The Chris Sartinsky Memoirs: Chapter Twenty-Four: In Medias Res

“People who eat with their mouths open.”

“People who work out at the gym.”

“People who enjoy musical theater.”

Karen and I had this game we’d play, wherein we’d go back and forth, naming the kinds of people we found unacceptable. Like this:

“People who work on their cars.”

“People who sleep on the train.”

“People who jog.”

And so on. We got a real kick out of this game, the two of us.

“People who take pictures of sunsets.”

“People who are happy to work in the hospitality industry.”

“People who drink wine.”

We didn’t actually keep score, and it wasn’t a competitive game, but we did talk of points. You got extra points if someone who fit your description was in the room, and extra extra points if that person was in earshot (we quite often played in restaurants and on public transportation, for instance). You got extra points if you were describing one of your opponent’s close friends.

“People who argue about sports.”

“People who argue about politics.”

“People who keep potted plants.”

I called the game “Our Game.” Karen called it “In Medias Res,” though I don’t know why. I think it was just something she heard and she liked the sound of it.

“People who get excited about meeting new people.”

“People who have opinions about television commercials.”

“People who ask for their salad dressing on the side.”

And though we never talked about this, the way you won was by looking your opponent in the eyes and describing him or her, with no ambiguity (the cold eye contact would do this), and the deeper the insecurity you hit on, the better. But it was tricky, because you couldn’t be too overt about it—you couldn’t, for example, say “boring, self-loathing Connecticut mop-head hayseeds who have no idea what a burden they are to people who are actually interesting and want to do things more involved than sitting around all day complaining like old men,” or “frigid, hateful urbanite Dr. Freud wannabes who learned everything they know about human psychology from Wikipedia and are about a hundred times less smart and a thousand times less desirable than they think.” Because that wouldn’t be fun. Plausible deniability was the key.

“People who wear cargo pants.”

“People who appropriate and fetishize cultures they know nothing about.”

“People who only speak English.”

Does it seem empty, this game? Cowardly? Unbearably grim? Well, yeah. We were a couple of college kids, arrogant and insecure, principled and nihilistic, sure we were entitled to be heard even though we knew we had nothing to say. It was ugly and self-destructive, what we did. It took our weaknesses—listlessness, a refusal to plan or commit, a fundamental and frightening inability to believe in anything—and glorified and reinforced them. The more we played it, the further we slipped backwards.

Anyway, it wasn’t long before we found ourselves living together. She slept in my room, most of the time. I never slept at her place. I don’t know why. Her place was a lot bigger and a lot nicer—it had a kitchen, for one, not to mention the living room and the bathrooms (two of them between her and her three roommates). My place was barely big enough for me, and all I had was a hot plate and a dining hall down the street and a dirty bathroom down the hall. She never stopped talking about how disgusting that bathroom was, and why didn’t I clean it (like I was gonna be the one to clean it and not one of the other slobs who shared it with me), and how my room was a mess and cramped and so on. But that didn’t stop her from staying over pretty much all the time. The only times she didn’t were when I said something awful to her, or she said something awful to me. We never got into real fights, exactly—there was never yelling or anything like that. We just said really awful things to one another, always behind a veil of oblivious civility—“how could that possibly upset you?” So we could deny that anything awful had been said, I guess, though we never bothered denying anything. We both knew what was going on. When she said something awful to me, I didn’t even have to ask her to leave. She could tell when a line had been crossed, and would just pick up her stuff and leave. Then we’d get together again the next day like nothing had happened.

We fell in with a couple who lived down the hall named Tommy and Jess. Tommy was the only one who lived on the floor, technically, but you never saw one without the other. I was even in a big polisci lecture with Tommy, and Jess was always there, even though I don’t think she was in the class. And it’s not like they made out through the whole lecture, or even talked. Jess just sat there and listened. She didn't even take notes.

Anyway, they were always inviting us places, and it was difficult for us to resist. We both wanted to resist, naturally. The way I did this was by refusing to show them even the smallest sign of human decency. I basically ignored them. Karen’s way of resisting them, on the other hand, was to accept all of their invitations. How it worked was one of them (usually Jess) would invite us somewhere, I would say nothing, Karen would say we’d love to go, the two of them would leave, and then Karen would basically blame me for making her go. I would try to mount counterarguments—generally “but you were the one who said yes”—but they were ineffective. She confused me, most of the time, and usually convinced me that she was the one making sense. She was very good at that.

The last time we saw Tommy and Jess, though, was one Friday night in March or April of that first year me and Karen were together. They invited us to this little restaurant in the North End they had heard about. It was either called Violjin’s or Viojlin’s—I can’t remember. The way they pronounced it, I thought they were having difficulty saying Violins—they didn’t pronounce the "J," but there was a weird rolling of the tongue—and it was only when I saw the menu that I realized what was going on.

Karen absolutely detested these two, I should mention. I didn’t like them, but I didn’t dislike them either. They annoyed me, but they were OK. I’ve always been very good at distinguishing between the people I dislike because of flaws in their characters and the ones I dislike because of the flaws in my character. In this way I think I am actually more tolerant of other people than most, or at least more forgiving. This is one of the advantages of being hyperaware of why you are such a disgusting person—you don’t hold so many things against others. Whatever was going on in Karen’s head when she was around Tommy and Jess, she held it against them.

So anyway, we got roped into going to this restaurant with them, just like we got roped into everything else. It was I think our third consecutive weekend spending at least one night with them. Karen referred to it as her losing streak.

“I don’t know why you just can’t tell them no,” she said. “Just say ‘no, we’re busy, we can’t do it,’ or, ‘no, we have better things to do.’ That’s all you have to say.”

“I don’t know why you can’t just not tell them yes,” I said.

“Stop changing the subject.” I was sitting on my bed and she was pacing around the room. She always paced—it was her way of making a point of how inadequate my room was. “You’re so terrified someone might not like you, you’re afraid to say no to them. And for the same reason, you’re afraid to say yes, because then you know I won’t like you.”

“That’s not true,” I said. I was pretty sure I already knew that none of these people liked me.

“You have such trouble trying to wriggle yourself out of these things with the perfect excuse so no one will think less of you, or trying to say something witty and memorable, you freeze up. And by the time you figure out that there is no perfect answer, you’ve been standing there with your mouth open for twelve minutes and no one wants anything to do with you.”

“Well there you go,” I said. “Just let me do my thing and they won’t want anything to do with us.”

“I’m trying to help you,” she said. “God, I’d love to see you in a job interview. What must that be like?”

“I do OK.”

“I can imagine. I can see the poor dumb interviewer asking you a question and you just sort of like tipping over in your chair.”

“I do all right.”

“‘What’s your biggest weakness?’ Oh Christ, what I’d give to see you in a job interview.”

“I usually say I work too hard.”

“You do not, you asshole. Even you do not say that.”

We took the train out to Government Center and then walked to the restaurant. I have no idea where it was. We wandered around the North End for quite a while, not really going in any consistent direction. I swear we circled around at least once or twice. Jess and Tommy were talking the whole time. They kept trying to include us in the conversation, but I always let Karen answer, and she never gave them more than a grunt or an mmm-hmm. They were walking arm-in-arm. It was very cute, in a stupid sort of way. They didn’t make an all-that attractive couple. Tommy grinned all the time, which made him look like kind of a moron, mostly. He was one of these people you think are good-looking enough until you’re not around him, and you realize you can’t remember what he looks like. He was short, I remember that, and was always making jokes about how short he was, in such a way that you just knew he was insecure about it, and Jess would always jump in and tell him he wasn’t short, which was just a blatant lie. He also worked out a lot—classic short man’s complex. Jess had hair it looked like she dyed a sludgy, ugly red. A lot of people have this color, and I’ve never understood it. It looks like someone melted a red popsicle in puddle water. She had glasses she needed very badly but was always taking off, and she had a weird squat frame, that made her look like she was a normal person before God came along and sort of pressed on her forehead with her thumb and just let her melt and sag and bunch up in the middle.

The restaurant was so hard to find because it was in someone’s house. It had been converted into a restaurant—the bottom floor, anyway—but it was unquestionably a house, weirdly set apart from the rest of the houses on the block. It was on the only one to have a lawn, for example. On the lawn was a sign—either “VIOLJIN’S” or “VIOJLIN’S”—like I said, I can’t remember. I didn’t even notice it on the way in. I thought we were breaking into someone’s home or something.

“This is an awful idea,” Karen said as the four of us walked in, ostensibly to me, but very much loud enough for Tommy and Jess to hear.

The first floor of the house looked like it had been gutted—not because there was construction equipment or sawdust lying around, but just because it was a big open room with no walls until the kitchen, and houses don’t usually have big open rooms with no walls (and again, this was very much a house). There were little square tables in seemingly no pattern. For a classy restaurant (which is what this place was supposed to be), they looked suspiciously like the kind of tables you’d find in an old diner, and the napkin dispensers, salt and pepper shakers and bottles of Heinz ketchup on every table didn't help any either. There was a little host’s station right near the door, where a skinny guy who looked a little like John Waters seemed to be looking straight down at nothing. The restaurant was totally empty.

The guy’s head snapped up when the door creaked open. Actually, he looked and sounded more like a villain or just generally creepy guy in a made-for-TV adaptation of a Poe story. “Do you have a reservation?” he asked. Karen laughed out loud.

We did have a reservation, as a matter of fact, under “Tossy.” This is the kind of lame shit they did—combined their names for the reservation. Karen and I both wanted to leave, though since neither of us had wanted to be there in the first place, saying that probably doesn’t mean a lot at this point.

The guy led us to a table right in the middle of the room. What a joke. I walked over to another table near the window, but nobody followed me. Karen shot me a look like I was being immature, which made me mad, because if she wasn’t in this with me, then what the hell kind of awful night was I going to have.

The other thing was this was an Italian restaurant, and you would expect some kind of quiet, classy Italian music in the background—something with strings, probably—but instead they were playing one of the local Top 40 stations. Annoying.

I don’t remember what any of us ordered. I know that I was dissatisfied with my choice the instant the waiter walked back to the kitchen, and I started compulsively looking at my watch. Just for fun, I started tallying the number of times I checked my watch on the tablecloth (which was not paper). I ended up somewhere in the 60s or 70s, I think, though at some point I was checking just so I could add another tally.

Usually, Karen could keep up enough of a conversation with Jess and Tommy that you never would’ve known she found them so distasteful, but she wasn’t really into it that night. And I was my regular charming self—I pretty much only opened my mouth to put bread into it or take a gulp of the brandies I kept ordering faster than I could drink them. Tommy and Jess were doing their damndest to get us talking. They were whipping out the stupid questions like they were talk show hosts or something.

At one point, Jess asked how we met. She wanted to hear the origin story. Karen gave me a funny cock-eyed look. “Did we meet?” she asked. It was a strange question, and there was a strange silence, before Karen finally got going.

“I don’t know if we met,” she said. “I think the whole reason we even have anything to do with each other is it kind of felt like we already knew each other. Or no. We hadn’t met, but it still felt like we weren’t starting anything new. We were picking things up where we had already left off, even though that wasn't true at all, in the factual sense. But that’s what it felt like.” She wasn’t looking at me, even though we were right across from each other. “No, I don’t think we ever would have gotten together if we thought we were starting anything new.”

Tommy and Jess looked kind of like Karen had stood on the table, peed, then sat back down like nothing had happened. For my part, I nodded, and kept nodding, until long past the point when it might have made sense to stop. I don’t know if I was nodding because I agreed or just to add to the weirdness of it for the other two. It was probably both.

“Do you two even like each other?” Karen asked them all of a sudden. That was a little weird—I wouldn’t have done it.

“Of course we do,” said Tommy. He sounded mad—for once he wasn’t grinning like an idiot.

“I don’t know if you do,” she said. "I don’t understand you to behaving the way you do if you really like each other. Like you’re trying to prove it to yourselves all the time, with all the—” she didn’t have a word—she just waved her hand.

“I don’t think it’s a bad thing to be affectionate,” Jess said. “You’ve got to be a pretty twisted person to think it is. You should try being affectionate sometime.” She was staring right at me, which was a revelation. I now knew where they thought Karen and I stood relative to each other in the relationship—she was cruel, they thought, but it was because I was making her unhappy.

“Oh, it’s not just that,” Karen said. “Have you ever watched yourselves? How you’re always asking each other ‘is that OK?’ And then the other one always says, ‘sure, that’s fine,’ even when it isn’t. And you’re always afraid you’re making the other one angry. ‘Are you angry? Are you upset? What are you upset about?’ ‘No, nothing, I’m upset about nothing, I’m not upset.’ Is that any way to live?”

What a monologue. I had barely noticed any of this about the two of them, although it was all true, I guess. True in a normal sort of way, though, so I don’t know if anyone else would have noticed either. This was Karen’s thing, noticing this stuff.

Jess and Tommy just stared at her. Deadly still, like in “Jurassic Park,” where they’re trying to not move so the T. Rex doesn’t see them.

She was honestly looking for a reaction, Karen was. What it reminds me of is the kid who pulls wings off flies to watch them squirm around, or whatever they do. When she got no answer, she excused herself to go to the bathroom and left me alone with the two of them.

As soon as she was out of earshot, Tommy and Jess started whispering to each other about how awful Karen was, and who did she think she was. As if I wasn’t even there. Which was fine with me, honestly—ignoring me was. I don’t know what I would have said if we all hadn't been pretending I was somewhere else. I probably would have said “yup,” just to keep myself out of it.

Karen came back and I decided to return the favor and got up to go to the bathroom myself. It was a dark room with dark red wallpaper, and I remember a dirty little mirror on the wall, and there was a shower. Again, house. I hadn’t really had to go to the bathroom—I was just planning on standing for what seemed like an appropriate amount of time before I flushed the empty toilet and headed back out there. But the shower intrigued me. I turned it on. Pretty good water pressure, and it warmed up quick. I stepped inside and rinsed off a little bit, in all my clothes and everything. Just for a minute or two, not a full shower (there wasn’t any shampoo or soap or anything). There was no towel, so I just walked back to the table, dripping wet.

Karen burst out laughing, and wouldn’t stop. I hadn’t done it as a joke, but as soon as I saw her reaction, I started milking it for everything it was worth. I did a little dance, I think. I shook my head like a wet dog. None of this made Karen laugh any more—it was just the idea that appealed to her. The gesture. Tommy and Jess were aghast—I think they looked about exactly the way they would have looked if I’d walked out of the bathroom with a gun and blown my brains out all over the table.

Just then, the host (who had disappeared as soon as we sat down) stuck his head out of the kitchen. “What is going on?” he said in a real dramatic voice. My instinct was to sprint, and luckily, Karen followed. We laughed all the way back to the train.

I think I said that was the last time we saw Tommy and Jess—that wasn’t true. They still lived on my floor, of course, so we saw them a lot for the rest of the year. They never talked to us though, after that. The four of us would run into each other in the hall or something and we’d all just stare at each other frowning, until Karen would burst out laughing all of a sudden, and she would barely be able to say, “you guys should have seen the looks on your faces!”