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Merritt Tierce

Love Me Back

Put Your Back into It

I met all four of them at an off-site catering event for the opening of their new Minimally Invasive Spine, Back, and Neck Group. The one I liked, Cornelius, was the only one I didn’t sleep with, and the only one who asked me out. Trained at Yale so why was he asking out a waitress? I don’t know. Two of the other three were sleazy and the handsomest was arrogant. One so sleazy I fled, though usually I had the stomach for it. Cornelius wore Tommy Bahama hibiscus-print silk shirts, and was more than twice my age, but who knows. Someone told him I was smart and gave him my number. We were to visit the Gordon Parks exhibit at the DMA on a Sunday afternoon. Gordon Parks was my idea and I knew it scored with him — maybe made him think of how I could be an accident, a good one lodged in the mire, just waiting to be sprung.

But late Saturday night I met my dealer in the parking lot of the Kroger on Cedar Springs and bought four twenties. At ten a. m. I hadn’t come down even after smoking a joint and taking five sleeping pills. In the mirror I had no iris, I was all hole, falling in. I didn’t answer when he called.

He’d asked me out the week before. It felt like a job interview but I went along. Would I be like Jordan? She was a young blond waitress liberated by one of her customers. Hedge fund. After they married they dined at The Restaurant often, before Stars or Mavs games.

I didn’t think that scenario likely, but still I would have answered if I’d been sober. When I recovered I left a message he didn’t respond to. He’d given me one suspicious half-hearted bored chance and I turned out to be a flake. I never saw him in The Restaurant again. I can’t believe he had that much pride.

The three others: I mentioned one so sleazy. Maybe in the end he wasn’t as bad as the other two. I say that because he was uglier, and an ugly man may learn to compensate for his face with some kindness. Perhaps his entire career was compensation for his ugliness — a path to money that could pay women to ignore the way he looked. Pale pink, fat, he reminded me of a hairless mole we’d seen at the zoo. There is no point in asking what the attraction was — that’s the wrong question. Clearly what has gone on in the world of my past can answer only other questions. Like why does a man want to pretend a woman likes him? What does anyone get from pretending? I did the ugly one first. Went to a bar in his neighborhood, drank some whiskey with him.

I ask my memory, Why did I take each next step? There was a hateful man who once said I am a step skipper but no, each step was taken. That one, then that one, then another, each voluntary. Whatever is in me that makes decisions is now full of an accretion of plaque, the chalky consequence of, paradoxically, so many hollow moments.