"Anyong Haseyo," said the man.
"English, please. I'm an American still getting used to kimchee with every meal."
The man chuckled. "So am I. From what state?"
"The Midwest mostly but I've been all over — born in Missouri but my father had to travel a lot."
"You look a bit agitated."
"I'm trying to write on my book. I guess I am annoyed at feeling annoyed."
"About what?
"The noise, I guess. I was trying to get away from noise. That's why I came here initially."
"To a ball game?"
"Strange, huh? Well the bleachers weren't full when I came."
"It isn't exactly a library. So are you saying that your feelings are mostly agitation or being agitated about being agitated?"
"The latter. Have you ever felt that mood where you just want to slap total strangers on their heads for not being introverts. There are just too many of them and none of them are doing anything constructive with their time. And then you sit there in this crazy mood you begin to blame them for being a bunch of mice breeding in a small cage and causing everybody to walk on top of each other."
He laughed. "Well, nothing exactly like that but we all have weird ideas going through our heads."
"That's exactly right. One minute a guy might see a woman in red pass by and for some reason he doesn't like her because she is wearing red. It is really pathetic. It is like a given guy is built with a primitive impulse to judge people instantly and to dislike someone for not being more like himself lest they be of a different belligerent tribe. I imagine the Lees and the Parks in ancient Korean history hated each other and back then they would be able to distinguish physical traits that were the least little bit different and judge friend or foe instantly."
"Maybe back then there was a use for that type of thinking but now belligerent ideas just come and go if we don't try to catch them. If you just let them pass they won't define you."
"I like that. Thanks. Maybe it is from not knowing the Korean language well enough. I hear their babble and it sometimes sounds like a drill in my eardrums."
The man laughed. "You are cute."
"Thanks. So are you."
"What do you do here?"
"Just teach English."
"What about you."
"Work for the Korean Herald."
Candymen copulating everywhere, their women and their offspring rife, each family wrapped in its monad, and each monad making up the celled outline of the lonely fervor of the monstrous universe as her febrile imagination conceptualized it; and there she was defying her wish to run away from an obsession to paint something seemingly important that was as enzymes on the hours of her life. She stood on a small ladder slavishly painting on the gigantic canvas in her garage as if this one obsessive idea could finally hold the elusive truth once and for all on why she, her 6 billion contemporaries, and all previous generations had bodies so easily worn away and existed so briefly within this recycling of life and as to why they rotated about the sun like hostages in a driverless bus that incessantly moved around the city square without any purpose. As she stared at her creation she ruminated that nature was so foolishly wasteful in formulating these tenuous beings who spent a fourth or more of their lives trying to acquire sufficient knowledge so that they could begin to think for themselves, and thereafter most of their energies in copulatory obsessions so that they could replicate new know-nothings. And yet if we were just cells in this mad, growing universe, she thought, none of it mattered anyway.
But at 2:30 p.m. she took her usual respite from her creative labors to meet the man with the unmemorable name at one of the less bourgeois coffee shops, not within the Starbuck franchise. She knew that in part she came here regularly not so much because she wanted to understand a Russian man's mentality or friendship, but to summersault from the diving board of another's ideas. For it was by this that she could free herself from lonely stagnation and the frustration of attempting to find genius from within. This sense of being alive was only possible when two or more were present (action being the body of all things) and so she came here to spring into life that was only in consort with another. After sipping her marginally bourgeois coffee gained from the exploitation of poor South American mountain farmers and their factory worker counterparts, she showed him a slide that she had taken of her inchoate work but then interrupted him as he tried to view it against the brightest part of the shop's light. "Do you think Michael knows you meet me here?" she asked sheepishly. They had been meeting there for a month without straying away from issues but now here she was focusing on their friendship like a weak female who went under the label of a woman. She felt that her question was a petty one formed by those who could not see themselves beyond their relationships and, embarrassed by inclinations that lowered her to mere mortals, she had been barely able to ask her question.
"Do you want him to not know?" he asked.
Her face cringed. "You mean, would I care to keep him from knowing this. Oh, I don't know." She shook her head indifferently and then smiled. "It isn't an issue for me — just wondering."
"It's not, it isn't important for me either. I'm nobody — just an investor. I didn't even invest all that much. I only go to his fitness center to lift weights. I am — how do you say — one of his more silent of silent partners; and I involve myself — I don't involve myself in his business or his personal business and hope he isn't involving himself in mine. My life for now is a lot of books in my graduate studies and not so many dates. "
"Good for you — I mean for both things" she said. "Women and business might make a man look good on the outside but it's cancer on the real human being inside. You don't need a woman."
He was sullen for a moment. "You and I are just friends anyway," he said irritably and avoided looking into her face.
"Yes, but there is no 'just.' Friendship is the only thing that has the possibility of being pure—people who enjoy being in each other's company and admire each other without thinking about the advantages and opportunities to be gained in a merger, people who aren't needing the presence of some partner to get the addictive high of this love rush, and all the rest of it." She looked toward the front of the coffee shop where a teenager was squeaking the soles of his tennis shoes against the floor while he waited for his order.
"That's a god awful sound," she said.
"Do you think God is awful?" he asked.
"I said that the squeaking sound that guy is making is god awful- 'God awful' is a colloquial expression. It just means very bad. The noise of those shoes is incessant." She smiled awkwardly at her irascibility, her innate peculiarities that weren't so pleasant and difficult to part from. "I'll turn the tables on you if I can. Do you think God is awful?"
"I do, if He exists!"
"You go to church."
"With my sister, brother-in-law, and their family. We go on occasion. We aren't believers. Catholic Mass is similar to Russian Orthodox services and it makes my sister feel like she is back in St. Petersburg."
"Not Christian or atheist, but a devout church going non-believer." She inadvertently mumbled the assessment of the man that she had meant to be an internal summary. She paused for a second and then decided to disclose the rest. "And one with a penchant for investments despite being one of the last vestiges of Russian communism."
He didn't grasp her concept since it was muddled in large vocabulary that he did not understand; but he felt that he was being criticized. "Do you not like something about me?"
"No, why would you think I'd feel that way? I like the mix. Still, let me be the Devil's advocate and ask what right you, a man, have in judging this potential God."
"What?"
"You said that you think God is awful if he exists. Tell me, now that you are in this one nation under god, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all and the rest of this gunk how you, a mortal, indict this god. I mean you are a myopic person as we all are so what right have you or I to judge this bigger entity whom we presume to have created the two of us and everything else. Surely this God envisions a greater picture? Am I making sense—what right has a little man in judging a God who might understand the bigger picture on why things are the way that they are. Also, as a sociable animal, don't you feel the need to follow the herd? In this country the herd eats from the Christianity trough— the Bible is like ground up bone marrow and the least edible parts of already decayed carcasses but these Americans devour it nonetheless. Don't you want to follow this God unquestioningly and eat the fables that are thrown in your trough?"
He guessed what she meant and laughed. "Not really. I am a human being, a rational creature, a creature that looks at evidence and thinks about it…I assess it."
"Yes, yes; I agree. Only by turning off our intelligence do we actually believe in such things."
"I don't understand. Are you a believer or a non-believer?"
"Well, certainly a non-believer; but I don't adhere to anything including non-believing. I let ideas whisk across me, weathering my obdurate convictions. What I am today is me now and what I am tomorrow is me then. There may be a God that is the cause of it all or some large thing that a human brain can't conceptualize enough to peg it with a label and if so I want an impression of the real one as much as I can and not the anthropomorphic god that society is trying to install into my head."
"I see," he said.
"Do you?" She giggled.
He smiled and then sunk morosely within deep contemplation. "I was quickly looking through a Newsweek at a newsstand while I came here — sorry, while I was coming here. Let me start again. While I was coming here I glanced at a Newsweek."
"Bravo. Finally, good grammar!," she bantered.
He smiled morosely. "The article said that in the Democratic Republic of Congo a door of a cargo plane fell open. The article said that most of the soldiers and their families who were inside were-" He could not think of the words so he used a gesture.
"Sucked out?" said Gabriele colloquially.
"Did you learn of it?"
She thought of it for a few seconds: the consternation and yet cognizant beings nonetheless understanding what was happening to them and their families as they freefell into the abyss, the wailing and the flailing of limbs, the sense of being a morsel swallowed into an atmosphere that was so smothering in its vastness, the sense of complete hopelessness, the horrific winds, the passing through layers of clouds with the specious illusion of nets, falling concurrent with the rain, each human being hopefully experiencing a heart attack or stroke before the stroke of death, and the plops of red raindrops flying into the air at impact. She knew that the world had not been gently patted together and shaped like a piece of clay. It had been smelted in violence and chance. This being so, so it was with an individual life. "How horrible!" she gasped. "No, I didn't read anything about it." She slowly lifted her face and resurrected her sunken eyes. She even feigned a smile. "I am bad that way: I'd rather listen to classical music and read a book than know the news. Knowing how violent the world is does violence to one's need to believe that life is essentially good."
"If God didn't care about those people why should I think that he cares about me?"
"Absolutely. I agree." She tried to extricate herself from morbid thoughts by altering back to a more frivolous topic. "Do you agree that that squeaking is God awful!"
"I do. My nephew does that all the time, you know, squeaking his tennis shoes. You can scold him but he doesn't stop it. Squeaking tennis shoes, playing with balls all day and most of the night, running around — I think motion gives him and all boys self-confidence."
"So this kid is squeaking — "
"To prove to himself that he exists."
"Yes; but if a boy never stands still — and this one would annoy virtually anyone he encounters with feet like fingernails on a blackboard — he will never think beyond his own little movements in the movements and changes of this world. Furthermore he'll never conceptualize permanence and truth and his ideas will be myopic and short term. Even if there aren't solid Platonic ideas out in Never- Never land and all ideas are just attempts at understanding what passes through the senses, standing back and contemplating life at least allows a person to think about the various perspectives of an issue before making a decision. It improves the ability to make good decisions. My theory is that for every twenty minutes of inordinate movement that a boy or a teenage boy carries out he should be put in shackles and fetters in a closet for the other forty."
He smiled admiringly at her words despite not understanding many of them.
She simplified her flurry of words. "Maybe movement gives a boy self-confidence that he exists but unless he is put in chains and kept in a closet half the day, he will think that there is nothing else beyond movement."
"Is there?" he asked.
"I don't know," she confessed.
"Do you do that to your son — put him in chains?" He chuckled.
"Coming soon," she kidded. "Aren't I right to contain males and movement?" she nudged him with her fist and then tucked his hand into her own.
"As our Russian poet, Alexander Pushkin says it — if I can quote what I memorized in an English translation, 'How smoothly, rapidly, and freely the sleigh glides in the moonlight when you are with a friend and when, warm and fresh beneath her sable fur, flushed and trembling, she squeezes your hand.'"
"Lovely sweet talk but it won't help you. You know what I want to do? I want to put you in chains too. Come on." She put their mugs into his hands and led him to an outside table. There, she had him put the mugs down and led him into a luscious and verdant yard mixed with yellow dandelions. Even though it was late autumn, the climate was arraying the landscape with warm rains and the dandelions of April. Seated on the ground she tied together a makeshift flower bracelet that soon became handcuffs.
"And what is that supposed to do to me," he asked
"Maybe slow you down a bit. Nothing much since it is made from flowers. It is just a reminder that there are flowers out there to be seen."
"As Dostoevsky's character, Razumikhin says 'You can talk the most mistaken rubbish to me and if it is your own, I will embrace it. It is better to tell your own lies than somebody else's truth.'"
She laughed, put the back of her hand thoughtfully under her chin, and compressed her lips into a smile. She felt rejuvenated in this exchange of ideas that were as tangible, palpable, and succulent as sucking on lemon drops. They left and walked into a nearby park where the fountains splashed water into the air making a rainbow.
"Are you still planning to go back to St. Petersburg?" she asked.
"Yes, just for a couple months."
"Are you still planning to go back next week?"
"Actually, I changed the date to tomorrow."
"So soon? Well, I'm sure you will be glad to see your family."
Yes, but I'll miss our times together. I'll hurry back as quickly as I can."
When she finally left the coffee shop she headed toward the nearest Wal-Mart, the shopping oasis for the underdeveloped bourgeois. Within this desert oasis she bought some sheets and, in an aisle for Halloween products, a witch's hat and some green gunk from which to soil her face. In the car she applied the paint and cut holes in one of the sheets. When she drove up to the house, she honked on the horn repeatedly until the boy finally came out of the house begrudgingly.
She rolled down the window. "Did you lock the door?" she asked.
"Yeah," he said, and got in the car lethargically.
"All of them?"
"All of them. They're locked," he said petulantly.
"Do I need to check?"
"No, quit bothering me!" he said insolently.
"Poor Mr. Petulant—always doubted and examined in these unjust inquisitions. Okay, I won't doubt you this time; but I must tell you this: in the event that we are robbed I will hand you over to the man with the unmemorable name with an unburdened conscience. He has connections with slave labor camps in Siberia from the way I understand things."
"I know that you don't understand anything. You are lying. There aren't any of these connections."
"Lying, never! Fibbing, maybe or maybe not. How do you, Mr. Petulant, know whatI know?"
"How do you know that I don't know what you know?" he countered. It was an old argument that she had excavated from one of the many miscellaneous parables in the thickets of pages that comprised a Chinese literature anthology; however, she had never radiated the enlightenment of her findings onto him. Such was the brilliance of an original thought; and so her hope for him was restored. Strangely, this argument seemed like a means to a new dimension albeit a golden key to the nihilistic abyss; and she was a radiating mommy for the fact that he had coughed up such an instrument out of the static charge of one thought banging against another one—the being incessantly comparing, contrasting, and categorizing various thoughts silently inside itself. "To think that Benjamin Franklin brought down lightning with a key and Nathaniel has made a key out of lightening!" she thought facetiously. She smiled and reprimanded him banteringly. "Well, Adagio, you didn't tell me what you wanted to be or I would have bought a costume."
"I don't want to BE anything. Trick or treating is for kids and I don't want any of that stuff anymore."
"So, because you didn't make your request, all we have for you is a tacky sheet. You will be a ghost; and you see that I'm a witch—always have been and always will be." She ignored his complaint. She knew that a ten year old stood on the back of his nine year old carcass and that a being's development involved using all former selves of earlier ages as steps toward these adult pleasures of lust, greed, movement, and conquest. She knew that condemning the innate discontent within her son, society, or to some degree within herself seemed as mad and railing ramblings of a madwoman and so she chose to have no reaction whatsoever. As an artist she believed that her mission was to thread a new logical relationship of old ideas or facts if not formulate new ideas themselves, and to add some flash and color to the ordinary. Whether or not she was marginally successful at altering perspectives, one thing was certainly not within her power at all. She could never adjust the base instincts of one's physiognomy. All she could do with the latter would be to accept it as if it were the third, dragging leg. Cutting off this limb, with its major artery, would be certain death if done to another or society at large. Base instincts were the guardians of the species. Selfishness to suck out the bone marrow of life, survive, and fulfill one's pleasures were the means by which this species perpetuated.
"I just want to finish my video game."
"Your brain will do some serious rotting with much more of that shoot and kill stuff. With this outing only your teeth will rot."
She was reminded of a few weeks ago when she had taken him to a professional baseball game which Michael had promised to him before this dissolution of family. She barely managed to acquire tickets by offering to pay exorbitant sums if the ticket office were able to get them into a couple seats; and yet this Adagio, Nathaniel, this Mr. Petulant, was saturnine the whole time. "What's your problem?" she asked as they were leaving the parking lot following the game. "You shouldn't be the one I go with. You don't even like these games," he said; and, true as it was, there was nothing for her to do but stuff the remainder of the hot dog into her mouth and drive home.
She drove him into more affluent areas and took him from door to door as if he were five years old, and as if she were trying to make herself that age in the process. She too had a plastic jack-o-lantern pail. She too got chocolate thrust into the pile within her pail. Experiences accompanying him in a childhood that had been robbed from her, for whatever embarrassment they caused him, were a million times better than being a mother waiting on the sidelines with vicarious yearnings. The quest of a chocolate mendicant, a ghoulish monk seeking alms, was leading her into the simple pleasures that were the foundation for appreciating life, from disengaging out of one's limited perspectives and hopeful adult futuristic conquests, and to be in awe of the entity. And yet with each new house his aversion to say, "Trick or treat?" increased as with his tacit animadversion of his mother. House after house there were chocolate benefactors and benefactresses with similar wisecracks: "You are a little big and old to be trick or treating, aren't you — I can't see how old your ghost friend is but he seems a bit tall too." As much as he tried to suppress it, his loathing of her was ready to disgorge from his mouth like vomit.
An hour into this childish foray, she still did not have any Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and so she told him that with ten or fifteen more houses there would be a probability of acquiring her favorite brand of candy. Somewhere after the fifth extra house he felt a full abhorrence for the witch who put spells on men, drank their pee, had men, lost men, made a family by abandoning him when she went off to Europe, lost a family, found him an irritant when she was acting the part of the artist, suffocated him in embarrassments like this when she was trying to act the part of a mother, who never connected him to outside relatives like his real father or Peggy, and when he finally had some semblance of a father she caused his departure.
"I'm sick of you," he said. I want to go someplace else but I don't have an aunt, an uncle, or anybody to go to. Nobody cares about me."
"What is your problem?" she asked.
"You taking me to trick or treating like I am six years old is pathetic. That's my problem. Pull it over. I'm getting out and walking home."
"Christ, why can't you just be happy?"
"Don't take the Lord's name in vain," he said.
"Don't bore me in Michaelish babble," she told him.
"I want to go see Aunt Peggy."
"Go then," she told him. "She's in Kansas. The walk should be good for you. Be careful not to take the detour to Timbuktu." She pulled off the side of the road and let him out; waited in dismay for a while as he went some blocks within a premature bout of independence; and then stalked him for another six blocks despite the fact that he was trying to make himself stealth through the yards of homeowners. At last, tiring, he got inside the car. She laughed hysterically, slipped a wad of chewing tobacco into her mouth, and continued on her quest for Reese's Peanut Butter Cups.
Despite genuinely believing that his sullen hatred toward her would go on forever in obdurate wordlessness, the need to dig himself out of the coffin and dirt of silence exhumed him. "I want to go see Aunt Peggy," he said in an exasperated monotone.
"Well, you see her every time you open those Christmas cards of hers and those scary photographs of her fall from her flowery notes of love as well as all those exotic European stamps and paper currency from her trips here and there."
"I never meet her. She wants to meet me and yet I never meet her."
"We live kind of far away."
"You have money. I want you to put me on an airplane and fly me to Kansas."
"I don't have much money anymore. I won't until I sell some paintings; but you are a child. What do you know of any of that? Your concerns are keeping a kite sailing in the breeze. What do you know of finances and paying bills? What do you care about it?"
"I want to go there for Thanksgiving."
"You, my dear, are free to want whatever you please but getting it is another matter."
He fell into his morose ruminations. "What about my father?"
"I wouldn't know anything of him." It was a preposterous claim; and to think that such an easily scaled wall would stop the besiegement was even more absurd. Quickly recognizing her underestimate she fortified the wall. "Some cowboy intellectual who mounted me or I mounted him one time. I don't remember which. I don't remember anything about him."
"Mounted?"
"Sex. Do you understand what sex is?"
"Of course."
"You know only the word—you can't define it and have yet to experience it."
"I know more than the word—a guy wanting some fun from rubbing his smelly penis against somebody else's naked body—white liquid comes out."
She was surprised to hear such a perfectly barbaric definition that few adults would care to espouse and she looked on him admiringly. "Did one of your friends say that?"
"Yes," he lied.
"Out of the mouths of babes," she said. "Come on. Just cheer up and let's enjoy our time together."
"Where are you going?" he demanded.
"I don't know. I'm just looking at houses. If there is one shaped like aReese's Peanut Butter Cup let me know and we'll go inside."
As she began to hum a tune on the radio random ideas pillaged through her perspectives like unwanted guests her belongings: she wondered why it had so far been a futile prospect to get her son to befriend the boy with the unmemorable name; she thought that since both boys were champion sneaker squeakers little else was needed beyond imagination and good will for children to declare friendship; she pondered how despite the disposition of Mr. Petulant and the forthcoming departure of the man with the unmemorable name, she was still glowing from her time in the coffee shop; how her painting needed some feral red brush strokes to increase its beauty and complexity; how each night her exalted ideas imploded to recurrent nightly dreams of Candyman riding in the white silk of her bare skin; how her recurrent dreams of Candyman were not only of his physical touch but ones in which he made her perceptions coruscate in the gleam of moonlight; mornings wondering whether the real truth of her life was just those meager sordid yearnings for sexual intimacies; that potential conclusion that intellectualism was nothing but one's own pretentious wish to appear to herself as more than motion and rampageous sexual urgings, hatreds, and fears that were vital to the survival of the species — this all flitted through her mind a second before she struggled to regain control of her car.
Nathaniel's hands were grasping the steering wheel and there she was trying to counter this jerk of the car to the right and contend against his Freudian death wish. The memories of the many versions of Nathaniel at various ages fleeted through her mind. What he was doing now was clear. Why he was doing it was unfathomable in her consternation. A couple of seconds later the car darted over a triangular cement slab and onto a yield sign. Like the car beaten down in inertia, they were as sedentary as death and as inanimate as rocks. They stayed this way for half a moment and then, when meaning to ask him if he was all right, she reached over and slammed him hard on his face with one of her strong German polar bear paws and his head slammed against the door. He took the knock with tacit defiance and locked in whatever whimpering existed within. It was one of his last Halloweens as a boy and perhaps his last time dressed for trick or treat and it had come to this.
With the car towed off to the mechanic, she hated him for a week and then it slowly abated, lost and tangled within new neurons, new electronic circuits with thoughts successfully attempting to understand his bitterness, and with new emphasis to forgive and forget. But he, on the other hand, hated her for her 7 days of cold Antarctic ponderings at the dining room table and in her director's chair. Betty wouldn't even talk to him by the orders of General Sangfroid and, finding it hard to swallow food or understand anything on the television beside images running amuck, he hated his mother with incremental emphasis and duration. Knowing this, she began to consider taking him to the airport to send him away.
One cold day she was on the roof nailing a border for the wires of Christmas lights to lean on securely. She was looking out over her acres of land like a lonely Martha Stewart when she felt the need to stretch her cramped legs. She tried to call him on her cellular telephone to have him come out and hold the ladder so that she could get down. It was only after the fourth time that he bothered to answer. "Is Betty busy cooking lunch?"
"Yeah, shit on a shingle."
"Could you ask her to come out and hold the ladder?"
"No, I couldn't. I don't want my food burnt."
"You don't want your food burnt," she mocked.
"That's what she was hired for: to keep my food from burning."
"Your food?"
"Yours too."
"Well, there's got to be a reason for me having your ass around so you come out here and help me get down from here," she said. But when he finally came out and she looked down upon him she saw virulence in his sunken eyes and she wondered if he could be trusted to hold the ladder safely. She wanted to call Betty to have her come out but she knew that she would never pick up a telephone no matter how many times it rang.
"Get Betty over here to hold the ladder."
"No, she's busy," he said. She was surprised that he was impudent enough to address her this way in person.
"Get her now!" she commanded. "Get her and then, maybe…maybe I'll come down to get you your airline ticket to Kansas."
"You'll buy one?"
"It is already bought. If you are eager to get rid of me I am eager to get rid of you."
"Okay," he said happily.
"Sure," she said acrimoniously, "if that is what you want. And if that is what you want why should I put these lights up for you?"
"Yes, why do it when I don't care," he said.
"Well good we agree on something. I'll look forward to hearing the results of the experiment: paradise or penitentiary in Kansas. Feel free to email me through the process. Go on and get Betty." As he left she knew that fear had motivated her to mention the plane ticket. The thought of cajoling a response from a child by appeasing him, and doing it from a legitimate fear or, worse, perhaps a baseless one, appalled her. Her will and her foundation of motherhood seemed to be collapsing. She could no longer move him by her words any more than an old woman could twist a lid off of a jar; and for the first time in her life she was losing confidence in her own will.
Betty came out to her.
"You gotted all of the lights up there, Miss?"
"Yeah, well…enough. I guess too much, Hispanic Betty. Todo las luces para esto ano de navidad estara poco y yo tengo miedo que poco esta desmasiado. We will be the only people who will enjoy them. Nathaniel is going to visit his aunt in a few days."
"Miss, we need to talk orita. You pay for me for to have my own apartment but I never go there. Nunca, nunca! No tengo una vida. I'm illegal but I should not a slave. There should more to my life than the two of you. Quiero permiso para un vacacion pagado para dos meses."
"Dos meses? Do I look mad? Dos semanas okay."
"And where you will get other slave? There are many masters to be gotted and not many slaves." Gabriele thought about this crucial fact: Indeed, there were many masters to be had but few slaves. The idea resonated off the inner walls of her brain.
"Y entonces tu volveres a nuestra hogar?"
"Si."
"Okay, Hispanic Betty, stay until Christmas Eve and then you are free as a bird hasta luego Febrero. 2 months of paid vacation. Here, hold the ladder so that I can get down."
Soon Nathaniel, as well as the man with the unmemorable name, was gone; and seeing the vacuous ruts that they had made in spinning away from her she was reminded of the fact that the outside world was changeable and that only weaklings and fools placed happiness on others. And yet with Michael out of her life, and worse, Rick and Nathaniel who were as much as lost to her now, her world was unsettled in a four-fold loss.
She tried to avoid this feeling of loss for as long as she could. She first coerced an interest in Russian literature to be interested in something. She became fixated on drawing two sketches each morning and two each evening as if the world required myriad more still lives of apples in charcoal; and as if all that paper for the redundant work in drawing her owls was justified by the infinite variety of their poses. She suddenly became preoccupied with the pleasure and health of her hound. She felt that by feeding, walking, and washing it with more responsibility and care she could extend the life of this big German shepherd that they still called "Cat." She occupied herself with its pleasure (an ice cube habitually given for it to munch on as she was preparing breakfast, and an extra dog walk in the mid-afternoon). She viewed her actions as a humane gesture as if from the first attempts to domesticate the canine, securing the contentment or felicity of so many temporary generations of dying beasts, had been a constructive use of their masters' precious moments of life.
And yet as buried as she was in the rubble of family, where shoddy and experimental construction was done without the mathematical formulas of engineers, her hobbies were natural. They were diversions and she knew that her diversions were a means to stop the pain.
Suffocating as she was in that rubble, she could have come alive in a diminished form like all other creatures of chemosynthesis. Such translucent beings never considered their unhappiness. They never considered anything at all but just engaged in their habits, instincts, preoccupation, and general movement. She was just beginning to get the knack of avoiding her stray thoughts through Gin Rummy games, and winning some of them too, but then Hispanic Betty also left. Gabriele was surprised that she, an anti-social person who had mixed, gyrated, and blended with such aversion, had become such mush. She was a bit like one of the herd. She did not know fully what to do with herself or who she was. Most people might be that way indefinitely, but for her the few days that this lasted was an appalling time. It was made all the worse by a temptation to find herself in her former boyfriend within fantasies of him running toward her and sheltering her under his umbrella and within one of his arms. Eager for sanity, she decided upon another trip abroad.
At first she yearned to return to Buddhism and saffron or deep dirt-orange robed monks to find an equilibrium and harmony within herself. She thought about going to Laos. From photographs on the Internet it looked like a little bit of Paris and a lot of dirt. She believed that its simplicity would be to her liking. She was eager to visit its communist museum and experience its photographs denouncing the French and American imperialists (the former having recuperated from the fever that caused delusions of grandeur, but the latter so delusional to think that it was God that granted such dominion). But as she was sitting in the travel agency ready to buy a ticket to Bangkok with the expectation of taking the train to Nongkai, the sister city of Vientiane Laos, she suddenly changed her mind and decided to buy an airline ticket to Jakarta.
Arriving on a garuda (GA flight 543), she ensconced herself in a hotel room long enough to take a shower for five minutes and look presentable with an additional three. Then she wandered streets like a dog following novel scents, and quickly became elated in a puff of sound and sight of hawkers stretching out into a street and causing the traffic to squeeze through a narrow area that was still not annexed under their squalid occupation. In a little park where all areas of grass were fenced off, near Pasaraya Grande, the shopping mall of he truly affluent on Blok M, she sketched Moslem women wearing their Haji or jilbab and glossed in beautiful makeup or not wearing headscarves and makeup at all but allowed to toss long and beautiful hair. She contrasted the two and was fascinated by this attempt of Indonesian society to allow women to be modern as long as they stayed demure, and how an individual was dangled by the invisible gossamer strings of this great puppeteer, society. Maybe, she thought, when encountered anew most cultural traits were romantically virtuous. She also sketched conservative men wearing their little oval shaped hats called kopias as they went to a little mosque near the department store; but mostly she sketched the throngs of park people whom she mingled with: guitar boys who, when not on buses, practiced versions of their beggarly tunes in the concrete park; a transsexual dancer with bizarre movements; the umbrella shelterers who eagerly extended an aegis against celestial darts; and that area seen with myriad candles from the nighttime hawkers who sold their goods on blankets and sheets, each with its own candle.
Finally finding her way back to her hotel room, she was amused and puzzled by this Christopher Columbus syndrome of adoration toward her white flesh. Had she been a superstar instead of an obscure artist, she told herself, she would not have been accosted any more than this. Having a good night's sleep, she woke ready to start it all again. On buses that took her through the streets of Jakarta and in the company of the musician/beggars who always boarded for a couple minutes, she was impressed by how remarkably talented some of them were even though the majority were as discordant as the howling of wolves. She almost wished that she were a talent scout to deliver the best of them from the streets. Then it occurred to her that by choosing winners for prizes she would be as vile as nature itself with its stance of survival of the fittest. She saw a 5 and 6 year old brother and sister team—the girl doing the most sensuous dance and then her brother turning off the tape recorder and collecting the Rupiah after the dance. In all, the children might have collected a tiny 500 Rupiah in loose change no differently than the guitar boys or the adult poetic orators who gave renditions of their tragic lives to extort sympathy and a bit of loose change. 8000 Rupiah were equivalent to a dollar and those who sold drinks and pens could at least get this sum if assiduous for a period of hours.
Over a period of weeks she became enamored of long back-alley vegetable markets and ghettos of the night. Here, like in Thailand, it seemed that those who had little resources were more interconnected and, from their makeshift huts they would smile to just see the presence of her makeshift life. And yet the Christopher Columbus syndrome was from a discontent and an eagerness to pass out of one's own domain to that archetype of American wealth and prowess that bedazzled the entire denizens of the world no matter how much they hated the hegemony of the American government and its people. Even here, she thought, children probably yearned to grow out of their age and adults dreamed of business empires, a corporate legacy from which to defy mortality. She knew that in this sense it was probably no different than anyplace else for even here discontent had to be in everything since all were creatures of movement. These ghettoers in particular were spewed around bridges and railroad tracks; and she boldly walked into their throngs in the fullness of night, intrigued and enticed within the mysteries of life, that black and white which were the rich hue of gray enlightenment. And, were it not for the serendipitous beckoning of two hedonistic smiles, she would have foolishly continued this way (potentially to a lethal end as a mugged and raped female lying bludgeoned along the train tracks, obscure in the thickets of an oblique area of weeds). This dual smiling was too conspicuous. With one man's smile an ordinary woman might fall prey but never with two of them; and she was tiers beyond the ordinary.
Self-declared as a female who was not a woman, Gabriele was a hard block of ice to thaw. Even an exceptional Adonis with a coruscating and speciously ingenuous smile did not have a chance with her. Only such an Adonis as Michael, with a familiar and sweet son whom she had already thought of fondly, had the potential to do the worst damage to her pristine Antarctic surface; but such happenings were rare indeed. The two strangers instantly made her circumspect and guarded by accosting her with their sexual innuendos, which she did not even have to understand in words. The nuances were rife like the sounds of locusts in the unfolding and draping blanket of night. They were there to be extrapolated in the intensity of lust-filled, hungry-hound looks and the flippant glances and general levity of the two males toward each other. And she knew that, as adept as she might be at defending herself with a bit of judo and karate, that she could never ward off an army of rapists. That being the case, she backed away to belong only to the day.
By day she was enamored by all of the mom-and-pop shops cobbled together from wood and tin and the activity that was bustling around them including the orange cockroach tricycle motor taxis a bit like Thailand's tuc tucs. She wanted to sink into the skin of those whom she encountered and to know of their lives intimately. The thought even occurred to her that she should get her boy from the provincial rednecks of Kansas and transform him with exposure to the world; and she would have done just that had there not been such a cloying and bitter after- taste to all this enlightenment amassing itself within her. It was a sickeningly aggrandizing clump that was exacerbating itself within her stomach; and it made her doubt the efficacy of the plan. It was getting so large that she, who grazed on the weeds and fodder of stark reality like a wild mare, was finding what she saw and her ruminations of it virtually unbearable.
In Buddhism good actions perpetuated good outcomes for the giver and motivated goodness in the receiver. And yet as important as it was for fools and the ignorant to believe in this replicating of virtue when with each new century mankind moved the world closer to the abyss, the reality was that they who had education and wealth gave both to their children for that accrued competitive advantage, that the poor floundered about trying to free themselves from a vortex, that suffering did not propitiate any god, that the meek did not inherit anything, and that they who were literal throwaways as children would sell themselves as prostitutes, get AIDS, and die hideously in the streets, emaciated incrementally like starving dogs. She could see the prostitutes near the National Monument with its hard rockish flame like the torch of the Statue of Liberty. She felt empathy for them as deep as the gods and it was a torturous perspective indeed. When she saw a bare-breasted homeless woman running down the sidewalk outside the monument, all depraved from wandering around aimlessly, screaming and looking behind her as if chased, Gabriele had a mixed reaction. In a small way, she saw sanity in this defying of convention that a woman's boobs were erotic armaments which, unless locked away in a blouse and a brassiere, would thwart assiduous man to recidivistic patterns where his amorous instincts would cause him to malinger from work. But there was nothing sane in this woman's plight, and any thought suggesting that there was such had been from a desire to fortify herself from the perspective that the world was a bad place. She imagined her face on this woman and wanted to abscond from Jakarta and life as a whole. She just wanted to rest her head thoughtlessly against a man's chest. She wanted to close her eyes to the injustices and the inequality of life and to float in the levity of dreams this way. Lonely as she was, the net was pulling her back home to America and New York State.
Left in the discontent of her own thoughts and finding the gift of solitude equivalent with insanity, she sensed a major polarization of her ideas and she knew that her own civil war was in the making. Two opposing armies were deployed around the frontline under the scalp of her own head, and each was trying to intimidate the other in the hope of gaining a painless victory within the dominion of thoughts. Either from consciousness absconding in a self-imposed exile in order to avoid conflict, or from finding her true self usurped by impulses, willessly she drove up to the home of Michael's parents as lovingly as a Moony. She told them that she was Michael's girlfriend even though she could have as easily meant the man with the unmemorable name. After requesting to see Michael, she awkwardly offered the whole family her love even though none had wished for it. The sentiment had been contrived for the purpose of breaking the cold silence but thinking onto it now with chagrin she felt that this foolishness had surpassed any she had done in the past. By her own estimation she hadn't been foolish since early childhood and the consternation of it all seemed like being tortured in the pits of hell. This torture lasted for a couple minutes and then she didn't care about what others had thought or were now thinking about her. Her life, she told herself, was her own and poised or plodding, flying or floundering it was her own and no one was worthy of scrutinizing it. She waited in their living room for nearly two hours until he at last drove in.
"This woman wants to talk with you Michael," said his mother.
"I know. You called me."
"She wouldn't leave. I didn't want to call the police. I didn't want a scene."
"You told me that," said Michael. "That's fine. Can we have some privacy?"
"Well — " She then spoke fervently in Italian.
"That's not going to happen," he said in English and then switched to Italian. Gabriele had already understood little words from the entreaty of Michae'ls mother like "money" and "bad women" and could extrapolate that mama was worried about a potential extortion and blackmail of her baby.
"Whatever! I give up," said the exasperated woman in English and then started to leave.
"I'm pleased to have met you," said Gabriele. "I hope that we can become further acquainted and that I may one day secure your trust." Her words were formal and archaic like a nineteenth century novel. If subconsciously done to impress others, they impressed no one. The woman stared at her with that apathetic and supercilious hardness that they, who identified wealth as a unique DNA of a more developed species, always did.
When his mother had left the room he closed the door, and then tried to camouflage the obdurate hardness of his apathetic eyes with a contrived smile. Closure was nonetheless in those eyes. They were hard and hallowed and they were permanently enclosed like tinctured and opaque glass windows. How, she remonstrated against herself, had she debased herself by knocking on a door of this family home and why did she stay here with him whose orbs were like slammed doors in one's face. How was it that she continued to knock? He smiled since there was every chance that she could rectify herself in his eyes through discomfort and contrition. Seated with this nemesis, he gained pleasure at the thought that she had been allowed to squirm in a seat for over an hour the way her son had waited and squirmed in the principal's office while dreading the forthcoming paddling.
"I tried to call you," said Gabriele, "but I think you were trying to avoid me."
"Possibly," he said. He could have told her lies that his mobile telephone was not functional or he could have prevaricated beyond the emphatic use of perhaps. Instead, he had made a truthful statement. She thought that she had to give him points for at least that; but as she pondered this he pulled out a cigar, lit it, and blew the smoldering flames into her face. That face turned red in anger and hate. It just bit a lower lip as an arm fanned away the smoke. These were hard gestures that were in part flailing against the personal life sucking her into its vortex of winds, and in part a protest of a man's insolence toward this womanly weakness that he correctly presumed to ooze within her. He saw hate in eyes harder than his own and finding not only them erotic but also the breath that was trying to extricate itself from the inhalation of smoke, he wanted to exercise against her will. He wanted to use her as if she were the gravity and the bar by which he might do pull-ups to claim masculine strength and virile complacency. He wanted to toss her onto a mattress and rape her like any gentleman.
She feigned a smile unsuccessfully. It was a hateful smile of hubris against him and all his male counterparts to whom a woman, and a female to a lesser degree, supplicated herself. Even more, it was a hateful distorted smile against herself who, no matter how hard she tried, could not fully exit the trivial sphere of the personal domain any more than an obese woman could easily leave her apartment.
"Monogamy, what a premier virtue, it is!" she thought sardonically. This denunciation was a defense against her feelings of guilt over the sexcapade with Candyman. She knew that it was so, for the guilt was spraying out onto consciousness with that constancy of a fizz of breakers on a beach. She knew that it was so, for there was a feeling disgorging within her that was a nasty flair of a warm shaken can of beer oozing from between the closed tab.
She wasn't married or engaged to Michael—matter of fact, hating her as she knew that he no doubt did, she wasn't in any type of relationship with him unless that envisaged by an overactive imagination off and spinning downhill like a rolling wheel of a flipped car— and yet society's prudish stipulation that a woman be faithful to the partner she was with, or had been with, nonetheless had some sway of her movement and thought as it had at previous times when they lived together. Back then she would always try to restrain herself from those cans of beer that preceded her chewing tobacco snacks in order to be spared from his scowling, to continue to seem attractive to him, and to appear less extreme and headstrong than what she really was. Such was the influence of this mixing intimately: this blending of pathos and petulance blurring boundaries; this nastiness of prudish society inflicting one with guilt for pursuing more than the allotted share of the love it had espoused; and these incessant compromises of herself in order to keep a relationship with a man.
She was but a tiny shadow of original and independent thought that was dwarfed and absorbed by the massive conservative shadow of America. Her shadow was poised like the Statue of Liberty — the liberty which had inadvertently created her unorthodox perspectives, but hers was an inconsequential adumbration. Americans were a provincial people as all bullies of the world were provincial, and the thought of mixing with an American (even one as Italian as Michael) seemed nasty indeed. The nastiness of being here in his home came upon her like the sticky wetness of a man's semen. The nastiness of debasing herself from loneliness by coming here was to walk on the same spit and urine evaporating pavements within the swaths of mankind.
Her ideas rambled on fervently. "The whole thing is a laugh. If where one aims body fluids determines a relationship and love, this sorry world is in for more gory times….How on Earth is being faithful or not being faithful a measurement of this amorphous, multi-definable emotion called 'love?' How is it, or lack of it, relevant to anything at all? Hedonism causes one to accidentally fall into the obligations of child rearing and a marriage certificate is society's glossy endorsement of contained hedonism to perpetuate the species….Confinement is not compassion; hunger for that other one to stop the pangs of loneliness is no different than a hunger compelling one to eat…any hunger really— hunger is just there to motivate one to clog an emptiness….Empty heads need to be filled with empty people. Even if they are only speciously tangible and as impermanent as gusts of wind, they need them like the air they breathe….Mortal bits of dust feel more solid in a family unit…. And although I don't believe in being faithful as the measurement of a caring relationship I can't see what I'd replace it with. I'm not even sold that love exists…I mean outside of compassion and this nurturing-of-the-young thing, I think that this medley of different selfish emotions hiding themselves under the guise of love don't have anything good in them. And if I can't believe in the measurement of love as being faithful or that the thing proposed for measurement is lovely I might as well shoot for the moon by denouncing relationships altogether. This adulteration of oneself in these incessant compromises and mixing never enlarge a person. They mitigate a being." She was thinking about her tree planting days with particular abhorrence, and hardly thought of the old duties of being a home teacher, an errand wife/mom, and a wall decorator for Michael's school since now, when assessed from a distance, they were trivial discomforts by comparison. "Infatuations in fatuous humans foster the illusion that great things can come from human coupling as if hitching can concoct the Orient Express…Am I the only person who believes this way? I am. It is no wonder that most people I encounter think of me as a bitch…. Can't blame it on menstruation every day of the month. No, I take pride in my bitchiness. I relish having such an accolade. No, I can't blame it on a period every day of the month…. What am I doing here? Am I just wanting to wear a white wedding dress with my tampon the way little girls are conditioned to believe that marriage in a white dress is the portal to an epiphany? This ceremony of holy matrimony is ludicrous as if a god, if He were to exist, didn't have bigger things on his agenda than to sanctify the act of disgorging liquids on this one spouse….this crazy aiming of body fluids at this targeted spouse…Oh, this monogamy is sickeningly unnatural! As if signing a name on a piece of paper can contain or clean out the filth of a thousand daily fantasies and instinctual hungers….And then there are all these primitive jealousies to this pleasure bonding: monkey woman not wanting to lose her hunter who brings her and the children their meat; and monkey man needing to ensure that there is a female possession as loyal as a domesticated hound to satisfy him on evenings when his erotic hunts have eluded him, and that one who would not burden him with caring for children not of his own genetic transfer."
He had gone into the kitchen to fix some coffee so, alone, her ideas spun quickly on the axial of ruminations.
"Love, love—the means to everything! The things we are taught in music television videos and Hollywood movies. And then we emulate them in monkey see, monkey do….Okay, my perspective is strange but strange things have half a chance of being right. At least it isn't the stuff of idiotic masses. Am I such a libertine—I don't really think so—well, probably not. I am just an old fashioned, conventional girl who believes that sex only happens on a mattress of a bed and have never once used a car's gearshift as a dill-dough—I cannot even spell the word."
For all her cynicism that long-term relationships were of individuals who stymied and quelled their thoughts to live numbly with their partners and took on joint tree growing activities to have something in common with them, she did know that there were some happy marriages out there. Such marriages were unions of individuals who sought to edify the world meaningfully with their contributions and admired this trait in their partners. They were more than ordinary but not as extraordinary or extraordinarily peculiar in quite the way that she was. She felt that she was without a similar peer in the world and that from some snowy mountaintop closer to the sun she was peering onto the world and deigning her thoughts upon those who were less peculiar than she was. Her weirdness droned on: "For those less extraordinary/more than ordinary couples who believe in their oxymoron of a happy monogamy, I tell them it can only be had provided they do a bit of front seat/back seat sexcrobatics in a car and some rape role playing once or twice each week within the comforts of their bedrooms. Excitement allows for longevity—it isn't the love of Buddha that the better-than-the-masses (hereafter called the Betthams) are after, but excitement. They, the Betthams, are no different than any of the wallowing pigs in that respect."
Only briefly did it fleet through her mind how ludicrous it was for the damaged monkey that she was to define love at all. With not even a residue of "real love" there to her observation early in life, these speculations now were merely word play in her brain. They were the mere friction of cold, solid sounds and the static of them slapping against each other in their empty abstractions as she juggled them in her ennui and rained her sour stoic perspective down on them like tears of knives. To her she was a bored goddess making lightning and her unique take on love was the rightful striking of Zeus.
Still there were doubts. She did wonder whether the smudge of light penetrating her consciousness was enlightenment or peering onto the stars with damaged retinas. To be laconic, she wondered if her judgment calls were merely the moody caprices of her imagination. For in Houston, that Houston of long ago with a Gabriele that was a spasm then of myriad spasms in the lost dimensions of a changing life, hadn't she seen a fellow student as small as a boy and as limp as a sack of potatoes being picked up by his father, taken from his classroom at Rice University, lowered into a wheelchair, pushed toward a vehicle, and then driven off to the next classroom in a different part of the campus? She had; and it was only from her own obdurate bitchinesss that she concocted a barrier to keep herself from consciously recalling this father's spending of money and time to enlighten the dying. It was love in the best gesture mortals could do, and it went contrary to her assumption that human society was a loveless "hell-hole" that was beneath her.
Yearning to depart from the bathos of contemporary society for the sublime colors of Titian, the circular idealism of Raphael, the ugly angular and emaciated forms of El Greco in that complex inner intensity that rendered beauty, the mysterious shaded faces of Caravaggio, and the true internal lives captured in the words of Shakespeare and Hardy, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Melville and James, Plato, Parmenides, and all dead contemplatives, she snobbishly wished to remove herself from the masses of men. Her contemporaries seemed to be moving like that loose downward tire of a flipped car and she seemed to only favor the stagnancy of deceased enlightenment. For a moment, she was as much as wishing to die to be raptured into their thoughts, and they into hers, the way a normal person yearned for shared physical and emotional intimacies. Dying young might be preferable to decades of being pinned into a stall hearing the shallow grunting of one of those male members of the porcine herd. Isolation in Antarctica without seals and penguins would be a hundred times better than that indelible connection of producing for him more grunting piglets; however death was not rapture but rupture.
"How is Rick?" she asked after he was seated and she had sipped a bit of the coffee that he had prepared for them.
"The same. Growing."
"And the dog?"
"Growing more quickly. He shits a lot, too. Thanks for asking. What do you want?"
She smiled bashfully as if she were an errant child whose laziness or mischievousness had been exposed. She noted the peculiarity of her erroneous reaction: a fixated response that she had comported in girlhood. Back then it had always preceded an impetus to be diligent so that she might propitiate a teacher's wrath and regain favor with one of those rare individuals whom she admired in her more credulous days. "I hate how this ended," she suddenly confessed in womanly neediness. "I don't know why you just pulled out like that."
"Pulled out like what? I proposed and you said no, so that was it. I decided I needed a wife who would be supportive and that you were right all along: it wasn't you."
"I think I was supportive."
"Why would you think that? You were never interested in any of my plans—at least not in the later stage of things. Maybe you just aren't interested in the business aspects of life, although I at least thought you were about selling those paintings of yours—at least at the beginning of knowing you. Maybe nobody changes. It is just what we know of them at different stages of expressing themselves—that changes. Just ideas of people at different stages…ideas changing."
She now felt that being here had not been such a mistake after all. Even though she repudiated superstition in all of it derivative forms from anthropomorphism to destined fate still she couldn't help but feel that she was meant to be here hearing his profound utterances and perceiving him anew.
"Yes, how can it be anything else? An individual is too large. So what were these ideas of yours about me in my many stages?" She really meant, "…my many stages as perceived by you in your stages" but she cut it short.
"I don't know. At the time I admired your ability to rise up in the world…the business savvy to do that, and how people were interested in your strangeness. Before that I thought of you as a caring mother and before that — "
"A disgusting whore?"
"No, not disgusting."
"Why not?"
"I liked it — the thought of you with many men. I imagined the smell of your skin afterwards …I don't know. It was sexy."
"Hmm," she thought, "latent homosexuality. His river is not damned for it flows both ways." She spoke, "What am I now — this sexy art mom weirdo — this idea of yours now at this stage?"
"I don't know that I have one. I don't know who you are now."
"No, you don't know who you are being without a woman all these months. Men need women, you know." The words belied the womanly slime oozing within her. "They put on women. Just like you needing symbols of importance as that attachZ case of yours, those flashing appointments in that PDA of yours, and that cellular telephone of yours. If you did not have money and things to flash at others how different would you be from any naked Etruscan savage apart from not being dead and living in America?"
" I don't need a damn thing," he said coldly. "You are the one who's here. You are the needy one." He laughed at her. She knew that to him she looked foolish even though that time of the Turk's execution in early girlhood had made her immune to the opinions of others.
"You're here," he repeated.
"So I am," she said in her cold hubris.
He blew his smoke into her face. "Well, with the gender factor alone no man and woman are interested in the same things nor are they all that compatible. That's for sure." His voice drifted slowly on the stream of smoke flowing from his mouth and from the effluvia of his lackadaisical scorn. "But to make any type of relationship work — even the most pathetic — neither of them can just stare at the walls day-in and day-out. One has to be interested in something — business, rearing kids, teaching, arts and crafts stuff, something. I'd say it was me, that you didn't care to live with me, and that's what made you so moody and useless in a sense; but it wouldn't explain your unwillingness to paint, would it? — You who just sort of sit around claiming that you are an artist all hours. I guess you can sell some of that stuff — what little you do so I guess somebody likes it. It is a shame that you don't draw more still life. Your artsiness was really beginning to have something in it." He stopped for he knew that he had run over her with maximum efficacy since gratuitous plowing through flesh and blood would not make it any more contrite.
Knowing how a hurt, rejected, and emasculated ego sought to maim others in speech, wisps of air, like a diffident eunuch brandishing a butcher knife, she let him disgorge his acrimonious sound. What was it to her? It was an amusing psychological study and only this. The petty utterances he would try to use to inflict misery commensurate with a rejected proposal intrigued her. He was no more dangerous than a child running around in an Indian costume and brandishing his rubber blade.
"Go on. No need to be bashful. We can't work on problems if we are ignorant of them." She meant "Go on. No need to be civil, you hateful bastard." But this would be repressed to a dream and there it would be in the flames of enactment and reenactment until the combustion was complete.
He continued. "Anyhow, you just looked bored all the time toward everyone including your own son. We were your headaches; and I looked like I was wasting my time with you."
The trivial bits and pieces of a personal life projected in acrimonious speech were often expressions of anger toward that other one whom these intense shared pleasures were dependent and the whole thing disgusted her. Cast from the two parties, the personal life was not merely a mosaic of selfish inconsequentials of bad off-moments nor a heavy shadow of two lighter shadows but, together, were the adumbration of the entire scaffolding of a being: the contorted and disgusting skeleton of instinctual drives to gain pleasure, to hate those who might hinder pleasure, to hunt, to harm, to eat, and to possess. This was the personal domain and as disgusted as she was with it, her disgust was not as solid as she had wished it to be. It was weakened and attenuated by the pleasure of having a significant other know insignificant things about her like where she hung her bra. To have him know such things made her feel a little less cryptic. She had scoffed at his proposal so it was no wonder that his bitterness disgorged upon her. She understood male pride and excused his caustic utterances. "I think I put aside myself for everyone," she said. "It was all new to me, you know, and it took some adjusting. I've always been a rather independent being. Still the family that we were was the only family I and Nat have had besides each other. I even went to your church, you know. How supportive did you want me to be outside of becoming you? As you say, no two people are alike—not even if you were to meet some docile little Betty Crocker Helen homemaker type with her certificates in cooking and ductility."
"Ductility? No woman could ever come as well prepared in big word armament as you. You are one of a kind for sure."
She smiled. It was the first dubious compliment that he had extended to her for so long.
" As for Mass, it is is important to Italian American families and you only went when you were forced to go—those times that it was too apparent that there were none of these headaches of yours and that faking one at the last moment would have looked ridiculous." She tightened her lips in consternation. His ignorance was that of the droves of men who believed that migraines were feigned. Even if she were to enlighten him there would be myriad others yet to step out of themselves. She couldn't change them all. She told herself that society's reaction to those like herself was no different than how the government treated Gulf War veterans. But in fact there was a major difference: when it came to going to church, those headaches were really feigned unless all unpleasant situations were headaches, which they were in a sense. He went on: "I wouldn't know. Maybe you did go once in a while and maybe you did help me plant a tree or two. Still that doesn't exactly make or break a relationship, does it?" She would have reminded him of their bedroom intimacies but she knew that he, a man, was already thinking of that which he most revered; and by mentioning it she would be opening herself up to a comment that one couldn't expect anything else from a professional. She nearly reminded him of those intimacies anyway just to taunt a response from him and thus free the hubris that she was barely able to contain within her. "— You know, there is no point in going into any of this."
"I'm beginning to draw again. I believe I'm painting some works that will outdo anything I've accomplished before. I feel so creative now like I'm about ready to produce something that could be my magnum opus. Before, I was just going through a phase where I couldn't draw and didn't know what I was all about. It wasn't you. It was me."
"I don't know that we are a good match, to tell you the truth."