The brains I got will stuff your bust out
(Apologies to Mr. Robert Johnson.)
The question, as always, is what are other people for? Or, just as perplexingly, what good am I to them?
The answer, as always, is that we are each other’s fictions. We admire each other only as long as we can make it all up. The onset of reality into any relationship is its death knell.
I have kept the news from you, dear diary, but for the past six weeks I have been in a “dating relationship”, which I had not done since before I knew better. This is my first post-knowing-better dating relationship. I am “dating”.
I am dating Erica.
Perhaps you will picture me sweating bullets when I tell you that Erica is a wonderful person. I am not adequately prepared for dating a wonderful person. Hanging over me is the knowledge that I will one day do something awful to her. However, she has so far proven so resilient that I know whatever I will eventually do will be the worst thing I have ever done to anyone. Her destruction will probably also be my own, or that of the world. It is a burden on our happiness.
But Erica continues on, saying she “love[s] [me]”. She is unshakable in this. Sometimes I try to talk her out of it, and she laughs, kisses me, and says, “You’re silly.” This enrages me.
In aid of her own dark motives, she is willfully ignorant about what an awful person I am. It makes me nervous. When is the judgment coming? Enough cat-and-mouse.
What does Erica see in me? As I long ago noted, nobody else likes her. I only ran into her a few times in the past year, but each time she seemed more and more pleased to see me. It soon became apparent that, if she had had a cap, it would have been set for me. Generally, I can tell when women like me, but only if I don’t like them. Desperate, distasteful women are easy to read. Whereas the sleek, surly Sphinxes I often admire are professionally incapable of a facial expression. Their self-satisfied sang-froid is a turn-on for me, but it’s an indication that they don’t really get turned on by anything. Which makes the relationships somewhat doomed.
Erica, on another hand, is probably the most acceptable woman ever to live whom I actually could figure out. It remains a mystery to me why she was on the loose. I don’t think our time together will end with my discovering her horrific secret, either. She is just too good for this world. Which makes it all the more maddening that she should pick me, the Gimlet Hamlet, as her swain. I worry about it. I really can’t enjoy the experience as I should.
The other day, as we were nestled on her sofa in her apartment that is much nicer than mine, especially because I never slept with anybody else in it, I was worrying about this. It was late after a day of doing couple things, the way couples in the street do them to your dismay. It had involved a museum and a café. She had my head in her lap and was stroking my hair absently as she one-handedly graded papers from the class she is T.A.-ing. (She is upwardly mobile.) I would not normally place my head gently in a woman’s lap any more than I would put it in the lion’s den. Erica is, by nature, soothing. I just lay there staring up at her breasts, which were soothing. I closed my eyes and tried to think about how to pose the question. It is the question humanity has always asked: why am I here?
I angled my head to try to catch her eye, somewhere behind her breasts, but without suggesting, by moving, that I wanted her to stop the soothing touching of me. I was counting on her soothing touching of me to cure me of my ills, if continued for the next forty centuries. “Erica,” I said tentatively.
“Mmmm, yes, dear,” she said, making quick marks on her page with a chewed pen. Dear.
“I don’t want to interrupt,” I hedged. She smiled down at me over her glasses and her breasts, and tousled my hair again. She put her sheaf to one side and bent down to soothe and smother. We kissed, during which I thought more about how to phrase it. I said, “I wanted to ask you something.” I thought it was wrong to ask this sort of thing perpendicular to the person you were asking it of; I didn’t want this couch to be Freudian, so I sat up. I put my arm around her in order to keep the reassuring contact and she interpreted that as an invitation to sink down to put her head in my lap. I couldn’t very well ask her in that position either. I patted her head and face for a while and then thought of a gambit that would involve rearranging ourselves: “Shall I make us a nightcap?”
“Oh, Jack, I think I’ve had enough. I have to get up early.”
I kept touching her head while she smiled at me sleepily. Her inability to be constantly doomed was always a strategic difficulty. I was used to girls who flipped out at the least sign of dissent, such as if you didn’t think Milan Kundera was the era’s most insightful sage. It was second nature to me to push their buttons. Every time you pressed Erica’s buttons a little sign would light up saying, “I Love You”. I said, “I wanted to ask you something.”
“So you said. What is it?”
“Can you sit up a minute?”
She sat up. “What’s wrong?” She took my hand. “Are you all right?”
She was squeezing my hand and I was beginning to feel unwell based only on the unnecessary drama I had built into this scene. I stuttered and looked around the room. When I looked back, I saw there were tears moving down her face.
“Why are you crying?”
“I don’t know,” she sobbed, and bowed her head in shame. “I don’t know; you won’t tell me!”
I quickly took her into my arms. “There’s no reason to cry, it’s nothing like that.”
“I’m sorry if I’ve done something wrong,” she said over my shoulder.
“You haven’t done anything wrong,” I said.
“Oh God,” she said. It hadn’t made her feel better.
But I was teaching her to be doomed. It was not even on purpose.
I said, “You know I love you,” and I kept holding her. “I just wanted to ask you something. Not about you, or about ‘us’; just about me.”
She wiped her nose on her sleeve, while she held onto me. “What do you mean.”
“I just wanted to know why you liked me,” I said. I traced some patterns on the back of her sweater, bumping back and forth across the bulge of the bra clasp.
She leaned against me in silence for a moment, then she giggled. She pulled back to look at me. Her tear-stained face was grinning. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” she laughed.
“I just wonder why you like me. An answer doesn’t come immediately to mind. I know the answer to why most girls like me — they don’t.”
“Awww,” she said, and put her hand on my shoulder. “Because you’re the perfect boy,” she said. “Or you would be, if you knew it.”
“That’s corny,” I said.
“It’s true,” she said. I wasn’t sure if anything corny could be true. I was brought up to believe more in dissipated, jaded, Tallulah Bankhead sorts of truth. “Be more specific,” I suggested.
“Because you are smart,” she said, “and funny, and kind.”
“You’re putting me on. Taking the last accusation first: kind? Kind of what?”
Erica swung around to sit in my lap. “You don’t have to be afraid of being a normal person,” she said. “It’s possible to just be a normal person and be happy.”
“I dunno,” I said suspiciously.
“I’m proud of you, Jack,” she said. “I’m proud to be with you.”
“Hmmm,” I said. “All right, well, thank you. Let’s go to bed now.”
So there you have it: the only woman on Earth who doesn’t understand Jack Task is now dating him. The very thought of him is enough to make her chest swell with pride — not that it needs it.
by Jack, January 29, 2005 2:24 PM | More from Erica | More from Women
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Kind of on drugs. Is this part of an acid flashback? Normal women scare me, Jack.
prognostication: one of 3 things will happen. 1. you realize she's too good for you in that she hasn't yet realized your dirty secrets. 2. she realizes your dirty secrets. 3. you construct some sort of complex (it won't be difficult; you've already the seeds) and justify the fact that you two just don't have a future. any of those, or you'll realize there's a reason none of these people like her that you haven't seen yet, you fool.
Those all sound like viable options. Of course, I don't write about something from my life until it is already over, so I know how it really turns out. Stay tuned.
you can be sure that i will. also, i had been drinking bushmills straight the night i posted that, so i apologize for my (let's call it tipsy) demeanor. and if you want to let me in on the secret, you know where to find me.