INTIMACY ISSUES

by Jenna-Marie Warnecke

Jenna-Marie Warnecke is this month’s winner of $602.50 for a story on taking action.

Bio: Jenna-Marie Warnecke has contributed to publications including New York, Witness, december, and F(r)iction, among others, and been honored by competitions including Writer's Digest Short Short Story Contest, Rising Writer Prize, Best New Poets Anthology, and Austin Film Festival.

Without further ado, “INTIMACY ISSUES” by Jenna-Marie Warnecke.

Bleary-eyed, Brian forced himself to shut his laptop and begin his bedtime ritual. In the shower, he rubbed his eyes under hot water, the glow of computer code seared through his vision. He scrubbed anti-acne cleanser onto his face and anti-bacterial soap along his bony body. He made sure his laundry sack was cinched tight before sliding, naked, into bed. Using an app, Brian adjusted the A/C another degree lower. Outside it was ninety-seven degrees, cool for a summer night in Arizona, but Brian preferred to sleep at sixty-seven. He liked to cuddle up to a pillow under his comforter while his favorite podcast sent him to sleep.

Brian nestled his earbuds in and rubbed his feet. He tapped on the picture of the raven-haired, crooked-nosed goddess and the familiar punk intro began. “Hey everyone, I’m Alina Bowman, and you’re listening to Intimacy Issues. I’ve got’em, you’ve got’em, and, spoiler alert: there’s no getting through life without becoming at least a little fucked up. At least we’re all fucked up together, right?” Alina’s voice, sturdy and smoky, traveled directly into Brian as though she were a part of him. His shoulders unhunched. He liked her voice being inside him. It quieted his own thoughts.

“If something’s been nagging the pit of your stomach, call or send me a voice memo, and I’ll try to work out your shit with some hashtag-Real Talk and that greatest healer of all, music. Let’s jump right into the mail bag, shall we?”

Brian adjusted the mask over his eyelids. The first caller was a young woman who didn’t like it when her boyfriend fingered her; she had been molested in just that way by a family friend, and it made her feel powerless and sad. “But I just feel like… it’s such a basic part of sex that I can’t tell my boyfriend not to do it, right? So I usually just let him.” The girl’s voice was fragile and small, like she was trapped inside a closet.

Brian tried to anticipate what Alina would say. This is an essential part of connecting with your partner, she’d probably tell the girl, so you’re gonna have to get over it sooner or later. Take back your power by finding a way to like it. That way you win, and your boyfriend will be happy, too.

Instead, Alina’s voice lost its serrated edge. “Oh, honey,” she murmured. Brian could picture her mouth, painted red, drawing closer to the microphone. “What happened to you really sucks, and I’m so sorry. But guess what? Now you’re an adult, and you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. I don’t care how much your boyfriend likes it; you never have to let him do it. If he really loves you, he will respect that line. And if he crosses it, you’ll know it’s time to dump his ass.

“But you know what you do have to do?” Alina continued. “You’ve gotta be honest. You have to tell him where that line exists and help him understand why it’s there. Otherwise, he’ll never have a chance to be good to you. Because honesty is the greatest intimacy of all, isn’t it? Doesn’t matter if it has to do with sex or, I dunno, the time I confessed to my parents that I’d dropped out of pre-med. It’s fucking scary, but showing someone who you really are, and trusting they’ll accept it—that is the ultimate vulnerability. And every time you practice it, you become a more whole human being. Now is the moment to start that phase with your boyfriend, my dear. Because if you don’t, there will always be a wall between you and him, or any partner you ever have. What are you going to do, go through your life letting guys do things that make you feel like shit? That ends now. It’s time to change your fucking life.”

As the guitar thrum of Fugazi’s “Suggestion” began to pulse through the earbuds, Brian sank into the folds of his comforter. Alina was so good. She always managed to surprise him. By now, the sound of her voice alone deepened his breath and relaxed his muscles. It infiltrated his dreams and kept the darkness away. By the time “Ladies and Gentlemen, We Are Floating in Space” began, Brian had started to drift off, the solace Alina had bestowed upon her caller now wrapped around him.

***

Brian squeezed his brakes as his Honda crept through rush-hour traffic. The nine a.m. sun already dominated the sky, blasting white and unrelenting at a hundred and eight degrees over miles of glaring windshields. Brian flipped his visor down, cold from the A/C but feeling his skin burn nonetheless. He navigated his phone to the second quarter of yesterday’s Intimacy Issues and turned the volume high, Alina’s raspy words consuming the small space. Since she only posted twice a week, Brian liked to break the episodes into segments. That way he could have a little bit of her every day. Sometimes he had her during his commute, sometimes while doing the dishes, but mostly while he fell asleep, if he didn’t get too high and pass out first. Once in awhile, as a treat, Brian listened to an old episode while jerking off to porn on mute.

Not two years ago, Brian had been unemployed, unable to leave the house, and could only afford one meal a day. But Intimacy Issues was free, and the two hours he spent listening to Alina’s sassy wisdom were the only hours he didn’t feel pathetic all day. The advice she gave was kind, but not touchy-feely like all the therapists he’d been to. She was better than a therapist. “Look, dude, I know it’s hard, but you need to take a walk around the block,” she told one listener last year, and Brian felt she was speaking to him. “Make conversation with the old lady at the grocery store. Get a goldfish. Connect with a being outside of yourself, you know?” She flowed her advice into the propulsive Harry Nilsson song “Gotta Get Up.”

Because of Alina, Brian had gathered the courage to finally try medication. That helped him find the motivation to apply for a loan and enroll in coding boot camp, and now he had a good job as a programmer in downtown Phoenix. On her website’s community page, Brian had found others like him, shy weirdos who liked vulgarity and punk music who were learning how to be vulnerable. They’d become like family to him. Together they edited Alina’s Wikipedia and defended her from assholes who said she gave bad advice. They sent death threats to people who insulted her looks. They even supported each other’s Alina-worshipping Etsy shops, full of embroidered pillows that said “Ruthless Compassion” and enamel pins bearing the Alina-ism “All humans hurt.” In fact, Brian was at this very moment using a “Respect My Fucking Boundaries” travel mug.

Brian pulled into the lot at Swzzlr, a startup that collected big data and sold it to marketing startups. He ignored the hot receptionist, Sunny, who ignored him back. He had asked her out a few times, but she’d turned him down with a polite smile every time. So he’d tried to get to know her, understand her interests and all that shit. He knew she was into drawing, so through the company’s proprietary chat system, he’d asked her what she liked to draw. Oh, this and that, she replied, a full hour later, even though the front desk was not even busy that day. He asked to see something she’d drawn. Nah, she said. Come on, he persisted. As Alina always said, good things are hard-won. If I ever have an art show, I’ll let you know, Sunny said. Come on, I bet it’s really good, Brian tried one more time. It is good, but I don’t feel like sharing it, okay? Sunny wrote. Brian’s face had turned hot and he flung out the words on his keyboard: Man, I feel bad for whoever has to date you.

In the company kitchen, Brian refilled his mug, loaded up on GummiBears and organic dried seaweed, then settled into his workstation. He nodded to Mark and Shankar on either side of him and put on his noise-canceling headphones. Alina had shared a new Spotify playlist today called Anxiety Can Fuck Right Off. The loud world disappeared as Alina’s voice entered Brian’s ears with a quiet intro.

“Hey Babies, Alina here. These are a few songs that calm me right the fuck down, and I hope it’ll do the same for you. Take a minute and tell anxiety to take a long walk off a short bridge.”

Chet Baker and Khruangbin and Fleet Foxes unclenched Brian’s jaw. This was his favorite thing about Alina: how real she was. He liked that she spoke openly about her mental health; Brian had always been intimidated by women, but when Alina talked about her anxiety, her parents’ divorce, her suicide attempt at age twenty-three, he felt close to her. He was amazed, in fact, at how close he felt to this cute, smart rockabilly girl he’d never met.

Well, once. He tried not to replay the memory as he typed code and bobbed his head to Helado Negro, but it wiggled its way in. It was last year, when Brian was still unemployed. Alina was promoting her book, Feelings And How To Have Them. Tickets to her Phoenix show were $200, and another $150 for the meet-and-greet afterward. Brian worked odd jobs on TaskRabbit for a month to afford his ticket. Onstage, Alina, a tiny figure in a swingy dress and sleeved in tattoos, filled the room with her loud laugh and conspiratorial murmur. Brian laughed with everyone else, all these people he knew but didn’t know, and afterward, in line, he wanted to make friends but spent the entire hour with his hands in his pockets, trying to think of something to say.

When the moment arrived, Brian stepped forward, his trembling hand holding a book for Alina to sign. He wished he’d brought a gift; other people had brought cupcakes and handmade Alina dolls and custom-made dresses.

“Hi, honey!” Alina cooed to Brian, who thought he might die. Her nails were cherry red and Brian admired the detail in the colorful winged bird inked onto her clavicle. Alina’s wing-tipped eyes looked red around the rims and he wanted to wrap his arms around her and let her sleep. “Thanks so much for coming,” Alina said as she swooped her signature onto the cover page.

Grasping for conversation, some way to extend their time together, Brian blurted, “I hope you’re staying somewhere nice tonight. I bet this gets exhausting.”

Alina’s gaze lifted to meet Brian’s. “You have no idea.”

Brian’s mind became a wide field of nothingness. “So… where are you staying?”

“Oh, just some hotel my manager booked nearby.”

“Which one?”

There was a barely perceptible shift in the air between them, just a fraction of the glint in Alina’s eye dropping away.

“Um… the Doubletree Inn, I think?”

“Oh, nice! Yeah, I know it—that’s right by my house, actually.”

“Cool. Cool, well, thanks again, take care!” Alina darted her glance past Brian to where her manager was standing.

To think of it now, Brian could kick himself. He could have recommended a taco place nearby. He could have told her about the vintage shops on Melrose that he knew she’d like. He could have practiced being vulnerable and thanked her for what she’d meant to him. Instead, he’d been so awkward, and she’d treated him like… well, she’d given him the same look that Sunny gave him every morning.

Staring at the rainbow of characters against a black screen before him, Brian felt himself falling into a hole of self-loathing. He wished he could have another chance. He was much better now, more confident, largely thanks to her and the Intimacy Issues community. She understood him in a way other people never had; what she said was how he felt. She talked on the show about how hard it could be to make friends, how she had to wake up every morning and literally tell her reflection that she was fine. She talked about that weird feeling of sleeping alone after being rejected and about locking herself in the bathroom at a party just so she could stop smiling for a few minutes. It made Brian feel better to know that someone as successful as Alina could have problems. Her imperfection made her perfect, the same way her funny nose made her somehow prettier.

Brian had emailed the show a few times, just to thank her and tell her how he felt, but she didn’t play non-questions on the air. Probably some intern had filtered them out before Alina got to them. Otherwise, she would have written him back, wouldn’t she?

By lunchtime, the meet-and-greet memory had gotten stuck in Brian’s brain like a record needle trapped in a bad groove. Brian shut himself into a stall in the men’s room and breathed deeply to talk himself down. He still could make it right, he reasoned; in fact, he’d bet it would be better in person. He went to the Intimacy Issues page he always had open on his phone and browsed Alina’s tour schedule. Last time, he’d been broke, but now he was flush with money. Programming paid. He could take the weekend and fly wherever Alina would be. What could be more impressive, more flattering than to drop a grand just to go see her and say “Thank you”?

His heart sank to learn tonight was her last tour date. Brian checked the clock. Could he get to D.C. in time for the show? He could fake being sick and race to the airport. But he’d called in so many times when he’d first started at Swzzlr, unable to leave his bed, paralyzed by anxiety, that he was now trying hard to be a good teammate to Mark and Shankar. Be the person other people can rely on, Alina had told him.

Brian tapped his shoe against the tile. Alina wouldn’t be touring again until next year. He needed to connect with her now; the urgency he felt was deeper than hunger, more blinding than libido. He had been weaning himself off of medication, he reminded himself. No, he thought. This fell outside the parameters of his disorder. This was as real as anything he’d ever felt.

Brian’s foot paused. If tonight was her last date, that meant she would be home within a couple of days. An itch crept into Brian’s scalp and he began to feel better. Brooklyn. He could definitely do a weekend in Brooklyn.

***

Alina rolled over, her own bed unfamiliar, and tried to discern the hour from how the sun poured into her room. Her place was smaller and staler than she remembered; it didn’t have the purified air and anonymous sheets of a hotel. Even after three months away, it still stank of her, and of Darron.

She’d slept in full pajamas and her bathrobe, even though the muggy warmth of New York didn’t break for night. It was nice to be held, if only by fabric. Alina curled into a fetal position and ordered a bagel and iced coffee, sized Mama’s Tits (extra large, lots of milk) for delivery. She spent the next two hours dropping everything seeds onto her sheets as she answered fan emails and responded to her Mentions on Twitter and Liked the Intimacy Issues community’s Instagram posts. Someone’s Etsy shop was already selling a ceramic mug that said, “It’s time to change your fucking life.”

The anxiety playlist was doing well; people were saying how much it helped them chill out. “Alina thank u 4 being so open about ur struggles,” a girl named Bree had written in a D.M. “I just got on meds for the first time after hearing u talk about it so casually. I had a hard time with my parents’ divorce too, and ur pod has helped me to be more honest about what I’m going thru. Ur my goddess. Thank u!!!”

Alina sucked on her straw and wrote back. “Yass Queen, recalibrate that chemistry and get your shit done!! So proud of you. Thank you for listening and reaching out. xoxoA.” Alina pressed Send. Immediately, a shadowy emptiness flooded her chest. It used to make her glad to know she was helping more people with this podcast than she ever would have as a regular therapist. But whenever people told her how great she was for being “so open” about her issues, Alina felt another dig in the mud of her heart. They didn’t know anything. There were things she couldn’t even say aloud to herself, let alone her audience. They didn’t know about her father’s alcoholism or her brother’s accidental death at age eight. How it should have been her, but all she got was a broken nose. They didn’t know she used to cut herself every day, and still sometimes wanted to. They didn’t even know about Darron, because he didn’t want to be mentioned on the podcast, so she couldn’t tell them how wrecked she was over their breakup.

He had been a photographer friend of a writer friend of hers, and she’d hired him to do merch photos last year. She’d posed for every picture, unselfconsciously changing in front of him out of the “Fucked Up / So What” crew neck and into the “No More Bullshit” v-neck and mussing her hair to its maximum sexiness. When he’d photographed her gams for the “Just a human, being” temporary tattoo, its roses and vines curling around her calf sculpted round by a high heel, she felt him transform at her feet. Something in Darron reached out for her, silently, so she dipped her fingers into his hair. They fucked on the couch and had been together ever since.

Darron was intense and occasionally mean in ways that felt familiar and therefore tolerable to Alina. He said the things she thought about herself, so she knew he was honest. He worshipped her but hated that she went on tour, guilting her for spending time with masses of people she didn’t know, so far away from him. Still, it came as a surprise to Alina, scrolling through her phone in bed in a Comfort Inn in Colorado, to spy the bottom of her audio engineer Karen’s signature Doc Marten/flower dress combination in the background of one of Darron’s Instagram posts. It was past midnight, after Alina had taken off her stage makeup but before the Ambien kicked in, and she froze. She called Darron, hardening her voice so he wouldn’t be able to tell she had tears rolling down her thickly moisturized face.

“So do you want to be, like, non-monogamous or something?” she asked. God knew she’d slept with two or three guys on tour, easing the edge of her loneliness one empty orgasm at a time.

She heard him sigh. “This is more than that,” Darron said. “She’s, you know, she’s here. And I love her.”

“But you also love me,” Alina said, her voice unbearably like a kitten’s. The silence that followed felt like the earth was being ripped apart. Hemispheres. Alina clutched the side of the bed. “So you’re going to be Darron and Karen? Are you fucking kidding me?”

Now she had no boyfriend and no engineer. She had only herself to take care of herself, as usual. That was a song, wasn’t it? Alina sucked her last drops of coffee and sang it to herself, an old one by Gilbert O’Sullivan.

***

Brian emerged from Penn Station onto 32^nd Street and 8^th Avenue. The sound of New York was overwhelming—thousands of voices in different languages layered incomprehensibly over one another, sirens, car horns, the woosh of delivery trucks. The smell was likewise invasive, candied nuts roasted over a steaming subway grate beside an open garbage can. Brian made his way to Herald Square and put his back against a stone façade in the chaos of morning pedestrian traffic. He checked his phone. He needed to find the F train.

On the redeye flight, he had checked Alina’s Instagram to make sure she was home. She’d posted the skyline from her plane window with the caption, Trash Pile Sweet Trash Pile. Brian had wondered with brief panic how he’d find Alina in a city of nine million people. Did she have an office or studio? The Intimacy Issues website had little information on her process. It’d be easy to figure out where she lived or where she’d be going if he had access to her email. Hacking into it was a possibility, but Brian had paused at the Gmail portal where he’d begin that process. A strange, dark hand had held him back. It seemed like cheating somehow; any idiot could break into her email, and this trip was not about proving his laziness. He would have to find her like a treasure on a map.

Poring her Instagram posts, Brian saw the same coffee shop appear again and again. Intimacy Issues was sponsored by sock subscription services and hipster laundry apps, but Brian thought Alina should be getting paid for all the fawning posts she put up from Teats Café. It was all he had to go on, and Google Maps told him it was right near a stop on the F line, so he bought a canary yellow Metrocard and stuffed himself onto the Brooklyn-bound train.

Everyone in New York was so close together all the time. You could smell each other and people’s skin touched as they jostled around on the train. As the population transformed at Jay Street, Brian went back to Alina’s website. The only address was for her P.O. box, where fans could send mail and gifts. Alina had just returned from touring. Wasn’t now the time she was most likely to visit the post office and retrieve months of mail? He looked it up on a map and saw it was in the same neighborhood as the café. Maybe he’d see her there. But what if she didn’t show? Maybe she had an intern or someone to do that for her? Brian scooted away from a man with a cart of full garbage bags.

He disembarked at Kings Highway and put his hoodie in his duffel, longing to peel off his Devo t-shirt too. Even the air here invaded his personal space, the humidity coating his skin and thick in his lungs. But if Alina could take it, he could too. He followed his phone map until he found the post office, directly across the street from Teats. He figured he had double the chances of seeing her there. Brian bought what Alina always posted, a large iced with milk, and settled into a seat by the window. It was ten-thirty. He had all day.

***

Alina spent the afternoon editing her next two episodes, a plastic container of pad thai on the pillow beside her as she cut out all of the “um”s and “uh”s and stammering, rambling bullshit and all the disgusting noises her human mouth made. She inserted XTC’s “Making Plans For Nigel” after a call from a kid afraid to tell his parents he wanted to go to South America instead of Princeton, and the Neko Case song “That Teenage Feeling” for a woman who was freaking out about being single again at thirty-nine. “This really sucks,” Alina heard her own voice tell the woman, “but if I know one thing, it’s that our hearts always work out their shit eventually. No need to settle for some mediocre peasant just because you’re scared right now. I’ll be brave for you, until you can get there too, okay? Ready?” She went back and played the clip again, and again.

Alina stayed in bed until the sheets smelled like her armpits. She pictured her brother, what he would look like, be like, as an adult. He would never waste his life inside on a day like this. Alina searched her mind for a reason to leave the apartment.

The sound of Brooklyn through her open window, noisy with children and sirens and bicycles, was comforting after three months of sterile hotel silence. I bet I have a lot of mail waiting, Alina thought. That counts. She pulled her legs to the edge of the bed until she felt the cool wooden floor touch the soles of her feet. She was up. She padded to the bathroom and began to put on her face.

***

At the post office, Alina filled her branded tote with postcards and bubble mailers with trinkets inside. Coasters with her face on them, pendants with the Intimacy Issues logo engraved into the metal. One package had to be signed for, so Alina stepped into line. As she moved forward, a heavy dread descended. She didn’t feel like talking. She didn’t feel like making chitchat and giving herself to others. Still, she nodded politely when she handed the slip to Mimi, the weary woman behind the counter who always helped her.

“How are the kids?” Alina asked.

“My youngest, she’s starting to wear those hoochie clothes. Thinks I’m not gonna notice her fifteen-year-old ass hanging out her short-shorts?”

Alina laughed. “She’ll be all right,” she said. “She has you.”

Alina carried her things to a deserted counter and opened the box. Inside was a devotional candle, but instead of the Virgin Mary, it bore Alina’s smiling face. As Alina sighed, wondering what she was going to do with this, she sensed someone watching her. She turned to see a young woman bearing an expression that had become familiar. The Hesitant Adorer, Alina called it. It was the face that approached her at every meet and greet, accompanied by questionable fashion and a lack of physical boundaries right before the person dumped their tragedy onto Alina while thanking her for her bravery. “I love you so much,” they said. “My father killed himself last year…” or “You are so fucking amazing and I love you and you are the reason I left my abusive husband…” Alina didn’t have the heart to tell them she was nothing, that she’d done nothing but use the F-word before playing a Led Zeppelin song that she didn’t technically have the rights to.

The young woman inched closer, a fearful smile on her face. Well, Alina thought, this is why we don’t leave the house without makeup. “I’m so sorry to bother you,” the girl said. “But I heard you talking and… are you Alina Bowman?”

Alina nodded patiently. Blow-men, she heard her sixth-grade bully sneer in her mind.