Will Lyman — Portfolio

OUTSIDE IT WAS COLD: Fargo streets, no sun for days, cracked gray snow banks, and spitty rain. At some indeterminate point in the late morning I grew tired of the internet, all the voices online asking for pictures or me or if I was into having whole fists shoved inside me, so I pushed back from my desk in a grand, renunciative gesture, and I dollied around the apartment looking for some domestic task to indulge: doing the dishes (Nelson got on me for neglecting them) or trying with earnesty to cut my hair in the mirror. I liked physical things, stuff that forced me to pack my mind away when things grew too loud. ‘Loud’ was the word I used––broadly applied as a stand-in for any of its more accurate sisters: overwhelmed, deluged, glutted––when I couldn’t bear the Greek chorus of the internet any longer.

That day the task was the shoes. They piled in a corner near the front door, spilling over each other in a mess of laces and peeling soles. Nelson was a multi-hyphenate artist, so he lived in a state of romantic disarray, leaving the common areas a mess as though it were a requirement of his job. Thus, these spaces became a battleground for our animosity. Him, knowing I needed things to do, left chores undone. I always did them, thankful for the tasks but too proud to admit it. Then he’d use the cleanliness of the apartment as a litmus test for my overall well-being, which was a primary interest of his.

I made a silly mistake the month prior––completely unnecessary, really––which provoked his concern. One which, though sanctioned by my circumstances (hammered stupid off of Jamesson gingers after one of Nelson’s gallery parties, the welcoming den of our apartment, and a lull in conversation that called for confession) lands amongst my more prominent regrets. In that moment of safety, I divulged to my roommate, Nelson, that I had rejoined the chatrooms I used to frequent, Wireclub and Jerkmate and AOL.

Nelson had a particularly adverse reaction to this, acting as if I’d taken out a gun and shot a pomeranian on the street, but I didn’t think my lie was worth all the pearl-clutching. Nelson was like a nagging mother, a life coach, wedded to the belief that I had to be a noble person with admirable practices. But I didn’t want to do anything spectacular with my life like he did. I was fine with my mediocrity and flimsy moral code.

Within a year of living together, Nelson made me his project: monitoring my well-being, forcing emotional conversation midway through our episode of Survivor, and offering me a job as his assistant, which was as demeaning as it was well-intentioned. Nelson’s savior efforts, either a result of egoism or genuine pity, grew more concentrated over the Summer, like a frog brought to a boil. Until, I’d slipped up last month and told him about my chatroom relapse, which only increased the frequency and ferocity of his efforts.

Worse, even, was that I’d withheld the most damning piece of information. My screen name on these chatrooms was RecentlyBeraved, and I’d been telling everyone I met online that I was a widow for almost a year. I thought the screen name––taken from an ad about having sex with old women––was a comical flourish that could adorn my otherwise lackluster internet presence. No one told the truth online, and I could stand only to benefit from embellishment. The lie was barely legible to most, since half the guys online didn’t have that wide a vocabulary outside codenames for sex acts, and those who did understand either ignored it entirely or took its invitation to plunge into sympathy, which is of course what I wanted.

In the days leading up to my alcohol-addled confession, I spent most of my time chatting with TheIndianBoy, who was a user who lived in Chennai and took particular interest in “helping me grieve.” The false biographical detail in my profile prompted him to ply me with all sorts of sentimentalities: “im still here bb,” “I never leave u,” or “look at how much I love u,” sent along with a picture of his bare ass. His messages were dependable and pleasant.

In return, he was easily satisfied with a few offhand tales of snow and cold weather. He’d never experienced either. I amused him by talking about how the Twin Cities froze over, the lunar winter landscape, or how I had to pour boiling water on my windshield so I could drive to work. But since the holiday’s he had been letting me down: taking longer to respond or growing snappy during interactions that ordinarily would have lit him ablaze. I had no idea what was happening on his side of the world, but I sensed in his tone that he was fed up with providing me emotional support and was growing impatient with my refusal to send him any pictures of me. In other words, he’d put in his time and wanted to be rewarded for it.

But that wasn’t what I went online for. Chats that were overtly carnal felt tacky to me: like staged recitations from bad romance novels. I wasn’t looking to bog myself down in the bluntly sexual. That was cheap. What I wanted was to talk with someone whose words pierced through the sterile interface of the app, speared me right through the center––ravaged me, raped me. After years online, I felt solid that this was why I’d been doing it all along. That was why I had a dead husband, because I found his presence made strangers less likely to open with lewd starters, and more inclined to ask me how my day was.

I had work in an hour, and knew I better leave early since the weather would prolong my travel time, so I finished the shoes and got ready, pulling together what clothes I could from the floor of my room. Before I left, I noticed a paper bag of recycling leaning against the door––all unsorted paper and bottles and cardboard. Another task of Nelson’s.

//

The route I took to the cafe was a maze of residential backstreets, each marred in slush and dotted with little dogs in the windows of the houses. I enjoyed the ride because it was silent, meditative, and easy to look out on the skeletoned winter streets and let my mind wander to better places.

I worked in a cozy, hip corner of North Minneapolis where my sloppy wardrobe and complete indifference toward my customers was fashionable. I drove, paid for parking (ugh), and presided over the transitional hours where the poets stopped ordering espresso and landslided into wine.

Though I dreaded the moment of arranging myself and the awful slog of waiting until my car was warm enough to start, I was glad––when I stepped back and evaluated my life––that I had my job to buoy me between my more serious inundations of free time. The abysmal tips and the paid-parking made my job pretty much negligible in terms of productivity and profit, but I stuck with it because it reminded me that the world was right there in front of me, and that I could reach for it when I felt the time was right.

After I’d clocked in, swept the counter free of grounds, and declared the tips from the previous shift, the owner, Doug, came in from the office to rip me a new one. The night prior, I’d forgotten to bolt one of the windows, he told through discerning whispers. He’d had the great misfortune of discovering during the opening shift that the window had carried in a sweep of snow, which melted because of the heaters, and partially flooded the corner near the chess boards.

“It’s fine,” he told me, “but you need to be sharper on the point.”

I said sorry, ashamed by his warm reprimand.

Doug looked at me with the smug righteousness of someone about to preach one of life’s central truths, but then he sighed and let his shoulders drop. He reminded me of a teacher I’d had in grade school who I’d hated.

“All good, buddy.” He clapped me on the back with his tailored, old-sport approach, then left without much ceremony.

Without Doug’s big-brother eye, I didn’t do much. I watched the customers in their work-from-home glory, engaged in a competition of who could type the most intensely, imagining that they lived the life I once did when I was in school and read regularly: Poe searching through a crowd or Plato lecturing drunk men or Warhol transcribing audio tapes over 500 pages.

Then, frustrated from Doug and TheIndianBoy and Nelson, too––all of them: problems––I switched from my chatrooms to the location-based services, hoping to be linked to people nearby. I liked the possibility that brimmed when scrolling these faces, however slim a chance, I felt that each person coming through the doors might be there to fuck me or engage with me more seriously than the regular customers, whose eyes glazed over me in various smiles of transactional disregard.

A profile a mile away. Macksliksit. A few pictures of each of us that followed, shared without request. His face was sand-colored with wide set eyes like a chinchilla. He was thirty-eight, with visible tells of maturity: fine lines, loose, sand-colored skin. My favorite were his eyes, which were concave like a chinchilla, looking lived-in and real. “New here,” was his description, which sold me. I liked the double-edge of an older inexperienced person, tinged with unpredictability.

He wrote “Same here,” and it took a while for me to connect the various bits of information. “Who?”

“Husband,” he said. The blurt of happenstance stirred me. I looked around the cafe, exasperated, wondering how nobody else around me could be privy to such unexpected thrill.

“Same.”

“How does it feel for you?”

“Numb, you?”

“Like standing naked on the moon,” he wrote. The sentiment was artful, and a little dramatic, but I appreciated its frankness. I felt like I could understand him.

We spoke for a while, exchanging the regular demographic information. He lived a few miles South in Kenwood: the rich suburb with its dignified, brick-trimmed houses. In December, his husband died from a cholesterol deposit in his heart, and he’d taken to the chatrooms, like all of us, for the sweet relief of distraction.

He messaged as I was closing the bar: “Live around here? You should come over.”

The sheer unpredictability of the encounter was enough to convince me. The decision to follow this anomaly––I never encountered people like this nearby––seemed as natural and necessary as a next breath. Fly the coop. Jump the line. I said yes without much hesitation. After getting the address, mapping it, and calculating the time I’d need to shower at home, I left work––the glasses polished, the doors locked––in a frenzied giggle, racing back through the snowed-down neighborhood.

//

The sight of Nelson––home from work, splayed on the couch––came as a shock even though I’d seen his car in the driveway. On my way to the unit I’d hoped he would be asleep or otherwise absorbed in one of his creative ventures, which often devoured his time with a feverish intensity, but to my dismay, he was waiting for me. I stared blankly at him before staring off toward the bathroom.

“Headed out?” he asked me from the other room once I’d turned on the shower. I stripped down to my socks and let the water run warm, not wanting to talk.

I chose silence instead of answering him, for it was much harder to lie to someone in the room with me. Nelson also knows how to work a confession from me. I was certain if I responded or gave the slightest hint at my evening plans I would end up telling him everything––even the ugly bits. Nelson lost his brother two years earlier, so it wouldn’t land well even with him, the most sympathetic of parties.

Often our conversations were to this tune: muffled through closed doors, a word or two exchanged when coming or going. I held him at bay, trying to do the work of convincing him I was alright by tidying up the house, dragging it back to equilibrium.

The most extensive exposure I had to him was through his paintings, which overstayed their welcome in our common areas, propped against a wall to dry. He was two-years deep in a series of male nudes, which were like sexual still lifes: abundant and peach-colored and tinge with the faintest impression of rot. Last fall he had a display up at the Walker, but I wasn’t a fan of it––of any of it, really.

He yelled again after me. I cut the water and tried to explain that I had a dinner plan I needed to get to.

“At eleven pm?” He asked, staring me down as I dripped water onto the living room carpet. He wore a concerned, prying look on his face.

When I moved in with Nelson, I believed he would be the gateway to a larger, fuller life. And for a while it was like this: an ongoing charade of house visitors and cocktail hours with eccentric characters. Everything was Nelson Nelson Nelson! But we’d gotten muddied when, after one of these nights, he tried to make a move on me. The whole thing soured within an instant.

Staring at him in the living room, I felt nothing but disdain.

“Be careful,” he said to me as I grabbed my keys from the entryway. I stopped to stare at him, laying across the couch. “I still care about you.”

//

It was not often that I engaged people on these requests. For as much of a flirt as I was, I was terribly lazy. The exertion of scraping the bad breath from my tongue and choosing the right underwear often led me to defer to the smaller misery of my own company. Yet the present request from Mack caught me at an optimal moment.

I parked along Irving with a fringe of panic, sort of thrilled and anxious at whatever the venture had in store for me. It had not occurred to me at all that I may have to concoct some backstory about my dead husband. I’d never once been questioned on it, and I knew Mack wouldn’t press too hard.

He was waiting for me at the front door, hand already on the knob as I knocked the snow off my boots. His house was near enough to what I’d imagined: a Kenwood beauty, historical and outfitted with small servants’ staircases behind doorways. I felt as if the whole night was a culmination of the bereavement saga, as if I was approaching the curious prize of lust and guilt all wrapped in one.

“I’m glad you’re here,” he said with an upstate accent, voice stretching needlessly in a few of the vowels.

There was a beat of apprehension when we came face-to-face. His hair was frizzled and grayer than I expected. In the hallway light, his skin was textured and divoted.

“I have to say, it is a bit strange that I didn’t know you at all this morning, and now you’re here.” He ran his eyes over me. “I’ll admit, I don’t do this often.”

“Me neither,” I lied.

He led me through a library: wood-paneled walls, cozy lighting, gently flooded with a streetlight coming through the window. And the sensations––the golden retriever yapping at my ankles and the slight boil-heat stuffiness to the room, the heater chugging in the corner, made me uneasy with the sheer physical immersiveness of it all.

For a while we improvised a conversation, cobbling together random observations about the week: the snowstorm, the pile-up on the freeway the day prior, the mayoral race. I chided him about the spelling of his name, which, he told me, was not his real name.

“Mack was just something I came up with,” he said. “Call me Al.”

He made me an old fashioned, taking great pride in cutting the orange twist. We sat down: leather couch, creaky upholstery.

“I’m sorry if I’m being strange,” he laughed.

“You’re not,” I told him, even though he was.

We both looked around the room. There were a few framed photos on the credenza that I didn’t want to look at.

“So,” he paused, “When did it happen?”

“Six months,” I said reflexively.

“How?”

“Opioids.”

“Agh,” Al snarled his teeth like he’d just bitten into something rotten. “That’s horrible.”

“Yeah,” I nodded, pleased with myself and oddly comfortable.

Al began: “It’s only been a few for me. We were married for twenty-three years.”

“Here?”

“Yeah, here for the last twelve.” He gestured around the room.

“It was a heart attack,” he explained, “tons of them: on this couch, in that bathroom, over that toilet.” He read the shock on my face. “His last one was in the hospital. He didn’t die in here, just withered.”

I imagined Al’s husband crumpled in the triangle of floor beside the bathtub: creped skin, popped blood vessels in his eyes. Al standing over him with a glass of water, his paltry attempt to halt the hurl toward death.

“I’m sorry,” I told him.

“Thank you.” Eyes widening.

Al continued for some time, during which I drank through the rest of my old fashioned and he made me another one, not breaking from his speech. His story, about his husband’s final days, was rife with platitudes about death: how terrible it was and how maybe he was in a better place. I kept searching his face for some hidden trace of grief, wanting to know what his pain really looked like. His answers were far too sanitized for me to believe.

Al finished talking, then took a swig.

“I don’t mean to dump all this on you, I just find it’s nice to imbue this with some humanity.” “It’s fine,” I said, “I want to know.”

I continued, shifting toward him on the couch. “Have you been with anyone since?”

He shook his head coyly, sighing, his hand on my leg.

“You’d miss him too much?” I asked. He nodded again, as if I were a schoolteacher he wanted to impress. I tried, above all, to muster sympathy for him, but none came. I didn’t feel bad for him at all, like his pain wasn’t real. Because losing something meant you had it, and his raw, counselor’s office vulnerability told me he exited in simple pains, ones he’d get over.

“I wanted you here, though,” Al told me. “I’m just adjusting.”

I nodded, unsure why I wanted the sex so badly. Maybe I just wanted to shut him up.

“How are you feeling about this?” He asked, moving his hand up my thigh, tracing the seams. “I feel fine,” I said.

“Really?”

“Yes.” Next to him, I felt much older. Though he had the years on me, he struck me as incredibly naive, as if I could convince him the tooth fairy was real with a few well-phrased idioms. I knew so much of what he didn’t: unhappiness, loss, the ugly look of truth. That was the thing; being alone teaches you everything.

I could no longer stand to talk, nor have him look right at me, for there was a pressure mounting in my throat and I wanted to drown it. I kissed him.

There was skin, the feel of cable-wool, and we were kissing as the couch croaked under our shifting weight. The sensations were all very pleasant for a moment: the rush of taste and texture, wetness and warmth. His tongue was slick, if a little hesitant.

While we disrobed, he spoke again.

“Why are you so fine with this?”

“It’s okay because we don’t know each other at all,” I told him, pulling him close. “We don’t have to.”

He nodded.

“Because we don’t owe each other anything.”

I kept at him, suddenly aware of my own hunger. I was driven primarily by the acceleration of the routine: tongue to neck, shirts pulled up, a clatter of a belt buckle on the floor.

“Slow,” he said into my mouth. I kept going.

Then there was an unfortunate off-beat of confusion. He leaned back and I kept at him, shoving my tongue in his ear, and with this we pulled apart in a painful rhythmic discord.

“Sorry,” I said on instinct. There was a pang of embarrassment that settled in my chest.

He looked at me––eyes raw––and saw something he before hadn’t, like I’d shrugged off my disguise. We sat, bludgeoningly silent, staring at each other.

After minutes, he glanced down, and I sighed a breath of relief, turning to look anywhere but at him. There were the picture frames, the blue foreshadowing of the window and the snow outside it. He began to put his clothes back on.

Without any instinct of my own, my shoulders caved, my neck hung, and out of me flowed only pathetic responses: “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” My voice cracked.

“You just changed.”

“I did. I do. I’m sorry.”