Döppelganger.
I like to imagine that he dresses better than I do, but I’m pretty sure when he’s at his computer he’s got cigarette burns on his T-shirt and cat hairs all over his sweater. We have two cats: one’s black and white, and the other a motley calico diluted with Russian blue (brindle, or so we’ve been told); upshot being no matter what I wear—the dark green, almost black sweater, the pale uncolored polar fleece—the cat hairs show up with little effort on their part. I imagine it’s the same with him.
I was writing something somewhere about love and domesticity, I was talking about (some of) the reasons why I dropped out of college, which had a lot to do with blond hair to the middle of an amazing back and a coyly winsome smile and a situation of achingly pure tragedy, or so it seemed at the time; I was going to make some point about the different kinds of love, and how the kind of love that’s usually celebrated, the kind that reaches its culmination just before the credits roll, after many wacky misadventures that end up mostly for the best and if there’s any screaming or crying it mostly involves a secondary character, somebody’s best friend, the grace note giving the whole thing its biting something of fragility, its pleasingly bitter affirmation of reality without spoiling the broth—do you remember how Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross turn to look at each other at the end of The Graduate? That’s what happens usually after most such loves burn themselves out all too quickly, that look, that empty, terrified, what-the-fuck look, and Edna may tell you that the candle burning at both ends makes for a lovely sight, but she knows, she knows that carefully husbanding a fire, building it with kindling and good dry logs with some foresight, red hair and a slippery snarky look that sneaks in under my radar, that opens and unfolds into something rich and new when I’m not looking and yet that I know, that knows herself, down to her toes; all that will last much longer, you see, and you know, fireplaces aren’t without their romance. —See? That was the point I was going to make, and then he walked in. I narrowed my eyes at him. (He still smokes.)
“I already said something with all that,” he said. And it’s true; I’d loaned him the anecdote for something else, another essay, and he’d been focussing on a different look entirely, a grin this time, or not so much a grin, from some other movie, or not from a movie, per se, but it was different; he hadn’t been making a point at all about love and domesticity, but about memory and the vagaries of sex and lust but nonetheless, there they were: the hair, the back, that smile, the unbearably beautiful angst I just wouldn’t put up with now, today. Different points entirely, but suddenly the point I was making went grey and listless; friable; ashen; and I put it away and never bothered to finish it. —Nor does it help matters much that he’s been making more money than me. Lately. Bastard.
“Whenever that pervert shows his face,” sings Momus, “my friends all think he’s me. They give him records by Squarepusher, and a box of Japanese tea.” Which isn’t exactly my problem, but I know what he means, or maybe I know what Nick Currie means. Whatever.
