The Bag of Smut
By Regina Green
Copyright 2011
Smashwords Edition
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The Bag of Smut
Here's how it all started. I worked with Cliff in a small, dingy office in a hot little city north of San Francisco for about a year. We worked on a sputtering, free weekly newspaper that was diminishing in size every week, and due to our paltry staff schedules we hardly saw each other. I came in twice a week to proofread copy and he strolled in early once a week to create the movie schedule page and leave by midday. Sometimes he would stay in the office writing a story on his creaky PC for the next week’s paper (he specialized in descriptions of gourmet delicacies, lovingly re-created from his past). He’d always worked in print media and seemed strangely out of touch and out of time—he didn’t drive, was very verbal, flirtatious in a courtly way, oddly childlike. His round face was topped with a pair of glasses, but his tall, burly frame could look elegant when he chose, as he usually dressed in dark suits. He had the reputation of a drinker, but always seemed perfectly controlled and pleasant.
It was hard to bear his gaze sometimes. I would lower my eyes and blush. A colleague in her 50s, slightly older than Cliff, described him to me with weary fondness as a lover of fantasy, who preferred his women to be elusive. She had known him for 15 years and was obviously past all the games. His gaze, on my full breasts, seemed frankly sexual and appraising, though he didn’t leer. I kept waiting for him to come on to me in a way that I could either reject or follow up on, but he never did. He managed to flirt, yet stay the perfect gentleman, and I must confess I found his routine slightly tiresome and annoying.
It was even worse when he started inviting me to go on restaurant reviews with him. Then I felt cast in the role of somewhat dowdy asexual friend, driving him to mediocre restaurants (like Chinese-owned seafood places with East Coast names) across the bay and eating only the dishes from the menu he wanted to write about, while he usually saw fit to mention that he had previously visited the restaurant at night with another female friend—surely a much more glamorous occasion, he seemed to be hinting.
Basically, he had his hang-ups. And so did I. I was involved with a woman and had been for the past four or five years. She was very important to me, but we didn’t live together, and in many ways didn’t share the intellectual rapport that I kept finding with men. With men, though, even at the ripe age of 40 I felt inexperienced, self-conscious and virginal. It was fun to laugh and flirt with them, get to know them even, less comfortable to feel stirrings of desire and possessiveness and not know what to do with those urges. At 40, and in a lesbian relationship, I thought, it was a little silly to be having crushes on guys. But a few male co-workers eyed me and seemed intrigued to some degree; they were less bitchy and competitive than my female cohorts, so I was grateful for that. Meanwhile my girlfriend and I continued our rocky, aimless road of dating, companionship, occasional good sex. There was a feeling that we were in it for the long haul, sure. But there was also a feeling that we weren’t completely in each other’s corner.
Cliff was a confirmed bachelor, unusual in this day and age. I even suspected he might be gay, just because he seemed to prefer alcohol to relationships with women, though he was cagey about his drinking. His mother was still alive, in her 80s, and he said he had dinner with her every week. I wondered what it would be like to go to bed with someone who seemed so repressed. My drinking days were long behind me and I didn’t want to fall into bed with someone dead drunk—that was no longer my style. When Cliff hinted on the rides I gave him back to town that he was lonely, and that he didn’t understand women, I felt he was looking for someone to swoop in and save him. Rather than create his life, I thought, he’s on a treadmill and so am I. We can’t really help each other. And when you’re in your 40s, you start seeing that there’s less time to waste. You want to hang out with people who are going somewhere, because the thought that you might not be going somewhere yourself is unbearable.
Finally I quit the job. The lack of pay and the lack of respect was getting to me. Cliff gave me a big hug and even bought me a moist chocolate fudge cookie from Double Rainbow on my last day. He likes me, I thought, as it crumbled exquisitely in my mouth, and his little moments of generosity are sweet. But I had a hard time taking him seriously. He was too like myself, with his fondness for alcohol and sweet things, his sexual repression, his need to stay at a lousy job because of comfort and security, recycling his columns over and over. While he may have been the paper’s best writer, they didn’t even give him health insurance, I thought. It wasn’t enough. And he was almost 50. Why had he let this happen to him? Why didn’t he care more about the future?