“Yeah, Bob. I’m sorry. I just forgot for a second.” He shook his head, tried to laugh it off. “Alzheimer’s.”
I merely looked at him. Forgot? We’d hung out together for two years. He was the closest thing to a friend I’d had at UC Brea. I hadn’t seen him in a couple of months, but you didn’t completely forget the name of a buddy in less than half a year.
I understood now why he’d been so awkward and formal with me. He hadn’t known who I was and had been trying to bluff his way through the conversation.
I thought he’d try to make up for it now. He knew me. He remembered me. I figured he’d loosen up a little, stop acting so stiff and distant, start a real conversation, a personal conversation. But he looked again at his watch, said, “Sorry, I really do have to go. Good to see you.” Then he was off, giving me a quick impersonal wave, heading briskly through the crowd, away from me.
I watched him disappear, still stunned. What the hell had happened here? I looked to my left. On the bank of televisions in the window of the electronics store I saw a familiar beer commercial. A group of college chums was getting together with beer and potato chips to watch a Sunday afternoon football game. The young men were all good-looking and good-natured, comfortable enough with themselves and each other to pat one another’s shoulders and slap one another’s backs.
My college life had not been like that.
The scene of the men laughing as they sat around the television faded into a close-up of an overflowing glass of beer, overlaid with the beer company’s logo.
I had not had a group of friends in college, a gang with whom I hung out. I had not had any real friends at all. I’d had Craig and Jane, and that had been it. My Sunday afternoons had been spent not with a group of pals, watching football, but alone in my bedroom, studying. I stared at the TVs as another commercial came on. I had not realized until now how solitarily I had spent the four years I’d attended UC Brea. Those media images of close camaraderie and lasting friendships had been only that for me — images. Their reality had never materialized. I had not known my classmates in college the way I’d known my classmates in grammar school, junior high, and high school. College had been a much colder, much more impersonal experience.
I thought back on my college classes, and I suddenly realized that I’d gone through my entire academic career having had no personal contact with any of my instructors. I had known them, of course, but I’d known them in the same way I knew characters on TV, from observation not interaction. I doubted that a single one would remember me. They’d known me only for a semester and even then only as a number on a roll sheet. I never asked questions, never stayed after for extra help, always sat in the middle of the room. I had been completely anonymous.
I had been planning to hang around the mall a little longer, check out a few other stores, but I no longer felt like doing so. I wanted to be home. All of a sudden I felt strange wandering from shop to shop alone, anonymously, not noticed or known by anybody. I felt uncomfortable, and I wanted to be with Jane. She might be busy studying, she might not have time to do anything with me right now, but at least she knew who I was, and that alone was a comforting thought, incentive enough to make me leave.
I found myself thinking about my meeting with Craig as I drove back to the apartment. I tried to explain it, tried to rationalize it, tried to play it off, but I couldn’t. He had not been a mere acquaintance, someone I saw only in class. We had gone places together. We had done things together. Craig was not stupid, and unless he’d had some sort of brain tumor or mental illness or drug problem, there was no way he could have forgotten who I was.
Maybe the problem wasn’t with him. Maybe the problem was with me.
That seemed the most likely answer, and it frightened me to think about it. I knew I was not the most interesting person in the world, but was I so hopelessly boring that even a friend could forget who I was within the space of a couple months? It was a terrifying idea, and an almost unbearably depressing one. I was not an egomaniac, and I certainly didn’t harbor any illusions about my making a significant mark on the world, but it nonetheless unnerved me to think my existence was so meaningless that it passed entirely unnoticed.
Jane was on the phone when I arrived home, talking to some girl from work, but she looked up when I entered, smiled at me, and that made me feel good.
Maybe I was reading too much into all this, I thought. Maybe I was overreacting.
I went into the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. I studied myself for quite a while, trying to be objective, trying to see myself as others might see me. I was not good-looking, but neither was I ugly. My hair, light brown, was neither long nor short, my nose not big and not small.
I was average-looking. I was of average build, average height. I wore average clothes.
I was average.
It was a weird realization. I cannot say that I was surprised, but I had not really thought about it before and I felt strange being able to categorize myself so easily and so completely. I wished it weren’t so, wished there were something about me that was unique and exceptional and wonderful, but I knew there wasn’t. I was completely and totally ordinary.
Perhaps it explained the situation at work.
I pushed the thought out of my mind and hurried out of the bathroom, back to the living room where Jane was.
I was acutely conscious, the next few days, of everything I did, everything I said, and I was both horrified and discouraged to discover that, yes, I really was thoroughly and consistently unexceptional. My conversations with Jane were banal, my work was never less or more than adequate. No wonder Craig had not remembered me. I seemed to be so average in every way that I was entirely forgettable.
Was I also average in bed?
It was a question that, in one version or another, had been haunting me for some time, even before I’d seen Craig, lurking in the back of my mind when I was with Jane, unfocused but there, a vague threat. Now it had been, if not voiced, at least given shape, and I knew it would not go away. I tried to push it out of my mind, tried not to think of it when we were together, when were eating or talking or taking a shower or lying in bed, but it gnawed at me, growing in my brain from a whisper to a shout until I felt compelled to bring it up.
On Saturday evening, as always, we made love, doing it during the half-hour local news before
Afterward, I rolled off her, spent, breathing heavily, and stared up at the ceiling, thinking about my performance. I would have liked to believe that it was great, that I was a true stud, but I knew that was not the case. I was average.
My penis was probably the average size.
I probably gave her the average number of orgasms.
I looked over at Jane. Even now, perhaps especially now, hot and sweaty in the aftermath of sex, hair clumped in damp tangles, she looked beautiful. I had always known that she could do a lot better than me, that she was pretty enough, intelligent enough, interesting enough to attract someone superior to myself, but it was suddenly brought home to me in a way that was almost painful.
I touched her shoulder, gently, tentatively. “How was it?” I asked.
She looked at me. “What?”
“Did you… come?”
“Of course.” She frowned. “What’s wrong with you? You’ve been acting weird all night.”
I wanted to explain to her how I felt, but I couldn’t.
I shook my head, said nothing.
“Bob?” she said.
I guess what I really wanted was to be reassured, to hear her say that I was not average, that I was special, that I was great, but in my mind I could hear her trying to assuage my fears by saying, “I love you even though you’re average.” Which was not what I wanted to hear.
Her mother’s words echoed in my head: “…a nothing… a nobody…”
That was how I felt.
