Lauren Holmes - Barbara the Slut and Other People

He left me alone for a little while and then came back and started talking to me again.

“Do you need something?” I said.

“No,” he said.

“Okay,” I said. “Then please don’t wake me up.” But it was too late; I was awake. I kept my eyes closed until I heard him leave the apartment, and then I got up.

That night I told him I had a lot of work to do and shut myself and Pearl in my room. Pearl cried on my side of the door. I told her the Swiss guy wasn’t all he was cracked up to be. I told her he was prejudiced against pit bulls. When it was time for bed the Swiss guy said that he hadn’t been sleeping well on the couch, and could he sleep in the bed again. I didn’t want it to seem like I was punishing him for licking the roof of my mouth, so I said fine. But the next night I locked the door to my bedroom before he got home.

The less I talked to him, the more the Swiss guy talked to me. He mostly wanted to talk about Pearl. If she was awake he wanted to know if she was sleepy. If she was sleeping he wanted to know if she was really sleeping or if it just looked like she was. He wanted to know if she was hungry, and I pointed out that she had a huge bowl of food on the floor, and if she wanted to she could eat the whole damn thing. Instead she liked to eat a couple of kibbles every hour or so. The Swiss guy wanted to know why. One day he asked me if Pearl was going to work with me. I said no, she definitely couldn’t go to school, and he wanted to know why not.

In addition to talking about himself and talking about Pearl, he liked to talk about my kitchen. He didn’t like that I let the dishes pile up, and tried to convince me that it was better to wash them right away. He was also very concerned with whether my food was still good. I made macaroni and cheese and he wanted to know if the cheese he grated for me was still good, even though it had come straight from the wrapper. He wanted to know if the eggs I used were still good, and if the oil I made the potatoes in was still good. He did buy groceries once: more milk for his coffee, a tin of cookies, and a bottle of wine product. The wine product was made of California table wine, water, sugar, concentrated juice, natural fruit flavors, citric acid, and carbon dioxide.

I pretty much stopped talking to the Swiss guy, but Pearl didn’t. They spent a lot of time sitting on the couch together. He let her sit on his lap and he talked to her in a baby voice, asking her questions about herself. Once I caught him letting her lick his ear. He was laughing, and all of a sudden she licked his open mouth. I could only hope that Pearl had HPV all over her tongue.

I started going to bed at seven or eight, before the Swiss guy came home, and leaving before he got up in the morning. I didn’t see him at all for several days. I told my brother that I was running a homeless shelter out of my apartment, and he offered to come down to the city to invite the Swiss guy to leave. My brother was an amateur MMA fighter and worked as a bouncer, and he was good at inviting people to do things he wanted them to do. I should have taken him up on it, because I didn’t have the guts to do it myself. It was only a few more days until the Swiss guy was flying back, and letting him stay seemed better than having to talk to him to ask him to leave. He did end up offering to leave, several days after I stopped speaking to him and two days before he was going to leave anyway. I told him not to bother.

Then the Swiss guy mentioned that there was a chance he would be able to make a last-minute presentation at a conference in New York in two weeks. He wondered if he should change his ticket. I wondered what would happen if he tried to stay. I googled “how to evict a guest.” I didn’t mean evict literally, but it turned out that in some cases you did actually have to evict guests. If they stayed for thirty days, they would establish residency and you would have to legally evict them. And even before thirty days, if you asked someone to leave and they didn’t, and you changed the locks and put their bags outside, they could say that you had a verbal agreement and sue you for unlawful eviction.

I called my brother back and told him that I really didn’t need him to come down, but I was just wondering what he would do if I did.

He said he would ask the Swiss guy to leave.

“But what if he didn’t leave?”

“I wouldn’t give him the choice.”

“What do you mean?”

“I would tell him that it was time for him to leave, and if he didn’t leave on his own I would help him.”

“What do you mean you would help him?”

“I would give him whatever incentive he needed to leave, and if he still didn’t leave I would make it very uncomfortable for him to stay. And if he gave me a reason to remove him physically, I would do that.”

“Okay.”

“Do you need me to come down?”

“No, not yet.”

• • •

The Swiss guy wanted to take me out to eat to thank me for my hospitality. By that point I felt that the only way he could thank me was to fall off the face of the earth. He countered any excuse I gave with a different time or a different place. Finally, to get him to stop asking, I said maybe to breakfast on Saturday, the day before he was supposed to leave. He hadn’t said anything else about changing his ticket, but he hadn’t said anything about keeping it either. On Friday night when he wanted to confirm our breakfast plans, I told him that it was still maybe. I told him I didn’t know what time I would be up, and that he shouldn’t wake me unless the apartment was on fire.

On Saturday morning I woke up having to pee and looked at my watch. It was only eight twenty, and I was half proud of myself for getting up so early, and half crushed that I would have to face the Swiss guy so early. I lay in bed trying to control my bladder, and wondering if I could get to the bathroom and back without him knowing I was awake. Finally I couldn’t wait any longer. I left Pearl in the bedroom. I peed and then peeked into the living room. The Swiss guy wasn’t there.

I went back to my bedroom and wondered where he had gone so early in the morning. I looked at my phone to see if he had texted me. He had. Then I noticed that my phone said it was two fifty in the afternoon. I looked back at my watch and realized I had looked at it upside down, and it was in fact two fifty.

The Swiss guy’s texts said that he was leaving for the library, and then that he was at the library, and then he was wondering if I was going to meet him or not, because he was so hungry. I texted him back saying I guessed it wasn’t a good day. He said he’d been waiting for me. I felt kind of bad and decided it was worth the free pancakes if I only had to show up, eat them, and leave. To expedite things I told him to go ahead and order, but the food arrived quicker than I calculated, and by the time I got there he was done eating and my pancakes were cold. I ate them as fast as I could and he talked about how he really wanted to stay in New York for the conference, but if he didn’t go back to Switzerland he would lose those two weeks of unemployment pay. I couldn’t bear the sound of his voice.

Afterward I went to walk around Target for a few hours. When I got home the Swiss guy wasn’t there. I went to bed excited and anxious about the next day. The Swiss guy’s flight back to Switzerland was at eight p.m.

In the morning I stayed in my room until the Swiss guy left to get his stuff from his storage unit. He texted to say he would be back around two and had to leave for the airport at five, so I took Pearl out for a walk at one forty-five and got back at five fifteen. We had never walked so many miles in our lives. At five fifteen the Swiss guy was still there, packing. I offered to help him but he said he was almost done, so I offered to call him a cab. I saw the keys he had been using lying on the back of the couch and pocketed them. He knelt down to say good-bye to Pearl and they kissed each other. I helped the Swiss guy carry his stuff down the stairs.