08.20.2001
We were supposed to go up to the Red Vic and see a Kubrick movie but she dropped me a note via e-mail and said that she was going to have to back out because of a prior engagement to have dinner with a former co-worker. "Don't ever break a date," I replied back to her and said that she was more than welcome to come over once she was done. She said she would and I went to go see the movie with out her. It was a good movie, Kubrick movies usually are, and I walked home to my apartment, stopping by the grocery to get some food for the two of us to munch on while we discussed whatever it was that we talked about late at night. I always looked forward to seeing her and that night was no exception.
She finally arrived – ringing the doorbell two or three times – at one in the morning, far later than I was expecting her and the bell woke me from a nap I didn't remember falling into. I lived in a converted Victorian – a building that at one time was a single family home but somewhere along the line had been converted into separate apartment units and though they had separate doorbells, they were not equipped with buttons to let us buzz the ringer in. It used to be the mudroom or the kitchen, I couldn't figure out which, but it was on the ground floor towards the back, and I padded out to the front door in my bare feet leaving my unit's door open so as to not need my keys. When I flipped the bolt and opened the door I could smell the alcohol on her from two feet away and she looked like a wreck. Her short red-tinted hair stood up on end and her clothes looked wrinkled and something about them didn't seem to hang right on her frame.
Concerned I let her in and locked the door behind her as she stumbled into my apartment and crashed onto my futon which I had in it's bed form. Thinking I needed one, I opened my refrigerator – which was in the same room since my apartment only had two, the main one that served as den, kitchen, and alternated between bedroom and living room, and the bathroom – and popped open a Bass. She just laid there breathing looking at my ceiling and the nice molding that circled it. After a few minutes – not mad, but concerned by the state she was in – I sat down next to her and asked if she was alright.
"I'm okay," she said. "I had a very strange evening."
"Oh yeah," I said smiling. I was up for an adventure story.
"Yeah," she said and let it hang. She didn't look like she was going to add anything more.
"So...," I asked plainly fishing.
"Well, I went out to dinner with him," she started. "And this guy always used to hit on me but I kept telling him no because he's like forty and divorced with two kids."
"Makes sense," I added helpfully.
"But tonight he was laying it on real hard and I don't know." She trailed off.
I chuckled thinking about how ridiculous it was. "You told him you had a boyfriend of course," I said looking for the end and to find out how she got all messed up.
"No," she said and that was when the first pang of an emotion that I later came to label dread crept in. "No, he did say that he had some things I left at the office at his place and offered to take me there to get them before dropping me off here. So I went," she explained and I tried to add the hours up in my head to see how it got to be one o'clock but something wasn't right.
"Well that's nice of him," I said taking another swig from my bottle and then another to help give the first directions in case it should lose its way.
She gave a single sarcastic laugh and added, "Yeah. That was nice of him," and I took a third drink to help out the first two. Better safe than sorry was my attitude. "He had a good liquor selection at his place so we had a few drinks," she said. I could still smell them, I thought and inside hoped that my bed wouldn't smell of it after she spent the night.
"Oh, and then you came here," I added hoping that it would be the end of the story but, of course, there was more.
"Not really," she said. "We were sitting on his couch and he kept putting his hand on my leg asking me if I wanted to see the bedroom."
I already knew where it was going and could feel myself start to shake as the adrenaline filled my bloodstream and dread became my predominate emotion followed quickly by a sense of loathing. I finished off the other half of my beer and got up to go to the fridge. She paused while I did that and, at first, I was going to just get another beer, but the orange juice made something in my mind click. I pulled it out followed by a bottle of vodka I kept in the freezer and poured myself a screwdriver. That's the ticket, I thought, and instead of sitting back down beside her as I had before, I took a seat on my coffee table across from her.
"So anyway," she started again.
"Yeah," I said, by then not wanting to help out but just wanting to finish the story so I could appropriately react.
"He started unzipping my skirt from behind and I just kind of figured, you know, what the hell," she said with as much emotion as a DMV employee.
"What the hell," I echoed. "So you slept with him," I confirmed. I didn't want to misunderstand her.
"Sure," she said as though it was the most normal thing in the world to do in a situation like that. My first sip on my screwdriver drained half of the glass and I wiped my mouth with my arm.
"Well, shit," I said maybe more loudly than my neighbors would have liked and finished off my drink. "I'm going to have to think this over."
"Yeah," she asked curious.
"Yeah, I think I will," I said and reached again for my glass before remembering that it was empty.
"Why?"
"Because you just slept with another guy," I almost screamed. I heard something drop on my ceiling and I knew that the woman upstairs was now awake and not happy about being so.
"But I've been sleeping with other people the whole time we've been seeing each other," she explained as though a new piece of information I could have done with out was going to make things better. I looked at her gauging the velocity my glass would have to travel across the short distance between us to make a dent in her forehead and though I figured that it wouldn't have to be that hard I restrained myself. She, in turn, got more comfortable on my bed pulling up the quilt my grandmother had made up over herself and turning on her side so as to look at me through her blurry eyes.
"Look," I said attempting to remain calm but sure that it didn't sound as such. "I need to, uh… not have you over tonight."
"What," she asked sounding concerned for the first time that night.
"I want you to leave," I said again firmly proud of the authority in my voice.
"You're kicking me out," she asked and I realized that for the first time it dawned on her that her actions had consequences even if it only meant walking the block and a half back down the street to her apartment.
"Yeah," I said. "I'm kicking you out."
"But that's not fair," she cried like a little girl who had been stripped of her crayons and curled up further in my quilt. I wanted to scream so many things but I couldn't say a word. I was past words, I was an action man. I pulled the blanket off of her, lifted her dead weight up off the bed and with some struggle and tears from both of us forced her out of my building, shutting the purple front door once I managed her out onto the stoop, where she subsequently collapsed, and turned the bolt to make sure she couldn't get back in. The dread had passed and I was filled with a mixture of disappointment, fear, and sorrow. I wondered back into my room and poured myself another drink. I knew that it wouldn't do away with my feelings but I hoped to put myself into such a state as to hurt too much to think about them the next day.