| Solitaire |
It was the morning after for all three of us sitting around Chris' dorm suite.
Chris played solitaire at the table. I played the computer version across the
room. Robin painted her toenails. It was more a morning after for her than for
us.
A pizza box sat in the middle of the table. We hadn't bothered to put it in the
refrigerator last night, but we didn't much care. It still looked like pizza.
What's that joke? Pizza's like sex; even if it's bad, it's not that bad? Chris
picked up another limp, greasy slice and took a bite.
After chewing thoughtfully for a moment, she said, "It's good you'll never see
him again."
Robin answered softly, staring down at her neon orange polish, "I don't know
about never."
"Trust me, it's the best thing. I've warned you over and over, and nothing
helps."
Robin screwed the cap back on and hobbled around the room, balancing on
her arches. "Where the fuck are my cigarettes?"
"With your lighter," I said.
"Which would be?" she snapped.
"You took them both into the bedroom last night," I reminded her. When we
had needed the lighter for the bowl.
"Right," she mumbled, walking in her peculiar way down the hall. I didn't
know how she thought she'd ever see Rick again. Chris would be graduating
in a month, so our regular drives up here would stop. All three of us would be
living in the same state again.
"You understand what I'm talking about, don't you Jo?"
I turned to look at Chris, and I was ashamed to notice that her upper lip
needed waxing. It was kind of scary to think that she probably scheduled that
procedure around our monthly visit rather than her own boyfriend Dave's. Of
course, his visits were much less reliable. If we'd stayed away the usual
length of time, we'd never have seen her dark stubbly fuzz returning. If Robin
hadn't wanted so desperately to see Rick a second time.
I considered the most democratic response to Chris' question. It was
important to her, I knew, that at least half her audience caught the gist of her
lecture. It was important to me to avoid an argument with my morning
fuzziness, so I nodded. Whatever, I thought.
As Robin returned, sucking on a cigarette and walking practically on her
heels, Chris said pointedly, "Jo agrees with me."
Robin shot me a look, and I shrugged.
"You just want to be in love," Chris indicted.
"No! No. I – no. Uh-uh."
I turned to see them, and Chris urged me to join in.
"If you weren't more interested in him than you say," I said finally, "you
wouldn't have talked about him so much, or been so upset when he didn't call."
"No, no, see, you're reading way too much into this. We had sex, that's it. Of
course I was gonna talk about it a little. Don't even try to say you don't do the
same thing."
I didn't feel like arguing; it wasn't my fight. "Whatever," I said, turning back to
the computer. Red Queen, Black Eight, Black Deuce.
Robin sat back down, apparently sick of the balancing act, and poked at the
edge of the faux marble tabletop that was peeling off.
"Is there any pizza left?" I asked. Chris winged me a slice and started on a
second herself.
"And another thing," Robin said, "I don't understand how you guys can, like,
expect so much from me, I mean, when the two of you sat here waiting for the
phone to ring all night."
I was getting nowhere. All the cards were useless, and I'd been through the
deck three times. I hit Redeal.
Robin went on, "I mean, you, Jo, you let Mike treat you like shit, and you're
constantly forgiving him and making excuses for him. And when was Dave
supposed to come see you, Chris? Friday night?"
Chris sighed, sweeping her cards up into her hand again, starting to shuffle
them listlessly. "I'll never win this fucking game," she said as she redealt.
Robin was by far the prettiest of us, and I think Chris and I blamed a lot of our
inferior luck with guys on that fact. If we tended to get screwed and screwed
over, well, it was because we had to take what we could get. If Robin got the
nicest boyfriends, it was because slim, pretty redheads could afford to be
selective.
"At least I was honest about what I was getting out of this," Robin continued.
"I never expected this thing with Rick to go on forever. Not even for a little
while. I mean, we don't have that much in common, and we don't know each
other that well. I went into this with no false intentions. I have been fucking
him every bit as much as he's been fucking me."
"I think, Robin," I said, "that Chris expects more from you than she does from
herself. I know I feel that way. It may not be fair, but of the three of us, you're
usually the smart one."
She was, too. She'd been in this long-term, monogamous thing for three
years, and she totally had her head on straight about school, and life, and
love, and all those things Chris and I messed up as a matter of course. It was
just a given that we would fall in love too quickly and let the guy run our lives
and break our hearts. Robin never seemed to have that problem. Until she
and Johnathan broke up the month before.
"You're right," she said, "it's not fair. I'm allowed to make mistakes, too."
"So you admit that it was a mistake?" Chris asked her.
"No. No. No," she said. Every time she said it, she sounded about to recant,
but she just kept on with her denial. At least, that was how I saw it, and how
Chris did too, I was sure.
"See, when I met him last week, I just wanted to get laid. It had been three
years since I'd been with anyone but Johnathan, and I wanted to see how it
would feel with someone new."
"You were bored?" Chris asked.
"No, I...." she trailed off.
I tried to finish her thought. "You were afraid it wouldn't be any good with
anyone but Johnathan, ever again. Right?"
"Maybe," she said softly.
Chris tossed down a card. "But you broke up with him," she reminded her, as
if that made all the difference.
"I know," Robin answered, sounding sullen and miserable. She picked up her
nail polish to do a second coat.
"I think she wanted to break up with him to make sure she really wanted to be
with him," I said. Robin didn't respond, so I went on, "Like if you eat nothing
but bagels for lunch everyday, eventually it doesn't matter that you know you
really like bagels. You feel you ought to eat something else just to make
sure. But if you've got some kind of commitment to bagels, you can't just
sample pita sandwiches without telling the bagels."
"Excuse me?" Chris said. Okay, the analogy did kind of suck, but I was
hungover, what did she want?
"I mean she couldn't sleep with anyone else without breaking up with
Johnathan, and yet she absolutely had to sleep with someone else to make
sure she really loved Johnathan. Get it?"
"Oh," Chris said. She began to deal out a new game, a version of solitaire
called Round-the-Clock. It's statistically impossible to win, though I've come
within one or two cards several times.
"I think, Robin," I said, "Chris and I sort of understand we're always going to do
the dumbest possible thing when it comes to men. But, we also sort of know
what the smartest thing to do would be. We know we won't do it, but we can't
help telling each other, in hopes one of us will eventually get it right."
Chris asked suddenly, "What do you think Dave is doing?" We kept quiet as
she answered her own question: "Prolly fucking some skinny slut." She
slammed the next card down with particular vehemence, then amended, "No.
He's really not the type. He just likes to think he is."
"Oh, cause it's so much better to be the type who wishes he could cheat, than
the type who actually could," said Robin.
"Oh, fuck you! You get to go home today. I'm the one stuck living upstairs
from Rick, listening to him talk about how hard he fucked you and how much
you loved it."
"Fuck him! Let him say whatever he wants. I was in it for the exact same
reasons as he was. He doesn't owe me anything."
It didn't really sound like Robin. She was such a nice person, and she wasn't
into casual sex. I happened to know Joe was only her third lover, and the first
two had been monogamous relationships that went on for years. Rick was
something special to her, even if not in the way Chris thought.
Chris was saying, "You've got some sort of feelings for him, don't even pretend
you don't. You can't have sex with guys just 'cause you feel like it."
"Why not? You guys do."
"You're not like us!"
"I know, I'm the one who isn't allowed to do anything stupid."
Chris had completely abandoned her game. Even I had lost interest in
solitaire for the moment. I turned to watch them more fully. Chris looked
Robin dead in the eyes. She said slowly, "Do you even think about how much
that means, that we think of you that way? That we fully admit we're a couple
of idiots, but we trust you to make sense? It's a fucking compliment. And
yes, you're allowed to make mistakes, but this? This was just stupid! You
went to bed with this guy you didn't know, but who lives right downstairs from
your best friend, so you were guaranteed to have to see him again. And after
last weekend, I told you what kind of trash he was saying about you, and you
still went to bed with him when you came up again. Do you know how fucking
stupid that makes you look?"
"Like I care what a bunch of strangers think!"
"What about what I think? And Jo?"
"If you mean to tell me that either of you could think less of me because of
this, then I have to wonder what kind of friendship this is."
"Well, what about the fact that you only come see me once a month, even
though you know how lonely I've been here, but you spend a single night with
some guy, and all of a sudden you're here two weeks in a row!"
"It's Sunday, Chris."
Chris was momentarily thrown off balance by the non sequitur. I knew where
Robin was going with it, though, so I turned back to the computer screen. I
didn't want to see this.
"What the fuck does that have to do with anything?" Chris asked.
"Dave was supposed to be here two days ago. Where is he?"
Chris got up and stalked into her bedroom, slamming the flimsy door as best
she could. Robin lit another cigarette. "Well, Jo? Do you have a side to take
in any of this?" she said angrily.
"Mike stood me up on Valentine's day."
"I remember," she said softly.
"Well, I didn't tell you what I heard later." I clicked on the deck and extracted a
black five. "He told his friends it didn't matter, because I was only seeing him
for sex, and I never cared what he did to me. He wasn't really my boyfriend,
so he could get away with it."
"God! Who told you that?"
"Candace. She was dating one of Mike's closest friends then."
"Wow...what did Mike say?"
"Say about what?"
"When you asked him about it?"
"I never asked him."
"God, Jo, why not?"
I settled a red jack atop a black queen and said, "Because if I admit what he's
done to me, that makes him an asshole."
"He is an asshole."
"And then what does that make me?"
From her silence, I guessed she understood. "Robin," I said, "whatever you
meant by going to Rick's room, you became in the eyes of anyone who knows
about it no better than I am in the eyes of all Mike's friends. I don't like being a
whore. It doesn't even matter that I know I'm with him for more than sex, that
I'm hoping he'll start to mean all the things he tells me. What matters is that
everyone else looks at us and sees a stud and a whore. I think you should cut
Chris some slack. She just doesn't want you to be like us."
Robin stood and walked over to where I sat. She walked almost naturally.
She put a hand on my shoulder and gave my hair a soft tug. "I love you, Jo. I
wish you'd kick that creep to the curb already."
Black queen, black jack, black ten. No use, any of them. "I'll never win this
fucking game," I said, hitting Redeal.
She stroked my hair. Smoke drifted down in front of my face. I leaned my
head to the side, finding her hip. I closed my eyes, and she let me rest there.
Chris played solitaire at the table. I played the computer version across the
room. Robin painted her toenails. It was more a morning after for her than for
us.
A pizza box sat in the middle of the table. We hadn't bothered to put it in the
refrigerator last night, but we didn't much care. It still looked like pizza.
What's that joke? Pizza's like sex; even if it's bad, it's not that bad? Chris
picked up another limp, greasy slice and took a bite.
After chewing thoughtfully for a moment, she said, "It's good you'll never see
him again."
Robin answered softly, staring down at her neon orange polish, "I don't know
about never."
"Trust me, it's the best thing. I've warned you over and over, and nothing
helps."
Robin screwed the cap back on and hobbled around the room, balancing on
her arches. "Where the fuck are my cigarettes?"
"With your lighter," I said.
"Which would be?" she snapped.
"You took them both into the bedroom last night," I reminded her. When we
had needed the lighter for the bowl.
"Right," she mumbled, walking in her peculiar way down the hall. I didn't
know how she thought she'd ever see Rick again. Chris would be graduating
in a month, so our regular drives up here would stop. All three of us would be
living in the same state again.
"You understand what I'm talking about, don't you Jo?"
I turned to look at Chris, and I was ashamed to notice that her upper lip
needed waxing. It was kind of scary to think that she probably scheduled that
procedure around our monthly visit rather than her own boyfriend Dave's. Of
course, his visits were much less reliable. If we'd stayed away the usual
length of time, we'd never have seen her dark stubbly fuzz returning. If Robin
hadn't wanted so desperately to see Rick a second time.
I considered the most democratic response to Chris' question. It was
important to her, I knew, that at least half her audience caught the gist of her
lecture. It was important to me to avoid an argument with my morning
fuzziness, so I nodded. Whatever, I thought.
As Robin returned, sucking on a cigarette and walking practically on her
heels, Chris said pointedly, "Jo agrees with me."
Robin shot me a look, and I shrugged.
"You just want to be in love," Chris indicted.
"No! No. I – no. Uh-uh."
I turned to see them, and Chris urged me to join in.
"If you weren't more interested in him than you say," I said finally, "you
wouldn't have talked about him so much, or been so upset when he didn't call."
"No, no, see, you're reading way too much into this. We had sex, that's it. Of
course I was gonna talk about it a little. Don't even try to say you don't do the
same thing."
I didn't feel like arguing; it wasn't my fight. "Whatever," I said, turning back to
the computer. Red Queen, Black Eight, Black Deuce.
Robin sat back down, apparently sick of the balancing act, and poked at the
edge of the faux marble tabletop that was peeling off.
"Is there any pizza left?" I asked. Chris winged me a slice and started on a
second herself.
"And another thing," Robin said, "I don't understand how you guys can, like,
expect so much from me, I mean, when the two of you sat here waiting for the
phone to ring all night."
I was getting nowhere. All the cards were useless, and I'd been through the
deck three times. I hit Redeal.
Robin went on, "I mean, you, Jo, you let Mike treat you like shit, and you're
constantly forgiving him and making excuses for him. And when was Dave
supposed to come see you, Chris? Friday night?"
Chris sighed, sweeping her cards up into her hand again, starting to shuffle
them listlessly. "I'll never win this fucking game," she said as she redealt.
Robin was by far the prettiest of us, and I think Chris and I blamed a lot of our
inferior luck with guys on that fact. If we tended to get screwed and screwed
over, well, it was because we had to take what we could get. If Robin got the
nicest boyfriends, it was because slim, pretty redheads could afford to be
selective.
"At least I was honest about what I was getting out of this," Robin continued.
"I never expected this thing with Rick to go on forever. Not even for a little
while. I mean, we don't have that much in common, and we don't know each
other that well. I went into this with no false intentions. I have been fucking
him every bit as much as he's been fucking me."
"I think, Robin," I said, "that Chris expects more from you than she does from
herself. I know I feel that way. It may not be fair, but of the three of us, you're
usually the smart one."
She was, too. She'd been in this long-term, monogamous thing for three
years, and she totally had her head on straight about school, and life, and
love, and all those things Chris and I messed up as a matter of course. It was
just a given that we would fall in love too quickly and let the guy run our lives
and break our hearts. Robin never seemed to have that problem. Until she
and Johnathan broke up the month before.
"You're right," she said, "it's not fair. I'm allowed to make mistakes, too."
"So you admit that it was a mistake?" Chris asked her.
"No. No. No," she said. Every time she said it, she sounded about to recant,
but she just kept on with her denial. At least, that was how I saw it, and how
Chris did too, I was sure.
"See, when I met him last week, I just wanted to get laid. It had been three
years since I'd been with anyone but Johnathan, and I wanted to see how it
would feel with someone new."
"You were bored?" Chris asked.
"No, I...." she trailed off.
I tried to finish her thought. "You were afraid it wouldn't be any good with
anyone but Johnathan, ever again. Right?"
"Maybe," she said softly.
Chris tossed down a card. "But you broke up with him," she reminded her, as
if that made all the difference.
"I know," Robin answered, sounding sullen and miserable. She picked up her
nail polish to do a second coat.
"I think she wanted to break up with him to make sure she really wanted to be
with him," I said. Robin didn't respond, so I went on, "Like if you eat nothing
but bagels for lunch everyday, eventually it doesn't matter that you know you
really like bagels. You feel you ought to eat something else just to make
sure. But if you've got some kind of commitment to bagels, you can't just
sample pita sandwiches without telling the bagels."
"Excuse me?" Chris said. Okay, the analogy did kind of suck, but I was
hungover, what did she want?
"I mean she couldn't sleep with anyone else without breaking up with
Johnathan, and yet she absolutely had to sleep with someone else to make
sure she really loved Johnathan. Get it?"
"Oh," Chris said. She began to deal out a new game, a version of solitaire
called Round-the-Clock. It's statistically impossible to win, though I've come
within one or two cards several times.
"I think, Robin," I said, "Chris and I sort of understand we're always going to do
the dumbest possible thing when it comes to men. But, we also sort of know
what the smartest thing to do would be. We know we won't do it, but we can't
help telling each other, in hopes one of us will eventually get it right."
Chris asked suddenly, "What do you think Dave is doing?" We kept quiet as
she answered her own question: "Prolly fucking some skinny slut." She
slammed the next card down with particular vehemence, then amended, "No.
He's really not the type. He just likes to think he is."
"Oh, cause it's so much better to be the type who wishes he could cheat, than
the type who actually could," said Robin.
"Oh, fuck you! You get to go home today. I'm the one stuck living upstairs
from Rick, listening to him talk about how hard he fucked you and how much
you loved it."
"Fuck him! Let him say whatever he wants. I was in it for the exact same
reasons as he was. He doesn't owe me anything."
It didn't really sound like Robin. She was such a nice person, and she wasn't
into casual sex. I happened to know Joe was only her third lover, and the first
two had been monogamous relationships that went on for years. Rick was
something special to her, even if not in the way Chris thought.
Chris was saying, "You've got some sort of feelings for him, don't even pretend
you don't. You can't have sex with guys just 'cause you feel like it."
"Why not? You guys do."
"You're not like us!"
"I know, I'm the one who isn't allowed to do anything stupid."
Chris had completely abandoned her game. Even I had lost interest in
solitaire for the moment. I turned to watch them more fully. Chris looked
Robin dead in the eyes. She said slowly, "Do you even think about how much
that means, that we think of you that way? That we fully admit we're a couple
of idiots, but we trust you to make sense? It's a fucking compliment. And
yes, you're allowed to make mistakes, but this? This was just stupid! You
went to bed with this guy you didn't know, but who lives right downstairs from
your best friend, so you were guaranteed to have to see him again. And after
last weekend, I told you what kind of trash he was saying about you, and you
still went to bed with him when you came up again. Do you know how fucking
stupid that makes you look?"
"Like I care what a bunch of strangers think!"
"What about what I think? And Jo?"
"If you mean to tell me that either of you could think less of me because of
this, then I have to wonder what kind of friendship this is."
"Well, what about the fact that you only come see me once a month, even
though you know how lonely I've been here, but you spend a single night with
some guy, and all of a sudden you're here two weeks in a row!"
"It's Sunday, Chris."
Chris was momentarily thrown off balance by the non sequitur. I knew where
Robin was going with it, though, so I turned back to the computer screen. I
didn't want to see this.
"What the fuck does that have to do with anything?" Chris asked.
"Dave was supposed to be here two days ago. Where is he?"
Chris got up and stalked into her bedroom, slamming the flimsy door as best
she could. Robin lit another cigarette. "Well, Jo? Do you have a side to take
in any of this?" she said angrily.
"Mike stood me up on Valentine's day."
"I remember," she said softly.
"Well, I didn't tell you what I heard later." I clicked on the deck and extracted a
black five. "He told his friends it didn't matter, because I was only seeing him
for sex, and I never cared what he did to me. He wasn't really my boyfriend,
so he could get away with it."
"God! Who told you that?"
"Candace. She was dating one of Mike's closest friends then."
"Wow...what did Mike say?"
"Say about what?"
"When you asked him about it?"
"I never asked him."
"God, Jo, why not?"
I settled a red jack atop a black queen and said, "Because if I admit what he's
done to me, that makes him an asshole."
"He is an asshole."
"And then what does that make me?"
From her silence, I guessed she understood. "Robin," I said, "whatever you
meant by going to Rick's room, you became in the eyes of anyone who knows
about it no better than I am in the eyes of all Mike's friends. I don't like being a
whore. It doesn't even matter that I know I'm with him for more than sex, that
I'm hoping he'll start to mean all the things he tells me. What matters is that
everyone else looks at us and sees a stud and a whore. I think you should cut
Chris some slack. She just doesn't want you to be like us."
Robin stood and walked over to where I sat. She walked almost naturally.
She put a hand on my shoulder and gave my hair a soft tug. "I love you, Jo. I
wish you'd kick that creep to the curb already."
Black queen, black jack, black ten. No use, any of them. "I'll never win this
fucking game," I said, hitting Redeal.
She stroked my hair. Smoke drifted down in front of my face. I leaned my
head to the side, finding her hip. I closed my eyes, and she let me rest there.
