And then I got an idea for an experiment. The kind of thing that was just too funny not to do. The kind of thing I absolutely had to do “for science.” I opened my phone and typed in the dark. “So I hear you’re single again. . . .” I paused for a second and then sent it to Jess. I’ll email May about all of this tomorrow, I thought. She’ll think it’s hilarious.
Then, tired from all the falling in love, I shut my eyes and tried to fall asleep instead. Felix was still up puttering around in the next room. I could hear him tapping softly at the computer, probably answering another email from another girl who rides the subway every day, some lonely girl who saw his post on Missed Connections, a complete stranger who “felt it too.”
CHAPTER 2
THE CAPTAIN
He was so earnest that she was surprised and impressed. Evidently he had deep-seated ambitions, for he seemed to speak with actual emotion of these despised things, which were so far beneath his planning for the future. She had a vague, momentary vision of Pitt, at twenty-one, prime minister of England; and she spoke, involuntary in a lowered voice, with deference:
“What do you want to be?” she asked.
George answered promptly.
“A yachtsman,” he said.
BOOTH TARKINGTON,
THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS
ON HEARING OF my plan to sell the T-shirts via eBay, The Bastard became excited and suggested that the shelf once emptied could be
his
room. “It’s practically a crawl space!” Felix shouted, motioning toward the boxes and bags still filling it. “My own place,” he dreamed aloud, “I could bring girls back here. . . .”
I became excited, too. In selling the shirts, not only might I make a little money, but I’d be performing a good deed by providing a home for The Bastard. With this in mind, The Captain came over with his digital camera yesterday.
We began by spreading a sheet from my bed across the bedroom door to affect a professional backdrop. We had to hang it a few different ways before we could find an area without blood stains.
“Get off my back!” I yelled at The Captain after he made another crack about it.
“I’m not on your back,” The Captain said lethargically. The Captain’s always lethargic. And pale.
“Yes, you are. You’re right on it. And you can get right off! I’m a woman. We bleed. It’s a sign of my fertility. I’d be very turned on right now if I were you.”
The Captain—tall; pale, like the deck of a ship bleached by sun, salt, and air; and lethargic—looked at me and suppressed a smile. Or perhaps he was actually trying to smile but could only muster a crease. It’s hard to tell with him. I went into the bedroom to change into my first shirt and underwear set.
A few nights ago over drinks, he promised to help me set up an eBay store where I could sell my shirts. “It’s really easy,” he said. “I can help you with it, if you want. We’ll just need to take some pictures.”
The plan was that I’d model each shirt, and then we’d crop my face out afterwards. I confess I was excited to resume my modeling career. “I was a foot model back in high school,” I yelled from the bedroom. You should see my instep! I was the envy of all my classmates in ballet school,” I went on, and then added that it was my dream to be a plus-size model.
“I thought you wanted to be a writer.”
I re-emerged from behind the door. “That’s my other dream. Hand me a cookie.”
He looked around. “I don’t think you’re big enough to be a plus-size model.”
My face fell.
The Captain rushed to soothe me. “You’re too skinny, I mean.”
I pointed to the Mint Milanos next to a pile of dirty dishes on the kitchen counter. The Captain reached in the bag and handed me one as if it were a single rose.
I took a bite. “Just look at all this gristle,” I said, chewing and pinching my thighs as if they were Salisbury steaks.
“You could be a ‘skinny but flabby’ model. Is that a category?”
“Skinny but flabby, yeah. . . .” I considered, before wiping away the crumbs that had fallen onto my navy blue “Second Base” T-shirt.
The Captain snapped a few shots while I held in my stomach. “Tell me when you’re going to take the picture so I can hold my breath.”
The windows in my apartment are pretty large, and for a second we both looked out, wondering what the people across the street would think. I’d bought a set of blinds a while back but never bought a drill with which to install them, so I did the next best thing, which was to lay the rolled-up blinds on the floor beneath the window. They’re pretty nice blinds. I tried to get the ones James Stewart has in
Rear Window
. I’m a big fan of most if not all of Hitchcock’s window treatments.
“It kinda looks like we’re shooting amateur porn,” The Captain said. “Especially because you have all those weird bruises.”
“They’re decorative!” I said defensively, regarding a big one on the back of my thigh—from a party last weekend. I kept going in and out a window to smoke on the fire escape and got all banged up. “It’s amazing that it’s left such a mark,” I said, examining it. “It didn’t hurt at all at the time. Do you think I might have that disease where you can’t feel pain?”
“Alcoholism?”
“No. I think it’s called something else. Hold on, the sheet is slipping. Maybe we should tape it.... Captain, hand me the tape.”
After securing the backdrop, we moved on to the underwear, a black cotton bikini bottom. “Turn around so I can get the words on the back.”
I turned around so that my butt, covered by a swatch of black fabric with hot pink letters that read, “Bad Ass,” was facing him. “How’s that?” I said, straining to look over my shoulder.
“Hmmm,” he said, positioning the camera at various angles, searching for a flattering angle of my backside. For the shirts I’d been able to suck in, but we were a little stumped as to what to do about my sagging rear. “Hmmmm,” he said again.
“Maybe I can, like, tape it or something.”
I’d heard celebrities use tape for photo shoots, so I tried to improvise with a role of scotch tape from my drawing table. It didn’t work. After a couple minutes I just had a bunch of tape hanging off my butt.
“It looks like you’ve sprained your ass,” he said.
We troubled over this for a long time. “I don’t want people to take the phrase “Bad Ass” literally,” I worried aloud. “Like Bad—out-of-shape—Ass. No one’s going to want to buy that.”
“Your ass is not bad.”
“But it’s not good, either. No one’s going to want to buy these if they think it’s going to make them look like me,” I said, poking at one of my sad cheeks. “Sad Ass,” I mumbled, considering a new design.
Then The Captain had an idea. He suggested we do a shot with the underwear around my ankles.
“I have great ankles!” I said, trying to recover my confidence, which is very important for a model. So I put on my Ocean Pacific swimming trunks with the pictures of blowfish and seaweed on them and lowered my Bad Ass underwear to my ankles, which is when we encountered the next problem.
I hadn’t shaved my legs in a while. I hate shaving my legs; it always makes me pensive. I’ll be in the shower lathering up and think, if time and space are infinite, my existence will recur an infinite number of times, which means I’ll be shaving forever....
“Should I shave them right now?”
“No, it’s alright. I can just fix it in Photoshop later. Same as the bruises,” he said, fiddling with the camera.
The Captain snapped a few shots of the underwear around my ankles, but the pictures were still not coming out quite right. “Let’s take a break,” I said and repaired to the kitchen. “I’ll be right there. I’m just going to heat up some dinner,” I called out before setting the microwave.
“What’s that crackling?” The Captain said.
“The silver lining on your dinner. I don’t have any microwave-safe dishes. But these only have one or two trimmings of silver, so it just crackles—harmless optimism,” I said, waving my hand and then jumped with excitement upon the microwave’s last beep.
“Mmm, this is an old family recipe,” I lied, bringing out a bowl of raw carrots, paprika, a keychain with a wooden tropical fish dangling from it that a taxi driver sent me in a handwritten letter following a long drunken ride, a few marbles, and a pair of purple sparkly shoelaces in a soup of warm milk.
The Captain watched as I set the bowl down on my coffee table. “Do you think it needs pepper?” I asked, worried I under-seasoned it.
“What is it?” he said, suppressing a sneer, or trying to sneer. Again, not sure.
“It’s my own recipe. Take a photo! I want to make a whole cookbook. I have about five recipes so far. My favorite is grilled lampshade drizzled with Tic Tacs in a balsamic vinaigrette over a bed of pencil shavings. I haven’t made it yet, I just wrote down the idea. I’ll make it for you next time. We can do the book together if you want. We can wear fake mustaches in our author photos. Or,” I said, standing up, “dress up as gorillas.” I always stand when I get excited. I was excited, imagining us as gorillas.
The Captain took a quick shot of me, and then another of my dish.
I repositioned myself in front of the backdrop and posed.
After about an hour, we were finished. We still had a few shirts left to photograph but decided to save them for another time, to just start with a few for now. I took a couple of beers from the fridge and gave one to The Captain and then sat on the couch and lit a cigarette. Then I got up and went to the stereo and tried to find something good to play.
“I can’t understand it. I have tons of music, but there’s never a thing I want to hear. What
is
all this stuff?” I said, motioning to the mess of records without their jackets, loose CDs, and tangled tape spilling out from a pile of broken cassettes. I decided on
Felix’s Cool Hits Volume IV
finally, because it was already in the stereo. Daft Punk’s “One More Time” came on and I sat down, feeling suddenly sedate. It was the song. I’d heard it so many times, always falling for Felix’s reasonable plea. “Come on, just ‘one more time’?” Felix would say when I’d suggest he turn it off.
We sipped our beers and listened to the music in silence. “Would you like to have dinner with me?” The Captain asked.
“I’d love to!” I said, standing.
I went into the bedroom to get dressed. I put on a yellow long-sleeve floor-length evening gown with some kind of bamboo shoot print on it that I like because I think it makes me look like Phyllis Diller, and a pair of fake-diamond clip-on earrings that used to belong to my grandmother.
“How do I look?” I said, coming out of the bedroom.
“You look great,” he responded, lethargic again.
“So do you!” I said excitedly. The Captain was wearing jeans and a blue Friendster T-shirt that his older sister, my friend Caroline, had given him. She’d started working there after she moved back to San Francisco to live with her older brother whom I hadn’t met. “He’s sort of the black sheep of the family,” Caroline told me. “He’s a lawyer.”
We decided to go all the way to the restaurant downstairs, which I like a lot because they let me bring my backgammon board when the place is not too crowded and because, during the winter, I can get really dressed up and don’t have to worry about walking in the cold but just treat their dining room as an extension of my living room.
The restaurant had a two-for-one martini special, which I took as a sign that it wouldn’t be around much longer. In the brief time I’d been living there, three separate restaurants had opened and closed in the same space. This restaurant had an elaborate menu of specialty martinis. We started with two each. Then we ordered a bottle of wine, because one mustn’t drink hard liquor during dinner—it’s coarse—and waited until after dinner to order our second and then third pairs.
We ate and he told me about his current job search and how he was thinking of maybe going to college after all. He was only twenty-two. I’d forgotten. Then he told me all about
www.spaghetti-dog.com
, a webpage he’d created, which was just a picture of a dog covered in spaghetti that his aunt had sent him. The Captain had shown it to me earlier. “She’s single,” he said, as if that explained it. It was getting thousands of hits every day.
I sipped my wine and told him I was very excited to be dining with such an illustrious figure.
He shrugged. “It’s just for fun. For Christmas I built her a template, so she can upload additional spaghetti-dog photos whenever she wants. She’s decided to start a greeting card company,” he said, perking up so much that he almost looked alive. Then he told me about his erratic sleep habits and how that’s why he’s so pale.
“Like a wampire!” I said, pronouncing
wampire
with a
w
a few more times. “Wampire . . . wampire.”
Then he told me about Diane Sawyer coming to see his grandmother’s duplex where he’d been living for the last six months on the Upper West Side. How she might buy it.
The Captain went on about Diane Sawyer’s visit, and my attention went in and out as I tried to gauge whether or not he liked me. We had been seeing an awful lot of each other lately, and he did offer to help me with my website. But then, he’d never really made a move. Or had he? Perhaps he had and I was just too drunk to remember.
We had already slept together a bunch of times, though all we did was sleep. When we arrived back from Atlantic City a few weeks ago and he was too tired to get the train all the way uptown, I let him crash at my place, on my bed, with me. But it had been perfectly chaste. We were still drunk and slept in our clothes on top of the blankets. When we woke up we took off our shoes, ordered food from the diner around the corner, and watched
Attack of the Killer Tomatoes
on my bedroom TV. I have it on VHS.
I’d been at Lex’s ’80s party with The Captain the night before, and after Lex had finished deejaying, in a fit of old times’ sake we decided to go to Atlantic City. The Captain had never been and taking him seemed a good enough reason to go so we left straight from the club, me riding shotgun in Lex’s 1972 Buick Riviera and The Captain listless as ever in the backseat.