Expectations and Mores

When he was nine years old his aunt had a miscarriage. They had been close when he lived in New York, but since he moved to Texas they barely spoke. He couldn’t even recall if he knew she was pregnant before he heard the announcement of the miscarriage. It was twins, he was told. She stopped feeling them move and so went to the doctor, who was unable to detect a heartbeat. Later there was a “procedure,” which he learned in time was a polite word for a form of abortion, and that made the loss of the pregnancy official.

His mother told him about it with an air of seriousness, defining for his nine-year-old self that this was important, and so required a commensurately momentous reaction from him. And so, he ran from his mother and threw himself face down on the old loveseat, upholstered in varied shades of brown. He was tall for his age, so his legs shot up at a severe angle on one side of the couch, pressing down the padding on the arm to the point that he felt the wood underneath pushing a line into the flesh of his lower legs. He felt that to shift his position to make himself more comfortable would cheapen the emotion of the moment, leaving him to be distracted by the minor pain in his legs. A loose spring in the couch pushed on his appendix from under the fabric. His face took in smells of pants and sweat and spilled drinks from many years gone by, some pre-dating his birth. The chirp of a cricket reached him from under the couch; critters were always getting inside, since their family lived on the edge of an overgrown field.

It was his objective to perform grief for the benefit of the house. He left the rest of the family to presume that he was overwhelmed with sadness and crying, but he had no way to gauge their reactions with his eyes pressed firmly against the textured brown padding. He assumed from the dramatic responses to death that he had seen in film and television that his performance was not an under-reaction, but whether it was too much, he had no way to test. He could not determine how the period of the pregnancy in which the miscarriage occurred was meant to influence the seriousness of the moment, or whether his recent distance from his aunt should have mediated his grief.

The cricket beneath the couch chirped again and he thought about how he would get it out from under there. The loveseat was too heavy for him to move. Perhaps reaching under the couch with a long stick and moving it around until the cricket hopped out would work? Did he smell dinner cooking over the ancient sweat pressed into his nose? If his mother was cooking at a time like this, that could imply that his reaction was not tuned to the correct level, but to abandon his display of grief now would show that it was phony from the outset. He needed to at least allow time for the tears he was presumed to have shed to soak into the fabric and dry.

In the following years, he continued to craft himself. The nine-year-old became twenty-five, but the empty human core didn’t age. He filled it with expectations and mores. His life was a series of if/then statements with complex hierarchies and arrangements, but he couldn’t just feel his way through anything. From his relations with other people, he understood his approach to be unique, so he hid it. They seemed to have innate understandings of social dynamics and instinctive responses to the human condition. When he saw himself, he saw an algorithm to be tuned.

One confounding experience was his relations with women. In an academic way he knew that he was meant to couple, with benefits to be attained from such a relationship, though the value of the benefits will ill-defined. Everyone seemed to react to him as if he were attractive, and thus high value, so his ability to achieve coupling would presumably be assured. Converting this reaction into any sort of personal victory remained challenging, however. He had a popular product in stock but couldn’t manage to sell it to anybody. The people on television who succeeded with women were effortless, the one trait that all the calculation in the world couldn’t generate. The people he watched in bars were forceful and confident. They assumed the sale, as any good salesman is taught to do. He had no reason to expect success, as a student of his own history, and so that confidence was elusive. Forcefulness was awkward in the face of resistance, but without it, he faded into the background.

He was much more comfortable with the friend-group that he had stumbled into. They talked about obscure movies and went hiking on Sundays. They went to bars as much to play darts and pool as to get drunk, though sometimes one thing did lead to another. Any female members of the group, though, were spoken for by other members. There was no way to translate that situational comfort into romantic success without single female resources to exploit. And so, he found women online and then sat next to them at sports games, begging the kiss cam not to find them and reveal his inability to make a move. The rare time that he was able to take someone on multiple dates, the interest dried up quickly, as he did nothing to move the relationship forward into more physical realms. The feedback that he received in exasperated declarations from people breaking up with him was that he wasn’t aggressive enough. He needed to be the one to kiss them and take them to bed. It was his role in society.

He was out at the bar with his friends one Friday night, presiding over a conversation on Harold and Maude’s use of music by Cat Stevens with the conviction of three beers supporting his arguments. He had recently lost another woman to his own inadequacy but didn’t feel in any way deficient that night. One of his friends brought someone with him. She had hair shaved tight to her head and her skin was the color of dark roast coffee, unblemished and glowing slightly in the low light of the bar. She had no earrings or makeup, wore a simple sweater and loose pants, but no effort at adornment could have improved the image he experienced of her. Something outside his algorithm flared up and he fell deeply in love with her based on only that initial vision. Her voice and personality were secondary. All of that could be developed in his mind and plastered over the reality. Who she was and what she wanted was incidental to his desires.

Remembering his last breakup and the one before, remembering the kiss cam thankfully avoiding him, remembering the look of hope that turned sour as women got to know him, he resolved to be the aggressive, masculine alpha that he was expected to be. He decided to win this prize through sheer force of will, overcoming all objections. His language was direct and sexual and repeatedly rebuffed. He reached out his calf to rub against her leg under the table, even as she squirmed and kicked it away. He followed her to the bar and blocked her path, getting too close, body against body, reaching out to touch her glowing face. He became a fearful figure for her, someone to be protected against; she needed to leave early and for her friend to walk her home in case she was followed.

He lost a friend that day. The man who brought her was offended on her behalf. There was talk of a physical altercation, but it never went anywhere. Other friends allowed for the behavior but made a point not to bring female friends around him in the future, cutting off other avenues for conquest. They would say things like “my friend is a good guy, but he sometimes gets weird around women.” It became his reputation. It was the crack in the boat that eventually sunk his standing with that group of friends and left him with no one. In angry text messages as the group broke apart, he was accused of many things, including racism. He insisted that it was a confluence of circumstances and feelings, and that the race of the individual had nothing to do with it, but he wasn’t sure if he was right. Maybe he had tried this approach on her because he viewed her as less human, like a test system on which to try out new code. It felt dirty, but not when he pushed it down and convinced himself he was blameless. He was still a good guy. He was just trying to be responsive to feedback and to tweak his formula for better results with women. Not every experiment ended up published in a scientific journal. Sometimes an experiment just left a mess to be cleaned up. It was the natural order of things.

When he arrived at the party, the hosts did not seem to expect him. The party was to start at 9 pm and he was wise enough to know that one did not arrive on time for a party, but apparently ten minutes late was insufficient. He offered to help get things prepared before more guests arrived in an hour or so. It was a going away party for his girlfriend. They had been dating for a couple of months, but it had never seemed to really go anywhere. He wasn’t sure how he was supposed to respond to her signals and when it was appropriate to move from one stage to the next. Now she was moving to Kentucky, and the implication seemed to be that this meant they were no longer dating, but no one had made the implication explicit, so he was still acting as if they were together.

Eventually people started to show up, few of whom he knew, so he mostly stood on the edges of conversations, contributing nods and empty vocalizations of assent. He became concerned that his girlfriend was missing her own party, so he texted her several times, but he received no response. When she finally arrived with two friends, she was already quite drunk. She was dressed in a way that flattered her awkwardly skinny body, with lots of ruffles and adornments to add volume where it was needed. Her hair was limp and disposed of in a scrunchy. The friend that she came with was half a foot shorter than she and more filled out in a way that caught his attention. She had mousy hair just below the shoulders and wore a plain, grey sweater. The lack of obvious preparation made her look almost accidental, like she had stumbled into the party as an innocent. Just behind her was a second friend, this one male. He was slightly overweight but hid it under the guise of muscle. His hair was dyed blond at its tips, like the member of a minor boy band.

Before long the situation clarified. His girlfriend’s mousy chauffeur was meant to serve as a distraction for him. She was carefully tuned to be his type and to make him interested in her. She spoke to him to the exclusion of everyone else at the party, steering the topics to areas of his interest with recon surely provided by his girlfriend. She made a point to touch him on the arm and to sit close enough that their legs gently rubbed together. The setup was quite effective, though he did catch occasional glimpses of the fruits of the scam: his girlfriend was attached to Boy Band like a band aide. He would occasionally hear her presentation of a laugh off in the distance and then notice the source of her mirth. It was too perfect not to be intentional, but he silently agreed to play his part. Maybe they really weren’t together anymore. He was not truly sure. Though, of course, if moving to Kentucky precluded them from dating, why was Boy Band a valid vessel for her passion?

As the party wound down, he was with the friend and his girlfriend was with Boy Band, together on a couch. Two sets of other friends who lived together were talking about moving the party to their place. They had a house with lots of space where everyone could “crash for the night.” Really, the townhouse they were in didn’t have sufficient nooks and crannies for the paired off couples to all find their own private playrooms and this was a way to allow it. He agreed, in part to display his conquest to his girlfriend and not allow his success to go unheeded. She could have hers if he got his, because then everyone had simply moved on and no one was being disrespected.

As soon as they arrived at the house, the mousy friend professed extreme exhaustion and disappeared, never to be seen again. He was dumfounded. Why had she allowed them to come together to this place if that was the ending that she intended? In retrospect, he knew that she had completed her role as a distraction, and that her charge did not include anything more physical. He stood alone in the living room as couples disappeared in all directions, not knowing who had gone where. They had come in her car, and they were several miles from the location of the party. Even if he wished to walk back, he didn’t know the area around the house well enough to be successful. He was stuck, and in a house where his girlfriend was very likely hooking up with Boy Band. It was devastating.

Nevertheless, there was nothing to be done, so he stretched out on a navy-blue futon in the living room and begged his mind for sleep, but, before it could come, noises overwhelmed him. They were the unmistakable noises of a couple having sex. It was relatively quiet, far enough away in a different part of the house as to be muffled and indistinct, but it was clear what was happening. He knew this would happen, but it was different to be presented with it so viscerally. He convinced himself it was one of the sets of homeowners and not his girlfriend. There was no reason to assume that the noise was one versus the other, so he tried not to let it bother him, but it didn’t work. Even if it were one of the other couples, his girlfriend was almost certainly doing the same thing at the same time in the same place, and the noises floating over his futon made it impossible to pretend otherwise. He needed to escape the proof.

He walked to the sliding door at the back of the house and opened it. The welcome sound of trees rustling in the wind drowned out some of the sexual moans, but not all, so he stepped onto the back porch and closed the door behind him. He noticed a green plastic Adirondack chair nearby and decided to sit there. It was a little chilly, but maybe warm enough that he could dose off right there in the chair.

When he settled down into the low seat, he discovered that it faced a small, rectangular basement window, which glowed from within. In the distance, near the source of the light, he could see a twin-sized bed with two people on it. The dim light and the distance didn’t allow every detail to reach his chair, but some elements were unavoidable. For instance, the bright blond tips of hair crowning the man laying down on the bed. For instance, the long, skeletal frame of the woman on top and her slow, steady up and down movements. For instance, all the exposed skin painted peach by the single exposed bulb. For instance, the heads thrown back and the wide-open mouths breathing heavily.

His first reaction was embarrassment, but he couldn’t articulate why. Was it that in two months of dating he had not made it as far as Boy Band had in one night? Was it the human reflex to shy away from unexpected nudity and sexuality, and to need privacy reestablished like it was a biological imperative? Was it loss?

He jumped up from the chair, still ashamed. He needed to make sure they didn’t see him and then think him to be some kind of voyeur. It didn’t occur to him that his girlfriend should be embarrassed or wish not to be seen.

He ran back to the sliding glass door and went inside, but then he heard movement from the basement and giggling. They were coming up the stairs for some reason. They could not make it up the stairs and see him. He ran to the front door of the house and snuck out.

He closed the door behind him and hid in a bush in the front yard in case they looked out the front windows. After a few minutes he crept away, hoping the coast was clear. He walked to the edge of the neighborhood and was presented with a left or a right turn and chose left. Soon a street sign told him a name that he vaguely recognized, but he couldn’t see the moon and the sun wasn’t up, and so he had no sense for which direction to go. Hours later, when the sun peaked over the horizon, he discovered that he had walked many miles in the wrong direction, and promptly turned around to go the other way, hoping that no one from that cursed house would leave before he was safely home and that he would not be discovered walking alone.