Rachel was secretly delighted that she failed to comprehend most of her boyfriend’s personality.
Most people never achieve beauty… Some people do manage to grow into it, but a deranged few are born into it, and never know any other way of life, perhaps until they get very old.
Arlo had been a good-looking baby, even-tempered, a fine sleeper – and his physical attractiveness always seemed to sort of sail ahead of him, like a golden icebreaker, allowing him few genuine oppositions in the languid forward thrusting of his life.
His mother was a trophy wife who relished his handsomeness – his father was a fairly wealthy entrepreneur, who viewed his son’s ice blue eyes and blond windswept hair with deep suspicion. To be handsome is one thing – to have an assertive hairline, a big jaw, even features and wide eyes was good! Life became significantly more efficient, since less physically blessed people always gave way before the dominance of accidental genetic excellence.
However, male beauty was a different matter entirely – it seemed to eternally demand excessive hair products, voodoo face creams, full-body electrolysis… Excessive beauty did not seem manly - or even masculine. It was too distracting to be used as a battering ram in negotiations – it was a dreamy alabaster statue merely to be admired from the middle distance. Beautiful men are always viewed as so far from the average that the surrounding thoughts are almost always: What on earth are you doing here?
Arlo’s father worked hard to teach his son qualities of intellect and character, reminding him that he was even more privileged than a beautiful woman, whose physical value degrades much faster under the sanding gusts of time.
“Three kinds of people rarely know the truth, son,” he repeated. “The very wealthy, the very powerful – and the beautiful. And if you don’t learn the truth, all you have is manipulation and envy – don’t be that guy!”
Arlo did have above average intelligence, but nothing close to his father’s – he had inherited more of his mother’s capacities. They were both socially easy, witty without being surprising or offensive, in relaxed possession of opinions as well-shaped as their figures – and both mother and son appeared almost entirely devoid of inner conflict.
The pair were central deities in the modern superstition of “over there.”
Ahhh, “over there…”
“Over there” is peace, tranquility, success, ease, perfection – and a pleasant life. Just as neurotic women flocked to Guatemala because “over there” was deep and Zen, people gazed at Arlo with envy not just because of his beauty, but their fantasies that his life and personality were endlessly shaped and eased by it.
Some men did fantasize that Arlo would benefit from receiving a significant facial injury, and imagined him scrabbling to rebuild his life from his sudden collapse to the average – but the fantasy that Arlo’s life was better because he was better looking – well, it is part of the general human condition to imagine that changing one variable removes all struggles from life – or that life is better without struggling…
Arlo’s looks radiated down into his athletic abilities, albeit with some unfortunate fadeout. He was a good amateur athlete, but lacked the grim will and semi-hysterical reaction times required to vault into the professional leagues. He enjoyed exercise, but the black-hearted thirst to win that so often emerges from a hardscrabble origin story was inevitably absent. Arlo was perhaps destined to settle into the upper middle – he was too pretty to stay at the bottom, too placid to battle to the top. He remained a pleasant diversion of passing beauty – perhaps destined for some public position of medium importance, memorable only in the future for the shadows on his selfies.
Like most modern young women, Rachel had a deep fetish for beauty. Throughout human history, beauty has always been intensely desirable – but it was designed by evolution to be a short-term high, not a long-term addiction. The flames of female beauty were originally a Lucifer match – burn brightly, darken quickly. For about a year from the age of eighteen or so, female beauty was supposed to shoot into the air like a flare, to draw high-quality men out of their hesitant lairs – then become pregnant, and shed smooth skin, excellent curves and bright eyes on the hard grater of gritty human reproduction.
Modern times brook no such acceleration – female beauty is now a shrieking siren to draw male attention, time and resources for at least two decades! Men are attracted to video games, women to attention – both allow adolescence to be extended into what feels like infinity – but only turns out to be eternity, after the pair-bonded richness of a life of having and creating love exists only in the endlessly regretful rear-view mirror.
Modern culture in a nutshell: Promote the narcissism of instant gratification, deny the deeper values of virtue and love – and then hide from view the roadkill detritus that scatter the lonely post-40s highways. Youthful beauty is no longer a lever to pry the next generation from drawn-to-the-mirror vanity, but an ego-infesting drug that hollows out the personality by assigning value only to its exterior.
Arlo was wise and intelligent enough to be bemused by the deference given to him for his looks. The first night he met Rachel – at a Halloween party where he was dressed as a duckling with a giant curved ‘U’ of metal as a belt – a ‘chick magnet’ as he explained redundantly - he told her the following story:
“It’s a crazy life, to be honest… Couple of years ago, I was in a bit of a shallow place; I was dating two girls at the same time – nothing was ever made official, like exclusive, but it turns out the girls thought…” He laughed. “People don’t actually ask me to be exclusive, they just assume…” He lifted his duck bill and took a sip of ultralight beer. “Anyway, this one girl came over unannounced, and found me – found another girl at my place, and the first girl got really mad, and called me all kinds of names – it was pretty exciting actually!” He smiled and shook his head. “So both the girls left – totally incensed – and I figure well, that’s that, I guess I just have to be more clear in the future. So anyway, I got a wicked flu that night – this was before Covid, it was unrelated – so anyway, I’m lying on the couch, half-dead - but happy to be losing weight frankly – and there’s this message, and this girl – the first girl – leaves me this total string of salty words about what a jerk and an asshole I am, and how could I treat her that way, you know the kind of stuff… So then the other girl calls – the second girl – and says pretty much the same thing, I don’t know if they coordinated their scripts or what, but… And I’m kind of delirious at this point – I don’t have a lot of skin on my bones, so I don’t have much fat backup for when I can’t eat, so I think my heart was chewing on my kidneys or something – but at some point, I don’t know, couple hours later maybe, the first girl calls back, and half-dazed I listen – and she says that she’s still really mad at me, but just wants me to call her to let her know I’m okay – and I think the other girl called too, something similar, but again, I was pretty out of it, hey… And then – the next morning I think – the first girl leaves a message apologizing for her earlier messages, but just really wants me to call her, because she’s worried about me – and I got this total image that she’d been up all night, I don’t know, it just - felt that way, in her voice.” Arlo laughed. “And then the other girl messages me – remember, they didn’t know each other – and said – pretty much the same thing, give or take… And then – again, I was pretty out of it – at some point the next day, both the girls leave messages in tears, apologizing like crazy, that they overreacted and it wasn’t my fault and they’re just terrified that something has happened to me – and I couldn’t at this point even tell which girl was which, they both said ‘it’s me’ but because they were crying they sounded – identical.” He laughed again, his wobbly beak slightly delayed in its movements. “Crazy world…”
Rachel had leaned forward, hungering to brush Arlo’s hair back from his forehead. “And – what happened?”
Arlo blinked. “What?”
“What happened – did you – call them back?”
“Call them back…” he echoed, frowning. Rachel could see that the idea had never even occurred to him. He smiled. “I bet you’re one of those people who waits until the movie credits have finished, just to see if there’s another scene snuck in past the end.” He shrugged. “Sorry, this band doesn’t do encores, that’s just the end of the story…”
Rachel was desperate to know why Arlo had told her that story – she believed that you knew everything about a man within a few moments – or minutes at least – of meeting him, and her mind raced around in small circles, trying to figure out the moral of the tale she had just heard.
“What is it like, getting all that attention?”
A certain shadow of weariness passed through his eyes, like a tiny ghost trapped in an abandoned fun house. “It’s – kind of addictive, to be honest…” His eyes suddenly cleared. “I mean, I don’t have to tell you!”
Rachel glowed with pleasure.
Arlo continued: “You know, I did try being a model, ‘cause everyone was bugging me to do it – I know that sounds weak-willed, but… My frat brothers kept telling me that if they looked like me, they couldn’t be paid enough to keep their shirts on – I don’t mean to sound vain, I’m just reporting what they said… So I did… I walked into the agency, and wanted to send me out right away – I signed some stuff and was on a call that afternoon. And I got jobs – but I got thirsty faster, so I never kept it up…”
“Thirsty?” Rachel laughed incredulously. “What the hell do you mean?”
Arlo blinked, his blue eyes lost in his yellow chicken face. “Oh, it’s nuts - I had to do an underwear shoot, and I literally could not drink any liquids for like two days before – because you have to be really dehydrated to look that – thin, or ripped, or whatever… Modelling is all about where you are – but most especially where you are not, which is having anything at all hanging over the edge of the underwear – a ‘no muffin top’ zone, if you get my drift. It was good money, but it’s a really – well – creepy lifestyle – no, that’s not it – it’s a creepy – layer of society… Everyone is sex obsessed and high strung and weirdly possessive and grabby.” Arlo shrugged. “I don’t like the word – but the closest I can get to it is – bitchy, it’s full of bitchy people – especially the other models, the men. And maybe I could’ve handled that part, but…”
“But what?”
Arlo ducked his head. Rachel could see his perfect part. “Look, I’m not try to pump myself up…”
“Go on, don’t tease me bro!” (Rachel mimicked an ancient meme about tasering.)
Arlo blew through his perfect lips. “Well - I was born with a couple of natural gifts, I guess physically – and I love to exercise, and – you might not believe me, but I really don’t like to eat, I find it kind of boring and bland – and this is the first beer I’ve had in about two and a half months – so I have some natural gifts, and I have some built-in preferences – or avoidances I guess – and it just felt – wrong – to fake this kind of standard for the average dude.” He smiled, almost sadly. “Yeah, I look pretty good in underwear, but it’s not something that the average man should focus on, or aspire to – or God help him try to achieve.” Arlo did seem genuinely troubled, and this touched Rachel deeply. “It got to the point where I felt kind of like a tall guy pretending he can sell his height to shorter guys – it’s a lie, for the most part, and I really didn’t want to participate in making other men feel bad for – natural accidents, nothing more.” He laughed abruptly. “That was a lot of it, but also I just couldn’t stand imagining the rest of my life hanging around with people who’d only ask me to play pool so they could grab at my butt!”
Rachel pursed her lips. “You know, you talk a lot about your body, Mr Chicken…”
Arlo frowned. “You think I’m talking about me in underwear so you can – picture me?”
Rachel pulled out her phone and searched for him. “Wow. Oh my…”
Arlo craned his head to look. “See, there’s just – less of me there.”
“Do you still get – residuals?”
“Oh no, I was never – I never got big enough for that.”
“How long did you do it for?”
Arlo shrugged. “Maybe – six months or so?”
“Did you meet a lot of girls?”
“Sure, I did some couple shots – but the girls all have stomach issues, and… Most of them smoke like chimneys and have the charisma of a damp rag. You can look sexy or you can feel sexy, that’s an iron law… Beauty and boredom seem to go hand-in-hand for most people.”
“So – then what?”
Arlo smiled. “Well, I – finished my degree in biology, because I always loved – roaming, as a kid. I collected tadpoles and salamanders and raised chickens and just – loved everything about animals… Volunteered at the zoo – where they had me giving tours on my second day…”
Rachel laughed, but Arlo looked injured.
“It wasn’t just a looks thing - I’m good with people, and kids really like me, and I genuinely know my stuff.”
“I’m sorry, you’re - you’re right…”
She saw the cliché behind the cliché – the inner boy who wanted to be appreciated for who he was, rather than how the man looked – and she felt some sympathy for that – but mostly she hungered for the splash-improvement of being associated with Arlo’s level of beauty.
Rachel’s mother had taught her very young that if you ever wanted to know how attractive you are, all you have to do is look at your boyfriend.
This created a multiyear obsession for Rachel, where she stared at everyone at the mall, or on a plane, or in school – looking for exceptions to her mother’s golden rule. Like a cat bringing in dead birds, she would bring exceptions to her mother, who would dismiss them with an airy gesture. “If she’s much prettier than he is, it’s because he has money…”
On the rare occasion when an attractive man was with a less attractive woman, Rachel’s mother immediately assumed hyper-religiosity, or an unwanted pregnancy.
“The exception that proves the rule!” said her mother triumphantly, which drove Rachel slightly around the bend.
“No fair!” she cried in her high child voice. “You can’t just make up a rule, then say that everything that goes against that rule proves that rule!”
“How often do you see people of similar attractiveness, but where the girl is much taller than the boy?”
Rachel thought, desperate for evidence. “Not often…” she finally admitted.
Her mother laughed, wrestling with a bread maker in their blindingly sunny kitchen. “You know, when I was a kid, about your age, my dad gave us a list of things to look for during car drives – we drove a lot, and my siblings and I would get up to all sorts of mischief in the backseat. There was some big prize at the end – can’t for the life of me recall what it was now – and I don’t remember much about what we were supposed to look for – license plates from the different states, cars with more than one colour, cars with a broken antennae, stuff like that – but two I clearly remember… One was a motorcycle with a woman driving, and a man on the back – this was before helmets covered up everything, so you could actually tell – and another was a clown in a convertible carrying balloons.” She laughed. “Your Uncle Jeff claimed to have seen the motorcycle one, but conveniently it just exited the highway as he was pointing it out, and we couldn’t – verify it. We never saw the clown, though – and even to this day, like forty years later, whenever I see a convertible, I look for a clown with balloons…” Her voice wobbled, because her father was ill. “I’d like to tell him I found one, that I remember…”
Rachel did not reply, because even as a child she always tried to figure out why people were telling her particular stories.
Her mother dabbed an eye and continued. “So, daughter of mine, when I say that most cars are not convertibles with a clown carrying balloons in them, that rule isn’t disproven when you see one. You see what I mean?”
Stung by her failed rebellion, Rachel nodded - while privately reserving her right to disagree.
Rachel’s father was altogether medium. Medium height, medium hairline, medium brown hair, medium income, moderate opinions, average dad bod - he didn’t even have any uncommon hobbies like stamp collecting or trainspotting to allow him to stand out from the masses. According to her mother, her father had great potential as a young man, but had somehow failed to achieve much of anything in life – which Rachel didn’t mind, because her father was always available to play and chat – but it bothered her mother, she could tell.
“When he was younger – oh, you won’t believe this – but he was better looking - of course, that goes without saying, we all were - and he had a little local access television show where he gave walking tours of historical neighbourhoods… And he played in a band, believe it or not, and was hell-bent on writing songs, but they lost their singer to Buddhism, and he left his songs on a bus, and the – air just kind of went out of their tires, I think. But he’s a good man, a good provider – and a woman can sustain her attraction to her husband by watching him be a good father, but there are times – I won’t lie – when I wish we could roam around the world on a big white boat, like my sister!”
It’s rarely possible in mathematics for two averages to birth an outlier – but Rachel’s parents did produce an unusually attractive child. The phrase that people generally used about her was ‘striking.’ Rachel preferred that, because it indicated impact, rather than ornamentation. She wanted to be a crater, not a pretty cloud. She kept copious diaries throughout her childhood and adolescence – entire bookshelves of scribbled red notebooks – and found herself even more drawn to Arlo when he first visited her apartment, and she showed them to him, but he just shrugged and said: “That’s all the past, man…”
As she grew to know him, Rachel learned that Arlo had as little sense of time as a deep-water shark. His physique never changed, his appetites never grew, he never seemed to encounter ideas which re-forged his personality – or affected it in any way really – and the rhythm of his days was like the heartbeat in his resting chest – steady, even, unflappable – unchangeable!
As they dated, Rachel got slowly drawn into Arlo’s timelessness. The rhythm of her period became like a metronome, without emotional or physical significance. They both staved off decay with rigorous exercise – she had to work out more, because she had a complex relationship with food. She used food as a reward mechanism for good behaviour and good decisions – which meant that she tended to oscillate five or ten pounds up and down – “like the tide,” Arlo said.
Rachel would eat well, lose weight – then reward herself by eating badly, and gain weight, and then get lectured by Arlo, and lose the weight again – she couldn’t find any balance between strictness and lassitude. She felt that running her body was like driving half drunk in a snowstorm, sliding from side to side, from excess to deficiency, always with half an eye on the rear-view mirror for the sirens of Arlo’s endlessly patient exhortations.
Rachel had to literally remind Arlo to eat – which was utterly incomprehensible to her. Rachel had vague notions of “blood sugar” which caused her to feel shaky if she hadn’t had a snack in a couple of hours. Arlo generally kept a granola bar or protein shake close at hand – especially when they were bicycling or rock-climbing – in order to short-circuit her “hangry” moodiness.
Once, he forgot to eat for an entire day – with no change in mood, no disruption of energy, no ill effects whatsoever.
“Didn’t you get hungry?” Rachel asked in shocked wonder.
Arlo shrugged in an incomprehensibly masculine fashion. “I guess I got – distracted.”
Rachel shook her head, trying to imagine a universe in which it was possible to forget about basic bodily needs. It was like listening to a doctor explain to a man that his bladder burst because he just – forgot to pee.
Rachel’s body was insistent in its expectations – or demands, to be more accurate. It complained when it wasn’t fed, watered, stretched, exercised, massaged, oiled – it was like a high maintenance camel that could run like the wind, but stumbled on a stone. She had to stretch her hamstrings every night, for fear of getting jimmy legs. Her skin grew powder dry without lotions. Her eyes required drops several times a day - and most morning she woke up with a kink in her neck because apparently her head had been off by 1.5 degrees on her pillow. (Rachel remembered Arlo’s comment about pretty girls having stomach issues when she first explained everything she had to go through in order to get an edible meal in a restaurant.)
Arlo’s body was like a machine – a robot that carried his brain and beautiful face from place to place – a server, a courier delivering the aesthetic joy of his presence to a waiting world. He barely thought about his organs, and it never seemed to give him any trouble at all – at least internally.
Being with Arlo came with a part-time job of endless movement. Quite unfairly, he did always remind Rachel of a shark – he was not predatory, she didn’t mean it that way, but she felt goosebumps one night watching a nature documentary with Arlo, where a fruity-voiced English narrator loftily informed them that sharks lacked an air bladder, and thus were condemned to swim forever. Watching the angular blue-topped beast swimming through a cloud of indifferent fish reminded Rachel of Arlo constantly passing by snacks without even noticing them – and watching him do his endless leg lifts, lying on the ground watching the landscape ocean on the television, Rachel felt a deep visceral connection between the shark and her boyfriend. Have I ever seen a fat shark? she wondered. I guess only pregnant ones…
In that moment, Arlo had look up at her from the Moroccan carpet and said: “You know, when I took up surfing, people would talk about sharks all the time, but I never felt scared at all. I saw a couple of fins, and always assumed they were dolphins - and every time I could see clearly, I was always right!”
One of their own, thought Rachel - hoping that the documentary would reveal whether sharks bit each other or not. (When he nibbled on her neck that night, she felt another shiver…)
Arlo did have his sensitivities, though – mostly physical, of course, because everything about him was physical… He had to give up local surfing, because the bacteria count in the water got too high for his fragile Blanche Dubois skin. He ended up with ear infections, pinkeye, and a rash between his butt cheeks. Rachel half-expected him to launch into some progressive environmental crusade to clean up the beach water, but it didn’t appear to even cross his mind.
Rachel did end up suggesting it to him, and he gave her a speech that remained burned in her brain for days. His face was eclipsed by the outside glare through the Starbucks window, and he cradled his white coffee cup - on which, of course, the barista had drawn an inevitable heart.
“Rachel, we all want to be free – and you can beat back injustice a bit I guess – but it’s always a losing battle… It’s like fighting aging – you never win, not in the end. Yeah, I could spend the next year or two trying to get the beach cleaned up – and maybe I could succeed – but then the air would get worse, something would spill… And if you piss the wrong people off – the media might single me out, attack me – particularly because of my looks – and get me fired…” His voice thickened slightly. “And – don’t take this the wrong way, babe, but I would really miss my babies, my lemurs…” He took a sip of his black coffee, grimacing like any proper caffeine snob. “So, I end up with no money, no job, giving everything up so that other people can surf for another year or two..? Thanks, but…”
Rachel did not understand Arlo’s slacker perspective until his father blew through town on business, and she was subjected to a forty-minute lecture on the bottomless vanity and futility of the most talented and brilliant Romans who wasted their entire lives trying to slow or reverse the fall of their Empire.
He also cradled a coffee cup while lecturing – a family trait it seemed. “Just think of the energy, the focus, the concentration – people wore themselves down to a nub writing and arguing and debating and fighting and voting – and being assassinated – trying to slow or reverse these giant falling dominoes.” He gestured for Rachel, on the off chance she had never played. “The benefits of political power accrue to a very motivated few - the costs are dispersed across endless millions of people. A man who can steal a dollar from a billion people is a billionaire – resisting him only saves a dollar for everyone else. You can slow that down for a bit, but you can’t fight or reverse it fundamentally. Human nature is like physics, and only a fool fights physics…”
This determinist view of history did not cause Arlo to fall into despair – rather, it gave him release and relief from almost any and all obligations. He could enjoy his life under the shadow of a rumbling volcano without falling into the delusion – as he saw it – that any bizarre rituals could prevent the eruption.
Perhaps that’s why he never talks about children… His father was far back enough in time to have children without a sense of imminent doom, but for Arlo…
“Rach?”
Her eyes suddenly flew open like missile hatches prelaunch. Rachel realized that she had been, as she called it, “stay-dreaming,” i.e. lying in bed.
She covered up her sudden shock by pretending to lazily stretch. Oh, the subterfuge required for a jumpy person to live with a ridiculously relaxed person…
“I brought your coffee, babe,” he said, placing it on a coaster.
He always sounds like he’s trying to pre-empt my bad mood by caffeinating me, Rachel thought – before scolding herself. As Arlo constantly reminds me, I cannot convict him in the court of my mind without evidence or his opportunity to rebut…
Arlo always awoke instantly, with full functionality – Rachel had to build herself up to competent adulthood like a two-year-old learning to stack blocks. She noticed that he was dressed for – dressed for – climbing.
“Our bodies are temples – time to get to church!” he grinned. “No rush, no pressure – but how much time do you need?”
“Well, I don’t have to do my hair, so – twenty-five minutes?”
Rachel knew that saying half an hour would bring complaints, but she could easily get thirty minutes out of twenty-five. Every time she was woken up early – though it was in fact after 9 AM – Rachel remembered the difficulties her own mother had on the days of family outings, when she had to get up before dawn to get everything ready – especially the children – because Rachel’s father would get watch-tapping impatient, standing by the front door before striding to wait in the car – no matter how cold – while her mother worked feverishly to get everyone in motion. It wasn’t that her father never offered to help, it was more that there was no point – the machinery of motion was so complex that any outside aid was just sand in the Jell-O…
Rachel lurched out of bed and grabbed at her coffee - remembering that the ‘coaster’ was in fact a cup warmer, bought by Arlo – she assumed grudgingly, though incorrectly – as a resigned acceptance of the fact that – in his view – it took her forever to get up.
Arlo was a coffee perfectionist – “The ritual is half the addiction,” he said - and the deep bitter magic of his black brew was an unparalleled pleasure.
Rachel lingered in the bathroom, mulling over popping a pimple, but made it to the car in thirty-two minutes.
Arlo was listening to a nutrition podcast, and gave her a blinding smile as she lurched into the driver’s seat. All that coffee, and his teeth remain platonic white… thought Rachel, then chastised herself again. You can’t choose a guy for his perfections, then complain about his perfections…
Arlo prided himself on his silent climbing. From below, his straining calves looked like giant pink tadpoles, and he had the lean thighs of a long-distance runner – as he once was, until he read about Tiger Woods mourning the effects of youthful running on his middle-aged knees. Arlo had immediately switched to swimming and surfing to protect his joints – and now climbing, which was somewhat low-impact at least.
“My dad has a bad back, you gotta empathize with your future self!” he grinned.
They had not gone climbing for a week or two, which had given Rachel’s body a chance to heal – and oh, did she wistfully look back at her early twenties, when she never had to wonder which way her body would fall – into shrugging off overuse, or entrenching and crystallizing it into weeks of pain.
Rachel occasionally lamented the basic reality that women seemed to age faster than men – men were “bricks” as Arlo laughingly pointed out – especially from twenty to about fifty, when very little changed except perhaps the hairline.
“Women age on a slight incline – for men, it’s a giant drop from 20s vitality to bad backs and gingivitis!” He shrugged, as he always did. “There’s good and bad in both of course…”
One thing Rachel loved and hated about rock-climbing was how it changed her relationship with breathing. The slight grit and sour notes of the city were unnoticeable until they were in the high clear cliff air. The air was sweet when they climbed – which was a plus – but bitter when they returned home. Arlo constantly claimed that he would love to live outside the city, but Rachel didn’t believe a word of it – beauty has no coin in the country…
The rock-face was steeper than a hill, but not as sheer as a cliff – Arlo liked it because he said that there was no need for belaying – either solo or simultaneous – since there were few actual drops.
Rachel started climbing first, so Arlo could more easily keep an eye on her. The rock face had its challenges – a lot of tiny grips and lateral travel. Arlo’s muscles always seemed to lubricate his ascent, while Rachel felt as if she were levering herself up on the stiff tension of tendons alone. Arlo only glanced at the cliff face inches from his nose, constantly turning to inhale the landscape over his shoulder. Rachel felt dizzy when she turned, but did love the bubbling green carpet of treetops far below, dropping in undulating waves to the distant blue of a still lake. The scent of the granite was heady, gritty in their noses.
Above them, they saw an intense bearded young man descending, blasting incomprehensible inspirational music in some Eastern European language on a Bluetooth speaker attached to his belt.
“Loose rock above, dust the ridges, friends,” the man called, chalk puffing out from his pointing finger.
Arlo thanked him and spider-climbed easily up, past him. Rachel didn’t even have to look to see the bearded man’s slightly shocked face. Everyone feels attractive until Arlo sails by…
Over the last year, Rachel had grown to love the climbing, because when she got into the rhythm of it, it took her completely out of her own head – like an exorcism of over-thinking. She was sometimes so desperate to escape the tangles of her own mind that she let her instincts convince her that falling was death – when the stakes were that high, her neurosis almost totally retreated.
Rachel transformed into a scanning ascending machine – panting, looking for cracks, dancing against gravity. She didn’t even notice that she had passed Arlo, see-sawing back and forth on the ridges until she was above him.
And then – and then Rachel slipped – her fingers scrambled and clawed at something, rubble – and then nothing, and she pitched backwards in a sickening flailing skidding fall.
Rachel screamed, her buried unease instantly lasering up into sheer panic. She had convinced her body that falling was death, and it now coiled for its own ending. As she dropped, Rachel caught a flash of Arlo’s face – and desperately hoped that her last earthly feeling would not be embittered rage, since he seemed almost amused, his hands resting comfortably in a vertical crevasse as he watched her plummet…
After a shockingly short span of time, Rachel’s left heel hit something, skewing her plummet. Grabbing wildly, her fingers clawed into a crevasse, straining her shoulder as she steadied herself. Twisting her head, her heart pounding, Rachel fixed her eyes on a distant container ship on the horizon, rotating her head to keep it in view, to combat the dizziness. Panic-dots swam through her vision.
“Whoa, you all right?” called down Arlo.
“I’m fine…” she muttered, then cleared her throat and spoke louder: “I’m good, I’m fine…”
“You need any help?”
“No!” she said tightly.
Pause.
“You sure?”
Rachel nodded.
Arlo had a two-question rule – he would only ask twice, then shrug and move on. It was designed to combat any potential for passive aggression.
It rarely worked, at least for Rachel.
Rachel pressed her forehead against the rock, ordering her pounding heart to slow down. She waited until she could grasp the rock-face easily, since she hated the humiliation of grabbing and failing - then slowly began to climb again, glaring up at Arlo’s tadpole calves. The first shall become last… The phrase, from a Sunday school class two decades in the past, rang through her mind.
When Arlo got to the top, he turned and helped hoist Rachel up.
“You’re upset,” he said. “Don’t worry, I still fall – even the professionals do. Talent and strength can only take you so far, there’s just this – element of luck. In life…”
Rachel shook her head tightly. “You know, I saw your face when I fell.”
Arlo laughed. “It’s sweet, you wanting my face to be the last thing you saw… No, really – so what?”
Her face was red. “You know, you could’ve reached for me!”
Arlo considered her words – he always had a slow way of responding to her aggression that made her feel a little insane. “We both would’ve fallen – probably – but…” His chin puckered. “That would have meant something, to you…”
“Well – yeah, shouldn’t that be some kind of – instinct?”
He shrugged. “The male instinct is to get into fights and protect his family, I thought that – one of the points of our relationship was to escape – toxic masculinity…”
“I don’t think it’s ‘toxic masculinity’ to reach for your falling – the woman you love!”
Arlo paused again. The wind chose this moment to ruffle back his flawless blonde hair. Rachel squinted. His eyes were the exact color of the sky behind his face, like two holes in his head.
Arlo said: “I do love you…”
“That’s not the point!” cried Rachel – knowing it was a useless phrase. Arlo knew it too, so didn’t ask her what the point was, knowing that she would be unable to answer. Or unwilling.
“I’m sorry,” he said in a bland inoffensive way, obviously wanting to move on.
Rachel stared at him hopelessly, helplessly, wrestling a tumult of unknown devilry. “Of course…” she said – it was the beginning of a sentence she willed herself not to finish.
Arlo flopped on the mossy granite, lifting his arms so the breeze would dry his armpits. “I’m not trying to change the subject, but I did forget to ask you – I remembered while we were climbing – how was lunch with your sister?”
Rachel gladly followed his lead, and sat on the earth next to him, facing the sky and the lake. She tried to remember if the lake was the colour of the sky because of reflection, or something more innate…
She turned. He was waiting.
“Oh, it was good, good. Volatile…”
“Oh yeah, how?” Arlo did not have many weaknesses – despite good justifications for them – but gossip was one of them.
“Well…”
His eyes narrowed. “Don’t censor, babe – just tell me.”
She scowled. “I’m not censoring, I’m just – gathering!”
“Okay.”
Rachel frowned, shivering slightly as her sweat dried, feeling the almost-audible hum of her muscles relaxing. “You remember Ben?”
“Dude, of course!” said Arlo, slightly offended.
“Okay,” smiled Rachel. “Calm yourself… So, he’s kind of – volatile now, I don’t know for how long. Cassie says a while…”
“Volatile how? Come on, Rach!”
“Volatile – just, he escalates. He wanted our dessert…” Rachel felt a sudden reluctance to talk about having any association with ordering bread pudding. “He started screaming and – I really think he was going to claw Ian’s face.”
“Wow,” said Arlo simply.
Rachel blew through her lips. “They had to get out of there, man – Ian and Ben. Super awkward. I checked social media, no one seems to have filmed it, thank God, but I don’t really know how to search…”
Arlo sucked in his cheeks and chewed at the soft inner lining. “Has this stuff been going on – long?”
“I’m not sure… A while I think…” Rachel had a sensation of falling again, but persisted. “Cassie thinks it has something to do with – daycare.”
Arlo’s eyes widened. “Daycare! Is he being – bullied?”
“No, she thinks that – that the daycare is the bully. I think… It’s hard to have a conversation with a little kid around…”
“Oh…” Arlo frowned. “So – it’s a – bad daycare?”
“She said something about daycare as a whole…”
Arlo snorted, and leaned his head forward, massaging the back of his neck. His voice sounded strangled from the position. “We’re daycare kids!”
Rachel’s voice lowered – you never knew who was coming up over the lip of the cliff. “Ian wants her to – stay home…”
“Hm.” Arlo stretched the other side of his neck. “Kinda like locking the barn door after the horse is gone, no?”
“She’s pregnant,” whispered Rachel.
There was a slight pause. Rachel wanted to look directly at Arlo, but that would seem pathetically inquisitive.
“Good for her,” he murmured, without any particular enthusiasm.
Another pause. Arlo started to get up.
Rachel said: “I noticed something, when the wind blew – you know you’re getting a bit of a widow’s peak?”
Arlo looked down at her. She could not read his expression.
“That’s funny,” he said.
“What is?”
He smiled. “How would you react if I pointed out that you were aging?”
Rachel scowled. “Like what?”
“Oh, I’m not falling into that!” He lifted his hair from his forehead. “I know, I saw it a couple of months ago. Forehead gonna become a five-head.”
“And you didn’t – say anything?”
“You wouldn’t believe why.”
Rachel wrestled herself to her feet, taking a few steps back from the cliff edge – though they were a reasonable distance away. “What?”
“Well – it’s not anti-female, but it’s not exactly – in line with how – you might think.”
“What are you talking about?”
Arlo sighed. “I wouldn’t mind at all being less…” He gestured at the entirety of his golden demeanour.
“Less – pretty?” Rachel teased.
Arlo smiled and nodded. “I’m just so tired of being objectified for my physical beauty – I want people to see the real me, the deeper me, the meaningful me, the – ontological me. I feel that the only people who appreciate me are my lemurs, because I’m a pretty man, but I’m not at all a pretty lemur, so only they can see into the very depths of my soul, and judge me for my morals and virtues and – integrity.” He wagged a mocking finger at her. “They don’t love me just for my sex appeal, they understand me deeply, and appreciate my personality, my sense of humour, my affections and – and my joie de vivre!” Arlo pretended to be throwing a scarf over his shoulder, and lifted his chin to stare meaningfully at the heavens.
“My himbo…” murmured Rachel. “Less talk, more abs…”
He laughed.
Getting up, she said: “My sister is pregnant, but at least I have step-lemurs…”
That was an edgy joke, but to her relief – wait, was it relief? – Arlo did not read anything deeper.
“We should head back,” said Arlo, scanning the distance.
Thick clouds clustered on the horizon, like a herd of grey grumpy sheep.
“What signs of aging, on me?” Rachel demanded suddenly.
Arlo shook his head, turning down the corners of his lips in an amused half-smile. “It doesn’t matter – I know we were drawn to each other physically, at first, but – we get along well, don’t we?”
A fly landed on Rachel’s ring finger, and she scratched at it absently, shivering.
Arlo held out his hands. “Time passes, events transpire, the body fades and falls away – but there’s no one I’d rather be decaying with than you, my love!” He shrugged. “We’ll have to walk down… I couldn’t find any extra chalk for love or money, so no more climbing.”
For love or money… Rachel frowned, trying to remember where she had heard that phrase recently…
As they walked down the narrow gravel path that wound around the mountain, Cassie’s lingering punchiness propelled a few words out of her mouth.
“Arlo, have you ever heard of – men’s rights?”
There was a pause – Rachel had deliberately taken the lead, to make up for climbing second, so she couldn’t see Arlo behind her.
“Men’s – what?”
“Men’s rights. You heard me, don’t stall!”
“Isn’t that – just about – everything?”
She threw a look over her shoulder, and saw him gesturing over the whole rooftop of the world with one hand, and fingering his ear with the other. “You’d think so, but apparently it’s a whole – thing.”
He snorted. “Sounds like an incel thing…”
“So - apparently it has something to do with family courts, and – female preferences in that – part of the law,” she finished lamely, hoping perhaps that a bad explanation would help them more easily dismiss the perspective.
Arlo’s voice descended into instantaneous seriousness. “Yeah, well, family courts are brutal, man… My uncle got accused of child abuse, he was investigated for like two years.” He blew a whoosh through his lips. “Never the same…”
Rachel stopped and turned around. “What? You think there might be something – to it?”
Arlo frowned, shaking his head slightly. “I think that some – individual men can be… Well, injustices can happen to them, but I don’t think there’s anything – institutional, of course. Certainly not for tidy-whiteys like me!”
Rachel fed this through her ideology computer, receiving only an indeterminate response. “I’m thinking of – doing an article.”
Arlo blinked. “On this – men’s rights?”
Rachel knew that Arlo had to add the word ‘this’ to distance himself.
“Do you know that men kill themselves way more often than women?”
“But women try more…” Arlo puffed out his chest. “Which only indicates that men are just – better at suicide, because we are more dedicated and masculine and full of testosterone and success!”
Rachel laughed. “There’s just – a lot of stuff, which is really interesting to me… It’s pretty delusional, of course, but it’s a delusion based on some data that – that needs some other kind of explanation, and I think I could – provide that.”
Arlo shivered.
Rachel continued. “You know…”
They had to pause the conversation as two men ambled down the path, holding hands. The pair stared at Arlo, then greeted them both as they passed – with some pity, Rachel thought – and she had the sudden urge to explain to them that they were not fighting, just having a – conversation.
“Well,” said Rachel after a minute, “we can’t have a serious conversation with you staring at those two men’s butts on the way down, so let’s just – stay here a bit…”
Arlo had endured a whole lifetime of “so pretty he must be gay” jokes, so just shrugged.
Rachel continued: “You know, I’m pretty happy with my career, but I’ve not – found – a place or a topic or a breakthrough article… And listen – I don’t want to get known for something like this, but it might be a great way to get my writing out to a wider audience, because it’s a – movement that has a lot of traction in certain circles – and it’s not like some extremist furry thing – it has a real presence, but it’s – mostly invisible to the mainstream… I’ve had a brief look, and it’s not talked about much, except in these – very contemptuous terms, like a slave rebellion!” Rachel laughed nervously. “I don’t mean that, that just – popped out! But my instincts tell me that this could be – a real thing for me, get me moving!”
Arlo stared at her – and she tried to remember through the static of fuzzy desire whether his eyes were really that blue, or were just reflecting the lake, which was reflecting the sky…
“Man, I don’t know, Rach…”
She waited. She almost never saw him uneasy.
He kicked a random stone. “When I was a kid, I always wanted to take this shortcut to get to – the woods, you know, where I could walk and think… It looked obvious, it went across this – open field, and the regular way was much longer – but there was just – no path. So when I actually tried to take that shortcut one day, this giant freaking dog – jumped a fence and cornered me. I actually had to climb a tree, scratched the hell out of my back.” He shrugged. “Sometimes there’s no path for a reason…”
Rachel laughed. Three tiny specks floated in the deepening blue overhead – hawks on the wing, scanning for prey. She closed her right eye, and could not see them with her left. “Yeah, that story is way too on the nose my friend. Editor says ‘delete’!” She pressed an imaginary button in the air. “So – you drag me up a mountain, I almost fall to my death, but now you tell me – don’t take any risks my dear!?!”
He smiled. “Physical risks are one thing… Has anyone else written about this? I mean seriously, in anything mainstream?”
“As I said, couple of things, but it’s all pretty contemptuous.”
“And would you write that – contemptuous stuff?”
Again, Rachel felt dizzy, and shivered in the slightly chill wind rising up from the green clouds of the treetops. She decided to tell him. It felt almost like a secret marriage proposal. “That might be a little tough…”
Arlo blinked. “Why? Because of – me?”
She sighed in mock patience. “No, Arlo, not absolutely everything is about you!”
He laughed again. Such gorgeous teeth!
“It’s my brother-in-law – Ian. He’s – into this stuff…”
“Oh wow,” murmured Arlo. “Wow.”
“Indeed.”
Another pause, then Rachel’s words tumbled out in a rush. “And it would be a kind of betrayal, I know that – it would create a lot of tension between us… And – and Ian wants her to stay home, with the new baby, and do something to – rescue Ben, as she puts it… And – and – I’m kind of torn… I know that’s nothing new, but listen – part of me thinks that she should – man up and stay at work, and part of me thinks that…” Her voice lowered, as if her phone was listening. “I don’t think she’s that good of a nurse, actually – and she’s never been particularly – smart, or ambitious, or – something – nothing like me, really. So why not – stay home, be a good little housekeeper, a 1950s wifey…” Rachel realized that her voice was getting wormwood bitter, and forced herself to stop.
“You guys are still pretty competitive,” commented Arlo.
Rachel sighed. Arlo was always going off on these tangents that led nowhere. And I guess it’s easy for him, with his simple and empty ‘relationship’ with his own sibling…
Rachel suddenly wondered if animals would be drawn to Arlo’s beauty – that perhaps it had evolved so that deer would not view it as a threat, and so would be easier to hunt…
She shook her head slightly. “I suppose I just want to – shake things loose a little bit, find out what the next – stage in the journey is going to be, because it does seem a little – repetitive – just a little bit, at times, don’t you ever feel that?”
Her heart was pounding again.
“I love our life,” said Arlo with annoying simplicity.
“Anything you would change?”
“Nothing.”
“Not a thing?”
Silence. Of course, the ‘two-question’ rule…
I think I’m going to write it! As usual, the sentence appeared in her mind for evaluation before manifesting on her tongue.
Rachel decided to say nothing – in order to bolster her resolution.
She did, however, sing one of Arlo’s favourite songs as they continued their descent, deliberately getting some of the words wrong.
He said nothing, but she could feel his annoyance.
STORY CONTINUES: https://freedomain.locals.com/post/3440046/the-present
