I am too drawn to women. I see them in all corners of my eye and in the iris of my pulse. They fuck with my head like a kaleidescope. But I love their distance. Their beauty intensifies life.
I have a problem. I used to go to meetings for my problem. But every time I’d go, they’d make me stand in a circle with the other problem-havers, hold their hands, and proclaim to myself- and to them- that I was powerless over my problem.
I didn’t fuck with that.
Circles in general rub me the wrong way. They indicate forever. No reprieve. People like using ♾️ to talk about forever. But that’s just an 8 turned sideways. Don’t let them get to you. Don’t let them tell you you’re powerless over your problems.
Nothing good lasts forever. You wouldn’t even want it to. Remember that one episode of Family Guy where Brian marries the girl with terminal cancer? Only for it to turn out that she’s cured and they can be together ’til death do them part? Kubrick soundtrack while the camera zooms in on Brian. Chills. Fuck.
My conscious mind maintains this hatred for the ○, and I have an iron will when it comes to being a hater. All of this means little to my subconscious, which continues to yearn for immortality. Squirming and squealing for the ○, like a horny collegiate girl in the first few minutes of a solo masturbation video.
***
Ainslee and I broke up on a Saturday. We were seated on the stone barricade that separates the street and ping pong players in Seward Park. Various onlookers – some on uppers, others on downers passed by giving me death stares. Nobody likes it when a guy is within 50 feet of a girl who is crying. You should be consoling her.
A couple weeks passed. I couldn’t stop thinking about early days, as is often the case.
Ainslee and I first got together on a Wednesday. We were talking about paintings, and artists, and shit like that. I made sure to remember that she was a fan of the Impressionists, Berthe Morisot in particular. Things like this feel like they’ll become important at some later date, and so you try extra hard to remember them.
My memory doesn’t fail me but it regularly disappoints. It trudges shit up when I don’t really want it to.
In a lame attempt to feel closer to Ainslee and that time in our lives, I decided to travel to Washington, to the National Gallery, where two of Morisot’s paintings were on display.
***
I came up out of Union Station at like 3 in the afternoon. The Sun was bouncing off the white Bethel Granite. I squinted out into the plaza and found a Hispanic dude squinting back at me. He was seated by a statue of Columbus standing ankle deep in crystalline water underneath a stone globe.
He was working through a soggy Baconator. He caught me looking up at the globe, and back down at him, and then back at Christopher. In my head I was imagining the globe starting to topple from its stand, and both Columbus and the Aztec were bout to get Baconated. But he had no way of knowing this.
“Está de la caca.” The guy said, as I walked past him. I nodded and kept it pushing.
***
Being in Washington and not from, you’re keenly aware that you’re standing in the ruins of a greater civilization. But this truth doesn’t always present itself through changes in architecture and diminishing social cohesion. Instead, you’re faced with a hundred small I didn’t know what I had until it was gone moments.
As I crossed a pedestrian bridge, I saw a reporter set up at the railing a few feet off. Her hair was too dark and too alive for the wind. I noticed, while ogling at her, that something in mic technology had changed over the last few years.
Almost mechanically, I lowered my gaze from her mouth to her hands, hoping to see long slender fingers wrapped around something that looked like something else. Instead, I got pinky and thumb, pinched around a ball of fuzz. She spoke to it with full lips and practiced passion.
I mourned the past.
Underneath the bridge, guys with more to lose and less to care about flew past doing laps at three times the legal limit. I held on to the reporter’s voice as I descended down the other side.
“This morning Kyle Kirkwood took me around the track himself, and I want you to understand, at a hundred and thirty miles an hour, I was just starting to not even…hear myself think! Right now, you can hear these guys whipping past us at speeds upwards of a hundred-and-eighty miles per hour! And at one-eighty, thinking is the first thing that stops.”
What the fuck is she talking about?
***
The Gallery did something to my knees before it did anything to my mind. Pause. Wide marble stairs, climate-controlled air. I found the Morisot room by process of elimination, walking past D3 art-hoes and men in burgundy totes.
Two sisters on a couch. The Helvetica to the side informed me that Berthe was on the viewer’s left and her sister Edma was on the right. Two Sisters was painted by Berthe a year before Edma had gotten married and had given up her own painting practice at her husband’s request. Berthe was failing the green-line test. But I guess it’s different for women.
I thought about Ainslee and her sister. Unlike Edma and other women of the time, Ainslee didn’t suffer for the men in her life. It was something else entirely that stood headstrong in her frame, with a straight green line, pulling her into its gravity. And it cost her nothing to fail. I would be short a kneecap or a kidney no matter how straight I kept my spine.
I left Berthe behind me after a few minutes, and went to go see a man about a bull.
***
I’d seen the Toreador in college or something. The reproduction made him look peaceful. A gentle man napping in an ornate suit. But reproductions lie.
In front of me, he was a giant. Laid out as if to the full-width of the wall and at my own height. Black suit, pink sash, the latter still reflecting light.
My nose was only inches from the long-ago-dried paint when a guard walked towards me. I didn’t move. He came closer and stopped. His stillness made mine feel less transgressive and I remained there for another minute.
I couldn’t tell whether I was having a real experience or pretending to since the guard was standing right behind me. To come all this way and feel nothing—it wouldn’t be my first time. I inventoried the Manet to do something about it in my head later. Boot soles turned out toward the crowd. Sand. Peaceful face despite getting got. No sword. No bull.
On the other side of the hall were portraits of Dutchmen who were worthy of the artist’s time just for having lived well. The Toreador was proof you could also get put on the wall for dying pretty in front of the right Frenchman.
When I was younger, I pictured my own death being witnessed by a girl I loved. How would she react? Would it change her life forever?
Two days before I turned 18, Selene broke up with me on campus, I think on the way to a class. Some girl had sent her a “hey girly” message on Instagram, back when girls still did honorable shit like that. And hours later, it was all over.
I told her there’s no fucking way, that the other girl was lying, and that I was gonna jump in front of a bus. She screamed “Do it.” After that, I stopped wanting to die in front of girls and started trying to outlive them.
I had reached that threshold that people get to in museums and thrift stores. I couldn’t bear to look at another landscape, another face, no matter how beautiful. I walked past marble pillars and slapped ‘em, the way you would a bag of rice at the Asian grocery or the ass of a girl convinced that she doesn’t have one, and stepped back out into the afternoon.
***
Capitol Hill went orange and then a bruised kind of purple. My battery bar was yellow, down to four percent, and eventually the whole phone went black. Dry as shit ’til the very end.
Miscellaneous dudes were out selling nuts from carts and tourist couples rode on Lime scooters, balancing poorly or well in accordance with the strength of their relationship. I felt like Scrooge in that August weather.
Along with the Toreador I did my best to inventory the general shapes and attitudes of the mid 20s to late 30s women in DC so I could text a leer report to my boys back home. Performance review haircuts: shoulder-length, blown out. Two pantsuits, which is two too many. I stayed Scroogey until I pulled up on a gay couple fighting on the grass.
One dude was on FaceTime with someone screaming on the phone about how his boyfriend was always starting shit while the shit-starter cried into his shirt. I felt this was thematically owed to me and didn’t linger for more details. You only get so many free passes to mind your own business in a single day and I’d already burned most of mine on a dead bullfighter.
I hadn’t eaten in forever. I started to hustle towards Logan Circle in my Ted Baker Oxfords with the soles fucked up from all the walking on hot concrete. Está de la caca.
***
The windows outside the place were doing this wonderful amber dance and there wasn’t an empty seat to be found. The last time I was at Le Diplomate was the last time I was in Washington. I was here with Kiki.
Kiki’s real name was far more elegant. It honored, in unequal parts, her Choctaw and Irish roots. Kiki was her mom’s stripper name from when her family lived in Vegas. Kiki Jr. was then between the ages of seven and nine. “It was the only period of my life where I remember my mom and I getting along,” she once told me. Kiki began going by Kiki when we’d moved to New York.
Two-and-a-half years ago I was sitting across from her at one of these tables by the window, facing 14th St. One of us sulking and the other crying. Here now, I am merely a shape at the back bar. The shape is holding a glass, and the glass carries a small cold ocean, upon which three green vessels lie. Undisturbed, for now. Unaware of the wrath that awaits them.
Niña, Pinta, Santa Maria.