The People Who Report More Stress Read online

  ALSO BY ALEJANDRO VARELA

  The Town of Babylon

  Copyright © 2023 by Alejandro Varela

  All rights reserved. Copying or digitizing this book for storage, display, or distribution in any other medium is strictly prohibited.

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, please contact [email protected].

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Astra House

  A Division of Astra Publishing House

  astrahouse.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Varela, Alejandro, 1979– author.

  Title: The people who report more stress : stories / by Alejandro Varela.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Astra House, [2023] | Summary: “The People Who Report More Stress is a collection of connected stories examining issues of parenting, systemic and interpersonal racism, and class conflict in gentrified Brooklyn”—Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2022045372 (print) | LCCN 2022045373 (ebook) | ISBN 9781662601071 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781662601088 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCGFT: Short stories.

  Classification: LCC PS3622.A7413 P46 2023 (print) | LCC PS3622.A7413 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23/eng/20220928

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022045372

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022045373

  First edition

  I dedicate this book to all the people who stay focused on the upstream causes and solutions;

  To everyone who retreats to their psyches because they’ve been excluded from the conversation; To the people who wouldn’t dare bring their dogs to a children’s playground in a city defined by inequities; To my parents—Maria, Ernesto, Miriam; And, as always, to Matias

  In memory of Gene—what a wonderful guy he was; And Rosario, a warrior.

  CONTENTS

  AN OTHER MAN

  SHE AND HER KID AND ME AND MINE

  MIDTOWN-WEST SIDE STORY

  CARLITOS IN CHARGE

  THE GREAT POTATO FAMINE

  ALL THE BULLETS WERE MADE IN MY COUNTRY

  THE MAN IN 512

  THE CARETAKERS

  THE SIX TIMES OF ALAN

  WAITING

  COMRADES

  GRAND OPENINGS

  THE PEOPLE WHO REPORT MORE STRESS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  AN OTHER MAN

  IT’S LATE JULY, AND YOU’RE sitting on a stoop covered in faint cracks. The scorching brownstone beneath your thighs is crossing slowly into unbearable when, all of a sudden, the postcard across the street—a sylvan park, a profusion of inquisitive dogs and distracted owners, toddling children and rigid adults—reveals a group of Frisbee-playing twenty-somethings. What begins as a harmless, anthropologic scan of skinny legs, knee-length denim, and Victorian mustaches descends into an obsessive survey of mounds, mesas, and bulges—more often than not, they catch the flying disc. Your husband, who burns easily, is sitting in the sliver of shade beside you. He is unaware of the panorama, immersed instead in the science-fiction novel he downloaded onto his phone. His pale white feet rest over his sandals’ brown leather straps; knobby toes grope purely decorative buckles. He’s been wearing these sandals since you met him. He orders a new pair every few years. These are his fourth.

  “The heat makes it worse,” he says, while balancing Octavia Butler on his superhero thighs. “The exposed skin roaming around always does this to you.” His voice is free of judgment, almost bereft of it, but its certainty dredges up a gnarled tire of your own shame.

  “How can we be so different from each other?” you wonder before saying aloud.

  “If this is going to gnaw at you, then just do it,” he says and places his hand on your lap, less a lover and more a coach; both are a turn-on. “I’m not worried about us. I’m only worried you’ll beat yourself up afterward.”

  These are words you would never say to him. You can’t imagine a deathbed scenario where you could be so magnanimous.

  “What if you end up wanting to do it, too?”

  “I won’t.”

  You believe him, but you fear going up in a hot air balloon full of imperceptible tears. On the other hand, it’s just sex.

  “Once we have kids, this’ll all get more complicated, logistically speaking,” he says. “Might as well do it now.”

  “I’ll give it some thought,” you say.

  * * *

  You begin by downloading online dating applications. First, one. Then, two. You draw the line after three. Before you can even ponder your decision, faces appear. They fill your phone’s screen, in grid formation. A few of the squares are recognizable: acquaintances predominantly, a few neighbors, and possibly a poorly lit coworker. You resist an urge to say hello, fearing you’ll impinge on Internet etiquette or that your greetings might be misconstrued. You worry that the people who recognize you will think you’re cheating. You panic, disable your profiles, and disappear. You do this three times. A few days pass, and you re-enable everything.

  You try to be innovative with your greetings (“What do you think: one- or two-state solution?”) and pleasant with your rejections (“I appreciate you reaching out, but I don’t sense compatibility”). You chat and endure the eternal pauses. You are hamstrung by the reliance on punctuation as a conduit for emotions—a misplaced semicolon can rapidly alter the mood; exclamation points are ubiquitous and no longer connote the urgency they did pre-Internet. You’re awkward about addressing sexually transmissible infections: you had crabs when you were nineteen, but sharing that feels like an unreasonable standard of honesty. What about HPV? Does that require an announcement? Likes, barks, and graphic images appear as if from nowhere. A few conversations escalate, but you don’t commit to meeting anyone.

  You get ignored too.

  One man says he likes his men fiery and that you have a Ricky Martin vibe. Another, younger than you, says he’s not into your people: “no offense.” Before you can contemplate whether the Digital Age is, in some ways, undoing progress, you secretly marvel at his honesty. You swipe away. You block. You disable and delete, again. You uninstall. You give up. You try watching porn. Every day is a new day. And after a few new days, you try again—there are no limits to downloading and reinstalling.

  Tweaking your profiles becomes a compulsion. You overvalue yourself. You undervalue yourself. You add a year to your age because numbers that end in 5 or 0 look commanding. You subtract two because numbers that end in 5 or 0 begin to look too neat to be believed. You aim for humorous and self-effacing. You don’t post naked pictures for fear of destroying a career in politics that is nowhere on your horizon. Before long, you start sending tasteful, faceless nudes to appease the men who are interested. One night, after your husband has gone to bed, after you’ve convinced yourself that anonymity is a devolution, after your second homemade martini, you send explicit and easily identifiable images to a “banker with a swimmer’s build.” You accept that you are not cut out for elected office. You’d rather be an agitator anyway, though you have no history of agitating. You never meet the banker.

  You’re drawn to charming profiles with hints of self-awareness and intelligence. Salt-and-pepper hair, average bodies, and dorky demeanors are especially appealing. You prefer subtlety and clothed images. You equate explicit images with a depravity that you quickly intellectualize as internalized homophobia, which, you remind yourself, is just misog
yny by another name, one more of capitalism’s divide-and-conquer tactics. You wonder if it’s possible to transform this reasoning into a palatable campaign slogan.

  You continue searching, but the guilt rarely subsides. Not only does this digital cruising feel like cheating, you also have an unfair advantage. You are, after all, playing with house money. There are men on these apps looking for love; you already have that. Come to think of it, the similarities between the men on your screen to whom you are most drawn and your husband are impossible to ignore. You put the phone down and go for a run. At mile four, you decide to give up on white men altogether because of the intrinsic power dynamics—some things are undone during sex; others are magnified.

  Sidestepping white men proves an onerous task on a distance-based application in a hyper-gentrified neighborhood.

  You focus on men who are direct about their proclivities and desires—but not too direct. You are especially curious about anyone who identifies as radical, a fairy, or an anarchist—you are keenly aware of the distances you are trying to bridge.

  Some men list sex without condoms as a precondition. You mull it over. But every public health message of the last twenty-five years flashes through your mind, and you just can’t, even if they are regularly tested for infections, even if their viral loads are undetectable, even if the science is on everyone’s side, even if their beauty feels like a prophylaxis. You desist and remain bothered by the implications.

  You contemplate calling your therapist, but it’s been a while. Besides, he’s the last person with whom you’d want to dissect your sex life.

  * * *

  “Describe your type,” you say to your husband while pointing to your phone. “Maybe he’s on here.” It’s almost noon on a cloudy Saturday of a nothing-special weekend in August. You’re both in your underwear, draped over the couch and each other. Your husband shrugs with one shoulder and one cheekbone, but you insist, and he begins listing attributes. He clumsily concocts you, and a proud smile takes over his face. Before you can slide his boxer-briefs down to his knees and swallow his cock, he looks up at the window: “Do you think we should re-pot the basil plant?”

  Afterward, he naps. He always naps.

  Your search continues. The phone regularly emits dings and whistles, but your husband doesn’t hear them, or pretends not to.

  Doesn’t he know that a hint of jealousy might signal an end to your extramarital desires? Doesn’t he know that his territoriality would turn you on? Doesn’t he know that a middle-child’s craving for attention is an almost subcellular penury that requires an entire reimagining of society’s economic structure? The answer is yes. You’ve told him this, many times before, but he’s terrible at roleplaying. He simply cannot act out what he does not feel. You can say, without embellishment, that you married the most self-assured person you have ever known. No one is less afraid to raise his hand in a crowded auditorium, send back an overcooked steak, or share his spouse. And never in a mean-spirited manner. Always matter of fact.

  You’ve been with him for most of your adult years. Plenty of time to observe and overthink. And you’ve surmised that your disparities in temperament, self-efficacy, and propensity for obsession are likely a function of your trajectories and positions in society’s hierarchy—as a researcher in a field of the social sciences, you feel equipped to draw these types of conclusions. He’s white; you’re brown. He was raised in a home with more staff than family members; you’ve been conditioned to eat rice and beans for months at a time if the circumstances should so dictate. In moments of stress, everything in you travels with the speed and tidiness of lava on the descent; in him is a durable glass beaker with a finely calibrated release valve.

  And yet, your love isn’t only measured in distances. You’re both gay men with degrees. You read the same things. You can have a conversation without straining in either direction. All the leveling that’s happened naturally over the years has made you a Venn diagram with a beautiful, comforting, and egg-shaped overlap. And that may be the best you’ll ever be. Anything else would be inauthentic.

  Or maybe you can’t work race and class into everything, hard as you try. It’s quite possible you just come from a long line of libidinous Lotharios; whereas his chaste chromosomes line up neatly, barely touching. Who’s to say?

  You keep to your conjugal schedule—Wednesday nights and Saturday afternoons. And when your husband leaves the room or nods off, your hunting resumes in earnest.

  * * *

  Cruising was once anxiety inducing and soul shaking—docks, crowded streets, empty streets, public restrooms, changing rooms at The GAP, interstate rest stops. It was a fevered, and often crapulous, pursuit for the cup of Christ, more exciting for the journey than the stemware. The online version is less personal, while somehow more invasive. And frenetic. At every single moment, you know if there are cis, trans, or gender-nonconforming bears, cubs, hungry otters, silver foxes, discreet jocks, and leather geeks within a five-hundred-foot radius. The wealth of options is arousing and disorienting.

  Noteworthy leads are thwarted by incompatible schedules. They disappear; you do too. This is more difficult than you imagined. A kid, a candy store, bins that are out of reach. It’s been nearly a month since this all began, and most everyone fits into one of three undesirable categories: no, distracted, or possibly perfect. Perfect, as you well know, is the enemy. Under no circumstances do you want to fall in love. You want to play out fantasies while avoiding antibiotics, antiretrovirals, and body lice. Nothing more. The target is increasingly smaller, but you keep giving it your all. Life imitates carnival game.

  The problem might not be the game, you realize, but instead, the player. You begin to feel old in a virtual space where your age isn’t far from the median. It’s not only the culture—you could fill a bathtub with all the acronyms and pop references you don’t know. It’s the cadence too. This is a carousel that never slows to a point where you can board gracefully.

  * * *

  It’s difficult to recall the feeling of truly meeting someone in person. The Internet traffics more men than a gay bar, but you don’t recall so consistently leaving a gay bar alone. Maybe you did. That was a long time ago.

  On a warm, sunlit evening when your husband works late, you find your way to a happy hour in the East Village. You approach with the trepidation of a tourist who doesn’t understand all the signs and who is embarrassed to speak a language he studied only briefly in his youth. As cliché as it sounds, you still feel like the boy who’d tell his parents he was sleeping over a friend’s place but who instead snuck into the city with a fake ID. Throw a backward baseball cap on, squint a little into the mirror, and you’re not far off from that seventeen-year-old—your brown skin has brought you some grief over the years, but at least it refuses to crack. And yet, in this room, you are mid-career. Apart from the worn survivors nestled at one end of the bar, everyone else is in his late twenties or, worse, his early twenties. Near the other end of the bar, a group of coworkers or friends are celebrating a 30th birthday. A waste of time and energy, you think. Thirty means nothing. The overall vibe in the bar is more quirky than shiny. You nonetheless fear several types of discrimination at once. Intersections, you think.

  You wait six minutes for a drink. You hate this. The bar is far from crowded. How could the bartender not have taken your order yet? Drinking establishments would do well to implement an equitable system of numbered tickets, like deli counters—both are meat markets, you think, before smiling at your own observation. To make matters worse, everyone the bartender is serving instead of you is white, a few of whom certainly arrived after you. This is why you prefer to stay home; this is why you splurge at the liquor store. Everything is being confirmed. The seconds race. The cortisol courses through your channels. You’re already drafting a letter to the owner and rehearsing the call you’ll make to the local community board if the letter goes unanswered, when, suddenly, he looks your way.

  His hair is a pink f
aux-hawk; skin, blond. The straps on his tank top are dental floss; his mustache is a car wash. He has a bull ring in his nose and tattoos everywhere—unicorns, Roman numerals, quotes, a subway car. He makes it all work. He looks familiar. Very familiar. “Hi, honey, what can I get you?”

  “Slightly dirty gin martini, straight up, three olives, a step up from well.”

  As he fills a smudged glass with imperfect cylinders of ice, you realize you’ve clapped eyes on this post-impressionistic figure before—the online matrix. By this point, you’ve seen the faces of several hundred queer, gay, or bisexual men in New York City, and the torsos, cocks, and asses of dozens more. Come to think of it, it’s been days of double-takes and second glances.

  “Here you are, darling.” He sets the drink down on a small napkin without spilling a drop. His artistry is evident but understated.

  “How much do I owe you?”

  “Nothing. It’s been taken care of.”

  “Really? Thank you,” you say, feeling somewhat foolish for having assumed the worst of a working-class stiff who’s living off of tipped minimum wage and probably wasn’t thinking about skin color or socially constructed racial categories when he ignored you repeatedly only moments before. His lurch from villain to saint is swift.

  “Don’t thank me. Thank daddy over there.” The bartender raises his chin toward a man too far down the bar for you to see clearly enough in the dim, red-filtered lighting. He has gray hair and a loose-fitting, short-sleeve button-down shirt, probably linen, either light green or blue. He’s white or orange. You try to refuse the drink, but the bartender walks away before you can open your mouth. You indulge in the moment and raise your glass in gratitude, spilling a fifth of the martini in the process. Maybe no one noticed.

  Your free drink begins to feel like a tether. Whenever you browse the room, you make unintended eye contact with your benefactor. You fear you might lead him on—this sweet, or lecherous, old man. You pull out your phone and look down. Seven of the people on your screen are within seven feet of you. None have pinged you. This isn’t deflating, but neither is it insignificant. You cease browsing online for the sentient beings who are chatting, laughing, and releasing pheromones in the immediate vicinity. You listen instead to the music: Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam, Sylvester, Blondie. Gay bar jukeboxes today are indistinguishable from gay bar jukeboxes fifteen years ago, and possibly twenty-five. It’s comforting to still feel like part of the club. A stakeholder. You finish your drink, savor the olives, and go to the bathroom.