Sam Lipsyte - Venus Drive

“Let’s go closer,” I said.

And then I did the wrong thing.

The building where I work used to be a bank. Now it’s lots of little start-ups, private suites, outlaw architects, renegade CPA’s, club kids with three-picture deals. It’s very artsy in the elevators. Everybody’s shaved and pierced in dainty places. They are lords of tiny telephones, keepers of dogs on battery-operated ropes.

I work here for my ex-girlfriend, some sort of handy-man, or some kind of clerk. I can’t run an accounting program, or collate, or even reload a stapler right, but there’s usually something for me to do, even if it’s only to loiter, to stand around in a way that reminds Rosalie she’s my boss.

This is not hard.

Rosalie is some kind of rock star now. She’s the founder of a web site for serotonin-depleted teenage girls. They log on and rant about their home life to other oppressed teens as far away as Laos, or at least Larchmont. Rosalie’s paper-rich since a big tech outfit bought the company. There’s a line of clothing, a perfume, maybe a sitcom in the works.

Rosalie and I are still chummy. Maybe she feels sorry for me. Maybe she also resents the way I ditched her back when I was a rock star in actual minor fact. She pays me piss wages and sometimes buys me lunch.

“Let’s recap,” she’ll say, the two of us out for Indian. The condition is I tell her all about my latest girlfriend.

“Her name is Glenda,” I say. “She’s a painter.”

“Painting’s very in right now,” says Rosalie. “Or it was a few months ago. I don’t have time to keep up.”

After me, Rosalie fell in love with a boy billionaire who saw her picture in a fashion spread, one of those bulimia gazettes dedicated to time and the body’s dwindle. They had what amounted to an amorous montage, young industrialist and glamorous new media mogulette — Zürich, Paris, Crete. Then one night the kid had a coke seizure, drove his Jeep off a bridge into a lake. For me, there are only two words that count in this story: Electric windows. My father always warned me about them.

“You’re in the drink,” he said, “and the power shorts out. A dumb way to go.”

Maybe they make them differently now. I don’t drive much. Maybe the kid hit his head.

These days Rosalie wrestles her Saint Bernard through doors, calls her lawyer from the curb. Whenever she pinches a napkin in half for the big dog’s leavings, bends over for a civic-minded scoop, her jeans make this lovely spout of denim at the back. You can see a piece of the prayer wheel she has tattooed on her tailbone. Look hard and maybe you can see me there, too, shackled to the spokes, spinning, dying.

“With Glenda, is it as good as it was with us?” Rosalie says at one of our tandoori lunches. Her mouth is a cavern of cumin.

“It’s different,” I say.

“Good answer. We just did an issue on why the best ex-boyfriends lie.”

“I know,” I say, “I was there when you thought it up.”

There really is a Glenda the Painter, but she must be in her nineties by now, if she’s not dead. She was old when my mother took me to her studio on Saturdays to learn how to draw. I could never get past foreshortening feet, which I took, correctly, I think, to be symptomatic of a deep character flaw. I was some side-on maestro, though. I’d have been hot shit in ancient Egypt.

The first time someone at the office asked me about my skill-set, I thought it was some kind of mail-order frying pan. Everyone seems to have one but me. The people I work with are human résumés. They are fluent in every computer language, boast degrees in marketing and medieval song. They snowboard on everything but snow. They study esoteric forms of South American combat and go on all-deer diets. Sometimes I’m not even sure what they are up to, but I know I will read about it in one of our city’s vibrant lifestyle journals. It’s easy to detest these people, but they have such energy, such will.

I used to think I had integrity but I came to realize it was just sloth. For a few years I was the lead singer in a band of punk manqués. I couldn’t sing, but who could? Talent was not the point. The hard dick of knowingness was pushing the least of us into the light. I referred to myself as the frontman. I liked the word. I was never at the front of anything before.

Our music was in dire need of notes but we had the charm of the improperly medicated. Between songs I used to stab out cigarettes on my tongue, weep, proclaim my love for my father in all its sordid, socially-determined complexity. Everyone said they couldn’t make out the words once the music started, but I preferred it that way. God knows what people will think if they ever really hear you.

I met Rosalie when she came to our show at a converted storefront grocery at the edge of the city. Everything was a converted something down there. Every club was the Bakery, the Barber Shop, Shoe Repair. My band was already up on stage, coaxing screeches from defective Peaveys, giving in to the joy of a random cymbal splash. This was our much-theorized intro. My entrance wasn’t due for a while, not until all possible frequencies of aural inanity had cancelled themselves out. Soon enough I would crawl into the lights with a microphone in my ass, bleat what I took to be holy.

Now I stepped out to the street in my fur stole and crash helmet, drank off my malt forty. That’s when I saw her, Rosalie, standing there in radiant slut-majesty beneath a urine-stained awning. She was talking to a tiny lady who might, in a period of categorical leniency, have passed for dwarf. This lady was selling syringes from a paper bag. I was waiting for her to recognize me, an occasional customer. Rosalie crouched in her pumps, as though smalling herself for some kind of progressive-minded field work with the dwarf. Or maybe she had finally found somebody who, as she tended to put it, really, really made sense. I smashed my bottle on a nearby sculpture, this hideous tinwork someone had dragged to the curb, maybe the second-to-last act of its agonized maker.

“The show’s started, bitch,” I said.

Rosalie wheeled.

I figured she was looking for someone to talk to her that way.

It was a good guess.

We bought an old Merc with turquoise-tipped window handles, drove past green fields and shimmering phallocracies of silo to see her bi-polar brother in Pittsburgh, PA. Going over a river I had a shudder, a sense of the terrible that would not be mine. We checked into a Super 8 motel with a bottle of Maker’s Mark bourbon and a running conversation about trust. I said for her to say a secret. She confessed she had never undertaken a proper bowel movement, that only on the rarest of days, fecal baubles, marble-sized things, pressed and shiny, worried themselves through her.

This is something between us now, and I can’t say it doesn’t affect me on the job. I suffer from lackey bitterness. Treachery is an easy sideways step.

“You should see the woman try to take a dump,” I’ll tell the design team, looking to comfort them after some venomous memo from Rosalie detailing their failure to achieve a “totalizing space for commerce and dialog.”

And here’s the other thing: I can’t remember the secret I told Rosalie. I must have told her something.

That’s how that works, right?

So, what’s the story?

What the hell is wrong with me?

Where the hell is my inner soul?

When it looked like our band was going to be the next great revolution in popular idiocy, I broke it off with Rosalie. A teenage industry groomsman took us out for transexuallyserved gnocchi and told us our time had come. The only thing we needed to do now was concoct some version of music. With all the speedballs and blowjobs coming my way, I figured there’d be little of me left over for some version of Rosalie.