You (You #1)(68)

I spend day after day with Ethan and getting to know him is no easy thing especially now that I don’t get to tell you about him. You complained about the loud fan in the employee restroom and pushed me to replace it as anyone would; Ethan calls it a “sound machine” and claims it doesn’t bother him. He’s almost like a hermaphrodite, this kid, in a CK One asexual cologne 1992 sort of way. Without asking I can tell you that he knows all the words to “Gonna Make You Sweat” and he’d be at home on a dance floor sidestepping, clapping, and counting. Out loud. He’s aggressive in all the wrong ways and he was born too late and he looks tired at forty-one from years of hunting for a color-blocked, Rick Dees–narrated way of life. You can either feel bad for the guy or jump him and steal his wallet. He’s a litmus test of a person and half the customers meet his smile and the other half glare at him and I tell him all the time that he should work in an old folks home and I mean it. He could deejay dance parties for people in wheelchairs, on life support. People with crooked, chamomile-scented dicks and lazy, warped vaginas would spark to his total, complete, and tragically inherent want for a time long gone.

“Have a good one, ma’am!”

“Ethan, you don’t have to call everybody ‘ma’am,’?” I say. “Some people, some people you just wave or leave it at ‘you’re welcome.’?”

He won’t listen or learn or bend and I’m losing patience with him, with life, with humans. I have nothing left to crave and dream about anymore. I feel queasy when I look at him because he’s so fucking nice that he doesn’t mention you at all. He doesn’t lord his relationship over me and he says as little as possible about Blythe, which makes me like a pity case. All I have is a shitty memory of our quick sexual congress, your eight seconds as a monkey locked to my dick. Every day, the hotness in Macy’s seems cooler and the sex memories are like all memories, doomed to tarnish and weaken with time. You told Chana:

I just got too deep, too fast . . . again.

The again hurt and it’s all perpetually downhill. My days begin with stale Frosted Flakes and newly ripped jeans I forgot to wash, won’t wash; you were on them. I ride the train to work and I don’t care about the books because you’re not touching them. I check your e-mail ferociously. You go on with your life and you don’t write to me. I pick at the scab on my burnt finger. I don’t want it to heal and I want this pain and I tear at my finger that you liked so much that night in the horse-drawn carriage. My finger oozes pus and blood and pain like everything else in my life. If Ethan tells me one more fucking time that I ought to go get my finger checked out and sue the maker of the coffee pot—I had to think fast, you can’t tell the new kid on the register that you lit up your finger when you got dumped—well, if Ethan doesn’t shut his face he’s gonna get hit in the face, pus and all.

And even though you only worked here a short while, you were a permanent marker on this place. And somehow, it feels vicious that Ethan now stands in your place. He likes new things, crisp Gap “merch”—“What a great sale!” he exclaims as if I want to know the story of how he got his discount denim—and his button-down shirts—“On Tuesdays, everything in the clearance section at the Gap is an additional forty percent off!” he informs me, as if to mark my calendar, as if I asked—and every day he’s in a good fucking mood and clean shaven and tragically, pathetically hopeful that more good things are going to happen for him. Having Blythe has made him feel like a winner and he plays the lottery now. “Hey, Joe, maybe we can go in on a ticket together, you know, like you read about in the paper, those guys that work together and win together!” Every day he raves about his coffee—as if this is something that needs to be pointed out, that coffee tastes like coffee—and when it’s January, the most universally reviled month of the year, and it’s sleeting and the sky looks like acid washed jeans and the store has to be mopped three times a day because of slobs in their boots and slobs with their umbrellas, and he’s got to fucking sing out, “Don’t you love a gray day?” and when the sun does shine to mock us cuz it’s thirty-two degrees he’s got to sing out again, “Nothing like a winter sun, am I right?”

And the worst part is that he won’t hate me, Beck. I can ignore him and bark at him and he’s my dog, smiling every time I walk into the shop. He’d never kill himself either, even if he missed a 75 percent off sale at the Gap. He’s too mild. One day, when he first started, he showed up with a bag from Bed Bath & Beyond. When he went to take a shit—he eats too much bran, worries about his colon—I peeked in the bag. Do you know what was in there? I’ll tell you what was in there: a collapsible tray table. Is there any sadder purchase in this fucking world? Maybe a CD of C+C Music Factory’s Greatest Hits, but that’s about it. And I remember thinking, Ethan is gonna go home from the shop and make fiber for dinner and put the dinner on his new tray and watch network sitcoms and think about how funny The Big Bang Theory is. He will literally lick the plate clean and fold his tray table and put it in the place where he will put it every night for the rest of his painfully lonely, fibrous, organized life. But then he got Blythe. And I know they are together; I’m not an idiot. And now it feels like I’m the one with the fucking collapsible table and the world is upside down. You should be here, telling me what Blythe says about him in her stories. I need you. I need levity.