Aimee Bender - Willful Creatures

About half the people here are in couples. I stand alone because I plan on making all these women jealous, reminding them how incredible it is to be single instead of always being with the same old same old except tonight I am jealous too because all their men are seeming particularly tall and kind on this foggy wintery night and one is wearing a shirt a boyfriend of mine used to own with that nubby terry-cloth material recycled from soda cans and it smells clean from where I’m standing, ten feet away, and it’s not a good sign when something like a particular laundry detergent can just like that undo you.

From here, against the wall, I can survey the whole living room. TV, couch, easy plant. The walls are covered with pastel posters of gardens by famous painters who rediscovered light and are now all over address books and umbrellas and mugs. Is it really worth it to dead earless van Gogh that his painting now holds some person’s catalog of phone numbers? Is that what he wanted when he fought through personal hell to capture the sun in Arles? I used to paint and I would make landscapes that were peaceful and my teacher would stroll through the easels and praise me and say, “What a lovely cornfield, dear,” but she never looked hard enough because if you did you would see that each landscape had something bad in it and that lovely was the wrong word to use: I made that cornfield, true, but if you looked closely, there was a glinting knife hanging from each husk. And I made a beach scene with crashing waves and a crescent moon and then this loaded machine gun lying on the sand by a towel; and then I made a mountain town with quaint stores and tall pine trees and people walking around except for that one man wrapped in dynamite walking over to the guy with the cigarette lighter standing by the drinking fountain.

The terrible thing is that the teacher never figured it out. And she saw all three paintings. She actually thought the guy in dynamite was wearing some strange puffy suit and that the corn was just very glinty. She said the machine gun was a nice kite. When the evaluation sheets came around, I said she was useless and should be fired.

The couples are shifting positions and I’m ready now and I find that redhead first. Lucky for me he is drunk already and sitting in a chair with pretzels and he’s talking to no one because he’s on break from being social because he is so drunk. I saunter over and ask him to help me look for my purse in the bedroom. “I lost my purse,” I say to him. “Help.” He blinks, eyelids heavy with the eye shadow of alcohol, and then he follows me into the bedroom which is covered with people’s items: twenty-five coats and half as many purses. I am rich but I consider stealing some of the stuff because they are so trusting, these people, and I feel like wrecking their trust. But where would I stash a coat? We are looking around for my make-believe purse because I don’t use a purse at all; when I go out, I just carry keys and slip one one-hundred-dollar bill into the arch of my shoe and let the night unroll from there. We’re mumbling in the bedroom and I pretend I’m drunker than I am and then I ask him, right there, among all the coats, if he thinks I’m pretty. His eyes are bleary and he smiles and says, “Yeah, yeah.” We’re standing by the bed, and I lean over and I kiss him then, really gentle because at any minute he could throw up all over me, and his lips are dry and we spend a few minutes like that, gentle kisses on his dry lips, and then he starts to laugh and I am offended. “Why are you laughing?” I ask, and he laughs more, and I sort of push him and pick up one of the better coats on the bed, with a shiny lined inside of burgundy, and I put it on for a second even though I’m not cold and I ask him again why he laughed and he says, “We went to grade school together,” and I say, “We did? We did?” and he tells me his name and then he tells me my name and I apologize because I don’t remember him. “I remember you because you were the one with the inheritance,” he says, and I tell him I was really good at painting too and he says, “Really? I don’t remember that.”

So I am through with him.

I take off the coat and throw it back on the bed and then head to the door.

“Wait, why did you kiss me?” he asks, and I know it is taking a big effort for him to string this sentence together because he is so drunk. “Let’s go out sometime,” he slurs. “I just laughed because it’s funny, it’s funny. To kiss someone you knew as a kid. It’s funny.”

I turn around and he looms above me and I can see the freckles on his collarbone and that means he has a chest of freckles and a back of freckles and knees of freckles and freckled inner thighs and I was the best artist in grade school for several years until that dumb girl moved here from Korea, and he is laughing more because he knew me as a little kid and is remembering something and I barely remember what it was like to be a little kid so it seems rude that he would recall something about me that I couldn’t myself. If I can’t remember it, then it should mean no one else can either.

“No,” I tell him. “I don’t want to go out with you, ever.”

And I’m back in the main room. I return to the same wall. The redhead follows me out and collapses back into that chair, staring, but I ignore him and look at the table of food instead. The guacamole dip is at half, and there are little shit-green blobs on the tablecloth. The brie is a white cave. The wineglasses are empty except for that one undrinkable red spot at the bottom. I go refill my glass and the redhead closes his eyes in the chair. One down.

The blond is next, and he is someone I used to date and in fact only broke up with around three months ago so I think it’ll be easy; I find him in the corner talking to two other guys and I glide over and because I am me I am wearing an incredible dress tonight; this one looks almost like it is made of metal; it has this slinky way of falling all over my hips and I feel like an on faucet in it and of course I am the most dressed up at the party, I always am, but that’s the whole point, so when the host inevitably looks down at her everybodyownsthemjeans at the front door and says, “Oh, but it’s not a formal party,” I smile at her with as many teeth as I can fit and wink and say, “That’s fine, that’s fine, I just felt like wearing this tonight.” Inevitably, the next time I see that same host she has more lipstick on or a new glittering necklace her mother bought her but lady she is dust next to me inside this silverness. I am now almost right behind the blond man who broke up with me because he didn’t feel loved and it was true, I did not love him, but he is the type to never go out with someone for a long time anyway so we would’ve broken up soon regardless and I just gave us a good excuse. I am next to him by now and I tell him we need to talk and could we go in the bathroom? He is confused for a minute but then agrees, and says “Hang on” to his friends who shake their heads because they remember me well and think he’s being stupid and they’re right but we go into the bathroom and I say, “Adam, I have a goal to kiss you tonight,” and he says, “C’mon, is that what this is about?” and I tell him to come here but he has his hand on the doorknob but also he’s not gone yet. “You’re incredible,” he says, shaking his head, and I feel mad, what does he mean, it’s not a compliment, and he’s out the door. And he’s out the door, then. I’m alone in the bathroom and I’m sitting on the sink and my butt is falling a little into the sink part, faucet on faucet, and I turn around to myself in the medicine-cabinet mirror and check my teeth and they are bright and white because last week I bought a new tooth cleaner and it’s working and my eyeliner isn’t smeared because I bought the new eyeliner that swears it won’t smear or you can sue the company, and I’m sitting there plotting my next blond when Adam comes back into the bathroom with determination and closes the door firmly. “You’re just playing with me, aren’t you?” he says, and I say, “Yeah,” and he sighs a little. “At least you’re honest,” he says, and I say, “Thanks, I try to be honest, I do, that is one of my good qualities.” He waits there by the door and I hop off the sink to go to him, stand and face him, and he’s not running away so I’m moving in and then we’re kissing, that easy, and his lips are the same ones I know well, in fact he was my longest boyfriend so I know his lips better than anyone’s, and his upper lip is much thinner than his lower lip which I always liked and I kiss that pillow at the bottom and we kiss and it gets more, we keep kissing and I remember just what it’s like and I am suddenly feeling like I miss him and I am remembering everything of what it’s like to be with him and I am forgiving him for everything and we’re still kissing and his teeth and his smell and we’ve been kissing too long now, it’s gone on long enough, so I pull away. He has lipstick on the edges of his mouth. “Okay,” I say, “thank you, okay.” He looks shook up but also wants more and he has the same feeling I do; he felt the room change into a different room during that kiss but I’m trying to get it back to being the first room, the one where I know it all. His hands are all over my silver dress slip-sliding around and the bathroom door opens, it’s some lady who wants to use the bathroom and she sees us and blushes and I’m glad I don’t know her because I don’t want the whole party to know I’m in the bathroom kissing a blond while I still have a black-haired man to finish the night with. Adam is wiping the lipstick off now and his hand is still on my dress, on my hip; “You’re a cold woman,” he says to me, and then his hand is gone and he leaves and I am left in there again and I know I am not a cold woman because the whole point of why it was hard for him to leave just then is because I am a not-cold woman but I resent the lie anyway. I check myself in the mirror again and my skin has sharpened and the teeth and eyeliner are all still good and I am thinking about him for a minute, thinking about how when he came inside me and I came outside him he would say something like “This is it,” and I’d think, It’s the end of the world, and then we’d finish up and be sweating and hot and the world would still be there, like it had swung up and met us. And when we slept then it was so deep it really could’ve been the end of the world with sirens and megaphones and panicked TV people and I know at least for myself I wouldn’t have even noticed.