Bitter Things
The opening pages to my dead novel
I wrote a novel last year, which I then scratched after, very pitifully, not being able to get it published. So it goes. Below are the opening pages of BITTER THINGS, by me
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Ripley Thompson was no longer the most beautiful woman at the bar and this was the pain she had to learn to live with.
A group of three fountain pens had slunk in, shining and smiling, waving at the bartender with certain refined motor skills that only came with being constantly observed. Their skin possessed some kind of dense undertone, honey, perhaps. Their hair was blown out and away from their faces as though they had arrived via convertible. And their nails, or more specifically, their nail beds — painted and long. Long nail beds looked good with anything. On a glass of wine, on a lover’s face, and resting on a table. These women were attractive enough to get by without charm, but there were always light hands on shoulders or a lingering lower lip bite. By the end of it, even she would have leaned in to graze her lips against one of their bouncy cheeks. Their shampoo would smell like The Peninsula Hotels.
She relied heavily on being Asian in these moments. That fetish persisted despite everything. She allowed herself to use it to her advantage and often found she was thankful for it, much to her dismay. She was only half Chinese, which used to be more of a discussion, but now it was clear what she was to the average person. Long gone were the days of ambiguity, the questions, and the coveted attention. Half Asians were everywhere, and she was not the most impressive one around, not by a long shot. The scale had shifted to an immeasurable tier. She had to learn party tricks, like listing the states in alphabetical order, to prop herself up. Her cherished double lids did nothing for her — now she needed to know how to speak Chinese. It was all quite difficult.
She had been chatting with a man for thirty minutes or so, pouring a lukewarm vodka soda down her throat at groundbreaking speed, waiting for the buzz that would give her the courage to place her palm on one of his thighs. He had a well-balanced face and she liked it. She watched his dark eyes follow the three gliding women as they emerged from the revolving doors, their high-heels clacking like a warning against the hotel bar’s floor. In midtown, Ripley thought she would have the upper hand. She was still young. But no — tonight, she would have to be the mousy woman by default.
The man was distracted, peering over Ripley’s shoulder to look at the fresh clientele.
“So what did you say you did again?” he said, muttering through his teeth, his neck craned to the right of her left ear.
“I work at a coffee shop,” Ripley said. She cleared her throat and tried to think of something else to say. The man’s eyes snapped back to hers.
“I see,” he said, hardly attempting to conceal his disappointment. “And are you working on anything else?”
“Am I working on anything else that isn’t my work?” she said.
“Right. Are you a writer or something? An actress? An…oh, I don’t know…” he trailed off. His fingers drummed on the bar. She took this as her cue and excused herself to the bathroom where she laboriously touched up her makeup in the mirror. She leaned in to squint at her pores and squeezed her nose, causing her eyes to tear.
When she returned the man was gone and a new one was in his place. She slid back into her seat and tried to order another drink, waving her hands in the air like an aircraft marshall to get the attention of the bartender who was handing out free shots to the women on the other side of the room.
“Good luck with that,” the man next to her said. “I’ve been trying to order for ten minutes.”
Ripley looked at him. He had the kind of neutral face she knew she wouldn’t be able to place in a few months if she ran into him on the street. This vague face was her personal preference. She decided to commence an hour-and-a-half-long staring contest with the man who possessed a nervous habit of licking his lips and a propensity to wait a beat too long before laughing at her sad, half-constructed jokes. His banter was lopsided but he had nice hands and good word choices. “I inhaled a burger before I got here,” he said. She found him a little gross; his honesty was less enticing and more strange. But after an hour of sustained exchanges had passed, Ripley decided her minimum threshold of attraction had been met and no one would judge her for taking him home if she ever had to recount their night.
They walked a few blocks after leaving the bar, and he began to speak without taking many breaths, indicating to Ripley that she really ought to cut in.
“Care for a nightcap?” she said.
Oh, how painful the song and dance was, the see-saw of filler sentences that came right before you took off each other’s clothes, stuck your tongue into every crevice of each other’s bodies and whispered words you had never used before into each other’s ears in a dramatic and floral fashion as if you were performing for a critical audience on Broadway. How polite the preface was, how restrained.
They got into a cab because the logistics of taking the subway together felt like an impossible feat to her. She nodded off around 14th street, and woke up to her head on his shoulder. She thought about what else she was working on.
There was a mutually agreed-upon pause in conversation as they made the climb up her six-floor walk-up. Human beings and the rituals they had constructed over time were painfully foolish. They had to consume liquids that were poisonous in large volumes, discuss books that contained made-up, unrelatable lives, and confront hundreds of stairs, their knees screaming, scalps burning, lungs straining to breathe through the polluted air, just for it to all end in a final act everyone saw coming from the start. The curtain call that existed before anything else, the motivation for, at least, eighty percent of any of life’s actions. It was so dumb to pretend that wasn’t what everything, especially tonight, was all about.
They sat next to each other on her couch, her legs propped up on the coffee table left behind by the previous tenant. It was one of those pieces of furniture that was not worth presenting to guests, even though it was free. It was made from some kind of plastic material, a neon tangerine color, oval, and sitting low to the ground. She would have paid for someone to take it off her hands at this point.
His body was angled towards her in a hesitant, noncommittal way, as though he was simply being polite. She looked at him, consciously deciding not to fill the second set of silence that would soon encroach on them. She didn’t find silence to be uncomfortable, but she found many men did. She wondered if it was because they were concerned women were thinking too much when they were not speaking, having the time and space to stumble upon an unconscious thought that had been quietly festering beneath the booze and evolutionary desire for romance. The woman would suddenly look up at the man, and say, “Oh goodness me. I just realized I find you deeply unsettling. Please may you leave? Yes. Right now, unfortunately. Thanks very much. Sorry about that.”
This type of realization did arise for her once while staring at a boyfriend of three years at an especially lethargic, chore-like dinner that came with being around someone so long it felt like they were a word that became gibberish after constantly repeating it in her brain. She was too young to be in this situation. She hoped she could become fond of it, but she needed to sleep with a few more people before doing so.
“What are you thinking about?” her boyfriend had asked her. A stupid question. She was shocked he didn’t know better. She sat and wondered why he desired this information. She became concerned that if he knew all her thoughts, there would be no difference between her and him. Or, he would just be an inaccurate version of her after turning her words over and over again in his head, playing a game of telephone with himself, a photocopier spitting her out just to be placed right back on the screen again. She did not want to be him, but mostly she did not want him to usurp her. She did not know where the molecules of herself would go if that happened, and she imagined herself as a photograph in the window of a hair salon, untouched for decades, bleached, blown out, and turned blue by the sun.
The man next to her now leaned in. Most men never paid enough attention to the nipples. It was a shame. He took her bra off more quickly than she frankly would have liked and they proceeded to have textbook sex that felt more like scratching an itch than anything else. Him on top, staring not quite into her eyes but to the right of her temple, saying nothing. He kissed her hand after he was done and then fell asleep without warning.
He smelled like everyone she had ever kissed. She was convinced all men had the same baseline scent. There was something animalistic and universal about it, like the smell of a school locker room or an elderly couple’s home. Paired with his vague face, she knew it would be difficult, and require a manipulation of memories conducted on a night when there was nothing better for her to do, for him to harm her in any way.
She stayed wide awake for hours as he snored next to her in a way that made her inconsolably irate. In the morning, she woke up before him. Their breaths were staggered after each other, as though her inhale was taunting his exhale in a juvenile mimic.