Page 54 - WTP VOl.VII#5

Tracy decides she can no longer love Andrés. It is impossible.
A list of reasons disqualifying Andrés from such love: The way he talks to dogs like they are people. The way he smacks at his thigh when he laughs. How he holds his breath while driving past graveyards. Is always letting the moon tell him what to do.
What else? Oh, right.
And ever since Andrés has run out of contacts and decided to just wear his glasses, Tracy laments, her heart an open sore, he’s become more and more of a Quadrant 2, and less and less of a Quadrant 4.
Oh, God. Tracy. I’m so sorry, says Doug, offering a sympathetic eye. His other eye, an enflamed pink clam beneath an eyepatch.
Some personal differences are merely too vast to be reconciled, says Brenda, a lifelong Quadrant 1. Brenda, whose condiments of choice include mayonnaise,
ranch dressing and sour cream, is an elementary school teacher. In fact, Brenda, Doug and Tracy are all elemen- tary school teachers. All three are eating their respective lunches in the teacher’s lounge, precisely now.
But does Andrés still, at least, like hot sauce?
Tracy shrugs, depressed. Her bag of Geronimo’s Heat Stroke Habanero Popcorn she bought from the faculty vending machine isn’t even that spicy. Meanwhile Doug, on her left, can hardly breathe.
Who knows anymore, Tracy says. Lately he’s been putting Ketchup on just about everything.
Oh, no. No, no. Ketchup? I’m telling you now, advises Doug. Run for the hills.
Brenda, obscured in Doug’s eyepatched periphery, glares at him in unabashed disgust.
Who could ever love him? Doug, whose condiment of choice was butter. Butter, like a child. Even his third graders knew better. Captain Butters, they called him, the Butter-Loving Pirate. Buttersticks left on his desk, in his chair, melting on his windshield.
Brenda did once, love Doug. Now, it was impossible.
It isn’t as if Tracy intended for this—her life, still love- less, at the tender age of thirty-four. Ask her and she’ll
tell you, the choice has never been hers to make. Every past relationship of hers, without a moment’s notice, has run its course off a cliff. One second on solid ground, a long, bright future ahead, the next, Wile E. Coyote’d, plummeting down to earth.
There is some solace, at least, she self-consoles, in having a definite reason for why she and Andrés are bound to fail. A high-flying, gleaming-red flag to point to and say this is why. All the others left her treading in grey for months, years.
But here it is: Andrés has crossed Quadrants.
Nothing can be done. Love is now impossible. The two are not meant, as it is said, to be.
Tracy carves a knife deep into the lunch table’s un- derbelly: FUCKASS
Coach Huff, eating alone at a nearby table, calls a quick Time-Out.
What in the? he says. Ketchup? Quadrants?
A shared glance between the three school teachers. Who could expect the P.E. coach to stay up-to-date on current sociological theories assessing the predictive factors for long-term, interpersonal compatibility between romantic partners?
Of course, he doesn’t know. Of course, he’s been di- vorced.
According to the Four Quadrants of Compatibility, Brenda starts to explain, sketching on a napkin, each individual in a population may be subdivided into one of four categories: Quadrant 1 consists of those who don’t wear contacts and don’t like hot sauce, Quadrant 2 are those who also don’t wear contacts but do like hot sauce, Quadrant 3 are those who do wear contacts but don’t like hot sauce, while those in Quadrant 4, such as Tracy, says Brenda, gesturing towards Tracy, though maybe no longer her fiancé, Andrés, are those who both do wear contacts and do like hot sauce. Understand?
Coach Huff, eyeing the sketched napkin, takes a bite of his sandwich and shrugs.
My God. Must all jocks be so heartless?
Tracy is a Quadrant 4! shouts Doug. Andrés was a Quadrant 4 but is now a Quadrant 2, maybe a Quad-
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The Four Quadrants
stephen WaCk