After dating a string of decent guys, the loudmouth girl started dating a loser. Most of her friends thought that the loser was ridiculous, a few of them thought that he was repulsive, and all of them hated his guts. But that was how it went with the loudmouth girl: You couldn’t figure her out, and you had no interest in trying.
The loser wasn’t a bad fellow. Maybe he was even a good fellow. Let’s stop the analysis here, though, for who among us wants to cast that first stone? At any rate, the loser knew one of the decent guys the loudmouth girl had dated; that decent guy had introduced her to him. The decent guy didn’t like the girl that much, and he didn’t like the loser that much. Together he liked them even less, but their affair wasn’t his business.
Except one night the loudmouth girl decided to make it the decent guy’s business. She called him. He hadn’t been expecting her call, but he knew she was unpredictable. He wasn’t surprised, but he was intrigued. What did she want from him?
The decent guy wasn’t that great, but he was better than nothing. Being better than nothing was all that decency, which had lowered its expectations in the wake of the Great War, demanded of people. Perhaps the decent could find out what the loudmouth girl wanted; perhaps he could wrest an answer from her; perhaps he could salvage his better than nothingness and move on with his life. He convinced himself that if he met with her, everything would work out for the best in this best of all possible worlds.
They met at his office and then went to a bar, whereupon the loudmouth girl began drinking beer. The decent guy also drank some beer, but it didn’t work on him the same way that it worked on her. She talked rapidly, and he struggled to follow what she was saying. What she was saying didn’t make much sense.
“I don’t know what I’m doing with him,” she said.
He didn’t know what she was doing with the loser, but he didn’t care, either. “It is what it is,” he said. He said things like that when he didn’t care. Of course, his not caring meant that somewhere in what remained of his better-than-nothing soul, he cared. Life is crazy like that.
“He’s got all these things about him that I don’t like, and I shouldn’t want to change him,” she continued. “But I do want to change him, and I know that’s wrong.”
The decent guy nodded, but he wasn’t listening. Should he be listening to her, he wondered? In his mind, which visited places he would never go and beheld vistas he would never see, he clung fast to his certitudes: faith, grace, hope, charity. He refused to share these with others. “You can’t change people,” he told her.
“He’s wrong for me,” she said.
Everyone is wrong for everyone else, he thought. “What do you want me to say?” he asked.
“What do you mean?” Her question didn’t sound sincere. In fact, it didn’t even sound like a question.
“Right now, what do you want me to say?” He knew she didn’t want him to say anything—that most people didn’t want their friends to say things to them, that they just wanted their friends to listen. She wasn’t his friend, though.
“I guess I wanted to talk to you about him. You won’t tell him I said any of this, will you?”
“Nah,” the decent guy said. What difference would it make if he did? He didn’t know the loser well enough to feel comfortable saying anything to him. “My lips are sealed. Your secret dissatisfaction is safe with me.”
A dozen beers later, she begged him to drive her home. He drove her back to her apartment in her car, then supported her while they walked to her doorstep. “Can you get up those steps?” he asked.
“I’m not going to have sex with you, if that’s what’s on your mind,” she said.
The decent guy didn’t want to have sex with her. He wasn’t sure he wanted to have sex with anyone. Gandhi didn’t have sex with anyone, he recalled, and Gandhi was more than decent. “I don’t think I gave any indication that I wanted to sleep with you. Besides, you and I were finished a long time ago. You’re with somebody else now. You don’t like him, but I know you didn’t like me.”
“You’re beautiful,” she told him.
He wasn’t sure if she meant it. Maybe she was trying to assuage his hurt ego; maybe she said it because he had paid for their beers. His own assessment of her attractiveness was moot. He wouldn’t have told her she was attractive even if she was. He didn’t say things like that. What was the point? “Yeah, whatever. True or not, it does me no good.” It did Gandhi no good, either, but at least Gandhi did good.
The loudmouth girl turned away from him. As she did, an SUV filled with drunken youths drove past. “Got yourself a real porker!” one of the youths shouted at the decent guy, who made no reply.
“What did they say? I didn’t hear them,” she said.
The decent guy chuckled. “’Got yourself a real porker.’” The loudmouth girl was far from obese, but that didn’t stop him from repeating the insult. He doubted that she could take it, but he knew that she would act as if she could.
“Screw them. I’m voluptuous. Don’t you think so?” she asked.
“Oh you know,” he said, which was another one of those things he said when he meant to say everything he ever wanted to say but found himself unable to utter one true word. “If it bothers you, you should start going to the gym.”
“Fuck you,” she said. “You should’ve defended my honor.”
“I couldn’t,” he said.
They parted like that. She stumbled up the stairs and he walked back to his apartment. As he passed through the quiet residential neighborhood that separated her place from his, he kept thinking about his last words to her. He couldn’t, could he? God help him, he couldn’t. Above him, the stars limned an infinite space.
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