The King Of Good Intentions Part Three

By John Andrew Fredrick

The oft-used adjectives--"rollicking," "uproarious," "zany," etc.--don't half do justice to the world John Andrew Fredrick has created in his The King of Good Intentions trilogy. In this, the final volume of the series, the author's madcap, kaleidoscopic, dazzling take on love (and love triangles) and life and an up-and-coming indie rock band called The Weird Sisters in 90's Los Angeles comes full circle as the story of principal bandmates and paramours John and Jenny (plus the mysterious Katie who comes between them) reaches its thrilling conclusion:  an ending that, as you'll find, bears out the T.S. Eliot line "in my end is my beginning."

 

Lyrical, heartbreaking, discursive/digressive, startlingly as poetic as it is laugh aloud funny, part three of The King is sure to draw favorable comparisons to the Russian-American master who loved tennis and chess and to play elaborate games with his readers; as well as to a certain bandanna-sporting/tennis-loving genius-writer we lost so tragically some time ago now.  As The Los Angeles Review of Books has observed about Fredrick's work:  "Come to him, you omnivorous readers with strong opinions. Follow him from A to B, and you'll laugh, furrow your brow, and maybe raise an objection or two. It's not a dangerous trip, but blink and you'll surely miss something."  

 

Here, John Andrew Fredrick's wickedly hysterical and outrageously poetic 90's indie rock trilogy crescendos like The Who, live circa 1969,  with Pete Townshend windmilling mad Keith Moon and The Ox to thump one more thundering, conclusive, triumphant note (as Daltrey tilts back his majestic, crazy mane and wails away). 

 

As The Weird Sisters return from their first What-Could-Go-Wrong (e.g. everything!) National Tour, bandmates/lovers John and Jenny face (or possibly escape from) their iffy futures together or apart as a gorgeous triple-threat (writer, director, model), the brilliant and mysterious Katie, upends the romantic/artistic balance that's been precarious-at-best throughout parts one and two. 

 

Just how "L.A." is part three? (Which, by the by, can be read as a stand-alone novel.)  Like, totally.  Like, uncannily so; unbelievably so.  The unmitigated vanity, the mythopoeic beauty, the megalomania and heartbreak, the exquisite talent and ludicrous hubris--it's all here in Fredrick's wonderful, tart-sweet, final fictional installment--one that's guaranteed to make the reader LOL (horrid phrase, that) at least seven-and-a-half times or more. 

 

"There's a manic energy to Fredrick's thought process.  It stands out next to the smoothness of his voice, his unruffled vocal delivery. Ask a question and he offers layers of allusions and caveats, jokes and asides.  Come to him, you omnivorous readers with strong opinions... and you'll laugh, and furrow your brow, and maybe even raise an objection."--Los Angeles Review of Books

 

"The King of Good Intentions II is a fresh novel about the travails [of a band] on LA's indie rock fringe... in the maximalist style and elevated diction Alexander Theroux's books exemplify.  We will welcome the conclusion to The Weird Sisters' spells."--John L. Murphy, Slugger O'Toole

 

"With four novels and an ebullient book on Wes Anderson, he is also an accomplished painter... and has somehow found time to make umpteen albums of indie pop about love and loss--with some of the most beautiful songs of 2023."--popmatters.com

• Language: English
• Publisher: Embers Arts Press
• Release date: Sep 12, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223581369

John Andrew Fredrick

John Andrew Fredrick was born in Richmond, VA and grew up in Santa Barbara, CA.  He has published four comedic novels and one book on the early films of Wes Anderson.  His poems have appeared in Artillery, Angels Flight West, and Santa Barbara Magazine.  He is the principal songwriter/singer for an indie rock band called the black watch that has released twenty-two albums to considerable underground acclaim, including Rolling Stone and The LA Weekly which dubbed the band "a national treasure."  Having retired from teaching English Lit and Writing About Film at such schools as USC, LMU, and UCSB, Fredrick splits his time between London and Los Angeles where he teaches tennis for beginners.

Book preview

A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.—Wittgenstein

"Is it worth a tear, is it worth an hour,    To think of things that are well outworn?  Of fruitless husk and fugitive flower,    The dream foregone and the deed forborne?  Though joy be done with and grief be vain,        Time shall not sever us wholly in twain...  —Swinburne, The Triumph of Time

Some people go, others leave.—Beckett, More Pricks Than Kicks

But the power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy, except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous.—Edward Gibbon

...for within the hollow crown/ That rounds the mortal temples of a king...—Shakespeare, Richard II

One

Kneeling there, in front of her, between her parted legs in those uncommonly soft, torn, and almost preposterously familiar favorite jeans, she reclining there, singularly recumbent, on the big plush brown L-shaped corduroy sectional couch with pale lemon piping in our enormous upstairs living room, she weeping quietly, and me with horribly rainy eyes as well, the twin orphan footstools shunted aside to make room for me as I rested my head for a bit on her trembling shoulders, first the left, then the right, intermittently pecking her neck, her sinking pale pink mouth, the little puerile filaments of spittle forming in the corners there, brushing the salty tears from her cheeks with the backs of my hands, right, left, sampling them, those teardrops, with the softest sweetest saddest kisses—I kept thinking that this whole sorry sordid muddle-and-mess simply did not have to be , didn’t have to happen.  And that of course it did.  Of course it ineluctably fucking did.  Did have to be and could not be prevented.  Could never be otherwise otherwise.  And I remember looking up away from Jenny’s sad, iridescent root-beer-colored eyes and the terrified and terrifyingly innocent-sorry gaze that emanated from them—as one has to do, look away, that is, as one must do when it all gets too intense, becomes too much to bear,—I remember looking up and away and admiring how the diaphanous, maple-colored curtains over the tall, wide-open French windows exhaled and inhaled like thrown ghosts motioning; and how the couple-of-days-before-Christmas California Sunday morning light streamed flavid copper and opaque white into the already-hot living room and frosted the dust motes with strange and beautiful orange stardust sparkles.  And I remember finger-brushing her cherry-hued hair and saying things like:  Jenny, we don’t have to do this and Jenny, I don’t know what else to tell you; I don’t know what else to do; I so don’t want this—and my voice dropping around forty-seven octaves and going thick with the tremendous tenderness, the unexampled fondness you feel towards someone you’ve Humpty-Dumpty’ed and quote-unquote must leave, leave without putting back together again, all the king’s horses and all the king’s etc.  If we could only... I’d stammered.  If we could just... If we could only just be happy together.  And it seems that every time we try, we can’t. 

A tremendous fondness, yes—as in the way a film noir putative suicide (stock brown fedora, glass of goldenly glistening movie-set Scotch quivering contemplatively in front of him, on the milk-white table he sits at) might patty-cake the beautiful classic black or ersatz silver prop revolver in his chiaroscuro-beautiful hands, juggling the bullets like so many Krugerrands in the palms of a miser.  With suchlike ineffable tenderness do we regard that special him or her we’re about to despicably devastate:  and with yearning, oh for sure, but also with an undeniable, albeit sometimes unconscious sense of resentment.  Resentment—yes.  Yes, resentment:  for for whom do we reserve more feelings of almost-contempt than those whom we have loved (past tense, mark you), and whose real or remembered presence reminds us relentlessly of the myriad wrongs we have done them, done unto them, the trespasses and betrayals and delinquencies, deliberate and otherwise.

Yeah, well, you know what they say:  breaking up is hard to do.

Love:  is it not strange that it often starts as it ends—with a crush?  Oxymoronically speaking, it’s that fully hollow feeling you get when you want someone you can’t or don’t yet have, counterbalanced by the winded sensation of having-been-left or having-to-leave, leaving especially when you are still in love with, or at least still love, the one you love but must forsake.

Ah, philosophy.

The whole thing, that late and fateful-indelible morning thru early afternoon, with our two mugs of tea only halfway-sampled, only partly palatable, sitting there quivering on the end table, spilling a little as we caromed the couch into it—the entire scene seemed like a gag bit from an amateur-theatrical dream that you didn’t want to be acting in but had to anyway, whether it was a role you didn’t want or just that you didn’t want to be an actor period, ever, not even in your wildest, most narcissistic and vainglorious Hollywoodish dreams.  And just then, because it was all too intense or because (unconsciously?) I simply had to break away for a sec, walk away for a bit, or just for something temporarily to do perhaps, or because, as good old T.S. Eliot so-rightly says:  Human kind cannot bear very much reality, I, kinda genuflecting as I did so, pushed up from the far-left arm of the gargantuan divan and went out to the kitchen to fetch Jen some fresh tissues, solicitously, plucking up as I did so the used ones that, like pale blue paper flowers, were bunched beside her. 

Be right back, okay? I’d said, all forcedly-cheery, striking a thudding note of the pretty phony, smiley-melancholic kinda tone.  Like I was real good at putting on such a put-on brave face.  Which I was.  Which she saw, knew when she saw it.  Knew it for what it was:  sad, and sadder than if I’d just been myself and broken down right there or something instead of pretending it was all going to be okay.

And finding myself there in the brilliant kitchen, I’d inspected reflexively (one of those automatic gestures you’ve made since primary) the insides of the refrigerator, just to see if there were any automatic answers to our love-conundrums miraculously stashed in there.  It wasn’t like I was hungry or anything—quite the opposite.  Had someone plopped a perfect roast turkey with fresh-crushed cranberry sauce, butter-slathered Yukon potatoes, baby asparagus tips with Hollandaise, plus golden egg custard with raspberry sauce onto the kitchen table I’d ‘ve passed , you know.  I must’ve just been feeling empty (no kidding) and looking for something to sport-eat or what not, despite the fact that I wasn’t in the slightest feeling peckish, wouldn’t’ve dreamt of wanting anything to eat right then, at a time like this, what with all we were going through, what with what was going down and everything:  us splitting up, that is, saying bye-bye at long last, after all this time.

Finding nothing, no answers, nor superfluous miracle-snacks either, I shut the fridge door and gave out what must have been a pretty theatrical sigh and went to the sink and did the dishes, oddly, just then, maybe to give Jenny a break, a break from our incessant talk-talk-talking—just at the last.  She’d always whinnied derisively, kinda, at the thoroughgoing incompleteness of my dishwashing abilities, or clucked and smiled and rolled her big kind shining fine clear beautiful pale brown eyes, even before we ever lived together (even when we were just dating and I’d make her impossibly sloppy and super-caloric breakfasts at her old roommates’ Walter and Nastasha’s—crepe-like buttermilk  pancakes with melted butter and syrup, monster omelettes, huevos rancheros heaped with cheese, home fries garlicked  to the max and nicely medleyed with marinated red and yellow peppers and caramelized onions). 

I guess I thought I’d just try and do a good job for once on the stack of plates sunk there and the half-drained coffee cups and the one grungy frying pan and the maculate silverware.  I got around a third of them sort of done, then did a cursory kinda going-through-the-motions job on the remainder.  I’m hopeless at it, doing dishes:   I just end up talking a glorified sponge bath of sorts and someone invariably has to re-wash what I wash because there are always thirteen creamed corn kernels still stuck in the tines of some of the forks, and a half pound of recalcitrant bacon bits larded in the little holes of the colander or the plastic spatula or the what-have-you.  I hate doing the wash-up; I have always hated it.  I will make you a ridiculously powdered-sugared sumptuous breakfast and serve it to you in bed on a blinding silver salver; I’ll whip up a brined turkey, a stuffed pig or piping hot pot roast, a delicious, sauce-lavish dinner of many-a-course that you won’t soon forget—I will make the mouthwatering creative mess, in other words, but the aftermath, the spoiled spoils, as it were, the bowls and cups and china pile-up?  No, thank you.  I hope there’s no very terribly glaring metaphor in there, character-wise, but I daresay I suspect there is.  Ah, well.  I’m only telling you the truth here—coming clean about it, har har har.  So anyway I rinsed my hands in the lukewarm tap and dried them on this plush, purplish terrycloth towel we had and I looked up for a sec at the gift-shop poster of the entire The Bayeux Tapestry that I’d bought at LACMA (with Jenny’s money) that spanned most of our kitchen when I Scotch-taped it so that it sort of rimmed the walls like fancy-historical upper-wainscoting, and I remember thinking:  That poster’s so cool; I’ve always loved it; I wish I could take it with me.  Jenny wouldn’t care, even though I know she loves it too, but...  but of course taking it with me’s absolutely out of the bloody question.  You can’t go plundering things, arty, household items and such, when you’re already taking too much away from someone, i.e. yourself.  Of course you can’t unstick that thing from the walls, you silly fool.  Don’t even think about getting on a chair right now and taking it down...  It’s probably all grimy, anyway, from all the steamy meals that’ve been prepared in here and all.  What are you—-crazy?  You must be and then some.

Coming back, then, with a  milk chocolate chip-and-coconut cookie in one hand (tucking it behind my back, swaddled in a black napkin), one from a day-before-baked buttery batch on a pink plate wrapped in cellophane—padding back, then, into the strangely  oneric living room, after Jenny’d thanked me and sniffled and smiled and then given out a funny little laugh-sob like you sometimes do in situations like these, when it’s all too much, that is, too sad not to be funny, she took the proffered Kleenexes, held them up to her pretty little aquiline nose; and I traced back a damp hank of her hair as she did so and she smiled momentarily brightly at my sudden/appreciative-of-her-beauty smile.  Ostensibly.  Then she’d gone and given out an even funnier, even more sad laugh when I’d produced magically the chocolatey treat from behind my back.  I stood above her and held it out to her like some kinda monster communion wafer and stuck my instructive tongue out as a gag, of course, for her to take and eat it.  And she’d given out a more plosive, refusing sort or snort and to my slight chagrin said No, thanks.  My tea’s cold, anyway.  And she’d shaken that head, those locks she’d had trimmed really cutely (in honor or anticipation of or mourning for our imminent break-up—as girls of all ages and ethnicities almost always do:  get their hair done when they’re going to be done with you, get the stylist on their side, that fragrant, smiling, supportive someone who never contradicts them, who with alacrity acts the surrogate best friend, the yes girl, the tsking-incredulous headshaker and indefatigable cheerleader/ego-booster in an aromatic cloud of avocado leave-in conditioners, cum-colored straighteners, and grape-purple gels). 

A novel by one of my five hundred favorite authors that I’d been reading in the afternoons, Henry James’s What Maisie Knew (a pistachio Penguin paperback I couldn’t get into yet couldn’t put down), had fallen between two of the sofa’s separable sections.  I picked it up as a sort of reflex, then set it down on one of the orphan leg rests; then I stepped over to the far left window and tucked the huffing curtain behind it, peering down at the sunburnt lawn and the thirsty trees and the clusters of flowers and mottled leaves dying on the sidewalk there, drying up in the sun—jarring blue jacaranda, yellowed oak, sycamore, some white petals like cherry blossom that couldn’t possibly be cherry blossom that I couldn’t identify and some other unidentifiable petals, purple, pale blue.  And I thought, strangely, in the midst of all the swirling sadness, the crush in my chest, the heaviness in the room, how beautiful that mélange of leaves and petals was.  I went back and sat down right beside Jenny this time instead of resuming kneeling in front of her I sort of threw my left thigh over hers.  And it was then just then that I noticed (as I picked and smacked and licked the last of the soothing coconut taste from my sugared teeth) that in my short absence she’d written out a check for me, a big one, and laid it next to her purse on the other side of her.  We’d talked about it the night before, so I wasn’t all that surprised but the reality of it kind of took me aback a bit as you might expect; I told her thank you in a voice I didn’t hardly recognize and in my nascent, palpable shame (tinctured with relief) I looked up at the monstrous black television screen on this completely appalling green stand that we had sentineled, as it were, at the far right corner of the living room—and there were our reflections, fish-eye distorted, 60’s black-and-white psychedelic.  Jen laid her head on my shoulder a sec and then, perhaps realizing that that—that intimate gesture, even just the hint of it—was only going to make things harder, sadder, straightened up and looked away, then back.  The look I was giving her must’ve been rather grim on account of when I looked back at Jen’s face her eyes had a dash more compassion in them—or so I surmised.  I don’t know.  Either way, I kissed her sweetly and she held back then let go and put her hand up to my face before she burst into real tears this time and I pressed her to me and kept repeating It’s okay, it’s okay and the sobs she gave out stretched out, it seemed, and then abated after a minute or two.

I’ve already cried so much, she said.

Quietened after a short while, after another little smirky chuckle, she was moving her head the way one’s head might move while auditioning an affecting bit of melancholic and demonstrably too-beautiful passage of Classical, Mozart or Schubert or especially Schumann, one of those guys, those heavies who certainly knew a helluva lot about sadness, all right, the way it sounds, a minor key and a slow change from a sad chord to an even sadder one.  I imagine I must have looked more than a little mortified and certainly humbled just then and maybe shocked to see it there, the check, all periwinkle blue, with Jenny’s meticulous and almost childlike handwriting on it, and all those zeroes.  But mostly I reckon I was shocked to think what it surreally represented:  that we were really doing this, going through with it, that I was really leaving, going, and Jenny was not and this wasn’t a joke or a test or the aftermath of a silly quotidian couples fight or sporadic hard time we were having, some corollary or superfluous thing that could just be smoothed over or quote-unquote forgotten:  this was a bona fide break-up, this time, and there was no denying it or white flag waving/kiss-and-make-upping possible.  And so of course in the wake of such a sad-making realization, such a jolt of sorts, what did I do (what could I do?) but smile wanly and monotonously away, perhaps as a way of mollifying myself and mitigating, maybe, Jen’s own horrible, palpable pain, and staving off the bitter observations that I might have made, that would have done no good, that’d’ve only made things worse.  And moreover the nice check was a sort of a bribe, ambiguous and bittersweet, bloody blood money, as it were, Jenny knowing only too well that I was totally broke again, figuring that with some money-to-hand (and me having investing every last cent into the band, our band, The Weird Sisters) I could—how can I put this?—follow through this time with the parting, the splitting up, the aching breaking apart that super co-dependent couples notoriously find so hard to follow through with and finally.   It was one of those loans you know the irrefragably magnanimous donor never really expects to get back.  Maybe she was thinking or, rather, dubiously assuming that I had nowhere to go, nowhere to stay—and that with a thousand dollars I now possessed the wherewithal for a deposit on a studio apartment or something, apartments in those indomitable days in LA being rather cheap and plentiful, especially if you were willing to venture forth to sketchy-suspect places like Echo Park or Silver Lake, Highland Park, or even Mt Washington, or The Brewery District way downtown. 

Or maybe she knew, knew all along, knew precisely where I was headed, headed in both senses of the term, literal, metaphorical:  knew that I was going to go straight to Katie’s and she, Jen herself, the woman whose very existence called into being the concept of the other woman, was just in incredible, undeniable, furtive, nonplussed denial.  There’s just so much that we, whether we realize it or not, just do not want to know.  Yet so much we tell ourselves we have to, have to find out about, get to the bottom of, know the full story, the worst, the truth at least.  I just need to know, the cri de coeur goes.  I have to find out why he/she did that, said that, vanished, then, like a ghost or matching sock or cold sore—disappeared! 

Um, no you don’t!

No you don’t.  And because curiosity killed the proverbial—yes indeed it did—and though we rarely heed such homespun shopworn warnings, the cat can’t, er, change its ardent-marvelous paws.  Not knowing kills us, is killing us, on account of we’re dying to know.  We have to.  Or we think we do.  Oh how our lives depend on it, don’t they?  To know, to know, to know.  But why?  Why, for Jesus’s sake and for pity’s sake and mercy’s sake, the fuck?  Why?  Other than medical knowledge or common sense (crocodiles bite; massive alcohol intake often clouds human judgment; he who might have a rare, curious fetish for lathering honey on self may not make ideal beekeeper; neighborhood fellow who pathologically steals pies off windowsills probably has psychological issues, esp. if he then goes and violates said desserts a la the Jim character in that in-the-future classic American Pie;  jumping from planes or buildings or tall rocks sans parachute is rarely a great idea; you don’t put your unsheathed member in a vagina that’s harboring  an archipelago of festering sores, pustules, scabs, et cetera, no matter how quaint it looks, fetching the girl is, or how drunk you are; in case of serious kitchen fire, best not to try to quench flames with glass of rye, scotch, or bourbon, no matter how convenient—as in it’s right there in your hand—it seems), knowledge never did anyone any good at all.

So now you know.

And I put quote-unquote knowledge in quotation marks on account of I kind of think all knowledge is relative, anyway, unknowable, the wicky-wacky big bad world’s just an illusion, it’s Maya and all that Hindoo stuff and so forth;  and furthermore,  what we think we know we really don’t.

Know what I mean?

Perhaps, now I reflect on it, Jenny simply didn’t want to admit to me and thus to herself in her immense, sad pride that she knew, knew I was going to go right over to the house of the quote-unquote other woman, the girl who, unbeknownst to Jenny (as far as I knew), lived a mile at most on shank’s pony away.  That giving me that lump sum was a wave of hope washing over her that I would take a break, be on my own for a while, come back to her eventually after a lonely time of being alone for long enough to appreciate her and finally, realize what I was missing, that she was the one, and I lost, mad to distraction without her.  Now, she may have reasoned, now he doesn’t have to go and rebound straight to that bitch, that Katie.  The one that she, Jenny, in a most cunning way, knew about without letting on:  Jen thinking:  if I let on that I know that he is having an affair, I will lose both him and the psychological battle with the other woman.  And if I just let him go, he will come back to me eventually, and I will win, and thus best the other chick (that bitch, that cunt, that stupid cunning-clever whore) and I will come out on top in this treacherous situation I resent  so fucking much I can’t tell you.  I will never let them, him and her, the two of them, however much it pains me to put it like that, never let them see it, know it; they will always be kept guessing and it will (unconsciously) drive them somewhat mad, and, ultimately, if all goes well, drive them, in turn, irreparably apart.

Of course that’s a quite sinister and speculative take but you know what they also say:  girls are fucking ruthless.  In the face of a pretty rival, cutthroat furious.

And Katie:  Katie who was never ruthless, almost always very kind, never spiteful towards Jenny, and only sporadically bitter about or wan over the fact that I had broken untold promises to leave sooner, to come be with her.  Katie with whom for almost-seven agonizing clandestine months now I’d been having the best, most ravenously joyous-sweaty over-the-top sex, with whom I’d been laughing like mad, and, sometimes, borne out by her touching frustration with my equivocations and neurosis and postponed promises, having quiet, calm, quarrelsome conversations with, rational rows wherein she played the fraught, patient, understanding mistress, and I the plaintive, well-intentioned cad, hurting all of us under the pretense of not wanting to hurt anyone.  Waiting for the right time—what a phrase!—to leave, to go. 

And of those rows had been about me leaving when, of course—even if they’d been about something completely picayune, superfluous.  Just the worst sort of altercations, actually, where instead of really spelling out or yelling about how you feel you try and temper your temper and don’t actually admit to yourself or your paramour what it is you really want or need:  because what I wanted and needed was to be what I was already being:  a selfish craven fuck who wanted his cake and to fuck it too.  Katie, the girl I’d  breakfasting-or-lunching with when, she wasn’t on set or on location and I wasn’t on tour or in the studio or rehearsing with the band, or at my dumb job at a moribund bookstore, or with my girlfriend, Jennifer, who was so easy to be with, which resulted in me missing Katie madly when I was at home, which resulted in me missing Jen frantically when I was ever-so guiltily/zestfully fooling around with Katie, stealing an hour here, an afternoon there in her yearning arms and fluffed bed. 

And several mornings a week, when Jen whom I was betraying, betraying and deceiving and feeling like hell about it, when I wasn’t feeling incredible, that is, invincible as an early Norse or Celtic god come in from a euphoric winter dip in the terrifying Baltic or half-frozen Irish Sea, was back (after the band’s west-coast tour that ended the day Kurt Cobain was found) at work at her drab job at Johnson and Johnson, a downtown law firm on a very scary high-up floor in a very high building, I’d cycle to Katie’s and more often than not we’d make love right away, soon as I came all basically priapic and stuff through her badly scuffed and chipped white door, kicking my socks off and stripping Kate’s top off by the time we tangoed to her bedroom, that dark, lovely den. 

Katie used to shake her head and give a little huh-chuckle whenever she’d consider the chemistry between us; and somewhat strangely she’d reference her own ostensibly sexually well-matched parents—as though that somehow justified what we were doing.  Sometimes after she’s had a glass of wine or two, Katie’d told me, "my mom tells me that even after nearly forty years of the ups-and-downs of marriage she looks at my dad as he comes through the door and wants to rip his clothes off before he’s halfway to the coat rack.  They’re amazing!  Of course the thought of your parents... you know.  But still.  Isn’t that incredible, John?  I think it’s just astonishing.  Don’t you think that we’re, um, a little bit like that as well?" 

And the other thing—had you asked her—Katie’d say if the topic of what we were doing to Jenny ever came up was this:  But you don’t really love her, do you?  At least, I don’t think you really do.

The inference being:  you really love me instead and are having a hard time leaving her—on account of the band.  Yes, the band—that must be it.

Katie the Infinitely Patient One.  St. Kate.  Saint despite the once-in-a-while rows.

Afterwards, after coupling ravenously, tenderly, we’d half-dress and kiss and kiss and canoodle and kiss so more and I’d muss then scarify her already wildly untidy thick, straight, naturally black hair, the long hanks like beautiful streamers, the fine straight long bangs and sexy, expensively-cut shoulder-length layers, and she’d sift through mine and sometimes cup my face and look into my eyes too-meaningfully, almost, so fondly-fiercely it hurt somehow, with those impossible blue and sometimes oddly transmogrified grey eyes (grey being if you ask me the most romantic hue, the color of the queen-heroine’s admirable gaze in an immemorial fairy story, literally charming and enchanting); and then we’d maybe sit reading quietly, and have Earl Grey tea in goofy particolored mugs from sundry thrift stores, or frothy espresso with in little bright white and violet-rimmed espresso cups with the little sickles of lemon rinds Katie delicately hooked on them. 

What floats or drifts back to me now:  fruit pyramided high in ceramic souvenir bowls in the kitchen and on her dining room table. 

This giant television I tried to tease her about, which she used to watch hockey, or The Expos, DVDs of her own work, and the work of her friends who were also in The Industry. 

And all those books, those tapes, her records.  All her stuff that seemed so unaccountably alien to me, so not my stuff, so strange, so weird.

Sometimes the constellations of freckles on the back of her neck would seem to blend together or meld or look blushingly flushed just after lovemaking, I recall, her mottled-cream-seeming Irish-English stock skin tone changing as our vigorous sex got her blood of course pumping.  And as we lounged around, she on the hardwood floor and me on the couch, say, amidst the avalanche of Katie’s  books there, and one of the shoulders of one of her Banana Republic-type jerseys or sometimes her well-worn (and torn) red-and-white Cornell sweatshirt would invariably slip down heartbreakingly while she was sitting there, bent over the sports section of the paper or one of her own brass-braded film scripts or a new novel by some superlatively au courant British writer and I would lean over and pinch it back in place, her top—only to find the other side see-sawing.  Or sometimes she’d put on what I’d been wearing.  You know that sight?  That sight of a ridiculously pretty long-legged barelegged barefoot girl in her everyday plain white cotton underwear and one of your long-sleeved shirts or V-necked jumpers?  Well, then:  then you know.  That’s what I’m talking about.  If you haven’t, you’ve seen it at least in a brightly glossy advert in the first few pages of some worthless and completely trashily satisfying magazine like Vanity Fair or Vogue or similar—I’m sure you have.  It’s a classic.  l was madly-crazy in love with her, with Katie, as well as being not-madly in love with Jen whom I loved so much, so differently.  And this, this atrocious clandestine love triangle, had been going on for the past almost-seven brutal months, this egregiously appallingly painful, utterly astonishing, nightmarishly ghastly, banally enthralling situation.  It was the kind of thing that gave me daymares when I got a nap in (which was often)—I mean, sometimes, late in the afternoons, I used to wake up on the aforementioned L-shaped brown and lemon couch just shrieking, just shrieking and sweating and shrieking again; startled and gasping; worked up and singularly disturbed from unimaginably bad, brutish, Macbethish dreams.

All on account of knowing what I was doing was terribly terribly horribly-wonderfully irrefutably wrong.  Wrong because I had great sex with Katie and not-great with Jenny.  Or, great for Jenny, seemingly (sorry as that sounds), not good for me.

Is it that bad to state it that way?  Well, it would be if Jen ever read this—which won’t happen, ever, let me tell you, no way, no chance, believe me.

Because nobody fancies that they’re bad in bed.  It’s like one’s sense of humor.  No one goes:  I have an absolutely terrible completely useless utterly stupid sense of humor; I really do.  I just laugh at totally not-funny things and it’s weird and I’m, essentially, pretty much a fucking idiot. 

Or if they do, say that, that is, you don’t want anything to do with them.  No one goes, in other words:  Hey, by the way:  I’m kind of a lousy lay.  Not a very good lover at all.  It’s kind of a drag and stuff but I don’t do, like, a very good job in bed.  I can’t kiss, kind of am gross, smell bad a lot of the time, make funky, funny faces when I climax, kind of just lie there or writhe around like a St. Vitus victim on pharmaceutical meth, snore galore, smother people and freak them out like I’m hugging a dead baby of mine that just stopped breathing, don’t pay attention to what my lover’s doing or what he or she wants or likes, come way too fast or never, make odd sounds as well,  shout out the strangest things, moan like fourteen Bedlam inmates in one (inmates that are being whipped, no less, or having buckets of ice cold saltwater dashed on them, or doing on-overdrive" imitations of the Les Mysteres des Voix Bulgares album or Elvis, drunk, doing The National Anthem), involuntarily beef or queef while fucking, issuing long, gushing, sputtering, imponderably malodorous blasts from either, or both, below-holes.

No one does think that, admits that about themselves.  No one.

The charming guy buying you a drink at your comfy local, your basic fern bar, a sports bar, the Mexican restaurant with the stalgtite kitsch and folkloric caboodle depending from the ceiling (mini-sarapes, toy sombreos, soccer banners, memento mori from Dia de los Muertos, spooky dolls, ceramic tacos, ships-in-a-bottle, inflatable plastic Cuervo and Corona bottles zeppelining above you, the gold-and-scarlet walls rigged with blinking-hissing Christmas lights, velvet bullfights, portraits of hildagos and senoritas tan bonitas)—, the guy, I say, parked right next to you in some dank, dark dive or tres swank Euro-style hotel lounge, the roadside honkytonk or sketchy urban billiards pillbox pumping Johnny, Hank, The Hag, and Willie, making time with you, amusing the hell outta ya, plying you with shots or trendy-expensive cocktails of blue or chartreuse hue you gotta try, and jumbo shrimp cocktails and genuine authentic flown-in-this-morning Maryland blue crab cakes—, he’s nowhere near going to turn to you suddenly and say:  "Oh, so, um, lissen, lissen ‘ere—guess wha’?  Forgot to mention, thought I oughta tellya that not only do I have a really dinky, needlelike, peanutty penis, but I have no idea-the-fuck how to use it!  Izzn’t that a laugh riot?  Is that classic?  Iz really somethin’—huh, huh, huh.  No, ser’ously.  I’m kinda not kidding here.  Wisha wuz but...  Ah’m not..."

No one.

Contrariwise, the comely girl you bought all those drinks for till closing, listened to (pretended to) ad infinitum, complimented wildly, pretended to be interested in, strained to train your severely limited attention on?  No way she’s recklessly going to filibuster at some point:  "Oh, I forgot to tell you?  I need to tell you something, Tom.  Ron?  Sorry.  I needa tell you somethin’, Ron.  Ron-Tom...  Hahahaha!  Needa tellya about how, well, during making, uh, the, uh, ‘the beast with two backs’ and stuff?  Well, I just kinda have a tendency-a, um, lie there while the guy’s going at it.  I do.  It’s horrible, I know but... Often I’m just so preoccupied and self-conscious, thinking about my, um, [whispering, fiercely now] giant vagina....  Hwhat?  I said:  ‘My giant vagina.’  I’m not kidding.  I wouldn’t kid around about a thing like that.  What do you think I am—crazy?  You think I’d make that up?  It’s tragic, is what it is.  I would have to date some guy who’d be a fucking porno-king for it to.... Let me put it thisss way?  Are you still lissning to me?  Are you?  Okay, okay—sorry.  You—or your kid brother, for that matter—could drive a...  whaddayacallit?  Toy.... or, Tonka, that’s it, you could drive Tonka Truck through it and I wouldn’t hardly notice.  No kidding.  I mean it.  I guess you might call it potatoey.  Or something like that.  And—guess what?  I’ve never ever done a single Kegel.  Howboutthat?  Honest.  And get this—when a guy goes-a kiss me?  I kinda, like, lamprey onto his face like this [demonstrates appallingly, comes up for air eventually] with my really quite dry and razor-like lips.  Hahaha!  Then (after about, like, half an hour?) stick my tongue out like I’m thinking it’s a piece of iron I want pass along to him orally or a tongue suppresser I’m applying to his tonsils, rather.  Thass jus’ how I am, I guess.  Oh, well.  Wha’canyado?  S-s-so now you, um, know, ‘k?  Now you, like, know."

No one.

This then:  what Jenny and I had done/endured the night before the mournful morning I’m telling you about, or trying to, ‘cause it’s nigh-on impossible for me to put it in to words here. 

And, mind you, to tell the truth—amidst all these exhilarating (and equally debilitating) lies, amidst all this stuff, this fiction, this novel novel I’m making up (or am I?) as I go along—it’s not a helluva lotta fun, telling you this shit, dredging it up and putting it down, moving it round and round, manipulating it like acrylics or oils or your generous, gullible gran when you need some extra spending money for a bit of a Saturday night debauche.  It isn’t exactly a total doddle, a walk in the park, a piece of cake with strawberry sauce, like shooting lobsters in a toy-bright yellow pail or picking off with a  crossbow at point blank range a drunk tramp sleeping in a wet ditch of much shallowness.  It  ain’t just going upsy-daisying through Golden Gate Park on mellow yellow purple microdot in the middle of The Summer of Love with the Jefferson Airplane playing in the corybantic background; or as cinchy as apple-picking via hay wain before The Industrial Revolution ruined everything for everyone,—as you hold hands with a pretty little English Rose of a girl in a sweet hat with fine mad eyes of palest blue and a saucy-shaped mouth, very high cheekbones (complete with beauty mark, a real mole), cutely bumpy-aquiline nose, nice plump red lips and a lascivious, lip-biting, gat-toothed yen to use them.  Use them, for example, on you near an idyllic, gurgling-rocky rivulet as a theory of swans lands on the water just as you, her loyal and newly-devoted and gamesome swain, buss her boldly under Constableish arboreta, your lovely-pretty little naughty naughty naughty mistress. 

You go for a long walk.  Through dense woods striated by breathtaking sunbeams replete with sparkling motes and dancing pollen and floating thistle-fluff, thickets and tall trees and susurrating ivy leaves, over stone bridges above murmuring brooks/rippling green pools with lilac-white-and-tangerine rainbows arching above luminous yellow pebbles, lily pads; past elves, pixies, wood sprites, gnomes; lawn gnomes, griffins, green men, ogres; may queens, krakens, pilgrims, oiks; dragons, dwarfs, oafs, Earls; baldies, gingers, parkies, bogles; druids,