The Opposite of Success, page 20
The bar where Ruben worked was an Irish-themed pub near the university, a place with grubby green carpet and three pool tables, a favourite haunt of professional drunks and engineering students. Alex had shown up near the end of his shift on a Thursday evening, two nights after Lorrie had sent her email to him, asking to break things off.
She found him standing behind the bar, in a black T-shirt and jeans, pouring a gin and tonic for a drunk woman in her late twenties who was leaning towards him over the counter and smoking a cigarette in an aggressively flirtatious manner.
Alex sat at the other end of the bar and waited for him to realise she was there. When the drunk woman gave up on him and stumbled off with her drink to rejoin her friends, Ruben drifted over to where Alex was sitting.
‘Alex. Fancy seeing you here.’
‘Hello, Ruben.’
‘I would have guessed this place wouldn’t be cool enough for your art-school sensibilities.’
‘You would have guessed correctly.’
‘And yet here you are.’
‘And yet here I am.’
He poured her a beer, and when his shift finished he came to drink with her. Some young guys in pastel polonecks kept queuing up Nickelback songs on the jukebox, and so Alex and Ruben had retreated to the courtyard. They sat on wire chairs arranged around a rickety wooden table sticky with beer. A heavy glass ashtray full of someone else’s discarded cigarette butts sat between them on the table.
‘It’s nice to see you, alone, Alex,’ Ruben said, smiling at her. ‘I feel like I never see you when Lorrie’s not around.’
Alex studied his face: the sweep of hair above his forehead, the slope of his upper lip, his pointed incisors. For a second she considered taking up the choreography of his flirtation—before pushing the thought from her mind.
‘Actually, I am only here because of Lorrie,’ she said.
‘Oh?’
‘She told me that she wrote to you, saying that she wants to stop seeing you.’
He looked at her for a moment, as if assessing what it was she was doing there, what might be at stake in the conversation. He sighed. ‘Yeah. I guess I haven’t been seeing as much of her since I’ve been working here. She seems to have been overthinking things.’
‘You haven’t replied to her email.’
‘Are you here to harass me to get back to her? Because I’m not sure it’s any of your business, Alex.’
‘I’m not going to harass you. I couldn’t care less if you never write back to her at all.’
He frowned. ‘So why are you here, then?’
‘I’m here because I want to ask you to—to respect her wishes.’ She had thought about these words before she came tonight. Now that she was saying them, though, they seemed wrong: overly formal, ridiculous. ‘It was really hard for her, you know, to write to you, to tell you she doesn’t want you in her life any more. But it’s important. You’re really bad for her, you know.’
Ruben said nothing, but sat back, looking displeased. His straight black brows dipped towards the bridge of his nose. He clearly expected some further explanation, even though, to Alex, it seemed like the explanation was pretty goddamn obvious.
‘The way you make her feel like you care about her, when patently you don’t—it’s fucking her up.’
‘I do care about her.’
‘But you don’t want to be her boyfriend.’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t want to be anybody’s boyfriend. I just don’t think monogamous relationships are really necessary, at our age.’
‘Okay, but I don’t think that’s how Lorrie sees things. She loves you, you know, and it really hurts her, how you just blow in and out of her life, giving her just enough to keep her hooked, but not nearly enough for her to be happy.’
Ruben folded his arms.
‘It’s not like I don’t have any feelings for her.’
‘That’s the problem, Ruben. She can see that you have feelings, of some kind, for her, and she keeps hoping that those feelings are the same as her feelings for you—and they’re just not.’
He let out an incredulous snort. ‘And exactly how can you know that, Alex?’
‘Well, for a start, if you felt the same way she did, you wouldn’t be out banging other girls all the time.’
She looked at him sharply, pinning him with her gaze, and for a few seconds he held it, meeting the challenge—but then he looked away, and took a sip of his beer.
‘I don’t really see why you’re here, telling me this. She could talk to me about it. She could tell me herself.’
‘She did tell you, Ruben. In her email.’ Alex hesitated. She didn’t want to turn this into an argument, but she needed to be clear. ‘What I’m worried about is that you won’t let her go, that you’ll talk her into seeing you again, because you like her, and it suits you to have her around, even though it’s ruining her life.’
He was silent for a long period, turning away to look at a table of drunk twenty-somethings nearby. He had a fantastic profile. Alex could see why Lorrie was into him, could understand why she had found it so hard to break it off.
While she waited for him to speak, she thought about Lorrie, who had spent the last few days slumped like a deflated windsock on the couch of their shared living room, her face ugly with tears. A pit of doubt abruptly opened in Alex’s stomach. Perhaps she shouldn’t have come here tonight. Perhaps she should have just left it alone. Maybe Ruben had been right, and it was none of Alex’s business. If Ruben told Lorrie about this conversation, she would be furious. She might never forgive her.
Eventually, Ruben turned his face back towards her.
‘Okay, Alex. I’ll do what you’re asking me to. I’ll let Lorrie go.’
She felt a rush of guilt, and relief.
‘But you have to do something for me.’
‘Oh, I do, do I?’
‘Yes.’ A smile made its way slowly across his face. ‘You have to stay and have another drink.’
Later, when he kissed her, in the corner of the beer garden, under a string of fairy lights, she had thought—ah, so this is why Lorrie cries for him. Later still, when they were alone in his bedroom and he was finding places in her body that she herself had not known existed, Alex thought—is this what he does with Lorrie? Is this how it is between them?—and a tremor of sadness came over her, stilling the rise of her pleasure. But then Ruben moved his hand, and his mouth, to a new place again, and Alex stopped thinking about Lorrie. She stopped thinking about anything at all.
Lorrie tried to keep a steady pace as she walked away from Ruben, so that he would not have the satisfaction of seeing how his words had affected her. She marched directly to the bar, where she quickly downed another green cocktail. The jazz ensemble was still playing, but people were beginning to take their seats in front of the stage. It was, she realised, nearly time for her to get up and do her speech. She had to get a hold of herself.
Alex had slept with Ruben. She couldn’t even think these words without a rushing blackness flooding her vision. Alex had slept with him, when Lorrie was still in love with him, at a time when Lorrie and Alex were living together, and Alex was spending her evenings stroking Lorrie’s shoulders while she tore herself apart with sadness about how Ruben kept SLEEPING WITH OTHER WOMEN and it was BREAKING HER FUCKING HEART. Her interior voice could not contain its all-caps.
Nineteen years had passed since then. Nineteen years during which Lorrie had told Alex everything, every dumb thing she did, every laughable romantic and social and professional mistake she had made, everything she hoped for, everything she regretted. Nineteen years during which Alex had told her not a single thing about what she had done with Ruben.
Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. She felt such a billowing surge of anger, of humiliation, she wasn’t sure how she could contain the feelings in her poor human body. She covered her mouth with her hand. She wanted to puke.
‘You look like you want to puke.’
Ivan had appeared next to her at the bar. She shot him a sideways look. ‘Ivan, hello. Yes. I do want to puke. Very insightful of you.’
‘What’s going on?’
She slumped onto the bar, resting her forehead on her arms.
‘I can’t even tell you, I’m afraid to let the words leave my mouth. It’s too fucked up.’
‘This does sound intriguing.’
Lorrie lifted her head. ‘Actually, Ivan, do you still have that joint?’
‘Well, yes. But do you think that’s what you—’
‘Give it to me.’
‘Okay, fine. But let’s not do this here. We can go around the back, behind the greenhouse.’
The path leading behind the greenhouse was no more than a metre wide. Lorrie and Ivan stood, leaning against the wall, and he lit the half-smoked joint and handed it to her. She inhaled deeply, and immediately started coughing.
‘You have to keep it in your lungs,’ he said.
‘Fuck off, Ivan, I’m not twelve years old. I know how to smoke a joint.’
He watched her as she took another drag, this time with more success.
‘Lorrie, what’s going on with you? Don’t take this the wrong way, but you seem even more crazed than when I ran into you in the street this afternoon. Are you in trouble with Philomena because of this morning?’
‘Probably. But that’s the least of my worries right now.’
‘So what is it, then?’
She wasn’t sure it would help to talk about it, but not talking about it didn’t seem like an option. How could she be expected to keep this ridiculous new information in her head? She simply could not.
‘I just found out that my friend, Alex, slept with my ex-boyfriend.’
Lorrie announced this information dramatically, stabbing the air with the joint to punctuate her words. Ivan looked puzzled.
‘Your…ex-boyfriend?’
‘Yes!’
‘Haven’t you been with Paul since the beginning of time?’
‘Well, yes, but before the beginning of time, I used to go out with Ruben. Glup’s lawyer.’
‘Right, okay, yes. I think you told me that.’ Ivan frowned. ‘I am sorry if this makes me sound dense, but does it really matter if your friend slept with him? I mean, when did this happen? Was it while you and he were together?’
‘Yes!’ She paused. ‘Well. I’m not sure, actually. It might not have happened while we were together. He didn’t specify. But…if it wasn’t while we were together, then it was not long afterwards. And she never told me about it. Not once. In twenty years.’
Ivan took the joint back from her and took a drag himself, looking thoughtful.
‘Uncool,’ was his final judgement.
‘VERY UNCOOL.’
‘So what are you going to do?’
She plucked the joint from his fingers.
‘I’m going to smoke this. And then I’m going to…’ She tried to think of something appropriately vengeful. ‘I’m going to do my speech…and go home…and tell Paul about it.’
Ivan raised his eyebrows.
‘That’ll show her.’
‘Yeah. She’s really going to go down in Paul’s estimation.’
‘Has she fucked Paul, too?’
‘Oh my god, Ivan, shut the fuck up.’
She realised, suddenly, that she could no longer hear the jazz ensemble. The PA system had begun piping out a recorded acknowledgment of the local Aboriginal peoples upon whose stolen land they were all drinking and eating canapés. Glup’s assistant, Jane, had organised this recording at the last minute after the local Aboriginal group Lorrie had been dealing with had pulled out of an agreement to perform a smoking ceremony (news had recently broken that Glup’s company, GMG, had casually blown up a forty-thousand-year-old cave painting in a mining operation in Western Australia).
‘Fuck, Ivan, I have to go. I’m supposed to be on stage in a minute.’
She headed, at speed, back towards the event space. As she neared the stage, she saw Harry and Philomena standing at the foot of the steps. Harry was looking at some notes, while Philomena gazed warily out at the crowd. When she saw Lorrie approaching, her eyes narrowed.
‘You’re not going up there, Lorrie,’ she said, in a low voice, when Lorrie reached her. ‘You’re drunk.’
‘Am I?’ Lorrie did a savage little shimmy. ‘Perhaps I am. But at least I’m a fun drunk.’
Philomena’s face darkened.
‘I don’t want to have to say this again, Lorrie. I shouldn’t have to say it at all. You know you can’t represent the council in this state.’
Lorrie was about to reply, but Harry looked up from his notes and put a gentle hand on her arm.
‘Lorrie, please. I know this event means a lot to you, but with this terrible news about your mother—it’s just come at a bad time. It’s a very traumatic thing to deal with.’
‘Yes,’ said Philomena. ‘And you seem to be processing that trauma in quite a—a peculiar way.’
Lorrie started laughing. She brushed off Harry’s hand and ruffled the top of his head, disturbing his impeccably neat hair. He really wasn’t such a terrible guy, she supposed. She turned back to Philomena.
‘You know, you’re right, Phil. I am feeling quite peculiar. But maybe I am just a peculiar person.’
‘But your mother’s illness—’
‘Do you know what, my mother has made a miraculous recovery. She’s not sick any more. So you don’t need to worry about me.’
Philomena looked very tired. She put her hand firmly on Lorrie’s shoulder.
‘Please stop messing around, Lorrie. Cancer of the pubis is not something to joke about. The fact is, you’re not going to speak today. Harry is doing the Glup introduction, and that’s my final word on it.’
‘Okay, Phil,’ Lorrie said, and then, suddenly flush with a wild, lawless energy, she shook herself out of Philomena’s grip, and leapt up the steps and onto the stage.
Once she was up there, standing behind the lectern, Lorrie felt dizzy. The lights illuminating the stage were very bright, and she felt unpleasantly aware of every crease and roll and curve of her body in her cheap jumpsuit.
She raised her face towards the crowd. Philomena had taken a seat at the end of the front row and was glaring at Lorrie with her arms tightly folded, evidently having decided that physically dragging her off the stage would be an even worse look for the council than letting her speak. Harry sat next to her, his face crisp with anxiety. Lorrie could see Ivan, right at the back, giving her a thumbs up. And yes, there was Alex, at the side of the crowd, standing by her camera. Their eyes met, and she gave Lorrie an encouraging smile.
Fuck you, Alex, thought Lorrie.
She had prepared a short speech earlier in the week, back when things were going well, when she still believed that her employers liked and respected her, and that Alex was her dearest friend, a friend she could trust, absolutely, with her naked, vulnerable heart. She had been practising it for days—she wanted to deliver it naturally, with confidence, as though she was just making it up as she went. Now, though, under the lights, with pot and alcohol and failure and betrayal charging through her veins like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, she found that she could not even remember the opening line.
She crouched down to her handbag, which she had dropped on the stage near her feet, and pulled out her notes. The paper was stained with coffee, which she supposed had come from her earlier run-in with Philomena on the street. She shook it flat, and stood up.
‘Good evening,’ she began. The low buzz of conversation gradually began to quieten down. ‘My name is Lorrie Hope. I’m a senior policy officer at the city council.’
Her voice, booming out of the speakers, sounded fuzzy around the edges, even to her own ears. Perhaps Philomena had been right. Perhaps she was too drunk to do this. But she was here now, on stage, in front of all these people. She had climbed the mountain; there was nothing for it but to leap off.
‘I am very proud to welcome you all here tonight, to celebrate the opening of Gup Glardens.’
There was a murmur from the crowd.
Lorrie coughed.
‘Sorry—I mean, Gard Glupens.’
The audience let out a nervous titter.
‘Glur Gludens. Gulp Girdins.’
She couldn’t stop herself.
‘Glam Glurpings. Grip Gonkins. Glum Glurters!’
‘Lorrie,’ Philomena hissed at her, her venomous tone cutting across the baffled laughter coming from the audience.
‘Ah—sorry. Sorry,’ Lorrie said, holding up a finger and taking a deep breath. ‘Let me try that again.’
While she waited for the crowd to settle down, she bit the inside of her cheek in an effort to quell the hysteria that was threatening to erupt from her throat. She started over.
‘Welcome to G-lup Gar-dens,’ she said, sounding out the words carefully, like someone who was just learning to read. ‘This beautiful new public space, which we are all enjoying tonight, is just the beginning of a larger project to make the city rooftops greener and…err…’ She couldn’t read the next word on her notes, the ink having run into a dark smudge of coffee. She peered at it more closely, but the harder she looked at it, the blurrier it seemed. She glanced up and found herself looking into the small, watery eyes of Sebastian Glup, who was sitting in the front row.
‘The project will make the city rooftops greener and… gluppier,’ she said.
She could hear the unmistakable sound of suppressed giggling coming from the audience. She looked back at her notes. There were a lot of things she had planned to say, but the words were converging into one long, nonsensical sentence.
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