You take the train to Manhattan. You pick him up at the airport. You drive to his hotel in the suburbs where he waits for you in the parking lot beside his car. You’re nervous and you take a wrong turn. You’re calm and you wonder if that’s a problem. You wonder if it’s a clue. You drive across town. You drive 90 miles and you make good time. You wear your best jeans and a t-shirt that hugs your chest. You’ve been to the gym four times this week. You’ve been twice. You haven’t been once and you look like shit but oh well, here goes. You walk through the indignities of Midtown. You’re early. You wait in the lobby with a bag at your feet.
You meet him at a restaurant on the Lower East Side. You meet him at a bar in the Mission. You’re early. Again. Does this make you look respectful? Or desperate? Walk briskly around the block. Duck through the door and wave at him with your cheeks flushed with life. He orders a margarita. He orders an Old Fashioned. He orders a local beer from the next valley over. You don’t know shit about beer so you worry. The waiter brings free bread. The waiter brings some chips. What’s an IPA, again? Rack your brain. What’s a stout? The waitress brings you a whiskey and the check. You signal for the check but she’s turned her back. You wait for the check. It’s kind of awkward, the waiting. He offers to pay. You say I can’t let you do that. You can get the tip, he says. Do the math in your head. You owe him now, metaphorically speaking.
He complains about the heat. Says he has AC back at his place. Superior AC. Come over, he says. You hate the heat, but it’s not why you go. I mean, c’mon. You take the elevator, you take the stairs. A boutique hotel, a Ramada Inn. His third-floor walkup. Sometimes, he says, a guy just needs to be touched. You bring him home. You unlock the door to your loft and you both pretend to be absorbed by the sight of the 30-foot ceilings. You’re thrilled and you’re shaking and suddenly mute. Are you okay, he asks. We’re okay, he says, and takes a step toward you. We’ll be okay.
He waits till the door closes behind you to lean in for a kiss. Your dog paws at his leg. He bends down to the dog. He ignores the dog. That’s probably a clue. You’ve got friends waiting. So does he. You’ve got an hour, he’s got two. You’re all alone and you’ve got all day. You’ve got a week, you’ve got two nights. Lie down with me, he says. Peels off his pants. The TV’s off, the TV’s on. Game shows three decades old. Cops, lawyers, zombies. Breaking news from Ohio of an active school shooter. He pats the bed and you slide in. You follow his lead—you always will. You stand making out for a good ten minutes. You forgot how good making out can be. How all the doors begin to swing open. You feel yourself changing at a molecular level. You put the dog on the couch and you close the bedroom door. You forget the door and she jumps on the bed. She knows the drill. You wonder if that makes you slutty. Dogs discern human patterns—you kiss a dude so she jumps on the bed. You tell her to scram—respectfully, so you don’t hurt her feelings. So he doesn’t think you’re a monster. He slips a hand beneath your shirt.
You open the bedroom door after three hours and the dog leaps at your feet. You open it after 25 minutes. He takes you out for dim sum and you stand at the bar. You take the elevator to the top floor. Forty bucks a plate. Bad acoustics and a view of the Chrysler. You yell over the table about your lousy childhood. You buy junk food and cheap cigars at a gas station and you smoke them heading down the coast. He buys you a scratch-off and you win nothing. Next time, he says. You win ten bucks. Ten bucks! You lose the card. You meet his friends for drinks. You take him to the neighboring town. He’s from Atlanta, he’s from Jersey. He flew from overseas. He’s a city boy afraid of the dark. He has money, he drives an old truck. He plans trips around odd strains of foreign cuisine. He relaxes at the sight of a Whole Foods. Sorry, you say, the roads around here are shit. He points to the barbeque chain. I’ll buy you dinner, he says. You’ll forget its name. Something something Texas.
The words come easy and you talk all night. You leave him grinning. You meet his friends for drinks and one of them messes up, mentions your dude’s other dude. Some dude in L.A. Gates slam down in your chest. He follows you back to the room on the 18th floor that he paid for and tries to explain. Fucking L.A. You give in. You know better and you still give in. In three months, he’ll leave you for the other dude.
He teases your dog too much, but you keep holding his hand on the couch. You want to see him again. You want to run back home. You pick a fight over a tiny, stupid thing. He falls asleep first. You lie awake worrying about money. He tells you that you snore. He’s rumpled and grumpy and you pay for his pancakes. You skip the convention and stay all weekend in a room over the Potomac. The little thing builds into a fight and he’s better at it than you. You’re stunned and ashamed. You yell. He backs away. Now you’ve ruined it. The whole trip. He wants to go home but his flight’s in two days. He sleeps in your bed and you sleep on the couch. You lie awake and wonder how the hell could he just fall asleep like that and snore. Like, no care in the world.
He stays four days, he stays two nights. He hugs you beside his cab. Your bag feels heavy and it’s nine blocks to Penn Station. You drop him at the curb. I got sad, he texts, watching you walk away. He makes the most of an awkward time. You take him to your gym. He buys a guest pass and critiques your form. Put your back foot like this, he says. I feel more stable standing like this, you say. OK, he says, stability’s more important.
What are we going to be, you say, when you get back home? He looks out the car window. Too soon to say, my friend, too soon to say. You note the word “friend.” That, and your perpetual thirst for status updates.
He texts you daily, he drops out of sight. His face pops up on your phone. You wait three seconds to click “Accept.” The weeks go by and every night on the phone you study his face. His impossible face. How can a dude’s face make your entire emotional edifice collapse? Your brain builds a castle and through its doors your future selves will elope. But who will carry the other across the threshold?
How many times in person have you met, your shrink asks. Once, you say. But we FaceTime every night. You resent the pause the shrink takes before responding. You’ll get a new shrink, you tell yourself. You’re supposed to shop around, they say.
He’s two hours, four hours, a full day by car. He’s a seven-hour flight. He lives on another continent. Another fucking continent. That’s not glamorous. That’s insane. You’re alone again in the lonely valley and you wonder again how you got yourself stuck there with nothing but yourself. It’s your ex-husband’s fault. It’s San Francisco’s fault. Who the fuck can afford those rents? No, man up, shoulder the blame. You ache to kiss him. You click on his pic. Let’s face it, you think, you sleep better alone.
You avoid his text. You avoid his call. He takes six hours to text you back. He forgets to call. He forgets. You punish him with neglect even though you’re way too old to be pulling this shit. He dumps you. For a dude living closer. For a dude with bigger arms. A bigger dick. Because he senses how you secretly turn cold while pretending that you bring the entirety of your big, beating heart to the collective table. He comes to himself and sees his mistake. He dumps you for an unknown reason. You waste a few weeks wondering why. You lie awake all night. One whole summer you fall asleep every night with the thought that we all get dumped for unknown reasons, in the sense that you can never really know another dude.
I’m not ready, he says – it’s the last time you talk. Come see me again, he says. There’s someone else, he says. I just want this with you, he says, meaning friends, meaning FaceTime, is that OK? It’s not OK but you nod OK. Too bad you’re not closer, he says. Then we could have tried. Then it would have made more sense. You wait for him to say goodnight. To say it first. You set the phone on the kitchen counter. You put on your coat and call the dog’s name. Outside it’s dusk. This doesn’t hurt this doesn’t hurt. Geese overhead, flying somewhere else.
Be your own man. Unfettered. Laugh with friends in loud restaurants. Wonder how good you look, laughing so freely. Don’t have friends? Everyone’s got friends. Call them up. No—text them. Normal people text. Don’t be geriatric.
Stop it, you tell yourself. There’re dead soldiers in Syria. Dead addicts in New Hampshire. Dead teenagers on the floor of a high school cafeteria. Snap out of it.
Drive home from work. Play that song on repeat and pretend that it’s not about him. Later, try to remember the trip home and fail.
Try to shake his cage. Date other dudes. Lie about dating other dudes. Pick a different filter. Post it and count the likes. Post it and interrupt his workday. He’s a truck driver swerving across three lanes. He’s a junior architect. He’s independently wealthy. Disrupt his post-workout smoothie. Add up all the ways your selfie manifests the many degradations and the inherent lonesomeness of life. The ways it intersects and resonates with the unknowable lives of others. Suspect that he never saw the selfie.
Masturbate to make it better. Yeah—that’ll work.
Pull a geographic. Dump your armor in the backseat of the cab on your way to the airport because this time you won’t need it. Fly three states over. Fly to Montreal. Sell your couch and move to Mexico. Drive all night through Kentucky. Buy cheap cigars and scratch-offs and truck stop coffee. Write a list of resolutions on the back of a napkin. Order a dish with protein and healthy fats. Pull into town at dawn. Unlock your new door. Unzip your suitcase and there—beneath the flannel shirt in the pale, pink light—glints the old chainmail, reeking of your sweat.
Curl around your dog at night. Grab your phone from the floor and press play. An album, a podcast, one last song before sleep. You drift off to voices. You’re not alone. You’re not.
His calls are the blood of your day. He saves you from the quiet. You watch through the screen as he sips a stout. You watch him change his pants. He sighs. What are we going to do, he says. About what, you say. About dudes, he says. You’re busy looking at his face. Oh, you say. Oh, I don’t know. I know, I know, you also say. But I don’t know.
He guts you with news about dudes. One visiting town from Australia. From Honolulu. A regular fuck from the Upper West Side. He calls you from Spain on his way to a date. Count the number of resentments provoked by that last sentence alone. Some dude in his city stands him up, and you’d punch the dude if you could. No, that’s a lie. You’d thank him. You’d probably kiss him on the cheek and offer a hand job if he’d go away.
His impossible face. You study it nightly to unlock its calculus and set yourself free. The creases at the corners of his eyes when you make him laugh. The color and pattern of his scruff, if he misses just one day of shaving. The math is cruel. Unbreakable. You try to remember what he smelled like. You come up short. Tonight you’ll hang up first. Tonight you’ll really do it.
You love your friend and he loves you back. You tell him a joke and watch him through the screen. He ducks his head out of view when he laughs. He ducks his head when you make him cry. You get through to him sometimes. You pierce the steel.
Stop it, he says. Stop what? Making me cry like a little girl, he says. You know what you’re doing, he says. No I don’t, you say. But you do.
Michael McAllister has been published in The Normal School, The Rumpus, War, Literature & the Arts, Fourteen Hills, and others. His writing has been featured in various anthologies, and shortlisted for Glimmer Train's Short Story Award. He has an MFA from Columbia University, where he was nonfiction editor of Columbia Journal. He currently lives in western Massachusetts and has kept a long-running blog at Dogpoet.com.
Photo on Foter.com