Dagger Key and Other Stories

“Hey, man! Since you been with this chick, she’s got you so whipped, it’s like you’re not even the same guy. You’re all fucking oh-I-love-her-so-much-she’s-such-a-big-fat-goddess. You should hear yourself. You got me thinking about doing an intervention.”

Gerald has adopted an earnest expression that doesn’t quite cover up his underlying attitude, which you perceive now to be one of jealousy—you haven’t been spending much time with him since you hooked up with Abi and he’s taken it personally.

“I’m serious,” he says. “I’m thinking about it.”

“You’re being a real asshole, y’know.”

“You’re the asshole! Letting this cow lead you around by the dick!”

You open the door and Gerald, angry now, says “Carole, man. She was hot. I can’t figure why you broke up with her. But this one, she’s got a butt on her looks like a bagful of oatmeal. Maybe you got a thing for chicks who look like your mom.”

You jump out of the car, slam the door.

“Maybe you got a thing for your mom?” Gerald shouts. “Little Oedipal thing? Maybe that’s why you’re so into Miss Piggy!”

He says “edible” for “Oedipal.” You tell yourself it’s time you put high school behind you. Gerald’s trapped in a universe of Tool concerts, stoner weekends at Rockaway Beach and raves in some scuzzy warehouse with underage girls on Ecstasy, whereas you have moved on. Steaming, you flip him off as he pulls away from the curb, shouting something about “…fat bitch!”

Abi stands at the edge of the garden, her fingers black from grubbing in the dirt, and there’s a smudge on her chin, too, where she’s wiped her face; strands of wet hair cling to her pale cheeks. She looks like a sexy vampire fresh from a dirt nap. “Hey, angel,” she says, and asks who was the guy in the car and you say, “Just this assbag.” From the way she kisses you, a promise of more and better to come, you imagine that she must have heard some of what Gerald had to say and the kiss is your reward for defending her.

Gerald’s dismissal of Abi, however, has planted a seed and in the weeks that follow you spend a good deal of time wondering if your entire experience with her has been the product of a newly manifested perversion. The suspicion that your feelings might be unhealthy or somehow unreliable causes you to notice things about her that are less than ideal and you become aware that she’s far from the perfect woman you described. Her refusal to talk about personal affairs now strikes you as pathological. While she’ll go on at length, say, about the relationship between astrology and electro-magnetism, or the role of angels in human affairs, she’s reluctant to speak of anything regarding your relationship. This frustrates you—it’s like you’ve switched roles with her, like you’re the sensitive woman and she’s the uncommunicative guy. Equally frustrating is her tendency to talk about the end of the world as though it’s already occurred. Because of this, it’s impossible to make plans more than a couple of weeks in advance without prefacing the discussion by saying, “If we’re still around…” or something of the sort; otherwise she’ll point out the omission and maneuver the conversation onto a different track. Her passion for the rain seems demented, cracked, fetishistic; her diet gives you gas. Perhaps the most problematic of her flaws is a lack of empathy. Crossing a Safeway parking lot with her one evening, you encounter a deaf couple having an argument, a man and a woman of late middle age, reeking of alcohol, wearing soiled down jackets and baseball caps. Instead of making delicate, quick speech with their hands, they jab at one another with fists and fingers, gesticulating wildly, their fury all the more intense for its silence. Abi laughs and says disdainfully, “From a distance you’d think they were Italian.”

Taken by itself, it’s not an important failure. But it opens a door that’s difficult to close and you’re persuaded to believe that what appeared to indicate an insensitivity goes much deeper: Abi is contemptuous of everyone and, though you’re getting the best part of her, the kisses, the smiles, the sex, you conclude that her passion for you must be counterfeit and what you have assumed to be gentle teasing in regard to the movies you like, the books you read, your favorite foods, everything, has always borne the stamp of contempt…and yet you refuse to accept this as true. Your ego won’t permit it, nor will logic. If she feels nothing for you, why hook up with you? You decide you must be missing something. She displays such a narrow range of emotions, perhaps you’re overlooking some nuance that distinguishes her disdain from her affection. You can’t quite accept that, either (you’re not sure which are less trustworthy, your judgments or her emotional responses), but it makes a good fallback position.