You go to a bar where you meet a pretty girl. She’s blonde and besides you think she likes you; you’ve never been the recipient of much attention in that uncomplicated way. You remember the mockery of your sister’s friends which frustrated you but it all remained somewhat flattering – they complimented your green eyes, and made you draw their giggling portraits on construction paper. Still, the thought is acidic, and you splutter slightly as you sip your beer. She’s telling you about her cat who died recently. She’s almost crying. You soothe her. You say you once had a cat that died. It was your sister’s cat. You were rather fond of it. It trusted you in the end after years of wary feline avoidance, sleeping at the edge of your bed for that last month. Was it a boy or a girl? Perhaps “they” would be more humanizing in this case, since the mourning girl doesn’t seem to be very soothed at all, as far as you can tell. You touch her hand and admire her large breasts. You wonder if you’ve passed the threshold in which this is acceptable and welcomed and wonder vaguely if you might not be committing some socio-political faux pas, but she smiles and so you are no longer a Man in the general socio-political sense but a particular man she’s attracted to, sitting, conventionally enough, at a bar. But you don’t go home with her and you weren’t expecting to anyway. You mean, you weren’t expecting to before you met and she took a tearful interest in you, tending the void in her life recently left by her cat, but you go home anyway and your wife screams asking where you’ve been. You tell her you had to get out so you went to a bar. She says she wants to go to a bar. She knows immediately that’s where you’ve been, because all the whores are there. She’ll go to a bar because you do, and because men are still interested in her. Your wife talks about her legs for some reason, even though you don’t think men, as a rule, care much about a woman’s legs, to judge from your own gazing lustful tendencies at bars and other such places, but maybe she’s just raising a general point about her remaining youth because legs do, in fact, tell a woman’s age quite well, don’t they? You think about your sister’s friends who were always laughing around you and wonder what was so funny. Your wife runs out of the house crying at the fact you went to a bar and ignored all her phone calls. She says she’s going to fuck someone else. It’s rather crass, isn’t it? Life. You find it beneath you. You drink a beer and think about the pretty girl at the bar, and whether or not it’s proper in some broader socio-political sense – but who gives a fuck, really? – to call her a “girl” and not a woman but you still are, in some immovable ineffable core of yourself, the boy being fanned and petted by your sister’s friends at seven or eight or nine and drawing their portraits which they clutch to their heaving chests like saints in ecstasy. The boy is crying from the other room you guess because his mother has been yelling at him all evening about her father and he only dimly comprehends his predicament or maybe understands it with more force and precision than even you do, drinking your beer, because it is, simply and horribly, a predicament, the feeling itself, the anxiety of the harried ranting caretaker and the absent other who might soothe her but doesn’t or can’t. You should’ve fucked that girl at the bar. Why should your wife get all the action? You drink your beer and think about the past. You once walked miles to have sex with your high school girlfriend – miles through dark country woods scurrying with suspicious, invisible life. Rather cinematic. Ninth grade and making pledges to the other to marry after two weeks, and the stupid shuddering affirmations of love probably gleaned from films or pornography or pop music. You imagine the guy at the bar your wife will fuck. He’ll probably look like you. The boy is crying from the other room. You think you are the only truly adulterous figure in this relationship since the girl at the bar was blonde and your wife is brunette. She once told you if you cheated she’d kill you and the boy. Herself too, naturally. Anything goes in that scenario. She doesn’t care. Your girlfriend in the ninth grade said she thought about stabbing you when you broke up with her that summer. So what were your sister’s friends laughing at? Is any of this so funny? And, furthermore, why did the cat trust you so much, warming up to you in silent feline pleading, rubbing your thighs with its paws the month before it died? The boy is crying but you think you’ve got to find some answer before you can tend to him in his crib, to free him of his false assumptions about life, insofar as he has any. What would you tell yourself, for example, at his age? Avoid the whole game, buddy. Stay clear. Stay on the straight and narrow. Walk the line. Never grow up. You stand at his crib stinking of lager and with the best, most paternal of intentions, take him into your arms and hold him to your chest, mulling over the right words which will resolve the whole evening and help you forget.
“Life . . .” you begin, “Well, what can you say? It’s no one’s fault.”
And with that, you set the boy back down, feeling you said what most needed saying.
