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Mumblecore

Posted on August 20, 2007
Filed Under The Stories |

They saw each other over the fuzzy tops of ice-cream cones. Fuzzy because their near vision was blurred from squinting hard to focus on the person so far away, to try and figure out what he/she looked like. They might have been low-key individuals but that was not to say that they weren’t looks-oriented. “Looks are very important to our culture,” is what he would say to her friends when they had dated for a while, “They let people know who we’re trying to be from day to day and they also remind us of how far we’ve strayed from our ideal.” Her friends thought she was so lucky to have hooked up with a guy who understood.

That afternoon, in the mall, over their ice-cream cones, he saw that she was a Manga-Gothic hybrid and she saw that he was going for a Reservoir Dogs aesthetic. They took two detours each to place themselves closer to each other and she saw that he was skinnier than the skinny black tie flopping off his neck like a tired snake after an hour of high-impact aerobics. She liked that. She liked the idea of putting her arms around a guy from behind and being able to lay her fingers on his ribs. Then she would find a place for her head in the bony thicket that was his back and feel like she was cuddling up to a prehistoric pet that she had tamed with her love.

To his eyes her tartan mini skirt looked good enough to crawl under. He wondered what she would taste like (and this was before they had even said hello). He liked that she was a girl from his side of the tracks built like a girl from the imagination of a horny Japanese illustrator. All eyes and boobs and the most seductive pink tongue carving shapes into a cone of Chunky Monkey.

After their intricate manoeuvring they were facing away from each other so he turned around at about the same time that she did and said, “Nice outfit.”

She frowned. When the cheerleaders and the hot chicks said that to her in school they always meant it as an insult. But he followed that up with, “Have you ever been to Japan? I think you’d be super popular there.”

The frown morphed into a smile and she said, “I want to go there someday.”

It was his turn to frown, “Please say it’s not because of Lost In Translation.”

“Are you kidding? I wanna go because of Battle Royale…and Manga. I want to be a vampire in Tokyo. I could sleep during the day and run wild by night…shop, drink…really push the fashion envelope in Shibuya…fuck Lost In Translation!”

He smiled happily and thrust out his hand, “Evan.”

She shook the proffered hand and smiled back, “Rachel.”

He laughed and came around to join her at her table, “That’s funny but it would probably be totally inappropriate for me to say I got Wood right?”

She puzzled over that for a moment and then she said, “Antichrist Superstar’s bridezilla! Nice one! Do you?”

“What?”

“Have wood?”

He looked surprised, “What? No!”

She bobbed her head, “Too bad.”

He blushed, “Are you coming on to me?”

“Would you mind if I did?”

He blushed some more, “No!”

“Cool. So what do you want to do? I’ve got the whole day free, you’ve sweet-talked your way to my table…I’m yours.”

“Let’s see, there’s watch something, drink something, buy something, listen to something or…eat something,” he watched her attacking her ice-cream cone as he spoke and said, “I guess we’re covered on the eat something front.”

“You got any beers at your place?”

“Sure.”

“So let’s go there.”

“Okay.”

And that’s how Rachel and Evan began their seven-month relationship.

The break-up came on the heels of a transformation. His more than hers but she wasn’t exactly blameless in the proceedings. He turned up to one date with a sensible haircut and in a regular shirt and jeans. She didn’t recognise him right away and when she did, she laughed in horror and said, “Your preppy boy is so good I don’t know whether to punch you or steal your credit card and buy myself something super slutty.”

He smiled uncomfortably and they had a bizarre evening. For one thing, the bar they went to was not one they usually hung out at. For another, she kept wanting to go screw in the club bathroom and he kept shaking hands with people she had never met, making conversation that featured words she had never heard before.

It was only much later when she had outgrown her own phase of trying to resemble some cartoon character or the other that she realised that he had stuck his toes into the shark-infested waters of financial traders.

At one point he had become so engrossed in one conversation that she struck up a conversation of her own with a guy who looked like the only bad boy in a roomful of good guys. Two minutes into their conversation, Charles asked her, “What kind of hooker are you?”

She was taken aback, “What makes you think I’m any kind of hooker at all?”

He looked pointedly at the way she was dressed and raised his eyebrows. She checked herself out in the dark mirror and felt incredibly turned on. Three minutes later she had smuggled him into a cubicle of the women’s room. Four minutes later they were bouncing off the walls of the cubicle, seriously startling their neighbours on either side who were trying to pee as quietly as possible.

When her whispers of arousal turned into growls of passion they exited so fast, one of them had to go back later to wash her hands. Four-and-a-half minutes after they first entered the cubicle Charles was done and Rachel hadn’t even got properly started. She watched him fumble with his shirt tails for a moment and then she said, “That will cost you three hundred dollars.” It made him pause for a bit and then he liberated four bills from his wallet and stuck them in her cleavage, “Keep the change, wildcat.”

Angry tears had streaked her mascara long before she exited the bathroom and when she saw that Evan hadn’t even noticed she was gone she walked out of the bar and his life. All she ever said about their meeting and break-up seven months later was, “It ended the way it began…because of a chance encounter.”

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