Jowita Bydlowska - Guy

“So the girls were talking about that too?” Trish says. There’s something wrong with her shirt, I notice now. It has a little stain on it, pale brown. It’s between her breasts. I imagine her pinching herself there, a drop of blood staining the shirt before she noticed.

Gloria says, “Yes.”

I say, “Did you notice the grey ribbon?”

“For sure. I was totally gonna ask him about that,” Trish says.

“It’s part of the cancer – The Grey Campaign.”

“Oh, that makes sense, cool,” Trish says. I look at the stain on her shirt again. Force myself to look away.

Gloria says, “So I’ll see you tomorrow?”

Trish’s eyes go wide; she smiles brightly, “For sure.” She grabs her iPad and inserts it into a pink Hello Kitty case. Her purse is pink snakeskin. “It was so nice to meet you,” she says to me. Those cute fucked-up teeth sparkle in the dimmed light. Our eyes meet. I would tell her to leave her cheap little pink bra on, but I would ask her to pull her small tits out of it. With the underwire supporting them, they’d point right at me. One nipple would be slightly bigger than the other. There would be a red mark between the tits, the spot that drew blood. She’d scratch at it with her fingernail, without thinking. It would turn out she’d forgotten to shave. She would be obscenely blond between her legs.

“Thank you, honey.” Gloria stands up and hugs Trish briefly. Trish breaks the hug first. She clicks away, her ass jiggling left to right. Big ass but small tits.

Gloria doesn’t say anything for a while. I get distracted by Mildred at the bar again. She is now even more intimately wrapped around the unmoving shoulders next to her.

“Oh, Guy,” Gloria says.

“What?”

“Seriously,” she laughs. “That bitch is old. And Trish is a baby.”

“I wasn’t –”

She laughs harder. I join in, laugh with her and think about Trish’s stained top, the teeth, the way she wobbled away on her high heels. I pull Gloria close, her body hot with remains of laughter. My fantasy Trish bouncing up and down, up and down. Mildred biting my ear. It was strange, teenage-like, her teeth on my ear. She said she loved my energy. Her son was only ten years younger than me, she said. I said I didn’t believe it. I told her if I could I would put her ass in a frame and hang it on the wall in my office. That’s what you say to women her age. They like hearing that their asses are worth hanging on walls in frames. It makes them feel like they are better than the women my age, women much younger than they are. They like hearing, too, that they couldn’t possibly be mothers, not with those asses.

I pull Gloria’s face close to mine and I kiss her. “Let’s get out of here,” I say after her tongue leaves my mouth. I need a body to relieve myself into.

I’M NOT A FAN OF AWARD CEREMONIES. TOO LOUD. TOO many peasants. Your face hurts from smiling – cameras flashing and people screaming at you, and you always end up looking like a lonely tampon against all those red backdrops. But it’s good for me to go out to these things occasionally, to make nice with people from the industry.

Gloria is excited because she rarely goes to parties where she doesn’t have to promote something.

Tonight, she’s wearing a powder-blue dress with a cinched waist and a full skirt, very 1950s. It’s unusual for Gloria, who prefers simple, straight-line clothing. She does her hair in a sort of layered bun; it looks very nice. I’m proud of her looking so glamorous.

I match her in my charcoal Tiger of Sweden suit, a purple-almost-black Paul Smith tie and white Thomas Pink shirt. I’m wearing handmade John Lobb shoes, which are the biggest fashion extravagance I’ve ever allowed myself.

I’ve hired a consultant on a few occasions and we’ve gone shopping together. Henri. We’ve had many intimate moments: Henri adjusting my shoulders, straightening my trousers, running his hand over my butt. Henri with his arms folded, an eyebrow cocked. Henri with his hand to his mouth. Henri watching me emerge from the vaginal folds of heavy curtains in the change room at Bloomingdales, strutting around in my winter charcoal greys, my summer light greys, my wild-card shiny stripes. All for him. Then, later on, the two of us arguing playfully over the width of tie, the shade of pink. Henri holding my foot briefly before passing it to the shoemaker, who took measure of my feet. “You have such high arches,” Henri said, dreamily, once.

Before the awards, I sit on Gloria’s balcony and drink my sparkling wine. I move my toes in my shoes, which hold them tightly, lovingly, as if they were Henri’s hands. Gloria’s apartment, similarly to mine, overlooks a cluster of towers with mole rats in every single available compartment.

She joins me and we click our glasses, a gentle click like a nod. “I’m sorry about the other day,” she says.

I don’t know what she’s talking about. There’s nothing to be sorry for, I want to tell her, but maybe there is something to be sorry for.

“I’ll be thirty-nine next month,” she says.

“Yes,” I say, even though her math is off.

“It’s crazy, no?” she says. “It feels like I’m running out of time.”

“Running out of time? We’re all running out of time. What’s crazy?” I know what’s crazy. Maybe that’s what she’s sorry for. Children. Talking about children. She’s been bringing up children, hinting at children. Perhaps she should adopt, after all. I try to recall the conversation we had with Jason in the summer. Gloria adopting a child to provide inspiration for a book she wanted to write? I can’t recall the details.

“I didn’t mean to get all serious,” she says, which only makes this more serious. I wish we could just call a car now and get to the awards. But there’s still a bit of time to kill.

I think about my mother and father; my mother and father having their little fights right before they’d be due to go somewhere, where they’d have to pretend that nothing had happened. Hating each other politely the whole evening. At parties, they were probably surrounded by others who had committed similar offences before going out, all of them in the same room. Rooms full of offenders and the offended.

“Anyway. I think it would be great if $isi won, don’t you?”

“She’s okay.”

“You can be such a dick,” Gloria says, affectionately, but there’s a tiny tremble in her voice, which tells me that she means it, too. I let it go. I’m not going to have a fight. Tonight is going to be good. There will be no fights tonight.

We stay on the balcony for a dull eternity, and she talks about TV shows and books and clothes and other things, and I say hmm and right and I know , and then it’s time to call the car.

At the awards, we’re seated near the stage. There are many painfully scripted introductions and even more painful performances. $isi doesn’t win for best song or best video, which draws some boos from the back of the room. There are hordes of teenagers with hand-drawn posters – $isi, we love you! and Black to Grey! – in the back of the room.

Gloria, next to me, is mostly silent throughout the evening, save for some words of encouragement when $isi’s name is read out for the third time. And for the third time, $isi doesn’t win.

It’s a good thing she’s not attending the event. According to Mark, she’s in Europe with her mother, relaxing in an infinity pool in Spain.