As I would lay there in the neither-here nor-there twilight between sleep and slumber I would invent and re-invent this girl. This went on nightly, for weeks. Indeed, this process of invention had gone on nightly before this and will, I expect, continue until my last lay-me-down. The process hasn't changed, only the subjects.
With my eyes closed, and my imagination loosed from the fetters of purpose I allowed Judy--this was the name I had assigned the girl--to tell me her story.
Judy drinks Bloody Maries if the sun is shining, and Martinis at night. She's very picky about her Martinis "Liberal with the vermouth, a twist of lemon and two olives please. And mind you don't use a plastic toothpick, only wood. Thank you." Three is her limit. She cures hangovers, when she gets them, by chasing two Midol with a can of Red Bull then taking a frigid shower. She claims this simple voodoo of hers can cure anything, short of cancer. "That's all very well and good for you, but it won't work for me," I tell her, "I'm fairly certain that men aren't supposed to take PMS pills. Besides, caffeine is a diuretic and the last thing you want to do is lose fluids when you have a hangover." She laughs at me, because she no longer feels hungover, whereas I feel like death itself.
We dance. Or, rather, she dances and I weakly flounce about. A song has to have 200 beats per minute to keep up with her on the dance floor. She can shake it for hours on end, when the DJ spins to her liking, but she doesn't know how to Waltz. I teach her to Waltz, over the stern protests of my feet. Soon she's left box turning with the best of them, and I'm realizing, too late, that I should have listened to my feet. She wants to go dancing every night. Each morning my feet hurt too much to even put my socks on.
She's the only other person in the world who has finished Atlas Shrugged. "Boy howdy, Fransisco and Hank really got shafted by that little hussy," she says. "I'm in complete agreement, " I tell her, "Rand may have had an admirable vision of laissez-faire economics, but what she knows of human relationships wouldn't fill a page." Judy has read Schopenhauer, Milton, and Kant; Tolstoy, Dickens, and Hemingway, but if she had to choose she'd take the current issue of Rolling Stone over all of them.
I lay there, slipping closer to unconsciousness and the unguided dreams it holds and I try to imagine what Judy's parents look like. Where does she get that soft mocha skin? Is her father Polynesian; her mother Colombian? Perhaps she speaks Spanish or Portugese at home. Maybe one day I'll walk into the video store where she works and find she's flown away, gone south to the tropical clime of her homeland.
Why have I spent all this time thinking and day dreaming about someone I don't even know? Furthermore, the egotist in me wonders if anyone ever does that about me? That girl I bumped into while I was buying a paper, does she lay in her bed at night wondering if I wear boxers or briefs. Or that black-haired girl who works at the bank, as she's driving home from work does she wonder if I prefer cats to dogs. Or maybe she wonders what it is exactly I did for that company that signed all my checks. I don't think it's very likely that this happens, at least not with me, but there's always a possibility. The possibility that someone is out there inventing Jeremy makes me feel good.
- Jeremy