Everything is Advertising 1

 

 

The door bounced off the stop and the hallway light poured in. Marie’s studio had learned the trick of looking bigger only when it was dark. With the flick of a switch the truth returned. 

 

Laundry had migrated across every part of the floor, shirts like flags of surrender, socks with ambition to be pairs again, suits filled with every wrinkle in the known universe. Her bedsheets were twisted into ropes, throw pillows exiled to the floor, candy wrappers gleaming like little stars on her dark comforter.

 

She let the tote bag go where gravity decided. The shoulders of her blazer slid off. Trousers unhooked, unzipped, stepped out of. The sudden spare cold of the room on her thighs. She stood, almost naked, in front of her small ornate mirror that didn’t match anything else in the room. The gold frame gave her a little church to confess in. She pressed a thumb under one eye and then the other. The mascara smudge became smudge-ier. Not like she’d been crying, more like she was auditioning for some b-roll horror film where the ghost who haunted modern studio apartments hadn’t slept in weeks.

 

The fridge buzzed. Inside: a tiny museum. Milk that had aged into chunks, peaches wearing a green sweater, a jar of something that chose to remain anonymous. Behind all of it, a large lidded rectangle: the casserole. The thing brought by a well-meaning neighbor last week after the fire alarm incident. 

 

She carefully slid it out of the jenga fridge and thunked it onto the counter. Popped the lid. The smell arrived with no shame: dairy, salt, onion (probably), and some elbow macaroni that added girth. 

 

She didn’t wait. Drawer. Spoon. That overly large serving kind.

First bite: too cold to be comforting.

Second bite: mouthful of salt. In a good way.

 

The third and fourth lost their numbers. She slid down the cabinet until she was on the floor, knees up, casserole wedged between them. The spoon clinked across the glass bottom. 

 

In the wall to her left, muffled conversation advanced and retreated like a tide. The building had thin opinions about privacy. She preferred it that way. Other lives as white noise meant hers could be static. 

 

Full is a word that belongs to containers, not people. What arrived instead was heavy. The kind of heavy that you have to carry to bed. She dropped the spoon into the empty dish, negotiated herself upright in stages, and crossed the room in a slow ballet. On the way, she flicked the kitchen light off. The dark let the place enlarge itself again by a few forgiving inches.

 

She fell sideways onto the bed. Her phone, face down on the nightstand, radiated the energy of a small, needy god. She gave in. Lock screen: a polite riot of notifications she deputized future her to solve. Thumb, swipe, the little red cartoon flame opening like a slot machine. Tinder.

 

Profiles came like a parade she had not agreed to marshal. 

• A man with a fish. You know the pose.

• A man standing in front of National Park signs. She loved the yellow and brown design of those signs. 

• A man in a suit with a tie so red he could be a congressman. He checked both Christian and conservative on his profile.

 

Left, right, left. The muscles remembered their politics without her. The ones she paused on had the same face expressed in different universes. A baseball cap and a toddler, a freshly killed elk, a gym mirror and flexing. Bios did their elevator pitches with varying degrees of grammar.

 

“Six-four if that matters.” (It kinda mattered.)

“Looking for my partner in crime.” (Okay, Clyde.)

“No drama.” (Sure, Jan.)

 

Marie didn’t like Tinder. She liked the rhythm of choice because it felt like control. Swipe enough and the part of your brain that wanted a partner mistook fatigue for connection.

 

A siren settled on a different street, and the cops quieted down as they hopped out to harass a homeless man. She adjusted a pillow, then another, then surrendered to a less than comfortable sleeping position. Left, Left, right.

 

Him.

 

Mark’s face found the screen the way a word you’re trying to remember finds your mouth. Not a professional headshot. A weird, casual image in Central Park shot from a low angle, probably by his daughter. Gross. A weird mix of photos in band t-shirts, unshaveness, and weekend light. The whole thing was jarring.

 

Hard pass. Left swipe.

 

This was the end of it for tonight. She set down her phone and lay back, arms in a precise T. The ceiling had hard cracks that could have been a map if she’d been in the mood to match the shapes to countries. She wasn’t. She had rules for situations like this, which is to say she had a collection of stories she told about what kind of person she was.  One of them was about not being the kind of woman who slept with someone at work. Another was about being the kind who refused loneliness and dressed up spontaneously. The third was about not being predictable, even to herself. The rules worked best when they were not tested.

 

The phone lay there, face down, buzzing once, some app asking for attention. Or a human. Or a robot wearing a human’s name. She didn’t check. 

 

In the wall, the conversation next door got briefly excited, then resolved. The fridge sighed. Somewhere in the building a toilet flush announced itself. She let her hand rest on her stomach and felt the solid, heavy truth of the casserole. The ceremony of the day had offered neither victory or loss, only the bright rectangle of a room where men had practiced not hearing her.

 

She rolled over and closed her eyes. When you stand on the edge of a cliff –