Watching Him Fuck Her (BUST)

(Originally published in BUST Magazine, 1995)

I knew the minute it started.

We were at that bar, The No-Tell Motel, and he did his trick with the coin.  He can flip a coin through his fingers, over the tops of his knuckles, smooth.  I suppose I once found this novel.

They were sitting just too close on the sofa, trading hot shoulder, and I was smoldering deeper into my vinyl stool, getting sticky and drunk.  It was a Friday night.  Fuck Night.  2:30 AM.  I saw him slide the quarter slyly from his pocket.

“Plato was a fascist,” he told her, shooting his cuffs.  “He thought he could dictate reality.”

I watched the coin flash and turn, admired his technique.  She looked lamb-like up at him, nodded yes.  And so, she was his for the having.

 

“Katz wants to have sex with you,” I told her.  We’re candid like that.

“What, are you kidding?”  Her tinny, cordless voice pitched up a little at the high end.  So she already knew.  “No way.  You think?”

Os course she knew.  Claudia’s a seasoned professional.  You don’t have to tickle her palm for her to get to the point.  That’s why we hang out.  We’re both women in the know.

“Don’t do it,” I warned her.  “For your own good.”

“Ucch, I would never,” she said. “Like I don’t know.”

Like I don’t know her, like she’s not practically my evil twin.  Like her motives are a mystery to me.  I’ve been there, I know.  Women.  You always want to think you’re who’s different.  But then, you’re just the one’s who’s next.

 

I met Katz through this chick Irma I used to work with.  Irma was cute, and she had her own little thing going on, but she was vapid, and Katz was bored of her.

He likes to flirt, he gives banter, and says a lot of witty off-hand things – insults usually, but so you laugh, so you like it, if you can keep up.

What he mostly does is, he pays a lot of attention.  He tilts his head while you talk.  He nicknames you, casually.  He says precise, perceptive things to you about art and philosophy.  You start to think about him while in the bath.

I ran into him in the street, on Broadway, alone.  He looked at me up and down and smiled as we parlayed.

“So how’s Irma,” I asked him.

He rolled his eyes.  “Who even knows.”

We smirked at Irma.

“You should call me sometime,” I told him.  “We’ll do movie.”

“I’ll do that,” he said.  “I think I will.”

The rest was automatic.

 

“Is Katz coming out tonight?” she wanted to know.

“I don’t know,” I said slowly.  Things must be thickening, I thought.  Claudia’s usually more discreet.  “Did he call you?”

“Why would he call me?” she squealed.  She’s got to get this voice thing under control.  “He doesn’t even have my number.”

Katz and I were over, but he was still around, in that indistinct, uncommitted ex-boyfriend way of his.  Or not really ex-boyfriend, Claudia reminds me, as never officially went out.

“Really, you guys were just seeing each other,” she said.

“For, like, three months, Claudia.”

“It was almost a year ago, though wasn’t it.”  Her fake offhand-musing voice.  Casual.  “I mean, aren’t you guys just friends?”

Like she doesn’t know.  Certain men are just taboo.

“Well you know as far as I’m concerned,” she told me, “he’s my dead dickless brother.”

And I thought, yah, whatever.

 

“It isn’t you,” he had said

“Apparently it isn’t,” I said right back.  “Apparently is isn’t me.”

He dumped me in a restaurant, which I hate, because you can’t make any kind of scene, and even if you cry the waitress knows and smirks all about it.

“Why are you making this such a big deal.”  Katz had restored to whining.  I was smoking up a small storm.  He showed me his empty palms, nothing to give or to hide.  “I just think we shouldn’t put pressures on us if we’re going to stay friends.”

The bile shifted in my gut and I put down my fork.  “It will be hard for us to stay friends,” I told him, “once I dismember you with a saw.”

But what are you going to do.  You can’t argue your way out of dumped.  And there were already other girls.  “Look,” he said, final.  “I’m just not looking for that kind of relationship.”

What a tired, tired line.  He wasn’t even trying.  “Oh, blow yourself,” I told him, got up, and walked out.

 

We were at the bar, getting woozy and snide.  Katz hadn’t shown up, and I could feel the dead wait for him between us, heavy like a lead purse.

“I’m bored,” said Claudia, making overlapping wet rings with her glass on the bar.

“It’s slow tonight,” I said.

She kept peeping over my head at the door, a spastic periscope.

“Ucch,” she told me, withering back down.  “I don’t feel like competing with any of these women for any of these men.”

I surveyed again the women in the crowd and instantly, exhaustedly, hated them all. I don’t know if I ever noticed before how much I am capable of hating women.  Especially when I drink.  Especially women who look like me.

This one chick by the back wall had my same shoes.  I hated her.  I knew why she was wearing those shoes, she was wearing those shoes to be stylish and cute and get fucked by a man.  Contemptible. Like I don’t know.  Girl, please.  I’ve spent twenty full minutes applying the no-makeup look.

“Ucch.”  Claudia leaned over, hissing.  “What does she, shellac her hair?”

We tend to hate the same women, that’s why we’re friends.

 

He insists that I broke up with him.

“Not that we were ever officially going out, or anything.” I say it before he can.

Katz’s story is, I was sick of him not acting the way I wanted him to – which is true – so I dumped him in a restaurant – which is a psychotic revision of history.

“I still thought we should see each other,” he tells me, which means:  He thought he should still be able to come to my house and have sex with me, or call me up late when he’s feeling neurotic, yet simultaneously remain free to nakedly scope other women, even sitting across the table from me at brunch, without me pitching a fit.

A likely story.  The long, drawn-out likely story out of my life.  Months later, I still wanted to take him home from bars.  Except I knew he wouldn’t go.

“You know, I ran into Claudia on the street the other day,” he mentioned, you know, incidentally.

“Really.”

“Yeah.” Dot dot dot. “How is she?”

“You tell me,” I said calmly. “You saw her.”

“Yeah. Hmmm.”

I was quiet, waiting, eyes closed over the phone. A year later, and he was still number one on my autodial.

“So, you think you guys will be at No-Tell tonight?”

“Who even know,” I told him, tired. There’s just no telling, with men.

 

“Life is so existential,” said Claudia. She was in high shine. Katz leaned over her, his arm against the wall.

They both had the smirk on, I noticed. It seems I noticed everything very much that night. I was in a hyper-aware state of drunk, stuck to my seat, struck dumb with déjà vu and blinding strobe.

“We’re going to go get coffee at Veselka,” she came over to tell me. He was putting on his coat.

I could invite myself, but why. I already knew. Claudia and I are the same kind, we want the same things. But there’s only so many of them, and there’s so many of us. You do what you have to.

“Is that okay,” she asked me.

I watched Katz light a cigarette and face the back wall, waiting for Claudia, waiting for me.

“Hello,” said Claudia. “All right?”

And I just kept watching, and I didn’t say anything, because Katz had just spotted the lookalike girl in the shoes. And for one bright, lucid moment I knew, if we all just stood there long enough, he could skip right over Claudia, and spare us.

“We’re going,” she said.

Oh what the hell, I thought. Why not let her suffer him. I was there once, soon enough she’d be here. I saw the coin turning in Katz’s hand.

He would fuck her, and fuck her over. I knew how it was. I felt him watching us, women. Let him have her, then.

“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” I told her, and kissed the whole thing goodbye.

Like I didn’t already know.