Jowita Bydlowska - Guy

“So where do you stay now? Different place? I’m trying to book the flight after my mid-terms and it’s around Thanksgiving so it’s, like, really expensive.”

“I’m away during Thanksgiving.”

“This is why I’m calling,” she says, as if we’ve had a bunch of conversations already, trying to make plans to meet.

“I’m away the rest of October and November, actually,” I say, and there’s finally some silence on the other end.

“I can come down sooner?”

“I –”

She says, “Friday? This Friday?”

I look out the window. I scan the building, a grid of glass. I focus on one particular apartment. A man is standing in the window, hand to his ear, shaking his head.

I shake my head, “Listen. I’m going to be honest. I don’t want you to come down. I have to go now. I have to take Dog out for a walk.”

“What do you mean?”

“That’s what I mean, Princess. I don’t want you to come down to visit me.”

“But, Guy –”

“No. I’m talking now. It’s over. We’re over. I’ve met someone else. Her name is Gloria. And I’m sorry. I’m very sorry.”

“No.”

“No?”

“No. I don’t buy it,” Dolores says.

My seduction has freed something in her, something much larger than just a glimpse of hope. Faith. A monster of faith – faith so grotesquely enlarged, so clearly and definitely in disproportion to what she realistically should believe about herself. I hang up. I’m a dick.

As soon as I hang up, I block her number.

I pace around my apartment. The dog picks up my nervous energy; he erupts and stops in half-barks as he clicks in circles around the kitchen. When I look at him, he freezes. He looks up from underneath his shy brows. “No kennel. Don’t worry.”

I almost never talk to Dog, and he looks at me even more stunned when I do. “No kennel,” I say. “What?”

Dog keeps staring, his tail slapping the floor unsurely. God, that face. I laugh as he continues staring. Laughing releases the tension that’s wound up like a coil around my throat.

I phone Gloria and we make plans to meet at Bibliothèque the next evening.

GLORIA SHOWS UP AT BIBLIOTHÈQUE WITH HER NEW ASSISTANT. Gloria is a human origami in her white panelled dress.

I introduce everyone, Patrick to Gloria and the new assistant, Trish, who is very blond and not pretty but not plain either. A Five. “My friend said they had this awesome fish tank here,” she says, looking around.

“Not anymore,” I say like I’m sad.

“Kerry is an account manager now,” Gloria explains when I don’t ask what happened to her original assistant.

Patrick talks fast like he’s on cocaine. Maybe he’s on cocaine. He is here to show us the first vlog on his iPad – the just-released vlog that’s already got more than ten thousand views, though Patrick says that more than half of these are buy-ins. That means they are subscribers to the newsletters from other products’ websites that Kolektiv has worked on.

“Is that legal? To buy out subscriber lists?” Trish, the new assistant, says. No one answers. She pulls her hair out of a ponytail and then immediately puts it back into a ponytail. No roots showing. She’s probably blond all over.

Patrick opens the first video. On the shiny little screen, two girls with shaved heads sit wide shoulder to wide shoulder. They’re both wearing too-big grey T-shirts with low cut-out necks – plain, but looking hot on them. The girl on the right has a tiny grey ribbon pinned to her shirt. They have little or no makeup; I can’t decipher.They giggle, touch, whisper and laugh with toothy, wide-open mouths, long necks stretched out.

Their banter is funny, not too scripted, and you can tell that they remember only some of the lines because the conversation veers in unexpected directions. Or perhaps Kolektiv are such geniuses that they make it seem completely unscripted. Either way, it looks authentic, intriguing: Who are these girls and why are they doing this?

The topic of the conversation is guys wearing flip-flops in the city. It seems to be an issue with them, guys and flip-flops and how gross it is.

Throughout the video there’s a song playing in the distance, very faintly but, to me, instantly recognizable: $isi’s new song. It has a great beat to it, a slightly dreamy synthesizer sequence that makes one think of an enchanted forest, at least according to the producer’s note. The song comes on after some distant radio static. It’s as if there was something else going on in another room and the song just happens to be playing at the moment. The video ends with the girl on the right, the one with the ribbon, moving toward the screen, turning off the camera.

“Who are they?” Trish says. She’s got teeth like a bunch of piano keys squeezed into a small box.

Gloria is staring at me. I smile at Gloria. No one answers Trish. Patrick stares at Gloria. He leans back in his chair like he’s cool.

I have no way of telling whether Gloria liked the vlog or not, but her eyes are sharp. They go all cloudy if stuff bores her. I want Gloria’s company to take on the Tumour Thing since Piglet doesn’t seem to be working out.

“I love it,” Gloria says, and Patrick’s relaxed pose relaxes even more.

“I don’t know, guys. I don’t get it,” Trish says, and all three of us turn to look at her.

“But do you like it?” Patrick says.

“I don’t know. Yes.”

Gloria says in a gentle voice, “Would you watch them again?”

Out of the corner of my eye, I see Mildred at the bar, talking to a man who is ignoring her. She leans into him, her frizzy head touching his shoulder, but he just sits there, unmoving, like a stand-in for a man, lifeless. I touch my ear, close my eyes briefly to recall her – her teeth clamping onto my earlobe.

“You okay, honey?” Gloria says. “You’re making faces.”

“I’m fine. So, would you watch the vlogs,” I say, looking at Trish.

“Yeah, for sure. I guess there’s something about it.”

“You don’t know what it is, but you like it,” Patrick says.

“Yeah. I think?”

Gloria’s smile is tight. I grab her hand under the table and squeeze it quickly. I’ve never done such a thing. She blinks a few times, hard. I look forward to unzipping her dress later, peeling her out of its white panels, running my hands over her muscled, slim body. I can almost taste the saltiness that isn’t there, is never there. Which is, I suppose, why I desire her as strongly as I do – for the saltiness that is never there but should be there. The promise of it, or perhaps the disillusionment when I miss it.

“Excellent,” Patrick says and looks at his watch.

After Patrick leaves, we order a tray of finger foods. Root vegetable chips, prosciutto-wrapped breadsticks with fig dip and asiago slivers with a tray of Gaeta olives.

Trish pops an olive into her shiny pink mouth. She sees me watching and blushes, looks down. The waiter comes back, refills Trish’s glass of white, brings some Perrier for me and a martini for Gloria.

“I thought that was so interesting,” Gloria says, and Trish nods, taking a big gulp of her wine.

“It was,” I say. I remember the flip-flops and bring them up.

“Oh, women hate them. But it’s also because of that article in GQ ,” Gloria says. “It was somebody’s manifesto, about how we need to get rid of all the flip-flops in order to improve the economy and just generally raise standards. It was about our standards. About our standards being low and about us having low expectations and not buying good products and good products not being produced. Everybody just wearing one-dollar Chinaswag that make your feet dirty and disgusting, especially in the city.”