Chapter 20: Emotion Sickness

Like I said, the first time Bette and I slept together, I didn’t see her for days afterward, which is (as many people know) quite a blow to the old ego. But it was easy to get over because I had a lot of work and I had my friends and so everything was really okay, except I kept sort of hoping she’d call and maybe shed some light on why she, you know, fucked me and left.

Like anyone would.

I think there are definitely different degrees of variation. Like, I remember when I was six or seven and my parents finally got us a dog, I remember that she took a liking to my older brother Nelson a lot quicker than she did me. I mean, now I owe it to me being an annoying kid whose chosen methods of displaying my love for my brand new puppy involved pulling her tail and painting her toenails (which, apparently, dogs hate), but at the time I was so crushed that I had poured so much love and devotion into Jacky and she still liked Nelson better.

It’s a little bit like how I felt when, after a week with no phone call from Bette, I managed to carry myself over to Milk, only to see her backing some girl up against a bar.

I mean, it was like that. On a larger scale.

The scene itself was strangely reminiscent of the way I’d felt cornered at Bette’s gallery that day. I had a stray, fervent wish for me and blonde-girl-that-Bette-Porter-was-backing-against-the-bar to compare notes, sort of come up with an antidote to whatever it was that Bette had administered to us. I watched them with my head cocked to the side-I mean this. At first, I really wasn’t jealous at all-I was genuinely curious. When I’d received that particular Bette Porter treatment, it was hard to think objectively as I was a bit too preoccupied with, you know, being incoherent and stupid. But from this distance, seeing the same treatment applied to some random blonde girl, it was unquestionably fascinating.

Then the jealousy set in.

What I could have done, I think, was act a bit like I acted that time I had managed to get our dog Jacky to pay a little bit of attention to me, only to have her run away to greet Nelson the minute he walked in the door: throw a tantrum.