March 2011 Archives

I see them with my mental eye, a fine and sharp thing of great utility and acuity that's fairly wide and whitely open these days:

The arc of her bare shoulder catches the light that stripes through the hotel's vertical blinds and into the darkness of the room. Vegas light, sodium arc edged with red. The white sheet clings to her back, curving upwards at her hip, and the curve rises even higher because her knees are drawn up towards her chest. Red hair flows onto the pillow.

And I can smell it: the conditioned air of the room, dry and colored with that ever-so-slightly freon tinge of plastic, the scent of commercial carpeting, recent paint a penumbra around the olfactory package of the scene. Having recently reread Jitterbug Perfume, scent and its mnemonic powers are fresh in my mind.

"It was good, wasn't it?" she says.

"Yeah. Yeah, it was good."

"But it's over now." It wasn't a question. "Isn't it." That wasn't a question, either.

Feeling it as well, now, as expressed in his posture and in hers, both equivalent, she on her side, folded in on herself, he on the edge of the bed, naked in the dark, his shoulders lowered with something like defeat, the gulf of the mattress between them. The two of them exist for me, their interactions within these precise moments of truth and realization illuminating the potentialities of the familiar. There are notes here, notes forming melodies that we all know.

"Yeah," he said. "I think so."

"You mean you don't know?"

"No, I know."

"So why'd you say that?"

"I don't know."

He does know, of course he knows: sometimes, even when it should be over, even when it is over, the bare fact of connection remains, that pure mammalian contact that we're loathe to give up, because once it's gone, there's never any certainty that it'll ever come again. Other times, that last little thread becomes a lifeline to the future, but it's easy to miss, and he's missing it now. It's drifting right past him. So I look in on them, with my wide mental eye, and I feel for them.

He stands up in the dark, and shuffles to the end of the bed, finding his pants with his feet, the belt clanking as he pulls them on. Behind him, she remains motionless on the bed, curled and thinly-sheltered. The sheet moves as she breathes. He can still feel her. "We had a good run," he says, and bends down to retrieve his shirt. He puts it on inside out, and buttons two buttons before he realizes it. "We don't hate each other."

"No, we don't."

"Lots of people don't get that. We're ahead of the game." He turns the shirt right side out, finishes buttoning it, sits on the end of the bed to pull on his socks and shoes.

"I didn't think we were playing a game."

She's beautiful, in all sorts of ways.

And he's being an idiot. I'd tell him if I could.

He doesn't say anything else before he leaves the room, not looking back, letting a wide wedge of light from the hallway spill across her bare shoulders, her red hair. The wedge narrows, becoming a thin beam just before the door closes and latches behind him. He's left his cardkey on the dresser, next to her purse, and when he has that final moment of doubt, and turns back, his hand on the door handle, it's too late: he could knock, but the effort of it is somehow too much. She might not answer. The flow has been interrupted. For a moment, he remains frozen in place, as though his hand has melted into the polished brass. Then it drops to his side, and he turns away.

It's a funny thing, really, because I know what he doesn't: if he had left his cardkey in his pocket after they'd entered the room earlier that evening, in that instant, with the door handle still in his grasp, he would have remembered it, and before he was fully aware of his actions he'd have slipped it in. The light on the lock would have flickered green. He would've opened the door, and gone back inside, nudged by the narrative.

But he didn't, and he doesn't, and so I watch him walk down the hall, towards the elevator, away from the room, and away from her.

It's not every day that I get to report on the actual happy firing of neurons, you know. I mean, I'm talking honest-to-Isis happiness, here, and still you can't take your hands off a slutty little bronze ballerina that probably isn't even French, let alone a Degas. Why I let you drag me to these yard sales at eight o'clock in the foggy stupid morning is beyond me. I don't care how rich the people are in the Montecito mountains, no one is going to set million-dollar artwork out with the tea cozies and the George Foreman grills.

So, yes: equilibrium, Gerald. Balance! It has arrived, which is actually too passive. Better: I've achieved it! I couldn't even tell you how, although I have my suspicions. If I didn't know any better I'd suspect mania. But--having had my share of it--I know mania when I see it, and this is not that. It's a groove. It's a flow. It's timeless and irreverent and purple and bedecked with golden trim. It's the best pillow ever.

Hard to describe I suppose, and when you're reaching for stuffed brocade as a metaphor for your internal mental and spiritual state it's quite possible that something's gone terribly wrong and soon the spiders will start coming out of the walls. But I doubt that. I doubt that very much. I doubt it so much that were it to happen I wouldn't believe it, and that's healthy, isn't it? Look how well I'm doing!

None of which matters much to you, apparently, because you think you're fondling something special when what you've got is a bronze plated knock-off tart in a tutu.

I'm making breakfast. Eggs Benedict! I'll bring it to the loggia. You can join me when you've finished molesting your "artwork."