The First Bad Man

by Miranda July

IT WAS HARD TO THINK of a confession that would make a person sweat that wasn’t either criminal or romantic. And how often do people, people we know, commit serious crimes? I felt jittery; I didn’t sleep. At dawn I experienced an involuntary total voiding of my bowels.

I made myself very still so he would continue; I love to be described.

Maybe he wouldn’t say anything, which is the worst thing men do.

“Three days a year I take on a submissive role. It’s a game we like to play, an immensely satisfying adult game.”

“I’m a mature woman, Cheryl—I ask for what I want, and if the desire isn’t mutual, well, at least I haven’t wasted any time thinking about it.”

“In love? No. I don’t connect with him intellectually or emotionally. We agreed not to fall in love; it’s a clause in our contract.”

Each driver who passed me thought, She is a giant rat or some other wet, craven animal whose hunger strips her of her dignity. And they were right.

She assaulted me as only a person born to a lifetime of martial arts training can. Succinctly.

The next five minutes proved that my neighbors didn’t care if I lived or died.

“Real comes and goes and isn’t very interesting.”

It used to be this was the only time I saw him outside the office—now I could say He texts me all the time and it wouldn’t be a lie.

I drank it while peeing to save time even though I didn’t really need more time right now.

Necessary? No. All that’s necessary is that you eat enough to survive.

I could see it so clearly, the zygote—shiny and bulbous, filled with the electric memory of being two but now damned with the eternal loneliness of being just one. The sorrow that never goes away.

was this your plan, that we would stand in the hallway together and—what? Fuck? Is that what you want? Or you just want to blow me? Hump my leg like a dog?”

The insult kept her interested, this and the fact that he was married.

But eventually she wanted it more than he did, and this made her lower than him.

“You’re a real secretary.” Like a person slapped, she said nothing.

She was giving him one last chance to choose her, to stay, stay forever, to honor all her complications and live with her in a new world of love and sexuality.

“This is the worst you’ll ever feel.” “Ever?” “Well, maybe not ever in your whole life. We don’t know how you’re going to die—that might be worse.”

An athletic-looking older woman was counting over the baby. Maybe keeping track of how many seconds it had been since he’d died. She would never stop, she would count forever if that’s how long he was dead for.

We would turn on the light when good news came and if it never came we would live in the dark like this forever.

I liked this way of talking where the verbs were left out. Maybe we would never say them.

Was all this real to her? Did she think it was temporary? Or maybe that was the point of love: not to think.

Sometimes I looked at her sleeping face, the living flesh of it, and was overwhelmed by how precarious it was to love a living thing. She could die simply from lack of water. It hardly seemed safer than falling in love with a plant.

I had been quiet when there was no reason to be quiet and consistent when consistency didn’t matter.

If you were wise enough to know that this life would consist mostly of letting go of things you wanted, then why not get good at the letting go, rather than the trying to have?

We thrust our babies into the air again and again, showing them what it felt like to be a mother, to be terrifyingly in love without the option of getting off.

Dr. Broyard popped out holding a file folder. As she looked up at him her whole bearing shifted; she became luminous. Not with the light of life, but like a husk lit electrically from within. She reached for the folder and he let it go—just shy of her fingers. It floated to the ground. Ruth-Anne hesitated and then awkwardly bent over to pick it up. When her face reappeared it was smiling with the hope that he had enjoyed the rear view, but he turned and went back into his office. Her smile widened with pain, and seeing her teeth I could also see the jawbone that held them, and her skull with its empty sockets and the whole of her clickety-clack skeleton. I could see right into her brain; it was shaking with fixation. Just his name on a piece of paper could set her off. Even a word like Broyard—barnyard, backyard—sent her into an exhausted loop of fantasies. Everything else in her life, including her own therapy practice, was faked. The spell consumed 95 percent of her energy but she was surprised to see that no one noticed; the wafer-thin 5 percent version of her sufficed. She kept a list on her desk of all the things that used to make her happy: Zydeco music Dogs My work Rainy days Thai food Body surfing My friends But she couldn’t generate enough sadness and regret to free herself. She lived for the three days a year he replaced her in her office and she worked beneath him. Through sheer force of will she became what he once said he wished his wife was: small, feminine, ...

Always being the heaviest person in the house had been exhausting.