Miranda July - The First Bad Man

I WAS SO EXCITED TOsee Ruth-Anne that I arrived fifteen minutes early. I cleaned out my car then I browsed the gift shop in the lobby of her building. It smelled like vitamins and was overly warm. A very pregnant Indian woman was inspecting elfin figurines. I turned a spinning rack of reading glasses until I was certain, then I stood discreetly beside her, picking up a skiing elf. The woman’s stomach protruded so far that its belly button was closer to me than it was to her.

Kubelko?

Yes. Am I in you?

No. You’re in someone else.

A sad and awkward silence followed. I cast about for some way to express the bereavement I felt every time we came across each other. A text vibrated in my pocket.

Excuse me.

SHE STRIPPED FOR ME: SAW HER PUSS AND JUGS. UHHHH. KEPT MY HANDS TO MYSELF. My blessing still reigned. Of course it did. I had to have faith in him. We’d been prehistoric together, medieval, king and queen — now we were this. It was all part of the answer to his question What keeps us coming back? He wasn’t done with me, and I wasn’t done with him. And the details — the text messages — were just riddles from the universe. Clues. When I turned back to Kubelko the pregnant woman was gone.

RUTH-ANNE’S COUCH WAS WARMfrom her previous patient and she looked flushed and radiant.

“Good session?” I asked.

“Excuse me?”

“You look happy.”

“Oh,” she said, dimming a little. “I just had my lunch hour — I took a catnap. How are you?”

So the heat of the couch was hers. I pressed the leather with my fingers and tried to think of how to begin.

“The thing you do with Dr. Broyard, that — what did you call it?”

“Roles? An adult game?”

“Right. Would you say that’s unusual?”

“Define unusual .”

“Well, how common would you say it is?”

“I’d say it’s more common than you would think.”

I told her what had happened — starting with what Michelle said and ending on the kitchen floor.

“And my globus is gone, still! I don’t know if you can tell”—I leaned forward and gulped—“but it’s much easier to swallow. I owe it all to you, Ruth-Anne.” I reached into my purse and pulled out a box.

Sometimes people say thank you before even opening the gift — thank you for thinking of me. Ruth-Anne didn’t do that; she glanced at her watch while brusquely pulling off the wrapping paper. It was a soy candle. Not the little kind, but a column in a glass jar with a wooden lid.

“It’s pomegranate currant,” I said.

She handed the candle back to me without smelling it.

“I don’t think this is for me.”

“It is! I just bought it.” I pointed down, indicating the shop on the ground floor.

She nodded, waiting.

“Who do you think it’s for?” I said, finally.

“Who do you think it’s for?”

“Besides you?”

She nodded by slowly shutting her eyes and opening them again. I held the candle nervously, like a hot potato.

“My parents?”

“Why your parents?”

“I don’t know. I just thought because this was therapy that might be the right answer.”

“Who might you want to give a candle to? Candle, flame, light… illumination…”

“… wick… wax… soy… ”

“Who? Think.”

“Clee?”

“ That’s interesting. Why Clee?”

“That was right? Clee?”

THE WRAPPING PAPER WAS STILLgood so I just retaped it. When Clee was in the bathroom I put it on her pillow but it rolled off with a bang; she came in just as I was reaching under the coffee table. I hadn’t wanted to hand it to her in person.

“Here.” I put the heavy cylinder in her hand. The fragrance was abundant and nothing like pomegranates or currants, neither of which is famous for its smell. It was so obviously a candle, the very dumbest present you could give a person. Clee undid the tape and she smelled it cautiously. She read the label. Finally she said, “Thank you.” I said, “You’re welcome.” It was horrible and there was no way to undo it.

I locked myself in the ironing room and wrote a long-overdue e-mail to the entire staff about recycling, overpopulation, and oil, then I toned it down a little, then I deleted it. The shower turned on. She was taking a shower. I called Jim and we talked about the warehouse staff.

“Kristof is lobbying for a basketball hoop,” he said.

“We tried that once and no one got any work done.” I hoped he’d keep pushing for the hoop so I could be really emphatic, but he dropped it. His wife was waiting for him; he had to go.

“How is Gina?”

But he really had to go.

It was dusk when I came out of the ironing room. She was sitting on the edge of the couch, knees wide apart. Her wet hair was combed back, a towel hung around her neck; a boxer is what she looked like. Her hands were interlaced in front of her and she was staring past them with a furrowed brow. The TV was off. She was waiting for me.

I’d never really sat in my armchair before. It wasn’t comfortable.

She ducked her head, acknowledging my arrival to the meeting, and made a sound in her throat as if she was pulling up phlegm.

“I may have given off the wrong…”—she searched for the word—“impression.”

She glanced at me, to make sure I was familiar with the word. I nodded.

“I appreciate the gift but I’m not… you know. I’m into dick.” She coughed huskily and spit into one of the empty Pepsi bottles on the coffee table.

“We’re in the same boat, as far as that goes,” I said. I saw us in a little dinghy together, liking dick on the big dark sea.

“For me it’s a little more intense.” She was bouncing her knee unconsciously. “I guess I’m ‘misogynist’ or whatever.”

I’d never heard the word used like this, like an orientation.

“I’ll stop if you want,” she said, looking abstractly into the distance. At first I thought she meant talking, stop talking. She didn’t mean that.

“Do you want to?” I asked.

“What?”

“Stop.”

She shrugged, utterly indifferent. It was probably the meanest thing she’d done yet. Then she shrugged again, exactly the same, but added “No” afterward, like that’s what she’d been saying the first time. No, she didn’t want to stop attacking me.

I felt a little winded, a little light-headed. We were making an agreement; this was real. I gave her a shy glance and realized she was fixated on a repulsive cluster of purple spider veins on my exposed calf. A shiver shuddered through me — she was attached to the super-special angry feeling I gave her.

“Do you want to make a contract?” I murmured, completely inaudibly.

“Make what?”

“A contract that says what we want to do and don’t want to do. We can download one from the Internet.” I said this too loudly, as if she was deaf.

She blinked a few times. “I don’t really know what you’re talking about, but I’m not interested in that kind of thing.” She pressed her knuckles to her forehead and then dropped her hand suddenly, with a surprising exasperation. “Have you done this before? With the contracts and all that?”

“No,” I said quickly. “A friend told me about it.”

“You’re talking about this with people?” Her knee was bouncing frantically.

“Not a friend. A therapist. It’s completely confidential.”

Her anguish seemed to level out. She was gazing at the remote control from afar. I handed it to her and she brushed her fingers over the rubber buttons a couple times.

“Is there anything else we need to…?”

“I think we pretty much covered everything,” I said, trying to remember what had been established. She nodded gruffly and turned on the TV.