A Thing (or Two) About Curtis and Camilla by Nick Fowler

Author:Nick Fowler
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307424532
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T00:00:00+00:00

Let Us Go Then, You and I . . . A Reflective Moment

So you would think, from the elaborate way I drivel on and on, that the architecture of all my self-centered fear would have castled me in something noble. Calamitous. Some candlelit kind of depression, dirged in monk chant.

But it wasn’t really like that.

My misery limped along. Cleared its throat.

Think Prufrock here.

So, to Paraphrase . . .

I show my NYU I.D. card to the big sloppy security guard on West Fourth Street. As he slits leaky, tired eyes at me, I try and make a wholesome smile.

Last year I stole this I.D. from the lost-and-found at Crunch, my gym, so I could sneak into the NYU computer lab to whittle away at my lyrics. Then I actually used this same card to obtain the student discount on my renewed Crunch membership because, in addition to being flat broke, the fluid ruse of stealth at least adds a little intrigue to the humdrum I’ve become.

I pick a monitor and check my e-mail, where the usual collection agencies have been unleashed to hound me through cyberspace. And oh, God . . . there’s one from Emily, Camilla’s best friend.

Jesus H.

I cup my genitals reflexively, another alluring little habit I’ve acquired of late, but I quickly remove my hand when I notice the delicate Asian girl at the next terminal pretending not to notice.

What does Emily want with me? We haven’t spoken for eons, in Camilla time. I decide that maybe I’ll wait a few days before I even open her e-mail (or at least thirty seconds), so I can savor the delectable hope that Cammy, bedridden since the day she’d dumped me, fired from her job, can now do nothing but mumble my name as she flits in and out of tormented dreams. That is until yesterday, in a rare moment of febrile clarity, when she’d at last called Emily to her bedside and formed her first coherent phrase in six months . . .

“I just can’t go on without him,” she’d whimpered, rolling her head from side to side on her sweat-soaked pillow. But, still too weak from her diet of woe to even lift a phone, much less log on to the Internet, she’d begged Emily to do her bidding for her—to inform me that she could no longer spend another moment away from me, whining and all, health insurance be damned.

Or maybe no. Maybe Emily’s informing me that Camilla’s expecting (perhaps with one of those Oasis brothers) and Emily just didn’t want me to see it first on Page Six.

I was surprised that Em didn’t ally in disgust against me after our breakup. This was actually a small victory for my identity, like when the phone company lets you keep the same number after a move. And yet, undertaking, as always, the ongoing project of becoming Adults, Emily promised she’d keep in touch with me, under the proviso that we wouldn’t mention Camilla, and that she wouldn’t speak to Cammy about me.

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