Jeremy Bushnell - The Weirdness

She looks at him again, less impatient this time. Takes a three-second drag on her cigarette, holds it, exhales. “Oh my God,” she says, a little drily. “I just got street-recognized. That’s the first time that’s ever happened to me.”

“Yeah, I saw—” Billy begins. He wants to say your author site but then he realizes it might sound a little stalkery. He doesn’t want her to know that he looked her up online, even if he could pass it off as being in a strictly professional capacity. “I’m Billy Ridgeway,” he says, extending his hand. “I’m the, uh, the fiction writer of the evening.”

“Well,” she says, “okay.” She gives his hand a squeeze, meets his eyes, and smiles. Something stirs in Billy for a second, and then she lets go and it’s gone.

“I like being street-recognized,” she says. “It feels good! As a poet, you know, you’re not sure that you’re ever going to get that.”

“You know what they say,” Billy says, absently, still spinning a bit. “In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.”

“That’s good,” Elisa says. “I like that. Anyway, you made me feel better about the — the thing.” She turns her hand in the air.

“The thing?”

“You know,” Elisa says. “The fuckwit.”

“The Bladed Hyacinth—”

“Yes,” she says. “Don’t even say it. I can’t even stand the name of the thing.”

“So you saw it.”

“Yeah,” she says. “I saw it. I didn’t feel great about it—”

“No,” Billy says. “Me either.” Neither?

“Well, anyway,” she says. “Point is: you helped me to feel better.”

“Glad to be of service,” Billy says, and for a minute they stand there in the cold, wind snapping around them, neither one of them looking at the other or saying anything. Billy doesn’t want to let the conversation die, though. He wants to be daring and bold. By this point, conveniently, he’s forgotten that Flaubert was talking about the work.

“I read one of your poems, you know,” he hazards. “On — your author site.”

“Which poem?” Elisa asks. Her eyes are on him, suspicion awakened in them.

“Uh,” Billy says. “The first one? I can’t remember the name? But there was a line in it that I liked. About the deleted world .”

“Oh please,” Elisa says. “That one — ugh, it’s the worst one. I keep begging my press to put any other poem up there.”

“Pshaw,” Billy says, and then realizes with horror that he’s saying stuff like pshaw . He forges on, though: “I liked it.”

Elisa pauses. “You didn’t read a second one, though, did you?” she asks.

“I did not,” Billy admits, freely.

“Well. At least you’re honest.”

She walks to the edge of the sidewalk, cranes her head out into the street like she’s looking for a cab.

“I see a bar,” she says. “You’ll be glad to know that it looks open. You want to get out of this cold?”

Of course he does.

They each have a shot and then they each order a second one. Talk thereupon quickly returns to the gripe they have in common, the Hyacinth piece.

“It got me so shook up,” Billy says, “that I don’t actually want to read, like, any of my preexisting work.”

“I know,” says Elisa. “I was up half the night writing six new poems. They could be good, they could be crap, I don’t even know anymore. But I figure, fuck it. It’s something different.”

“Exactly,” Billy says. “Something different. That’s the key. I’m half thinking that I’m not going to read anything at all but instead do like a piece of, I don’t know, oral storytelling.”

“Well, if it’s good enough for The Moth, it’ll work here.”

“Oh yeah,” Billy says. He’d forgotten about The Moth. Somehow that shakes his confidence in the violent originality of his idea. A bit. Just a bit.

They seem to have exhausted this line of conversation. She looks at him and he at her. The second round of shots arrives.

“Cheers,” she says, and they down them with all due haste.

Seconds pass. She looks at him. He can see the intelligence in her eyes at work, making some set of complex assessments. She leans in incrementally and her nostrils flare once: Billy would swear that she was sniffing him, if there was a way that that made any sense at all.

She leans back. “Okay,” she says. “I don’t know you well, Billy Ridgeway, but you seem like an honest guy, and I like that.”

“Thank you,” Billy says, and as he says it he realizes that he’s starting to yearn for Elisa Mastic. Maybe this breakup with Denver — for that is how he is now thinking of it — doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Maybe it’s a piece of good luck. Maybe it’ll be an opportunity: a chance to start over with someone who doesn’t know all his flaws.

“I’m going to ask you a question,” she says. “And I want you to answer honestly.”

“Okay,” Billy says. “Is this a test?”

“This is a test,” Elisa says.

“I’m ready,” Billy says. This is normally the kind of thing that would make him nervous, but the bourbon is helping.

“The question is: What is the worst thing you ever did?”

Billy blinks. He doesn’t want to think about whatever might be the worst thing he ever did. And whatever it is, he’s certain it’s bad, and he doesn’t want to let his bad side enter into full display. Absolutely not. The whole point, the whole goddamn point of this conversation is to showcase only his good side: to be charming and funny and charismatic. He looks around for a story that will highlight those aspects of himself but also maybe seem a little mean or over-the-top. It takes him a minute to find something that qualifies; during that time Elisa calmly examines her hand, all five fingers extended in front of her.

“So I had this girl over,” Billy says. This is a Denver story, which gives him a queasy feeling, but he needs something. Elisa raises her eyebrows in a way that conveys a very guarded species of interest.

“We’d been out,” he says, “out at some restaurant or having drinks or something, after what had already been a pretty long day, and then we got back to my place, totally exhausted, and I remembered that I didn’t have any clean laundry for the next day, and instead of just saying screw it I insisted that we go out to the Laundromat. This girl just wanted to lie on the couch and I made her get up and come with me because I wanted the company. I even made her carry a bag with the sheets and pillowcases.”

A thin smile from Elisa.

“And so we’re at the Laundromat, and it just seems like it’s taking forever , it’s like time has just slowed to a crawl. A fucking crawl. And then after we’ve spent like a year there we have to move everything over to the dryer. Bam , another year gone. We’re not even talking to one another we’re so tired. And so finally everything’s clean, and we go back to my place, and she immediately goes up to the loft and curls up on my bed. Just like direct on the mattress: the sheets are still all in the laundry bag. And I’m like come on, come on, we need to make the bed and she just, like, grunts. So, thinking I’m funny, I get the fitted sheet out and I just pull it over top of her and tuck it in on all four sides. She starts to giggle a little, so I figure it’s okay. So then I put the next sheet on over top of that, and then finally the comforter, and by this point I think she wants to get out, she starts kind of squirming but she’s really too tired to figure out how to make her way out of it, and then I start poking her. Like, index finger, right in the ribs. And she says stop it but she’s laughing at the same time, so I don’t stop right away, I poke her a couple more times, and she starts to shriek, cause it tickles her, right? and finally she starts to thrash her way out of the sheets and she gets her head out at last, and I’m laughing, and even she’s laughing a little bit, but then it just tips somehow and she starts crying. These big, hot, frustrated, tired tears. And — that’s it.”