“No one will ever love you just for your looks,” she told him off-handed once, “you’d better get real-rich or real-interesting if you don’t wanna end up alone.” Was it a joke? Did she even say it at all? The few times he ever mentioned it to her, she denied it happened. Said he was making a go at manipulating her one time, said he must’ve been stoned on another. Said she may’ve been quoting a film or what-not and he misinterpreted it, on a third occasion. Was she being cruel for cruelty’s sake and gaslighting him? Was she so ashamed of being so blunt with the truth that she had to pretend she couldn’t be that bad a person? It’s hard to say. Even us third-person narrators don’t know what the folks are actually thinking sometimes. Some of us narrators are really only omniscient to the exterior of their lives, we’re just as blind to the “why” as anyone, all we know is “what”, what physically happened. As a third-person narration casting asides into first-person explainers, I cannot say why. But. I can confirm that she actually said those awful words to him.
Was she trying to protect herself from a fear of non-platonic advances from him? Or to protect him from being hurt by her eventual rejection? Was she trying to nip what she was afraid of in the bud in a coward’s way that avoided a reckoning and preserved their friendship? Again, I’m just the exterior narrator here, I’m not even sure he thought of her like that. From my sky-level observations, he found her physically-attractive but there’s a lot of physically-attractive people that you still don’t want to date. He was not an ugly man, but fair to say, he was unremarkable? She was a good-looking woman but hardly-remarkable herself. They were both normal, really? But in the American 21st century normal felt like the worst thing in the world anyone could be.
Body-shame culture had always been terrible to women, but late-stage Capitalism was working on tormenting men just as badly for not being perfect. For every two conventionally-perfect yet entirely-uninteresting Sydney Sweeneys pushed on the world to sell soap and awful films, there was an equally-pretty equally-vapid Jared Leto doing the same. By the time they were both old, what was left of their culture would make it a terrible gender equality. Everyone judged harshly and equally sad, equally chasing infinite horizons of unattainable standards to steal their money.
But whatever he felt and whatever she intended, it haunted him the rest of his life. His inability to possess fifty-seven abs like the werewolves on teevee drove him to try and make a name for himself, a goal he disastrously chased the rest of his life. She ended up with a muscleman who eventually came out the closet and abandoned her with three children. No happy endings at all.
Except for the stockholders. In America, they’re the only ones who matter. That’s the narrative.
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