Olympia Billiards

by Lena Rubin

Olympia Billiards

Lena Rubin | AUG 2024 | Issue 36

My college professor drew a circle on the chalkboard. Inside it, she wrote the word story. She held a copy of my story, printed and stapled, in her hands. She looked at me and asked, “what is the center of this story?” It was such a personal question. I felt my heart move backwards.

What if the center of the story (I didn’t ask) is that I'd had a dream so vivid that I woke up and couldn’t get it out of my head. What if it felt like wax; an oil lamp casting a foggy light over the remains of the summer. What if I had been hoping that I could become immune to heat.

That summer, I fought with my boyfriend with increasing intensity, and shaved my head unevenly in the bathroom. I worked in an office, a windowless room in the university library. Sometimes after my shift I bought a soft serve cone, always vanilla and chocolate twist with rainbow sprinkles. My job was to watch promotional videos made by a philanthropic organization. Then, I had to render the video into textual categories which I inputted into a spreadsheet. This was called creating metadata. I worked on one singular spreadsheet; it grew and grew. Metadata yawning into infinite scroll.

There was so much going on that it felt like nothing. I was a body filled with static, perpetually poised to move yet running in place. In this position, it is difficult to move a story forward, to find its center. I am thinking of the word overwhelm and I am thinking of the sensation of overlap. The foreclosing of space within a body, within a room two people share, within a life. Objects losing their individual definition and becoming translucent, slipping, uneasily merging.

When I was not creating metadata, I was at a farm in Crown Heights. I made myself a sweating apprentice of the land because I thought it would make me tougher. My boyfriend had worked at a farm in his hometown and now he was building wooden decks onto celebrities’ townhomes in the West Village. When I was not creating metadata or sweating on the farm, I was writing, for an alternative music magazine, what they were beginning to call "content." For these last two labors I was not paid.

My headaches began in earnest that summer. I did not yet have the words “chronic pain.” I had, instead, an intermittent sensation of the sun seeming to turn against me. I was paid amply for my creation of metadata, which funded the unpaid endeavors that I was hoping would teach me in experience. My boyfriend made a good amount as a carpenter but for whatever reason it was my money, not his, that he spent on beers. I pretended I didn’t notice. In the dream I tried to write about, a woman named Olympia hears a ghost playing piano in her house. The next morning she walks down a steep hill, forgetting her shoes.

The name Olympia came one afternoon when I was walking in Elmhurst, Queens, with my boyfriend. He’d brought me there because he wanted to show me his culture. As we were leaving the Irish bar, O’Flanagan’s, we walked past a sign in a strip mall that said OLYMPIA BILLIARDS. On it, a rainbow of balls in their perfect mystical triangle. I almost asked Lucas if he wanted to go in and play a round with me. Then I remembered that the last time we played pool together, I beat him. We were in an indoor pool hall in Koreatown, Los Angeles, where we’d been visiting friends that winter. You could smoke cigarettes inside; it was like a Paul Thomas Anderson movie. After I won the game, Lucas leaned against the pool table and puffed on a Marlboro Red, sulking, for the rest of the night.

So that afternoon in Queens, rather than subject him to more injury, I just kept walking. I stored OLYMPIA BILLIARDS somewhere secret within me. Better to just keep it to myself.

That night, the dream came, and I woke up sticky with sweat. I’d missed my alarm and was an hour late to my cubicle in the library. No one noticed. I pulled up a word document, keeping my spreadsheet of metadata open on the screen just in case someone walked by. The videos I watched, the ones that were made by the philanthropic organization, were sorted by third-world country. Currently in progress on my spreadsheet: Pakistan; orphans; water shortage.

The dream made sense in my head. It made more than sense. It made so much sense that it felt like a parable, like someone else had made it up hundreds of years ago. But it would not conform to lines on a page. Still, I felt I had to record it as faithfully as possible, even if it wouldn’t make sense to anyone. I wrote, “her toes were freezing.” I wrote, “her very important notes had flown out of her pocket, out the car window, and onto the concrete, and were blown away by the wind.” I wrote, “ghost chords emanated from the attic.” I wrote, “she knew this day would be just like several that had come before.”

When I workshopped the story in class that fall, no one understood it. My professor least of all. She was confused by the story. She seemed worried about me.

My boyfriend went to Catholic Mass every Sunday. He asked me to come with him each time. And each time I made up an excuse. I think he wanted me to learn how “real” religion worked. Earlier on in our relationship, I had told him about the reconstructionist Hebrew school I went to as a child. Our class had put on a play based on a scene from the Torah, Jonah and the Whale. Extra characters were added so that everyone could have a part. But no one was assigned to the role of God. Instead, when it was time for God to speak, we all spoke in unison. “God is a plurality,” explained Rabbi Linda.

“That just sounds like identity politics gone too far,” Lucas said. “When you read the actual Bible, you can clearly see that God is supposed to be a man.”

I hated how he looked when he left for church, plaid button-up and dress pants slung onto his hunched, bony frame. It made me feel like we were middle-aged and married. But we were only nineteen.

On a steamy Wednesday morning in July we left the house together, walking towards the 2 Train. I was going to the farm in Crown Heights, and he was meeting the construction crew. They were going to install a deck onto Meryl Streep’s Tribeca loft.

“Hop on,” called one of his coworkers, in a thick Boston accent, as the truck pulled up. It was a beat-up red Toyota Tacoma, with faded white lettering on the side and a bumper sticker that said “Kiss Me, I’m Irish.” The guy driving wore a camouflage hat and held a yellow Gatorade. He honked his horn jovially as they pulled away, like an old-timey train conductor blowing a whistle. Through the truck’s window, I saw another one of his coworkers nudge Lucas in the ribs. He was looking at me and saying something I couldn’t decipher.

Later, Lucas came home, depressed, and said that his coworkers had been making fun of him all day. “Why?” I asked. He averted his eyes.

“Your haircut. They said, ‘your girlfriend has a dyke chop.’”

“A dyke chop?” I asked. I was bemused.

“Yeah. Then they started referring to you as my ‘boyfriend.’”

“And you weren’t into it?”

He shot me a stony look, opened the fridge, and pulled out a beer.

Lucas turned twenty in late July. The construction crew was working up in Westchester now, at Martin Scorcese’s country house. They were welding custom-made planters for his rhododendrons.

Since the day they’d met me, his coworkers had been berating him relentlessly. Now, they’d regularly refer to him as “pussy” or “gay.”

“Hey, pussy,” called his coworker Brian, who was holding a torch to a large piece of sheet metal as Lucas walked by. Lucas was about to leave for his lunch break and had taken off his protective gear. His regulation welding goggles hung loose around his neck. But in his anger, he turned toward Brian, towards Brian’s torch and its bright blue flame. He looked right at it.

“I got fuckin’ welder’s eye,” Lucas told me when he came home, his blue eyes flinching and watering in the light of the apartment.

“Welder’s eye?”

“That’s the medical term. It fuckin’ hurts.” He switched off the overhead light and planted himself face first on our bed.

“I have something for you,” I said, placing the birthday gift in his upturned palm. “Just a little something I made.”

He moved it around in his hand without looking up. “What is it? A piece of paper?”

“No, it’s—well, yes, technically. It’s a zine.”

“What’s a zine?” he asked, speaking into the bedspread.

“Uh, it’s like a small, handmade book?” I said. Finally, he sat up. The day’s last dregs of sun filtered through the window. He squinted at the zine. I’d printed it from my library cubicle and I could now see, as he flipped through it, that the collation of the pages was off.

The zine was a response to the book A Lovers’ Discourse by Roland Barthes, which I’d read earlier that summer. Barthes’ book is made up of fragmented passages that he referred to as “figures.” Each figure is prefaced by a single French word and is intended to serve as “a gesture of the lover at work.” It reads like a dictionary. S’abimer—to be engulfed. Angoisse—anxiety. Annulation—annulment. Most of these figures toe the line between pleasure and pain: metadata of the heart.

I had made my own take on Barthes’ project, tailoring it specifically to my relationship with Lucas. Perhaps more consistently so than the original, my “figures” were simple, happy, effulgent. I wanted to conjure our best memories together and preserve them. In doing so, I almost convinced myself that I’d stay.

I titled the zine A Luvrs’ Discourse, and wrote the title in a font that made it look like it was a text message sent on an early-aughts cell phone. Looking back, my zine was more than a little masturbatory.

“You know I’m not into literary theory,” he said.

It was Sunday. I woke up, expecting Lucas to be at Mass, but instead he was just sitting on the edge of his bed in his formal outfit, his black patent leather shoes untied. He was holding my phone and staring at the ground. “I thought you might want this,” he said, handing the phone to me without moving his eyes.

My phone was unlocked. How had he remembered my password? I’d given it to him once when I’d ordered delivery and wanted him to let the guy in while I was in the shower. But that had been almost a year ago. On the phone’s screen was the interface of a dating app that I had re-installed on my phone a few months prior. I hadn’t intended to speak to anyone at first. I was just curious, I told myself. Just browsing. It wasn’t any different than just going to a bar, or walking down the street. I was just looking at people’ faces, learning their names. Then I’d matched with this girl named Heidi.

Heidi had a lip ring and an eyebrow piercing and a mullet. According to her profile, she was spending her summer in rural Maine, at a craft school, where she was making abstract furniture out of wood. She’d posted pictures of her work. Deconstructed chairs, little egg holders, artisanal salad spoons. Heidi was Jewish and from Providence, Rhode Island. She said she liked to read Kathy Acker, and Derrida. Heidi, in her pictures, in her cut-off jeans, slouching and scowling, seemed tough. More masculine somehow than Lucas, but also more artistic, more sensitive.

I had messaged her, “you seem cool.” She hadn’t responded. This last part was perhaps what I was most embarrassed about Lucas seeing.

“Are you going to meet up with her?” he asked in a flat voice.

“What? No. She hasn’t even answered me. And she probably never will. I sent her that message weeks ago.”

Heidi never did respond to me. But I never stopped thinking about her, that whole summer. Just like I never stopped thinking about Olympia, and her billiards.

You could imagine a whole life with someone who never even knew you existed. Just like you could imagine a whole story, and never actually write it. Maybe Heidi was my Olympia. She was the ghost playing piano in my house. She was everything I could be, I thought, if I left.

Lucas seemed reassured by my answer.

“I guess I’ll go to church then,” he said, dropping the phone by my pillow. “Do you want to come?”

“I’m feeling a bit under the weather,” I said. “Maybe next time.”

Lena Rubin is a cross-genre writer with work published or forthcoming in Second Factory, Tricycle Magazine, The Columbia Review, and elsewhere. Lena has a BA in History from Barnard College and is currently pursuing an MFA at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

EssayGuest CollaboratorAugust 3, 2024Lena Rubin