plateau fuck
STIMULANT WEEKLY NEWSLETTER 005 // JUNE 29, 2024
You have finished class for the day. Your stomach is a breeding ground for mutiny, since you have chosen to oppress it with unheated pasta you made earlier in the day and refrigerated in the pot it was made in, dressed in cling wrap, sauce coagulated. You do not heat it because you know you will not finish it, with your appetite confiscated by anxiety. You are nervous to meet this mustached semi-stranger on the sidewalk outside a passable Plateau bar whose volume and Frenchness you cannot yet determine, which frightens you further. You leave the last three bites in the pot, for your nerves will keep you satiated until eleven o’clock, when your second drink is taken like a scalpel to the stomach and you’ll wish you were eating ketchup chips and drinking Pepsi in bed. This version of yourself could only possibly be revealed if there were a sixth or seventh date, but you have not even made it through the first.
The metro is indecisive about its temperature, and here you feel the first pangs of terror. You are experiencing the bargaining stage of grief without the anger or denial, without having lost anyone. Music does not console you; the best option you have found is Yeat, a juxtaposition with the ribbon you are wearing somewhere on your body to endear yourself to public transit geriatrics. Since you are wearing lip liner, you are prepared for bad news up to the point of a natural disaster. Your angle is that you look like a painting of a guilt-wracked sinner, wearing invisible tears and conjuring a pitiable shadow beneath your brow. You will work this angle on the mustached semi-stranger in whom you have imagined love, or whatever it’s called when you lounge around naked and listen to songs you cried to in high school, kissing each other’s ribs and preparing the next morning’s poem.
You are chronically early, and with ten minutes to spare outside the bar you wish God existed to both justify your Catholic disposition and to smite either one of you down to end this approaching date. You wonder what kind of obstructive catastrophes could befall you within ten minutes of a rendezvous—to cancel for normal reasons would be unforgivable at this point. You practice your response to “How are you?” and rack your brain for a funny anecdote, someone you saw on the way here for you both to string up across the mind’s eye and jeer at in order to break the ice. You also know you will forget this line once your date arrives.
Your date arrives, and so does the split second of adjusting to each other’s third dimension. You hope the size of your teeth has not shocked him. Awkwardly you shuffle inside, but you do not know him well enough to demand he do all the talking with the bar staff. He does anyway, because you are a girl with a ribbon. His French is god awful—he’s from Alberta or Massachusetts or something—and you almost wish you had taken the lead just to spare you both the sight of his failure, since he has given you no reasons to love him yet, flaws and all. Love is the patience and willingness to understand, your one-week love affair once told you before mentioning his recent breakup. But you know if this semi-stranger had a string of snot swung up onto the tip of his nose, you would have no reason to understand him beyond the most primal sense of empathy that ultimately comes back around to self-interest. You are excited to ask him about his sommelier course.
You order a gin and tonic because it is the same in any language you can think of and your date is taking a sommelier course. He orders red wine because he is taking a sommelier course and received a nice watch for his birthday two years ago. The French he does know is limited to specialized language about wine, the same way a ballerina knows French, or how a composer knows Italian and German. This is neat. You love when things are specific and when people have their trades.
You hope he says something utterly strange about his childhood within the next five minutes. You say something utterly strange, which is that you have conceived of a new metric for time and have begun to count things in Lithuanian minutes and Lithuanian hours, etc. He asks what those equate to, and you explain they are the same as normal minutes and hours, etc., but truthfully only serve to confuse and inspire. The jig is up, so the bit is inauthentic for its explanation, but it still has a chance of being obliquely funny. He does not laugh as much as he should, so you tell him he just had to be there, and he asks where, and you say you were half-asleep when you thought of it but are not inviting him to your bed with the fitted sheet that always crumples like a dehydrated apricot in the middle of the mattress. A Pepsi sounds great right about now, because when you drink Pepsi atop the pilled sheets your first-year landlord provided no one is staring at you with their big, brown eyes and describing the layout of Hemingway’s house in Florida.
Despite his love for reading in parks and metro cars, he does not write, so when you are an interesting person he will not do anything with it besides jerk off a few times and never think about marrying you. He will not put you in a novel and name you Cecilia, which is a beautiful name your parents never would have thought of because they have business degrees. The best he will do is get distracted by the thought of you while filling in the crossword. He may even spill espresso on his khakis, tastefully unbelted.
Actually, you realize many people have loved his face before, and you hope to come around to it. He is very beautiful, so it won’t be hard as long as he does not commit the typical blunders within the next few hours. He is on the way to becoming more than a semi-stranger, and you have your part to play in it, but your unexpected lack of charm frustrates you. You are not unfunny, it’s just that your delivery has been thwarted by your desire to impress. You resist clarifying how you always loosen up when sprawled out on a bed with someone, listening to music you cried to in high school, drinking Riesling. If he sees potential in you, he will find out soon enough.
You are in the Plateau, so you throw quirks around like darts. You are building your Romantic Resume of Life and showing it to him. He also turns out to be fairly accomplished, and you imagine being great collaborators, how bitter you will be when you inevitably break up and he does not resign himself to bumhood but rather achieves and achieves and attracts acclaim and other women—a double-edged sword. These accomplishments of his lead you to speculate about how proud his mother must feel, having raised a kid she can fill her Facebook wall with. If you were not his suitor, you might like to be his mother. You once saw a Tweet about this that got deleted for its controversy, so you have not voiced this sentiment out loud. Freud’s wooden couch disintegrated long ago.
It likely will not be him—because you share a nationality and your sameness offers nothing in sentimental education, and because you will not stay in Montreal after your degree or incite him to flee with you—but you’d like to marry a professor who drinks tea in the morning alongside the newspaper, plays piano for the dog, and has filled the walls with books. Maybe it is not apparent with the way your charm has leaked out like blood from the jugular, but you do fancy yourself fascinating enough to be wanted by a professor. You’d like to stroll around Vienna or London or somewhere arm-in-arm. First, you must sift through all the men who dress the same as your prospective husband and want desperately to know what Camus meant when he said this or that. You yourself are also a pretentious son of a bitch and call yourself a lamb or a baby when no one has asked. You are a great judge of character.
Looking at him, his lips engraved with wine, you think he stares at himself in the mirror every morning and wishes his mustache looked a little more like that of patient zero for trench foot rather than someone who makes GHB in his bathtub. As he combs his hair at the vanity, a few strands fall onto his collarbones, onto the straps of his wifebeater. You see it in him as he talks. You see him sing Chet Baker as he irons his shirt.
Many people have loved him before, you are sure. You do not know how you will be implicated in the scheme of his being loved. By the end of the night you will have learned but one or two names from his life beyond this Plateau bar.
One day you may have full authority over his mustache. If he reaches for the bill, sometime you’d like to see how the bones of his hips depart into softness, the overhead lighting struck out as you resist grief for your younger years.
Who You Are… was edited by Jack Schaaf and Charlie Zacks.
GIF from Submarine.
PLATEAU FUCK was edited by Jack Schaaf and Charlie Zacks.
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