Jowita Bydlowska - Guy

I stay at the beach house for the next three weeks. There’s nothing to do in Toronto, where I spend my winters. Gloria is away in Bali with her sister, and $isi is completing another short-term rehab stint.That’s fine. I can be anywhere, there’s no rush to leave and the weather is nice.

I work on the beach house, cleaning it throughout, making it ready for the next visitor. I’m renting the place to Jason when he comes back in September. I write out rules for him as soon as we make the arrangements. One of the rules is: No meth in the house. Or outside of the house. No meth ever.

Jason has tracked down his ex and he’s thinking of bringing her here. “She needs to be in a non-confrontational environment,” he says on the phone. He sounds pathetic. His words rush into one another as he tells me how he won’t tolerate any bullshit anymore and how much the ex has changed since the last time they were together. Things are going to work out.

Except that that’s not going to be the case.

I don’t say this to Jason. I found out a long time ago that there’s no point in talking people out of stupid things they want to do. Most of us never mature past the age of four. I tell him I hope it works out.

“What do you mean, you hope ? Of course it’ll work out,” Jason says.

“I liked you better when you were a PUA,” I say. “Do you remember staying at my place with your knapsack and all you had inside were rubbers?”

“I don’t remember that.”

“Okay. Send me the name of your trainer.”

We hang up.

Despite my stoicism on the phone, internally I am disturbed. I have to come up with a couple of calming thoughts (the nice run this morning, last night’s first successful soufflé of the season) to quell the anxiety and ignore the image of the beach house destroyed in some druggy rage – or worse, turned into a meth den.

I think about how Jason is the opposite of me. He falls for girls who don’t match him. He pines after strippers and waitresses and girls who ruffle his hair like he’s a puppy or a younger brother. Girls with low self-esteem but high self-regard. Girls who fuck him because they had a fight with their boyfriend or girls who are waiting for the guy who doesn’t want to commit to call back. Jason pines after the kind of girls I could easily have. Back in university, I would get middle-of-the-night emails, sloppy drunken come-ons from his girlfriends at parties – I know there’s something between us, I’ve always thought you were so handsome – as if I needed to be told that, as if that were some kind of a prize for me, Jason’s girlfriend.

I wish there was something I could do or say to rescue Jason from his taste, but I know he’s delusional. He represents the worst-case scenario of what may happen to some of my conquests: chasing after people who are like me for the rest of their lives, or expecting their actual lovers to measure up to a fantasy.

So it is not my place to say anything to Jason about his tastes and delusions. And I have to admit, it’s somewhat entertaining to watch him struggle so much in the name of desire. It’s foreign to me, his struggle.

After the beach house is cleaned and tidied up, I spend most of my time taking Dog for long walks and watching television.

I look at girls on the beach, taking in all the imperfections. I don’t approach anyone and no one approaches me. I keep my distance. But I see everything. I revel in the bellies and thighs of the big girls as much as the gawky flatness of the skinny ones and the shapelessness of those who are neither. I can smell them without smelling them, and many of them smell like Dolores – and $isi too – milk and spit and chemical sweetness, sun and sand. Sometimes there’s a boyfriend or boys around those girls, and sometimes as I fuck a girl in my mind, I imagine myself to be one of those boys, my flat hand slapping her sloppy ass, Good girl .

One morning, I notice a couple on the beach. I order Dog to sit, and we sit in the shadow of the dunes, watching. They are splayed out in camping chairs beside a big blue cooler, most likely filled with beer for him and chips for her. The guy is pale and skinny with a pregnant belly and a haircut that hasn’t seen a decent shape since childhood. The girl is not skinny. She is rectangle-like in a one-piece bathing suit with cutouts meant to suggest curves. It fails: the bottom is cupping her flat ass so that the beginning of her crack is visible above it. Her hair hangs like a cheap curtain, convulsing here and there in random waves of yellow streaks.

As she gets up, it’s obvious that she’s not terribly confident about the bathing suit. This is what intrigues me – the way she attempts to hide inside it, trying to make it seem like no big deal, as if the suit hasn’t been designed to specifically accentuate her sexiness. I imagine a scene from whatever horrible town they’re from: an over-lit change room at Target, some girlfriend of hers encouraging her to get this suit because it would be a crime not to since it makes you look so totally, like, hot .

I watch the girl shuffle through the sand and into the water, submerging carefully, lifelessly. She stays in the water for a short time, as if this was a duty she had to perform, then comes out dripping wet, walking with her eyes cast down. My hard-on pushes against my shorts. Dog stirs beside me, probably sensing my excitement, probably mistaking it for the desire to get going.

As the sun comes out from behind a cloud, for a split moment, the black contours of the bathing suit are all I see, the girl’s white rectangular shape washed out in the light and white sand. In the light, she becomes the impossibly, cartoonishly defined woman-body that the suit promised she would be. So funny. I snap out of my little fantasy of walking up to her, bending her over the blue cooler and having her right there in front of the boyfriend.

I suddenly find the beach oppressive, as if the ruined illusion of the girl actually, physically burst inside me, hurled me toward some sort of limit I had and broke through, exposing me to my surroundings. I become aware of how the beach crowd resembles a mob, the people growing sweaty and tense from the sun. They are frying their brains right out in the open, shovelling junk food into their endless mouths, the shouty radio commercials everywhere. Everyone is too fat or too weak or too crazy to escape, at least till the evening, when it gets cooler.

“Let’s go,” I say to Dog, and we walk on, both of us done with the beach and ready to go home, back to prepare for winter in Toronto. I motivate myself to walk faster. I conjure a fantasy of being followed by a mob of hungry fatsos, snapping their jaws behind me like I’m a bag of chips. I don’t turn around.

NOTHING HAPPENS FOR ALMOST A WEEK AFTER I GET BACK and then, in less than twenty-four hours, there are twenty-one emails from Dolores in my professional email inbox at my agency. Some of the subject lines are: Hello, Its [sic.] just me! , At last [sic.] let me know if your [sic.] alive, I cant [sic.] believe it and Read this 1 before the last 1 PLS!!!! [sic. sic. sic.]

I fire my remote Mexican assistant for not monitoring my professional email account diligently enough. I don’t spend a lot of energy on trying to figure out how she got my email address. I’m no match for an eager young woman who grew up thinking psychopathic behaviour such as stalking is nothing more than your right to keep in touch.