Bizarre Love Triangle

Lydia had noticed a tinge of pain, like a miniature ballpoint hammer lightly but insistently pounding away on the top of her upper gumline, for several months. Ever since Brooks had left. She hadn’t done anything about it, hadn’t hit up an urgent care facility or made an appointment with a dentist she could have had access to through her student status at University Of The Arts.

“It felt kind of satisfying,” she told Ryan later. “Like I had a secret.”

That was until the night she awoke at 3AM with a lacerating pain pulsing through the synapses and vessels from the tips of her teeth right on through to the back of her head, lighting up her brain in a blinding white light like a burglar caught in the beam of a tripped motion sensor.

Brooks was long gone. Up to NYC on the Devil’s conveyer belt. A peripheral ghost to her now. Ryan may have lived just down on Pine Street, but he wasn’t a helpline either. He was a friend of Brooks, after all. Not exactly an enemy, but not to be trusted. None of her friends were answering. They were probably getting fucked, Lydia reasoned. Bless them. It was dumb phones in 2003. Still 7 years before everyone’s lives were ruined. It took three clicks to hit for any one letter. A chore when your hands are vibrating and involuntary waves of drool pour from your mouth at regular intervals.

Lydia sat rocking on her bedroom floor until the light. She lost consciousness at several points and her vision was blurry from the pain. Being blind was something that terrified her. It was the thought of losing her eyesight, of having the Stevie Wonder zombie eyes she had once seen in a video where Stevie’s shades were temporarily knocked off his face by a drunken sax player, that finally compelled her to rise and begin the long, hunched walk to the Penn Hospital down Spruce. She was barefoot and wearing a Britney Spears pajama set.

By the time she entered the chaotic neon of the ER it felt as if her head had been caved in by a shovel. She collapsed before she even reached the desk. The last thing she recalled was the cruel, smirking, fat face of the intake nurse.

It wasn’t a tumor or an aneurism. Lydia didn’t die. She was out by the next night. It was a cavity run amok, an infected crevice that spread, over the space of several months or maybe years, all the way to just underneath her brain.

“A few more months and you’d be dead or mentally challenged,” the hot doctor told her.

For years afterwards Lydia could, if she concentrated hard, make a sip of water or beer squirt out from under her eye. This being 2003, the hot doctor at the hospital wrote Lydia a very large script for a very large bottle of Oxycontin and a seemingly bottomless number of refills.

And this is where the trouble began.

Lydia had no real interest in the pills. Her tastes in narcotics tended towards the fun stuff. The mind expanders and the party tools. Listening to Sun Ra Arkestra on LSD or shroom caps. Anything MDMA. Downers and dope were for the sketch zombies she had seen on the streets of Northeast Philly ever since she was a little girl. When she was 14 a man in an old Crown Vic had beckoned to her at an intersection. He wanted to know how to get to 30th Street Station. As she was about to tell him she had no idea, she noticed the leer creasing the man’s face, looked down, and saw he had a needle sticking out of his right arm and was lightly jerking his half-limp dick with his left.

So no, Lydia never had any interest in downs or junk. But she did enjoy the temporary portal away from the pain of her cavity. Three days after her discharge she was floating on a half-pill through the Wholefoods by U Arts when she encountered Brooks’s best friend. It was the first time she had seen him since she told Brooks she never wanted to see his pinched little ripe tomato face or his fucking Eurotrash hair ever again in her life. Ryan was lingering over an assortment of exotic cheeses. He had a dumb mustache now and was looking nervous. She wondered if he was maybe fixing to steel some cheese. “He probably is,” she thought. “Hipster scumbag.”

Ryan had always been a nuisance to Lydia, lacking the gravity to even be considered a real threat. A mere jester on the periphery. A loser third wheel always stopping by with a 40 ounce whenever her and Brooks were looking to get intimate, tagging along to the arthouse movies they liked to see and ruining them with acidic disses of the main characters, 80 percent of them falling dead flat. She kept track. “Why do you keep this guy around?” He didn’t even attend the University. And he was older, like 28 or something. Ancient. A hanger on. Always babbling about Philip K. Dick or Bret Easton Ellis as if he alone had discovered them, as if thousands of people hadn’t already made these exact same observations and many millions more wouldn’t continue to do so until the Earth finally, mercifully, spun off its axis for good. He was some sort of writer but never wrote anything. Always going on about some dead Mexican girl, the love of his life, that probably never existed. You see, Brooks had many different gravitational pulls working on him at all times, and this friend was a beacon to his darkest impulses and worst possible eventual outcome. The Brooks Lydia loved was front-facing, bright, community-minded, considerate in bed. This friend pulled him away from all that, toward isolationism and weird urban religious cults. Toward dark corner ghetto bars and scenester girls with sleeve tats and packets of cocaine stashed in their bras.

But still she was kind of glad to see him. Was it that she wanted dirt on what Brooks was up to up there on the Williamsburg frontier? If he was still fucking that girl? If he was still painting or had he sold his soul to graphic design like he always threatened to do? Or was she perhaps kind of lonely? All her friends off getting fucked while she couldn’t even think of a dick that wasn’t Brooks’s. He really was a beautiful boy and she felt she never truly appreciated this until after he was long gone from her life. That smooth, hairless chest. That little ass she could clasp in one hand while he moved on top of her. He always knew when to back off, when to drill down. Nobody else was really going to do for her now. Maybe not ever again. Maybe it was the pills making her think these thoughts. Maybe the trauma of the recent near death experience she still hadn’t told anyone about. Whatever the case, she found herself, against nearly all her best instincts and intentions, approaching the hipster scumbag potential cheese thief to say hi.

He laughed when she asked if he was about to steal a block of cheese, informing her that he didn’t have to, that he had in his possession a drug dealer’s EBT card. Of course he fucking did. She should have walked right then and there. But he was familiar, a face from a recent period that was in danger of slipping into the ether. He didn’t meet her eyes and she didn’t meet his. He scratched at his neck nervously. It was an awkward scene, and something in his acknowledgement of this surprised her. She had expected the unjustly brazen loser she always knew. She expected he would be happy, thrilled even, that she was finally out of Brooks’s life. All his to lead astray. But he didn’t really have any words, and this endeared him to her instantly whether she wanted it to or not. She felt compelled to say something, anything, to thaw the chill. How was this creep suddenly in control? All it really boiled down to was this: Lydia didn’t wish to be alone that afternoon.

“I have some Oxys back at my place.”

His eyes lit up like a famine victim tossed a candy bar. So boringly predictable.

She had been meaning to get rid of the last of Brooks’s paintings. His disgusting red toothbrush too. Ryan sat cross-legged on the living room floor next to a too-flattering portrait of himself. Brooks had dashed it off in what seemed like mere minutes the night the three of them watched Lost In Translation on DVD, stoned, with Ryan mocking the lead characters more effectively than usual that evening. “It must be really rough being worth tens of millions of dollars and gazing lovelorn out the window of a thousand-per-night luxury hotel in Tokyo.” It was the only time she could recall him making her laugh, and also the only time she could recall his being dead serious. He looked at her, mad that she was laughing, and she realized there may have been something of the class warrior lurking deep beneath his apolitical, dropout exterior. Bored with the film, Brooks set about composing a rough rendering of his lame friend, capturing his side profile, his impassive face and obnoxious cheekbones. Lydia thought it was a waste of a canvas. Lydia thought he should have been painting her. She wondered if these boys ever made out. Maybe late one night before Lydia was in the picture, when they were on E and hadn’t managed to pick up any sluts at whatever dark, gross indie disco they’d been too. She made a note to ask Brooks about this sometime. She never did.

Lydia always hated that painting. It was going in the trash the moment Ryan left. Which would be soon. She would see to that. Maybe another hour. A portrait of Ryan should be ugly. Disturbing. Shadowy. And yet Brooks’s rendering was bright, full of life, with shining eyes observing the 4th floor walkup’s kitchen/living combo space with great interest. In real life Ryan didn’t have such interest. He observed any room as if sizing it up, determining what he could get out of the space and the people in it, a vapid emotional vampire. Look at him now, leaned back, floating on the pill she had tossed him, glowing green Yuengling bottle in hand. A fucking nightmare. His eyes opened. He was taking in the room, and her, as if he hadn’t been there hundreds of times, as if she hadn’t had to subtly urge him to leave, to whisper to Brooks to get him out of there, on many, many occasions. She only noticed then that those eyes were deep blue, too blue, wasted vessels for an empathy he would never be able to summon. Damn. These pills were messing with her head something major.

“You sure you don’t have rats in here?”

Of course he had to say something dumb in that moment. Something that spoke to her least attractive fears. In fact she had been seeing evidence of mice lately, a few droppings in the cheaply laminated cabinets, a shadow or two in the bathroom at night. It had admittedly been a long time since she had cleaned up. Since Brooks left, actually. There were plates and takeout containers on the kitchen island. She had been missing some of her classes, showing up for others with the wrong supplies, once to Sculpture with a paper trimmer from Basic Drafting. Dr. Noel, the sculpting instructor, had pulled her aside, asked if everything was ok with her, asked if it was her love life, mentioned her “pretty, dark eyes”, mentioned he had a nice apartment in a new building in Olde City, a river view. To her absolute horror, she realized she was now crying, right there in her cursed living room in front of her cursed ex boyfriend’s cursed friend. And she wouldn’t be able to stop now.

“I miss him too.”

He enunciated carefully, lingering on each syllable, almost purring. He didn’t sound alarmed, didn’t move to comfort her. Of course she was sobbing. It was as if this was the most natural thing in the world to him. As if women just wept all the time in front of him. But when she did look up, trying to knock back the cresting wave, she saw a glistening concentration in his gaze that finally, against the greatest of odds, fully matched Brooks’s rendering in the portrait.

The slut’s name was Autumn. Of course her name was fucking Autumn. It hadn’t taken long to locate her on Friendster. Last year’s bangs and jeans, but pretty, Korean, the slut had that going for her. Brooks had met Autumn on his internship at some NYC bullshit tech cult startup. Dot Com Boom times. Free vending machines. Bosses cutting out lines of free blow at free happy hours. In house graphic design teams. It would all be erased within five years.

“If it makes you feel any better, Autumn will be fat as hell before she hits 35. You can tell.”

He grinned. So did she. Here was the second time he had made her laugh. The loser had done it again. Roaring. Uncontrolled. She wondered what time it was and if the hippie yoga couple next door could hear them through the uninsulated walls. It was probably ok. It was still light outside.

“You met the slut?”

“Unfortunately.”

He told her this Autumn was “a walking void” and how she was some millionaire’s daughter, for millionaires were like billionaires then, who sent her off to NYU to get her out of his hair so he could continue his affair with a girl younger than Autumn, how she was just playing the burgeoning Williamsburg waterfront circus for laughs before slutting off back to Korea to spawn yet another rich loveless family. And get fat.

“And she’s playing Brooks for laughs too.”

Now this was interesting. She would have assumed he’d be all about this slut, this Autumn. “Ditch that art hag,” he would have said. “Get with a hot rich Asian party slut. You deserve it.” This wasn’t playing out the way she imagined it. In a way this asshole was more concerned for Brooks than she was. Her concern was laced with the twin poisons of jealousy and anger. His was pure.

“He was much better off here with you. That chick up there, those people…all harsh angles and jostling for invisible advantages. Invisible to us, that is, you and me and Brooks, tangible only to them.”

Ok he was rambling again, back to the onslaughts of meaningless verbiage. She didn’t like it. She never thought of the three of them as a team. They were a couple and he was a phantom limb she always wanted amputated. Now she wasn’t so sure. All she wanted was momentary companionship with someone familiar on a lonely, faded afternoon. Now she had more confusion.

“Happy hour has started at Dirty Frank’s,” he said solemnly. “Let’s do another of those Ox’s and get you out of here for a bit.”

Was he seriously being this condescending? Get me out of here for a bit? What am I? A child? A charity case? Some sort of mentally unwell individual that needs babysitting? But maybe some air would be nice. Almost involuntarily, she reached out her hand and he pulled her easily to her feet. It may have been the first time they had made physical contact. She hated it and his hand felt gross.

Walking down Spruce the air did feel good. The streets were empty. God only knows what day it was. Ryan was pretty tall, she was noticing now. She was slightly unsteady from the Oxy but had been drinking plenty of water and no alcohol. Yet. She wasn’t wasted. She wasn’t going to reach out to him for support. She just wasn’t.

Harsh slivers of light from a dying sun laced the dirty oak bar top. It was just the two of them if you didn’t count the homeless junkie nodding off in the corner. Ryan seemed to know him. Of course he did. He also knew the bartender with the four leaf clover tramp stamp peaking out from between two rolls of cellulite beneath her Dirty Frank’s tank top. When she ordered a gin and tonic, Ryan said, “and a large water for her too.” Dad instincts. Would he one day actually be one? That poor, poor child.

“I wanted to check on you,” he said after downing a vodka shot in a greedy, obnoxious gulp. “But I’ve been down and out too, Lydia.”

Down and out? What is this, an old blues dirge? Blind Johnny One-Wing Farm Owl or whoever? Why did he always talk like this, like there was a mic in his face recording soundbites. Nobody will ever care what you say, dude. These quotes will not be remembered. Just empty soundwaves bouncing around the stratosphere for all of eternity.

But what could he possibly have to be so down and out about?

She thought then of the time she and Brooks had gone to Sea Aisle City for what was supposed to be a long weekend. But both of their debit cards were rejected at a cheesy seafood joint the first night and they had to write down their address for the scowling manager. They drove back to the city a day early. She always hated that Ryan had the keys to Brooks’s apartment on the far end of South Street. That day they happened to disturb him as he sat on Brooks’s couch with a surprisingly pretty, shockingly normal girl with hip glasses and beautiful, long dark hair. Lydia was furious. Brooks was not. “Oh hey man, sorry to, um, disturb you. We came back early. Hey Dana.”

Dana. Jesus. Why was that poor girl here, with him, and why did Brooks know her name like that? It was a whole secret world those two had going on. A world Lydia had nothing to do with. It made her want to vomit. She forgot how the scene ended. Maybe she stalked off into the bedroom. Maybe the three of them, Brooks and Ryan and this Dana, rolled their eyes at her? She was never sure enough to accuse him of this, but she secretly hated Brooks for it whether it happened or not.

It was all coming back to her at Dirty Frank’s. After Ryan and this Dana had left, later on that night while Brooks slept, she sipped a glass of rancid white wine. She wondered if their debit cards hadn’t been rejected and they hadn’t argued and decided to come home early, if maybe those two would have fucked in that apartment. Or who was she kidding…OF COURSE they would have fucked in that apartment. Maybe they HAD fucked in that apartment. The thought should have sickened her like it had earlier, but in that moment it did not. They were, objectively, an attractive couple. Or at least she was…skinny and long and dark-eyed, with an apple-shaped ass tucked into her jeans. He was whatever. But she seemed legit. She seemed like the real deal. Maybe they would have fucked slow and awkward, missionary, on the couch or, oh God, in Brooks’s bed where they had a little more room to maneuver. She dropped the wine glass in the sink. It was supposed to shatter. It was supposed to snap her out of it. But it didn’t break. She simply sighed and, hating every step, walked into the bedroom to wake up Brooks. She closed the door behind her even though there was nobody else in the apartment. She had suppressed this memory for a long time.

“Is it…Dana? Is that what has you down and out? She was pretty hot, man. Jesus.”

He nodded. He told her she was his first real adult girlfriend. There had been others, the UPenn undergrad he lived with illegally in the dorms at 26 who once knocked him over the head with a thick candle, the mythical dead Mexican girl he was always waxing about that had a 1-in-8 chance of being real, but this Dana was his ticket out from society’s edges. A real girl with a real career (“She’s a librarian, I swear to God, Lydia”). Real deal pretty. Not a scenester slut. Not a single tat in sight. Not into drugs. A potential wife. Naturally, he had fucked it up. She could have told him he would right from the day they caught them on the couch. That girl was already leaning for the door even then. Just getting in her last kicks with some objectively decent looking loser before heading off to win at life.

Decent looking? Did she really just think that? This would be her last gin and tonic. “Her parents looked at me like she’d brought a sex offender home,” he was saying. “They were right to think that,” she smiled, saying it out loud. She expected him to be mad at this, defensive, but he instantly smiled too. They were laughing again. This time it was her saving him.

She had never been to Dirty Frank’s before. This was always Brooks and Ryan’s place. A boys night destination. She hated everything about it. From the plaques on the wall celebrating dead neighborhood drunks to the dust along the rims of the glasses. Plus it was fuller now. Still living neighborhood drunks just waiting to get their plaques. The two of them sat in silence for a long time. Staring straight ahead. It was not uncomfortable. Night had finally come down.

“I think you got it worse than me,” she said without looking at him, the emotion in her voice surprising her. “I’ve lost a love. You’ve lost a love and a friend.”

“Ghosts in the slipstream,” he shrugged.

He pushed back his stool, tapped twice on the bar. She was glad he made the first move, glad that he too wanted to leave. She figured he would want to be there all night, that he would become engaged in some debauched conversation with some of the drunks and junkies or maybe the tramp stamp bartender, that she would have to walk back up Spruce Street all alone. Back to hell. She was impressed he didn’t even have to pay. Just a nod from tramp stamp. The fucker was on credit. Nobody ever gave her credit anywhere.

The water hadn’t worked. Her feet weren’t moving right. Neither were his but he was steadier than she was. There was some talk of getting a cab. One went by and blew the horn. He waved the cab goodbye. It was a funny gesture, even cute. She almost fell just then. The dreaded time had come. She reached out and took his arm. She instantly hated it. Brooks had long, taut arms. Easy to hold onto. These were more muscular, more pumped, though somehow weaker. These were all just for show. An older couple walked past. They smiled. She wanted to scream to them that this wasn’t what they thought.

“We need to make a pact,” he said to her, serious for real in a way she had never seen in him, in a way that frightened her. “We need to take that bottle of pills and pour it down the toilet. Because right now I want to go back and eat five of them. And then five more. And I know you do too.”

She’d never been so offended in her life. This was a legit prescription. She had almost died. She had told him the whole story. But yea, now that he mentioned it, she did want five more. She wanted the whole bottle. Then another bottle. Then another until she slept forever. She was doubled over now in the street. People were staring. They were no longer smiling. He paid them zero mind. He was probably used to scenes like this. He brought her upright and guided her up Spruce Street. His arm was pretty comfortable after all.

It had happened just once. Right there in that awful apartment when the three of them were watching The Ninth Gate, a film Brooks loved and would watch over and over again but she hated. Brooks had an occult fascination that always struck her as silly and weird. She wasn’t even paying attention to the film, just staring off into space, when Ryan had said something interesting for a change. “If I ever had money, I’d be a rare books collector.” This struck her as odd since it was so out of character. What did she think Ryan would do if he had money? Open some shitty hipster bar or club. Maybe take up DJ’ing or become a barber or something similarly insufferable. Maybe ante up for a coke stash and become the dealer he was always meant to be. But rare books collecting? That was actually kind of cool. She looked to him across the darkened, dusty room. Brooks was transfixed on the movie and didn’t notice that their eyes met. Just for a confused moment. And he was the first to look away. This fact made her hate him all the more.

She asked for one more pill but he didn’t give it to her. They teamed up. He poured the pills and she flushed. She didn’t admit out loud that she felt good about this, just slumped on the couch in the same spot where she’d been when their eyes met that night. He was in the kitchen now, working on the dishes, cleaning up some of the mess the best he could. He asked her if she had been to class lately. She admitted that she hadn’t. He encouraged her to do so. She should have been furious. Who was this loser prick to chastise her like she was the one headed for the gutter? But she wasn’t mad. Not at all. She’d been slipping and she knew it.

He was throwing expired olives from the fridge into the trash when she decided to use the bathroom. Sitting on the toilet in the dark. A Ween song was playing next door, Push The Little Daisies, a song clearly about nipples, piping in through the paper walls from the hippie yoga couple. She couldn’t help but notice two small glowing orbs under the sink. Staring her down. She knew instantly what it was. The scream she let out just then…no human should be able to make that sound. A feral, feline howl. The rat was scared too. She hadn’t closed the door for some reason. Did she really feel that comfortable with him out there? She ran screaming into the bedroom with her jeans halfway down her thighs and her panties hastily hiked. Was the rat chasing her? A wide-eyed Ryan, clutching a dull kitchen knife from the old set her parents had given her when she started school, was now in the room.

“What?! What?! What?!” He was yelling.

“Rat! Rat! Rat!” She yelled back.

“Where?! Where?! Where?!”

“I! Don’t! Know!”

“Are?! You?! Sure?!”

“Yes! I! Am! It was looking right at me you fucking prick!”

She kicked the bed in anger. Out from underneath came the rat, mid-sized and glistening as if it had been swimming. They were both screaming now. The following happened in mere seconds: the rat made a run for the living room, moving right over Ryan’s foot. Instinctively, he kicked his foot, which happened to send the rat flying, by amazing chance, right through the opened bedroom window. They looked at each other, wide-eyed, for a long, silent moment until a woman’s scream could be heard below on the street. She moved to close the window.

“I totally meant to do that,” he said. She placed a finger to his lips. “Just shut the fuck up,” she whispered. The knife went clattering to the floor. The hippies next door were tapping lightly on the wall. But there would be no more sounds tonight. They fell to the bed. Their eyes met again, just like that time during The Ninth Gate, only this time for longer. She was too wasted to really move, which was unfortunate. She wanted to straddle him. She wanted to push up his T-shirt, see what was going on under there. She wanted to grind against him. Just for a little bit. Just to get the feel. A new body. He’d been good to her that night. They really were alone. Their futures uncertain. She was no different than he was. She wanted his gross hands on her, all over her even. Maybe, just maybe, if it all went well, she wanted him inside of her. Maybe. She would see. Maybe they could come together and become one for a couple of minutes in the dark.

She passed out before any of those things could happen. They never even kissed. As she drifted off, she wondered if perhaps he would take advantage of her. But when she awoke sometime toward dawn and saw him sleeping next to her, a placid look on his stupid, handsome face, she felt guilty for thinking that. She felt great. Well rested. They had passed out early. Her guest had a hardon peaking out from the fly of his boxer shorts. Straining, painful-looking, unattended. She gave it a thorough, exploratory pat down. It was nothing like Brooks’s. That one was smooth, welcoming, an extension of its owner. This one was an extension of Ryan, usable but slightly dangerous. This never would have worked anyway.

She gave him a peck on his gross cheek and moved for the shower, locking the bathroom door. He remained asleep with his hardon as she dressed in half-decent clothes after months of jeans and T-shirts. One pair of jeans, to be exact, and two white Ts which she tossed in the trash. There was no saving them. It turned out to be a Tuesday. She consulted her class binder. There was a textile workshop at ten she hadn’t been to in weeks. Today would be the day. Maybe a yogurt and a tea from the student union before then. He was still asleep. Ryan never knew the right time to leave.

She didn’t bother to wake him. But before leaving, she did write him a note in block letters on the back of some hospital discharge paperwork.

LOCK THE DOOR WHEN YOU LEAVE AND NEVER COME BACK