Jowita Bydlowska - Guy

I realize now that I was Emily’s, Em’s – Em; she’s my Em – mysterious summer project. It’s comforting to know that I was indeed that important to her if only for a little while. But then not just for a little while, really. This, what’s happening right now, this is bonding. This is for life, her accusation and my supposed crime. I will always be the perpetrator, from now on, and she will always be the victim. We will be forever linked in the eyes of the law and the rest of the world. Suddenly the name Bride doesn’t seem so out of place anymore because this union of ours is a marriage; it was for better and now it’s for worse, and nothing can do us part except, of course, death.

I think of Em’s beatific smile from this morning, the way her eyes softened as if we were sharing a secret, the secret that would allow us to connect beyond what was happening. A secret between secretly married people.

I’ve only spent a few days with her and only got a glimpse of the possibility of being with someone like me or, rather, someone who could understand me. Sitting here in this room, this is the only thing I truly miss, her companionship. Not having her here is the biggest source of my distress.

I doze off briefly in a zigzag of non-dreams, colours and electric sand running through my body. I’m aware of where I am and where I’m not.

MY FIRST COURT DATE HAPPENS ONE MONTH AFTER MY arrest and bail. My conditions are: no communication with the victim, no weapons, no leaving the city. I don’t know what I was expecting, but I was expecting more – having to wear an electronic bracelet on my ankle like a drunk celebrity, getting a camera installed in my bedroom, Net Nanny preventing me from perverting my mind with porn.

Jason comes over every two to three days to torture me with stories about his pathetic dating life. A lot of it happens online. On his desktop, he has folders of links to girls he’s approached or is planning to approach: Yes Girls , Maybe Girls and No! (girls who rejected him, but whom he tells himself he didn’t want to get with in the first place).

“The crème de la crème,” he says, clicking the mouse to close the folders.

“Who fucking says that? Cr è me de la cr è me ?”

He blinks at me. I’ve offended him. Good.

There’s construction being done on my building. New windows being installed. I fantasize about Jason leaving my house and a glass panel falling down from a great height, cutting his head off.

I wave for him to go on. “Don’t sulk.”

“Okay. Okay. ACAs. I just clean up there. They’ve got these eyes,” Jason’s manicured eyebrows form into a worry arch. “Whether they’re about to cry or not, they always look like this. You should go. They’re really eager to please, it’s astonishing. The older ones especially.”

“Who?”

“ACAs. Adult Children of Alcoholics. The meetings I go to.”

“That’s disgusting.”

“Is it?” he says. He looks at me, the eyebrows rearranged on his face, one raised.

“Right,” I say. I’m the one who’s at home awaiting trial for assaulting a young, vulnerable woman.

“Fuck. I miss that bitch so much sometimes,” he sighs.

I pat him on the back. The bitch, Candi of the messy tattoos, has gotten back together with her filmmaker boyfriend. They’re now making a documentary about the difficult lives of public relations professionals. Jason said they interviewed Gloria.

(On the day of the interview, Gloria was running on three hours of sleep and had a meltdown in front of the camera. The night before, one of her visiting clients, a broken-nosed actor known for playing bad-boy love interests in rom-coms, called her before midnight, high on coke. He wanted to jam and had forgotten his guitar, so Gloria had to locate the owner of a music store that carried his favourite brand of a semi-acoustic. She managed to get the guitar! I can’t say I didn’t feel impressed and proud when Jason told me about it.)

“Maybe it’s a mommy thing for you? With these children of alcoholics?” I say. But I’ve lost him. He’s back to talking about Candi. How she betrayed him, how she had terrible taste in TV shows, how her new boyfriend will have to put up with her poor hygiene – I didn’t want to pry but I wanted to ask about that ; I didn’t ask – and how, how, how –

He can’t possibly think that this is interesting. He’s torturing me because he can. There must be a sense of retribution in being in charge of the person who has always made him feel insecure, to be my surety, to have that power over me.

I never confront him about his reasons for agreeing to bail me out, but I suppose I’m grateful. It really doesn’t matter.

In the past few weeks since my arrest, I’ve resigned myself to various humiliations, big and small. The big ones are losing my job, not being able to leave Canada – where I rarely feel at home anyway; not that I feel at home anywhere, really – having to put the beach house up for sale to pay for my legal fees, putting Dog in the kennel and getting an email from Gloria suggesting that I get in touch with Celia Stone from Personality magazine to do an interview “to help your cause!!!”

The smaller humiliations are Gloria taking Dog from the kennel and fostering him and me agreeing to it because I had no choice and because it was the right thing to do.

Another small humiliation: Writing to Gloria and asking her to forget it after: would you like to come for a drink? And Gloria writing back, Very funny! This was followed by an invitation to a party celebrating Gloria’s engagement to the Polish count.

I buy black curtains on the Internet and same-day courier them to my address. I hang them up. I close the curtains. I disappear. The only time I act human is when Jason comes over. Other than that, who is there to perform for anyway?

I’ve given up on my workouts. I pace enough.

I’ve given up cooking. I order food from restaurants that I find online. There’s sugar in everything. None of the places are actually what they claim to be: a Korean shows up with food from a Thai place, the pasta sauce on pizza tastes like it comes from a can, the sushi restaurant has Chinese owners. Once, I try an Indian restaurant that actually manages to serve Indian food, but the apartment smells of armpits for days afterwards.

When he comes over to check on me, Jason brings bread and milk and the plainest cereal. Tomatoes, for some reason, but no good cheese. No pâté, no fish. Jason is uninterested in food. He knows how much I enjoy a good meal. I don’t say anything about the groceries to him. I won’t give him the satisfaction.

All the time, I think about Em. I know it’s not technically doing something, but it feels like it, something pleasurable, like going on a little trip. It’s my meditation; I can sit still for it. I can rewind the tape in my head a hundred times, analyze every little thing, like the way the light would expose the soft peach fuzz above her lip.

I don’t spend too much time on our last encounter, with her sitting on the picnic bench. That’s done now, and anyway, there’s really not that much of her in it. At least, I don’t see how that could possibly be her. She was possessed. A demon with the face of a saint.

At the same time, I understand why she did what she did. I do understand it, on a level where everything makes sense once you add the facts together. The rest is complicated: How do I feel about it?