Renata ♥ Mark: first two chapters

Ed: Working on a literary novel vaguely inspired by Diane Schuler, who was a seemingly normal suburban Mom who drunk-drove with her kids the wrong way down the highway and killed them all; she had hidden longstanding alcoholism from her family for years. I was inspired by that kind of self delusion to write a similar long form story.
 

1. Terminal

By the time I was 32, I'd made a private accounting of myself (the kind I did for the company in spreadsheets I pored over, spreadsheets which no one else engaged with, not in a real way) and squared the numbers away. I had everything I'd earned; whatever I still longed for, I figured the longing itself was due. I felt ashamed at even the prospect of pitying myself; I had never wanted for the house, the obese-corn-syrup sticky-fingered children (or, maybe I had, at least, successfully convinced myself those things weren’t for me). I was unmarried and I lived alone in a one-bedroom with good morning light and a dishwasher, and when colleagues asked how I spent my weekends I had a ready-to-go list of banal events to discuss that did not involve Tinder dates who tried to finger me at the wrong time, or who fingered me incorrectly, or didn’t finger me at all because I’d said something over dinner that made even a straight guy find me eminently unfingerable. 

The spreadsheets I busied myself with concerned a business built entirely on the premise that people will get hurt and someone will need a spreadsheet about it. I was good at a job that I knew very well wasn’t worth discussing with anybody, and getting any better at it meant nothing to anyone, not even the people who employed me. I found satisfaction in clean lines of numbers whose relationships to one another I knew intimately, and I mostly liked sending the spreadsheets in emails to c-suite guys who would have replaced me with an LLM had the technology existed at the time, because it meant that somewhere in the world the numbers became figures and those figures became people (people, I presume, involved in some horrid insurable accident). 

Importantly, at the time, I also liked finding myself in interpersonal disputes at work that largely couldn’t reach the levels of verbal conflict high schools and colleges previously allowed one to get away with; I found satisfaction in watching my colleagues filter their frustrations with me through some corporate stratagem. 

The conflict which consumed me that particular day started when Kevin Aldous stood up in the 9:15 and described, to the finance VP calling in on speaker, a reconciliation process for the exception queue that I had built, alone, over four consecutive weekends the previous spring (using my own login so everybody could see the timestamps were 11 p.m.). He called it "the workflow we've been iterating on as a team." I heard the VP's tiny disembodied voice say that's great work, guys, and I watched Kevin absorb the praise like a dish sponge sucking up soap suds, without any apparent awareness that he'd done anything.

I was excited by the opportunity to feel wronged, but I am not built for real-time correction. I am built for long, pored-over emails, written by me carefully to sound diplomatic while still undoubtedly proving that I was, definitely, certainly, the aggrieved party. By 10 a.m. I had a tab open with the exact dates of my login history for that project, which I’d typed into a separate document for reference for the eventual email I’d send Kevin, an email which I’d inevitably open via a cheery: Hey Kevin! Renata here. Just a quick issue.

I would pass Kevin in the halls throughout the day, on opposing trips to the water cooler, paper cups in our hands, and I’d feel the low mechanical hum in my brain of knowing I’d soon create a situation wherein Kevin would be forced to engage me in corporate warfare. 

By 6 p.m I still had a draft in my Outlook. I'd meant to skip the happy hour (someone from underwriting was leaving and there would be a sheet cake with her name not quite fitting on the cake’s face), but I went anyway, for the reason I did most things I didn't want to do, which was that not going required more explanation than going did. The bar was the same bar it was always at, two blocks from the office, exposed brick walls (in its last gasps of fashionableness), and a happy hour menu that used thesaurus words to describe cocktails with three ingredients.

Kevin was there, laughing at something, unbothered; the excitement I felt for the eventual moment he’d receive my email and receipts was nearly something sexual (this was something I did and would do often – get wires crossed between hostility and desire, and, for instance, find myself blowing a guy who I’d met when he played music too loudly on a bus). I got a glass of the house white because it was the fastest thing to get, and I stood near the window where I could see people without appearing to be conspicuously alone. I counted on someone whose friendliness I hadn’t earned, like Aimee from reception or Aimee from accounts, to eventually stop by and at least give me the dignity of looking like someone wanted my time.

I want to describe what happened next accurately, because I've thought about it since on quiet nights when I have time to myself, its importance is evident only in retrospect: I felt relief. Like some prey animal with bulging eyes, I sensed a threat passing. About halfway down the wine glass, the hum at the base of my skull ceased. Stopped, the way a refrigerator stops and you notice the quiet more than you ever noticed the sound. My jaw unclenched and in the sudden quiet I found I could think about Kevin the way I thought about the lined-up numbers of a spreadsheet: clearly, without heat, already halfway to a solution. I would let it go this time. I would still document it privately, I decided, and I would wait, because waiting cost nothing and I had an almost limitless capacity for it.

Predictably, one of the Aimees approached me and touched me on the forearm, with a quick “Well, hello there, Renata”. She started talking to me about her son, who was some form of retarded. I was thinking, though, of what had just happened inside me: there would be future Kevin-types, for sure, and what with having spent my college years and twenties drinking heavily. This Pavlovian conditioning shouldn’t have been new. But I looked down at my nearly-emptied wine glass that night, and, deep in my brain, behind a closed door, neurons fired and lined up, and a terminal connection was formed.

2. Submerge

By our third date, Mark Halloran was someone who revealed himself so fully, so earnestly, I figured I could read him entirely. I could sequence his DNA – each A, T, C, G in order – by the way he’d told me his favorite band was one that played at his alma mater’s tailgates, whose entire catalog was brainless post-grunge he was slightly too young for. He smiled at and introduced himself to strangers in a small-town way, and he got upset when I told stories about work where my colleagues were political and catty (I censored my own involvement in those stories’ bitchiness), and said he and his coworkers only argued over banal stuff like pizza toppings and then got over it by the time they were at the next house, scaling the roof for the gutters. He looked how he seemed, as well: an all-American mid-30s man with an acceptable amount of flab and swelling around the middle, but strong arms and a hard chest from manual labor. He had a full head of hair at the time with the exception of some thinning on the front, which I could tell brought him no self-consciousness. There was a wholesomeness to him that should have been unbearable, and instead I found myself checking it the way you press on a bruise. At the outdoor market Mark and I were strolling through, I remember thinking, in between shared glances at each other’s faces, that this man would soon find out who I really was. Every needless conflict I ever engaged in, every ex-friend and acquaintance who found me too unpleasant, too closed-off, would emerge from around the next street corner and depose me, depose us both, and unveil the real me. But instead of deciding to pull the plug early, end the date, block him, and therefore insulate me from any kind of autopsy, I instead allowed myself to sit in the anxiety of hoping I could fake it for Mark. I wanted, I suppose, him to rub off on me. 

The market was the kind of thing a town does to itself on a random night in July. We passed the over-enthusiastic cover band providing the ambient music, maybe a nepotism hire by the councillor’s nephew, and then the kind of guy who is always at these things selling raw honey, or organic fruits that look like abortions. There were drink tickets, torn from a strip like a raffle, one ticket per beer, and Mark had bought us each a strip of ten without asking, which struck me at the time as either wildly optimistic or a subtle audit of how much I intended to drink.

By his second beer I was on my fourth ticket. I want to be precise about this because I was being precise about it in real time. I held the remaining tickets tightly in my closed hand when I needed to get them out, so he couldn’t see how few remained, and hoped he was not keeping count. Every time I tore off a new ticket I did the math on whether he'd clocked the gap, and every time, he was looking askance, or introducing himself politely to a passerby, or pointing out a dog wearing a bandana, in a way I chose to read as genuine unawareness rather than the polite unawareness of somebody counting anyway and deciding not to say.

He gestured to the cover band. “Do you like the music?”

There was an obvious pause while I did the arithmetic on how to construct my answer. “I think someone’s Mom is very proud of them,” I eventually said, a small threatened-chimp grin. I studied his face, which remained neutral for a moment, and figured I’d ruined it.

“Practice makes perfect!” he finally said, a smile spreading across his face, showing the perfect amount of teeth. I’d found the line – the point where Mark would sit with some light teasing and play my favorite game of shitting on strangers  – and crept up to it safely. 

Somewhere around ticket five, something in me got looser. He was telling a story about his father teaching him to bait a hook, badly, both of them laughing about it, and I found I wasn't waiting for the punchline where I got to feel superior to something. I was just standing there letting it be a nice story. It occurred to me, with a pleasant, slightly stunned clarity, that maybe he wouldn't ever clock it — not because he was unobservant, though he might have been, but because whatever I was worried he would find inside of me could be fully submerged. 

This felt, for the length of ticket six, like the single most romantic thought I had ever had about another human being.

He asked, once, mildly, over the noise of the band murdering a Springsteen song, whether I wanted to get some food in me, and I heard three separate things in the sentence depending on how I chose to parse it: a kindness, a critique, or nothing at all, just a man who liked funnel cake. I told him I was fine. I was aware, in the sober fraction of myself, that I'm fine was doing a great deal of work for four words, words I released slowly and deliberately for fear of letting myself slur. 

Walking away from the festival later, his hand found mine in the ordinary way of someone who wasn't thinking about it, which was itself the whole appeal of him (nothing performed, nothing costed out in advance, free of irony) and I felt something that I would, if pressed, have called tenderness, although it was a tenderness I couldn't yet perform. I let his stand anyway. Everything about myself, I decided, could be reshuffled to make room for Mark – my personality easily muted; my life goals amended. 

After seven beers, the festival losing its luster, and sloshed, I agreed to follow him in my car to his new apartment. His nice but unadorned furnishings and functional bedroom, I felt, needed my presence to have meaning. I lay on my back in his room while he fumbled with a condom (he’d been in a long-term relationship for a decade prior, he said, no kids, but hadn’t used one since he was nineteen) and then felt lights flicker inside me as he kissed my bare chest and neck and entered me. Doing the calculus on the effort required to include and keep Mark in my life, still drunk, I orgasmed, and rolled over with him beside me. His reddened face and upper-lip sweat weren’t disgusting or unflattering but they were merely the constituent parts of a man who, I then calculated, would be with me for as long as I could make it work.