Jowita Bydlowska - Guy

After PAT TRICK leaves, I watch the Nineteens for a short while. I picture them on film, talking about something to do with $isi’s situation, giggling and being intimate and best-friendly with each other. There’s a rush of sudden happiness, a spark going off in my brain.

At home, there’s a surprise waiting for me. A new bouquet of roses. I put this one in water, intending to give it to Gloria tomorrow when I see her for dinner at Bibliothèque.

I MEET PATRICK AT HIS AGENCY. IT’S A WHITE OFFICE, SLICK like a laptop, on the main floor, with the word Kolektiv printed in red on the white wall behind a symmetrical, straight-haired secretary, a Seven.

Patrick manoeuvres me through a bright hallway filled with cubicles filled with guys and girls typing on their Macs, toys and boxes of crap towering on their ergonomic desks. The ceiling is punctuated with skylights. Nobody looks up as we walk by. I let out a silent fart.

We go inside a small conference room, where Patrick gestures toward a chair and I sit down across the table from him. He says, “Got your message. We use two girls. Tens. We shave their heads and we shoot them just talking. Just talking to the camera, recording one of those vlogs, yapping on about, I don’t know, The Sopranos . Or something lighter. Maybe makeup or dating. Or sex. One of them is wearing a ribbon.”

“WTF,” I say.

“WTF. We’ll get someone good to do the script, a funny guy. We’ve got guys to figure out that kind of thing. It has to be about the feeling of it, right? And the look, too.”

I say, “Young, but a bit weary around the eyes. Russians or something. We get them to be rude and sexy and bald and hot and the ribbon is there, maybe just one of them is wearing it. I’ll hire someone good to write a bitchy opinion piece in Slate or Salon .”

“Bald?”

“Chemo.”

“Right. Yeah, man. And we play your client’s music in the background, then louder, maybe third episode or something, and it’ll be totally accidental, just some quiet song or something in the beginning,” he says. He’s wearing an Adidas jacket and a shirt with a video game character on it. Since he’s losing his hair already, the effect is that of an aged toddler. I smile encouragingly at him.

“Yeah, so they talk about neutral topics – fashion, shopping, douching, stuff like that. No cancer. At first.” Patrick sits up, elbows on the table, fingers massaging temples. He talks fast. “Then we do a second campaign after our numbers go up, but it may just happen naturally, you know people googling the song, and the name of the chick and then cancer, and then we can address it directly. Then if our numbers are good – no, they will be good.”

I keep smiling at him. He smiles back.

He says, “That tie is great, by the way,” as if we were two girlfriends catching up over lunch.

“Thank you. I like your glasses.”

“They’re Japanese.”

“Handcrafted?”

“I guess,” he says, and turns the screen of his computer around so that I can read the notes as we talk some more about details: the number of people we need, dates, clothes, etcetera.

I’m finally able to make out the label on his glasses. Charmant.

Eventually, we’re done talking about the strategy and he walks me out. He tells me about how Mildred got indignant because he didn’t ask her to sleep over. He talks about her tits, which are droopy from what I recall, and he says something about how it’s unsettling to see older women shaved – he makes a joke about the skin of plucked chickens. I count down from twenty, and then it’s time to shake his hand and I’m out, stepping right into a busy, sunny day in the city.

THE PHONE RINGING JERKS ME AWAKE. I’VE FALLEN ASLEEP, deeply and dreamlessly, like a teenager, after yet another whole afternoon of Skypeing with Kolektiv, followed by reading scripts and looking at videos of all of our vlogging candidates. I can’t tell the bald, Slavic-featured actresses apart anymore.

The shooting starts next week, and it couldn’t be soon enough. $isi’s new song, “Black to Grey,” is leaking everywhere, showing up on top spots in charts, in celebrity news, in music blogs, new fan pages set up by her teenage fans and their mothers.

I pick up the phone, and the phone says, “Guy, I’m sorry.”

“Who is this?” I ask, trying to guess the familiar voice but unable to place it.

“The number you gave me was wrong, but I called your agency and told them I was a cleaning lady at the beach house and there was an emergency,” she giggles. “I’m sorry.”

“Who is this?”

“Dolores.”

She appears then, the way I’d left her in her jean shorts wrapped tightly around her bum, her trusting face.

“Dolores!”

“It’s me! I’m sorry! I didn’t know how else to get a hold of you. I’ve got your address, too. I’ll visit as soon as I –”

“What is this about, Dolores?”

“What do you mean?”

“Why do you want to visit? Why are you calling me? What’s going on with you?” I say, but I already know.

Of course I know. Dolores thinks she is in love and she wants to prove her love by stalking me. She wants to show up on my doorstep with her little suitcase, and she wants to have a romance. She doesn’t understand the gap between us. She thinks she has a right to me. She thinks that I am, indeed, a vampire prince who has found her at last, his princess. She thinks that there’s actually an us .

“Well. I love you,” she says simply. As if that answered all my questions.

“Dolores –”

“I know, I know, it’s crazy, and I was even thinking that you gave me the wrong number on purpose and you haven’t been answering my emails? But then I thought you couldn’t do that, not you, I mean, we connected, no? Like, we really connected. I looked at the paper and it was clear that the one was really a seven and that I was just an idiot for misreading it. But now here I am. So I was thinking of booking the ticket –”

“No. But I’d love to have a coffee or something if you’re ever in town,” I say. Coffee. Not risky; things come up at the last minute; everyone cancels coffees all the time. It’s almost expected.

“What?”

“When you’re in town. We’ll have coffee. Right now is not the best time,” I say.

“Oh. So you really don’t want to see me?” Her voice is small. I see her eyes then, opened wide, the whites so white, the blues so blue.

“It’s not that, it’s –”

It’s exactly that. Why won’t I just say it? I won’t just say it because I am not a dick. Women love me. And because of that, sometimes, I need to lie and present myself in the best possible light, and simply telling her to fuck off is not something I can stand behind a hundred percent just yet.

I know, I know, for all the $isi lessons, I’m still lacking the ability to make myself absolutely clear. I’m trying to quickly come up with something to end this conversation without hanging up abruptly and calling my phone provider to give me a new number.

“Oh, that’s a relief! I couldn’t come right away, so I just sent the roses to your address.”

“I moved. No roses, Dolores. They probably went to the wrong address,” I say. This is a poor strategy. Now I’m going to make her think that I’ve been sitting here, waiting for something like roses, that I feel wronged by not receiving the roses that she just said she’d been sending.