My Lover’s Phone part 1
This is the first section of four from Lattice 5, coming out on Friday October 25. If you’d like to read the rest of it when it’s released the quickest way to do so is subscribing for only $2 per month.
My lover’s phone has 92 buttons, and I don’t know what to do with any of them. It’s the same bland beige that coats every computer I’ve ever seen, like cement without texture or wear, the kind of beige reserved for storage Tupperware. It’s a small phone, well, for what it is I would call it small. It’s small compared to other phones I’ve seen in person, like my dad’s, who only ever uses it in his truck even though he says it’s not a car phone. It sits in his glove compartment next to the truck manual and slowly dies of misuse. He says it’s just for emergencies, and that’s why it’s so thick and heavy. He bought it because if he rolls his truck again he wants to be able to call for help. There’s only one line for digital numbers on the brick, as opposed to my lover’s, which has two screens, one small one on the outside for dialing and one secret one on the inside for stuff I didn’t even know you could fucking do on a phone. She doesn’t even have to tell me; there are buttons for email, fax, Kontakte (which is German for Contacts), internet, and escape.
My lover’s name is that of a Disney princess. Dark hair thickly layered and curved inward, just above her neck. It is the type of haircut that looked like it took real effort to keep up every morning. I didn’t know what I would do to myself in the same time. What would my hair even look like with an hour of work? It never occurred to me to try. I never asked her because I never really cared about the details. She wore light white blouses and plaid skirts even though we didn’t go to a catholic or private school. I saw her legs often and never got the chance to touch them but I have the memory of what it was like to wonder what it would have been like. My lover needs glasses but only wears them at home.
She doesn’t let me call her my girlfriend in front of other people or even when we’re alone (which is never enough) so I call her my lover and even then only when I’m by myself. I walk her home every day, and I call her after I’m done eating, and we talk for half an hour most nights. I don’t remember what we talked about. If I had to guess it would be class gossip. I want to say we talked about television but we didn’t watch the same things and no amount of liking her was going to get me to watch the shows she would mention. I was into sports, so I watched all the sports. I did not talk to her about sports, equal parts being that she would not be interested, I would not be interested in telling her, and I didn’t understand sports enough to communicate anything interesting. I could recount stats and scores but without even trying I knew she wouldn’t care. But if I could go back and listen to these phone calls, I doubt I’d pick out anything interesting anyway.
The quality of conversation was not why I called her. She is the first girl I like, even if I haven’t properly processed that or was even terribly conscious of its effects. I want to be around her as often as possible, and if we can’t be in the same room then I will do what I can to hear her voice—what she would say and what I said in return would become important things. For the entire time we are together, it is about the difference between not wanting to be around any girls and immediately wanting nothing else. It is about that struggle in my head, and because of that some days I don’t call and I don’t like her or think about her. I would go back and forth between this and I wish I would just get a fucking hobby already. In my head I exaggerate this time to be an entire year. It absolutely was not.
Her dad bought her the phone, and I wasn’t allowed to do anything with it because she said he said only she could touch it. She said she could send emails and she did to some boy named Toby in New York. Fuck that guy. She said she emailed me once but it didn’t go through and she wasn’t going to keep trying just because I couldn’t figure it out on my end. This is after I sign up for an email address specifically so she can send me one. Now, when something related to technology doesn’t work, I don’t know if it’s real or just people trying to get me off their case.
My lover’s phone weighs and feels like a stapler. She keeps it in her purse and almost never takes it out while in school. It was so seldom that it was talked about like a rumour. Because I am more often than not in her corner, I never whisper hey, you know what? I’ve seen it. I’ve pressed the buttons. They feel great. They feel like they’ve never been touched by anyone else. Because I’m 13, these are normal thoughts. It is important to me that no other boy had ever held it.
It was just the once that I really got my hands around the thing. I was in her room. I have no memories around this room. I don’t know how long I was in there. I don’t know how I got home. I don’t remember what her dad looked like, but I do remember he came upstairs once to make sure the door was open. He made a whole theatre about it. He wanted me to contemplate how good a guy I was. But I was not a good guy. Her phone was on the bed, and she was flipping through her tapes and telling me what bands she liked (I did not like these bands but also didn’t care to argue) and I cracked open the case and carelessly mashed buttons with my thumbs. I tried to find this asshole Toby in there, like in the contacts, but couldn’t figure out the menu. Phones came with instructions back then and I could imagine how thick the book for this phone might have been. It was like an overgrown game boy with three heads, a monstrosity not built to be handled by humans but some kind of super business robot with no regard for humour or love. It was the phone Miss Havisham would have used.
My lover sat down next to me and she took her phone and placed it on her nightstand and looked back at me and right then and there I knew that absolutely nothing was going to happen between us. It was around the moment she said “You know nothing’s going to happen between us, right?” It wasn’t even heartbreaking. I knew it before she told me. That’s some self-defeating shit, but that’s where I was at thirteen. I had no ego to bruise. I asked her what she thought we were.
“Friends,” she said. “But I want to keep it that way. And even then, just between us.”
I looked up her phone on my computer at home. It took me an hour to find anything about it. There was a review some magazine had scanned and posted. They said the internet on the phone was slow. They said the functions never really worked as advertised. They said it wasn’t worth the price, that this would be what everyone would eventually want, but not like this. Not this way. Nobody knew a better solution, but they said this wasn’t it.
My lover’s phone could receive texts, but not from me because I couldn’t convince my parents to give me a phone. My lover’s phone could receive email, but I just got an account and didn’t know how to use it and didn’t see the big deal. We were the same age and sat in the same science class, but she might as well have been an empress on Jupiter. I talked myself into how lucky I was that I got to spend any time with her at all.
One day I was feeling particularly masochistic so I asked her why she spent any time with me at all if she didn’t want me to be her boyfriend and she probably just wanted to be with that American jackass Toby. I knew that whatever she said about me would immediately become my least favorite thing about myself.
She said she wanted a few days to think about it. In those few days, we called back and forth. Sometimes I would call her cell, and sometimes her house. I began to call her cell more often because that meant I wouldn’t have to speak to her father, but also because the phone kept a record of calls. My home phone had no screen, but her phone did and it showed all the people who had ever called her. I wanted on that list and I wanted nobody else on that list. I looked at it like a high score list on an arcade machine at a corner store that other people played, and I excelled. I had no idea how to treat women so I just reverted to ideas from sports and video games. I am an idiot.
She calls me back in a few days and has something like this to say. “I wanted to give you a good answer, because we’re friends and I like you. I didn’t just want to give you some bullshit, but the truth is, you’re just different. Sometimes that’s nice, because the guys I actually like can be dicks and you’re nicer, but even then sometimes you’re exhausting to talk to, and your niceness is something I feel you sometimes put on because someone told you acting nice was better than being true to yourself. The reason I don’t want to actually date you is because of that artifice. I can’t quite put my finger on the real you and the you that you can’t help but project when I’m around. There’s just something about you that isn’t authentic, like you’re wearing a person instead of being one.”
Like her phone with her 92 fucking buttons, there wasn’t much I could have done to make it work. But I would argue this point incredibly. I wouldn’t let up on the idea that “No, this is the real me. Please, listen. There’s nothing else. I’ve shown you more of myself than I can ever actually admit. This is my skin and these are my feelings. If I’m awkward and unseemly it’s only because I’m new to this and keep trying on different hats to see if they’ll work, and I’m not even sure what I’m trying to get to work other than that I like you and don’t know why and you don’t like me and I don’t know why.”
She would say something almost pretty much exactly like “Well, if this is the real you then I don’t know what to do. Maybe the answer to someone questioning your authenticity isn’t admitting that this is all there is. Maybe there should be something underneath that you weren’t willing to show out of nervousness or self esteem, and maybe a girl wants to draw that real person out so that she can see him and only her, and that’s what makes a relationship special, and any indication that she’s not actually receiving something unique is a killer.”
I would rally back, and find myself holding my corded phone harder, until I feel the plastic squeeze in my fist. I have no idea how much my phone cost, because it belongs to my parents and at this point I’m not even sure where one would even buy a thing like this. We move every year but I don’t know where our stuff comes from. Tense and nearly breaking my own phone I defend myself poorly. “It isn’t that this is all there is, but it takes time to really form. I don’t know what I like. I don’t even know if I like you. But I can’t stop thinking about you and your life and how I’d like to be in it and explore that, swim in it, breath it, and find who I am and whatever that means, probably nothing, probably something you don’t even like, but god damn I try, try, try, try, try. And that’s it, that’s my problem, isn’t it? You like Toby cause he doesn’t give a shit and he lives in New York, and I know that because I snooped on your phone you call him and not the other way around just like you and I in reverse and isn’t that just the oldest and saddest thing? I could criticize you but I know that’ll only do damage and tear and the little I’ve got left so I’ll just let you have the last work and then I’ll leave and never talk to you again but know that you, or the idea of you, whatever you represent, will probably never leave my thoughts. You will somehow hurtfully inform every decision I ever make about a woman ever again. And man, that’s not gonna go great for me.”
The real conversation was much shorter and much more hurtful, but I can’t repeat it because I don’t remember it. At this point, I don’t even know if the conversation happened at all, or if she just faded from my life and we stopped calling one another. I have a feeling I implanted this memory because it changes every time a new relationship falls apart, and the faults I display in the latest failure inform the criticisms she gives me. I don’t know if I was artificial with her or another girl. I don’t know if I tried too hard or too little, and I don’t know this because I did not possess the ability to actually be honest at the time. If I had it, I would have surely let her have it, and perhaps her future relationships could have been improved by our arguments. Maybe she would have liked me. Maybe it would have worked out. And maybe I’m just kidding myself.