Jowita Bydlowska - Guy

“You’re not even going to defend yourself,” she says when I say nothing about her calling me names and talking about taking breaks. I am too exhausted by her, by all of this; I am a shell of my former self, to paraphrase a cliché.

“I don’t even know who you are anymore,” she says.

“Me neither,” I sigh, and she must be mistaking my reply for weakness because she comes up to me and puts her arms around me. The image of Caroline, the girl I lost my virginity to, wrapping herself around me to keep me flashes in my mind and I shudder.

Gloria leads me to bed. I make no effort to try to fuck her and she strokes my head, lying in her lap like a kitten, murmuring over and over, “I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what to do.”

I have no idea what she’s talking about. I fall asleep because the stroking is nice.

IN THE MIDDLE OF SUMMER, GLORIA TALKS ABOUT TAKING a break again – this time it seems that she has made a decision and wants some kind of a plan in place.

I remain passive, my contribution contained mostly to sympathetic – and hopefully guilty-enough-looking – nods.

Gloria says we should “reflect” in August and “regroup” in September to discuss further. Talk about our goals and hopes then. My hope is for Gloria to feel terribly wounded by my continued lack of fight while she’s doing her portion of reflecting. My hope is for her to feel so wounded that she will, for example, go to Poland to spite me and reclaim the count who was once in love with her.

“I need more from you,” she says.

“Yes.”

“I need you to be more present. If you want this to work out, I need you to make the effort. Do you want this to work out?”

“Of course,” I say.

“I don’t want things to be the way they are. I want us to evolve,” she says.

“Me too.”

I wish I could tell her why she is wrong about relationships having to move a certain way. It could free her. I always thought she had the potential to avoid succumbing to convention, the way she lives as if she doesn’t care about fitting in too much: jet-setting, dating Polish counts, not breaking into my email account to check if I am being unfaithful – stuff like that.

It would help her to realize that she doesn’t have to subscribe to the commonly accepted belief that once a couple, we’re supposed to move in stages as if we’re working for a corporation: giving each other performance reviews ( really good in bed , always calls when he’s running late ), expecting bonuses (surprise birthday parties, surprise blow jobs), climbing steadily up the ladder of coupledom (attending weddings, wedding).

I wish I could share with Gloria why it seems so bleak, advancing in this particular corporation – starting with the first weekend together and ending in a shared cemetery plot. How impossible it is to have to remain excited, or at least grateful, or at least not homicidal about the fact that we have to spend most of our adult lives trying to understand a human being that ultimately is just too different to ever understand, the way all the human beings who are not us are.

Then again, we could tell ourselves it is all worth it – it is romantic and natural and even practical. And if we are indeed so lucky to achieve the pinnacle of any respectable couple-corporation, a child, it is okay to die because our work is done. Although, before we go, it is important to instill similar values in our child, teaching her that the only point of her life is to, essentially, pair up with someone, birth something and then die too.

And is modern marriage about love? The love evolving, maturing like some kind of alcohol as it sits in the barrel of disillusionment and misfortune, disease and ephemeral joy? The love maturing so much that it is prone to forgetting that it originated in desire, demanding the same desire to succumb to exclusivity, monogamy? And desire, this chronic viral condition, torturing monogamy with its lips and hips, its swagger and smell, its eye contact, its hands everywhere?

Then, at home, the desire resting next to the wife’s sleeping cheek as the husband masturbates in the darkness, quietly, hideously. He is an evolved man, a man who evolved so much that he married, respected and observed the rules of modern society. And later on, his wife locks herself in the bathroom with her secret stash of Fifty Shades of Grey or some other romance fable and fantasizes about being mounted by someone else, the neighbour.Anyone but her husband, whom she finds repulsive now, after years of marriage.

I wish I could talk to Gloria about my own parents, stuck in their monogamy. I would tell her about seeing my mother with our neighbour Karl and how they panted at each other, how my father didn’t seem to understand – or if he did, never acknowledged it – that his own wife, his soulmate, the love of his life, was separated from her sexual freedom by a metal fence. Then again, if he were to have let her go, he would never have done it to appease her desire – he would’ve done it to feel smug about it. If anything, he would’ve done it so that he’d have his own freedom, the freedom to call her a whore for the rest of his life.

It seems to me that the most loving thing to do is to set someone free. Therefore, breaking up with Gloria is a loving thing to do. I have no intention of this being temporary; this is for good.

I lie to her, tell her I’m looking forward to September, when I’ll next see her, and she must know that I’m lying because when she leaves my place with her final suitcase, she holds my head in her hands and presses her forehead against mine and says, “Don’t ever let a good thing go.”

It sounds familiar and it sounds like a threat.

I CAN ALMOST SMELL IT. THE WATER AND SAND, THE COCONUT oil and sweat and beer breath. I see the beach in the distance: the whiteness of the shore, the candy-blue of the ocean, the candy-blue of the sky. The freedom expands inside me, along with the salty air. I cannot wait to meet them, all the girls with their wobbly flesh, the straight waists and straight legs and hair fried from home dye jobs. Despite what happened with Dolores, I haven’t given up on my passion. I’m still the universal dream boyfriend, and I’m even stronger and more refined this year. I’ve prepared. In my non-professional life, besides being Gloria’s boyfriend, I’ve also become a secret, late-night teenage-Internet-forum reader, a Facebook commenter, a Twitter subscriber who’s been following every rant a plain girl has to post, everything she has to say to the world that makes her mad and invisible. And so now I know even more about boys not returning affections, and how hard it is to find bleach that will work on a moustache without making it stand out if you get a tan. I know more about how impossible it is when dumb hos and bitches steal boys who have been spoken for, how spiteful skinny girls can be, how diets never actually work unless you turn them into an eating disorder.

I know even more about how it would be nice to have someone to care for you, to cuddle with, someone other than the jerks who fuck you and leave you and you have to pretend that you don’t care but really you do.

I pull into the driveway of the beach house and turn off the engine and sit in the car with the windows open. In my head, I hear all those voices from the Internet – the squeaky whispers, the whining, the rants – complaining, explaining, asking.