Aaron Welk was good looking, and four years older than me. He kept to himself, and when I met him in a class on Shakespearean Tragedies he seemed oddly confident all of a sudden, for a shy guy who sat at the back of the class listening intently and rarely taking notes.
"Can we have lunch sometime? Maybe tomorrow? At 12?" I had been on my way out of the classroom and everyone in the room, including the professor, turned to look at us.
"Sure..." If he had been ugly I wouldn't have said that, but Aaron looked a lot like Jason Statham in the face, and he had a fairly athletic build as well. Older, athletic, and studious, I liked it.
Over the next year and a half I would meet him at his tiny studio apartment where I had quickly learned that his confidence was a dull tool he hadn't sharpened since high school where he was a fairly successful football player. And I wondered if this atrophy was due in part to the fact that shortly after graduation he found himself engaged to a girl he later ditched abruptly in favor of a cat he named after her in an intentional twist of irony.
We drank red wine before I had decided it was my favorite. He cooked dinner for me a couple of times. He invited me to a concert once, and we left after the opener because that was who he had come to see. We discussed Albert Camus, and various philosophies, which were his major, and occasionally the logic behind why it was improper for a girl to take her bra off on a regular basis for a boy who had established his interest, true, but who was so uncannily blunt that he had to say it just so:
"Why don't you take off your bra."
He would say this, without blushing, without even blinking, he would say,
"Did you like your pasta?"
"Yes. It was good. I did also enjoy the green beans."
"Finished?"
"Yes." And he'd take up the dishes.
"So how about taking your shirt off?"
I don't remember feeling insecure at all. And I remember trusting him completely. Even now, for all his cocky demands, I think I like him. He was blunt, but excruciatingly honest, and always in such a way that I felt he never spoke to anyone else. He was, after all, a sort of loner who enjoyed philosophy and would rather stock and re-stock his antique bookcase than engage in any typical college fraternization. All the time I was there, or I wasn't there, I knew that he knew how to hurt my feelings, and he chose not to.
And that counted for something. But it was never enough.
"You have a new cat." He had moved into an apartment complex away from campus in Nashville, and since it had been two years since I'd last seen him, I decided I would visit.
"I did. I've named it Truffle."
"I take it you haven't broken up with anyone by that name, now have you?"
"Of course not. But Jessica is getting older. she needs something youthful around." He had gained some weight. He looked... puffy. I wanted to stick a pin into him.
We sat on his couch and watched football, and then part of a movie with Steve Zahn. It was awful.
"This movie is terrible."
"I think your boobs have gotten bigger."
Just like that.
"They have." I suppose we all do our fair share of puffing up in our early twenties. My mother had called it woman weight. Since graduating, I wasn't expected to be a spritely coed anymore. Lately I called it a steadily-approaching-Dead-Or-Alive-Xtreme-Beach-Volleyball situation.
"You know, you're the last person I've been with." He stood up and put away the hummus we'd been munching.
"Seriously?"
"Yeah." He closed the refrigerator door and looked at me from across the room. He was the kind of person who could explain the most embarrassing thing that had ever happened to him without flinching, like it was the some matter of fact story that had happened only that morning.
"I'm a different person now, you know. I've changed." I felt myself hedge toward the arm of the sofa, and the door.
"I haven't really." I could see it was true. "Same single guy living in an apartment with not one, but two cats, working a job at a publishing company that pays the bills."
"You haven't dated?"
"Oh, there was this Brazilian girl that was working at the warehouse, and she was gorgeous. We sort of flirted, but we couldn't ever go out because, well, she was really Brazilian, and I don't speak Portuguese. We couldn't speak to each other. Couldn't have a single conversation." He dropped onto the couch uncomfortably close to me. He still looked like Jason Statham.
"You look good," he said.
"Thanks."
I could tell he was about to say something weird. There was that crackle in the air between us, just waiting to be silenced by something off the wall.
"It'd be really nice if we could, uh--"
"--No, thanks. I'm actually... off men."
"You have a serious boyfriend."
"Actually, no. I just ...don't care."
"Oh. Okay." And he turned back to the tv, like we'd never even spoken just then. And it started to boil in me a little bit. He was so rude! Just asking for whatever completely inappropriate thing that crossed his mind! Just after discussing some 'gorgeous' Brazilian chick he might have dated. Maybe he was only like this with me. Maybe there was a reason that this former all-American football star with an apple-pie fiancee had turned cat lover, turned Hegel lover, turned lonely, crotchety, quarter-life crisis in his apartment that cost a thousand dollars a month! I was probably the last one because I was the only one who could laugh at the blunt assertion!
"You are just so rude about it!" I burst.
"What's rude about asking for what you want?" He grinned. "And besides, you used to not mind."
"I told you I've changed."
"You used to laugh at it. You used to have spunk."
Ah, spunk. The very description I chased after for years in college. I was always trying to be the girl who was different. Who made snappy, sarcastic remarks and could hang with the guys. Quirky, eccentric, idiosyncratic. I could have sold my soul not to be normal. And in some ways, I think I did.
"Spunk is overrated." On tv, I watched Steve Zahn get attacked by killer bees. People on tv never die when they're supposed to. Not like real life any way.
"I'm sorry if you think I'm out of line. I just thought I'd give it a shot. I always did enjoy your company."
It suddenly occurred to me that I'd had no idea what to expect when I'd come over there, and Aaron Welk was actually excruciatingly boring. Watching bad movie and having very little to say, sitting uncomfortably close, and wondering if I should have worn a shirt cut higher in the neck wasn't exactly the definition of a good time.
What did we ever talk about before anyway?
The philosophy books were still on the same antique bookcase in the corner. But I couldn't think of anything I could possibly say about Hegel or Kant or Camus any more. Besides, I remembered liking Hume best anyway, but I forget why.
"I think I'm gonna go."
"Okay."
And I left. I hope his cats are still okay.
Hume: held that the self is nothing but a bundle of interconnected perceptions linked by relations of similarity and causality. Emphasized the role of experience, evidence, and especially sensory perception in the formation of ideas.
