Post-Modern Sleaze: Chapter 2
“Do you want us to keep this shit up or not?” Olive raised her voice at him but had much insecurity behind her question. “Like, why did you even say yes to me coming over if you’re just gonna do that,” she continued.
“Oh, poor baby doesn’t get to get off exactly when she wants.”
“What the fuck, David? You’re so gross. You know that’s not what I meant. Stop projecting.”
“Do you even know what that means?”
“You know I do,” she gathered her bag and headed angrily to his bathroom to shower.
“Whatever… fucking bio-chem major at generic state school,” he said, going for the Marlboro lights on the kitchen counter.
“Oh, Jesus fucking Christ! There’s only one reason I regret staying in this shithole of a town, and it’s because of you,” there wasn’t much fire to Olive’s words, which led him to stop her in her path to the bathroom. All he had to do was reach out his lengthy arms and wait for Olive to give in. He enclosed them over her small frame, and her bag dropped to the floor.
“I’m sorry. I still don’t know how to go about this. I felt really in my head about all of this… with you tonight,” he said with his chin resting on top of her head.
“Really? I couldn’t tell,” Olive replied softly.
“It feels weird… obviously wrong. I don’t want you leaving this school with my claw marks all over you.”
“Well, it’s too late to respond to that. Isn’t it,” the main director responded to Olive’s signature demeanor.
The set was put into place. Olive and pathetic man were as turned up and turned on to their characters as they could ever be, as well as immensely tuned out to each other. That didn’t matter. Both of their love for the person they were inside their head at that moment would project better than any fake love they could show to one another. Olive gave the pathetic man the sexiest show she could, and pathetic man’s lack of understanding of the character did immense wonders for Carl’s Jr. branding. Olive didn’t even realize she was topless as she spun around in that desk chair with him until crew members started covering their eyes and shouting.
“You know I despise you,” Olive whispered in the pathetic man’s ear. “But I kinda wish we were shooting a porno right now.”
Wallace brushed his fingertips over Olive’s thighs and slightly dug his nails into them. She tried to control her bone-deep shiver.
“You will leave them,” she said. “And that’s fine.”
“It’s not.”
“We have months left together… can we just forget about it… right now,” she said.
“I guess.”
They stayed in the same position for a moment, their breathing becoming more deep, shaky, and uneven as they grasped each other tighter in the middle of his living room. She could feel every inch of him pressed against her. Her brain became static, while her body felt electric. Olive snatched the cigarette that was hanging loosely between her subject’s fingers and put it in her mouth then guided his hands underneath her top. Sometimes Wallace could never understand the effect he had on girls he should never deserve, but he was realizing blatant intelligence and fame was really all it took to get girls like Olive off. His hands felt cold as he traced over the warm skin of her abdomen. Olive took a long drag off the cigarette with her hand wrapped around his neck, realizing it was her only saving grace in this terrifyingly sober situation. “Nothing could be scarier than the first time this happened,” she thought. Most of the times they were alone, she seemed to be sober. He liked it better that way. She didn’t.
In Olive’s factual fantastical belief as she spun around in that crappy desk chair with warm adrenaline shooting through her veins, she assumed the two characters they were portraying were either heavily sexually involved or had never gone below the waist with one another. “But why would they be having their first sexual encounter at school?” she thought. Clearly, she knew the idea was to play out some weird bad-girl detention fantasy. Even though Wallace never taught high school classes, it seemed like a funny idea at the time. But in her mentally alert, hyper-sensitive state, a worrisome paradox came to fruition in her mind.
“Are you real?” Olive sighed as his hands continued roaming her body. “Sometimes I can’t believe you’re real.”
Olive was out of pathetic man’s lap and putting her blue bra back on before they could yell cut. She approached the two directors and faced them head-on, inquisitive but fearful.
“Is all of this supposed to be for real,” she said.
“No, I’m a complete figment of your imagination,” Wallace laughed.
“Huh?” both the directors questioned over Sneaker Pimps’ “6 Underground.” Olive sighed a looked where the music was coming from but found no answer. She didn’t know how to get the right words out.
“I don’t get what you mean?” the main director questioned.
“This is like an Infinite Jest parody, right? Or a parody of Wallace and stuff. We all know this shouldn’t be....”
“Well…it’s the fiftieth anniversary of the book.”
“Yes?”
“And Carl’s Jr. wanted something a little avant-garde and edgy. You know.”
If Olive wasn’t high on coke, she would have had a heart attack.
“Avant-garde? You’re-you’re telling me this is not a joke.”
“Ha!” pathetic man shouted.
Olive ignored him.
“This has to be satire. Even if it’s for real, it’s a satire. You realize that?”
The crew looked around, puzzled. The two women sighed.
“Honestly, we’re not sure. We’re just freelancers and got hired for this one job.”
“I mean, did you look at the book?”
“Don’t worry, honey. We know the basics.”
“So, who was the head of this whole idea, then?”
“You were, of course,” she gestured to Olive.
“You were, of course.”
“You were, of course.”
“You were, of course.”
At twelve years old, Olive tied a noose with a pink sequin scarf she was given as a birthday gift four years before. She left it casually in her closet, hoping one of her parents would notice it and see she needed help, but it sat there untouched until she tried to seriously use it at age fourteen. “If I am constantly killing myself, why don’t I actually kill myself?” No one knows she did it, and Olive seemed to detect no brain damage from the incident, but she could never be sure. Rubbing alcohol was the next experiment at sixteen, but it only left a constant throbbing pain in her cerebellum. At eighteen, she just had to give up her dream and resort to anorexia nervosa like every other girl. At nineteen, she discovered David Foster Wallace, like every other girl. He was worse than all three combined.
Many men have pretended to take Olive’s place on earth seriously over the years: her high school AP teachers, professors, friends’ dads, and the ones that lived in her head, of course. However, the one man she needed to, didn’t: her dad (I know, shocking.) She already knew by eight years old he thought of her as the stupidest person alive: slamming his college calculus textbook down in front of her, while yelling to explain the letters and numbers after she had a difficulty figuring out a number line worksheet. By twelve, every comment she made was dismissed by him in a shameless annoyance. She was used to constantly being shushed or interrupted. If she talked around any of their family friends, she could feel him tense up. She realizes all she was to him was a performance puppet to sell to everyone else…a plastic painted doll. Now she knows her existence on earth does not reflect any meaningful value to any man, and as she ages, her worth will only decline. “If no one cares about me, how can they expect me to care about myself? Suicide is not a selfish deed when no one actually cares.”
This thought was making its way back to the real nineteen-year-old Olive (however, both the make-believe girls would probably relate to it as well), who was sitting in the middle of a Pomona College classroom in Claremont, California. The year was 2004, and she was staring back at a sweaty, fidgety professor Wallace in front of her. This one looked noticeably older. His skin had a West Coast tan, and his hair was beginning to grow out again. He was somehow less intimidating than the one Olive threw around in her head. Words left heartbeats in her brain every time they made eye contact:
Disco Lemonade ♥
Good Old Neon ♥
Lemon Shake-Ups ♥
Shake You Off ♥
Cinnamon Girl ♥
Cinnamon Toast from Hell ♥
Brigade
Country Western
Ecstasy of Saint Teresa ♥
Byzantine Erotica ♥
Temporal-lobe ♥
Audience Pussy
Ontology ♥
“I need to kill myself, again,” another heartbeat told her as she picked at her sheer black tights. These tights she often wore not only were her signature fashion statement, but covered bruises, cuts, and scars that splattered over her legs. Some marked her skin for more trivial reasons, such as running home and falling on concrete in six-inch heels, blackout drunk after going to clubs with her model friends. Others she marked with her nails (or something worse) when she got home on those nights. Her mind was then loosened up and more open to reveal the true, un-processable despair of her life, which left her no choice but to “take the edge off” in that way (which she thought was embarrassingly juvenile sober). She would wake up confused when she saw red claw marks on her back upper thighs, skin peeling from them where her nails dug in, but it lent her comfort that at least she was the one making them. Olive knew the tights didn't cover her marks completely, though; if you looked closely, they were visible through the fabric. Olive pulled the long itchy cardigan she was wearing as a dress over her hands and tried to steady her breath in the classroom. Her eyes trailed down over Wallace’s body. She felt she would either pass out from anxiety or have an orgasm right there at her desk once she realized their eye contact was affecting him too.
“Everyone, have a mind-blowing weekend, guys. Remember to finish Silence of the Lambs by next class.”
Her double-slit daydreams had to conclude. Olive was mentally exhausted by his presence and her convoluted, freakish fantasies that were triggered off by the mere sight of him. She couldn’t face him alone today. She just couldn’t. But as she was about to cross the safer side of the threshold, he gave her that look. “Of course, this is the day, he changes his mind.” She leisurely lingered by the door until the small number of students left and jumped when she felt a hand around her wrists.
“Jesus fucking Christ, David!”
He shushed her. “Can I talk to you for a second…please.”
He almost sounded desperate, which turned Olive off immensely. She rolled her eyes and shut the door, locking it. Wallace sat at the edge of his long brown desk in the classroom auditorium, barely trying for eye contact with her. Large green overlapping chalkboards were their backdrop.
“I-I shouldn’t have tried to cut you off so quickly. I know I’m the one who initiated things. I need you to see me tonight.”
Olive scoffed. “It’s been like two weeks. Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
“You know why. I’m confused…been questioning my morality. And considering my record of fuckups on things like this, you should be thanking me for the two-week cessation,” he lazily gestured to her.
Olive felt she was no better to him than the occasional classroom cockroach on the wall.
“But if it means anything to you, I am sorry,” he added.
“Oh, god. Like you care about any of this! Morality… really?” Olive walked around to his rolling desk chair, brushing the top of it. They faced each other head-on—the desk being their court.
“Why-why don’t I care?”
“I’ll tell you why!” Olive took a paperback version of his holy bible out of her tote bag, which was amusingly annotated with colorful sticky notes, sandwiched between the pages like love-letter reality checks for him. She slammed the blue book down hard on the desk. The sound echoed through the room. He laughed.
“Damn, so you finished it. You were only halfway through when I last talked to you.”
Olive rolled her eyes. Wallace couldn’t keep count of how many times she had so far. Olive studied the book to distract herself, counting how many puffy clouds were on the airplane brochure-like cover. She then glanced at the gap between his legs.
“Yes, it was so hard to put down.”
He started to slowly make his way to Olive’s side of the desk, and her heart began palpitating like there would be no tomorrow. He snatched the book, paged through it, mildly amusing himself, and plopped it back on the desk. She felt fingertips brush her lower back, as he walked behind her. He rested down in the desk chair.
“Guess I took your spot,” Wallace smirked.
Olive raised her eyebrow and studied his uncombed appearance once more. He looked tired… like his brain was outwardly projecting some distress he was in. She then gave up everything that was good for her, as she sat in his lap with her back facing him. She leaned back, head against his shoulder and found the aloof position surprisingly soothing to her racing mind.
“So, you do like to impose your phallus on the consciousness of others, then?” Olive said hazily, smiling into his neck. She soon tasted salt on her lips.
“Only onto you.”
Olive could feel tension leave his body when she turned her head away from him.
“So, are you gonna see me tonight or what?” he said, trapping her in his arms.
“Why should I?”
“I just want to talk with you somewhere. No… no fornication. You like talking to me, and you can show me all those literary criticisms,” he gestured to the book on the desk.
“I would enjoy that. But I don’t know,” she breathed as Wallace held her waist tightly, pressing her body down into his, giving her no option but to feel how much he wanted her or at least her at surface level. She looked down at their abdomens and thighs pressing together and wished she hadn’t.
“I’ll take you somewhere nice,” Wallace could barely hold in his laugh.
Olive scoffed again. “Hm... condescending and dripping with condensation today,” she remarked almost to herself. Wallace let out a confused laugh and squeezed her body like doing so would trigger some off button. A jolt moved through her, and she grasped onto his shoulders, feeling the rough fabric of his reoccurring black buttoned-down shirt.
“Can you wear this same outfit?” Olive wanted him to show up that night identical to how he looked in her class to heighten the taboo of it all.
“Yeah…I guess? I was going to anyway.”
“Of course, you were,” her heavy, shaky breathing exalted him.
“Sorry, superficial consumerism is something I try not to take part in heavily,” he snapped.
Olive’s mood dimmed, and she turned to straddle him on the desk chair. They observed each other’s darkened eyes. She took his face in her hands and slowly traced the lines forming on it. Neither spoke for a while. The subtle sadness on their faces already told each other pretty much everything they could ever argue about.
“Wanna make out?” she asked, knowing her chances were getting dicey.
She thought about the first time they kissed: him going over to her private dorm to “help her with her essay,” since she was the only STEM major in the class, so writing “wasn’t her thing,” and she might benefit from some “extra guidance” because her work looked “promising.” It was all too much. “There’s no prom queen in college,” he had said to her for no apparent reason during that office hour where he invited himself over. She felt victimized that he guessed she had won prom queen only by knowing her at surface level. She thought about their faces inching closer together in her shared living area (roommates gone for the day) as her Partridge Family Album record he got his hands on blared in the background. It started with him performing his Keith Partridge impersonation for her— the same one he used to do as a child for his family. Then he encouraged her to dance with him halfway through “I Can Feel Your Heartbeat.” He seemed so out of character that day, but now she knew it was just his way of throwing her off in the moment. The worst part was she loved who he could be, whether one action, word, or touch of it was real or not.
Olive eventually cut Wallace off from her mouth, ending their detracting moment. He frustratingly sighed and leaned his head back. Grabbing Wallace’s holy bible from the desk, Olive raised up on her knees and shook it over his face. A paper rainbow cascaded down on them as he pivoted the desk chair back and forth with his legs, trying to throw Olive off balance.
“Infinite jerk,” Olive said, giggling, her face a ray of incandescent sunshine reflecting off Wallace.
A larger piece of folded notebook paper fell out as well. She snatched it before he could get a hold of it and opened it. It was one of her many poetic suicide notes. She wrote this one two weeks ago specifically for him. She laughed at the irony, then folded it up and placed it in Wallace’s ugly shirt pocket.
“Pick me up at eight by that street across from my dorm,” she said.
“I will be there.”
Her fingertips brushed over his wet lips quickly. He parted his mouth.
“You’re beautiful,” she (sort of) lied before standing up, reaching for his Marlboro lights, and leaving the classroom. Olive looked behind her to catch a glimpse of his state as he began to open the note, and for once, she was able to leave him dumbstruck.
To Professor Wallace,
Consider the women. That’s all I ask.
Consider the teenage girls that once sat on your lap.
Consider their fears and the weight of your brain, which you have installed unto them into thinking they’re insane.
I’m not smart…but many things I know you don’t.
I didn’t get into Harvard but worshipped many of the graduates’ thrones.
Poor Joelle. She’ll never know how to justify your actions or analyze your tones.
I just don’t care anymore…who cares if I’m interesting.
I’m done with this facade.
I’m done romanticizing the fucked-up gods.
Love,
Olive ♥
Hailey Paetzel is a Texas-based writer and scholar attending the Savannah School of Art and Design. She is a guest fiction columnist for Delude Magazine. You can find more of her work here.