“The bank teller has a great ass. I know this because she had to get up and go to her boss’s office when I told her I wanted to withdraw sixteen of the just under twenty thousand dollars remaining in mine and Jen’s joint checking account. When she returns, I see that she has nice lips too—full and pouty—and she has a dimple in one cheek, and something about her eyes and the way she chews her gum makes me think she’s a very sexual person. Her name is Marianna, which I know because it’s on the little badge she has affixed just beside her breasts, which aren’t particularly large but come together nicely in her push-up bra to form a perfectly adequate suntanned cleavage in the V-neck of her blouse.
My guess is that she didn’t go to college, at least not a four-year college. Probably community college for her associate’s degree, and then right into the bank’s training program. She is the kind of girl who dates the kind of guys who will ultimately screw around on her, guys like her brothers, who work with their hands and drink too many beers while watching football, and have a stupid tattoo of a dragon or the Rolling Stones’ lips on their scapulas, guys upon whom she projects more romance and ambition than is actually there, and then she asks her girlfriends, who are hairdressers and medical technicians and tanning salon clerks and secretaries, why she can’t find a nice guy.
And I’m dying to tell her that I’m a nice guy. I’m the last nice guy. And I haven’t been kissed or rubbed in months, and I’m as horny as a high school kid, but I’m also dying to fall in love, and if you let me, I’ll fall in love with you, and cherish you, and listen to your dreams and your hurts and I’ll be faithful and funny and I’ll never forget your birthday or make out with your girlfriend and blame it on too many shots, or come home from guys’ night out drunk and smelling of strippers. That’s what I want to tell her, but instead I say, ‘Can I have an envelope for that?’ and if you want to know where all the good guys are, we’re standing right in front of you, lacking the balls to actually make ourselves heard.”
- Jonathan Tropper “This Is Where I Leave You”