By Josh Wiebe
Photo by Brett Beadle
For most people the distance between their mouth and a cup of potato salad can only be navigated with the help of a spoon or other utensil, if only to steady the journey. Were I counted among the number of people who find something to admire, or at least something edible, amongst the vomitous mass of potatoes and mayonnaise, I’m sure I would be a part of the set of more conventional eaters, smartened apes with our silver spoons gripped tightly between forefinger and newly formed thumb. Penny, however, puts us (or at least me) to shame. She requires no such assistance, and instead chooses to bypass the spoon in order to get the salad directly into her mouth thanks to her cupped hand and upward bent fingers. What sounds disgusting, I can assure you, is not. It’s not exactly erotic either, but the point is that the woman can shovel something I find revolting into her mouth and still remain attractive, and that’s a hell of a thing. A hell of a thing.
We break up. I’m good at break ups, I understand break ups, and when she tells me she doesn’t want to see me anymore I can’t really give her a good reason why she should stay. I’m not an easy person to live with. I can cook and clean well enough for myself, in that I can make hot dogs and hamburgers, and wash the plates and the grill that I need to make hot dogs and hamburgers, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I’m an immaculate or even remotely healthy person. Not that I’d want to be Felix Unger or anything, but I just assume that’s what girls want. Someone to take the load off their shoulders, you know?
But that ain’t me, so to speak. I aspire not only to be messy and unhealthy, but also have a strange preference for the ugly and the hefty, at least when it comes to my own appearance. I’m hypocritically shallow as well, because my girlfriends have all been beautiful, all been smart, all been thin. What they see in a man whose idols admittedly run the spectrum from Orson Welles in Touch of Evil to Oliver Platt in Diggstown, I don’t know.
So Penny and I broke up. We broke up because she got tired of me, or I wasn’t caring enough, or I wasn’t good enough, or she didn’t want to talk about movies anymore, or God knows what else. I didn’t start it, but I should have been able to stop it, but that’s not really the point. I think. To tell you the truth, I don’t know what to think, I don’t know what the point is, all I know is that two days ago I’d slept with my arms wrapped around a woman I loved, and today I teared up when Tom Doniphon burnt his house down in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and fell asleep alone.
I don’t know what it is about sleeping alone that seems so pathetic to me, but waking up and turning over to see a wall and one half of an empty bed makes my insides churn. I swing my legs over the side of the bed, rub at my scalp, crack my joints intentionally, stand up and hear them crack unintentionally, shuffle to the bathroom and I can’t recognize myself. I feel everything that reflection does, every movement and gesture, but it’s not me. I’m lost and alone and cold and kind of afraid but I brush my teeth and I have a shower and I go to work because that’s what I’m expected to do and that’s what I’m going to do.
I finish work and I go out to a cafe where people, friends I guess, ask me how I’m doing. I say I’m okay, friends pick up my tab, we go to dinner and I make vacant attempts at humour because that is the kind of thing I do at dinner and everything feels kind of fake and without consequence. I call my friend and we talk about John Ford and that’s fine with me.
“Hey.”
“How are you?”
“Fine. You?”
“Fine. What’d you get up to last night?”
“The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.”
“Lee Marvin.”
“Uh-huh.”
“John Ford.”
“He was great.”
“He was.”
“Hawks, too.”
“Ford, though.”
“Ford.”
“Stagecoach.”
“Yeah.”
“She Wore A Yellow Ribbon.”
“I like Liberty Valance.”
“Me too. Just saying–”
“I know.”
“Good.”
“When he burns his house down.”
“That hurts.”
“Every time.”
“For the girl, right?”
It goes on. We go on. I go on. That’s what I do, I go on, I deal with these things and move on. I watch life and I try to keep it separate but I can feel myself slipping away and I can feel the meaning disintegrating. Even my clothes are starting to fall apart. I trip on binders, edges, desks that I’ve passed a thousand times, I rip holes in my shirts, my jeans, sometimes I rip open wounds from her cats but I think that’s just a way to keep my mind off her. It works okay for the most part, I go through the motions and tell my friends I’m rebuilding, I’m fine, I’m great, I’m doing well, I met this girl, she’s cute, and I know that I’m lying but I can’t help it because it’s not my fucking choice. When control leaves my sphere of influence I get frustrated. I don’t even know what I want anymore, other than that I want to instigate it. I’m a catalyst, a confessor, I don’t listen I talk, I don’t react I prevent, I lose my shit because I’ve seen other men my size lose their shit and they get respect and I want that respect.
I want control and I don’t have it and maybe I never had it but I had the illusion, and that illusion is with her and she took it away from me. That control is sitting in her lap now, watching her eat potato salad, watching her do whatever she’s doing with whoever she’s doing it with or to. I’ve lost that. I’ve lost her. And I had no fucking clue what I was doing or why I was letting these things get by. But maybe that’s the issue of control, maybe I look back and see things I could have done and now I see her in my head and I just want to tear my eyes out and jump over the railing of the bridge that I’m walking on now. Steel girders, other people, cars, bikes, helmets, water bottles, Ziploc bags and torn candy wrappers, I can’t get this shit out of my way or out of my head.
I look down. It’s a freeing sensation I’m seeking but there’s nothing there holding me back, I’ve got the ability to jump but I don’t have the impetus. I can’t make myself do it so I walk to the end of the bridge and sit down in a record store that keeps used DVDs under the counter. I hunch down and look through them but none of the titles are registering at first, then I worry that I’ve missed something incredible like a bootleg Greed or an import of The Silent World and so I flip back to the same bullshit that’s been under the counter for the past year and a half. It’s a half-hearted search and I buy a copy of Bug and I’m okay with that, and I leave. I go to the pub and I order a Heineken, drink it, watch a fight on TV and pound my fist against the table when something exciting happens. I keep waiting for a tooth to fly out or an arm to get broken or someone to start weeping for freedom so I can feel better, but none of these things happen and for the most part they just grapple.
My friend sits down across from me and she asks me how I’m doing and I show her my DVD and she says she’s never seen it and so we watch it at her place and she hates it and we argue and I go home feeling sorry for myself. I go back to the pub the next day and meet her and bring something else, something she’d like, a musical, and we watch it and she likes it and we have sex and I’m okay for the moment, and in the morning she doesn’t kick me out and we cuddle and maybe I’m okay with that too but I’m not feeling great so I excuse myself, I’m sweating but she doesn’t notice, at least I don’t think so, and I try to remember to take my socks off next time because my feet hurt and besides that it’s unattractive. All these unattractive habits I have to get rid of.
I shave my face a few mornings later and I look like a kid, and I put a piece of toilet paper on my cheek and it stops the blood and I feel sick and then I look closer and see that one hair that she used to make fun of me for never getting. I leave it, my silent dedication to what was a pretty great relationship that I have to move on from.
“So you’re okay then?”
“Yeah. I’m okay.”
“Nothing wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“Promise?”
“Sure.”
“You don’t mean it.”
“Sure I do.”
“I hope so.”
My friend looks at me.
“Don’t worry.”
“Don’t do anything stupid.”
“I won’t.”
“That’s a lie.”
“Probably.”
“What are you gonna do?”
“Nothing. Long as you live, don’t ever ask me more.”
I’m cold and I’m sleeping alone and I’ll get by.
Great story, loved reading it.