Jowita Bydlowska - Guy

“I feel inspired.”

“I bet.”

“Not like that.”

He was wrong. But it didn’t matter. I didn’t need his feedback. I just wanted to tell someone about her. She was what I’d been looking for, for years, a cookie-cutter sensitive girl who was distinctive enough to possibly make it big.

I called her and flew her in. She showed up with her mother, who was all bleached hair and bad skin, who smoked and said almost nothing the entire time. When she did speak, she spoke softly. She twitched, couldn’t wait to leave. She might’ve been on something. I never asked. She seemed ready to sell her daughter to whoever would buy her. So I bought her.

After her mother left, $isi moved into a place I’d rented for her. In the recording studio, she squealed and jumped and threw her arms around necks by way of greetings. She wrote notes for everyone, thanking them for working with her. She would come by with Tupperware full of cookies and cupcakes that she never touched because she was worried about getting fat.

I hired a stylist to come up with a look for her. I hired someone else to bleach her teeth. I hired a music coach to get her in shape and started making phone calls to all my contacts to get her promoted. Then we gave her a name. She was no longer Sylvia. And once people received her studio-slick demo, they called us right back.

She cried in the cab after not winning anything at her first awards show. I made some jokes, but I’m not very good with jokes. Knock knock .

I tried calling Mark and getting him to come down, but he was away in Europe that week, annoyingly unreachable. By this time, $isi and I were in a booth at a club, with a curtain separating us from the crowd dancing on the floor. I didn’t really know what else to offer her. I put my hand on her tiny shaking knee and she looked up at me with teary, mascara-gooped-up eyes and opened her lips a little, enough to see her tongue.

There was a bottle of sparkling wine chilling in a silver bucket. I ordered sparkling despite the fact that there was nothing to celebrate. Or there was, as I kept insisting. It was an honour to just be nominated. So we celebrated.

I spend one more night of moping around in my condo. I listen to music of my late teenage years, when I went through a brief period of dark clothing and makeup, and locking myself in my room even though my parents were nice and I had no reason to lock myself in my room. But I liked to imagine that I had bad parents; a father who shouted outside my door, an absent mother who stumbled around the house all day in an open robe with a cigarette. The music was dark: morbid, heavy beats of electro and synth. It begged my life to be tragic. I’m tragic now; I’m seventeen again, and I am depressed for no good reason. I lie on the floor in the darkness until I fall asleep. No dreams.

I wake up refreshed, as if after a detox.

I want to go outside.

I’m hungry.

I want to see people.

I want to fuck.

There’s only a chunk of stale bread left in the breadbox. I make French toast.

I shower. In the shower, I shout my own name over and over to test the timbre and strength of my voice – it comes out in a croak at first, but then it booms through the apartment, bouncing off the concrete walls, echoing back to me, filling my ears with its strength.

I call Dog’s kennel and ask them when I can pick him up. I want some company and Dog’s company is the best way to ease into it, a training ground for the company of others.

I collect all of the roses that have been accumulating in the little vestibule by the elevator. It’s the same kind of arrangement every time – six deep, bloody red roses with shaved-off thorns, each bunch wrapped with a thick red velvet ribbon. There’s a sticker attached to the ribbon with the name of the delivery company and a number.

I call the number to try to find out where the roses are coming from. The robotic-voiced woman won’t even tell me if they’re an international delivery or not.

Maybe $isi is behind the flowers. I wonder if it’s some perverse way of showing that she pines for me, or if it’s the result of her being high on medication. If it’s a reply to the white roses I sent to her when she was in the hospital for the first time, overnight.

Wherever they’re coming from, I throw them all out because they’re shedding black flakes all over the floor.

I call Gloria and make a plan to fuck her later. I’ll have to go through the usual sequence of dinner, drinks and light-yet-serious relationship talk where she will ask me where we stand, have I found somebody else, and where I will say she has nothing to worry about, I’m all hers, and I love what she’s done with her hair and I would love to taste her, it’s been so long.

MY IDEA FOR MAKING THE TUMOUR $ISI’S THING TURNS OUT to be brilliant. Post-tumour, there are TV appearances: morning shows, afternoon shows, even a few evening show appearances. There are a couple of magazine articles. We get interview requests – too many, so we have to start turning them down. $isi has been asked to give advice on everything from how to be at parties to healthy eating to fashion in the bedroom. For the latest release, we rejig the lyrics so that the song has the word grey in it. The ribbon colour for brain tumour is grey. With a nod toward Amy Winehouse’s “Back to Black,” the writer comes up with a title: “Black to Grey.”

Although $isi is on the way to recovery, it’s important to continue with our Thing, to keep giving it a positive spin. Everyone works hard to keep the tumour issue in the public eye.

I have many ideas.

I call Piglet. “What about the destigmatizing angle. Let’s destigmatize it. We can talk about the stigma. How $isi is trying to do that – how she’s not shying away from talking about dark subjects. Like tumours.”

“Very good.”

“You like it?”

“We just need to come up with a new word. She says she hates saying that word.”

“Tumour?”

“It’s an ugly word,” she says.

“We should have a coffee someday,” I say.

“I’m allergic to caffeine.”

“Tea then.”

“I’ll call $isi right now,” Jennifer says. “I have to go.” She hangs up.

I throw the phone at the couch to satisfy my desire to throw it. I will have to ask Mark if we can get another publicist; one I can actually see in person because this is ridiculous.

I belong to one of those private clubs with leather chairs in the library, a farm-chic dining room and wide counters for doing lines in the bathrooms. In exchange for high membership fees, I have the privilege of spending thirty dollars on martinis that always get served with microscopic trays of salty almonds and sweaty olives.

Gloria loves these places, so I mostly use it to wine and dine her when she’s in town. Her favourite is Bibliothèque, the one I belong to. It’s filled with ad guys; PR types looking for junket-loving journalists; junket-loving journalists pairing up with PR types, film guys and young MBAs; old guys with money trying to look like young MBAs; and the old guys’ Botoxed au pairs.

Despite the leather chairs, Bibliothèque is flashy and full of aimless pretty girls of all types and leg-length. Most are under thirty, or pretend to be. They are not actually aimless even though they look it. The girls come here because this is the place to find a boyfriend, or at least a friendly sponsor, if he happens to be tied down already (sometimes to a former club member, who was once just like them). The girls present their breasts and shoulders and cheeks and teeth and phones, light bouncing off their jewellery and their eyes, like this is a pageant – and in a way, it is. A big aquarium with tropical fish had been installed on the glass rooftop, and I remarked to Gloria that it’s like decorating a baby’s room – the aquarium is for the girls.