On Jealousy: Part One
The green monster in my lesbian barista era.***
I was newly out and had kissed one girl once on a street corner before Arial got hired at the coffee shop where I worked. Our deal at this coffee shop, our staff culture, was to have no boundaries. The goal was not to snub the personal/professional divide—a bar we cleared with no effort—but to share spit and sweat. We bit off each other’s sandwiches. We drank from each other’s cups. There was a single stick of staff deodorant.
All of us were between nineteen and thirty, except the owner of the shop, who was forty-ish. As with most businesses, the peculiarities of the culture were set at the top. The general manager and the baker were ex-fiancés and the owner of the shop (I’ve now lapsed into gossip, but it’s been years so I think it’s fine) obsessed over the possibility of their reunification. It was, for whatever twisted reason, his dream. He would scheme in this direction, get others involved, set up parties and invite just the two of them. It was nuts.
The social currency at any café is free drinks and the free drinks policy tells you a lot about a place. At this café, you got free coffee if you were the roommate or sexual partner of anyone who worked there. You could be a present sexual or past sexual partner; future or prospective sexual partners had to wait their turn. This wasn’t written down anywhere but this was how we did it and everyone agreed to the righteousness of this policy which was often interpreted broadly to include the sexual partners of roommates or the roommates of sexual partners. This didn’t tank the business because, since the theme of the place was no boundaries, lots of people on the team were each other’s roommates or sexual partners anyways, which limited the pool of people off payroll who drank for free.
When I started the job, I was the only woman on staff who dated other women. I was just months out of the closet and jazzed to have a new gig where I could be gay right from the start. Since I was one of the few employees who did not share a complicated romantic history with anyone else on staff, I also felt above the fray, privately and pleasingly superior. And then we hired Arial, who went from straight to bicurious to gay within a few weeks. We slept together and became girlfriends shortly after that.
And shortly after that, she was polyamorous. In tears on my couch, we discussed an open relationship. I was not excited. My hesitancy surprised her. She brought up that thing that happened with Chris. What thing?, I asked.
She looked perplexed. The time I called you from his house?, she nudged.
Oh, right.
Chris was another barista who worked with us. There was one night between when Arial and I had sex for the first time and when we became girlfriends when she called me from Chris’ apartment. I was out with friends and left the table to take the call. She was crying. I asked what was wrong. She told me she had gone to Chris’ apartment the previous evening; she had been upset and didn’t want to be alone, so she’d him asked if she could come over. I spent the night., she said.
Okay, I said. That makes sense.
You’re not mad?
I was not mad. I didn’t understand what Arial meant to imply, which was that they’d hooked up. Chris lived in another part of town so I thought it made sense that she spent the night there for logistical reasons—better to make that commute in the morning. And I also thought, and expressed, that it was nice that Chris could be there to support her when she was feeling low. But why are you still upset?, I asked.
Well, I feel a lot better now, actually, she said. I guess I just wanted you to know.
It wasn’t that she had done anything wrong—Arial and I were not quite official when she “spent the night” with Chris—but, as she explained weeks later, she’d worried I’d be jealous. She didn’t want to mess up our new thing, which is why she was crying. She thought my response was quite evolved.
At the time, I was light on romantic and sexual experience. If I ever spent the night someplace before Arial, it wasn’t for sex. Spending the night connoted sleepovers to me, of the warm and fuzzy birthday party variety. The other barrier to my understanding was that I could not grasp Chris as a sexually appealing individual. He was a good looking guy. But he was a guy. I knew Arial had been attracted to men before we slept together—and I knew many people were attracted to men!—so, it wasn’t that I forgot, only that I couldn’t extrapolate on my own.
As part of exploring polyamory, Arial wanted to keep kissing Chris and to continue kissing me. We decided we would try an open relationship but that we wouldn’t be girlfriends anymore. I was sad, not mad. Well, I was a little mad at Arial. Was I mad at Chris? I wasn’t sure.
Chris was my friend. We were all friends at that café. The most satisfying part of working in coffee, what I really miss, is how you get to know the people you work with so well. There are the slow hours when you are washing dishes and bagging tea and backwashing the espresso machine, all stuff hands can do on their own, so you talk and talk and talk with your co-workers. The only aim of the conversation is to fill time, so the topics are eclectic, personal and impersonal: childhood, world history, what everybody dreamed about last night. And then there is a big rush and all your bodies get pressed into a single organism—literally, at this first shop where I worked, the space behind the counter was so cramped that during a rush, three of us were touching, one person facing the customers at the register, another working the espresso bar with their shoulder pressed into the register person’s back and a third in charge of setting up the drinks and running orders for the kitchen. This person was, every thirty seconds or so, reaching to touch the person at the register or at the bar, a light hand on the shoulder blade, Behind you. Behind you.
When you do this with your friends, it feels amazing. When you do it with someone you sleep with, it is almost indistinguishable from sex. When Arial and I worked a rush together, I felt like my skin was made of glitter. She would say, Behind you, and her hand would land on my ass.
I had the opening shift the day after Arial and I decided to open up and declassify our relationship. Chris was on the schedule too. I saw his face and realized: Actually, I was mad at him. It wasn’t a rational feeling. It burned much lower down in the body. I managed to stay pleasant through our early tasks and then the morning rush arrived. Chris was at the register; I was on the espresso bar; we pressed together as the customers pressed towards us. A few orders in, I looked over my left shoulder at him. A thought crashed into my mind: I will kill you. It was just like that, in the form of a sentence. I snapped my head back towards the espresso bar. I will kill you???? That was nuts!
Immediate recalibration was necessary. I told Arial I was not capable of an open relationship, so we had to break up. That sucks, she said and we both cried. I’d brought all the books she loaned me back over to her apartment in a paper bag, which I left in the hallway when I came in, since I thought I should explain myself gently and a bag of her effects would’ve made the headline clear. I fetched the bag from the hallway and we sat on her bed with the paper bag between us and cried some more.
It would have been awkward to continue working together but right when we broke up, an anti-Arial faction formed. The baker and her best friend, the assistant baker, had a falling out early in Arial’s tenure and Arial had, in the wake of that conflict, said unfavorable things about the baker in support of the assistant baker, a politically fatal move. The baker had major pull with the boss, so, as soon as the baker and the assistant baker were friends again, and the baker got wind of Arial’s public statements, Arial was excised. It wasn’t fair. But, the baker was the baker. She made all the muffins and the scones and even the bread for the sandwiches. Arial was just another barista; there were lots of us.
And I didn’t kill Chris. Never thought about it again, thank goodness. I haven’t talked to that guy in years and years. The last conversation I remember us having, he told me the whole plot of Pet Sematary while we were behind the counter. I hadn’t seen it yet and then I didn’t need to after that. I think the moral of the movie is supposed to be that you shouldn’t try to get back what you’ve lost. But another way of looking at it, and this is a bit of a spoiler, so cover your eyes if that matters to you, is that whatever you bury, it’ll come back to find you in a different form. After the whole incident, I went back to thinking I wasn’t a jealous person. The delusion did not persist forever.
***All names are changed so as not to be overtly tacky.
If you like this, you might enjoy the latest episode of Kirby and Hart Online. The set-up is that Kirby, who is super online, tells me what I’m missing by being almost entirely off the internet. Our latest episode, out 4/10, is Lesbian Internet Drama Part One. We are on Spotify & iTunes.
I also made a promotional playlist inspired by our conversation. Here it is: