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Boredom makes one do strange things, Janet thought. It was a Saturday evening, for God’s sake, and all her friends had some either incredibly mundane or incredibly exciting task lined up preventing them from having a few drinks and a nice chat. When faced with a situation like this, one might accept their fate and simply return home, but Janet had never been one for silence. Even David had some dreary-sounding event with some school friends, or something to that effect, so Janet was left with only one option if she wanted some good conversation, a motive she was beginning to doubt as the phone rang and rang.
“Hello?” said a voice sounding distinctly not-Brandon.
“Phillip, dear, is that you?” Though she knew it was, it seemed rude to come right out asking for the other man in the room, and she didn’t particularly want to provoke the subjectof Brandon
always
answering the phone right this minute.
“Hi, Janet. Did you need something?”
She frowned into the phone, nails picking at the hem of her skirt. “Say, can’t a girl call up her dear friends for a chat every once in a while? You talk like this is the twentieth time I’ve called today– is Brandon there?” For a moment, she only heard a sharp inhale, and then silence.
“No, he isn’t.”
“Well, that’s alright– are you free this evening, then? We ought to catch up, I swear it has to have been over a month since I last spoke to the two of you.”
“Janet, it’s really not a good time. I’m sorry. Another time.” She could tell then by the curt response he’d rather be doing anything else, which hurt in its own way, but gave her pause. Brandon out on a Saturday night without Phillip seemed like a miracle, though not one she was sure was that miraculous, based on the harsh and lilted tone of Phillip’s voice. She’d known them both as teenagers, knew that nasty little push-and-pull, and had spent enough time babysitting both of them through spats that when she guessed something was off, she knew she was right. Though Janet usually just felt tired with the two of them, she felt some alarm going off in the back of her mind, and allowed herself some friendly concern– if that alarm meant she had to play the nagging girl, he’d forgive her eventually.
“I simply can’t believe you– in fact, I bet you’re all at home sitting bored out of your mind just waiting for someone to call– well, old chum, you’re in luck for I have this absolutely literary story to tell you–”
“I can’t. Not tonight. Goodnight, Janet.” His tone was sharp, and becoming quite desperate, breaking almost imperceptibly over her name.
“Phillip.”
“Janet.” The steady breaths that had begun to slowly increase suddenly caught, and she felt, more than heard, his mouth open and pause before he spoke, solemnly. “You’re not going to leave this alone, are you?”
“If you
truly
cannot even stand to see my face, I’ll leave well enough alone.” A pause. A longer pause. Then:
“Alright, then.” A click, and silence from the other end of the line.
–
Until Phillip reached forward to pour the second round of whiskey, Janet, not for the first time, debated how far she really should be throwing herself into this. Her first mental note was the shaking of his hand, the wobble of the glass as he moved it. The second note was the frankly horrific amount of alcohol in his own glass, accompanied by the two empty glasses already resting on the edge of the table. The third felt as nauseating as it did simple– only a perfectly silent moment as Phillip’s sleeve inched up enough to show a blotching bruise on his wrist, and the undemanding air as Janet knew that he knew she had seen it.
It was funny in itself, really, how deeply unfunny she could be when she tried.
“So where’s the mysterious other half tonight, huh?” she said, punctuated by a deep drink and a deliberate avoidance of eye contact.
“I don’t know,” said the shrouded boy in front of her, and she knew this was the truth, as unfortunate or fortunate as it was. The room, empty without Brandon’s nervous filler, ticked steadily for a long, long moment, and Phillip looked as sick as she felt.
God save her, Janet should’ve left it. It’s not like it was all one big secret, or that she thought of Brandon as some gentle saint and had never imagined something like this would happen. Or that she thought it was
always
something sexual (as she had originally guessed), or that she thought it was always accidental. The two of them were off in their own world, off in their own little bubble of philosophy and words and blasphemous little ideas, and everyone that had ever gotten close, had ever fallen into the orbit of their dark schemes knew to
leave it.
Half the joke among their prep school cohort had been the homosexual bit, and the other half had been how blatant it was. To their credit, it was harder to bully someone when their only response to the slurs and jeers was: "Correct!"
To her credit, she had, but she had also “orbited” closer than the rest of their dim-witted-but-rich associates, and no one had ever yet called her dim-witted. She left school, she left home, she found herself a job, and all her friends did the same. Some of them left school, left home, and fell into the arms of some dim-witted boys with penthouses and heavy hands.
None of them reminded her of Brandon. The hardest part was trying to consolidate the ideas in her mind- that a man could be so smart and so terrible, that he could be the farthest thing from dim-witted and still get his pleasure from an open palm. The hardest part was that she didn't know who to feel worse for, the shadow of a child trying his best to impress the big man, or the other man black and blue at the hands of the now-big-shadow-child. One night she'd debated asking David about it all, but couldn't find the right words. David, who never hit, only yelled when Janet did. That's the hard part.
To her credit, even the most versed poets could not have found the right words, and Janet often found herself at a loss for them these days. Brandon could be as stupid as he was wickedly intelligent sometimes, and Janet had learned long ago that she had to expect very little from him to ever really stand his presence.
“Does he do this because he thinks of you as a woman?”
Whatever had hidden behind the dark screen of Phillip’s brooding and vague gaze sharpened to a point, spearing into Janet’s eyes with his own unrelenting and scathing stare.
“If you need some poor wretch to project your headaches onto, I suggest you find some other girl to drink yourself to death with. I have absolutely no clue what prompted that little fantasy of yours.”
There were many different types of cruelty, Janet found. If you live long enough and surround yourself with enough people it’s quite easy to tilt your head and see what makes a man tick, what makes him go off. There’s the ignorant and learned cruelty, rarely on purpose and easy to spot. The closed-minded are often the loudest, and the most incorrect, though they
rarely
think so, and are effortlessly shut up by a well-timed fact. Twin to the more intuitive sadistic and pointed type, one harder to shake, like a splinter buried so deep into your finger it’s only visible held up against a lightbulb. This cruelty knows its power, knows where to cut to make it all spill out, and knows it can hide behind the last, behind the most inescapable. The boyish, jejune cruelty. The defense, the taunt, the condescension.
Janet never doubted Phillip’s gender, never had any of the trouble of seeing him as anything but a boy. Maybe it made her a truly modern woman, practically a goddamn beatnik, to care so wholeheartedly for
her
ex-boyfriend’s questionably male
new
boyfriend. Phillip snapped into place too easily for her to claim any part of him was feminine save for his birth certificate. His words, lined with a mixture of alcohol strong enough to sedate an entire elementary school, felt so perfectly masculine that no one would doubt he’d ever been on the receiving end of such schoolyard taunts, and Janet tried harder than ever before to admire it more than she pitied it. It didn't sound practiced, didn't sound learned.
Phillip stared at her with wicked eyes, eyes that began to look more afraid than anything. Janet suddenly felt incredibly out of place in a silent apartment blocks away from her home, sitting in one of her favorite outfits on the couch of a boy she’d barely had the time to know.
“You used to be a black-out drunk, when you were in prep school, before you learned how to handle it better.” Phillip stared, and Janet tried to be as kind as possible. Gentle. Understanding, like trying to coax a stray dog. “You don’t remember.”
Nights when Brandon would leave for weeks, “leave” in the most significant way you could while sharing a dorm, when he decided they needed to gain a more respectable reputation among their classmates. Janet tried not to think about the episode junior year that he’d spent by her side instead, because that only made her feel guilty, though she knew she shouldn’t. She tries not to because she was the only one Phillip could call, the only “friend” (quotations, for back then, a consolation to the teenage version of them to which friend felt too monumental a word) that had gotten close enough to Brandon to touch and lived to tell the tale. Or the only one also mourning the loss of him. It’d been years since she’d relived that specific emotion, and it’s not one she cares to sort through often.
Phillip shifts in his chair, straightens his jacket, steels himself back
into
himself. Breathes. Drinks.
“Did he ever hit you?”
A few notes. The first Janet notices: they’ve moved on from vague terms. The second, lesser, that she’s intrigued he hasn’t said anything in Brandon’s defense the entire night. Third, monumental again, that this is a topic he’s thought about and is willing to broach.
“He never did.” This time, his face did not change. It didn’t fall, it didn’t smile, and Janet didn’t know what to make of it. “Honestly, maybe that's in your favor. I don’t think he’d ever hit a woman– he didn't want anything more from me than I can give him. I was never his equal.”
As she finished the word, she heard the door open, slow, like in some creepy film, and though she snapped her head around to see, Phillip sat motionless, not bothering to look over towards the noise. From the hall, she heard Brandon’s telltale nervous stutter call out, uncharacteristically meek around Phillip’s name.
“A-are you still here?” As he turned the corner, his expression froze, and as his eyes flicked towards Phillip, they exchanged a look Janet felt again too tired to attempt to decipher. “Janet. Why are you here?”
“What is it with you two and your lack of
hello
-s tonight?” Brandon looked at her as she rose out of her chair, put down her glass, and gathered her things at lightning speed, and Janet was sick of exchanging silent words, unspoken understandings. “Well, chum, I was looking for you, but I really must be going now, it’s much later than I ever intended to see tonight. I should hope I’ll see you quite soon, dear, goodbye!”
Janet was out the door in the fastest exit she’d ever managed to pull off, for better or for worse. Pulling on her gloves, she breathed, and wondered if David’s dull friends were still awake.
–
“Yes, hello?”
“Janet.”
“Again with your no
hello
, dear, I’m really beginning to think you’re well and truly sick of me. What is it?”
“He’d gone out that night to buy new music. For the piano, that is, I mean– Janet, they’re expensive compositions, brand new ones. He went to five different stores to find the ones I’d mentioned earlier.”
“As long as you’re happy. Are you?”
“I’ll practice all day and night for you, so whenever you come by next they’ll be perfect.”
“That’s lovely, Phillip. Lovely.”