About Bob
By Andrew Madigan
Bob was a forty-three year old restaurant manager living in a cramped, dusty studio apartment. Suspiciously unread-looking journals littered the windowsills and end-tables. He liked to tell people it was a one-bedroom, trying to include the little alcove outside the kitchenette.
“That’s not a room, Bob,” people would say. “That’s a—what?—changing room? It’s like five-feet square. If.”
“See,” he’d tell people, “built-in bookcases with glass doors. Nice, huh?”
“They don’t shut, Bob. What, has the stuff here, this closing mechanism, been painted over?”
“The super’s gonna fix that. Did you notice the elevator? It’s got a crank.”
“Yea, I noticed, Bob. A real sweat box, that.”
“No, no. It’s got Old World Charm. See—”
People didn’t understand: the apartment had real elegance.
In any case, Bob was a child of the 60s, sort of, and as such he was, for the most part, quasi-dedicated to the principles espoused by the rebellious youth of that decade. His modest apartment, therefore, was a badge of the counterculture and its anti-materialist ethos. No one got this either, since neither Bob nor anyone else seemed to be wary of Mass Society or The Military Industrial Complex anymore. Bob was pledging allegiance to a philosophy that was no longer pertinent, which was like declaring himself to be a Dreyfusard or a Whig.
A few months ago, Bob slept with Ellen, his best friend’s wife. Frank, the best friend, didn’t suspect a thing. This was right before they separated. Bob liked to imagine that the two events were unrelated. He seemed to recall something he learned in college, during his three semesters at CUNY. Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc. His philosophy prof, Dr. Jenkins, used to say this all the time, until one day someone raised her hand and asked him what the hell he was talking about.
“Because one event (a) occurs right after another event (b), doesn’t mean that there’s a causal relationship (c) between the two events. Which is to say, A + B does not necessarily = C.”
After a few beers at the Hop Pole, Bob liked to think that he’d only slept with Ellen after the separation, which made the betrayal seem smaller, but no one else bought the deception. It’s like when you buy pants one size too small, to make yourself seem less fat than you really are: you’re not fooling anyone, especially with grapefruits of gut-flesh dribbling over your waistband.
(Hand grenades clipped to the ammo-belt of your self-delusion?)
And assorted figures of speech.
It happened like this.
Bob dropped by on a Thursday evening after work. It had to be Thursday. Why? Weekend nights were too much pressure, like New Year’s Eve or the Prom. We must have an outrageously good time! Whoo! Thursday was laid back. Any good times you had were just an unexpected treasure, a forgotten twenty dollars crumpled in the pocket of an old jacket.
Bob didn’t call first, because he never did. He liked to work under the illusion that it was a casual thing.
“Just thought I’d drop by—”
“—Bob! Come on in!”
He always dropped by at the same time on the same day, but his friends always acted as though it were a total surprise. Still, sandwiches and drinks would always be at hand, so you’d think Bob would have found it difficult to sustain the illusion. He didn’t.
“Where’s Frank?” Bob asked on this particular Thursday, accepting from Ellen a cold Miller High Life with his right hand and reaching, with his resourceful left, for the (as yet unseen, around the corner from the entrance) bowl of Bavarian-style pretzels.
Ellen frowned—in a small way, obscurely, allusively—before speaking. “Out.”
She spit the word out quickly, though it’s impact seemed to linger in the room. Bob remembered when he'd met an old girlfriend’s strict Roman Catholic parents, many years before, and had inadvertently betrayed the fact that they were living together. The effect had been pretty much the same: a Victorian novel's worth of subtext compressed into one syllable.
“Oh.” Bob’s monosyllabic reply, perhaps because it was mumbled through a pretzel filter, lacked novelistic resonance.
After a few more beers, some reluctant (on Bob’s part) semi-ironic (on both parts) dancing to a Disco compilation, a quiet and serious back rub, and a thirty-minute period during which Ellen recited a litany of her husband’s flaws, cruelties and annoying habits, an awkward kiss was detonated between them. While Ellen worried over the ethical ramifications of the act — and the theoretical, if therefore not improbable, acts to follow — and the difficult position she was putting Bob, as Best Friend, into — Bob engaged in heated internal discourse about the relative desirability of pretzels and chips in the context of beer-drinking (both sides had their merit, he concluded).
“You know, Bob. I’ve always fancied you.”
“Yet — strangely — I’m not the least bit fancy,” Bob uttered.
Ellen thought it was a poor time for his weird brand of humor, which seem to exist somewhere along the border between non-sequitur and stupidity. She also wondered what on earth had made her select a specifically British locution — fancy — from her overnight bag of stock phrases. Am I midlife-crisising? she asked herself. Or am I merely suffering from Adult Onset Anglophilia? If the latter, then who did I catch it from? Have I slept with any Anglophiles lately? Have I been exposed to blood pudding or the novels of Anthony Trollope?
“No, really. Bob. I like you. A lot[ ]”
A lot: The last in this strained series of wrenching and simplistic utterances was punctuated not with a period but with a tender right arm on Bob’s left and eyes cast downward to suggest willingness and shame, the twin patron saints of foolish sexual misadventure. (This is more than figurative language, mind you: she actually did intend her gestures to perform the acts of semantic gate-keeping typically assigned to punctuation.)
“I like you, too, Ellen[ ]”
Bob, an avid punctuator as well, unzipped four teeth of his trouser fly, which had the same effect as the ellipses which would have ordinarily trailed suggestively from unsaid words to unspeakable acts.
To Ellen, a good woman who’d been happily or unhappily married for more than eleven years, the nonverbal import of said unzippage was vaguely oral in nature, so she obliged. It wasn’t what she had intended, at all, but after initiating things to this point, she didn’t have the nerve to stop short. It was around this point, between the elliptical zipper and her acquiescence to its siren call, that Ellen realized how little cheating on one’s husband had to do with sex. Bob did not realize this.
Later, they made love.
A few weeks later, Frank invited Bob out for wings and a pitcher of Old Style at Shooters™, a local sports bar. More than just wildly popular, Shooters™ was in fact the very epicenter of social life (of the scene) in Springlake, the suburb to which Frank and Ellen had fled once the idea of having children had been seriously broached. (According to Frank, anyway.) Bob wasn’t altogether comfortable with the idea of a sports bar. Not because he was an urban hipster (he wasn’t one: he wasn’t clever enough to sport a soul patch or ennui), but only because the multiple TV sets made him confused and irritable. He didn’t know whether to watch hockey or football or NASCAR or Girls Gone Wild!
“Bob, I’ve got a confession,” Frank began, emboldened by the second beer. “I’ve been cheating on Ellen.” When his friend refused to answer back, or nod, choosing to drip more Tabasco on the hot wings instead, Frank added: “Just thought you should know.”
“How ‘bout another pitcher?”
“Okay. Bob. I guess.” There was a missing or implied question mark—and a reluctant exclamation point—at the end of each of these sentence fragments. Frank just didn’t have the guts to use all the punctuation his emotions craved. (He’s the kind of mealy-mouthed guy who, fearful of arrogance, might write: “It’s a boy…” or “Vlad, we’ve toppled the regime.”)
Just because Frank lacked courage at moment x, however, doesn’t necessarily mean that he would lack it at moment y. Especially after a few more drinks. Case in point:
“Some more wings, Frank?”
“Withaman.”
“Hmm?”
“Withaman.” Breath, Frank, breathe. Separate. The. Words. There you go. “With a man.”
“With my beer, Frank. Wings with my—”
“—No, you stupid… I slept with a man. See?”
“Oh.”
Frank had been expecting eyebrows to jump. He wanted mind-blowing ellipses to follow Bob’s remark, and a wondrous exclamation point to boot, but he got nothing more than a lackadaisical period.
“I guess that means I’m gay…”
“Not necessarily.”
Frank perked up. He wanted to believe that, because his marriage had been in trouble for a long time, and because he suspected that Ellen had been fooling around with someone, his recent indiscretion was symptomatic of nothing more than boredom, healthy curiosity, and a shocking lack of self-discipline. He didn’t want to be gay, though. Frank just didn’t have the wardrobe for it.
“No?”
“No, not necessarily,” Bob said, though he didn’t list any alternatives, which annoyed Frank. He really didn’t have the clothes to be a gay man. This worried him immensely.
“Say, Bob. You don’t date much.”
There was a period at the end of this sentence, metaphorically and literally, but a question mark (or rather, a whole chain of them) was implied. The question was silent, like the h in when or in a cockney’s estuary twang. Bob didn’t bite, however. He just looked quizzically at Frank through the opaque yellow lens of his beer mug, which was hoisted in front of his face.
Later, Frank was more direct:
“Bob. I like you. I think you know that.”
Well, there were a whole lotta ellipses at the end of that last sentence, which Frank chose to express with a warm impatient hand on Bob’s acquiescent thigh.
Later, after they’d made love, Bob thought about his life, which wasn’t something he did very often or with much depth. I’m not gay, he said. It’s just, I’m not picky is all. Man, woman, whatever. Sitting on the edge of the motel bed, separating his clothes from Frank’s, Bob was pretty satisfied with this analysis. Still, something nagged at him. There seemed to be unfinished business between Bob and himself.
The following week, Bob thought very seriously, for way more than fifteen minutes, about moving into a larger apartment. Maybe this is what was bothering him, what his life was lacking: more space. But then he remembered the anti-materialist countercultural philosophy in which he almost half believed. No, moving to a four-bedroom, ranch-style house in the suburbs wouldn’t do, especially since he didn’t have the money.
For several minutes, Bob stared at his shoe and wondered why both houses and potato chips came in “ranch-style” varieties. He couldn’t figure it out. It was an enigma.
Instead of moving, Bob went over to Todd’s apartment across town. Todd was a painter who specialized in a certain childlike style and menacing subject matter, things he’d appropriated gradually, after twenty years in the city, from various folk artists and poseurs. He used a very engaging shade of chartreuse, however, which added something to this predictable and derivative method.
Bob and Todd had a few beers, discussed important books which neither one had been able to finish, and watched a series of late-night talk shows without any particular devotion. They did not sleep together, nor even kiss, which Bob thought was a step in the right direction. He was beginning to turn his life around. He was injecting a purpose into the withered veins of his life. It was like the 60s, all over again.
Andrew Madigan recently moved to Brooklyn from Dubai, UAE, a city with twice the glitz of Las Vegas and almost as much cultural depth. His agent is currently not selling his novel.
