Noah Cicero - The Collected Works of Noah Cicero Vol. II

I get to her house and knock on her door.

This is a bad idea.

Jessica opens the door.

I look at her and she looks at me.

We are looking at each other, both thinking about the other one. I’m thinking about how she looks good. That I would like to touch her face and some other stupid shit. She probably is thinking about how she hates me and only brought me here to torture me for the sake of her self-esteem.

I go into her house. I know where everything is. It hasn’t changed. Nothing changes at her house; it is like an inert rock on Mars.

I sit down at the kitchen table; she is still standing and says, “Do you want some coffee?”

“Yes please.”

“You were always polite.”

I sit there waiting for her to take out a gun and shoot me in the face. I close my eyes for a second, waiting for the end, but it doesn’t come. So as to not seem so weird, I open my eyes and try to stay composed and functional. She is doing a much better job at staying composed and functional than me. She was always better at these things. She watches soap operas and Julia Roberts movies; she is a master of drama orchestration. She is a maestro and I’m a lame bassoon player when it comes to the art of drama.

Jessica sits down and hands me coffee. She is also drinking coffee. We are both drinking coffee, sitting across from each other, staring at each other, being dramatic.

“Vasily,” she says.

“Yeah.”

“How are you?”

“I’m doing fine.”

“Our lives have gone on without each other.”

“Yes, they have.”

“Remember, how we said all those things. How we said we loved each other and would always be together, and we would get old and kiss each other’s wrinkles.”

I do remember it, but I don’t want to admit it, but I say, “Yes, we said shit like that several times.”

“It wasn’t true.”

“I suppose it wasn’t.”

“People go on without each other. No matter how much feeling you have at one single moment, it fades. You scream and holler for this person, you tell everyone you meet about this single person you’ve met and are with, and how much you love them. But then it still fades.”

“Are you talking about us or your current marriage?”

“No, he is like me. He watches the same shows, he likes bowling like me, he likes kids like me, we have common interests. It is true, our relationship has lost the passion of sex, but we have become like friends or partners in life. I’m not addicted to him, I’m just, well, friends with him.”

“Would he say the same thing?”

“Who knows, I’m not going to ask. It doesn’t matter. That is how it works.” She drinks some coffee and lights a cigarette and goes on, “It is strange, there are loves in life, when you are crazy addicted to that person, you are crazy about them, you have crazy wild sex, you get into huge insane fights, like you can either do one of two things with that person: fuck their brains out or scream at them. That is what we had.”

“That’s probably because you resembled my mother and I resembled your father. We were living as children wanting our parents to love us. Not as who we actually are, and basing our relationship on logic.”

“See, there it is. That’s why I left you. You started talking about love like it is some goddamn science experiment. You refused to let yourself go anymore. And I guess from that comment you still won’t. You used to fuck my brains out, and you used to fight with me all night. I loved fighting with you. As you say, I was getting to vent my anger at my father. And I guess you would even say when you fucked me, I was getting the attention from my father I always wanted. But one day you stopped fighting. And you even stopped fucking. I went into the living room yelling my brains out at you and you just sat there. You sat there and stared at your shoes and waited till I stopped yelling. You used to fight and scream like a motherfucker. It was horrible to me. The game was over, the drama and passion had ceased to exist.”

“I had grown out of my mother.”

“And that made me a joke.”

“No, it made you a remnant of a world I no longer wanted.”

“So trash then, I was leftover trash.”

“To say it bluntly, yes, trash. I truly did not hate you. You just seemed

in the way

.”

“I don’t understand. Did I do this to you? What the fuck happened? You just stopped one day, you stopped caring. Look at you now. You still haven’t picked yourself up. You dropped out of school, and it has been three years and you still haven’t returned.”

“The meaning of my whole life was that I hated my mother but even though I hated her, I still wanted her to love me. That was my reason for being, that was the reason I was going to school was because I wanted her to be impressed by it. But two years passed and she never even looked at one of my report cards. I thought maybe if I dropped out she would take notice if I was doing badly, but she didn’t notice that either. So I gave up trying to impress her, trying to get love, and by doing that, by saying goodbye to that part of my life, I said goodbye to you and to college, and perhaps to doing anything that would cause the slightest chance of impressing her.”

“So you chose to never impress her again, and that means you can never do anything impressive ever again.”

“No, I think it is like, since I cannot impress her, then what is the point of doing anything.”

“Then your behaviors are still connected to her. You are still basing your daily activities off of her behavior,” she says.

“Did you bring me here because you wanted to destroy me?”

“No, I brought you here because I wanted to tell you this. I want you to know and realize what you’re doing. I keep tabs on you, I always ask about you when I’m talking to people who know you. It is just, I’m out west, I’m married, I have a kid, I’m doing okay. It isn’t a great life, I’m nobody’s hero, I’m not on television, I don’t have a million dollars in the bank. But I’m sure as fuck doing better than you. You haven’t moved forward since I’ve known you.”

“No, I haven’t. But why do you care?”

“I loved you for seven years. I woke every day for seven years and thought, ‘I love Vasily.’ That means a lot to me. If I didn’t see you for twenty years and you died, I would still go to the funeral. We only have one life, as you always said, and before we die we look back on it, and I can’t look back on mine without seeing you. I don’t know if that makes sense, or is logical, but that is how I feel. And one day when my daughter gets older she will ask about my boyfriends before I met her father and I will have to mention you. I will speak the name Vasily to her. She will ask about Vasily and I will explain your strange ass to her.”

Jessica pours us some more coffee and sits back down. We stop looking at each other. We stare at the table, at our shoes. But while we speak we don’t notice them. Our minds are busy, our eyes are open, but in our minds we are trying to find what to say next.

Jessica says, “Vasily, why haven’t you attacked me. I’ve been sitting here attacking you. But you say nothing. You used to be so good at arguing, you could tear holes right in me. You always broke through my wall of shit and blasted me with something I did not want to admit to myself. You were so good at analyzing other people, so apt at judging people’s characters, of seeing past their lies. But now, you just sit there. Still sitting. It makes me think you don’t care about me. Do you not think anymore? What is it?”

I don’t like this conversation. Why doesn’t she talk about when we went swimming at Willow Lake or something?