Jowita Bydlowska - Guy

I pull out and slip off the condom and flip her onto her back again and spray all over her belly.

When I open my eyes, she’s looking at me, smiling. She says she loves – me or it , I can’t hear clearly. I lie down beside her, pull her close and say, “Mmm.” Her head smells of coconut; I fall asleep with my nose buried in her hair.

THE HOURS I SPEND WITH DOLORES ARE SIMILAR TO WHAT it was like with $isi. They look nothing alike, but when I look at Dolores, it’s like $isi is superimposed over her, and I have to keep doing mental double takes. Maybe it’s something in their gestures. Or maybe the way they both eat sloppily. Or the constant chatter – first childhood crush, first pet, first serious injury, how much textbooks cost, coming back here for Spring Break, how gross ham is but how delicious bacon is, what she thinks of – These are the sorts of inane tidbits $isi has offered before, just as frantically, to cover her nervousness over being with me.

Dolores and I part for a few hours, then we have another dinner – takeout Thai, which I think is disgusting but which she loves.

Later, we fuck again. She stays overnight. In the morning we eat grapefruit for breakfast and a smoothie made out of banana, strawberry, avocado and apple juice not from concentrate. Dolores is silent in a loud, tragic way, and I’m silent, too, because I’m reading a newspaper.

After breakfast, she asks if I will drive her to the bus station in the afternoon. She is leaving today. I will never see her again. I like the thought of literally driving her away from me. I wish it was this easy with $isi, or I wish there was a way to surgically correct $isi’s brain so that whatever it is about me that got stuck in there could be removed like a tumour. I’d pay for the surgery. Everyone would benefit.

Dolores says, “I know you said not to get upset, but I can’t help it? This was really –”

I hold her head against my chest and stroke her hair. Whatever she’s saying, I can’t make out a thing.

Later on, I pick her up after lunch at her friend’s parents’ house, somewhere on the outskirts of the beach village where the families with kids live. In contrast to what you see around my beach house, the street here is quiet, full of trimmed bushes and little gardens; no passed-out half-dressed teenagers on porches.

The house where Dolores is staying is a bungalow with a smaller, equally ugly building attached to it that bears a nameplate reading Teenagers’ House .There’s a sign in front of the bungalow with a big SOLD on it.

Dolores and her friends come out of the Teenagers’ House with bags as soon as I pull into the driveway.

Dolores runs up and throws her arms around my neck. She tries to slip her tongue into my mouth, but I cut her off, even though I understand that she’s doing this partly for show.

Her eyes widen.

I quickly kiss her on the cheek to not make a scene.

The girls load into the car. Dolores sits in the front. The pretty blond, Kelly, and the brunette with glasses sit in the back.

“Cool ride,” Kelly says.

She’s right. It is a cool ride. Only a year ago I drove a little Acura that I had to part with because it made me look like I was afraid to grow up. Like I was a bro. A knapsack-filled-with-condoms-in-the-backseat kind of bro. I sold the car to Jason and he immediately reclined the front seat “so the chick has no choice but to lie down when you drive her,” he said. He planned to have a lot of sex in that car with chicks he’d meet online. They could smell it; it would increase his chances if a girl got in his car and it smelled like it’d been fucked in, he told me. It was one of his PUA wisdoms.

I don’t own cars to fuck in them. I drive my cars. So I bought the Infiniti G37 Cabrio. To drive it. A black convertible, butterscotch leather interior. Three-twenty-five horsepower V6. Six-speed, manual shift. I could have gone for the seven-speed automatic transmission with paddle shifters, but women like to see you shift gears. It’s the crudest association, your hands on that stick, handling it.

The car came with a seven-piece Bose stereo system with twelve-inch woofers in the rear. It is roomy enough to transport three women comfortably. It is a cool ride; Kelly is absolutely right.

Dolores starts fiddling with the stereo as soon as we get on the road. “Can I play them the song? The one Yumiko is singing. It’s so good.”

She means my Japanese-American band, Charlie, and the song I hope will be in the soundtrack in a movie about a teenager who stalks another teenager. The song is something that the band hasn’t tried before. It’s almost entirely electronic: catchy kick drums, Auto-Tuned vocals and two drops – the first gentle and the second one faster, filthier and deeper. The lyrics are partly Japanese.

Dolores doesn’t wait for me to answer – such are the entitlements of a girlfriend – and the song boom-bah-booms out of the speaker, filling the car with its sexy, velvet intro: Anata o aishitai, demo anata wa itte shimatta. Anata ga inakute sugoku sabishii. Ikanai de hoshii. Soba ni ite hoshii. Mou ichido anata o aisasete kudasai.

I think of Yumiko, the girl who came into the studio to sing this part, a big-eyed anime character. She seemed flat-chested like a boy, but maybe it was the tight corset top she was wearing. During the break, I heard two sound guys talk about the long white socks she wore – one of the guys groaned that the socks were “obscene.” He said he wanted to take her home and – he didn’t finish. His friend told him to shut up. They were young guys, possibly still trying to figure out their sexuality.

The socks were obscene. In the best possible way.

The socks’ boyfriend was waiting for her at the hotel, or so she said when I invited her for a drink after the recording.

“No problem,” I said, and shook her hand.

Later, it turned out her breasts were indeed tiny; deliciously tiny, a dollop of cream topped with pink nipple. Straight black pubic hair. The socks stayed on as requested.

“Yumiko? She usually plays bass, doesn’t she?” says the brunette.

“She pretends to play bass,” I say.

“What do you mean?”

“They’re all singers, actually,” I say. “It was just an idea to market them this way, as a band.”

“So it’s a lie?” Dolores says, so loudly I would actually call it shouting.

“No, not a lie. It just made more sense to go in that direction. They can play musical instruments. Just not really well. You don’t need to play them very well anyway. Especially bass.”

Kelly says, “Aren’t you worried we’re going to tell people?”

“And?”

“I don’t know. That the news will spread that it’s all a marketing ploy.”

“You don’t actually believe that there’s anything left out in the entertainment world that isn’t a marketing ploy, do you?”

Dolores says, “Yes, but –”

“There are some independent acts that get through, it’s true. But we snatch them up and that’s the end of that,” I say, and pretend-laugh to indicate that I’m joking but maybe not.

“This is why Amy Winehouse will die for sure,” says Kelly, darkly.

“Who gives a fuck?” says the brunette, and I look in the mirror again, and she meets my eyes without blinking. I smile in a friendly way, but the eyes remain unmoving, watchful.

“Everything okay?” I say.

Kelly says, “The song’s really great anyway. Dolores was going on about it, but we were, like, totally distracted.”