Oh My God, Whatever, Etc.

Leo met Lisa in a bar. It was the beginning of a long cliche: he sent her a drink and she looked suspicious, but he made no other move, just smiled and raised his glass to her from across the room, and kept his off her legs, Jesus her legs, and eventually she came over to say thanks. They didn’t go home together that night, but he called her the next day like he said he would and two weeks later was having to pull her hair out of his shower drain. After four, he was finding her clothes in his laundry, and at two months they were both calling his apartment “home”, on the phone or in the morning when they were both half-asleep and it just slipped out.

But it had been six more months since then, and Lisa was still getting up early to catch a nine-o-clock train and Leo was still staying out late to meet this kid for drinks to talk about some stuff, or going to a show to check out this band for that company. And eventually, on Saturdays when their schedules finally coincided, or at least overlapped, they had bags under their eyes when they looked at each other.

But Leo was okay with bags, okay with the amount of hair he’d pulled out of drains in the past eight months, because Lisa was still mostly really cute when she would storm in the living room after he got home early in some morning, rumpled with sleep, and snatch the cigarette out of his hand and tell him for the thousandth time not to smoke in the fucking apartment.

And so, sitting outside in a patio cafe, he’s taken aback, at the least, when she reaches across the flowering iron table to slip a cigarette from his pack. Parliaments, just because he thinks the recessed filter is hella sweet.

“When did you start smoking?” he asks and holds out his lighter.

She pauses to light it, and when she speaks the words tumble out shrouded in smoke.

“About a month ago.” Leo scratches his jaw and furrows his brow, and turns his gaze down to scan over the menu intently, even though he comes here at least twice a week on his lunch break, and always orders falafel.

“Leo,” she sighs, around her third cigarette and over her empty glass of Chardonnay. “Is this really how you want to be living?” “What?” he asks, and moves his fork to the side of his plate, next to his knife.

“With me, I mean. Us. Never seeing each other, arguing when we do... You know.” She waves her hand in a quick flip, sending smoke spiraling through the air between them, and for a split second he can’t see her for the silver-grey threads.

“Yes,” he says. “It is.” She sighs and crosses her legs, then uncrosses them again and leans back to let the waiter clear her plate.

“Well, I don’t,” she answers at the waiter’s back.

“So... what’s the alternative?”

She leans forward and touches his arm, rests her hand on his wrist. He doesn’t move, doesn’t even twitch, because he knows exactly what her alternative is and he feels like he’s sixteen again, when he accidentally fell on his favorite Fugazi album and it snapped in half right down the middle.

“We’re not getting any younger,” he can hear her saying when he’s back in his late twenty-somethings. “I want to go out and find someone I can actually spend the rest of my life with, and I think you should do the same.”

He’s known Lisa long enough to know that look, that whatever he could say or wants to say isn’t going to change anything, so he says nothing. He also knows that look she gets when she leans back again, folding her long hands on the table top-- that whatever she’s about to say next is going to kill him.

“Besides,” she continues, with flippancy through a forced smile, “our names are way too similar. It’s like Samantha and Samuel or something.”

Leo remains in his chair for a long time after she leaves. Most of the time, when these things happen, Leo feels like he’s the only stationary point in the universe. Not paralyzed-- he can move, he just isn’t, while days and lunches and girls go flying past him. He thinks, as he watches a young couple, maybe eighteen, take seats at the table next to his, that Beckett wrote something about that. About not moving while everything else spins in periphery. He hasn’t read Beckett since college, but he’s pretty sure that’s what the gist is. He should go back and find that passage again.

When he goes inside, finally, squinting into the dimmed lights after the blinding brilliance of outside, he steps up to the bar and orders a glass of something very dry to counter the wetness on his face. The bartender doesn’t notice, or doesn’t say anything if she does, and he’s relieved and thankful and really, really wishes she just would.

It’s their anniversary, or it was an hour ago, and that makes him sick and makes him want to laugh, because it’s so cliche, everything is so cliche, and because this happens to everybody all the time, probably on anniversaries, like in the fucking movies, and nobody is unique and his problems, this “problem”, women problems, is meaningless and it means everything to him. It was their anniversary, and now it’s not, and that thought also makes him feel like he hasn’t lost a single day, outside of eight months. He’s exactly where he started eight months ago, and that makes him feel a little better and a lot more lonely.

He tosses down a bill to pay for the drink, but when the bartender comes over she slides it back to him and smiles faintly like she knows. And she probably does know. She’s probably seen a million Leos trying to dry their wet faces with drinks.

“It’s on me,” she says. She looks young, and her voice is soft, and even if she has seen a million Leos, this one in front of her now is glad she hasn’t been jaded by them. But, he figures, she probably has her own problems, with Justins or Ryans or Marks. So he smiles back gratefully and orders two more with the bill, and hands her one when she sets down both.

“To women,” he says, raising his glass when she takes hers, “and how I’m done with them for good.”

“Then,” she counters, with an easy flippancy Lisa had worked so hard to produce, so recently, “to your right hand. And arthritis.”

He laughs before he even remembers what laughing is, and his teeth hit the crystal of his class, and she squeezes his wrist where Lisa had last placed her own hand, before she moves back down the bar, and he knows he’ll never be done with women, not even close.