Barbara the Slut and Other People

“Huh,” she said.

“Why wouldn’t he?” I said.

“I don’t know, he can be so rigid.”

“He’s been really good,” I said.

Now there were more divers on top of the cliff and they stood in a circle and put their arms around each other and their heads down.

“When did you tell him?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “High school.”

“Oh my god. Lala. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It didn’t seem urgent.”

“Why are you telling me now?” She sounded mad.

“I don’t know,” I said. “There’s this girl and she thought I should tell you.”

“You didn’t want to tell me?”

“No, I did, I wanted you to know.”

Now one of the boys was climbing down the cliff, and he stopped and stood. The people around us cheered, and he flew off the cliff, his back arched and his arms spread like eagle wings.

“I wish you told me when you told your dad.”

“You weren’t there,” I said.

The diver entered the water with a high splash.

“You came to visit,” she said.

“I don’t know, Mom.”

She looked away and I could hear her breathing. “Lala, you are breaking my heart,” she said. She didn’t look at me. “I’ll meet you outside.” She walked up the stairs and I stayed and watched the cliff. The boys prayed and dove forward and backward and did flips and double flips. Right after they jumped they were still in front of the sun for a split second, and then they rushed into the water. At the beginning I had been worried about them, but now it seemed less real, like they were on automatic or something, or like I was watching them from very far away. From very far away I watched them jump off the cliff one or two at a time, and finally three at a time.

• • •

My mom was waiting outside the entrance for me. We walked back down to the Zócalo without talking. When we got there she said, “I guess you have to get on that bus, huh? If you want to get to the city before dark.”

“You could come to Grandpa’s,” I said.

“You know I can’t,” she said.

“I don’t really understand why not.”

“That’s okay,” she said.

We walked to the bus stop and when she saw the bus coming she hugged me.

“Bye baby,” she said.

“Bye Mama,” I said.

“Maybe I’ll come to the States.”

“Okay.” I hugged her again. “I love you,” I said.

“I love you too,” she said and kissed me.

I took the bus to the bus terminal and then waited for the bus to Mexico City. I was really tired. When the bus came I sat in my seat and closed my eyes. I imagined my mom on the beach, kneeling on rich people’s towels, telling them that the “See you tonight” underwear was her daughter’s favorite.

WEEKEND WITH BETH, KELLY, MUSCLE, AND PAMMY (#ulink_9b773e11-aaa3-53f5-b6a2-e5ba4874fd61)

They say men and women can’t be friends. Because men will always want to have sex with women, even if we say we don’t. We might even think we don’t, but if we see the wrong body part in the wrong way, it will be over. Our penises will end us. But I think there’s a loophole. If the man in question already had sex with the woman in question and was so drunk that he doesn’t remember it. Or he only remembers it enough to know that it was not good. And then the man becomes friends with the woman, and because he has no memory of her vagina, he doesn’t think of her as having one. That’s what’s up with me and my friend Beth. I don’t want to sleep with her even though everyone, meaning my sister, Kelly, thinks I do.

I’m also not gay. Which everyone, still meaning my sister, also thinks. That’s not why I don’t want to sleep with Beth. I’m attracted to women. I’m not attracted to men. But for a straight guy in New York City, I’m not doing such a good job. For a tall guy with almost all of my hair, I am not doing such a good job. I did great in high school. I did fine in the beginning of college. I did horrible later in college and after that I took a break. I’ve been trying to make a comeback since I got to New York. But New York is weird. And I live with my sister. And back to my sister, the point is she says I have issues. I’m sure I do, just not the lying to myself kind, or the gay kind.

• • •

I met Beth the first night of college. We got wasted and had sex. I did two things wrong. Apparently I laughed when she told me to lick her pussy. In my defense, I probably just laughed because I had never heard something like that come out of a girl’s mouth. And I had never done that before. I don’t know why, but I hadn’t. It’s probably better that I didn’t take my maiden voyage into that salty sea when I was blackout drunk. It turns out that I like it very much, but I found that out too late for Beth. I found that out with Tiffany, which was the other thing I did wrong. When we woke up in the morning, I saw Beth’s roommate sleeping in her bed, looking like half Playboy Bunny, half cross-country runner. Which is exactly my type. So I said, “Who’s that?” And that was Tiffany.

Beth, on the other hand, wasn’t my type. I could see that she was attractive. But I was not attracted to her. At least not when I was sober and had a better sense of how tall she was. I’m six one in shoes but Beth is six two, barefoot. And that morning when I stood up and asked who the blond angel in the other bed was, Beth stood up and told me to get the fuck out. I looked up at her and tried to rearrange my brain. Then I followed her instructions and got the fuck out.

You know the rest of that story. I dated Tiffany. The ratio of times I went down on her to times she went down on me was ten to one. Beth forgave me. We got to be friends. We thought it was funny that we fucked. I was glad I didn’t remember it. Tiffany cheated on me with four different guys. A new guy each semester, sophomore and junior years. I never would have found out except I met the guy from spring semester junior year. It was an Italian guy she was fucking in study abroad. I visited her there, in Florence, and we ran into him. Something was lost in translation and he thought I was her brother. He asked if I was as flexible as she was and he laughed. At first I thought it was some kind of compliment. Then I realized something was wrong. When it dawned on me what it was, I punched him in the face and broke his jaw and I told Tiffany I hoped she choked on his dick and died. Either that, or I cried in front of Tiffany and Luca the Italian stallion, and Tiffany broke up with me and put me in a cab to the airport with some napkins. I forget exactly what happened. I honestly thought we were going to get married. That’s how fucking stupid I was.

By that time Tiffany and Beth weren’t friends anymore. According to Beth, Tiffany was a motherfucking cunt. According to Tiffany, Beth was volatile and had no filter. Tiffany may have been a cheating whore but she was very polite. It drove her nuts that Beth said “pussy” and “retard” and told the chair of the biology department that her biology professor was the worst teacher she had ever had and demanded to know if he even had a PhD. I liked that Beth was rude. It was funny. And her referring to her own vagina as her pussy was disgusting and part of what made our friendship possible.

When we graduated Beth and I got an apartment together in town. I had been offered a job at the college’s development office. None of my other friends were staying around. My two best friends fled the country, one to China to teach English and the other to Haiti to be some kind of hero. Beth wanted to stay in town to keep her suspiciously lucrative job at a pizza place. She worked three days a week and she was rich. I asked her more than once if she was sure they were only selling pizza. She said of course they were only selling pizza, expensive pizza. She took home two to three hundred dollars on a regular night, and she always wanted more shifts. One of the girls who worked six days a week drove a brand-new Mercedes and apparently slept with a Yankees player.

Beth got fat that year. She stopped exercising and she didn’t know how to cook. Whenever I cooked, she had already called for takeout. She didn’t eat at her restaurant because pizza was fattening, so she ordered from the Chinese food place, the Indian place, the Thai place, and the Korean deli down the street from our apartment where everything tasted like Korean food, including the buttered rolls and the brownies.

Beth and I got very comfortable in that apartment. I tried to keep up decorum but she really let it all hang out. By the end of the first week she was walking around in T-shirts and underwear. I had to ask her to put pants on if anyone was stopping by. I still couldn’t be sure she was going to. She left clumps of her hair on the walls of the shower. She left tampons bleeding through wads of toilet paper on top of the garbage. She never washed her dishes. We had cockroaches and she didn’t care. She talked to them. Like, “You little cocksuckers are getting big. You like that fucking pizza, huh.” It was like living with a much grosser but much nicer version of my sister. Or of Tiffany. Or really, a grosser but nicer version of any other girl. Beth gave me a hard time, for sure. But she also wanted to talk to me every day. She brought me pizzas. She watched basketball with me.

So I missed her when I moved to New York. We tried to keep in touch, but she said she was too busy to come to the city. I was too busy to go back down there. We were supposed to celebrate twenty-four together in August. We have the exact same birthday. But when she got to my apartment and I wasn’t home, she had a panic attack and drove back to Pennsylvania. My sister was the one who invited her because she said I was lonely. They wanted it to be a surprise. It wasn’t, because they kept asking me for each other’s phone numbers. Then the real surprise was that Beth didn’t show up.

Several weeks later Beth said she was coming to the city to see me. Then she said if I wanted to see her I could meet her and her friend Marnie to go salsa dancing. I did want to see her but not for the price of going salsa dancing. She said she was going to go anyway. I asked her why she told me she was coming to see me if she was really coming to see Marnie. She said I was being a little bitch. She said she knew it wasn’t my fault that I was so sensitive but it pissed her off.

I wanted Beth to come see me because I didn’t know anyone else. A couple of guys from college worked downtown. I had drinks with them when I first got here. But they weren’t close friends and they were hard to track down. Kelly wouldn’t let me hang out with her friends. She was still mad that I slept with her best friend in high school. This girl was unbelievably hot. I never would have gotten to sleep with her if she hadn’t been at my house every day of her life, and then decided to let me take care of her when she was drunk and on a shit-ton of mushrooms at a graduation party. The next night she came over to say thank you and that I was the nicest guy ever. And by thank you I mean she let me have sex with her then and several other times that summer. And that is called karma.

So Kelly made it clear that her friends were not my friends. Also because of Kelly, the women in my office thought I was gay, but apparently not the fun kind of gay. Kelly got me a purple shirt to wear on the first day. She knew I would think it was blue because I can’t see reds. It never occurred to me that she would do that again. The last time was in high school. She knit me a yellow hat that turned out to be pink. When I got mad at her about the purple shirt she said it didn’t matter what color shirt I wore. Everyone knew that all men in development were gay and all women in development were straight. Except for on the finance side, and then the women were also gay. In any case, my coworkers kept to themselves. I spent most of my free time with my sister’s dog, Muscle. Other than that I was all alone in the big city. Each night, as I lay under the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, under the polluted moon, I wept out of loneliness. Ha. Just kidding. But I was really fucking bored.

A month after Beth said she was coming to see me and then didn’t, she called. She said she felt bad about the birthday not-surprise and about the salsa dancing, and she was going to visit me for real. I told her I wasn’t going to hold my breath in case she couldn’t find a parking spot on my street and just kept driving until she got to Canada. She said very funny. She was coming Saturday.

On Saturday morning I made omelets for me and Kelly. Kelly fed half of hers to Muscle. Muscle was a Pomeranian. Kelly shaved him in the summer and it actually did look like he had muscles. But now he had long hair and Kelly called him Pammy because she said he didn’t have a penis in the winter. I preferred to call him Pammy year-round because Muscle was a stupid name for a dog. He was very cute and I loved him. He wasn’t mean like small dogs are mean. He would just sit and keep you company while you were watching TV or eating dinner or taking a crap or whatever. At night he liked to sleep between Kelly’s side and her arm, with his head on her shoulder. When Kelly was out he slept between my side and my arm. He loved to be under the covers except for his head. A tiny, very hairy, yellow person.