Cynthia Kicks Ass
“You know, I've never really accepted that I am a little bit dominant.” Cynthia poured her smoothie from the jug in the kitchen. “It just occurred to me that this is probably why I am always confused.”
“Everybody else knew, trust me.” Lorne grumbled and returned to his sick chair with another bowlful of pineapple. Hence, a benign conversation instantly became malignant.
“Here was me thinking I just attracted unusually weak men.” Cynthia snarled. “It's amazing, for example, how you can manage to feed yourself and yet cannot manage to press the button on a camera.”
“It's not my fault....” This was Lorne's answer to any question. It was untrue, and they both knew it.
“The opportunity cost of sitting listening to you complain is that I do not meet anybody that might actually help. This is not helping, strangely enough.”
“It's obviously time I went home.” Lorne started to gather his mess together. Cynthia went upstairs and cried.
Having dealt with this, Cynthia went on to write to the bank and the financial services company who were preventing her from working. It probably wouldn't do any good, but at least she felt better. She then took an agency and a government department to task over their poor management practises. Again, probably futile, but at least she had done something. She still had some paperwork to do for herself, but this would have to wait.
Endless job applications were taking up most of her time, so none of the physical artwork pieces could be finished, not least because Cynthia was assiduous about her beautiful house. The film work could not be done because Lorne didn't care about anybody apart from himself, so she could not finish that because she did not know anyone, and the academic work she was doing was hugely impeded by a general lack of confidence caused by years of being harassed by stupid people. Stupid people, she found, had a very aggressive attitude and liked to pretend not to understand simple things in order to attack you. Hence, Cynthia had learned that people were generally dangerous and not to be trusted. It was odd, therefore that she had taken one look at Asher and detected some unexpected honesty.
She did not bother to analyse this. She had spent years overthinking things in the past, because of self-doubt or shame, or whatever other excuse she had found. She didn't want to this time. She just wanted something not to be horrible. This was an odd event in her life, not least because she was far from an avid porn watcher as a rule. In fact, so absent was she from her own body that it had entirely closed up before she had taken drastic action with porn and a small vibrator in order to deal with a sciatic problem.
She wondered what life would have been like had she not taken responsibility for her parents. She would have been famous and then probably dead, she surmised, since she had worked twenty hours a day at times in the past. She was certainly healthier than she was at half her age, but was this useful?
It did seem that an attitude of disposability had become a general principle in the UK. The elderly were disposable. The disabled were disposable. Workers were disposable, to the point that nobody gave references any more and you were expected to accept anything anybody said to you as if it were true, even when it was blisteringly obvious that it was not.
The concept of running off with a beautiful porn star was entirely within Cynthia's wide scope of reference. If supposedly competent people were all incredibly incompetent, and also incapable of listening, why would it not make sense that a beautiful, bright, caring and honest person was choosing a life of pornography? Perhaps this had always been the case? Maybe there was some honour left, hidden for much the same reasons that Cynthia had had to hide?
She was trying to be sparing with her chatter, because she did not want to annoy him. It was nice to have something pleasant to focus on. Here was somebody that might finally understand. Cynthia had never been afraid of odd relationships, despite her morbid fear of allegedly normal people, who were apparently characterised by self-interest, stupidity and aggression.
Despite the medium, this particular porn star had managed to convey a routine calm and gentleness that Cynthia felt very attracted to, that, and the self-exposure she now habitually practised to combat the crippling lack of confidence she had had in the past meant that this new episode did not surprise her at all.