Jowita Bydlowska - Guy

“Parents. I’m exhausted.”

“I know. I really feel for her,” she says.

“Well, yes, she is very disturbed. But that has nothing to do with us. She’s just one of those mentally ill superfans. Anything to get to $isi. It’s scary, but it’s not uncommon.”

“I feel responsible. We saw her climb that tower, we witnessed it.”

“The police seem to be okay with us leaving.”

“I know. But we’re connected by that experience, all of us.”

“Maybe you could adopt her.”

“Very funny,” Gloria says. She looks at me like she is sad. She may be sad.

“I’m sorry.”

She closes her eyes and slumps in her chair. Her party dress is a bit filthy, dust and grease, as if it was she who’d been climbing on things. Her updo is in place, but it seems like a wig now in its perfect form that clashes with the rest of her. In the hospital light, her skin has a pale green shade to it, the powder, or whatever makeup stuff she’s wearing on her face, visible in tiny, uniform specks, some of it more concentrated in the skin’s ridges where the wrinkles are.

I enjoy seeing her so unguarded and imperfect.

An older woman can be as fascinating as a younger one. But some have been too dulled by disappointment, by the resentment of having youthful dreams disappear, and then later on, that disappointment hardens like a scar. The skin is thinner and everything hurts: getting passed over for promotion, watching her best friend get married to her crush, or getting married and watching her husband stroke the remote control with more fondness than he’d have for her breast. And then even later, troubled children, divorces, funerals. Other ex-wives at funerals; what to wear to funerals with other ex-wives present.

I can’t really offer an older woman anything in terms of experience; there isn’t a lot I can open her to. I can give her a lightning of romance, a wild weekend in the country where we explore her unloved vagina and talk about her failed relationship with the last married man she met at her work Christmas party, but that’s about it.

I think about Mildred. How she wrapped herself around the unmoving shoulders of the man at the club. How it made me tired just watching this.

But Gloria is relatively untouched, not bitter, and perhaps this is what attracts me to her – that I can still find a certain innocence to her, that her eyes still widen; the world still surprises her. She was a princess, she had princes, she was on the cover of a magazine – all of her dreams came true. She’s like a girl who seems overgrown, a girl who seems to have aged by accident, who has found herself in this older woman’s body one Alice-in-Wonderland morning.

I appreciate Gloria. And now, in this washed-out green hospital hallway at three a.m., I feel that there’s nothing wrong with trying to have her in my life a little more – there will be no unpredictability of the sort I’ve had with $isi and Dolores. There’s safety, a notion that I’ve landed somewhere dull but beautiful: a five-star resort in a politically unchallenged country.

And I need a vacation.

I take her hand in mine and give it a quick squeeze and let go. She leans into me, rests her face on my shoulder. Her tiredness spills all over me, and I pull her close, drape my arm around her wide shoulders. And then these words come out of my mouth: “Let’s just go. Let’s go to my place.”

She stirs and sits up, looks up at me, her eyes scanning my face, and I close my eyes once to affirm, show her that I mean it, that I really want her to come over to my place, stay the night, god, maybe even stay a couple of nights, stay many nights if that’s what it’ll take to get her out of here and if that’s what it’ll take for me to get some peace of mind.

I SURVIVE THE SPRING AND SUMMER AND FINALLY GET TO the end of it.

There isn’t a lot to tell – or there is. Gloria and I become exclusive at her insistence. This, ultimately, means that we somehow own each other – each other’s genitals and actions and possibly even thoughts.

In my adult life, I have never had a long-term exclusive relationship like this, so I am not entirely sure what to expect. There is some residual part of me, a ghost of my childhood naïveté, that keeps insisting this kind of arrangement is for something – that there is a huge prize at the end of it all, an endurance prize, a Lifetime Achievement Award – but this idea is absurd. If I were to use one of Gloria’s adages: it just doesn’t feel like me. I only go along with it because I have no mind or energy to argue it. I have reserves of it, energy, that I need for my work, and my mind is anaesthetized by the predictability that a serious – what a romantic word that is, serious – relationship brings.

Being with Gloria is similar to the time in college when I swore off sleeping with women, except that I am sleeping with a woman – I’m majoring in one woman. Whatever I’m doing with my major should count as some kind of homework – the routine of intimate dinners, the long walks with Dog, the cinema on Fridays, the small cocktail parties for PR friends, the grocery shopping trips that are only slightly less interesting than cocktail parties.

The sex. How quickly the regular sex is dismissed, then taken up to another level because of Gloria’s initiative to keep me happy.

I don’t have a problem with kinky, but what we do doesn’t seem organic, there’s no spontaneity – it is forced, like a list of activities that we must get through – homework, again, or a prescription from a chick mag, a check mark beside each item:

• The Magic Fingertip Trick

• The Start-Stop-Start Technique

• A Wild New Use for Your Loofah

• Foreplay Men Crave: Touch His Secret Erotic Spot (Surprise: It Doesn’t Rhyme with Shmenis ).

I am passive – not in bed, but in going along with the list, in letting Cosmopolitan and dildos direct my life. The wooden Dalmarko trunk that Gloria buys at a designer showroom sale accumulates a variety of rubber, silicone, plastic, leather and combo-material sex toys that we use dutifully on each other, short-circuiting each other’s genitals till orgasm. We spend months rubbing and prodding, tugging and kneading and clamping.

There are a few weeks when there is none of that stuff at all – no sex – as Gloria goes through different product launches, festival preparations. One time, when she leaves for a week, I take her torture trunk and shove it deep inside my walk-in closet, then I change my mind and drive the whole shebang to a dump and leave it there.

When she comes back, I tell her about the trunk. She shouts at me, but then I suggest we experiment with her ass – the place that she had never used sexually – which makes her forget about being angry, and about the trunk. After weeks of lube and butt plugs and anal beads and, finally, intercourse, ass fun also manages to turn dull and repetitive.

The Tumour vlog series is becoming more and more popular, raking in hundreds of thousands of viewers. People finally figure out the answer to the WTF strategy, and when it’s discovered that it was a tumour that drove the whole enterprise, we get exposure that doubles and triples the currency of $isi’s fame. From hundreds of thousands of viewers, we go to millions. There are articles being written about the tumour and $isi and the vlogs; there are essays in Personality magazine, and Salon is talking about the idea of making a chronic illness cool: It’s a part of human experience!