A Family Affair

            I´ve never been what you´d call a family man.  I´m just too flirtatious for marriage. And yet that´s not to say I´m not the jealous type, because I am. It´s just that I see myself as being essentially allergic to marriage. And so you can imagine how I felt, then, when a brute of man in a tight T shirt and jeans came hammering at the door of my flat and demanding that I marry his younger sister. Listen here, I told him, I´m not going to stand out here and argue with you in front of the neighbours. Not that I could really give a hoot what anybody thinks of me, but even so.
            The man shrugged and said we´d better go inside, and before I´d really had time to consider what I was doing, I found myself being hustled into my own living room. It was a warm summer evening, and the louvered shutters were open, so that the noises of the street below came in. I have always been one to savour the vulgarity of the life of the street,  but at a distance, oh yes, always at a safe distance…Only here I found that the street had burst its way into my living room, in the form of this vulgar brute of a man that I now found myself confronted with -- for he was all biceps and ungrammatical testosterone, and he sported tattoos and long sideburns in the fashion of the truly and irredeemably vulgar…I found that I was intensely repulsed by this brute of a man, even as I was attracted to him in equal measure.
He began to babble, in his brutish Spanish, words to the effect that I could either marry his younger sister, Julia, or face the consequences. In short, I´d had my fun with the girl, he said, and now it was time for me to face the music like a man. At this point I held my hand up, as a policeman might when engaged in stopping a stream of traffic, and assured my unwanted guest that far from having taken advantage of his younger sister, I had no idea who she was…What was more, I hastened to add, women were not really my bag…If instead of his younger sister Julie it had been his brother Jorge that he was speaking of, then it might well have been a different matter…Far from pacifying my visitor, this last comment of mine, whose intended purpose had been to assure him of my innocence where his sister was concerned, appeared only to serve to convince him of my guilt when it came to other matters…I had better leave Jorge out of this, he snarled, if I knew what was good for me -- and Jorge wasn´t his brother but his cousin…I considered trying to point out that the Jorge I´d had in mind was a figurative as opposed to a real one, but a mere glance into the angry mug of my interlocutor was sufficient to apprise me of the fact that I would only be wasting my time and energy were I to address such overtures to him…Anyway, to cut a long story short, he threw me over the back of the sofa and had his wicked  way with me, as the saying goes -- and in the most bestial fashion…Afterwards I lay on the floor in a cowering, sobbing heap, while he took his leave of me.
            Well, that´s the end of that, I finally said to myself, once I´d managed to pull myself together. I really had no idea what the episode had been about, but I decided simply to put it down as one of those rude and crass brushes with fate and the proletarian class that individuals who are cut from a finer cloth are sometimes forced to endure. Such an encounter, I decided, really didn´t bear too much scrutiny, and for this reason, I told myself, the thing to do was try my best to forget about it. And I was well on the way to doing just that, when the Brute came and rang my doorbell again one evening of the following week. This time he was holding a large bunch of flowers. He had come to apologize for his terrible behavior of the week before. He realized now that I was quite innocent of what he´d accused me of, and he wanted to show how truly sorry he was. And as I deliberated as to whether I ought to slam the door in his face and tell him to get lost, and leave it at that, or call the police and press charges against the man, I found myself being bundled, rather as if I were a sort of oversized toy, into my living room once more, as had happened the evening before…Only this time, the Brute threw himself at my feet and proceeded to profess his love for me. It was no good, he said, he´d tried to fight it, but now he realized that he was “a man´s man”, and that I was the only one for him…In short, he wished to marry me and “take me away from all this…” If I rejected him then he would throw himself off the balcony down onto the street. Life without my love would be just too painful to be borne.
             I was rather taken aback at such a transformation, as you might imagine, and I found myself torn between wanting to laugh in his face and wanting to put this so-called “true love” of his to the test…If he would truly do “anything” for me, then he could start by doing the dishes that were piled up in the sink. Then he could come and give me a foot massage…Some twenty minutes later, I lay on the sofa watching the News, as the Brute kissed my feet and sucked my toes. I pretended to ignore him as he did this, which made the experience altogether more pleasurable. Indeed, I began to feel as though I were really rather set up. Just then, the doorbell sounded and I ordered him to go and see who it was. Moments later, I heard a woman´s voice, and then, as the woman who´d come visiting followed the Brute into my living room, he made a full confession to her of his love for me…The fact was, he said, he was leaving her for me.
            At this stage, I was struck by the fact that my feelings hadn´t been taken into consideration whatsoever…Even so, though, I couldn´t help but see the funny side of all this…until, that is, the Brute´s brute of a wife – or lover, or whatever she was -- announced her intention to kill me for daring to try and take her beloved  Juan away from her…Hearing this, the Brute threatened to tear her to pieces her if she even so much as laid a finger on me…And the effect of all this was to cause my thoughts to turn on my own true love, Jeremy, who was, in fact, lying dead in my bed at that very moment, as a consequence of the fact that I´d accidentally killed him during a fight that was really nothing more than one of the lovers´ tiffs that we were always having…The fact is that Jeremy had cheated on me with another man -- or at least, I´d suspected him of doing so,  and he´d found my jealousy rather amusing…so I threw a bottle of cologne at him…I hadn´t really meant to hit him with it, but my aim was lucky --  which is to say unlucky -- and what was more unfortunate still, he fell awkwardly and banged the back of his head…Death was instant, and I dragged his body into the bedroom and put him to bed, just as though he´d been drunk. That happened two days ago, and I´d been roaming the flat in a state of psychotic denial ever since – until now…And as I suddenly found myself coming face to face, for the first time, with the reality of the fact that I´d lost my beloved Jeremy, I realized that there was really no way I could possibly face living another day without him… and so I went out onto the balcony, and climbed up onto the railing and jumped…Or, that is to say, I tried to…because no sooner had I stepped off the iron railing, than I found myself being saved from certain death by Mr. and Mrs. Brute, who had stopped their bickering by now and combined forces to drag me back…

Another of Nick Sweet’s stories is due to appear in Bartleby Snopes online over the next week or two, and three of his stories have been published over the past year, in Fertile Source and issues 117 & 118 of Evergreen Review. Previous stories appeared in Cutthroat (summer 2007) and Descant 106, while his first novel, Gemini Games, received a degree of critical acclaim. His second novel, Winter Trees, was published last year by New Generation Press, and he is currently redrafting it for a new edition.

SHELFLIFEMAGAZINE : issue #009