He apologized, said he’d had too much to drink. He withdrew, his body no longer on top of hers, replaced with the view from his big windows again, the endless mosaic of windows on black buildings, rows of squares, some lit up but most not. Music blared on his flat-screen television, bluetooth from her phone, which charged behind her. She checked the time—three a.m. She could’ve continued drinking, but it was evident the night was over. That’s usually what a soft dick indicates. She wasn’t too disappointed by his flaccidness; if anything she was relieved, wondering when and why she’d decided he was who she wanted. He was forty-seven and worked in tech but his hair wasn’t grey and his skin had no wrinkles. Several times she’d asked if he’d had surgery but he said no. She was fascinated but also turned off. What was the point of fucking an older man if there were no signs of wear? What was the point of fucking an older man when his name was Kyle? He paid for her car home and she scurried off, down the carpeted hallway and the elevator, then walking past the man at the front desk as her stockings fell, a polyester puddle at her ankles. Out the revolving door, up cement stairs, there the SUV was, waiting for her. The driver mispronounced her name, and she said, yes.
The stockings were her dead grandmother’s, handed to her in sealed packages in a plastic bag along with some jewelry and clothes. She’d placed the small silver watch on her nightstand and when it was really quiet she could hear it ticking. It was a brutal winter and she was often in bed, staring at the ceiling, listening to the passage of time. She read some books by Houellebecq and often found herself relating more to the disgruntled old men than the promiscuous young women they slept with. She underlined the sentence, “Anything can happen in life, especially nothing.”
When she was drunk, she liked to bombard men with the random question, “Are you mad at me?” Lately, without conscious decision, she’d shifted to asking, “Do you think I’m pretty?” It was a more obvious admission of desperation; it was like being on her knees. Outside Penn Station at four in the morning, she posed this prompt to the man selling soft pretzels. He answered that she was gorgeous and had a beautiful body. She handed him a twenty-dollar bill and told him to keep the change, but when he requested a hug she ran off.
There were a lot of people who were older than her and seemed to be doing a bad job at life. They were crashing out on the internet; they were doing lots and lots of drugs; they were ruining friendships; they were losing their jobs; they were joining cults; they were attempting suicide; they were crashing cars; they were spewing hatred and nonsense. She was just drinking and fucking too much, which didn’t seem like such a bad thing. Sometimes it could be a bad thing, like when she drank herself into an epileptic episode, but usually it was fine. She liked to talk shit about the people crashing out and destroying their lives because she felt superior to them. She was bad at life, but not that bad.
