Alex considered the all-too-rapid decay of his memory. Images did not come catalogued according to time or place, or even with the stirring rises of emotion, but as reflections in misted mirrors or as isosceles shards gleaming hues that repulsed further engagement. And cross-legged on the floor, waiting for the numerical analysis class to begin, he blinkered, straining for respite, from the offers of a wealthier and more rousing future posted over the walls. He sighed. This too would be forgotten. Sandy, smacking gum across from him, her head too bulky for her thin short neck, would also be forgotten, and happily so her assertions of sexual rejuvenation due to perineum breathing. Next to her, Joey, who, with the open wet mouth of an infirmed, would nod expectantly to Sandy’s tantric stupidities, now aloofly reposed over his phone, an arousing band of skin peeking from above his waist; he too would be forgotten. And also the past four years of torrential enlightenment courtesy of the State of California’s taxpayers, Dad’s pushing for a garish graduation affair, the peppery orange scent that cut short his morning jog, the high-powered interview he really ought to prepare for, and even Dimov’s Herculean hands pinning him to the bed—All of these would be forgotten in two, five, ten years.
Then distress beckoned with another irate text message from Frank. Would he forget Frank too? That was too horrendous a prospect for him to ponder.
On these numb planes Alex skated through math and computer science, even the cultural studies class that usually paraded a weepy coliseum of sensitive feelings, and when he came home to find Susan in the front lawn, stooping over a row of budding irises, with her bottom round to the grinning sun, his numb soul quickened with smiles.
“Planting some origami blue and white flowers would be nice,” Alex said.
“What the hell is that?” said Susan, tottering upright with the help of her cane.
Alex came to her aid, but she, a scowl lending grit to her upside-down lips, shrugged him off.
“I think you’d like them. Blue and white, pretty all round,” he said.
“Whatever works is fine,” she said dryly.
Alex watched in a childlike awe as she, her cane picking at the ground, negotiated the front steps with a gruffness that well suited the dry plainness of her pulled-back red hair and her jeans bag dress. But even with all her bandy-legged bravery, she could not appreciate the soft and the gentle—he felt—much less grasp it. A fucking shame.
The sky suddenly transmuted an ashen patina, a miraculous grey to those who despaired of the supposed desert undergoing a supposed drought, but Alex detected in the western reaches of the sky cragged with grey clouds a coming cyclone of discontent. The interview better not suck. Bitterly resigned to a cosmic joke coming his way, he persevered through the day with mindless avidity. Bills were settled. Laundry was sorted. Susan’s medical appointments were scheduled. Then he plunged himself into the intricate task of preparing a supper that would tempt Susan’s particular palette.
When the evening descended, propping a gibbous moon atop the cypress tree outside, Alex was vegetating at one end of the sofa, the back of his laptop facing, at the other end, Susan quilting fantastic geometric designs.
“I’d have to look to wear for something decent for your graduation,” she said.
“Awesome, you’re coming? I’ll drive you around to the places you like.”
She gave a doubtful tick of the head. “Lianna wants to come. Rather she’s looking to me for free rent,” she said as an afterthought to a vicious needle prick.
“It’d be fun the three of us.”
There passed terrible sighs from Susan. “You should teach her how to boil water and maybe how to uphold certain standards.”
“Mom, come on, she’s fun. Her cherry-lime punches were delicious.”
Susan glared hard-lipped over a pointed needle; Alex retreated to the open page of statistics questions on his laptop. But the puzzles of Bayesian inferences or Poisson processes commanded less of his all-too-jittery attentions than the neural flashes to Lianna’s home brewing experiments. The hopped mead had been drinkable. The rye ginger grog had defeated him and Susan’s patience for exploding beer bottles.
He had paid his cousin three hundred bucks last summer to stay with Susan while he pursued an internship in New York. Susan had nothing commendable to say about his ‘gambling’ internship or Lianna’s manic company, but Frank, sputtering a gunfire of syllables, cheered the High Q jiggle index of her 40 DD breasts.
Alex rubbed his glazed eyes. The screen was rippling a surface of symbols and nonsense and he, now tumescent with feeling, gulped as Frank’s arousing echoes dampened all sound, all movement in the living room. He seized, slammed shut his laptop. He’s one hundred percent straight.
“What the fuck was Dimov’s bullshit?” Alex muttered.
Susan turned her bulbous head at him, and Alex smiled and re-opened his laptop. Statistics drifted away as he tallied his memories of Frank, his glances, his comments, his silences, in search of an irrefutable proof. The shorty, seating in Susan’s very spot, had laid out his Rube-Goldberg plans to fuck Lianna. Now that he thought about it, Frank never did say if he was successful. And there was the three weeks of indecision over whether it would be gay to attend the yoga class of a MILF instructor. Conclusion: very gay.
Senior year of high school, after a self-imposed experiment, Frank had reported, “Mom keeps trying to set me up. Dad’s even more a douchebag. My sister thinks I want to hear fuck all about her cramps and shoes. And my brother, get this, he asked me the other day which pants to buy? For fuck’s sake, you say your parents are hard asses because you’re gay, my parents turned into fucking wusses.”
Alex remembered the pain in his head, and the rage soaring through him. The shorty was fucking with him over something fundamental to himself, but Frank never apologized, not even bothered to apprise his family of the joke. That would happen three weeks later when his sister caught him at Newport Beach necking a busty lifeguard. Two months later, in a bid to exorcise himself to his outsized fury over the trivial joke, Alex extricated himself from all things Frank. By the end of senior year, they were barely speaking to each other.
Alex closed his eyes, took a desperate breath, and looked once over the amoebic shadows seeping over the coffered ceiling. The walls were solid, the floors sound, the house an enduring edifice to ten years of dubiety. A dangerous feeling tumbled through him, not unlike being unable to trust a judgment or an emotion, the constricting void glaring at him his own inanity and obsolescence. Alarming really, so alarming that he clicked furiously for his email, but the welcome page of five rows, bolded lines courtesy of a Frank scorned zapped him to bits.
Get over it already. So fucking what I ditched you? Alex deleted the emails with acerbic relish. Fuck yeah, he had been a dick, but that was the sum total of their relationship: disguised dickery.
Susan’s cool blue stare harpooned Alex, and his tenderly vile soul busted at the seams. He suppressed a shiver, reached for a glittering smile, asking, “Did you want some tea?”
“I’m all right,” she said dryly.
“Okie dokie.” Alex dropped back jauntily to the screen of emails then noticed Tony had invited him to a weekend beach thing. Tempting, but that was not the kind of thing he sought Tony for. Next. Tom found a place in shit hole Arizona where they could count cards in blackjack—Nope, didn’t give a shit about Tom—Next. And Jacob …
Sir Frowning Fucker was quite possibly a closet case as suggested by the bedside temple of portraits featuring a brunette lovingly draped over his muscle-slatted shoulders. But the hung Sir was his best fuck yet, even better than the Russian-whatever fuckface.
Alex peeked over his laptop as if to seek permission. Her eyes were sliding off in an hypnagogic runoff, and her timber fingers slackened lifeless over the quilt. Boyish thrill, erotic hard-headedness bubbled in him, spiked a high aching feeling, and he determined he could slip away and absolutely be back in an hour.
“Let’s put you to bed,” said Alex, still high, still hopeful.
“I’m good.” Susan shook off the soiled clothes of sleep. “What suit are you wearing tomorrow?”
“I dunno. Something I guess.”
“It’s an interview, not a day in the park.”
“As long as it’s clean and pressed, it’s all good.”
“If you were going clubbing than I bet you’d put more thought into it.”
“I won’t go clubbing in a suit.”
A bastard feeling crushed him with the sudden reminder of his promises: to be a good boy who would go on good dates, to be the dutiful adult who would be devoted to her needs for all his days. He closed Jacob’s email, closed the email window altogether, blinked blankly at the statistics page.
“Strange no? This is even the silly finance job you want so much,” Susan said.
“The brown one’s good enough,” Alex droned.
“Makes you look old.”
“Old’s good. I’d be taken more seriously.”
“No good if you look like those geriatric sociopaths you see on the cover of Forbes.”
Alex hopped up. “Do you want some tea?”
“No, thanks.”
“I need some tea. It’s going to be a long night.”
Stray glints glided along the chrome, the glazed tile, the rectangular glimmer of the microwave thrumming a low whine to his background noise of discontent. The microwave beeped. The phone buzzed. Fuck him, his mind blared as he pulled open the microwave and thrust his hand for grey-green mug. Five seconds later, a volcanic splash and a shatter dashed Alex back to the earth of his absurdity. He should have known better, but regret was no good against the sting searing his hands or the ceramic shards strewn all over the wet blue linoleum.
“Damn it!” Alex yelled, wringing his raw hands, “Damn this to hell.”
“Frederick Alexander Stanton, you need a bleach mouthwash over there?” His mother’s voice vroomed through his muttering curses.
The gravelly tone was sufficient to have him shriveling into the deformed husk of a little boy mumbling quiet furies. He tiptoed about the debris, thornily numb now, and ran cold water over his red hand. Amid the rousing rumble of the faucet, he salivated for a long, hard dick, preferably Jacob’s, just thick enough to spilt him wide open, and perhaps then he might disregard the small thoughts of her unconcern grinding away at the base of his heart. And the phone, in his pocket, buzzing—a lamed sack had waddled into the kitchen, with a maternal resignation to childish ineptitude crossing her glare snagged over the trenchant disorder.
“Well,” her eyes flickered in disbelief, “you managed to screw up tea.”
“Yeah nerves,” said Alex, with a twitch of a smile.
“The interview? You shouldn’t worry too much about it.”
“Goes without saying.”
“I’m rooting for you even though I don’t like the idea of the job much.” Her goodwill seemed palpable enough.
“Thanks. I appreciate that.” Alex sighed at the logistics of cleaning up the shards and spill. “You should stay back. I don’t want you to cut yourself.”
As dispassionate as she had come, she lumbered away, leaving Alex wedged at a lukewarm angle of unease. This was it, his mind whirred, this was the unexciting dregs of the hours to which he had to re-acclimate himself if there would be no Frank. As though a man preparing to dig a grave, he shut off the phone and began to clean.
The next day, the interview began with fiendish mathematical puzzles, and then came the psychological battering in hunt for his moral aversion for the blood and gore of finance, and then came the lunch ungovernable with his revulsion at the leathered langoustines, and then came the final leg of the interview, an evaluation by a middling colleague of the firm.
“Shit,” Alex muttered.
“That’s about right. Shit,” Dimov replied.
****
Ok readers, look for another chapter next Sunday.