For every, really, every single thing she’d ever done: every movement,
moment, choice that had ever really been hers—the nights, days,
springs, summers, winters, falls, or sorry autumns, all the PG–13s
and the Xs and the Rs, for every kiss, man, cherry in season, leg
spread, sundown, green sunrise, girl, movie, all her friends, every
mind-blow, comedown, heartbreak, fever, holiday, her entire child-
hood, meeting him, marrying him, the album coming out and seeing
their two glossy faces looking sullen and impressive on the cover like
anyone in the world would kill to be them—it was still so easy to
believe that this thing she’d just done—just now, fifteen seconds ago,
after he’d gone to bed, where she looked forward to him going all day
every day, pawing across the kitchen, her feet definitely still bleeding,
uncorking a bottle of Cave d’Irouleguy Gorri d’Ansa, which she was
so in love with these days, every intention in the world of drinking it
all to herself (which she did)—was the point, the absolute, what all
the rest of it had been leading up to.
Plopping her bony ass down on the swivel chair in front of the
desktop she wasn’t really supposed to use (because it was his and she
broke things), opening up Word and saying a hello that fell through
her whole chest to her best friend the picture of the page (well, there were two pictures of the page, just as there had been two moons
(drunk)) and, in her beloved twelve-point Bodoni, so “flattering” she
liked to say, she wrote:
Everyone loves a person who doesn’t give a fuck about anything.
She was twenty-eight years old, turning twenty-nine on the thirty-
first, and if there was one person in the world who, if you asked
anyone who ever met her, would be the last person to ever stop giving
a fuck about anything, if they remembered her, they would tell you:
Allison Altamont, who was, and once thought she always would be,
a person who cared.
Which was exactly what had gotten her into this mess. She’d
thought she was really cool for it at the time. Sometimes she’d walk to
the bookshelf and find that old notebook: red with a bendy binding, a
heart on the cover drawn in ballpoint surrounding her initials, Triple-
A (her parents were so clever), and inside, closer to the beginning than
the end, there they were. She’d written them drunk and alone in her
father’s basement five years ago, the night she sold out her commit-
ment to never listening to any record past 1972 that anyone said was
any good and heard Charlie Caswell by Charlie Caswell:
dandelions and gravel, or black cherry magic markers and black
cherry mixed with Coca-Cola Slurpee, and the real serious permanent
markers, the toxic kind of headache-inducer, Citroëns and crinoline,
citron Citroëns, standing at the gas station pumping gas into his Pon-
tiac Parisienne. Biting down on someone else’s teeth. Hearing your
alarm clock go off on a TV commercial and the ensuing hit of lethargy
LASSITUDE. The words “bagel nosh” but not anything real about a
bagel. Maybe a soft pretzel? Mr. Stupid Peanut and his monocle and all
other such mascots who are similarly smug assholes. Glass shards in your
bedsheets, sniffing in subzero temperatures, drunk in the middle of the
day in either spring or fall but definitely not summer or winter. Prob-
ably a Sunday. Beethoven went deaf and that’s sad. My ear-worm, my
phantom limb. A hot man baking black-and-white cookies at his deli day
job and watching The Simpsons on a brown tweed couch in his mother’s
basement, jerking off and Kleenex roses and chubby basslines tumbling,
inaudible through the pink cotton candy lined with pictures of the Pink
Panther’s face plastered behind his mother’s basement’s plaster walls
plastered with posters of the Who. Charlie Caswell alone in terrible un-
derwear, hopelessly lighting a lighter on and off with his opposite hand,
adjacent to the beer and Coke can graveyard.
She’d never romanticized jerking off before, but on him, it felt
right.
That was such a heavy month in her life, the month leading up to
the night she knew she’d meet him. It sounds really negative and
embarrassing written down, but she basically starved herself all Sep-
tember—pineapple chunks, almond Snickers, Onion Blossom Prin-
gles stacked as high as a roll of quarters, cottage cheese mixed with
tropical fruit muesli, apples, baby carrots. She went to the gym every
day for thirty-seven days, even fucked up on Dayquil with a head
cold and, with every bounce on the elliptical, a brick was lifted from
behind her eyes to the top of her skull. She saved up all her money
to buy this really sick Karen Walker minidress, this gray little A-line
made out of T-shirt material and covered in all these little ruffles ar-
ranged in a shield over the bodice and fanning out like lamb’s ears
at the shoulders, these fucking gorgeous Rachel Comey pumps in a
blue kind of leopard-looking print, thinking up her opening line and
rehearsing her opening line and imagining herself saying it, wowing
him, like, you’d have to actually be the dumbest idiot in the world
not to fall for it:
“Hi, I’m Allison Altamont. We both have alliterative names.”
When she finally got to say it, he replied, “Huh. Huh-huh, wow.
I’d never thought about my name being an alliteration before,” and
she kind of wanted to kill him for a second: How had he never con-
sidered that?
“Let me buy you a drink,” Allison offered, “Because you’re such a
giant fucking genius.”
“Mmmkay,” he sniffed, looking as he was saying it like he was
coming to terms with it: his strange new life of stranger-girls offer-
ing to buy him drinks for being such a giant fucking genius, which
maybe could be something other than all bad.
“What do you want?”