Fugly

Short Stories

Dear Friends,

I’m sharing a story from the collection New Yorkers, which is about, like, millennial life.

Best,

Sam

FUGLY

They were friends for a long time before they got together — the kind of friendship that was difficult to date or reconstruct. Brian claimed that he remembered the moment they met, she sitting on a low wall a block or two away from campus, claimed he could even remember the thought that flashed through his Jaeger-addled mind, that this was an interesting person, someone in some way important to him. But every time he told her this story, she, like a patient attorney, broke it down. He remembered a white dress with frills, which was not in her wardrobe until years later. She also claimed that there was no reason for her to have been on that side of campus at that time — she was very busy hooking up with Aaron, who would go on to become Brian’s rival and in many ways the bane of his existence.

That was the dynamic between them — she was bossy and dominant, smarter, funnier, more attractive than he was. He was faithful, stolid, not the most glaringly brilliant or talented — “you do have a slow streak,” she’d said to him once, appraisingly, which was the sort of dry, withering assessment of hers that they both found hysterically funny — but with a staying power. They experimented with each other early on. It was a classic mean girl scenario, part of a catty streak that Liz had had at least since middle school and couldn’t get rid of even though she periodically tried. She had a friend, from one of these high-achiever summer camps, a résumé-enhancer from the final sprint before college applications were due. Brian and the friend were hooking up in the puppy love way of the first few weeks of college. She was very pretty, the friend, tall and WASPy, with the kind of deep, even tan you got from early morning regattas. Brian was drinking in Liz’s suite. He got a text from the friend asking her over to his room. Compliantly, he stood up to slide the phone back into his jeans pocket and to start taking his leave of the group. “Everybody has somebody to spend the night with,” Liz said and said it so sharply that Brian sat back down. “There are so many new people around and all anybody wants to do is be in a couple as fast as possible,” she said. She wasn’t consciously jealous, it wasn’t consciously a challenge to him, but he seemed to take it seriously somehow. He texted the friend several prevarications, the room thinned out, Brian seemed to be rooted in his eazy chair, helped himself to another drink from the cooler, in the end found himself alone with Liz and Liz forgot her scruples about coupling up for the night.

The relationship, such as it was, collapsed quickly. She had a series of complaints about him, predominantly that he was too short, and at that time she was mostly with Aaron. Just as they couldn’t remember meeting, they couldn’t exactly remember breaking up, just called each other less frequently, and when they were in bed together she first forbade sex and then gradually forbade kissing. They shifted surprisingly quickly to being friends again, there was a relief about that, it gave them other things to talk about, it wasn’t all relationship chatter, wasn’t the endless discussion about exclusivity, as if they were arguing out the fine points of a contract. He showed her text message threads with different girls on his phone and she critiqued the conversations — mercilessly. “This is so puppydogish,” she would say, “you can’t say, ‘maybe you’d like to meet sometime,’ you have to say ‘let’s meet’ and pick a time, pick a place.”

“I don’t want to just schedule in appointments,” he said, “I don’t see how that’s attractive,” but by then she’d already taken the phone, typed on it, cursed him for his slow keyboard, his unwillingness to upgrade his model, arched her back away from him when he tried to read the conversation. “You’ll see a funk band and then you’ll walk around afterwards and get ice cream,” she said wearily, handing him the phone back, “it’ll be a nice date.”

That kind of transparency didn’t apply to the relationship with Aaron. It was very much behind locked doors, mostly in his apartment off-campus, but if he did visit her in her dorm, she took careful precautious. Sometimes she texted Brian that she couldn’t see him ever again, which was usually sufficient to keep him out of her hair for a day or two and was as long as she really needed. Sometimes she asked one of her suitemates, who spent all their time in the common room anyway, to act as lookout. And there was an ugly scene once when Brian, very drunk and determined to make Liz part of some rush ritual, stopped by, refused to buy the roommate’s insistence that Liz was out, pounded once, futilely, on her locked door, then went storming off and, in his disconsolate drunkenness, started to pass out while standing over a urinal, chipped his tooth against the porcelain side and had to have it replaced. But that was an aberration, he was so good-natured that he could forgive Liz even for that. “Only pansies get through college with all their teeth,” he said, adopting a new persona. The visits to her room continued, the conversation topics continued to widen, she successfully stage managed at least two or three mini-relationships of his, and they spent a great deal of time arguing about who should get the credit. “It’s my game,” she would tell him, “it’s my moves, you’re way too fugly for any of these girls,” and he would try to convince her that he wasn’t fugly, the only time he’d ever been fugly was in the three weeks when he was walking around with half-a-tooth and really she was responsible for that. “If there’s any fugliness it’s coming from you,” he said. “Don’t you think of calling me fugly ever again,” she said, which put an end to that.

Sex wasn’t totally absent but it was very discreet. She might say, wonderingly, as they were lying in bed, arguing about whether his Society enhanced his status or made him even more of a loser, “God, I don’t know what it is, I’m just incredibly wet right now,” and slyly, almost mid-conversation, he would undo the button of her jeans or untie her sweatpants and press his fingers onto her. A couple of times, in a real break from character, she said something like, “If I just rest my hand here, and not move it, do you think I could get you hard in twenty seconds?” and they tried that with the avidity of a science experiment. “With you, I really feel like I’m in a basement in the suburbs, do you know what I mean,” she said, “like I didn’t have this as a teenager but this is what I imagine it’s like, like having to look completely normal, have all your clothes on, and then if there’s any creak in the floorboards, any sound anywhere in the house, you suddenly have to look like you’re doing something else.”

***

Aaron was older and graduated first. He and Liz decided to try to stay together, but as far as anybody could tell that just meant that he visited her about once a month for a weekend of undiluted fucking and spent the rest of his time trying to sleep with as many of his former classmates as possible. Liz had a good intelligence network, had several friends who were graduated and in New York, and they duly reported back on all of Aaron’s adventures. Brian had become a kind of confidant by this point, like a maid-of-honor, and he took it upon himself, which was not at all his place, to convince her, for her own self-respect, to break up with him. “I know, I know,” she said, she was in one of her spells of self-doubt and low self-esteem, “but the sex is so good, and, also, he’s so tall.”

So Brian actually hounded Aaron down. He was in New York for some reason, got himself invited to a party of Aaron’s group, found him smoking a cigarette by the fire escape. “She’s a really wonderful girl,” he said. “She’s smart and she’s funny and she’s special and she’ll never say this to you but you’re really being a jerk to her and it’s making her miserable and it can’t keep going on like this, all of her friends know that it can’t keep going on like this, and you’ve got to decide what you’re going to do, because it’s not an option to just keep stringing her along like this.”

It wasn’t a bad speech, Brian had rehearsed it well, but Aaron was really drunk by that time, his eyes were glazed, he blew smoke right at Brian’s face, either from rudeness or lack of coordination, and Brian, who’d been prepared for this eventuality, started to hit Aaron. Unfortunately, he didn’t hit him with a clean strong punch, he lurched forward, headbutted his chest, sent their drinks flying. He got himself pinned into a reflexive headlock, and they went careening across the living room of the apartment, knocking aside wood carvings and electronic keyboards, crashing finally at the base of the couch where they pummeled each other until they were separated. Brian got the blame, was expelled from the party, and, in a useless decree, from all of Murray Hill. More crucially, Liz blamed him. She put on her feminist hat, accused him of not letting her make her own mistakes in life. “What is this, some kind of honor killing?” she said. “If he cheats on me again, are you going to stone me to death?”

***

That was definitely the end of a phase. There was no more cuddling in her dorm, no more Bergerac-ing of his dating life. He had progressed to what he called a ‘serious relationship’ with a quiet, pretty blond girl from Wisconsin, which lasted through graduation and then a few months after. They were both in New York but different parts of the city, she was in deep, budget-saving Brooklyn, he was, somewhat flamboyantly, in Murray Hill, either because reducing a commute was really important to him or because he was intent on defying the expulsion order of Aaron’s snide friends.

Aaron lasted longer than any of Liz’s friends would have expected him to. He cut a very different figure in the real world than he had in college. Quicker than for almost anyone else, his drinking crossed over from being an amusing way of fitting-in to being something pernicious and intervention-worthy. Jobs seemed to be elusive for him, and if, during college, he had triggered Liz’s desire to be a favorite mistress, a camp follower, now he stimulated her maternal instincts.

She accompanied him to his therapy appointments and his AA meetings. She went to support groups for people with partners in AA. In a reckless burst of affection, she went with him to the shelter to pick out a dog — he was from the South, claimed that part of his problem was that he was cut off from nature, from animals, in the big city. She watched, she took a rapid-fire succession of photos as one of the dogs, recognizing him as a dog-lover, climbed over him, licked his face, forced a ticklish laugh out of him — it was the first time she’d seen him laugh or smile in so long. And then, of course, it was mostly her dog — she had a dour competence to her, an old maidish tendency that, in college, kept her doing her homework no matter how drunk or despondent she might be, that kept her going to her job, that propelled her to walk Dolores the dog morning and evening and also, somehow, in the afternoons, in the occasional spells when Dolores lost control of her bladder and strayed spraying the apartment.

Aaron’s primary responsibility was to make it to meetings and he did that. He was well cast in the role of the newly sober. His hair had somehow become salt-and-pepper in his 20s, he had a permanent five o’clock shadow, wore lots of plaid, he looked worn-out, dogged and committed, packed his coffee thermos and his cigarettes for his AA meetings — “I would have quit cigarettes so long ago if not for AA,” he’d say, a flicker of the wry charm that had been so successful for him in college. He did well enough in his ‘recovery,’ that Liz put in a word for him with her father and he was taken on as a paralegal, doing work that wouldn’t be too taxing but would let him use his brain a bit. Work was a risk, everybody acknowledged that, there was a dive bar downstairs that the other juniors liked to visit, and Aaron, who truly was a creature of compulsions, found himself joining in. This was tolerated, law work really hurt his head, he claimed, he did need something to take the edge off after a long day, but then, like in some kind of Chinese fire drill, he started to skip steps. He began to show up very late to work, if at all, and it was discovered that he had commuted in to the city, as scheduled, and checked himself straight in to one or another of the few bars that did morning business. He had very literary taste in bars, McSorley’s or the White Horse Tavern if he was near the office, Malachy’s or The Dead Poet if, as sometimes happened, an assignment took him uptown. It really was much more stylish than the tiki-themed dive bar that the other juniors liked. When Liz visited to root him out, she was impressed at how peaceful it all seemed, the little plates of pickles or crackers in front of him, his beer and shot lined up next to a prudent glass of water, the geniality of the daytime bartenders, how obviously pleased they were to meet any friend of Aaron’s. Liz’s father sacked him and Liz followed suit a few weeks later. He looked bleary-eyed and very relieved actually. He named the various possibilities of what he could do with his life and when he reached the option of returning back to Charlottesville and living with his grandparents for a bit, a heavy, visible pleasure settled on his craggy features. 

The disintegration of Aaron was a locally famous event, and Brian, as a former boyfriend, was of course asked from time to time for his opinion about it. He was always as circumspect as a diplomat. Being a decent person mattered a great deal to him, and he’d say something like, “Liz is free to make all the decisions in her life” or “Aaron’s a nice guy, it would be great if he can pull through whatever he needs to pull through,” but after Aaron had really left, held up Dolores to look her straight in the eyes, kissed Liz on the cheek, took the subway to Penn Station to connect to the Amtrak, and Liz’s friends had organized a series of get-well-and-perk-up parties at her place, bringing their four-cornered bottles of hard liquor, and the word was out that the parties were fun, intimate without being stuffy, with the oddly buoyant feeling of a wake, Brian did start to hang around as well.

There were these spasms of nostalgia from time to time, a wedding, a reunion, and then they happened more informally, like this, a group of college friends finding themselves suddenly magnetized to one another. They always generated the same reflections, the sense that, contrary to everything one felt about one’s life, all the many transformations, the time gone by, the way that one became unrecognizable to oneself, once reunited with an old group it was clear that nobody had changed at all. The funny ones were still funny, the awkward ones still awkward — their strange preoccupations had migrated on to something new, but with the same cluelessness about how it registered with anyone else. Liz had always been funny, and the Aaron episode had given her a rich new source of material. There was some attempt at discretion, to not speak ill of the fallen, but Aaron was, deep-down, the organizing theme of their gatherings, and Liz as a good host found herself obliging the audience. She talked about her misfortunes at the support group, the way that all the other women there talked about how they were abused, kept waiting for her also to say she was abused. “I couldn’t take a neutral pause with them,” Liz said. “Every pause, it was like they were stalking me, they were ready with their box of Kleenex and their proverbs, they were sure I was going to come clean about it. I felt so weirdly guilty somehow explaining that Aaron didn’t actually hit me, that he was really a very nice guy who just hadn’t found any other hobbies.” There were other stories, stories about various interventions, the time a few friends and family members came over to look for Aaron’s secret stash and kept not finding it and Aaron was just sitting blissfully on the couch getting drunker and drunker. And the outwardly radiating stories of the AA colleagues, each improbable story there, bikers and rubber-roomed teachers and high-functioning executives leading to other, more improbable stories, the security detail that showed up once so an ex-mayor could attend a meeting, and Liz who had been accepted for a long time as a member of the community, the constant visits from the other women in the support group, the baked goods, the deep hugs, the long tearful eye-gazing. “Even though I was only half-accepted since I hadn’t yet admitted that I’d been beaten,” she said. It was fun, the problem in college was that there was never anything to talk about really, now there was an import to the conversation, the thick bottles clacked around the room, there was a feeling of everyone paying witness to their own lives — this is what has become of us, was the thought. Liz fingered her necklace thoughtfully, pulled it away from herself. “It’s so crazy,” she said, wrapping up the subject of the support group, “we were a pack, we had each other’s backs. I’ll be surprised if I see any of them ever again.”

The party filtered out eventually. There was a musical chairs feeling to it, the way one person would be getting ready to leave and their place would be taken by someone else, the way they tried to exit in some kind of pattern. In the end Brian found himself alone with Liz. The music switched off on her Pandora station. An ad came on. “Do you want me to change it?” he asked. She told him not to bother. There was another moment of the two of them sitting, it was exactly like how it had been when he was on the eazy chair in her freshman dorm, he got up and kind of crab-shuffled across the room to sit next to her. It felt like they were diligent scientists who had conducted a series of experiments and now were returning to one of their very first sample sets. After a while, she gave him her hand and led him to the bedroom. All around them were Aaron’s books, his posters, his sweaters, everything he hadn’t managed to pack up for the train.

***

Brian was mostly single at the time. He broke things off with the girls he was seeing. One of them, whom he’d found on one of the kinkier dating apps, turned into a kind of mini-stalker. She elicited from him the name of the girl he was leaving her for, and she forwarded him a string of unflattering photos from Liz’s facebook. “THIS is the girl??” she texted. “Does she always look this annoyed?” “I could see going on a couple of dates with her but BEING with her?? She looks like an angry mom.”

Brian didn’t take much notice. Sex with the girl was neither as good nor as frequent as had been anticipated. There were real satisfactions in being with Liz. She was funny, she was with it, she knew him really well. There were old patterns to lapse into. Within about a week of being together, she was calling him ‘fugly.’ She would say it in this wondering, awestruck tone, sometimes out of nowhere, when they were silent on a lazy afternoon. She would gaze at him when he was on his computer or making coffee. “God, you’re fugly,” she would say. Or sometimes she would come around for closer inspection, touch his jaw, his cheeks, his nose, as if she were reading braille, testing for asymmetries, pry open his lips as if he were a yearling, observe closely the way his capped tooth hadn’t been perfectly attached. “Fuglier and fuglier,” she said quietly as if it were a prayer. “Any fugliness I have is because of you,” he told her, reaching for her face. “I wasn’t fugly until you made me fugly.” “You were pretty fugly before then,” she said. “But being around you seems to make me fuglier,” he said. “It make me think you’re the original fugliness.” He reached for her face to demonstrate but she held up her hand threateningly. “Do not think you can call me fugly,” she said.

Within another couple of weeks she’d been reminded of how terrible his sense of humor was, how slow he could be on the uptake. She liked to do this as a tickle, standing just in front of him with her arms wrapped around him, tickling furiously as if he were a child or a cat. “You’re so not funny,” she might say, in her cooing voice, “your jokes fall so flat, always, always.” And Brian, who was very ticklish, always had been, was howling with laughter, choked up too much with tickles to articulate a comeback.

“I think this is good,” she said to him once, in a quiet moment, à propos of nothing, “this is the most important thing, that we have like a private language, a private world.” He was in her apartment, on his laptop. He was waiting for the other shoe to drop, but this time it didn’t. “I think that’s the difference between the couples who make it and the ones who don’t,” she said. “The ones who don’t talk like they’re on a first date — always. The ones who do talk like they’ve known each other since birth.”

After six months, which seemed to be the standard fixed time for courting, they moved in together. “It’s great stuff, these relationships,” she said, in her favorite dreamy tone, like a stage whisper, “all the savings you get in real estate.” He was in the middle of packing up boxes in his apartment, he was being a bit emotional and dramatic about it, glared at her over his tape roll. “Great for real estate, great for dog-walking,” she continued in the same tone, “and you know what would be best of all,” she said, flickering her eyebrows, “the tax benefits if we got married.”

As surly as he was being about it, it hadn’t really taken all that much persuading to get him to leave the Murray Hill apartment. He had already made his point by living there as long as he had. They moved together into deep Brooklyn, further out than either one of them would have liked. It was one of these bitter, painful moves. The railroad where she had lived and Aaron had squatted for all that time suddenly seemed not at all viable — there were all kinds of considerations that seemed to have just occurred to her, lack of closet space, thin walls, that kind of thing. The whole swathe of desirable real estate, anything close to a river, had apparently been occupied by a conquering army of investment bankers and their auxiliaries. It struck them both as a mystery that anybody could afford the prices for the first apartments they had looked at. And then, in deep Brooklyn, they faced a world of tradeoffs. Liz would stare at a space, hand cupped on chin, communing with it, while Brian asked a few random questions, like if there was laundry nearby. By the time they left, she was usually optimistic. “I can see it,” she’d say, but in the morning, after the anxious night’s sleep, she’d turn to him with a particularly dark tone of voice and say she realized it wouldn’t work after all. In Sunset, they found the perfect apartment, large and quiet and elegant, had the nagging feeling throughout the visit that they were forgetting something and realized only after they’d completed the application that it didn’t allow dogs. Liz held Dolores up in front of her face, a move she’d learned from Aaron, asked the dog, “Well, I’ve got to decide — what’s more important to me, you or a washer/dryer in the apartment?”

In the end, the dog won narrowly, which wouldn’t necessarily have been Brian’s choice. He was allergic, subsisting on Claritin, and although he liked animals there was something about his energy that made the dog nervous. The apartment they finally found was a bit out-of-budget, a bit shabby, a walk from the subway, in a neighborhood that neither one of them had heard of before they started the search. Still, it checked various boxes, it didn’t produce quite the same anxious sleep. They rented a UHaul, took it first to his old room then to hers. Brian was stalwart in carrying boxes and furniture downstairs. They accepted with surprisingly good grace the parking ticket they received while the van idled outside her building. When it was over, they lay on the mattress on the floor of their new bedroom, too tired to brush their teeth, stared at the boxes piled up next to the wall. “I feel like this is about as far as I can take it,” Brian said, and, to the surprise of both of them, Liz laughed, really laughed, an exhausted, relieved laugh, like Brian had never really been able to wring out of her before. “Here I can and no further,” she agreed.

What finally motivated the unpacking and arranging was that Liz had somewhat recklessly committed to a housewarming party. “All this work — for the two of us to just sit around on the couch?” she asked. She was very conscious that her social life had vanished after the brief reuniting phase in the aftermath of her breakup with Aaron. Invitations were sent, various friends promised to bring four-cornered hard liquor bottles, a sitter was found for the dog who would have gotten too nervous around so many people. Meanwhile, Brian was madly painting walls, mopping up paint splotches, pushing furniture items into the rearranged floor space. He was sent on expeditions to get plastic dishware, streamers, chips, salsa, an assortment of dips. He was diligent but a bit inattentive, on each of his expeditions he seemed to return short an item or other. Just as the party was supposed to start, it was discovered that he had brought back parmesan instead of a real cheese, that he had somehow neglected to buy forks. He went tearing off to the supermarket on a Citi Bike, Liz chasing him with a text string of last-minute additions. He went through the supermarket at a jogging pace, hung his plastic bags off the handlebar of his bicycle, rode precariously back to the apartment. He was sweating when he arrived, he’d paid close attention to hygiene, dressed himself carefully when he got back from work, that was ruined now. Liz was in a foul mood. It was a full twenty minutes after the party was supposed to start and no one was there. She sat in her round chair in the newly-swept living room and she flicked her eyes at the space around her. She got in these states from time to time. “Blobs of paint,” she said. “Look at that, gobs and blobs of paint. Dust on the floor — not really swept, everything just kind of covered over. For a spread, bullshit from the deli. Hummus and salsa like we’re college sophomores. Anything nice, some simple fucking cheese and I have to send you twenty text messages.” It was a variant of her stage whisper, how she seemed not to be talking to anybody, just airing out complaints to the far corners of the room. “And too far, I knew it was too far, I’m not sure why we didn’t just move out to New Jersey, social life is dead anyway, maybe if we’d gotten a place in Wisconsin we could have saved a bit on rent.” She was spitting out words now. “That’s what I get, spend time with you and I lose all my friends, end up in this hellhole on the farthest side of the boonies.”

Brian listened to this with his hand on his chin as if it were a lecture he was intent on memorizing. Some response seemed finally to be called for from him and he said, slowly, “You know, you weren’t my top choice either. If I could have made it work with other people I would have. I don’t know what it was, why it didn’t happen with anybody else, why it ended up always being you.”

Even for Liz, hyper-verbal and combative as she was, it was hard to think of a reply. The idea had been that Brian was devoted to her, always had been, always would be — in his blind, loyal way, somehow that had been taken for granted, but, apparently, it was based on some sort of misunderstanding. It was too much to argue about just then, and, finally, the phone was making noise, a pack of people lost on their walk from the subway. Their texting seemed to trigger the doorbell and Brian went downstairs to let in the first of the guests. Everybody was on schedule after all — it was taken for granted with these kinds of parties that you showed up about an hour into them.

It turned out to be a terrific party, actually. It was the right number of people, they made all the right appreciative murmurs about the apartment, and it did look great with lots of people in it. Probably there was some kind of superstition that if the hosts had a fight just before a party, then the party turned out better — Liz made a note to herself to look that up, but she got so drunk, had such a good time, that she forgot all about it. The exact same observation applied as at the time of the parties surrounding the Aaron breakup. Everybody stayed exactly the same, they hadn’t changed at all, it was just different milestones they congregated around. All those months ago, it had been 20-something melodrama, now it was domesticity and the lead-up to middle age. There were a few subtle changes. The dips were more popular, the booze was relatively untouched. After everybody left, they sat around, Liz and Brian, poured each other slivers of drinks from the leftover bottles, recapped the party. There was lots to address from their fight earlier, but they would get to that some other time. They would make it, the two of them, somehow they both felt that, candles had been lit at some point during the party and their faces were flushed and glowing in the wavering light, and it was so clichédly romantic that Liz couldn’t help but lift the corners of her mouth to smile at the obviousness of it, and, when she did, Brian broke into a relieved grin.

There were so many couples like them, probably everywhere, definitely in New York, people who had given up on the early side, stopped searching for anything better, settled on companionship.