The Fuck Up by Arthur Nersesian Page A

to make yourself feel pretty at someone else’s agony. Fuck you.” I slammed the door behind me and left.
    When I arrived back at Helmsley’s, I told him that I had the job.
    “Good, this can be a double celebration. What are you doing tonight?”
    “Nothing, why?”
    “Because there’s someone very special I want you to meet tonight.”
    “I’d be honored, but to be honest I’m tired, starving, filthy, and broke. Tonight might not be the night of nights.” It was only around six. He suggested that I nap an hour or two, take a shower, and then maybe we would go out, his treat. “It’s important that you meet her tonight.”
    Three hours later we were at a local restaurant where Helmsley ordered the most expensive dish in the pasta category.
    “A fine meal can alter one’s entire perspective,” Helmsley quipped as I gobbled deeper and deeper into the high-sided plate. I felt like Godzilla as I tore through the many pasta roofs and cheese floors. To do any real damage to that tomato and garlic structure was a gluttonous task. All Helmsley did the entire time was pour from a select bottle of vino and snicker. Eventually, though, he attempted to start a sentence, an opening to something he didn’t seem to know how to close.
    Finally, when I was full, I asked him what was going on.
    “Well,” he replied, “it’s a little hard for me to say.”
    “Is it concerning that special friend that you mentioned earlier?”
    “Yes, in fact.” He smiled a bit. “I’m trying to give you an idea of what to expect.”
    I could easily imagine her, a fair-skinned cutie who had probably graduated from an Ivy League and developed a shapely resume. “I’ve been in love, Helmsley. I know, you want to tell me that she’s different from any other girl you’ve ever met…”
    “Yes, but there’s more…”
    “There’s always more. You’re nervous, that’s all, just calm yourself.”
    Helmsley, as far as love went, was just entering puberty. In this area I felta bit like an older brother and was about to mention how beguiling love is and the disappointment that inevitably follows, but I caught myself. I wiped the oil and sauces off my face, he paid the bill, and we left.
    We went to the nearby bar where the fateful rendezvous was set to occur. A sign outside said it was an American Legion Post. Once inside, I noticed a cool tension that I learned was due to the two types of patrons: the recently arrived yuppies, who’d found that quaint Cobble Hill was only minutes away from their beloved Wall Street, and the third generation Italians who resented the young professionals, probably for jacking up the neighborhood’s cost of living. Helmsley quickly brought two bottles and mugs over to a booth by the door. Once seated, I could feel poor Helmsley’s anxiety multiply.
    “Calm down.”
    “It’s just that, well, you know, I don’t have many women friends and I feel very different about this one …” He then launched into a poetic preamble about man’s profound and incurable loneliness and how the soul itself is a piston-shaped apparatus that creates a series of vast obliterating implosions which are the true motivations of all man’s actions. Nothing was simple. After the earlier session with Miguel, I couldn’t stomach any more.
    I grabbed the beer mug, shoved it to his lips, and turned it bottoms up. He started guzzling as he struggled for the handle. When he finished it, he put the mug down and apologized.
    The door suddenly whipped open with such a bang that Helmsley’s empty bottle fell over. A gang of young locals stormed in. The last of them broke from the rest and shoved into our booth. Pushing up against Helmsley was an older lady. She took Helmsley’s hair in her hands and gave him a hard unexpurgated kiss on the mouth. I couldn’t believe it.
    Angela was a small, butchy mama who couldn’t have been any youngerthan forty-five. Her dark wrinkled skin sagged loosely away from all bones, and as she