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There is No Soundness

Matt Hlinak

    I gave her my heart.
    She gave me chlamydia.
    These two lines are running through my head like a wise-ass country song while the doctor is explaining my test results. My dickhole still stings from the swab he jammed in there to take the sample. I kept putting off going to the doctor long after I’d stopped having doubts about why white stuff kept oozing out. But now my worst fear is realized. Actually, that’s not true; my sixth worst fear is realized. My worst fears are, in descending order: AIDS, hepatitis, herpes, syphilis, gonorrhea, then chlamydia. I’d been hoping for a bladder infection.
    “I’m going to put you on a course of antibiotics,” he says, scribbling lazily onto the prescription pad. “Your partner may well be asymptomatic, but it is important that your partner also sees a doctor and goes on antibiotics. Otherwise you can become re-infected. You need to inform anyone with whom you’ve had sexual contact within the last sixty days. Undiagnosed chlamydia can cause severe complications, including infertility and blindness, in any female partners you may have had.”

    We met at a campus bar during my senior year at the University of Illinois, at the time when Ken Starr was publicly exploring the sex life of the Leader of the Free World. Up to that point, my sex life had been non-existent without alcohol and only marginally better with it. I am naturally shy, which had left me frustrated and lonely in high school, but in college I discovered that somewhere between drinks seven and nine, the alcohol lowered my inhibitions enough to allow for extroversion while still retaining sufficient intelligence for charm. Once I reached the tenth drink, though, my night’s activities became limited to the consumption of more liquor and perhaps damage to public property, but nothing more interesting.
    During a pub crawl one warm spring evening, I found myself sipping my eighth Seven and Seven at the bar next to a petite marketing major. While most of the other girls had tanned themselves naturally over spring break or unnaturally at one of the seven tanning salons that dotted the campus, her skin was the color of dogwood blossoms, pale and lightly freckled. She ordered a gin and tonic in a drawl that, while not Southern, was certainly rural. I commented on her accent and asked her if she was from Brooklyn, which really wasn’t funny, but she laughed anyway. She told me she was from a tiny town about an hour away from Springfield that no one had ever heard of, but I knew a guy from my dorm freshman year who had gone to the same high school as her, so I told her about the time he woke up drunk in the middle of the night and peed in his roommate’s closet because he thought it was a bathroom stall. She laughed again, and I figured I was in.
    We chatted for a while before dancing drunkenly in the middle of a bar with no dance floor. I leaned in and kissed her, which seemed to catch her by surprise, but she kissed me back, so I asked her if she wanted to get out of there. She said she did, and we left without telling our respective groups of friends we were going. Her apartment was just a block away so we headed there. Right outside the bar we ran into a panhandler, a fast-talking man in his thirties with about three teeth, who kept trying to spark up a conversation. She nodded politely as he worked through his pitch, and I tried to hurry her along. The guy persisted until I threw a handful of pocket change at him. He swore at me, but stopped to pick the coins up off the ground. A scowl darkened her face.
    “You didn’t have to do that,” she said.
    “You’re right. I’m sorry. I just like you and I like talking to you and I didn’t want to be interrupted.”
    She smiled and said it’s okay.
    Her bed was big and soft and covered with fluffy pillows and stuffed animals and it smelled like lilacs. It was the most girlish room I’d ever been in and I told her so. She said she liked her room this way because she was “a fucking princess, goddamnit.” I laughed and drew her to me. She didn’t exactly seem adventurous, but I could tell from the way she moved and moaned beneath me that she’d done this before. We screwed clumsily before I passed out in her bed. The next morning I asked for her phone number, and she gave it to me, but she still seemed surprised when I called her later that afternoon. This was four months ago, and we’ve been together ever since.

    I walk out of the doctor’s office numbly, dumbly clutching a prescription for amoxicillin. Although the clouds are forming a hazy curtain obscuring the sun, the air envelops me like an old quilt, and I immediately start sweating. I’m doing mathematical calculations in my head. The last girl I slept with before her had been on New Year’s Eve. Now it’s the last week in August. There is no question where I got it.
    I’m having a hard time accepting that a girl so sweet, so caring could do this to me. We’d lived together this summer and spent so much time together, I can’t even imagine how she managed to contract chlamydia without me knowing about it. I’m not a suspicious guy or anything, and she’d given me no reason to distrust her, but I have to think there’d have been some sign she was fooling around. I jog my memory and can’t come up with anything.
    It’s hard to believe that I thought we had something serious. If she can’t go four months without screwing around on me, what hope do we have for a long-term relationship? I’m so angry I want to call her up and scream at her, but I imagine her crying on the other end of the phone, and I know I’ll cave. I’m not one for confrontation, and the thought of yelling at a crying girl who I thought I was in love with doesn’t give me any satisfaction. It’s better to just hold off until I’ve calmed down and can think rationally about the situation.

    We were inseparable during that last month of school. I was taking only two classes that semester and had just accepted a job editing copy for a middling Chicago newspaper, so I was almost completely free from responsibility for the one and only time in my adult life. She had landed an internship at a downtown ad agency, so we were going to be together all summer as well. We were giddy with new love and the infinite possibilities life seemed to hold out for us. One night we lay naked in her bed well past three in the morning, discussing our future. We were both a little drunk, but I was always careful not to over-imbibe around her. This was my first and only real relationship, and I was trying not to screw things up.
    “If money was not an issue,” I asked her, “what would you want to do?”
    “Do you mean for a job?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Hmmm,” she let her latte-colored eyes linger on the ceiling while she thought about it. “I’d want to work for an animal shelter.”
    “Oh yeah? Why an animal shelter?”
    “I like animals and I think it would be fun to take care of puppies all day.”
    “What about the ones they can’t give away?” I asked, picking up a baby-blue stuffed bunny and examining its beady eyes.
    “What do you mean?”
    “I mean the ones they have to—” and I wrung my hands around the stuffed animal’s throat for effect.
    “Oh, you’re mean,” she said yanking the bunny away from me.
    “I’m just being realistic.”
    “You ask about my dream job, and you want me to be realistic?”
    “You’re right,” I said, running my fingers through the soft spirals of her untamed hair. “That wasn’t fair.”
    “Anyway, if money wasn’t an issue, then I could take the dogs no one wanted to my big house and let them play in my big yard.”
    “Okay, so you want to be the neighborhood’s crazy cat lady?”
    “Dogs, not cats,” she said with a shove. “I don’t know why I bother talking to you.”
    “Because I’m so funny,” I said, climbing on top of her. She looked so vulnerable beneath me, her tiny body so fragile, her slim, pale throat so delicate, her wide, brown eyes so trusting. I brushed my lips across her forehead.
    “What would you do?” she asked.
    “I don’t know.” I kissed her on the cheek and let my lips linger against her skin.
    “Come on now,” she said, pushing me off. “It’s not fair. You have to answer the question, too.”
    “Okay. I’d like to find a nice cozy bar with a fireplace. And I’d like to spend all day sitting in front of the fireplace, reading a novel and drinking imported beer.”
    “That’s not a job.”
    “No, but it’d be cool if it was.”
    “You want to spend all day drinking by yourself? I think that’s the saddest fantasy I ever heard.”
    “I never said I was by myself. You like to read, don’t you?”
    “Yeah, but I don’t want to sit in a bar all day.”
    “Too bad. This one’s my fantasy, not yours.”

    I get home and there’s a message from her on my answering machine. It doesn’t say, Sorry I gave you a disgusting disease I got from some slimy bastard who probably doesn’t even remember my name. Instead it says, Hey, handsome, just calling to say, ‘Hi.’ Give me a call when you get in. Love you. Her voice tugs at the pit of my stomach, and all I can think of for a split second is cradling her in my arms, but then, as if on cue, my cock starts throbbing, which causes me to envision some faceless horde of greasy, infectious guys with gold chains nestled in the thick tufts of their chest hair going to town on her. I seem to have forgotten to breathe, which makes me dizzy until I plop down on the couch and inhale deeply and deliberately.

    She went back to school for her senior year three weeks ago, just about the time I started noticing my condition. While I am by no means well-off, my copy-editing job is a real job, which means I have more money than I’ve ever had in my life, so I took her to what we both felt was a fancy restaurant for our last night together in the city before she returned to campus. She wore her curly hair up, and it looked like a bouquet of wild flowers. I had donned my one and only suit, sans tie, which I felt made me look casually sophisticated. We sipped mid-priced merlot over candlelight while gazing longingly into one another’s eyes.
    “Are you going to miss me?” she asked.
    “Of course I will, but we’re going to see each other in just two weeks.”
    “I know, but we haven’t been apart that long since we started dating. Maybe you’ll start to forget about me.”
    “I won’t forget about you,” I responded, grabbing her hand.
    “How do you know?”
    “Well, they say absence makes the heart grow stronger.”
    “Fonder.”
    “Yeah, that’s what I meant.”
    “Do you really believe that?”
    “Sure, why not? Don’t you?”
    “I don’t know,” she replied. “What about ‘out of sight, out of mind’?”
    “That’s just a dumb expression.”
    “It’s no dumber than ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder,’” she shot back a little testily.
    “Yes, but my expression is nicer.”
    “But that doesn’t make it true.”
    “No,” I said, taking a sip of wine. “I guess it doesn’t.”
    “It’s just that it’s been such a wonderful summer, I don’t want it end. Everything has gone so perfectly, I’m afraid that my leaving will screw it all up somehow.”
    “Don’t be silly,” I said, and then bent over the table and kissed her. I could feel the heat from the candle burning a few inches from our faces. We were seated by the window, but there was no moonlight.

    I’m not ready to call her back. Instead I snatch a paperback off the bookshelf and go to the bar down the street, which doesn’t get much business on a Tuesday afternoon. The bar is a little too well-lit to be cozy, and it has a fireplace, but they don’t light it in August. The waitress there is a close to a decade older than me and big-boned, but she has a warm, white smile and she remembers me from the last time I was there, so she sits down to chat with me when things are slow. We like all the same movies, which sometimes is enough. I knock back nine Seven and Sevens and convince her to join me at my place after her shift ends. Thankfully I manage to find a not-quite-expired rubber in the back of my medicine cabinet, so neither of us winds up any sicker than we started.
    The waitress is gone when I wake up, which is good because I’m late for work and feel unclean. I show up at the office obviously hung over and miss three typos in the article I’m proofreading. My boss tells me I’m not in college anymore and that I need to pull it together. I want to tell her not to expect perfection unless she wants to increase my imperfect salary, but instead I tell her I’m coming down with something, which isn’t exactly a lie, and promise to bring a sharper eye tomorrow. I make it through the rest of the day without any more screw-ups and duck out early. The light on my answering machine is flashing when I get home. Of course it’s her. Hi, honey, I guess I missed you last night. I know you’re probably busy but we haven’t talked in a few days and I’d love to hear your voice. Love you. I’m still not ready to deal with this so I erase the message and go to bed.
    I wake up at four in the morning because I have a bad dream. She’s in it. In the dream, I keep trying to talk to her, to hold her hand, but it’s like she doesn’t know who I am, and she’s pulling away from me. Her vast brown eyes have been replaced by inscrutable black buttons. She’s afraid of me. I can’t get back to sleep, so I decide to start my day early. I clean up and eat breakfast and get to the office an hour and a half earlier than usual to make up for my poor performance yesterday. My boss is already there. I drink a pot of coffee and tear through my day’s clips. By three o’clock fatigue sets in, and I spend the last two hours playing Solitaire on my computer. When I trudge out the door at the end of the day, my boss gives me a brief wave without eye contact before turning her attention back to her computer screen.
    There are two messages on the machine when I get home. The first is from my college roommate asking me to join him at the local sports bar for two-dollar beer night. I skip to the next message and hear her voice, laced with pain. Hey, it’s me. Please give me a call when you get this. I just want to know you’re okay . . . and I want to make sure you’re still coming down this weekend. I don’t care what time it is in when you get in. Please call me. I delete the message and go meet my old roommate at the bar. He asks how she’s doing, and I tell him we broke up. He asks what happened, and I tell him I don’t want to talk about it. The waitress is a tiny blonde in a short skirt who is vigorously chewing a piece of spearmint gum. I race through twelve beers and try to strike up a conversation with her, but she pretends the music is too loud to hear and moves on to her next table. My friend laughs at me, and I’m not in the mood for his shit, so I slap forty dollars on the table and stumble home. There are two messages on the machine that I erase without playing.
    I wake up at five in the morning because my phone is ringing. I look at the caller ID and see that it’s her. I don’t pick up and she doesn’t leave a message. I call my boss, who thankfully isn’t in yet, and leave a voicemail telling her I’m too sick to come in. I don’t care if she believes me. I unplug the phone from the wall and spend the day in bed. I get up around four in the afternoon and sit unshowered in my boxers on the couch for the next few hours, drinking scotch and watching a Planet of the Apes marathon playing on cable. The sun sets, but I don’t get up to turn on the light, leaving the room awash in the synthetic blue glow of the TV set. And then I hear a knock at the door.
    I know it’s her. For a second I think I’ll just ignore it, but then I remember that I never lock the door when I’m home, and besides, she has a key. So I just sit there, completely still, as she pushes the door open, spilling light from the hallway into the dark apartment.
    “Hello?” she says, groping along the wall in search of the light switch. She finds it and flips it on.
    I turn off the TV and rise to meet her. I’m drunk, and I’m dirty, and I’m unshaven, and I’m in my underwear. She is wearing wrinkled sweats, and her hair is matted to the sides of her head, and her cheeks are blotchy, and her eyes are pink and swollen. She is beautiful.
    “What’s wrong?” she asks.
    She stands before me completely exposed, and I can see the pain bursting from inside her, which can only mean that she loves me, no matter what she’s done. Suddenly I think I love her more than I did before this all happened. I no longer care if she’s cheated on me as long as she’s willing to be mine now. I run forward and take her in my arms, and she collapses into me, sobbing.
    “I was so scared,” she whispers.
    I hold her for a moment, stroking her hair. I press my lips against her hot forehead and inhale the sweetly-familiar aroma of her hair. Then her body stiffens. She stands up straight and pushes away from me.
    “Why didn’t you call?”
    I’m taken aback by this question. I’ve spent the whole week feeling aggrieved, so I’m surprised to be put on the defensive. But of course, she has no idea what’s been going on.
    “I’ve been try to figure out what to say to you.”
    “For a whole week?” she continues. “You had me so worried. Do you know what you put me through?”
    And then I just tell her everything. I tell her how she gave me chlamydia, and that I freaked out about it and didn’t know what to say to her, and that I slept with a waitress to get back at her and how that just made me feel worse, and now I don’t care about the chlamydia anymore and I love her and I’m sorry and I want to make everything go back to the way it used to be. I’m almost crying now, and I drop to my knees and hold her hand in my hands. She looks down on me, letting my words register, and then she pulls her hand away.
    “You fucking asshole. How do you even know you got it from me?”
    “I haven’t been with anyone else in a long time, but that doesn’t matter. I don’t care.”
    “Well, I care. I haven’t been with anyone since we started dating. If I gave it to you, I got it before we ever met. You have no right.”
    “I guess I just assumed you were cheating on me. It just feels like we’ve been together so long, it’s hard to imagine you being with someone else. It made me sick just thinking about it.”
    “I make you sick?”
    “That’s not what I mean. It’s just that this kind of thing never happened to me before.”
    “So what would you have done if I hadn’t come here? Would you ever have called me back? Would you have just kept sitting around drinking in the dark and fucking waitresses?”
    “This isn’t me.”
    “Oh, yeah? Who is it then?”
    “You know I’m not normally like this.”
    “But if you are going to act like this when things get rough, how can I be with you?”
    “Can’t we just talk about this?”
    “Okay,” she says, glaring down at me. “Talk.”
    Put on the spot like this, I can’t think of a single thing to say. My mind goes from a jumble of ideas and emotions to absolutely blank. I stammer for a moment before exclaiming, “I love you,” and it feels like the truth.
    “You do?”
    “Isn’t that enough?”
    “You let me think you were dead. I’ve never felt so scared and alone as I’ve been these last few days. Every time I look at you, I’m going to remember that feeling. You completely abandoned me.”
    “I promise I’ll make it up to you.”
    “No, you won’t.”
    She turns to leave the apartment. I’m still kneeling on the carpet in my boxers as the door slams shut. My stomach churns and I rise to vomit in the sink. The smell of half-digested scotch fills the air. Though I know she’s still in the car, I call her apartment and leave a heartfelt message, begging her to forgive me, then another, and another, and then I call at all hours of the day and night but give up on leaving messages. But she never calls me back.
    A few weeks later my chlamydia clears up. By then I’ve stopped calling.

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