Oh, Glass

     After Cat’s reading, I return from the café with the water and hear her gay friend Rick say, "…I once blew one that was over two feet."
     "Really?" I say.
     Cat elbows me. "He's a glassblower, Harv. Jeez."
     "Oh, glass." Two feet of glass. Still impressive. "Some lungs." I look at Rick's arms, scarred and burnt.
     “Not cool,” Cat says.
     “It’s fine,” Rick says.
     But it’s not. It’s high school all over again, never cool enough for the cool table. They say it’s shallow to want to be there anyway, but that’s just uncool people talking. Twenty years later and still the guys like Rick do cool things like blow glass, the girls like Cat do cool things like write short flashes about kids finding a vibrator and sticking it in each other’s ears. Aural sex. I told Cat that would make a great title for this story. She snorted.
     They surround Cat now. Rick the glassblower. Fran the inner-city art teacher. Dennis her hairstylist whose advice she does follow. Zed the Jordanian soccer player/coach who brings Cat Turkish coffee at work.
     “Hey. You’re Cat’s what? Husband, boyfriend, partner, companion?”
     Her uncool shadow. “I’m Harvey,” I say.
     “Like the big rabbit,” she says. She has red hair down past her waist like Crystal Gayle. “You don’t seem like Cat’s type.”
     “I’m not. I’m an experiment. Like her stories.”
     “Well, at least you know. I’m Kirstin. Cat’s old college roommate. We kissed once. On the mouth.”
     “That’s sweet.”
     “No. She tastes like ash, don’t you think?”
     “She doesn’t smoke anymore.”
     “She didn’t smoke then.”
     Kirstin’s giving me a headache. It takes so much effort to keep up. I don’t know what people mean, what they want, what I’m supposed to say or be. See, it is high school all over again with pieces of conversation I’m neither a part of nor capable of understanding.
     —Did you hear about the flame war Cat got herself into?
     —Oh come on. She said that? Show don’t tell? That’s, what?, like preschool advice?
     —She said her period was like the nails going through Christ? What a faker.
     On and on and on, a background hum like a barrier between them and us. Or me. I mean them and me.
     “Actually she did,” Kirstin says.
     “Did what?”
     “Smoke then.”
     “Oh,” I say, “I thought so.”
     “Well. Why didn’t you say so, then?”
     Cat makes it over to me. “So, what do you think of my computer geek? He designed the Web. Very important guy.”
     “Maybe he’s a spider,” Kirsten says. Cat laughs the laugh of poets and writers. I stand, silent and cut-off, wondering, as always, why I didn’t think of that. Someone waves. Cat moves on.
     “You aren’t long for this world,” Kirstin says. She rubs my shoulder and walks off.
     I’m alone, a spider spinning threads onto a glossy window. This image comes over me like dripping molten glass. I keep it to myself, watch filaments melt away like the magic mirrors of fairy tales.