Mr Salary

If he left my line of sight for more than a few seconds, I couldn’t even remember what his face looked like.

My most recent boyfriend had called me ‘frigid’, but added that he ‘didn’t mean it in a sexual way’. 

It was in my nature to absorb large volumes of information during times of distress, like I could master the distress through intellectual dominance. 

In bed that night I asked him: When will we know if this was a bad idea or not? Should we already know? Because now it feels good.

I found his distraction comforting. In a way I wanted to live inside it, as if it was a place of his own, where he would never notice I had entered.

Death was, of course, the most ordinary thing that could happen, at some level I knew that. Still I had stood there waiting to see the body in the river, ignoring the real living bodies all around me, as if death was more of a miracle than life was.

Frank? I said. He mumbled something, and I thought: well, even cats recognize their own names.

If I happened to meet the woman the following morning, I would discreetly inspect her for any physical resemblance to myself. This way I found that everyone in some sense looks like everyone else.

Before he was diagnosed with leukaemia, I had been toying with describing Frank as an "abusive father" when the subject came up at campus parties. I felt some guilt about that now. He was unpredictable, but I didn't cower in terror of him, and his attempts at manipulation, though heavy, were never effective. I wasn't vulnerable to them. Emotionally, I was myself as a smooth, hard little ball. He couldn't get purchase on me. I just rolled away.

Outside the restaurant window it had started to sleet, and under the orange street lights the wet flakes looked like punctuation marks.