He went to pick up his good shirt from his avant-garde filmmaker friend. As he’d gone through a tough time, she’d held onto the shirt for him. She certainly didn’t have to, but she did because, she said, You would do the same thing for me. So he traveled across town to find her a special gift brownie and then traveled back, arriving with blinking eyes. After a moment, his avant-garde filmmaker friend went to her closet and produced the shirt. He forgot to present the gift brownie right away, his heart already savoring the fabric in hand, and he reached into his satchel and almost said, Here’s a little something for you, but changed it at the last second to, And look what the cat dragged in—equally awful, but without the nettling diminutive. He smiled and held the gift brownie aloft.
While his avant-garde filmmaker friend did like brownies, she did not like ungrateful people, or at least people who weren’t grateful in time. She’d allowed him almost two complete minutes to give her a rightly deserved gift and he’d failed. Now he stood there holding the shirt to his nose, but their friendship was over and she bemoaned the fact her art took so long to produce because she wanted to make something about this character who she was once attracted to, still was, but dismissed for monetary reasons. Would he have ever held her shirt if it needed a safe place when she went through tough times? She didn’t have a favored shirt, but if she did and also lost her house or her job or her print of Stan Brakhage’s Dog Star Man and went a little cuckoo, she would not visit his expectantly sour apartment to store her many-times-laundered-in-preparation-for-separation shirt because he probably wouldn’t be there. If he was there, he would probably leave his iPod on the whole time she talked so any special instructions would sound just the same as synthesized drumbeats, and if he didn’t have an iPod he would have a young woman in his room who he’d recite Macbeth’s Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow speech to—so depressing, learn a fucking sonnet—and if he didn’t fill his bed with Willy’s help, then he’d have filled it by doing something daring like putting his hand on her heart and mumbling about flower petals, and that’s why she was friends with him, she liked the daring of the population, they made the world go round, but were also repellent and thus wonderful subjects for film, just not avant-garde film because character was not so important there, image being everything or most things, and that was what she specialized in and she wasn’t going to go narrative, no goddamn way—she was who she was and wouldn’t change and they would just have to accept that. And when he left with his shirt, she repeated how they would just have to accept that. And when she smelled her closet to make sure the scent of the shirt was gone, she said she was sorry for who she was. Where had her life gone?