It was a spur of the moment thing, and she was excited to have me. She was an old friend, a successful writer, and lived on a farm north of Kingston. The conversation was animated, remembering times past.
“You were always someone I knew I could turn to.”
“Really?”
“You looked out for me.”
Dopamine was a go-to topic. “Gotta get our shot of dopamine. That’s what it’s all about.”
“Swipe left, swipe left!”
“That’s what we do.”
I drove across the bridge later that day and thought about how we only spend time with one another to be disappointed. That is what we do. That’s what she would have said too.
“Have you seen Chris anywhere?” Blaire asked Davis, her heavy breasts pushing into arm. “Did he come?”
Davis looked around the half-crowded bar, the view of Granville Island and Burrard Inlet behind it obscured by the overpass stanchions. He didn’t recognize half of the people even though he had apparently been in college with all of them 25 years ago. “I thought he was dead.”
“Oh, hey, what?”
“Bad joke. I don’t know where he is.”
“Same old Davis.” She stepped back and crossed her arms over her beer. “Always saying crazy things.”
“That’s what my wife says too. She might be finally done with me.”
“Oh, hey, I’ve been there and it worked out okay for me.”
“I’m sure it will be fine. Yeah.”
“Hey, there!” Minnie, Blaire’s sister, arrived and kissed them both. “How are you, Davis? I haven’t seen you in years.”
“You know, living the dream.”
Minnie was prettier than Blaire but she had more a boyish figure and no breasts, not that Davis hadn’t tried back in the day. “You’re still writing?”
“I don’t know what I’m thinking. I personally hate it when people say that. ‘Living the dream’. It’s really stupid. Sorry about that.”
“Okay.” Minnie and Blaire laughed.
“I’m teaching. That’s what I’m doing, teaching. Although the way it’s going now, I don’t know.”
Minnie leaned in. “Nothing bad, I hope.”
“Bad? No. I think I’m going to get fired and my wife is kicking me out.” He threw his arms out. “But I feel good. I do. Could be the gummy bear, I don’t know.”
“Oh, hey, Davis, I’m sorry.”
“I’ve actually got a bone to pick with you?”
“Yeah?” She leaned in, smiling, and it seemed like no time had passed, like they were in a bar at college, and the weekend had just begun.
“You owe me money!”
“I don’t owe you money! That’s not true.”
“You’re right. You don’t. But what I wanted to say is that, as much I loved the good old days, there wasn’t enough sex.”
“You and Lynnie had lots of sex.”
“No, I mean me and you, me and Blaire, me and you and Blaire!”
They looked at each other, barely offering a smile.
“Not to be crass, but it would have been good.”
Minnie glowered. “Okay, Davis.”
“Hey, Davis, old buddy!” Jackson crashed into their tiny circle. “I haven’t seen you forever, man! Forever!”
“Jackson, hey.” David looked back, curious as to why he wanted to talk. They had never talked in college and, if anything, had been acrimonious. “What are you up to?”
“Who the fuck knows?” He looked back and forth between Minnie and Blaire hello. “Who the fuck knows?”
“Hey, uh…” Davis leaned into Minnie. “Sorry about that. I’m just…”
“It’s okay.” She looked over at Blaire. “It’s okay.”
“It’s okay, Davis,” Blaire agreed.
“Yeah, Davis, man, it’s okay!” Jackson slapped him on the back.
“I gotta go.” Davis was going to kiss Minnie goodbye but turned and fled down the steps and was in a cab. “Number Five Orange. You know it?”
Gustave Flaubert famously coined the term mot juste. The idea of finding the right word and avoiding synonyms to vary the language was famously seized upon by Ernest Hemingway in his autobiographic tale of boozing and writing in Paris, A Moveable Feast.
I always appreciated the idea and tended in that direction but have come to wonder if it is more so mot paresseux (lazy), just sticking in the word out of habit, rather than some kind of idealization. I still prefer the idea to Mot SAT, but it’s something to consider.
First, I dream up something in my head, a moment or a line like “I like that they like you.” That’s where I feel like a baby shaman. I make it into words, a little doll house as it were. I am proud of it. And then I think about it and kill it. It stinks.
I dream another thing like “gun laws around here”, and build again. I feel a better shaman now, almost through adolescence. I kill it again. It’s worse than the first, a foul mutant.
I think more about the dream of the thing, the essential little lines and light and capture what I can of that. I mean, I’ll kill it later. Just not now.
I know exactly who I fucking am. I have no fucking clue who I am.
These phrases go back and forth in my head like Mrs. Mulwray’s cries as Jack Gittes slaps the shit out of her in Chinatown. “She’s my sister! She’s my daughter!”
The recent obsession with a multiverse existence is not surprising, given the surge of the sad and lonely scrolling to the next seven-second moment.
I think about a moment when I was 25 where I had to make the call between working as a caption editor or assistant book store manager. I chose to edit captions and did that for several years before stumbling into education. Why? I don’t know. I could have made a publishing contact at the book shop and been a dozen or so books into my career. Or I could have been fired for yelling at customers for reading the Penthouse magazines. Or I could have murdered someone for losing the only draft of my first and great work. Who knows.
Where would we be if Trump had died of food poisoning as a boy? If Hitler had been aborted? If Paris had just kept his hands off Helen? Or if, as Gunter Grass posited in The Flounder, women had never told boys the secret of procreation and therefore held onto their super power. Yes, sadly, this verse is it, kids.
