ARRvol34 master reduced - Flipbook - Page 102
There was a bad fight over something I never bothered to find
out about a week or so before Ashley and I actually had sex. Katie
was doing pushups, topless, in the kitchen, on her knuckles. Ashley
was curled up on the couch, waving a thin arm and then hitting
the couch for emphasis. She jabbed a finger at Bobby in the kitchen.
Brian, who at this point had gotten to know me well, said, “Bowie,
dude, don’t get involved in their fights.”
“Why not?” I really wanted to solve this. He’d probably say I was
scowling. My scowl is something of a legend: no one has ever fully
proved to my satisfaction that it is real, and I like to think of myself
as a perpetual smile.
“They do this, man, I’ve known them for years.”
“So that makes it right? Repetition?”
“No, it makes it repetitious.” Brian was a darling with replies like
that.
Because I wanted to have sex with Ashley and not with Bobby,
Bobby was wrong, even if I had no idea what the argument was
about. By pressing his wrong opinion repeatedly, his actions probably amounted to emotional abuse. A character from Borges’ story “Death and the Compass” supported my theory. That character
opined that while reality is under no obligation to be interesting, a
hypothesis is. When Bobby came out onto the balcony under the
plane tree, said, “Fuck that lazy fucking bitch,” and asked me the ritual “Wanna shotgun a beer?” I obliged him, secure in my moral stature. The character from Borges’ story was murdered because of his
elaborate hypothesis and insistence on fixing something. I wasn’t.
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Later, after Bobby had slammed the bedroom door, I informed
Ashley that I loved her and said something vague about us leaving.
It occurrred to me later that I did not mention a destination. She
