A Touch of Jen

by Beth Morgan

“Have you ever reached a state of equilibrium with a person and not wanted to disrupt that?” Jake says something inane about “the friend zone,” and Remy says that no, it wasn’t that at all and then tries to explain the holy, delicate suspense of nothing happening with Jen, and the beauty of their perfectly calibrated distance from each other.

He notices this quiet feeling, but doesn’t interrogate it for fear of disturbing it.

As he navigates each wave of diners, keeping track of the tables in his section and vaguely enjoying his own long-developed intuition about how and when to give each of them his attention, and as he weaves through the tables, balancing plates, sensitive to every aspect of his surroundings (the different quality of chatter as he moves from the kitchen to the dining area, the water droplets trembling on plates fresh from the dishwasher), he feels so capable that he forgets that this repetitive churning goes nowhere, except towards the end of the day.

Riding her bike home, Alicia occupies a mental state between pleasure and boredom, akin to her state of mind while showering.

Any of the intuition that would have served him in the old days is inaccessible. If he hadn’t started relying so much on Alicia for his social interactions, these instincts wouldn’t have abandoned him. It’s really Alicia’s fault.

Before Jen was such a large presence in their sex life, Alicia and Remy had other scenarios: home intruder, bad babysitter, vampire attack. This time, they get confused. Neither of them is sure if this is a Jen scenario or a home intruder scenario. Alicia-as-Jen’s fingers slip against the soap holder and reach for his hair with a gesture somewhere between desire and self-defense.

Genuinely OBSESSED with this. It's a car wreck of a toxic codependent relationship fueled by an intense shared infatuation with a social media presence.

“He’s probably the type of person whose favorite book was assigned reading in high school,” she says, although neither of them can remember the last time they read a book.

“You think that because I act one way around you and a different way around other people that one of those is more authentic?”

He gets up and sees that Alicia’s already putting on the expression she wears around other women.

It startles him to think that other couples might share the same intimacy he has with Alicia, and he’s suddenly aware of how exposed he is to their judgment.

But cynical, quote-unquote smart people always underestimate the power of something as simple as a positive mindset and openness to the world. Lots of good things have come my way because of it.”

what a way to make me immediately hate a character.

In his suddenly spacious, blank mind, the desire to stay in this stream of movement is the only thing that matters. But this thought, like a cell mitoting, elaborates into a more complex thought.

Remy tells Alicia that Jen is a fraud. That she enjoys manipulating people. He assigns many of his own qualities to her.

Remy vaguely recalls some mention she made of an art project. She’s brought it up several times, but he thought that, like all of her projects towards self-actualization, it would never really materialize.

What surprises her most about sitting inside the Spod, thinking of nothing, is the sensation of privacy. What’s less and less clear is to whom the privacy belongs.

She leaves shortly after, saying that she hopes to see him in the next course. He lies and says that she definitely will. He doesn’t understand why she, like Jen, seems to believe that whatever is behind Remy’s “walls” is anything good.

Jen doesn’t say anything. Remy asks her if that’s weird. He’s so overwhelmed by the sensation of disclosing something true that he forgets that what he’s saying is a distortion of the truth.

“I’m talking about— I just feel like there’s a version of the life that I should be living that’s just out of reach, and it doesn’t make me as exhausted as this one does.” “You mean like…an ideal version of life? In some other version of reality?” “Things should just be as easy as surfing. Technically, I can do what I want, but it doesn’t really feel like freedom.