CHARLES CHUBINKSI: You look fantastic in that sweater.
LORI TREVANIAN: I know.
[They are both hungover and in love. Their relationship is broken.]
LORI: I’m starving.
CC: I know.
[She’s better than he is. More attractive, more “vital life force.” He’s a neurotic dump.]
LORI: I love you.
CHARLES: Nah, you don’t. I mean, you won’t. After we’ve been broken up for a few years.
[They both weep softly. Lori thinks about the men she’s slept with since she began dating Charles. Charles thinks about the sandwiches he will make after Lori falls asleep.]
CHARLES: It doesn’t matter, anyway. I wish I were gay.
LORI: You are.
[An all-nude dove flutters in through the window, a bleeding butterfly caught in its jaws. Can butterflies bleed? Do doves have jaws? These questions are printed on the insides of candy bar wrappers.]
LORI: I love your “writing.”
CHARLES: And I love yours. I also love your hair, and your body.
LORI: I love your body!
CHARLES: It sounds like a good thing that we’re a sexually active heterosexual couple, then.
LORI: Yeah: Since we love each other’s bodies, it’s good that we have sex with them.
CHARLES: Would you like to break up now?
[Forty days of confusion, attack, anger, and pain. They meet again in a restaurant.]
LORI: Look at you! You’re tiny. How did you lose so much weight?
CHARLES: You broke my heart and I stopped eating.
LORI: You’ve also surely been working out? Christ, let me see your abs.
[Charles gravely lifts his T-shirt. He has an awesome six-pack.]
LORI: [Thinking] I want to have sex with you.
CHARLES: I had my gentials removed.
LORI: You have no genitals now?
CHARLES: No.
LORI: That’s sad. You used to enjoy sex so much. What will you do?
CHARLES: I have a blog where I write erotic and nonsensical scenes for the other residents of my village.
LORI: Los Angeles is hardly a village, darling.
CHARLES: I live in Pasadena.
LORI: Even though you have no genitals, we can still kiss.
[They kiss. Charles feels his heart sublimate and rise through his tear ducts. His veins are like the roots of a rapidly growing plant, swelling and throbbing with a powerful ache. He can’t believe how much he loves Lori, who seems bent on ruining him. Charles somberly dons a fatsuit.]
LORI: Why are you somberly donning a fatsuit?
CHARLES: This is who I really am. I hate being so toned and “diesel.” I want to be fat again. But I’m so heartbroken that I can’t bring myself to eat more than a reasonable portion at every meal. So I wear this suit.