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ARRvol34 master reduced - Flipbook - Page 101

eyes the color of the underside of a leaf on a sunny day. I’d hold the
books like a triumphant hunter hefting game, and grunt nonsense,
all height and unearned, though encouraged, confidence. Ashley
and I would talk alone before Brian woke up, until Bobby came
home from work, tired and irritable. Bobby and I always shotgunned
a beer, and then he’d go with Ashley through the bedroom door.
Bobby was short, older than me, a beer enthusiast, and neither
especially brilliant nor remarkably stupid. At some unspecified time
in the past, he had been a powerlifter. Ashley wished he “still tried,”
but only to me. He had the sort of rounded back and thick neck,
though, that one associates with picking heavy weight off of the
floor and screaming “One more rep!” When he shouted at Ashley, it
convinced me that he had practiced.
He was at least a little stupid because he didn’t think much of my
habit of spending mornings working out using his weights, cooking
breakfast using his eggs, avocados, and toast, sitting on his balcony, and reading poems to his girlfriend because the two had been
arguing the night before about something irrelevant to me, the sun
sliding against, into, and through the leaves of the tree that hung
above the wood plank balcony. He never thought much about my
habit of playing Ashley’s favorite band’s second album around the
time I got into the only shower in the apartment, in their bedroom,
while she pretended to sleep and Bobby got ready to go to the radio
station. Radiohead. The Bends. High and Dry.
Ashley’s taste in music suggests to me now that she was not the
wholly passive object of what I assumed was my extraordinarily
seductive manner, because little in Radiohead suggests the wilting
damsel is real. That this was evidence that I shouldn’t have sex with
my roommate’s girlfriend even if I think I’m going to save her from
something not quite obvious, well, that never occurred to me. Or
that having sex with my roommate’s girlfriend wasn’t going to solve
the basic problem.
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