Page 32 of Sublimate
“Not scary, just wrong for him,” he corrected. “The woman he dated in college was probably the meanest person I’ve ever had the misfortune to meet.”
“Did she hit him?” It also happened to men.
“You know, I wouldn’t be surprised,” he answered. He was serious, too. “She demeaned him, she criticized him, she taunted him. I would stand up to her because he never could.”
“Do you know why he stayed with her?”
“I think he felt like he wasn’t good enough.”
“Oh,” I said, nodding. Yeah, that was so common.
“Our college was full of wealthy kids. A lot of them were also spoiled kids,” he said. “They didn’t go there because it was going to give them a good education or because they would graduate and be ready for careers. They went because they needed a diploma and they had gotten an acceptance letter. Not Beau,” he continued. “He wasn’t from a background like that. In the past, the Gowans were doing very well. One of his ancestors had actually founded the school, but he was there on scholarship and he struggled with his classes. He never went, which was a problem. He skirted through by cheating.”
“I knew lots of people who cheated with all kinds of things. You really shouldn’t do it in a casino, though.”
“He was sure that he couldn’t keep up so he didn’t even try. He also thought that his girlfriend was better than him and she agreed,” Nolan told me. “She wasn’t particularly smart or hard-working but she certainly was unpleasant. They finally broke up when she met someone else and then I introduced him to my cousin Celestine. I wish I hadn’t done it because they had problems right from the beginning. She hated him for being lazy.”
“Well…” I hesitated. “I can understand how it would upset her, if she had to go and work hard and he just sat back and watched.” Maybe he had even made fun of her for trying, which happened to people.
“She was equally lazy and she was also unfaithful. Now she’s going to have him fired.”
“So, he has an ugly history with women but it doesn’t bother you. And why would it? It doesn’t mean that he’s bad himself. Maybe he’s just dumb.”
“No, he isn’t,” Nolan defended his friend.
“I don’t mean that he’s a stupid person. People who have ugly relationship histories don’t have to dumb, like, in general. They’re dumb about love and choosing wrong but they’re not actually bad people themselves,” I explained.
“Are we talking about my friend Beau, or are we talking about Vivienne O’Keeffe, who was living with the guy who slashed the couch and broke the windows, and who escaped from Vegas because a man there had threatened to kill her?”
I actually had been talking about myself. “When I was fifteen and I moved in with my boyfriend, I thought that he was like a knight in a suit of armor on a white horse, and all my problems were solved. Now I see relationships more clearly. They’re a way to get by. Not that I was using the guys I was with…I guess that I needed Kolter for his house, but he was also using me right back.”
For example, he had liked to have a lot of sex and it had been convenient for us to live together so he could get as much as he wanted. He had said that I couldn’t wear any clothes to bed so my body was always accessible. Then, after the furnace went out, he had dropped in during the day for it. I’d balanced a pine needle on the door handle so I’d know when he was there and I could prepare myself.
“I really do like to wear at least a pair of underwear a night,” I announced. “What if there was a fire? What if we’d suddenly had to deal with a spirit from the nearby graveyard? I didn’t want to do that naked!”
Nolan didn’t disagree with my logic about sleeping in the nude, although he didn’t really understand why I’d mentioned it (I hadn’t led with the information about Kolter’s constant demands for sex, so it didn’t make as much sense). “I don’t believe in black magic or spirits,” he said. “Of all the things in the world to worry about, that would be low on my list.”
“It’s still on your list,” I noted. “It’s near the middle of mine. Up at the top are things about getting old, not about wrinkles or going grey…you know, you won’t have to worry about that.You’re going to be what they call ‘distinguished’ and your blonde hair will hide the color change.”
“Oh. I suppose that’s a good thing? I never thought about it.”
“I worry about bears finding my body, but mostly I worry about getting frail so that I can’t work anymore. What will I do? I keep trying to save but I never seem to make a cushion. I won’t get government benefits, not with my lack of paperwork.”
“How is Cadence doing with that?”
I sighed because the answer was that she was struggling. If Cadence couldn’t find the answer, I had to believe that an answer didn’t really exist and that was terrible. There was a very, very real possibly of me getting stopped for not having a valid license plate and then what? Jail? Tickets I couldn’t pay? Court costs?
He answered his own question by assuming my response. It didn’t make him an ass because he was right. “She’s not having any success,” he stated. “My mother is an attorney. I should talk to her about this.”
“You would ask her to help me?”
“She would probably love the challenge,” he answered.
“I don’t know if anyone can do it,” I admitted. “I tried for years. And I felt so stupid showing up at different agencies and repeating the same things to different employees, answering the same questions, and then getting sent somewhere else or taking another number to call. It got overwhelming and it was impossible to keep up with everything. How can you sit inoffices for hours and hours when you have to work to live? How are you supposed to show up for appointments if your car broke down?” I looked up at him. “Would your mom really try?”
“I’ll talk to her and see.”
“Do you guys talk very often?” I wondered.
