Jowita Bydlowska - Guy

She continues shaking her foot. She sighs.

“You okay?” I say.

“I hate slow eaters,” she says.

“I hate children,” I say.

She puts on a little summer dress. We go outside. I feel myself sobering up. In my head, questions demand to be answered.

“What happened with the smoothie shack?”

“It wasn’t my thing.”

“When did you quit?”

“Maybe the night I met you? But don’t worry, it has nothing to do with you. The place sucked, that’s all. Why?”

“I asked the kid who worked there about you and he seemed surprised. He laughed when I asked for Bride.”

“How many times are we going to go over this? You wanna see my ID?”

“No, of course not. I believe you. Listen, I’m the guy with Guy for a name, so I should talk. You okay?”

“Yeah. Okay. Sure.”

“I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“You didn’t. But stop bringing it up. It’s weird. You’re being weird.”

“Sorry,” I say. I’ve never been accused of being weird. It feels gross. And the fact that I just said sorry feels small and desperate.

We walk in silence. The beach is full of Fours and Fives, but I can barely focus. Bellies and nipples and asses and knees and hair. A parade of body parts. Nothing stands out.

Bride’s bright voice snaps me out of it. “We could be like sexual Natural Born Killers . I could find girls for you,” she says. She grabs my arm. We stop, facing each other. Her face is flushed. “Instead of killing people, we’d fuck them.”

“Right.”

“I could really help you,” she says.

“Help me.”

“I’m gonna bring you the girls and you can do the rest.”

“Hilarious.”

She almost shouts, “I’m serious.”

“Okay.”

“I’d befriend girls and then bring them over so you could have fun with them, you know, fulfill your endless appetite. For variety. Virgins for the dragon.”

“You are crazy,” I say and try not to think about Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka, the serial killers Dolores was fascinated with. Is that how all of that started?

I have to bend over and place my hands on my knees. While doing this, I think up a fantasy: Bride in her girly dresses, talking to other girls, holding elbows, heads touching, bald heads and hairy heads in the sun, laughing, chewing on straws in their drinks, spraying liquid out of their noses, Bride bringing them over to my lair, music pounding, everybody, all the girls, jumping on my bed.

“Guy?”

“I’m good.” I straighten up, start walking.

She trots along; tiny feet, tiny steps. “No, but seriously, eh? Don’t you think that would be cool?” she says.

“How would you know what I like?”

“Oh, I’d know. I’d figure it out eventually.”

I imagine taking Bride for one of my walks, showing her what I’m looking for, teaching her to observe and notice the specific plainness: the girls that look as if someone just slapped their features together, fat asses or asses that are flat like a pancake. She’d be hurt to learn of these girls, I’m sure. She’d wonder if she had the same appeal to me, and I’d have to explain that she hadn’t, in fact – well, maybe just barely – and that her appeal is not of the same sort. It might’ve started that way, I’ll say. But that’s all.

“What about her?” She points to a group of girls, her age or maybe younger. “The one in the green bikini.”

I isolate the one in the green bikini, and she is curvy, with hair like a sheet of burned gold, mouth full of lips and teeth, but perfectly proportionate.

I shake my head.

“Seriously, Guy. Look at her,” Bride says. I pay attention to her voice. Nothing in it suggests she’s getting upset over this. It doesn’t sound as if this was one of those girl tests, checking what or whom I’m attracted to so that she can twist it into a fight.

I say, carefully, “No. Not my type. Perhaps the other one, the one in the stripey one-piece.”

“What? Her ?”

“I don’t know, there’s something about her,” I say.

“She’s a fucking fire hydrant. I’m sorry.”

“Yes. That’s why I like her. Take a closer look.”

I wait. I wait for her to observe the girl carefully, and she does. I watch her eyes zero in on the girl. I bend down to stroke Dog’s bumpy head.

Bride sighs, “She’s just so –”

“Yeah,” I say. “Plain . That’s it. Let’s go,” I say, and pull her along.

We walk all the way to the end of the beach in silence. I watch Bride looking at groups of girls and couples and individual girls around us, and I imagine my eyes seeing through hers, seeing through the awakening of her eyes. I imagine my eyes blending with hers, teaching them to see what I see.

When we get back to my place, we both drink a glass of vanilla-protein smoothie.

“Tell me more.” She sets her glass down.

“Okay. It’s like a fetish. But not quite. They’re not essential to my fulfillment of sexual pleasure. It’s more cerebral. It’s all about me, but it doesn’t work if they’re not involved the way I need them to be.”

“So you want these girls to worship you?”

“Not exactly. You see, a girl like that, a plain girl, would never have a chance to be with someone like me, right? I mean, I know it’s arrogant, but I’m simply stating the facts. Beautiful women often pair up with unattractive, plain men. It’s not fair, but it happens. Why does it happen? Because of power, money, control. A beautiful woman wants control and money and power, and he wants her beauty. They work out an arrangement and everyone is happy. But what about a woman who’s not attractive? A woman who’s not only unattractive, but has no other power? A girl who is not yet formed, but who already knows enough about the world to not let herself have any hope about her ability to attract guys, interesting, smart, attractive guys? You see, if I give her the illusion that it’s possible for her to be desired by someone beautiful and successful, I may open her up to so many possibilities, may even give her enough boost to do something interesting and powerful with her life –”

“But what makes you think that she won’t anyway? This is bananas.” Bride doesn’t sound angry.

“Yes. Yes, she might. But sadly, the world values women based on their looks, and sadly, most women base their own value on looks. So I’m just responding to that, nothing else. I bring joy to girls who would otherwise have to wait for joy for a long time. Maybe forever.”

Bride’s big brown eyes scan my face cautiously. But I can’t stop now. “It gives me great joy to awaken this in them. I delight in knowing that I’m their first love – this doesn’t happen every time, of course, but still, it happens. It’s a lovely thing, Bride. I enjoy knowing that they go out into the world feeling like princesses. Feeling like they could do just about anything.”

“You think they feel this because of you? You seriously think this way?” She’s not raising her voice or making any ugly faces when she says this. She says this with the same calmness as when she asked me for a vanilla-protein smoothie.

“Why not? Why shouldn’t I believe it? Bride, look at me. It’s a dick thing to say, but I’m a catch, don’t you think?”

She gives a little smirk.

“Why do people always shit on those who admit to being awesome? I’m awesome, and I won’t let people shit on me – what’s wrong with that? And I believe that I was put on this earth to bring a few girls some great memories, some happiness even – what’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing. Nothing’s wrong with that,” she says.