Twenty-Two

Twenty-two year old Virgil sits with Anette, the second girl he’s ever been with, at a table in the back corner of her favorite sushi restaurant, the one he hates. It’s a busy place, and a line for the unisex bathroom starts to form right next to their table as soon as they pick up their menus. The people in line have nothing to do but look at them and look away, sheep-faced, as though they’re ashamed of having to pee or whatever it is they’ve lined up to do. Anette usually has to go a lot, every twenty minutes or so, and she wants to be right there when the last person goes in. Strategic. He used to think he liked girls who could drink hard, but that was back when girls didn’t want to sleep with him, and he hadn’t even thought about the mess. All the pissed jeans and late-night puke, thick and stinking of rust, not to mention morning puke, toxic leftovers that simmered at the bottom of an empty stomach and rose up watery and fluorescent, like mercury. When she started coming around, he thought pretending not to mind her messes could be his way of expressing intimacy, since they weren’t really talking to each other yet. But after a few months, he started to wonder how intimate he wanted them to be.

He’d decided he would figure out by midnight whether or not he could be with her, really be with her, because she’d asked him last week and he hadn’t said anything. It was, So where are we going with this?, followed by a shrug, like it wasn’t so important he needed to come up with something right then and there. And any other guy would’ve been happy with no ultimatum, because if he remained silent, or shrugged back, it meant he was technically still in kosher fuck-around territory. Virgil wished he could be that other guy, but since she’d brought it up, he’d been chewing his nails into the skin half the night, sweating and trying to keep from calling her.

The first girl he’d been with had shrugged like that whenever she really wanted something from him, and the whole time he thought he was off the hook for anything serious with her. When she tried to kill herself after a few weeks together, weeks that had raised his spirits and sent him to class blushing like a fourth grader with an apple to give to his pretty teacher, he could see that he hadn’t really been paying attention.

Anette sits sipping thimble after thimble of sake, eyeing the bathroom line. Two girls still hover there. She looks over his shoulder, pretends to count all the heads in the room. She tells him her shrink told her to try not thinking about her bladder (he’s also told her to cut down on drinking). A smear of black eyeliner covers her eyelids all the way to the uppermost creases. She sucks on an edamame shell for a long time, and he starts to feel uncomfortable. He folds his hands underneath the table, tries to squelch the clamminess. What else are they going to talk about? His palms swollen, icy. She reaches her arm out as the waitress tries to whisk behind the bar and orders more sake. They are waiting for defrosted sashimi that leaves a film on teeth the way cooked spinach does. Waiting for her to get up and go already so that she can sit back down for twenty minutes.

One girl left in line. Anette starts to look hopeful but doesn’t say anything. So, where are we going with this? she’d asked. This what exactly? Living in the moment with her, suffering the consequences? In his head he counted three months: January, February, March. All that time getting her up the stairs so that she could run puking to the toilet, always leaving a trail on the floor. Waiting, hope straining his cheeks, for her to come in feeling better, renewed. But always she’d come crashing into bed as far away from him as possible, too plowed for sex. She’d start snoring immediately, her tiny voice taking on the tenor of a wildebeest. He’d take off her shoes, socks. When they did manage to have sex, it was sort of wild, but he wasn’t always convinced it was her in there. Her high howls often woke his roommates on work nights, and also her screaming, probably faked orgasms, now that he thought about it. He’d come out of her and she’d be sticky and beer-smelling, laying there with a sleepy half-smile on her face. Like she was relieved it was over. On a good night she’d wait till morning to puke, but sometimes she’d puke right after. Motion-sickness, she’d say as though it were some sort of joke, the whole thing.

And she was funny, for the most part. Funnier than he was, his friends all said. Her friends were cool, too; he was almost surprised. He wasn’t sure when he first slept with her whether she had very good judgment. They liked to do crazy things he’d never heard of girls doing, like dumpster-dive and ride free on the backs of Safeway trucks going down Mission Street. Every month or so, a group of them would break into a shooting range in Hunter’s Point. Shay, one of Anette’s oldest friends, would bring her dad’s rifle, and they’d all take turns busting bottles. He’d never had so much fun in his life.

His stomach tenses as the waitress brings their food: a wobbly sashimi platter, the reddish-purple slabs issuing a conspicuous sheen. Finally, his girl whispers as she slides out of her seat. He hears the bathroom door wheeze shut behind her. A minute passes and another girl comes and rattles the handle, glowers, and stands there next to him. She eyes his plate. Her longish, windblown hair clumps around one shoulder as her shadow falls over the platter. Is that fish sweating?

He laughs and says, Whatever it’s doing, I’m not eating it.

I hate this place. My boyfriend makes me come here.

I hate this place too! My…

And then Anette comes out of the bathroom, and the other girl pretends not to be talking to him. They switch places. Anette leans in and kisses him, and when she backs away, he can see her small, hefted cleavage, the thin, dark line of it. A little thrill patters through his cock.

He’s relieved when, fifteen minutes later, he hasn’t noticed whether the girl with the mussed hair and the boyfriend has come out of the restroom. He’s probably missed the chance to inspect her tight jeans from the back, but he and Anette are talking now. He’d forgotten they don’t usually talk till there’s food and she’s peed. Three months and he’s still feeling new at this. He’s even eating, and although the fish doesn’t particularly taste fish-like, it doesn’t taste bad. He likes the king crab in the side salad. She tells him it’s made of whitefish dyed pink. She is actually pretty smart.

On the way back to his place she asks, Should we get a movie?, and does the shrugging thing again when he doesn’t answer right away. And he realizes maybe she isn’t like his first girl, maybe she just shrugs a lot. Maybe So, where are we going with this? had been about the Chinese food he’d been carrying over to his friend Tony’s place from the one restaurant in the neighborhood that didn’t deliver. In all the time he’d been awake nights, mulling over her question, he hadn’t thought about why he stopped by that night, rang her doorbell, asked her to come out. She lived out of the way, three and a half blocks, a hike to someone hungry and carrying hot food. He realizes he went and got her because he felt like it, felt like being with her just then.

They almost walk past the video store, but he grabs her arm. He turns to go in, and she stops next to the door to give a homeless guy their leftovers, a few tuna slabs and some rice they’d probably forget to refrigerate anyway. The man smiles up at her. Sorry, it’s just fish, she says. The man shrugs and says, That’s all right I guess. She waits for him to open the little paper box, and Virgil tugs at her sleeve.

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Amy Glasenapp is an MFA candidate at San Francisco State University and the fiction editor at Fourteen Hills. She just finished her first book of short stories and is at work on a novel.