Jowita Bydlowska - Guy

THE SATURDAY WITH GLORIA AND JASON IS MORE OR less a repetition of the Friday afternoon. Jason ventures out to the beach twice while Gloria and I fuck. I make two different salads and a puréed sweet potato soup for lunch; in the evening we drink and eat the leftovers. On Sunday, I wake up next to Gloria and my bed seems too small; I want her out of the bed. I feel like shouting at her to go, but I would never do that, shout at a woman.

I shake her and kiss her on the neck to wake her up.

The breakfast is eggs Benedict and silence. A table full of newspapers.

“I’m going to miss you, babe,” Gloria says before they leave.

“I’m going to miss you, too,” Jason says in a high-pitched voice.

“I’m going to miss you ,” I say back to him in my normal voice.

I’m impatient to go out and find Dolores, but it’s no use this early in the day.

I watch the recap of the news on my computer. Amy Winehouse almost overdosed. A bomb in the Middle East killed forty people. A young woman got hit by a train and survived. Slow day. There are seventeen emails from $isi. I delete them all without reading.

I close my laptop. Go outside. The morning is cool and rainy, which is great weather for a run. Running, I try to focus on an image that will inspire me and make the inspiration stick, form into a girl, one girl, Dolores, but I’m all over the place mentally: $isi, Gloria, the pretty blond – the friend of Dolores’ – a voice from the past, some girl’s voice accusing me of something. Kerry or Kayla.

After the run, I work out in my basement, but my workout is as disastrous as my mind – I forget to count reps, I break a dial on my stationary bike; I say, “Fuck it,” out loud and stop.

I take a shower, and after the shower I eat plain yogourt with muesli and drink a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice.

I take my dog for a walk. The beach is just starting to fill; the morning’s dampness is still lingering in the air. It won’t be damp for too long. I can sense the heat coming on. I walk along the road for a while, taking in the sights that I usually only get in a blur when I run first thing in the morning. There’s a man-made waterfall to the east of my beach house. There are more beach houses to the west, and most of them are rentals. The fact that they’re rentals is an ideal setup for me. I despise neighbourly relations, the expected pleasantries between people who happen to share a road and nothing else. The rentals are like musical chairs with a set of asses plopping down for a bit, a week or so, then disappearing to make room for a new set of asses.

Here it’s mostly college kids. The biggest wave of them is during Spring Break, although we don’t get full Daytona fuckery here. But it’s all sex, humid air, sheeny skin, drunken vomit. Coconut oil and sugary drinks. The kids stumble by, flirting, pouncing on each other like lion cubs.

This early in the morning, the houses are still in disarray: wet shirts, wet towels, stacks of flip-flops and floatation devices and open coolers, empty cans of pop, puddles of fresh puke starting to dry, empty cartons of beer and bottles – bottles everywhere. Sometimes you see big, pink-faced, crusty-eyed boy cherubs rubbing their eyes on the too-bright porches. The girls who belong to these boys are sleeping inside. These are the pretty girls who get invited to beach houses with boys.

It is too early for the kind of girl that I’m looking for – a Dolores-girl. A Dolores-girl is also probably not at one of those beach houses. She’s staying with her parents. Or maybe with friends whose parents own a house off the beach. She doesn’t get invited to beach houses like these, anyway, and if she does, she thinks someone is playing a joke on her so she politely says no .

This early, a Dolores-girl is still slurping her fluorescent cereal, taking just one more bite of a muffin. She’s trying to figure out which bright bathing suit to squeeze her doughy body into. She is in a dining room that is clean and bright and smells of Pine-Sol.

I know it seems like I make fun of a Dolores-girl by constantly referring to her pudginess and shapelessness and overall lack of contour, or even character, but the truth is just the opposite. I admire everything about a girl like this. I like how she thinks that nobody is looking at her. How she doesn’t even make an effort, how she’s already given up on her dream of becoming a model. Because let’s face it, most girls her age would still be dreaming about being like Gloria, who at sixteen had modelled for an underwear label.

A Dolores-girl doesn’t allow herself to think that she will run the world one day, be a model one day, if she only snaps out of it and fixes her nose and loses the sweet twenty pounds. She doesn’t think she’ll ever meet a prince and start a business of her own, a PR firm or a designer furniture store. She has realistic dreams, none of the delusions of the thousands of strung-out dieters out there who support modelling schools that are spreading like fungus all across the cities. A Dolores-girl dreams of men like me, but she doesn’t believe men like me talk to girls like her.

And then I see her.

The promise of the second chin, and her perky nose, and the roots poking through the strands of blond hair. My Dolores. I say her name out loud. I actually enjoy how it rolls off my tongue – Do - lo - res . I remember now that this is Lolita’s real name, the heroine in Nabokov’s novel that I read as a child because it was supposed to be dirty, but it really wasn’t. Dolores, the real one, with her sturdy trunk, is the opposite of Nabokov’s lithe nymphet. In that, she is perfect.

My Dolores is sitting on a big towel with a book in her hand. The dog tugs at the end of his leash and gives a tiny, stifled woof. He probably remembers her smell, the way she stroked his head.

She looks up. Her eyes round and clear with bright irises and thick lashes. That mouth-breather mouth, pink lips parting in a daze that comes over her face. “Hi, Dog,” she says.

“Dorothy?” I say, and give her a big smile.

“Oh, hi,” she says, and looks up from making faces at the dog. She doesn’t correct me about her name.

“What are you reading?” I point to the book.

“Oh. It’s nothing. Just one of those stupid vampire books.”

“Why is it stupid?”

“Oh, you know. Everyone’s just like basically chasing each other with their fangs out and trying to not eat each other when they have…when they get together.”

“A book? I haven’t seen a real book since 2007,” I say, and bend down to pick it up. “It’s very interesting. I like the feel of it; it feels nice in the hand, solid. What do you do when the battery runs out? I don’t see a USB slot anywhere.”

“Yeah. I know,” she says, and pretends to giggle, which is worse than if she just didn’t do anything. I can’t tell if this is because she found my joke lame or because she’s so tense she can’t get into it with me.

I put the book down, peek quickly at her toes: thick nails, no nail polish. Tiny thatches of blond hairs.

“So, how long are you staying for?” I say.

“Leaving Wednesday. It sucks, but Emily’s parents won’t let us stay on our own.”

“Bummer. You’re going to miss the tribute band for New Kids on the Block.”

“You’re kidding, right?” She giggles. I feel relief. Giggling is a must. And I don’t know how to make jokes. It’s painful for me to have to make them because I’m not good at them. And these aren’t even jokes. It’s true that there’s going to be a tribute band for New Kids on the Block. There was a poster about the concert in the smoothie shack. I wonder if Dolores had noticed it, if she’s indulging me – if she’s indulging me, that means she’s already hooked on me.