Dogface Chapter 7 Part 2
So I employ metaphor with smaller targets. Soft targets, someone said once
I lost the fulltime placement I'm gonna deliver food on my bike or something
chapter 1. chapter 2. chapter 3. chapter 4 part 1. part 2. chapter 5. chapter 6. chapter 7 part 1
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Getting into Le Bain feels like entering a castle. Regular door guy was in the bathroom so Beth had to quote “Front Bunker” so we could cut the line. “Y’know, I was a fat kid,” Beth is saying to Mena as we head up the stairs from where the elevator stops. Trent interjects, saying “you were absolutely not fat. You were on TV - we all could see you.”
“Well, my old agent made me think I was.”
“You’re such a liar,” Trent says, laughing.
The top floor bar with its floor-to-ceilings windows is dizzying. My drink is barely in my hands when I see Beth, coat checked, in her underwear, slide into the heated pool. She holds a cocktail above the water. Mena is laughing, sitting on the bench beside the water. Steam rises from it, flowing around Beth’s face, lit by the below-surface lighting. I swig my rum & coke and remember that this is my 7th or 8th drink today. I feel guilty for looking at Beth so closely. I begin to ruminate intensely, my gaze switching back and forth, from her dancing form to the bartender to the towel rack to the guy in hiking boots and snow pants beside me. If Bart could hear my thoughts, somehow, he’d kill me. So I should stop thinking them.
You should not have lustful thoughts about someone with whom you couldn’t sleep. It’s ungodly. Imagine if your partner knew you found Mackenzie Davis from Blade Runner 2 attractive, how betrayed they’d feel. A relationship is two open wounds, grinding against each other, never separating so as to never heal. In one you lose every aspect of self; you dissipate into a cloud called “LOVE” in a vain attempt to find “HAPPINNESS” and you have to condensate again afterwards and it hurts like a chemical burn to do that.
I go upstairs to the deck, forgoing my coat. I figure for a moment, once I’ve surfaced, making quick eye contact with the small circle of smokers right outside the door, that my cigarettes are in my jacket. I remember, now looking at the closed-for-winter bar, that I haven’t smoked a cigarette in a few weeks.
“Could I bum one?”
“Go for it,” a white guy, maybe 6’4” says through his own cig. He pulls a pack of green Spirits from his puffer jacket and pulls one out for me. The girl beside him, 5’6'“ or 7” maybe, lights it.
“Thanks,” I say.
“Hey, do I know you from somewhere?” the girl asks.
“I don’t know. I go to college. Springer. I work at Donnie’s.”
“Oh, shit. Are you dating Beth Winkler?”
I choke on smoke and stammer, “What? She’s… a friend. Good friend. She dates my good friend, I mean. I mean, we’re good. We’re hanging out tonight. But no, we’re not dating.”
“You never thought about it,” the guy says.
“No! Not tonight and not ever.”
“Woah, dude. Chill out.”
“Do either of you know Myra Franken? Fuataga-Franken?” I can feel my eyes sting in the wind.
“Who?” The girl says.
“You alright, man?”
“I’m fine,” I say. “She’s a real Molly Millions-type. Around here.”
“Alright, man.”
They head in. Something’s happening tonight, I can feel it.
I sit by the hot tub and listen to Beth tell Mena a story that involves a stolen truck, exotic-fish-smuggling and a terrorist attack in Brussels.
“When did this happen?” I blurt out.
Beth looks up from the side of the pool, her head still resting on crossed arms. “It’s a script I got. Mena thinks I should do it.”
“One for them, one for you,” Mena says, beside me on the leather couch.
Beth slings a bit of water up at her, wetting Mena’s sneakers. “I’ve done like eight for them, Mena. My agent bought me an apartment. I just finished a Disney+ show. I need something insane or I’m gonna go back to film school.”
“Promise you won’t do that.”
“Bart says I’d make a good director.”
“No actor has.” Mena is laughing as Beth slings water at her again.
A mild-mannered “Hey!” floats over the hot tub. The towel attendant has stood up. Beth turns around, buoyant. I can see her cheeks rise from behind as she beams a smile up at this guy. “Hey, you’re Rainey,” he says. “Front Bunker.”
“Hiiii. I’ll behave, I swear.”
This moment is the last thing I remember. I wake up in Beth’s apartment. My head slips off the couch and that split-second of freefall wakes me up in a rush. I sit up. Mena is curled up in the love seat with a beanie pulled over her eyes. Trent’s bike has fallen over in the hallway.
There is a flash of light, outside the windows that line the bar. They implode, spraying shards of glass across the room. Mena jumps on top of me, as if to shield me from the torrent of skin-shredding crystals. Beth has ducked under the water. The towel guy is unscathed, though the blood of the busser beside him has coated his face and Standard Hotel-branded polo shirt. He’s grinning, unfazed.
I open my eyes again. Beth stands in her kitchenette, Airpods in, looking demurely down at her phone. Mena is standing over me, jacket on. “Joy,” she whispers. “I’m gonna go home.”
“Okay.” She kisses me on the forehead.
“Beth’s got a call." Mena waves at Beth and she smiles and nods back.
“Anyway,” Beth says. “Lemme see that action thing again. Uh-huh. Well, I’d definitely do it if it’s Gos’… Zoey Deutch?” She sighs. “Jeremy. Get this for me. This well is going to dry up eventually. No, not me drying up. Streaming money. It’s going. Recession! You know that…”
Beth’s not looking at her phone anymore. She’s giving the New Museum a contemplative gaze. “Think about it. You won’t have to buy me another apartment. Love you. Bye.”
I sit up, slowly. “Good morning,” I say.
“Hello,” Beth says. She groans. “You ever get mad at your, like, advisor or whatever you guys do up there?”
I belch, hard. “Sorry.” I sit up straighter. “Yeah, I guess I do. Not everything’s in my best interest.”
“No, it isn’t. It can’t be.”
“But he does know better in a lot of ways. Most ways.”
“Most ways…” Beth gazes off past me for a moment. “Do you want anything?”
“Like breakfast.”
“I was thinking water, or coffee.”
“You don’t have coffee.”
“Wanna get coffee?”
“Beth, I should probably get going.”
“Let’s stop by Think on your way out.”
“Whatever. Where’s my jacket?”
“What do you want to do after school,” Beth asks, drearily. We are sitting in the back of the coffee shop and I can smell the sweat on her body. I ordered a red-eye, though I am not sure what I’m doing later.
“Why do you ask?”
“Well, I was late to college, and I was already successful and I feel like I never got the change to build anything.”
“I don’t think I’m building anything in school right now.”
She tilts an eyebrow.
“I’m afraid to ask anything of anybody, and I don’t know how I’m going to get a reference to do anything. I got the job at Donnie’s because someone had run their SUV into a pole out front, and Bart and I were skating it, and Donnie had just reopened because he had prostate cancer or something, and he asked if I wanted to work there. That was like, 2016? And now I do emails and whatever for him.”
“You could work in the industry.”
“I don’t want to fight for scraps with rich kids.”
“That’s all I’ve ever done,” says Beth. She bristles, sipping her unseasonal iced latte. “Why do you hang out with Bart?”
“He’s my friend.”
“He’s a rich kid.”
“I don’t fault him for it.”
“If you’re so resentful, why keep him around?”
“I love Bart. He’s like, my best friend. And I’m not a child.”
“Huh?”
“I’m just projecting insecurity when I saw ‘fighting-for-scraps-with-rich-kids.’ I understand these systems eat people and chew them up, and I resent the systems, but it’s too Rage Against the Machine to address them directly. So I employ metaphor with smaller targets. Soft targets, someone said once.”
“Oh.”
“I mean, we’re friends.”
“That we are,” says Beth.
“Why do you date Bart? He’s not successful. Not yet. And you’re self-made.”
“I don’t consider myself self-made. I had to go on TV to pay my for my dad’s rehab. I wouldn’t have done that on my own.”
“So you were self-made and had dependents as a child. So it was harder.”
“No, Joy, I mean, my parents directed me in the right direction, and they had resources-”
“You were a child, of course you didn’t have resources. Why would a child-”
“I was making 150 thousand dollars an episode. That’s like a week of work! My mom and dad are set for life!” People are looking at us now. A girl peers over her laptop. A barista, pulling espresso, looks over his shoulder. I wince.
“Why are we arguing,” I say, like Bart would.
“You’re being mean!”
“I think I should quit drinking,” I say, after a moment.
“My dad’s braindead because of alcohol.”
“Can he still skate? Can he wipe his ass?”
“He’s not braindead, he just forgets sports statistics. And he relapses. He’s a drama queen.”
I laugh a little. Beth is smiling. “My dad’s dementia isn’t funny, Joy.”
“Sorry,” I say, still laughing a bit.
“You’re just hungover. ‘You can’t see the back of your own head,’” Beth says.
“Who said that?”
“My dad.” She sips her drink loudly. The barista isn’t looking anymore. “Mena likes you.”
“Amazing.”
“You should make an honest woman out of her.”
“I can’t do distance.”
“From the way Bart puts it, you can’t do anything. Are you afraid of love?”
I rub my face with one hand in exasperation. It’s dry. “Who needs it?”
“You need food and water. You need a place to sleep. But you need the other stuff, too. People do.” Her tone is suddenly serious. “You put yourself in love triangle shit because you like the struggle. You don’t have to struggle.”
“I knew that,” I say, after a moment. Beth has placed her hand on my hand on the table between us. Great, I’m getting relationship guidance from the TV girl. The TV girl cares about me. The TV girl wants good things for me.
The shape of her face is different in reality.
“Going to the restroom,” Beth says, getting up. After a moment of my staring absently at the illuminated logo on the backside of the girl across from me’s computer, she asks me if that was Beth Winkler. Her jacket is huge, lined canvas, and it’s open and her t-shirt says KALE ME in a boardwalk font and her beanie is pulled low over box braids.
“Ask her.”
“You’re not famous, though. You’re a regular guy.”
“So I never get annoyed when people ask me about my famous friends? I could be famous. Maybe you just don’t know. I could be some kinda indie director or something. I’m not, but I could be.”
“Ok?” The girl shrugs. “Is that Beth Winkler?”
I shrink in my seat. “Yes.”
“Do you know Trent, then? From the podcast?”
“Yes.”
“Wow.”
“You owe me a coffee,” I say.
“Why?”
“For bothering me.”
“You’re doing it again,” she says.
“What am I doing.”
“You asking me out is avoidance. That’s what Beth was talking about. You’re afraid of love.”
“I’m not asking you out, you eavesdropper.”
“‘You owe me a coffee’ is asking me out-”
“Shut up. Shut up. We’re in a coffee shop.”
The girl stands up, sauntering over like a horse in weird clipless shoes. Her hip hits Beth’s chair and it squeaks. Her phone is in her hand, slipped out of a leggings pocket. Sorry, cargo-bib pocket. “Give me your number,” she says.
“Stop it.”
“We should hang out,” she’s saying. “You’re Joy; I saw you on Beth’s Instagram.”
“Then follow me,” I say. I don’t move to take her phone.
“You go to Springer. I go to Springer.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Class of 2022. Karl Friend is my advisor.”
“Fuck off, man.”
“See you on campus,” she says, walking back to her laptop.
I see the bike helmet hanging off her chair. “I hope you get hit by a cab,” I say, my voice cracking.
“No, you don’t, Joy.” She’s packing up.
“What’s your name,” I ask, softly. “Do you know Myra Fuataga-Franken?”
“Where’s she from?”
“I have no idea.”
Beth comes back over. “Meet my new friend,” I say. “The eavesdropper.”
“Hi, I’m Beth.” They shake hands.
“Ruth.”
“She’s been bothering me,” I say, smiling a bit. “It’s interesting.”
“He can’t see the back of his head, Ruth.”
“No, he can’t. He won’t take my number.”
“He doesn’t date black girls,” Beth coos.
“Hey! You don’t know that.”
“Bart says you made out with this one girl in high school and she’s gay now.”
“Every girl is gay,” I mumble.
“What?”
I call out sick on Monday. My mom wakes me up when she drops something loud in the bathroom and I can’t fall back asleep. I decide around 9 that I am not going in. I call Donnie and he says okay. I call Miranda and ask if she’s doing anything. She says she is going to the Angelika to see River Rapids. A Springer guy she knows is the writer’s agent’s assistant. Sounds cool, I say. She invites me.
I get there early and decide to have a beer upstairs. The cashier opens the Brooklyn Brewery thing before I can get it to it. I wanted to do that myself. She has those eyes where you can tell exactly where they’re looking, stark pupils dead set on the bridge of your nose. I nod and thank her; she grunts and heads back to the espresso machine.
I sit down at a table and make quick eye contact with the ticket taker. He is still wearing his beanie. They make him wear a suit, even for weekday afternoons. I guess that’s normal.
There is an older lesbian couple by the automatic ticket machine. It confounds the woman with glasses until the woman without glasses guides her hand to the right portion of the touchscreen.
River Rapids is a Neon-distributed filmed-on-a-iPhone epic about a lonely literary agent and her steely recent-grad assistant. It looks like A Teacher, I suppose. It stars a woman who looks eerily like Lindsay Burge but is not her.
I wonder what it would be like to bike places. I live too far from work. At school I worry about going under a truck or something, though why would that happen there and not here?
“You can’t take beers into the movie,” somebody says. I look up at Miranda, standing beside me. I stand to hug her.
“Miranda,” I say.
“Hi.”