Not Like I'm Jealous or Anything: The Jealousy Book (Ruby Oliver) Read online

  Speaking of Brody, Vanessa finally dropped him. And even though what’s bad for him is fine by me, it also means there is a free seat in his car. Awhile back he asked Greta if she wanted a ride home. She said no, of course, but it freaked me out a bit. Which is part of the reason I know taking this car is the right move, even though I said what I said about not wanting anything to change. What I’ve realized since then is that things have a way of changing even if you don’t want them to, so I can either make them change in a way I like, or have someone like Brody change them in a way I don’t.

  Dad and I drive the car from Carl’s straight to the DMV, where I pass the test and walk away with a license. The car will need at least an oil change and probably a full tune-up, but everything runs well enough to make it the mile or so home. Greta knows nothing about this. As a matter of fact, I didn’t either until this morning. Dad just came to the breakfast table and said, “Get your coat. We’re going to Carl’s.” Now, back at home, I call Greta.

  “We still on for today?”

  “You know it,” she says. “I have something for you. I can’t wait to give it to you.”

  “I have something to show you, too.”

  “What is it?”

  “Not now. I’ll show you when I get there.”

  “Are you walking over?” she asks.

  Not anymore. “Not exactly. See you soon.”

  Greta

  Not exactly. How can two little words that are meant to say nothing tell you everything? I remember something very deep in my subconscious stirred as soon as they were spoken. Something stronger than butterflies, weaker than dread. Not exactly. Not just a monster under the bed, but something real and unexpected. Something not in the plans. Not exactly. Ben was supposed to ring the bell, come inside, kiss me, and tell me he couldn’t wait to see my gift. To open the book, read the words I’d written to him, and tell me he loved me and that he would walk with me forever. Not exactly. So when Ben called again moments later from his cell phone—did he run here?—and told me to come outside, I knew . . . that it was all wrong.

  I told him I’d been chopping onions. There was no other way to explain to Ben why there were tears in my eyes when I came outside and saw him standing there with that car. I stood under the streetlight with my breath snatched away, listening to him talk about bucket seats and fenders, nodding like a bobblehead. I tucked the copy of Walden inside my coat; Ben never noticed and never asked. When he stopped talking and we were left in silence, I couldn’t bring myself to mention it. It never occurred to me that when people get excited, they lose themselves in the moment and forget really important details, like the fact that your girlfriend told you she has a gift for you she can’t wait to give you. I told Ben I wasn’t feeling well and ran inside.

  Ben

  There is a grinding sound when I shift the car into gear. Replays of what just happened spin through my mind. Greta hardly said a word. At first I thought she was too excited to speak. It probably didn’t help that I got a little carried away showing her the car. She didn’t even have a chance to show me her present before she got sick. That was weird. I want to believe it was what Greta’s mother said it was, a bug going around—that it would pass the next day—but I can’t shake a really sick feeling that something was very wrong. Before long, I’m trembling too bad to shift gears. I don’t want to lose Greta. My plan was to show her the car and then drive her to the church. We’ve never seen it at night. I thought it would be the perfect place for her to give me her gift. I had a feeling it was something important to her—not just a DVD or a pair of jeans—but something only I would understand. Besides, I like my jeans.

  The next day I leave a message with Greta’s mother. I don’t know if Greta never got the message or if she just didn’t have a chance to call back, but for whatever reason, she doesn’t return the call. I consider going over to her house but don’t. It’s not the right move. I’ll see her tomorrow. We can drive up to the church after practice, and I’ll ask her if there was something she wanted to give me. I know whatever the problem is, we can figure it out. It’s not like we just became two totally different people overnight. I tell myself this and try to breathe a little easier. And try to imagine the look on Chris’s face when he sees the Ghia in his parking spot.

  Greta

  Ben called. He wanted to know how you were doing and if you would like him to drive you to school.

  Mom

  That’s the message I found on the refrigerator Sunday night, the day after Ben’s birthday. At the time, I was getting close to forgiving him for not asking about his gift. After all, it wasn’t entirely his fault. But reading the note sent me reeling for a chair. This was about more than just the book. Seeing the message was the moment I found myself hating, I mean hating that car. And the more I hated the car, the more I think I loved Ben. Innocent Ben, who had fallen under the spell of this temptress with her bucket seats and oversized headlights, just as he’d fallen under my spell. God, were boys that easy? He could be won over by a car as effortlessly as he could by a human being? But what really made me go to pieces was realizing for the first time that Ben would be driving to school. And home from school. It was becoming miserably clear that whatever we had was slipping away.

  I said before that sometimes you can see someone every day and there’s nothing, and then all of a sudden, for no reason, a light goes on. Well, the minute word got out that Ben had this new car, girls who didn’t know him from Adam were suddenly speaking his name like he was the second coming of Elvis. Even Lillian, who found me in the locker room before practice. “Greta, there you are. Why aren’t you out there enjoying this?”

  “Enjoying this?”

  “Yes! Do you know what kind of jealousy shit storm you’ve created? The car . . . the boy . . . Greta, you’ve got it all! And Ben has been looking all over for you. Vanessa asked him for a ride at lunch, and do you know what he said?” Lillian took a breath and answered her own question when it was clear I wasn’t in the mood.“ ‘Sorry, it’s a two-seater!’ I swear she’s still in the hallway counting on her fingers trying to understand.” Lillian leaned her head toward mine and looked me in the eye. “Greta, what’s wrong? You’re not happy?” I shook my head. Lillian pressed on.“Is it Ben? I thought everything was great.”

  “It is. It was. It was perfect. That’s the problem. Things were perfect. And now it’s all different.”

  “Why? Greta, is it about—the car?”

  “You think I’m jealous of a car?”

  “I didn’t say that exactly. But are you?”

  “Well, you saw the way everyone is looking at him now, talking about him. Before today I was the only one looking at him. He was mine. I found him. I saw him first.”

  “Greta, that’ll pass. It’ll be ancient history by the end of the week. And then nobody but you will be looking at him. Just like before.”

  “It’s not just that.”

  “What else?”

  “Don’t you think if he liked things the way they were he would have let things stay the same? Instead of changing everything by getting a car? If he wanted a car all along, then it just means he didn’t really enjoy walking home with me. That he just wanted—”

  “Greta, stop. You are reading way too much into this. Ben got a car for his birthday. He got a little attention at school. So what? Wait till after practice. He’ll be there like always and then you guys can talk.”

  “And then what?”

  “And then what, what?”

  “And then what do we do? Drive home? That’s the whole point, Lillian. I don’t know what we are anymore.”

  Ben

  It’s after practice and I’m on the bleachers in a pair of warm-up pants and a sweatshirt. Two days have passed since my birthday, and we’re well into November. The warm days of early fall are gone. The weather is going to turn soon and it will be too cold and too wet for walking. For the thousandth time I go over the episode at Greta’s in my mind. The sudden illness, the unr
eturned phone call. I can’t figure it out. For the first time since we started going out, we went an entire day without seeing each other. Has she been avoiding me, or is this all in my head?

  Across the field, she approaches, bag slung over her shoulder, head down. No wave from a distance. No smile. My heart is racing, but it is from dread, not anticipation like all the days before. I dig deep, searching for something I could have done wrong, hoping it’s something I can undo so that we’ll be okay again. So that we can get in the car and drive to the church like I’d planned to do the other night. Like any other day, almost. When Greta reaches the bleachers, I can see something in her eyes is different.

  “You look sad” is all I can think to say.

  “Ben...”

  “Greta, if I did something, if you’re mad at me, you have to tell me. Because I can see something is wrong, but I can’t figure out what it is. So you have to tell me because . . . Look—how about this—there’s still some light. Let’s drive to the church.”

  “Ben, we can’t go there. Not anymore. That was before.”

  The life goes out of me when I hear her say “before.” It doesn’t matter what I’ve done or what happened. The way Greta said it, wherever we are now, there is no path back to before.

  Greta

  Let’s drive to the church. That’s what did it. That’s what broke my heart once and for all. That he could even think of driving to the church told me everything I needed to know. I know he didn’t mean it that way, but it sounded so cheap. Like driving to some secluded point where people go to make out. Had we really been seeing things so differently this whole time? Had it really been about getting me alone every afternoon, and a little walking was just the price of admission? Well, if it hadn’t been before, it would be from now on, at least in my mind. But for the moment, I had to say something to Ben to make him understand. But how do you tell someone you love more than ever that he’s betrayed you just by driving to school? So I said the only thing I could manage before turning away.

  “Thank you for walking me home.”

  THE DRIVER: ME AND MARTY BECKERMAN

  Ned Vizzini

  When I walk down the streets of New York, which I do a lot because I’m a writer and we don’t get cars, I never look all that hot. I skitter; I dart; I chomp at the bit; I hold fear behind my eyes; I bend over so I move more quickly, like a jockey. And, yeah: I talk to myself.

  “Death.”

  Everybody’s got to have something.

  “Death.”

  It works for me.

  “Death.”

  Nobody notices anyway.

  “Death.”

  I say it when I’m frustrated, which I always am. I say it when I’m stressed, which I always am. I say it when I’m late and when my cell phone is ringing and when I wish it upon everyone else and when I wish it upon myself. I say it when I wish I was everyone else. But the sad thing is, I say it when I’m happy, too—to clear my mind, to remind me what I’m up against. My mantra.

  “Death.”

  I get it from my father. He has all the expressions; “death” goes hand in hand with “name of the job, name of the job,” which he repeats when he’s at loose ends but knows he has to get something done, usually after getting up from a session with the History Channel. Death and work, those are what drive my father, and where death and work intersect, at that fun spot in the Venn diagram of life, we get jealousy.

  According to the dictionaries it’s different from envy, by the way, and envy is what we’re really talking about. Envy is the delicious “ill will because of another’s advantages, possessions, etc.” while jealousy is just lover stuff, “resentful suspicion.” Sometime back in 1960 they morphed into the same word, though, and dictionaries never caught up: jealousy and envy, right next to each other at the bottom of the well, looking up at the other words, each one jealous and envious of the other.

  I picked up jealousy early on and never let go. I found it to be the best motivator, better even than sex, because it started before sex and continued on as sex got left behind. My jealousy never let me down; it just telescoped out, refining itself, grabbing at better and better targets until in 2001 it found the best, a bête noire that keeps me true—a writer named Marty Beckerman, a hero for me to run after until I hit death for real.

  But first it was video games. Super Mario when I was nine, blocky but strangely narrative, as good an encapsulation of the human condition as any book I was reading at the time. Sometimes you were big, and sometimes you were small. Sometimes you could kill your enemies, and sometimes they killed you. The only thing you had for sure was yourself, and you had to keep moving forward; there was a princess to save, plus it was always best to have the most coins. Mario was life.

  Something happened after I played four hours of Mario, though; a little light went on in my child’s head and asked: What are you doing ? It wasn’t my mom’s voice, telling me that it was time to go outside, and it wasn’t my father’s voice, telling me that it was his turn to play. It was the Driver, and it presented its case well: You’re either a consumer of culture or a producer of culture. Which do you want to be?

  Death.

  People made Mario, see; they put it together from scratch in a way that involved the heart of a computer— the magic. They created it from nothing, and I just used it. What a dork. I couldn’t stay in that position.

  So I started designing video games.

  The people who really did it used computers—I knew that much—and employed things called programming languages, which apparently meant the BASIC scripts that I saw in KIDS! Discover. But the only tools I had to make video games were graph paper and Dixon Ticonderoga pencils. I began to sketch out desert levels, with palm trees.

  “What are you doing?” Mom would ask, poking into my room. My desk lamp nearly scorched my pet lizard, Xerxes, who always sat on my shoulder.

  “Designing a video game, Mom.”

  “Oh.” She would leave. My lab was closed to outsiders early on.

  Up next were comic books. I bought them, read them, grokked them, and then the Driver rose up in me and asked: Producer or consumer, Ned? Because you can’t be both.

  So I tried to make comic books: I went over to a friend’s house to watch some rented Marvel video that purported to teach you how to draw them in the length of the video, meaning, uh, sixty minutes, and that was where I learned to weep silently. As the hands on the screen drew rippled heroes and my friend drew rippled heroes, I drew what looked like a crash test dummy carved from a potato. I couldn’t do it; I was a failure.

  Death.

  The Driver kept driving, though; at twelve it led me to read everything George Orwell wrote that my grandmother owned, and I became jealous of him. His essay “Such, Such Were the Joys”; I was jealous of that. The fact that he wrote it and not me, that made me angry. He was dead and still producing culture, and I was alive and just consuming it. How lame!

  There was an advantage to this new medium of hatred, though—I could catch up quickly. I didn’t need special tools to write. The only language I had to understand was English. My graph paper and my Dixon Ticonderoga pencils were overkill; I could use plain lined paper and any old pencil or pen. So I would finish an Orwell essay and immediately appease the Driver by cobbling together one of my own.

  I didn’t show my writing to anyone but my parents, but I had a feeling it was good; I was a chameleon who could write anything. I moved forward. Writing was the gig for me, where I could most easily and cheaply experience art, suck it into my consciousness, get jealous of the fact that I hadn’t made it, and spit it back transformed, morphed into something of my own. You can get addicted to a thing like that.

  Rapidly, in a way that would make other people jealous, I began imitating the work of confessional essayists in a local alternative newspaper, New York Press. Once I got published there, I moved on to a first book and then a second; but the Driver was never happy. I dented it most mortally when I got that firs
t piece in the Press, when I first saw my name in print— the world exploded for me, and I walked through high school not just happy for myself, but happy for the sum of flesh around me. But the next day the Driver was curious: What next?

  When I was twenty, the Driver found its best lure. New York Press printed a cover story written by a (and before long he wouldn’t need an “a” in front of his name) Marty Beckerman, from Alaska. Marty was seventeen. He was excellent with ages; although two and a half years younger than me, at every critical juncture— his Press cover, the publication of his book Generation S.L.U.T.—he always managed to be on the younger side of the two-and-a-half-year gap, to make himself three years younger, in a different class.

  Marty was a chewed-up, sucked-in, spat-out, and improved version of me—it was terrifying that someone had been on the other side of my equation. He wrote from a nerd perspective like I did; he wrote about the vagaries of girls and the decrepitude of American high schools and colleges, but he did it with a cavalcade of curses and capitalized words and cracked-out, self-referential phrases and “Praise Jesus” refrains and reckless hate that was, well, astonishing. It was thrilling to read.

  We got in touch quickly, in one of those find-the-other-person-on-the-Internet-only-you-don’tremember-who-e-mailed-who-first ways. I liked him, just as I liked his writing; he was quick and bone-dry and you couldn’t one-up him at bringing yourself down, at least personally. He had a concept for this new book, which he intended to sell. He wanted to come to New York to do so, and we decided to room together at my apartment for the summer.