Some Men Eat Steak
The abuse of greatness is when it disjoins remorse from power.
— William Shakespeare
Oh, power, with its Medusa gaze! Whoever has once looked into its face can no longer look away. He remains enchanted and captive. Whoever has once tasted the intoxicating pleasure of power and command can no longer give it up.
— Stefan Zweig
I. The Curtain Rises
Few things are more pathetic than a lovesick nerd chasing a beautiful woman he was clearly never meant to have.
Max knew this.
He knew it every time he sent Katya another wall of text he considered a masterpiece of eloquence. Every time he called just to ask how she was doing. Every time he posted some wounded, philosophical status update and hoped she would somehow understand it was about her.
She understood.
That was the problem.
Over time, when his lofty eloquence went unappreciated, the grand messages gradually shrank into curt epithets accusing the object of his affections of being easy. Yet even after this “final” chord, poems might arrive as apologies. And they would be genuinely good poems, perhaps even commissioned from some rhyming friend. In response, he might receive a message like this: “Fuck off, you freak! You’ve driven me completely insane, you asshole.”
And that response would express, more accurately and more honestly than anything else, the true reason they were not together.
In our story, however, there will be no girls that crude.
For Max, Katya was what a prime cut of tenderloin behind the glass of a delicatessen is to a scruffy mongrel: an unattainable dream about to go to someone else.
Imagine for a moment the wordless thoughts of that miserable animal who will NEVER taste that delicious steak, doomed only to watch as someone else effortlessly claims his dream. Unfair? Pitiful?
Now try to picture what the steak itself must be thinking — ladies, forgive the author for such a comparison — under the hungry stare of a mongrel who cannot even afford to pay for it, let alone steal it.
Max knew full well that his persistence deserved a few choice words. He marveled at Katya’s restraint, assuming that either her upbringing or her conservatory training prevented her from letting her inner bitch off the leash. She simply did not react to his drunken, crude messages.
Katya was one of those women who did not need words to send a man packing. After all, every one of her admirers was already there by default, until she herself deigned to rescue him.
After years of youthful brooding over his place in the male social pyramid, Max decided that, since he could not rise above the foundation, the best move was not to compete in the game at all. He had not retreated into the intellectual sphere by choice. He had fled there, finding refuge among books.
For a while, he managed to replace women with fantasies alone. But sooner or later, almost every nerd gets knocked out of his fantasy world by some very real woman.
Max’s first girlfriend was a moderately attractive divorcée from Mamba, a dating site, who tried to teach the young student the intricacies of sex. The sensation of a real vagina was a revelation to him. It did not, of course, match what he had only dreamed of before, but it was far more pleasant than a defrosted and violated chicken.
He wrote poems and gave chocolates to his first Dulcinea, until he learned she was teaching those same intricacies to more than just him.
Then came a relationship with one plain colleague, the only woman in the entire office who gave him nocturnal emissions. But when it actually came down to it, she merely faked moans and gasps, trying to play the young Madonna in bed, which made everything dreary and dull. During sex, she kept repeating how much she wanted little “Maxies,” and eventually Max fled, changing jobs.
Then, for two years — not counting a couple of prostitutes — he masturbated miserably until he was caught by an attractive, plump girl who looked like “Cheerful Hilda.” It is very difficult to refuse a woman sex without making an enemy if she is the one who initiated. Max did not try. And he did not regret it.
That woman fucked with talent.
Some people have an ear for music or a nose for money; others, just by being in bed, can make their partner shake with lust. She had smooth skin that always smelled good. Hilda’s only flaw was that she nagged him nonstop, as if trapped in perpetual PMS.
That, essentially, was the extent of his meager experience, until a former classmate invited him to a birthday party where, to Max’s astonishment, some thoroughly drunk girl started making out with him and even let him touch her breast once through her thick sweater.
She did it, Max assumed, simply out of boredom and because it was dark. And all the better candidates for such games were already taken.
That was how he met Katya, who forced him once again to play by the rules of the male pyramid.
After that night, Max took her to movies, cafés, and even restaurants for several months. But throughout that entire time, Katya never again let him kiss her, except on the cheek.
Long ago, a woman whose computer he had fixed at her place told him, right before slamming the door, that the whole trouble with nerds was not that they did not get any — it was that they did not take it.
After several months of courting Katya, already desperate, Max suggested they go to Egypt together and rent a luxury room for two. At his expense, naturally. He planned to take out a loan, because a fresh grad had about as much money as fur on a castrated Sphynx cat’s balls.
“Max, we’re just friends,” she said with condescending calm.
“We could practice friendship there,” Max tried to joke, his stomach knotting from desperation and humiliation.
“Max... I’ve started seeing someone.”
And yesterday’s would-be alpha male, who had at least once, however briefly and however partially, gained access to the female body, turned into a keyboard-scratching philosopher with access only to his own hide and a bottle of valerian drops.
In this world, some men eat steak.
Others only stare at it pitifully.
The very next day, having tucked his balls deep inside himself, he started calling friends to get a soothing dose of: “She’s not worth it.” Or: “She’ll come crawling back on her knees soon enough.”
But illusions are no less harmful than drugs.
A week passed, then another, and for some reason, no one came crawling. Moreover, no one answered his texts about a forgotten valuable classical music disc.
Each time he heard the long unanswered rings, Max’s heart pounded in panic, while his imagination painted scenarios that would shame the lead screenwriters at Private Media Group or even Vivid Entertainment. And Katya appeared in those scenarios, but not with Max, which made them resemble an obsessive neurotic film impossible to switch off.
His friends were already answering less often, trying to avoid conversations about his suffering. They thought the matter should have long been settled. Everything was clear: she was a bitch, therefore there was nothing to grieve over.
And when Max had finally worn out all his friends with his dick-wringing confessions, he was left completely alone.
At that moment, Max asked himself whether he would want to deal with someone like himself and realized he would be suitable only as a drinking companion — someone to have beer with while cursing all the bastards in the world.
Around that same time, he picked up a thematic hobby.
Every evening after work, where he stayed late trying to distract himself from good and therefore agonizing memories, Max headed straight to some cheap bar. He would get wasted there, then go home to wake up with a brutal hangover, and then spend the agonizingly long workday trying once again to write code, for which he was paid at mid-level programmer rates.
He might have succeeded in flushing his kidneys down the toilet while wallowing in emotional suffering, if one evening a strange guy had not sat down next to melancholy Max at the bar.
They got drunk together, and Max, following his usual script, poured out his soul to grateful ears.
“God... if only they’d invent a pill to cure heartbreak after a breakup,” Max finished and stared blankly into space past his companion, who until then had mostly listened.
“There’s another remedy. A better one,” the stranger broke the silence after a minute.
And the stranger told him an intriguing story.
He said he had contacted a certain firm that guaranteed one hundred percent results in all matters of love. According to him, after using their services, within a month he had gotten back his beautiful wife, who now did not give a damn about money and fulfilled every wish of his at the snap of his fingers.
“All wishes? Really?” Max asked with a drunken squint, waving away cigarette smoke.
“Absolutely all. Any wishes,” the stranger nodded matter-of-factly, returning to his beer.
Max shook his head, chalking it all up to the fantasies of a pseudo-macho born from beer bubbles.
But then, as if to prove the stranger’s boastful story, a very beautiful girl ran up to them. Looking only at the storyteller and paying no attention to Max, she started wailing:
“Borya, there you are, you bastard! I’ve been looking everywhere for you. You don’t answer your phone, and I’m losing my mind! Let’s go home, honey. I’ll make us dinner.”
Borya looked lazily at his wife, who was smiling nervously into his eyes.
“I’ll give you an erotic massage,” the girl added, playfully biting her lip.
Judging by her behavior, this woman was ready to perform an erotic massage — and not only that — right there in the bar, just so Borya would always remain HER Borya. Her eyes were pleading.
And Borya, squeezing out a smirk, pushed a business card from that very firm toward Max and said:
“Call them, dude. And you’ll never again look like a deflated, shriveled dick that didn’t get any.”
They left.
Max carried that card in his wallet for another week before finally deciding to call the number on it.
That call began this whole story...
