magazines in names like Leigh Cabbot Lodge, Leigh Harvey Cosvald and Leigh, Annabel—inevitably commented upon by delivery boys or any other dweeb looking for a reason to talk to her. I also ordered for her sets of commemorative plates and figurines. 

Still, Leigh was much better at this game than me. For several hours after I’d tweaked her about that ringtone I braced myself for something, including but not limited to visiting granny porn sites on my un-attended computer, about which she knew I was paranoid. It’s embarrassing to have to explain one’s misuse of internet privileges at work; people are always getting called out over it. Anyway, late that day Leigh and I were talking somewhere between cubicles, on our way to or from fresh coffee when she said something that chilled me to the bone. “I was talking to Beth awhile ago.”

“That creepy Christian chick?” I was incredulous. Leigh hated her more than I did.

“Sure.” Leigh shrugged. “You know you two have a lot in common. She mentioned she’s a huge reader of Fanfare—like you are?—and she just loves that ‘Speak, Television thing.” Raising an eyebrow, arching her voice, Leigh was suggesting that since a stupe like Beth read “Speak, Television” clearly I must also be an idiot. “But,” Leigh continued. “Beth isn’t only a reader. They published her last week.”

“No way!” I cried truly impressed.

“Amazing, right? Anyway, it occurred to me you two guys might want to talk it over.”

“Let’s not go crazy.”

“Oh but you need to.” Leigh turned and motioned at Beth over a cubicle nearby. She’d obviously been waiting and instantly flew at us. Beth was an energetic, pinkish-blond soul, vibrantly tan, gushily polite, the kind of gal who’d use my strawberry coffee mug in earnest. She stuck out at me her long smooth hand—nails unostentatiously clear—and took mine with gooey femininity.

“Hi, Edmund, we haven’t really met before. Strange you can see someone around all the time, know their name even, but never have talked to them.” She issued an endearing Meg Ryan giggle that would have made the actress herself ill.

“Call me Ed,” I insisted, disentangling my hand from her soft, searching fingers. My stomach roiled at her rosy awkwardness. What an adorable, busomy young thing she was—about 27—and already I knew I was expected to respond to her with the requisite courtly interest.

“I was just telling him,” Leigh put in, “how you were published in ‘Speak, Television’ last week. He was really wowed. Why don’t you tell him all about it, I got to get back to work or else Josh’ll have my ass … so to speak.”

I would have asked her about that ass-crack (haha) if she hadn’t immediately capped her comment with a smirk. She raised a hand to her shoulder, like a bouquet, and made a ticklish wave of all five fingers at us before pivoting on her heels and striding off. Her stage-exit was starting to work my nerves. For reasons not obvious at the time she had, at the Christmas party, made a vague, tipsy, nonsense-comment I no longer recall, to a group of coworkers in the throes of gossip about some higher-up’s supposedly sleeping with one of the gals from the lower depths. Deftly she’d executed that famous high heeled swivel of hers, holding cocktail aloft, and sailed away, leaving us none the wiser.

Conversations abandoned by Leigh usually were already at the awkward stage. It was no different with me and Beth now, since all we had to talk about was “Speak, Television”. This we did until I was able to extricate myself from the circumstance. Unfortunately I agreed to get together with her not just in a wonderful mirage socially known as “later,” but that evening after work, having made the mistake of telling her I had no other plans. Leigh cackled with witchy glee over this when I told her about it. 

4

Turned out I’d read Beth’s comment in what they call “real time”; its colorlessness had, for some reason, stuck in my head. I could hardly imagine anyone bothering to form such a generic thought much less work up the necessary steam to actually lift a phone, call Fanfare, listen to its message and spit the thing out for all to share. Proof positive evolution was not filtering perfected traits through the species down the generations. I say this as myself evolutionarily superfluous. 

Anyway, I’ve got that issue of Fanfare in front of me now (they’ve stacked up since inheriting my brother’s massive collection). “I like the show In Dreams,” she began. “The recent episode where the angel cured that little boy of cancer made me cry. The way he got his angry brother Caleb to donate bone marrow despite his fears and resentments shows true brotherhood. Why don’t more TV shows take a page from this? No one needs violence, sex or foul language to be interesting.” 

This was hardly an unusual notion, but in the hot-house world of “Speak, Television” it was triteness cubed; removed to a metaphysical plane where ignorant decency renewed even the stalest archaic attitudes. It represented the faux-sensitive banality “Speak, Television’s” readers never tired of producing. They could have huffed themselves senseless on this kind of brain-fart. 

Beth’s contribution, however, was one of the least distinctive guppy-thought specimens swimming “Speak, Television’s” crap-clouded waters. I shall now whip up a robust taxonomy of which Linnaeus himself would approve. Some commentators bitched regularly about morning talk shows. These fragile souls believed their supposedly sassy female celebrity hosts were merely political propagandists planted by elites to feminize and coarsen American culture by acting like shrill, foul-mouthed harlots who couldn’t stop talking about their menstrual cycles. Yet, woe unto any daily offering which dared change out its figurehead for a fresh face! When that happened all the animals came out. The ancient host of a game show I’d never seen called That Can’t Be Right! had been replaced two years previously by a chubby, bespectacled comedian.  Month after month “Speak, Television’s” readers had expressed, and still were expressing, their disappointed disgust with this lardy pretender. Every aspect of his image they’d deconstructed, down to his glasses; one surly person even suggested they were purely for show, insisting his eyes had been laser-corrected years before, the sneak! 

Many were mad the networks had moved favorite programs around the schedule and demanded that “Speak, Television” personally put everything back the way it was. Occasionally incredulous morons demanded to know who even the hell watched some stupid, invariably high rated, show. And they wanted to know who thought that dirty filth like The Last Straw was funny? Who cared if the characters trapped in the undersea world of Beyond Leviathan were dead or merely in a hell-dimension? How could anyone who watched Mobbed not be offended by such an approving portrayal of crime? Rip Van Winkles wondered “whatever happened to” things like The Dick Van Dyke Show, which had been off the air for decades! Another set of comments concerned boring celebrity trivia or featured individuals boasting of having discovered some surprising, possibly supernatural likeness between stars and scabs, stars and corn-chips or stars and moldy growths. 

This is where I came in. 

As my brother noted before killing himself, it was impossible believing all this junk was for real. I mean, one woman actually claimed she found the endless violence on so-called “death-shows” with geriatric sleuths of Agatha Christie issue, where by the way Dick Van Dyke had been for years, essentially an expression of the lynch-mob mentality! Surely this was some sarcasto mocking the faint-hearted objections oldsters often raised against high body-count series like Buffy The Vampire Slayer, hilariously denouncing the bloodthirsty fare they couldn’t get enough of. 

There was a whole other type of weirdo thing from men claiming to be so obsessed with certain has-been performers, far more has-been even than the usual run of has-beeners one saw on Fanfare’s covers, that they’d supposedly formed clubs which met every week to discuss the importance of their non-existent work. The very idea was too absurdly depressing to be taken seriously. And what of the string of asinine literalists who were annoyed that shows such as Angel Eyes, an erotic crime drama, wasn’t actually about a pair of winged eyeballs flying around the country? What?! Someone else pointed out that Desperate Housewives had been misnamed since its aging “hotties” weren’t actually housewives and their whorish circumstances not ‘specially desperate. A joke.

But why had such inanities been allowed into print? Was it the work of a bored sardonic hispster chuckling his way through the telephonic idiocy? I felt challenged to do better, go dumber, and submitted myself. For my virgin attempt I pretended to be a plumber who’d completed an elaborate sculpture of Phyllis Diller out of a mass of hair plugs and fecal matter, saved from jobs. I asked if “Speak, Television” would give me Diller’s address so I could send the thing to her. For my next call I said pastors’ wives on Christian television were inappropriately sexy with their caked on cosmetics and quoted them out of context supposedly supporting drug use. In another I demanded that the entire schedule of primetime TV be re-organized so that each show fell into a heterosexual boy-girl, boy-girl format. After that I theorized shows would be far better if they exchanged titles with each other; complained synopses in Fanfare’s program guide did not describe every single aspect of the plots of every offering. I asked, “Isn’t it true that black sitcoms are horribly minstrelly since they’re filled with stupid jokes and so-called sass, clear signifiers of ghetto origins while the characters are depicted as unrealistically middle class?” That one Leigh came up with. Funny considering. 

No matter what I tried though; no matter which voice I used on the phone—rheumy old man, bubbly teen-queen, CONFUSED FOREIGN PERSON—I was unable to get one of my astute observations into the body politic of “Speak, Television”, though they were no less intellectually challenged than the pearly pensees which got through week after week. What was I missing? 

5

That’s why I was so excited to hear that Beth had been published in “Speak, Television”.  And since I’d agreed to meet her for drinks, I figured I could at least get something positive from the experience. Maybe Beth might give rise to an utterance authentically cheesy enough for me to plagiarize it. I was trepidatious, jazzed. The whole affair had about it an illicit tang. Not simply due to my perverse desire to ravish Beth’s voluptuously empty mind, but because I’d made sure to conceal our unnatural evening from Leigh who would have tortured me for fucking ever had she known. 

We settled into a plum colored booth at Charlie’s, a bar around the corner from work, and awkwardly minced our way through a few deep puddles of silence. She asked where I lived. I asked where she lived. She wondered how long had I worked at Laverne (4 years). I wondered where she’d worked before joining our happy corporate family. She asked outright, was I single? Averting her brown eyes, I drank, said yes. She gave off an uncertain laugh and flipped her hair—that beer she’d been sipping had really begun to kick in—and admitted she’d been married until, well, recently. Her terse tone I took to be a god-fearing gal’s discomfort with the sin of divorce. I saw it clearly. The husband had cheated. Beth was made to be cheated on. As I fantasized that pathetic parting scene real life Beth wrecked it by asking me to church with her that Sunday. Now, I laughed and told her I didn’t go in for that nonsense. 

“Oh okay,” she said. I hoped fleetingly my godlessness might be a deal-breaker for her. “I’m not trying to push anything on you. I don’t do that. Least not anymore. Just that in these times I think people don’t know where to turn, you know?” 

I didn’t. 

This disastrous exchange brought on another bout of awkwardness. The previous puddles of silence now seemed oases as we confronted a conversational desert which took a good while to cross. Then suddenly, before us, a subject, TV. Pretty much the only reason for my going out with her in the first place. We parted ways on comedy. I was partial to the major networks’ Thursday night fare, all offices and trailer parks, which struck Beth as gross and off-putting. Just the sort of talk I longed to hear from her. She said she preferred wholesome 1990s and pre-1990s reruns on cable and liked quality women’s drama. The one about the successful city doctor who goes home to make good. The one about the slick lawyer lady who marries a devout Christian widower with 8 children. A recent show she liked followed a non-denominational angel with a bad haircut who wanders the earth righting wrongs, fixing people’s problems. Of course, as I pointed out, that show was not biblically Kosher since it celebrated all religions and not just the one true one. Beth shrugged my bad faith off. Her “news” intake, I wasn’t shocked to discover, comprised a mix of right wing talk radio and a single weekly TV digest where hysteria about crime and true-life court cases were made to lewdly intermingle with the occasional tearful remembrance of soldiers killed in the imperialist adventure of the moment. Basically she loved every show that ever made you want to puke.

My views on Terrorism she found glib, considering the faceless Muslim threat to our country’s tenuous future. She got kinda angry too, which was cute, insisting the stuff I watched on PBS or listened to on NPR was just liberal propaganda, or in her eloquent G-rated words, “bull hockey. These traitors are undermining the country right when we need to come together in the name of democracy, to keep tyrants from obtaining dangerous weapons.” 

Being lectured by a dummy like her was really fucking annoying. “And what?” I asked. “We just get behind our leaders’ stupid decisions no matter how brutal, unjust and fake they are?”

“What fake?” She nearly spat. “Who says they’re fake?” 

I explained. She denied the veracity of my sources. I told her she was being misled by the nose to the tune of televangelists and idiotic A.M hotheads. That made her really mad; she told me I didn’t know anything at all bout reality. And since she refused to admit these Limbaughster frauds were in fact frauds, I declared myself the winner of the discussion. “No,” she said with absurd vehemence. “You’re the loser of the discussion!” 

All seemed lost until we came back together on the subject of made-for-television movies, Lifetime Lovelies as I call them. Suddenly the tension dissolved. But since I was drunk I of course offended Beth a final time, saying I liked amnesia and double personality thrillers (during the course of which the psychotic heroine, ignorant of her murderous alter ego, will at one point glance at her reflection in a bifurcated mirror) because they’re so stupid and it’s great fun guessing the way every dumb scene will play out. Why did women like this crap? I asked aloud, laughing so hard I’d soon laughed my way into our date’s early termination. Beth stormed out of Charlie’s, more bothered by what a bitchy drunk I was than my sexist takedown of shitty Lifetime movies. Funny thing is I forgot to ask her about “Speak, Television,” necessitating further unwanted interactions.

6

In truth though, I was afraid I might have scared her off for good. A week elapsed. Life at the office went on, Leigh and I the happiest couple there. I told myself I was relieved, but part of me missed the possible fun and drama of using Beth. Not to mention the thrill of “cheating” on Leigh.

Then Monday morning Beth came to work, blonde hair bouncing; she rushed to my cubicle, waving a copy of Fanfare. She’d had another comment published! I was horrified, gleeful as I marveled at the vapid aura of her latest offering, a poem sublime in its pure insipidity. It had slipped my notice reading that weekend’s “Speak, Television” because I got stuck on a remark by a guy suggesting all TV be shut down for a week, to give people the chance to read their bibles again. 

Beth’s input didn’t have that kind of flair; like the greatest artists she eschewed self-conscious stylistics, working directly, intuitively from the gut. Whatever was in that cotton-wadded brain of hers, she unfolded it with shocking simplicity. And what gorgeous masterpiece had she given us? “I always thought Madeline on TV’s Collateral Damage is cold and prickly, but she grew her hair out recently and seems nicer. The slight wave at the sides gives her warmth.” 

I was awestruck by the genius of the third sentence, feeling now that I knew the sound of one hand clapping. By contrast my own failed attempt to get in the column seemed cheap, hack. I’d argued a character’s views about the importance of family on the show Northern Dreams were exquisite while the exact same ones expressed in almost exactly the same terms on a recent episode of Down in the Valley were fascist, because the show took place in Germany, Alabama. I even suggested the backgrounds of its producers be looked into. 

Obviously, I accepted Beth’s invitation to go for drinks that night. When Leigh heard I was seeing her outside work she laughed her ass off, leaning against the building’s tall glossy wall and taking a drag from her cigarette 

[SMOKING BREAK, SCENE TWO]. 

“You know you’re dating one of the office hotties,” she said, “making you a real alpha I guess.” She laughed more. “Jim Coates has been tryin’ to hit that since she started. Christian gals never know how lucky they are. That’s what you call sarcasm, Ed. In case you were wondering.”

Disappointed my little charade (pronounced the gay way, sha-rod) was blown already I asked Leigh who she’d heard this from.

“Please,” Leigh was dismissive. “Who haven’t heard it from? That’s all these ball-less wonders do around here, talk about which guys are fucking the chicks they want to bang but never never never never never will. So ridiculous how they wander around all the time, congratulating each other for liking pussy. Note to self: gang rape explained.”

On the way back up in the elevator I asked her, “When do you hang out with these people?”

“What people?”

“The guys around here,” I said.

She shrugged. “Whenever.”

“Oh, I keep forgetting. You go to strip clubs with them.”

“I do love big tits.” She flipped one of her own at me.

We squeezed into Leigh’s tight cubicle. She plumped down in her black chair, crossed her skirted legs with elegance and took a sip from a Garfield mug. Afterwards, she checked her computer. “Goddamnit!” she snarled, rolling her eyes and typing an email to her supervisor, announcing she’d officially returned from break. “Josh fucking freaks if I don’t let him know I’ve gone to the goddamn bathroom!” Afterwards, she sat back and admired the cutesy junk littering her area, siblings of the crap on my desk. There was a kitten calendar and various fuzzy creatures huddling around her computer monitor; a print out tacked to her divider read, “What part of NO don’t you understand!” Next to that was a black and white picture of conjoined African American sisters posed in an antique library. Their bulbous heads blended seamlessly one into the other. On the divider leaf across from them Leigh had taped a tabloid photo of a woman in a hospital bed. She cradled her space-alien baby beneath the headline: “MOM SHOCKED BY MONSTER BIRTH CHANGES VIEWS ON ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION” (Beth deemed these items “weird” and “inappropriate for the workplace”). 

Leigh returned to the subject of guys around the office. “Normally I have a policy of not messing around with co-workers, but you never know when you’re gonna get drunk at an office party, so best be prepared. I let these boys know they will be expected to buy breakfast if anything untoward happens. A couple years ago at a different place I had a major whoopsy and hadn’t made anything clear. Happily,” she said changing her voice to a saucy whisper, “abortion is still legal in Oklahoma.”

“Some girls might call that whore-talk, you know.”

“You mean Beth, the one you’re dating? Jesus Eddie, I only sicced that bitch on you as a gag.”

I gave her a look.

“I wasn’t kidding about Coates, by the way—he’s furious you bagged Beth before he did, especially since he figured you were gay.”

“And what’d you say to that?”

“I considered telling him we were fucking, but the whole conversation was so dumb it felt like anything I said on your behalf would just have the bullshit subtext being gay’s somehow bad.” Her eyes became distracted. “So Gidget thinks I’m a whore, does she? Maybe if I wore peach colored lipstick and thick tawny blush brushed up to my goddamn temples the way she does,” Leigh said demonstrating the style against her own face with her black polished fingernails, “I’d have that wholesome look too. Weird she doesn’t like me, isn’t it?” 

 Not only did I go out with Beth again that night, but we had a couple dinner dates and lunches the next few days as well, which I was only barely able to keep from Leigh because Josh, her supervisor, was giving her more difficulties than usual, forcing her to do extra work, whatever that was—no one around Laverne knows anyone’s actual job. Everything is more or less a variation on low-level or middle-management paperwork. We “assistants” and “interns” are placed throughout the company’s infrastructure and made to pitch in with whatever the given day’s shit-work is.

7

While I’d started seeing Beth in order to dredge her dull brain for ingots of golden banality with which to pelt “Speak, Television”, that wasn’t my only reason for keeping it up. 

Jim Coates, the guy Leigh mentioned speculating about my gayetry, was a motivation too. This douche saw himself as a goddamn company stud; his looks, while good, were just around-the-office good looks though. His black product-sprayed hair was stylizedly askew—that rooster-do which had migrated from gay clubs to fraternities to macho boardrooms. His broad-shouldered, well manicured person exuded always an odor of nostril-burning body sprays and colognes: that is the sweet smell of success. Think Salinger’s Stradlater in his thirties or Bret Easton Ellis’ Patrick Bateman and you get what an empty, insufferable presence he was. According to Leigh, Coates derived from a poor background. He’d worked his way through college, sending money home regularly to his poor crazy momma; supposedly climbed Lavern Inc.’s invisible ladder starting as mailroom clerk. “All of which,” Leigh quipped, “goes to show being a first rate prick takes effort.” 

However he began, Coates is a slick example of the professional managerial class. He comes on hardassed with the usual grinning shark’s mix of sexually crude blather and philistine straight-talk while shamelessly dick-riding any and every shirt slightly above his station (these male homophobic terms are catching). Coates loved giving me condescending pointers how to make my reports “sexy”; instructing me on the correct use of equipment. He would annoy passing custodians, asking whether or not they had the proper clearances to walk through the rat maze and do their job! He boasted how much money he spent on watches, cars, alcohol; talked about football as if it were a field of science, though Leigh understood the game far better than he did. 

I go into this because once I’d learned he asked Beth out and she turned him down flat—I certainly would not have considering those sinewy forearms—I experienced an egotistic, not un-erotic thrill. How delicious having Beth hang on me and my every word in front of him; seeing that annoyed look of disbelief when we left the office together. And I’m not the sort of gay who uses the word “delicious” with any frequency. 

But mainly, if I’m being 100% honest, I kept seeing Beth because I didn’t have anything else going on. 

A weird part of me really enjoyed how enthusiastic she was about “us,” insisting our chaste nights together were romantic. It was nice having someone, anyone be excited by just the fact of me. There was a down side of course, and it was huge. Beth was clingy, cally, expecting tender texts to fly back and forth between our shameless phones; before I knew it I was in so deep that extrication would have required crushing her or coming out of the closet, which might have crushed as well, and I was too cowardly and frankly lazy to do either. Even if I’d wanted to be honest at that point Beth was such a blabber mouth, my secret, which maybe most people knew already, would definitely have been all over the office within a day. What kind of Christian does that make her, I ask you?

But I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep up my charade (sha-rod) much longer due to the tension between Leigh and Beth. Their instinctual feminine dislike of one another had settled into a not-so-subtle passive-aggressive sniping which it is now considered sexist to notice. Frankly Leigh was plumb on the verge of smacking Beth.  

One night after work Beth and I got on the elevator. We were joined by Leigh. During a previous exchange Beth had explained to Leigh, as if anyone didn’t know, that sleeping with someone “outside marriage” not only was a sin but physically, emotionally and spiritually unhealthy; something desperate frustrated women resorted to because they didn’t like themselves. It said even worse about a woman’s self-esteem, Beth added, if she bedded married men, a moral-psychological distinction I found fuzzy. Well that set something off behind Leigh’s cool blue eyes, taking our innocent Beth to be outright calling her a whore.  Anyway, the elevator doors closed, sealing our doom.

“Interesting shade of nail polish,” Beth said, indicating Leigh’s gleaming black talons as they tapped the lobby button.

“Not really,” Leigh said examining her hand front and back. “Black’s sort of the opposite of interesting when you think about it. Certainly not divinely decadent.”

“I couldn’t get away with anything that Goth myself.” Beth giggled. “My complexion’s too ruddy and black only works with really pale skin like yours.”

Leigh didn’t respond. She looked Beth over with a bland, self amused smile, tres Marlene Dietrich. She removed a piece of nicotine gum from her purse, for which she’d developed a taste her last time quitting smoking, and chewed and gazed. “Oh, you know what?” She said as if snapping out of a fog. “I just realized my date’s sick tonight so…” She re-opened her purse, probed its depths. “Means I won’t be needing these.” She removed several green, foil-wrapped condoms and pushed them at Beth. “Maybe you two could use them. I know you’re not exactly extra-marital sex gal but better safe than sorry, I say. Aren’t I always saying that Ed? Something like that anyway.” 

Beth stared at those hateful green packets. “Thank you very much,” she said more formally than I’d have expected, “but I really won’t be needing them.”

“Oh gosh, I’m sorry,” Leigh said, feigning embarrassment. She glanced back and forth between me, Beth. “I just thought…you know … well, I guess I don’t know what I thought, excuse me for assuming which make a mass out of E and U. I meant well.” After replacing the condoms in her purse Leigh turned to the small television screen playing silently over the button panel and stared at it the rest of our downward journey. I would have died laughing if I hadn’t wanted to strangle Leigh. Thank goodness Beth didn’t report her to HR, though things were about to take a turn.

8

A day or so later. Lunch. Beth wasn’t at the office. She texted she always got depressed this time of year and couldn’t come in. It was early April, a beautiful spring day. I asked no follow up questions, just basked in her absence. 

“You know, dad, you’re going to have to tell that poor girl you’re gay eventually,” said Leigh either smoking outside, sitting in her cubicle or standing around the break room.

“Why? She’s Christian. The whole sex thing’s moot, so we’re good.”

“Honey, I wouldn’t count on that. Christian girls are the worst. Plus you’re good looking and since you haven’t been trying to get in her pants like most guys, I’m sure she thinks you’re sensitive and tres gallant.” Leigh rolled her eyes with distaste. “She’ll probably be popping her bra off halfway through your next date. Also, and I know this may seem like a small point, but shouldn’t you be dating a nice young man?”

“I don’t want to date anyone,” I said. “And though I grant my animal magnetism is considerable, I think Beth’ll be able to control herself.”

“Please. If you weren’t three thousand percent queer we’d already be fucking.”

“Whoa, stuck up much?”

“Human nature, sweetie—men are whores and all women are bad.” Leigh fingered her shiny whip-like ponytail and crossed her legs. (Cubicle, that’s right! We were in her cubicle.) “Look, Edward,” she said, using her most mock serious voice. “Enough is enough already.”

“My name’s Edmund.”

“Whoever the hell you are, I forbid you seeing that unspeakable girl again.”

I laughed.

“I mean it Edward. Don’t make me terrorize that dear little thing into therapy. I did that once to a girl in high school, Wendy Vandemeer, after she ratted me out for smoking under the bleachers. And I do not mean cigarettes. It got ugly.” 

“My, we’re being awfully Elaine Benes today, aren’t we?”

 Leigh leaned forward with shocking quickness, grabbed me by my shirt front and yanked me down to her level. I had been leaning against the inside of her cubicle, hip touching that picture of black conjoined sisters for good luck. Leigh said coldly, “You take that the fuck back now Jack or I’m going to kick your ass! I am nothing like some bougie, quirky bitch from that has-been TV show. This ‘Speak, Television’ habit of yours has truly gotten out of control.” 

Between numerous ouches and laughs I raised my hands in surrender. “Okay! All right, all right! But in my defense it was a gay compliment.” 

“No more dates with Beth,” Leigh insisted, releasing me. “And if you don’t knock off reading ‘Speak, Television’ I’ll start reading you. Front to back, sister.”

Having the women in your life battle for ownership of you is, I must admit, an exciting experience! Now I understood why guys on talk shows seemed to get off having trashy women scratch each other’s eyes out over them. The ultimate titillation of one’s vanity. Made one feel a total stud while seeming above all. You forgot your own patheticness and concentrated on theirs. 

But the stuff Leigh had said stuck with me. I felt embarrassed texting sweet nothings at Beth all day long. After work, since I was free for the night, Leigh dragged me to a lecture at a nearby college. Professor Peter Grimes, a plump cultured owl, discussed drolly his recent book Just Jesus, examining the antisocial nature of Christ’s doctrine. According to him, if you were to live a genuinely Christly life you’d either be locked up as crazy or pronounced a vain priss. Normally I enjoyed the occasional high-toned evening with Leigh, musing at modernistic shapes in museums, enduring bouts of screechy atonal music (she was a passionate cellist)—but being spiritually edified for two and a half hours nearly put me to sleep, left me irritable. Once the evening’s festivities were over and we were driving home, Leigh said she liked Grimes’ idea the bible should be viewed as a roadmap to potential enlightenment rather than a dogmatic list of dos and don’ts. But, she said, it did seem like this higher form of spirituality ultimately treated religion as a scavenger hunt made up of a bunch of post-it notes. Figure that one out dear reader! Leigh felt that Grimes obviously did not believe in the Christian god anymore and that he’d do better giving the whole thing up as archaic poetry. Anyway, she added, were god really to exist, surely he’d be too inhumanly bizarre to be conceived in terms our senses could grasp. 

My response: “Fuck god and his long haired hippy kid.”

Next day I told Beth about Grimes’ pointing out the bible’s many contradictions and emendations. “The bible is the word of God,” she said, shocked by such irreverence. “However it wound up or was translated, it is what it says it is. Period.” I told her scholars were in unison that the bible had never been intended to be taken literally. Beth blew this off. “Experts are always turning out to be wrong; God’s truth is forever. Without it how would so many of us who have lost so much be able to go on?”

For that, I had no answer.

If Leigh or Beth had asked my opinion on the otherworld I would have told them I was impressed not by flimsy metaphysical conceits but the mysterious beauty of a billboard hawking cigarettes, lit up at night. That’s a paradise I could imagine. A pretty tan man with supernaturally white teeth, frolicking on a blazing beach between two gorgeous women in tiny bikinis. Live, awe-inspiring, the cheap allure of this fleshly vision seemed ever present yet always elsewhere, a hot prospect floating in the darkness as Leigh and I headed up the sidewalk under it, toward some gay club, to get drunk. Well, I got drunk. Leigh never seemed anything but in complete control of herself—maybe because the constant chaos that was her life was so much the norm I was blind to it. 

The club’s blue mirrored walls kept exerting some kind of gravitational force on me, so that Leigh would have to peel me off them anytime a song she wanted to gyrate to began blaring. “You dance like a straight guy!” she shouted at me over the music, because my arms were flailing around like the tawdry disco queen I became when intoxicated. I gave her breasts an amiable squeeze (one of our many “gags”); she scrunched her shoulders and smiled brightly. Things went on that way, us drinking and dancing, while our glassy doubles performed parodies of these actions in the various mirrors.

At last Leigh guessed it was time to get me home to bed, as did her reflection; we all of us straggled out onto the sidewalk where we began a discussion about who was less okay to drive. The sign in the club’s front window radiated green, which interpenetrated with my fogged in drunken state. All was intensified, the blackness of Leigh’s ponytail sharpened. Her sleek black blouse glistened so that its creases and folds were like facets outlining the fascinating shape of her bust and shoulders. Her pale angular face glowed; her lashes became throbbingly dark. The whole buzzing scene was improbably romantic and I took Leigh’s hand. I pulled her close, enjoying her cool smell, marveling at the thereness of her body, the pliant pressure of her breasts between us. 

“Okay, perv,” she said with a laugh. “You’re squashing the girls. Also, I need a cigarette.” I tried then to kiss her. She pushed me away. “What are you doing?” She wasn’t mad, more wearily amused.

“I’m not doing anything,” I said lamely (the lame use of such an adverb underscored my mortification).

“That is just not going to happen, Ed. My life’s way too complicated to mess around with fags, no matter how cute.”

“‘Complicated’ how—you involved with another married guy?”

“None of your business.” She undid her ponytail. “Not that it matters, but I know enough at this point to know the two of us wouldn’t end well. I may seem like fun, baby—hell, I’m loads of fun—but real life me is as much a wreck as your girlfriend Beth; after a couple weeks there’d go another friendship just when I’d established a routine. And even if I was gonna fuck a fag, which I never ever would, I’m wearing my gross underwear tonight so naughties of any sort are out of the question.”

“I think they’re great,” I said. “Wait, I’m talking about your panties, aren’t I?”

“Fags,” Leigh said, shaking her head with joking disgust. “They have literally the worst taste in women.”

“I hate you.”

“Course you do,” Leigh said, lighting her cigarette. “You have to hate me a little to want to fuck me. Hate and alcohol is pretty much how we straights make it work. Welcome aboard.”

9

Though drunk I went out again soon as Leigh had dropped me off at my apartment. Depressed, confused. The tentacles of feelings flimmered, trying to get hold of something real, dragging me into a good gay bar, The Tool Box, one I’d never have gone to with Leigh. It was all blear-and-blur. There were a few shots of me trying to chat up a couple indifferent males then being indifferent to a few who dared walk up on me, one of whom was so enthusiastic for the music stylings of Hilary goddamn Duff I couldn’t help but make fun of him. Yet moments later I was forcing myself to be what I assumed was charming, complimenting some cunt named Kimberly Locke, to a hot guy with good shoulders, sinewy forearms. 

At last, right before closing, there was a bit of amateurish footage, metaphor for my alcohol-blasted memory in case you hadn’t realized, showing me buying some redhead in a tight shirt a drink. His brown eyes gave off shy sensitivity, but what really did it for me was his frat-boy roostered hair, like Coates’ at the office. 

We went back to my place. Safe Sex was had. After which the redhead, whose name I now forget, fell asleep in my arms. As I nodded off I realized I was finally moving on with my life; had the proof right in my arms, thank you. But I couldn’t actually sleep that way, was too uncomfortable, so I stumbled to the living room couch and passed out.

Hopes of moving on with the red head evaporated, curdled, vanished the next day. I woke on the couch to vicious sunlight attacking me through the un-shaded living room window. The boy had gone. The only sign of his presence through my hellish hangover was a note saying, “Had a nice time. You seem sweet. Hope you don’t mind my saying, but you should really redecorate this place. It’s way faggy.” No name, no number. 

Boy, I thought, that homo sure had nerve dissing my ex’s nelly decorating considering her vigorous, over-the-head, Z-shaped snaps every fucking time she, he, it brayed laughter! And what about how she kept declaring every sluttily dressed woman to be, “Cunt”? Balling up that note, I stared angrily at the hideous interior of my effeminized apartment. So much time had passed yet my ex was still fucking me in the bad way! [Hangover seems to have dried out my writing style, hasn’t it?]

10

I have described that night so thoroughly because it was to be echoed a couple weeks later with Beth.

It began the afternoon Leigh got fired, an event which started several days before. Leigh was always something of a Straight-Talk Express, as I’d begun calling her. “Meaning I have a big fucking mouth,” she said.  She’d been hanging out bitching politics with a few office folk, including her HR friend Wanda, when she let fly a few controversial opinions. 

 “Where do you guys do all this stuff?” I asked as she detailed the vague scene to me. “And how come I’m never invited?” 

“In that empty supply room around the corner,” she said pointing somewhere up, over and beyond her cubicle. “A lot of us huddle there when no one wants to work, but sweetie you’d rather die than fuck off.” 

Anyway, work-complaints had graded into a heated discussion about the latest make-an-instant-celebrity show; that then morphed into an even more heated political “debate” concerning the race to see who was going to win the Democratic presidential nomination that fall and face off against John McCain. Would it be Hilary Clinton or slim elegant Barack Hussein Obama? The group was pulling for Obama. Leigh, an instinctive contrarian, deemed both Clinton and Obama to be the same, saying she had a hard time getting worked up either direction. Everyone objected vociferously that Obama was a young attractive outsider to Washington’s game of inside corruption; they said he was an inspiring speaker, practically a poet; felt real hope and change might be possible with a character like him on the horizon. 

“Inspiring my ass,” responded Leigh, doubtless rolling her eyes. “Every time he goes into that gaseous cloud of ‘Hope,’ where no concrete statement can be heard to scream, I feel like I’m going to.” Obama, Leigh declared, was an ambitious smooth talker, nothing more than another soft-money whore. “Look I’m not knockin’ the hustle,” she said she’d said. “If that fucker can clinch the nomination more power to him. I just wish the press would stop acting as if he were Christ’s own speech writer. Now you guys are at it. Not to be a naddering nabob of negativism.” 

 Leigh was surprised to hear even Coates speak up passionately for Obama saying, “I consider myself a conservative, but even I’m thinking of voting for him.” Spoiler alert: he didn’t. After Leigh expressed a derisive snort everyone went off about how great and historic it was to have a black man, a smart black man who talked good, as a credible candidate for the highest office in the land. 

“That’s great,” Leigh agreed. “I’m glad people, black people, are jazzed enough about somebody to bother voting for once. All I’m saying is this crap about transcending color seems like a corny way for white people to say how utterly amazing it is they’re not threatened by someone’s being black…Am I right Coleman?” Leigh held her hand up as if to high-five Coleman, one of two black people in the room, the other, as I said, being Wanda. Coleman grinned but refrained high-fiving; Wanda outright laughed. 

“Everybody else tried to act like I was being racist,” Leigh ranted. “This from people—Coates mainly—who’ve actually said that even though slavery and the KKK were fairly bad they’re tired of hearing blacks bitch all the time.” 

The specialness of Obama, his racial exceptionalism, was again emphasized by all. Leigh responded that she’d love a black president, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, both of whom “actually are great orators”. She said she might also get excited for Gwen Ifil [blank stares from everybody] or Frangella, which again made Wanda laugh [Frangella were a couple black female comedians]. Here, unfortunately, Leigh vaulted over that vague-ass line representing the socially acceptable, into flat out offensiveness. “And if,” she cracked blandly, “Obama did get elected that really might be a good thing. Maybe he’d have Ralph Nader as his V.P. so if some loon assassinated him we’d finally get a real president.” 

“Funny thing is,” Leigh told me during our penultimate smoking break, “I don’t actually give a shit about who becomes president. I just wanted to say something shocking so I could whirl around and walk out. You know how I do.” 

Her comments spread the office over and soon everyone was saying how terrible they were, imputing to them the most devastating label a pencil-pusher can: “inappropriate.” Especially inappropriate were such words stated in front of Wanda and Coleman, though Leigh believed neither was particularly bothered by them until they were cowed into officially stating they disapproved Leigh’s “violent” language as “divisive” and “polarizing” to workplace morale. Once the guys who’d always thought Leigh was a straight up bitch got hold of this ammunition they started campaigning for her immediate dismissal as a demonstration to Laverne Inc.’s valued African American employees how despicable they found Leigh’s hateful intolerance, which should never be tolerated. Numerous complaints to both HR and Josh, her supervisor, became overwhelming. Several emergency meetings were held. Finally Josh was forced to have a separate morning-long conference with Leigh, in his office.

I was late to work that day. By the time I got there Leigh had already gone before the firing squad. She came out of Josh’s office, went blindly to her cubicle and started packing her things, watched over by a stoic security guy. I need to insert some information here. I’d endured a bit of trauma myself that morning, so my mood levels were low. My ex, Billy, had awakened me with a call inviting me to his goddamn gay wedding! 

“Congratulations,” I said insincerely. “So you’re marrying that guy you left me for, Brad?”

“Isn’t it great!” Billy gushed, “He’s so amazing. I’ve never been happier. Nothing I’ve experienced with anyone has been like this. It’s like, I found the other half of my soul, you know?”

Now, these are horrible words to hear from an old lover if you yourself are still single, trying to get crusty sleep-remnants out of your eyes. Especially as I’d been practically living for the inevitable crash and burn of that relationship; hearing him say it was more or less immortal, that nothing had ever been as great—that I hadn’t been as great—was awful. Worse, Billy seemed to think I ought to be happy for him and want to spend money on an expensive present to celebrate his legally meaningless union (this was several years before Obergefell in 2015 when, by the way, the happy couple made it official). In any case, the call had its, I’m sure, intended effect, ruining my morning if not my year. I felt in need of Leigh’s shoulder to cry on, which I’d begun to think would be forever available. Turns out the only things anybody can count on are liquor, cigarettes, taxes, hunger, long hours, low pay and the loneliness that awaits one in the grave.

I followed Leigh out of the building after she’d packed up, listening to her rambling despite my own problems. “It’s not like I care about this stupid job,” she said, “but it’s shitty being told I’m losing it because I committed a hate crime. Then Josh poured even more salt on the old gash, saying he should have canned me for being a terrible worker way before, which pisses me off because…well, it’s true and it sucks getting the harsh from the guy you’ve been fucking.” By now we’d stepped into a buttload of sarcastically brilliant sunlight, where the security guy following us left off and went, I’m sure, to spread the gossip he’d just heard. We continued down the street to where her car was parked.

“So Josh is the married guy you’ve been sleeping with?” 

“Yep.”

“How is it possible? He has that awful, long, 1970s hair.”

“Fags,” Leigh said and gave me a look. We reached her car. She put the boxful of her junk—mug, kitten calendar, pink pencils, picture of African American conjoined twins—on the hood of it. “Anyway,” she continued, “after telling me I deserved my firing the asshole says he loves me and is willing to go to the mat for me. ‘You must be crazy,’ says I. ‘You’ll just get yourself fired. And anyway, I realized a couple seconds ago, I’m not interested in you anymore.’ Because, Eddie, it’s inappropriate. Oh just toss this crap in the dumpster for me.” She slid the box across the car’s hood my direction. “Or maybe give it to the company’s next victim. Whichever you think best.”

She got into her car, took a flustered breath and looked at me through the windshield. “I’m pregnant also.”

“What?”

“I’m all knocked up and naughty.”

“Boy that sucks. Or is it great? Are you gonna keep it?”

“Absolutely not!” She shouted through the glass. “Look at my goddamn life. I’m taking a bull dozer and systematically smashing the fuck out of it. And for what?”  She looked at the wheel of her car where she’d placed both hands. “I have no idea.”

That was when Leigh’s phone went off. The ringtone was a recording of her mother screaming, “Leigh! Where are you? I had to call the cops on Roy. He beat me Leigh, beat me!” Denying the call Leigh closed her eyes and shook her head. “You have no idea how much I wish I hadn’t done that. Oh well.” She shrugged. “Nothing I can do about it now. I’ll just go home, strip to my bra and slip and drink vodka straight out of the bottle like Patty Duke in Valley of The Dolls.” She started her car, rolled down the passenger window. “What are you going to do?” 

“Don’t worry about me kid,” I said bravely, bending down and looking at her through the window.

“But I do worry about you, Eddie. I worry a lot. Hey, I have an idea. I’m going to call Vallery Winchell in Legal. She’s been having trouble conceiving this last year. I’m sure that cow would really appreciate hearing I’m pregnant again and that I’m off to have yet another abortion.”

She got on her phone and drove off. I admired for the last time Leigh’s professional chic, her black blouse, fingernails; the sheen of her ponytailed hair—framed by the gleaming black of her car, which disappeared into the gray traffic as I pointlessly waved after it. We haven’t spoken to each other since, for whatever reason, but I guess that’s how work-place friendships often go, isn’t it? Well wherever you are Leigh, Goodbye! So long Bette, Elvira, Morticia. Sayonara Audrey, Marlene, Liza. See ya around Patty and Joan. You were to me all women and I loved you dearly.

11

Beth was glad to see Leigh gone of course, feigning shock over her “ugly, racist talk.” I tried setting Beth straight, but she did not want to hear it. Such things, she kept insisting, one ought not to say under any circumstances, especially about a man as dignified as Obama, though she would never have voted for Obama under even mortal threat. 

This same censorious authoritarian drivel ruled the office. I approached Leigh’s friend Wanda in Laverne’s cafeteria the day after the firing. She was seated at a table with two or three black female employees and other un-cool kids, her hair pulled close to the scalp for once, giving her a look of intimidating moral clarity. I asked what she thought about Leigh getting sacked so precipitously. Wanda stiffened, said that while she liked Leigh and was sure Leigh hadn’t meant any harm by her comments “considering, per se, what’s happened to so many black men in the past, and how endangered they are in the present, her words just weren’t funny. You do…not…joke about that crap.” Wanda widened both eyes and squared her head on her neck, physically underscoring this so even I could understand. Maybe she was right, but I couldn’t help thinking everyone was being hypocritical, patting themselves on the back for their virtue-osity when the real problem was that aggressive women like Leigh scared the hell out of them. 

Chester, the security guy at the desk in the lobby, I thought had correctly labeled the whole thing “office politics bullshit”. He said all he knew was that he would miss having someone around to play chess with. But why, you may wonder, was I of the belief that running around asking all the black people at work how they felt would somehow validate how I felt? 

By the end of that day I was afloat in a kind of boring existential crisis. The only thing I was certain of was that I didn’t want to date Beth anymore or listen to her talk about things I, well, would never care about. Seemed a million years since my stupid “Speak, Television” thing got this absurd, misshapen ball skidding if not rolling. 

Being mean I took Beth, who hated “exotic” food, out to one of those tiny Indian restaurants crammed between mirrored walls where one can hardly see for all the drooping decorations. The tables were set close together, so you had no choice but to listen to your neighbor’s in-depth chat about his sexually transmitted disease. And of course Beth spent the whole time picking through the stewy vegetable dish I’d pushed on her, saying over and over that it was sooo spicy—not a complaint, she assured me. She just she wasn’t used to it. 

I hardly listened while she channeled the office at me, pretending to care about what had happened to Leigh. I looked at her: softly pretty as always, her fleshy realness filled me with sharp revulsion, a dyspeptic queasiness unpleasantly familiar. The last time I’d felt it was in connection with my emotionally crippled brother, shortly before his suicide. How the months do fly.

Beth drank more than she ate, as did the version of her in the mirrors which would not stop mocking her. She said she was feeling “up” for more “fun” by the time the check was handed us by our lovely if obsequious South-Asian waiter. She wanted to go bar-dancing, though she was an even poorer hoofer than me, sober. Still, I obliged. Soaking in the heat of a crowd in the throbbing blue belly of yet another dumb din of iniquity, this time heterosexual, Beth casually draped herself on me, swigging from a beer bottle, saying “this is fun, don’t you think? Aren’t you having fun?” 

I was not. Then It happened. Beth dove in for a kiss. Coolly, I dodged her move. I suppose I could have been more polite, but I kept thinking about how my ex-boyfriend was somewhere happily snuggling up to an attractive man while here I was stuck with this sham, second rate, sit-comesque relationship based on television trivia; I didn’t even have my best friend to complain to about it either! And why, I wondered, was my best friend some transient co-worker anyway? Already, I felt Leigh becoming a memory; another of life’s dropped plotlines. 

Drunkenness eventually overcame Beth and I had to get her home. She insisted that I personally deliver her to her apartment. Several garlands of twinkling holiday lights dangled from the living room walls, giving off muted illumination. I felt around dark corners for the overheads but Beth stopped me, saying her eyes couldn’t take direct brightness. She pressed her compact body against mine and suggested we turn on a little romantic music. I demurred.

“It’s nice you’re a gentleman,” she said. “But you know, just because I’m Christian doesn’t mean I’m a prude.”

“Well I think we shouldn’t push anything we can’t stop,” I said, inly groping for an excuse to get the hell out of there. “You don’t want to do something you’ll regret.”

She unstuck herself from my person saying, “That’s not very complimentary.” Her voice was now un-frilled by any vestige of pert cuteness. Wearily, she dropped into a white wicker chair with a plush turquoise cushion and looked at me through the slight glow of holiday lights. Beth’s puffed-hair was silhouetted by a halo created by the pale mint dots on the wall behind her. Obviously my eyes had adjusted to the dimness.

I said I was sorry, but I had a lot on my mind. 

“Which doesn’t include me, apparently; that’s not very complimentary either.”

How to respond? I looked around. Near the window was a plump chair; on its left an oval-shaped couch of indeterminate shade. Above that hung a tasteless still-life featuring a table laden with fruit. An oval glass coffee table contained the correct number of magazines and on the wall across from it, beside Beth’s wicker chair, a tiny television poised on a bamboo stand seemed to watch us like a great eye. From the looks of all this I surmised her bed would have one of those dreadful ruffled skirt things, a nightmare detail I was determined never to see for myself.

“So is it me?” She asked. “Do you not find me attractive?”

“It isn’t you Beth.”

“Well what then? I don’t mean to sound desperate, but we never do anything Ed, and…well it’s been awhile since I, you know, did something. Not since I was married.”

“You were married?”

“Four years. I told you that.” She sat back in her chair dispiritedly.

“Oh right,” I said. “Now I remember.” I didn’t though. “What happened again?”

“He died, Ed: two years ago this April. Stomach cancer. That’s why I was out the other day. I took off for the anniversary. Didn’t help though. I remember he was in so much pain for so long it felt like I was going to be in all that…” She stopped, made a gesture I took to be a shrug. “Then it was just over.”

They’d met, she said, at a Christian college located downtown, and right off found that they were burning with hellish lust. Giving in to temptation, they’d slept together, the sinfulness of which I have no doubt made their perfunctory endeavors hotter. This mistake they compounded by confessing to a revered teacher, who promptly had them expelled. Cast out of that paradisal building topped off by an enormous neon cross lighting our way to salvation through the night, every night, they married and settled into normal life; they’d just decided to have kids too when hubby—David, Don, Dennis—got sick. Beth found him one night doubled over the toilet, blood and vomit everywhere. Turned out he’d been sick awhile, having ignored many tell-tale symptoms the way men sometimes do, and was in the last stages of malignancy. Failed treatments ravaged him; he died slowly, horribly over a few slow, horrible months. “The only thing Don [Dennis or David] could stand at the end was TV,” Beth said glancing at the dead one beside her. “He was so miserable and out of it, though, I had to describe shows for him, which I did as much to drown out his groaning and moaning as to entertain him.” She laughed. “Seems like all that was ever on, too, was that stupid show, The Last Straw—have you seen it?”

“Yeah, it’s dumb all right.”

“I can’t watch anymore. The new girl they got to be Tessie’s best friend isn’t funny like the black one was. And she wears tacky red high heels too. I hate those.” After a thoughtful pause Beth continued her story of woe. “With David [Dennis or Don] dead I was on my own; it was terrible.” Mostly, she said, because life kept chugging along as if nothing had changed. She moved into this apartment to escape the nightmare of waking up every three a.m. to an emptiness which could never be refilled; a silence that would not be broken. Soon it started to seem as if the brief period of her marriage had only been a fever dream. Nobody ever asked her about Dennis [Don or David] anymore, and the few times they did she changed the subject; no one cared either. “What weirded me out most was how casually irrevocable it all was.” Surprised me, Beth so ably tossing around a phrase like that. Sitting in her chair, with those little green lights wanly radiant on the wall behind her, I saw a dignified something in her I hadn’t noticed before, reminding me of Leigh.

I thought of my brother again too for some reason—an odd mix in my brain, him, Beth and Leigh. And the whole scene took on a dreamy, slightly vertiginous quality, as if a bout of Deja Vu had slipped between two mirrors and momentarily lost itself in an infinite regress of nagging familiarities. “I get it,” I said. But did I? I think I might have been filling time while the sense I had of being lost in a disorienting emotional hall of mirrors faded. Either way, I leaned against the door jamb between the living room and foyer, and kept talking. “It’s really screwed up the way life gets changed around forever by almost anything; for no reason. I don’t think I told you before but I had a brother who killed himself a few months ago.” 

“Wow, Ed. I’m sorry.” 

“Thanks, but I’m okay. Was more a deal for my parents of course. It’s just hearing you talk about your husband [Dennis, David, Don] made me remember.”  I couldn’t explain, though, that the moment we were having, possible due to the shadows and my sadness over Leigh, had brought out in me certain regrets if not true grief, which I needed somehow to acknowledge. I certainly tried. “Me and my brother weren’t close,” I said. “I knew he was in trouble mentally, but I let myself ignore it because it was easy. I told myself I didn’t know what to do anyway, which made me somehow resent him. Now I keep seeing him cringing and helpless in that terrible bedroom at our parents’ and wish I could believe in god, so his pathetic life wasn’t all there was left of him.”

Beth laughed. “I’m the opposite. When [fill in the blank] died, I was glad. He’d gotten so sick and gross at the end, and smelled so awful, that when I fed or cleaned him I thought I’d throw up. Got pretty mean too. He’d try to make me feel guilty cause I wasn’t sick; make me feel small ‘cause I had thoughts that weren’t about him. It was like everything about me was wrong ‘cause I was gonna live past him, you know? Life isn’t like TV where the dying wish those who survive them, happiness. Then when he did die I started feeling like I hated God, wishing he and the whole damn thing weren’t real. If God didn’t exist, you see, it wouldn’t matter I hated him; he wouldn’t know how disloyal I’d been on the inside. But God does exist,” she said. “I know he does and I’ve got no idea what to do with it.”

The main thing I thought was that if Beth simply had less prim taste she’d have discovered her feelings safely, banally dramatized on any number of adult dramas. There really was something bizarre about these square fantasies streamed at us through rectangular windows, showing worlds where everything has been carefully embalmed with soft-focus platitudes. As daydreams I suppose they’re harmless, but somehow such bright fantasies become a way of papering over life’s mess with the wisdom of waxworks, as if any soothing, final solution to human conflicts was always preferable to the disturbing open ended freedom and drift of actuality. 

Fortunately I didn’t say this to Beth. I said her reactions were normal, the way a therapist on a TV talk show would. I said she was allowed, by god and society, to feel as conflicted as she wanted—who wouldn’t after going through such an experience? How could you not feel messy and mixed up considering the layers of horror and blood our animal existences had been founded on?

Beth ignited a silver floor lamp beside her white wicker chair and smiled a face swollen with tears. “I knew you’d understand,” she said rubbing her nose so harshly the nostrils bugged out. “You’re not like other guys. I knew that too, the first time I saw you; knew I’d be able to share my real self with you just like this.” Her heartfeltness was ruined a little by a smear of peach lipstick on her front upper teeth, which kept focusing my attention. She was very drunk. 

Beth stood, stumbled in my direction. She took my hand as much to keep from falling as out of tenderness, and suggested I stay over. I should have told her then I was gay, but I couldn’t help imagining the terrible look of recognition slowly altering her slack, confused face. Instead of doing that, the honorable thing, I broke up with her, saying she was great but that I couldn’t see her anymore. She cried, hugged me, asked something irrelevant and lay down on her couch, where I tucked her in with a yellow afghan. Then I turned the television on. Then I left. She probably thought I had dropped her for Leigh.

Going down in her apartment building’s elevator, standing before its silver doors, I tried to see myself clearly through the scuffed reflection on offer, perfectly bisected by a rubber seal where the doors came apart. I thought again about my brother and Leigh and Beth; how it seemed I’d missed something essential about each of them. My own self had gotten in the way, I supposed. But then I wondered: were the sad parts of these people actually their real selves? Or merely self-serving slop? The idea seemed a convention of bad TV melodrama—all you had to do was crack the not-so-hard shells of people’s social defenses and there they would be, mushy souls, tragic, vulnerable, searching for love just like everybody.

The elevator reached its destination with a soulless ding. The doors tore my fuzzy image apart, opening the void of a shabby lobby. One faulty fluorescent I’d forgotten to expect was flickering. Beyond, the city night pressed in on, or better say oppressed, the glass entrance. I stepped into the lobby, strategically lit for alienation, at which moment the flickering light jarred something loose in my head. Beth’s comments about that terrible sit-com, The Last Straw, the show she and her husband had watched during the series’ finale of his life (Beth, please forgive my shitty television analogies wherever you are). She’d said something about not liking Sheila Sheldon’s new gal pal, the girl who wore red high heels, hadn’t she? That’s it! I thought. I’ve got it, inane, farm-fresh, perfectly perfect for “Speak, Television.” 

A sense of relief and liberation spread through my being. The pain, waste of the recent past finally was redeemed! I rushed home and put in a call to Fanfare.   

Joseph Aisenberg is an Oklahoma-based writer, film critic and historian. His noted works include the critical film analysis Brian Palma’s Carrie: Studies in The Horror Film, which was nominated for The Bram Stoker Award, horror’s premier literary award. Aisenberg is also a regular contributor to film magazine Bright Lights Film Journal, has provided commentary tracks for Shout Factory’s 4K/BluRay steelbook special edition of Carrie, and is also the author of numerous other stories and novels. Freeline Media happily welcomes his contributions here.

Check out Joseph Aisenberg’s contributions to Freeline Media:

• Bloody Rabbit Review: A Wily Comic Nightmare
• A Christmas Eve Story Review: A Holiday of Darkness
• Short Fiction: “Motherhood’s End”
• Short Fiction: “Folk Art”
• Short Fiction: “An Old Friend”
• Sontag’s Song Of Herself: Thoughts on Cinema