On weekends they often went to nurseries to buy shrubs and trees for the landscape of her home as well as that of the school; but one Saturday morning he got her to acquiesce to this yearning to find one's maker that was there in the collective consciousness of primordial modern man. At Mass she fidgeted with some beads in her lap and chanted Hail Marries. She chanted these archaic trifles although, tacit and hidden away amongst her private thoughts, she had her own version of a Hail Mary: "Hell Mary Juana, full of recalcitrance, the Lordess, Santa Gabriela, be with thee. Blessed art thou in the salubrious realm of illegal substances and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, beer and chewing tobacco. Hell Mary Juana, servant of the Gabriele goddess and her partner, the sun god, give us something sweet to hallucinate now and at the hour of our death. Amen." She looked over at Nathaniel there in her pew. He was barely able to keep himself from launching through the roof. This sententiousness and pomp was too much poop for him too. For the first time in months she felt a special cognate affection for her son that excluded the others. Feigning smiles only when cognizant of Michael glancing toward her and silent as death, she tacitly spoke to Nathaniel in an imaginary utterance, "I'll make this up to you—we must all play with the tinker toys of language in thought to have some degree of meaning within our petty lives; but God and heaven are empty make believe words of a feeble animal. They are a feeble species who need to look for external meaning and finding only tragic random chance within the mortality of the family and friends that have given them pleasure, and then their own mortality as well, resort to storybook scripture, churches, and chants. Their jargon of God, heaven, hell, and sin don't refer to anything— totally empty words—and to have to forfeit running around, celebrating life to sit uncomfortably in this dark Saddam Husseinish torture chamber—I'll make up for this. What can I give you? What about a dog or a gift certificate to Swenson's Ice Cream parlor? No, too much sugar. I wouldn't want you bouncing off the walls any more than usual."
Following the service the boys were sent to a Catholic version of Sunday school and she was paraded in front of a bunch of stiff strangers with eyes euthanized by talk of the heavens. He introduced her to various people but the introductions were an awkward mix. She was given their names with little else and they were given this spiel that she was an artist who had become his girlfriend and was now contributing some ideas for the interior design for his school, whose beauty was distracting him from building his version of a loosely affiliated Catholic school, and who might draw some "pictures" of the school's patron saint. He said it in various ways but each time she felt flaunted like a woman seeing the image of herself in a bra on a lit billboard in front of a bench at a bus stop only in her case bust size and her ability to wear lingerie beautifully did not matter. It seemed to her that he was trying to boast a vague connection of an artist to the school, which she couldn't quite figure out unless he had the idea that she would teach art there. The stout and husky figure that she was, she couldn't see that his introducing her as if she were Helen of Troy would grant him a lot more customers. A half hour into being introduced and memorizing names that she would forget once out of there (one young Russian who exercised with Michael at a fitness center and had the most forgettable name of all) she told herself that she did not want the four of them to stay there a minute longer. She used English like a crowbar, demanding that he remove the boys so that they could enjoy the remainder of the day; and from his saturnine expressions she could see that she was the condemned one. As the condemned one she knew that she would be free to implement whatever she pleased since he would be too sullen to have it any other way. She knew this for she had been condemned before.
Not needing to worry about being condemned since she was already such, she went ahead and argued that the boys should be left with Hispanic Betty if the two of them were still planning to go to the nursery. She didn't want to see them dragged through flowers, trees, and shrubs (Nathaniel spilling his incessant complaints and disturbing big Mr. Phlegmatic by making him morose) or kept in the hot truck the way they were on the previous Saturday. To be in the truck all alone with nothing to do but slap one another and pull each other's hair while she and Michael were plant hunting for verdant plantings, they would be nothing but prisoners and their apoplexy from incarceration would probably cause severe fraternal loathing. If nothing else, their whole day would be constricted by adults' self-centered preoccupation with contrived accomplishments since it was adults who ruled over them — adults who went contrary to the senses which implored that through contemplation one might celebrate the day.
Gabriele and Michael returned with two German Shepherds as well as five or six tree roses in the back of the pickup. Caring less about the plants, Gabriele was eager to witness dog meets boy and boy makes dog into a friend but the joy was stymied in stepping inside the house. When they went in they saw mercurial Mr. Petulant executing punishment against the son of Mr. Phlegmatic. Nathaniel had Rick's head under the running water of the faucet. The crime was spilling a glass of milk; the punishment was a near drowning; and the perspective she chose to take for a fuller understanding of this situation, as Michael pulled off his belt, was Piaget's idea of the moral absolutist. As the brazen non- flinching boy was being whipped, she thought to herself that she would need Betty to monitor their every move from now on for children's system of government was more procrustean and draconian than that devised by adults in most, but not all, areas of the global jungle.
On a Monday built vapidly on the vacuous graves of wasted hours, she heard the school bus return and the barking of the two hounds. Curious about how Nathaniel related to his dog when she was not around, she went to the studio window to witness this interaction of dog and boy inconspicuously.
Outside the window there was the same rectangular wooden container where, at the trailer, she had planted a flowerbed which an owl then used as a domicile. Now it was fastened under the studio window with a different choice of flowers. She remembered the days preceding that move to Ithaca: having climbed onto a tree, which had been the umbrage of the trailer, with slow, surreptitious movements, shooting the owl with a tranquilizer gun, and pulling its body into a laundry bag without falling from the limbs of the tree. It had been a time consuming undertaking and at the time she had doubted whether it would actually succeed; and yet here the owl was well acclimated to its setting. Looking onto the bird now she was pleased: it had succumbed to the belief that the trailer had been nothing but a dream just as she had awakened or succumbed to the belief that her arduous efforts to paint visions imagined in her head had no substance and that only filling one's mind in the clutter of activity that involved others did one actually live at all. After all, contemplation involved having to contemplate something and what else was there but this ball, this planet of movement? A racket ball player was called such because she played racket ball and a rebel because she rebelled—all people had self-worth by defining themselves in words of action.
From the window she noticed that Nathaniel played with his dog when she was not around. He actually had some affection for it. Had she bought at least one of these dogs for the experiment of discovering his ability to care or to prompt that attribute? Was it for the companionship of both boys or was it for her own companionship? Maybe the dogs were bought to fill the hours when she wasn't taking the boys to their scout meetings, buying clothes for them, rooting for them on bleachers at baseball games (she had tried rooting for them as a voluntary concession stand worker, but her tacit words and supercilious coldness to the inconsequential and insufferable gossip of these motherly peers brought her a flurry of unfriendly glances not all that different than what she received in all the other days in the years of her life), tree planting, or going to the site of the school to say, "It looks like its really coming along well." It was all of this and more. So much that was selfish, altruistic, curious, and indifferent went into the simplest of acts.
She could see there, in this dog centering its actions on her boy and her boy responding by throwing out a shoe for him to fetch, a reason for all this carbon to be divided into so many organisms. Looking through the window at this interaction (saliva drooling from the mouth of one and smiling fangs from the other) she saw that the universe communicated with itself and that it's self responded in a distinctly varied perspective. It was by doing so that the universe was at last real. There was no doubt that there were other worlds like the Earth throughout the cosmos. Simple pleasures, simple interactions, were the entity, and she knew that the whole thing was good. She knew that this overlapping of the universe in carbon beings interacting with each other in their distinct ways were the talking heads that made the universe real. The sight of forty-dollar sneakers there in the drooling waterfalls of the dog's mouth caused her consternation. Still she did nothing. She just watched and recalled what had occurred yesterday.
Yesterday, Sunday, when she had approached this gathering of boy and dog Nathaniel had shoved the animal away and when it still pounced on his legs as he walked away from it, he kicked it on its belly. She didn't mind him showing that he disliked her. She saw it as a passing stage: a diminishing but still open animus toward her for the trip to Asia and Europe without him, resenting this distribution of her attention to include two other males, taking umbrage over her slight favoritism of the chosen over the natural members of family if he did indeed perceive it (certainly he saw and resented the grocery shopping with Rick that was done without him), this refurbishing of the whole of family within contrived Friday night croquet games of bonding regardless of the mood and wishes of individual family members at the time, and this slipping out of a boy's closeness to his mother so that he might fit into himself. She did not concern herself with that in the least. He could critically assess her and show his dislike openly so long as it was done respectfully. True motherly love was raising children and not needing to smother them in maternal, nurturing instincts or expecting understanding that their egocentric beings could not muster. The paddling yesterday was not as punishment for hostilities toward her (hostilities that existed because of issues he was trying to resolve in himself) or to oppose Skinner's belief that negative reinforcement accomplished very little. It was done as justice for the dog and a statement on behalf of it and all other animals that they weren't there to be targets of aggression. It wasn't negative reinforcement per se for none of that could work with him. She knew that skinned knees from bicycle accidents and the whippings he got from Michael (Whippings she was beginning to resent) were proof that the boy was somewhat stoic to pain. Outside of learning that Nathaniel did not dislike his pooch (only herself) she lost herself in Internet articles on owls until she and Rick began racing and banging their carts against each other down the aisles of the grocery store, and Monday went by uneventfully.
On Thursday morning, when everyone had gone in accordance with their habits, she ate some burnt toast with her grapefruit and for ten minutes stared at a coffee pot with glazed eyes. There was a time when inanimate objects never failed at reflecting the ennui by which she gazed at them, causing profound ideas to be projected onto her consciousness like a great beacon of light shown onto a screen in dark movie theatre —a filmed documentary of the entity and its discoverer, Parmenides. Now meditation on a blank wall brought a sketch of that wall within her memory and this was all.
So, from pure boredom, she decided to watch the dogs that were all alone and unto themselves in the back yard. Since she wasn't exactly next door to Antarctic penguins and these two specimens were infinitely more fascinating than calculating the exact strands of gray hair in the underbrush that lay fully on her scalp, she cast spells onto the dogs making these smelly bodies with panting faces oozing out halitosis objects of mild curiosity. They were certainly something to consider for those who had nothing better to do with their time. Betty was busy behind the loud vacuum cleaner, and Gabriele could hardly retreat into her bedroom to escape the noise since the fusillade of Michael's flatulence a half hour earlier had been so rife that the air freshener could not do much but dilute it in an equally reprehensible odor.
She went out on the deck and looked onto a world that was definitely for the dogs. The German Shepherds moved in the yard unrestrained. In a more genuine way they seemed happier to sniff and distinguish bits of the world instead of this obsessive bliss of centering themselves on human masters. Much of the time Nathaniel's anti-social dog growled when Rick's dog came near him; but, depending on its mood, the two at times could play and wrestle with each other amicably. Gabriele fed them Puppy Chow and watched how they relinquished their freedom to instantly come for their meals. She pondered how all creatures were always slaves to hunger and the desire to obtain more than their allotted share—at least both characteristics were apparent in Nathaniel's dog.
Her thoughts echoed the breakfast talk a little over an hour ago. Rick had wanted to bring his dog to school and had suggested that he could tie it to a bicycle rack. Nathaniel had scoffed, "Right, ignoramus. D'you think Betty'll come behind the two of you with a pooper-scooper to keep your ass from being expelled. I think not!" Now, thinking of it, it still struck her as funny. It hadn't bothered Rick. He had retained his placidity the way his dog was now happily wagging its tail and looking up at her while its partner stole the food that was in its dish. As agreeable as Rick's dog was, she could understand Mr. Petulant's canine perfectly. Half-battered and half-loved even for a few days in this thing called family, it was lost there in the bosky thickets of confusion. Made to sleep with Nathaniel so that it might know him as master, it could already sense that his love was tepid at best. Feeling inferior and groping around in pleasurable associations so inextricably linked to pain it was sometimes bumptious, aggressive, and striving to leave a concept of its superiority onto the other dog's mind.
Months passed. She could not think anything in particular about the owl or the dogs let alone anything else. They just existed along with her existence and as incommunicably as her reticence. The late April rains were making shallow ponds within her yard. Sodden as the mustard MF put on his eggs, or the streams rolling across her sidewalk, the turgid sediment brought turgid sentiments of desperation in her mind. Then out of nowhere came a chain of events as if a blessing. They offered a respite from the void by the clogging of one's days in myriad tasks. It was clutter devised by her bed partner's making and it beeped according to the schedule in a PDA/ pocket computer that he lent to her. It all started one numb day when Rick's dog was licking her face and she wasn't even cognizant of it doing so and the telephone was ringing but she wasn't aware of it either; a message on her old answering machine informing her about Nathaniel's truancy; the imbroglio discussed in pillow talk; and the smell of MF's breath cajoling her to withdraw the boys from public school and to home teach them until the private school opened.
Eager to escape imprisonment in the void, her intransigence on the issue began to break down and there she was arguing with him playfully, agreeing with him silently, kissing him, needing the intoxication of his breath, and that tendentious male assertiveness of that one right perspective. Her tenuous arguments were playful and like any male he felt licentious flames from this clashing of wills, this electric and sexy friction, and this knowledge that by rubbing her in his arms and planting his seed in her he would conquer all resistance.
The next morning she kissed her MF at the breakfast table in front of the others without inhibitions, massaged the nape of his neck, and then sat there holding his hand under the table as she bobbed on some type of cloud. Betty's frying of bacon did not seem nauseating; the mustard Michael put on his eggs radiated warmly like the sun god, Aten; and the flatulence of one or more males at the breakfast table seemed aromatic. Convinced of her mission to be a teacher, she was suddenly the indispensable cue ball setting others in motion but being banged along with them. Her busy new life often involved the search of the right books to purchase; the readings, the making of handouts and worksheets; her impatient lectures, enforced homework, and administered tests; her punishment for recesses of savagery when Mr. Placid's head of hair was often pulled out of the sink like a fisherman's trophy; more lectures; taking Mr. Placid—never Mr. Petulant— with her grocery shopping or searching for acceptable amateur art for the school lounge (a Gabriele Sangfroid deemed not tame enough); sending another one of Mr. Phlegmatic's suits to the dry cleaner; and then driving the boys to baseball practice, boy scouts meetings, or swimming lessons. Her only contemplation during the first week of this teacher act was to sit on the toilet to urinate and defecate. It brought not only to her a physical catharsis but, from the bathroom window a view of Betty burning raked grass and leaves in the yard. Smoke hovered over the tree limbs like a thick massive spider web and she saw that the fire that was leaping and the smoke that was hovering was her own life. She told herself that she loathed contemplation. And so the months passed by in a vapid and dizzying succession of things to do. Real existential pondering or the internal creation of meaning within herself were troubles she did not need to ponder.
Sometimes she doubted herself and wondered whether motion had become an ersatz; and this quandary was as pesky as a fly trying to land on the oils of her shiny nose. She kept having a recurring dream of floating on the mattress of her bed to undulations and the sounds of waves splashing against a wall. These bedroom walls had old pallid- yellow wallpaper that was bubbled and flaking off and patterned onto the strips of wallpaper there were hexagon shapes. Cartoon versions of herself and her family were trapped in each hexagon like semi-beings in monads that were unable to connect to the bigger picture, but like the wallpaper they were fading away.
In a last exasperated appeal for her to apply for work at the school before it opened, he reminded her that the boys wouldn't be there to teach any longer so she would need to do something with herself. Ruminating would never succeed; but an external activity like painting that was so outwardly self-absorbing might be used to subtly reiterate to them who she was as if an action or a set of actions were the summation of a being. By painting she could only thwart the aspirations of others by making them realize that her own selfish agenda came before theirs. Such an appearance would make her outwardly narcissistic and impregnable in their perspectives. For otherwise they could take her apart piece by piece the way souvenir hunters chipped off Teotihuac‡n or walked off with the Petrified Forest.
He would perceive the less concrete images in her paintings to be feral, and yet he would remain taciturn, scowling but leaving her to be herself. Maybe there would be some of these bedtime reminders, although not so many as now. Now there were these continual reminders of suits to have cleaned, grocery items for his palate and pallet (colors for his mouth that she would be vile and immoral to ignore) and reminders of what their boys needed, the agenda of pleasure for these little monkeys whom she was meant to chauffeur from place to place (a karate class for one, a baseball practice for another, a friend's birthday party for one, a jean and shirt buying extravaganza for both).
But now, she would not paint for she did not need it to support and pull herself back as if she were the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Her foundation, she told herself, was not as tenuous as this. And even though she was a true woman for him, catering to family matters and allowing herself to be his whore (he asking her questions about men she slept with so that it would excite him enough to maximize his pleasure when impaling within her) she told herself that she could do it without needing art as a crutch. She was a true woman as he liked it and yet had her own sense of being fully Gabriele within her own head. Painting would merely be a prop of a weak feminist. Yes, she could have told him that she had her art, that focus of the realm of ideas that had been her vocation before he moved in with her, and he would have scowled discreetly, never criticizing its odd feral qualities directly. But she would not have believed herself to be an artist anyhow since expressions were being effaced in each new day of life's mundane inconsequentiality.
She just gave him a wry smile and shrugged her shoulders. Too busy: the phrase was air above her lips and it just hovered there like the gossamer smoke strewn in the branches from Hispanic Betty's burning of leaves. She didn't dare say anything. She just let off a whiff of air. With head in denial, she silently repudiated that the school was even being constructed let alone finished, and that the two pupils who put motion and a sense of being busy into her life would soon be gone. She didn't want to discuss any of it. Still the school opened, not being subservient to her solipsistic thoughts. Its opening brought to her regret that she had chosen to not work there and that a role and an interaction with others, which had so easily defined her, would no longer be there to cling to. She had circumscribed her yearnings to go on with teaching, was now miserable, but believed that not prostituting herself in high school psychology classes or elementary school finger painting had been the right choice. Wounded not by vacuous stretches of hours but by the severing of this habit to place meaning and happiness on one's role and interaction with others, hers was a battered retreat. She withdrew into her own books to not be entirely lost unto herself and she knew that knowledge contained there was one step toward building herself apart from the addiction to the chaos and motion of others. She again returned to the nothingness from whence she came. She sometimes sat in her studio with a carton of Swenson's ice cream on her lap reading books on owls like any good ornithologist, got nebulous readings of Tarot cards that she smacked into Celtic designs on her bed, or sometimes drew funny faces on the patio with the chalky edges of rocks. Feeling discontent if left alone for five minutes and incrementally disconcerted for every minute beyond ten, she often interrupted Hispanic Betty to ask what she was doing as if housework were pantomime and the gestures could only be guessed at. The days were invariably long and despite their plodding movements they clunked into each other like two emaciated furless dogs in Thailand that were enervated and stupefied by starvation and blindness.
She questioned who this MF was. The boys were easier: the preferable one who had not come from her womb purred more often than he whined and the one with the demanding mouth railed and complained in less of a dual personality than the former but on the pettiest of things from her forgetting to buy him Pop Tarts to Hispanic Betty's abuse of toilet paper; however both could be easily characterized as egocentric toy soldiers who beat their drums chaotically when their batteries needed recharging or a TV advertisement had indelibly branded a "need" onto their brains. The other one (this Michael, this MF, this Mr. Phlegmatic) she knew in multi-interpretable bits for all her intimacies with him. She knew that he was glad that Rick now had a mother but this might have just indicated that he was glad to have some woman chauffeur his kid to after-school activities and take the kid clothes-shopping so that he did not need to do it. She knew that he claimed to be pleased that Rick now had a surrogate brother who might "toughen him up a bit" but this was ironic since the only one he beat with his belt was Nathaniel (except for occasional S&M sessions with her, and during that time she would struggle to gain the mastery of the belt, and it was she who more often then not would be the sadist). She knew that he had taken the boys to an amusement park a week ago when she was going through what she believed he thought of as an imaginary sickness, and yet she wasn't sure if it was from love that he removed all noise away from her or from simple indifference and neglect. Inconsequential facts littered her mind about Michael (facts like him giving his aunt a poinsettia every Christmas or that he liked to sodden his eggs with mustard), but was this inconsequentiality the real summation of the man? Was she, his woman, in such a needy state of mind that facts like this and the manipulative power of sexual pleasure so much more enhanced when with another should posed themselves as intimacy. Was this the epitome of a woman? It might be; but then, she told herself, she was a female and not a woman, and that she was a goddess and not a mere mortal. Her love of him, she judged, was a few facts mixed in fantasies begotten in neediness. What she asked and chose to know about him and the feeling of love she mixed as color on her pallet to spread around these facts were her own invention. She decided that she did not know him at all.
Her mind would not rest it there. She continued to think, "His obsession with viewing his watch could be from nervous energy instead of a desperate wish to succeed at every turn — who knows? His change to a CEO instead of an educator could be interpreted as a wish to make the educational experience everything that it should be so who am I to say that he is a derelict to values I was attracted to. His buying of other businesses and doing whatever it is he does shows industriousness and the desire to leave something to his children." She said these things to convince herself that she did not have a stranger who slept in her bed. But then she thought, "Even if he is a stranger — there have been lots of strangers in my bed. Should I chase him away out of a fear that we are all strangers?"
This enjoyment of hearing his footsteps on the linoleum when he stepped into her home, his smell within the cologne he wore, the pleasure he gave her (now less synchronized to her needs, now more male banging, but still pleasurable), the beautiful black eyes that were hard and virile, sideburns on his handsome, swarthy face, virile hair on the nape of his neck and as abundant growth on his fertile chest, and a general masculine handsomeness that told a woman, that breeding with him would grant unto her beautiful babies with little or no chance of deformities—these things were the most primordial instinctual drives of attraction and bonding that made her love him but still she did not think that these things were so much him as they were the promptings of a woman's breeding.
He was a busy little entrepreneur opening a fitness center with his Russian friend one month, an Internet cafe the next, and some minor investments in between that she knew less about. He did whatever he did throughout the day. Questioning him about his schedule annoyed him in his taciturn ways. She was made to feel that he did not want business to intrude on his personal domain or the personal domain to intrude on business but that, she knew, might just be her own positive interpretation. For what she knew there might be another woman. She didn't own a man's body. He could do with it whatever he wished so long as he didn't bring any disease to her. She told herself that jealousy was a primitive instinct of men warding off the responsibilities of babies that weren't composed in part by their own DNA, women who did not want to lose income, that food of the hunt, for themselves and their kids, and both sexes wanting to ensure that their bed partners were slavishly loyal at assisting their pleasures. She told herself that she was beyond such absurd human foibles as jealousy.
And yet she did not know who she was: she was now not even a teacher—just one more person groping around lost and clinging to others and, to a much lesser degree now, the commotion of the days, in order to be cognizant of being at all. She did not want to think of him, herself, or the demise of her higher authority nearly a year ago, and how like a good captain her higher authority had bravely gone down the toilet with her reefer ship. She thought again about the boys. Children were often thought of as callow adults making their inchoate journeys into adulthood. To her, adulthood was not superior to childhood: it was just two of the four links of recycled life no less purposeful than any raindrop slapping into the surface of a river which would then ooze back into the ocean before slowly being evaporated back from whence it came.
Sitting on the patio doodling on the concrete with the chalk of rock in her right hand and left hand like Moses holding back the waters of drool that came from her affectionate beasts, she felt the beginning of what she could tell would be an intense migraine. She tried to ease her apprehension by joking to herself that it would be no more than a seven or eight quake on the Gabriele scale and yet the foreboding knowledge of her vulnerability was exacerbating the pain and making her body rigid. In that sense it was a bit psychosomatic. She went inside to take one of her pills that never did her much good. The water was more immediately beneficial. She drank it voraciously to lubricate her dry throat.
As she was drinking her water she heard the lonely howls of Rick's dog. Disregarding simple pleasures, which should have slid down the apertures of a being's senses and filled lonely vacuous gray matter with curiosity and awe, this dog was fixated on her. It "needed" her. Domesticated creatures were so needy and clinging but she was reluctant to disparage this behavior as altogether delusional since she could not even disabuse herself of such inane notions. It probably was delusional but it still deserved sympathy, and so she once again went out to be with these dogs. Was this the only meaning of life, she asked herself, this soothing of imagined mental travail? She believed that it was. She picked up Rick's halitosis harried hound and took it into her bedroom—the cat, Mouse, having succumbed to cancer shortly after she returned from Europe and its body placed in a shoe box that was buried in the forest behind the house. She went to her bed and had the dog lay at her feet. She pressed her palm on her forehead and closed her eyes. "In Biblical times," she thought in an attempt to recall, think through, and solidify to long-term memory what she had read, "one of the fairest of fowl was the owl. The historical origin of the owl is, of course, the historical origin of the bird which probably evolved from one of two groups of dinosaurs, the—oh shit, I can't remember— during the early part of the Jurassic period. The term, Preavisanussyphilus or I don't know what, is applied to flying reptiles. Some…what's the word…ornithologists—some ornithologists say the earliest bird was a tree dwelling reptile which began flight by gliding from one branch to another although other experts say that it was a running, leaping, terrestrial animal which gradually increased the length of its leaps by the use of long forelimbs. After the appearance of Archaeopteryx Lithographica, the first known bird, the myriad species descended from it. It is hard to isolate when the first owls evolved. The first owl may have come out of the Cenozoic era of 70 to 40 million years ago if not the latter part of the Mesozoic era, which was 135 to 70 million years ago. The Mesozoic era was characterized by large seas, lakes, deltas with deserts, and occasional glaciers. If the owls came out of this period it was when the last of the dinosaurs were dying out. The Cenozoic era had volcanic activity and geological unrest. The environment was — " She couldn't concentrate. She wasn't confident of her facts. They were like sand falling through her fingers. She went downstairs into the kitchen, took another pill with some cola, and then fixed some burnt toast but the idea of buttering it seemed so nauseous to her that she ate it bare. Then she went back to her bedroom, feeling as mad as the pharaoh, Akhenaten (or Akhenaton) who purportedly worshiped the sun in his desert utopia until he was fully mad.
Her shadow on a wall in the hallway when passing into the bathroom to vomit seemed fey and she somehow felt subordinate to its alien presence. She felt so needy and wanted the shadow that was Michael, the last vestige of something somewhat real, to merge into her shadow to give it pulp and tangibility that she, who was less than her shadow, entirely lacked. She wanted the virile male shadow to stifle her thoughts, to free her from ever becoming old, and to shoo away loneliness and meaninglessness — an aloneness pesky as that incessant fly landing on that shiny nose of hers and as meaningless as a sedentary stick insect spending its life camouflaged as an inanimate object. She vomited before she got the lid up and the colors looked like the hard, tactile brushstrokes of thick orange palpable paint of a Van Gogh. Both her trembling head and her strained and feral vomiting moans seemed to be to the rhythms of Chopin's Funeral March.
She cleaned the bathroom for a few minutes and almost felt salubrious to be wiping with her sponge around the toilet; but, losing energy and feeling the heavier drumbeats of a migraine's gradual crescendo she realized that she was just passing out of one pain and going into something more intense. There were noticeable barricades to her thinking, checkpoints in the junctures of her thoughts, the looting of her ideas, and a forehead on fire like buildings in Sarajevo. Feeling extremely weak, she dried the floor, toilet, and sink with a towel, rinsed out the sponge, and lay on her bed. She felt startled to see Michael enter the bedroom.
"Hey," he said. It was his version of 'hello' distorted as it was in an oxymoron of informal indifference. She wondered whether she could expect anything better than this as sick and listless as she was. All sick people were an ignominy to those who were well just as contemplation was an abhorrence to all that spun in action, and as death was an opprobrium to the living.
She imagined the wraith of her higher authority saying, "Creatures of motion in their mortal frames unto their termination at death are incapable of true contemplation. Needing to subdue the earth, theirs are half-hearted prayers never to reach their destination …th never — "
"You have the dog in here," he reproached her with a gentle disdain.
She now wanted to waive him away like a fly — he who a few minutes earlier had been needed no less than air to breathe. She didn't say anything.
"Huh?" he demanded
"Yeah." It was her version of 'mind your own business.'
"Come here, Roman." He clapped his hands and made a downward gesture to the dog.
"He won't come. Look at him." His eyes are alarmed and his chest is heaving. Still, I think he knows that if I don't hold out as his aegis he can still elude you. He knows that you find it repugnant to pick him up so he's playing dumb."
"You're spoiling him. Get him out of here. I'm not coming into the bedroom tonight if it smells like this."
"I smell your farting."
He cracked a smile bashfully despite himself. "Betty's cooking."
She wanted to say, "True she likes frijoles, jalape-os and the like, and the boys like Mexican food too" but her pain trod into the breath of the utterance like children kicking puddles. She was doing her best to put on an agreeable facade—that appealing facade of the bantering bourgeois in the levity, the amusement park, that was supposed to be the world— but it was hard. It was too hard.
"Why are you just lying around?" he asked critically.
"Just resting," she lied. She frowned. His repudiation of her sickness, as not all that different than the attempts at malingering by former pupils whom he had beaten with his board, irritated her; and yet she doubted herself. How did she know what he thought? How did she know that he believed that her malingering was synonymous to theirs and had disdain for both? She did not know anything. It was speculation. It was discerning a mood and then devising fiction around it. But then, how did she know that she didn't know what he thought he knew? "I'll paint later. I am just thinking what to paint on" she lied again to test his reaction toward her proposed return to herself.
"You should wash that dog—both of them."
"What time is it now?"
"3:30"
"You hardly ever get back here until eight."
He went into the bathroom where he began to brush his teeth. The toothbrush muddled the cohesion of his words. "I'm in between meetings. While I was driving I spilled some coffee and then some ketchup from my hamburger. I need to change jackets so can you take the one I have on to the cleaners?" Water came down the faucet but it was a parsimonious dribble. She thought to herself that rich people were so stingy about the damnedest of things. She could not hear any water but she did hear him spit into the basin. With a toothbrush still in his mouth he glanced into the bedroom. "Are you unhappy with something?"
"No," she said.
"These headaches again?" His disdainful tone had the sotto voce of exasperation as if she were the pesky fly who should be shooed away.
"Fuck, don't say it that way. It isn't psychosomatic."
"What did you say?"
"The headaches aren't psychosomatic."
"You need to watch that mouth," he said sternly. He rinsed his mouth and spat. Then to soften his austerity he added, "Remember there's a bottle of Ivory Soap in here to wash out your mouth. You know, if there weren't two imitative boys to consider I wouldn't really mind all that much a slip here and there. As you have pointed out a bunch of times guys get enthusiastic at ball games and say things they shouldn't say. I've been one of those guys. Fine, I can buy that; and you are kind of right—the love and hate in the tone of voice matter more." He turned off the faucet and came into the bedroom with the stained suit jacket on a hanger. "Look over here. I'm putting the jacket on the chair. Make sure that you take it this afternoon so that you can get it tomorrow morning."
"I'm ill, Michael."
"Then have Betty take it."
"She can't drive."
"She should know how to sit in a taxi, don't you think?"
"Well, I wouldn't know whether she knows how to sit or not," she retorted spitefully. His voice was a meat cleaver to her thoughts. "Why don't you ask her yourself? Tell me something: I want to know why you don't want me to paint."
His face cringed. "Since when have I told you to not paint?"
She was silent and taken back since it was true that he had not expressed anything like this. She told herself that she needed to acknowledge this fact to be truthful to herself. He had not made her into a wifely errand girl but it had occurred from following his subliminal promptings. It was her womanly love that had made her succumb to his every wish less enthusiastically than most women but with enthusiasm nonetheless. If she were a has-been artist she (not he) had made it so.
"Sorry," she said. He was in the clothes closet, putting on a different jacket.
"No problem." He looked on this slug hanging from a pillow with a bad smelling dog on its lap. Her lifelessness disgusted him. Then the next moment he was disgusted by the thought that she was there, dormant, as if waiting on a bed for her clients. Scrambled by a non-Christian desire to rape her and a bored yearning to leave, he spoke what he knew that he should not say. "Listen, Gabriele, there is something on my mind: my father and my aunt have asked when they can meet you. When I introduce you, of course, I want to say, 'This is my fiancZe, Gaw-bre-el spelled like Gabriel but with an E, loving mother to Rick and her own son, who talks mildly and politely with no fowl words, and she is a respectable teacher or she is an artist.' Of course I don't want to tell my parents 'This is my fiancZe. She lies in bed and gets headaches just as she did in her former profession.' 'What profession is that, dear son?' 'Dear mother and father, it is the oldest non-taxable profession which is somewhat illegal.'"
"My heavens! — can I say 'My heavens' without getting my head cut off like a bad Turk or aberrant Afghan woman not wearing her burka?" She took a deep breath and tried to maintain a supercilious dignity. "You certainly have been repressing your hatred of me, mister. I for one am certainly glad that you have had your little catharsis." She feigned a smile and spoke weakly. "Please! Leave me and my imagined sickness. You are hurting my head."
"I don't hate you. I love you. I sleep in the same bed with you."
"This grinding of sexual organs against each other, Mr. M.F. Quest is not the making of love."
"Grinding of sexual organs." He sniggered. "Well, that's a new one. Here we go. It's your perverse perspectives in your paintings and life in general that I object to. You aren't always that way and you don't have to be that way. The fact that you overcame obstacles to become such a successful artist was my initial attraction. I encourage your art — still-life, portraits, landscapes, beautiful things. Those thing are a Catholic expression of God — not the surreal I don't know what that you put to canvas. It sells. That's good. It's critically appraised. That's fine. But you need healthy expressions."
"Former profession…non-taxable income…somewhat illegal. I can't believe you are rubbing my nose in this. I had a son to raise. You were one of my clients. You aren't perfect either. I think we shouldn't say bad things. My head is—it's too much"
"I'm sorry, Gabriele. That was—" He halted.
"Out of order," she filled in.
"Okay, a bit." Looking at the lifeless thing in the bed he spoke diffidently, unsure of his words. "I would be honored if you would marry me. Now, get out of bed and let's talk about it—take an Aspirin if your head hurts."
"That doesn't work with these things. What works you had me flush down the toilet like an ignoramus."
"Where did you get it from? One of your Johns?"
She laughed bitterly. "No, I don't want to marry someone this ignorant and insensitive."
"So what's this been if you don't love me."
"I care about you."
"What's the difference?"
"I'm tempted to say none, but that isn't it. Most people wouldn't agree with me but I'd say that being in love is psychosomatic and caring is real; so yes, I love you in a real way but I won't marry you. I won't be owned by a man and I won't feel lost to him."
She said it despite these urges within her continually to just nod to whatever he said and to cling to him as if family were the most concrete of life's illusions. It was only from being run over by a tank or two and having known the temporary nature of an insufferable family that she was saved from that illusion. She smiled. It was wry with a general look of confusion. As he walked away she found it mildly amusing that girlhood tragedies were delivering her from feminine predilections.
Spinning as she was in her own head with important short term memories that should have been for survival in her environment seeming so elusive, she questioned if she were now in Ithaca; but for the most part believing that she was, she wasn't sure whether she had driven or had flown there. She was not only spinning within her own head with facts about petty events which happened to her recently scurrying and absconding every time she tried to corner them (what she did yesterday and what she was doing now a mystery), but instinctual drives and fantasies of her subconscious were rife. They were at one moment spinning strobe lights and at another time like twirling maelstroms of dirt and trash flicking clockwise or counter-clockwise according to the caprice of winds. Each time she tried to ground herself within an idea, a thought, a memory of her life, it was futile. The winds would not allow it. If this spinning of a fragmented self were to stop she might be able to sense herself more fully. If only there was certain knowledge of where she was at she would have a sense of a numb self existing someplace. But feelings and desires were amuck like a dust storm and so who she was and where she was at were unfathomable at certain moments. The drugs she was now beginning to believe Candyman had slipped into her drink were allowing her wanton subconscious to blow everywhere and nowhere now that they could escape from a fragmented container called self.
At one moment many of those inconsequential but darker and subconscious thoughts were of the wraith of Rita/Lily hovering around her with a countenance showing the consternation of being abandoned and forgotten, the yearning to kiss Candyman and founder into the black silk of his body, the virulent idea of rollerblading through the held hands of couples so beautifully and speciously linked together in their little eager walks along shopping areas near Cornell University, and the voracious, hedonistic wish for anything that could feed her with pleasure. In another moment she had an outright hatred of self-centered lovers who would frolic together as if the world were conceived as nothing but the orange glow of a sunset for everyone, an indifference toward others who seemed so atavistic and unworthy of her company, the image of people being breathed in and out of her life with as little conscious regard as one's own breath, fantasies of women passing the romanticism of love to her like an Olympic torch, the fantasies of young men as juicy to look at as the Candyman, and the general hunger to merge with beauty. Still, in the next moment there was this strange hunger for people and company to pour into her vapid life, the wish to launch herself like a rocket, the trail of fire and heat from burning fuel roaring from her vagina sending her to more intellectual realms where the needs of the body wouldn't sap one of mental purpose, and that desire for pleasure and adventure to escape her stagnant intellectualism that was stifling her from feeling alive. She believed that she was in some drug dealer's house in Ithaca and yet was beginning to believe that her beliefs were mad. Her only conclusion was that she couldn't conclude that either of these matters could be conclusive.
"He's spiked your drink with Ecstasy," said the higher authority. Gabriele formulated her question to Candyman in deference to her higher authority's promptings. "No, I didn't spike you drink none so relax there, Snowflake. I just prepared my special." "What is in this special of yours?" she demanded as she unbuttoned part of her shirt. "Hmm…my own little recipe." "What is in this shit? I'm fucking hot." "You sure are. Nobody'd say that a husky ain't sexy if he has any sense at all. Anybody does, he don't know the type of mama I got in here with me. Not much of a snowflake, are you? That's fine; so fine! No worry about that, Mamma. I like older chicks and husky women are better bed tackles."
Was Candyman a hallucination like Rita/Lily a few minutes ago? If not, wouldn't that mean that she was back in Ithaca? For what she knew she could be ill from a migraine and resting there on a bed in her home in Albany with her son bringing to her wet washcloths to counter the fever that burnt under the surface of her forehead. However, a hallucination was made up myriad transient images, and the sight of Candyman had constancy. Either by plane or by car she had gone there. That she knew. The Candyman was there before her face to face. She couldn't imagine or hallucinate anything so clearly. And he was the landmark for her knowing that she was at Cornell University in Ithaca, with its eternally young and often drug addicted specimens, as much as the World Trade Center towers, the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty were landmarks of New York City. She anxiously tried to isolate what had happened to her ten minutes earlier for to be without some facts about this self would be like blocking the apertures of the senses with gauze and drifting in and out of consciousness with no self at all — a mutiny against the higher authority and the first mate by those with no navigable skills whatsoever; and as a bad omen from tossing the corpses off the stern, the ship being tossed around in toilet waters.
She more or less remembered knocking on his door and the ensuing conversation thirty or forty minutes earlier in a rather generalized impression. "Whadaya want, Snowflake," he said through the crack of the chained door. "I need some weed," she said. "Whydaya think we got somethin' like that in here?" "Because you're the Candyman," she said. "Is that a fact?" he said indifferently. "You a cop?" he asked. "No, of course not. I've been here before even if it was a couple years back. Don't you remember me?" "No, I don't." "Gabriele, the whore." "I don't have a thing for you." "Tunafish sent me the first time I came. He was your client and that of my own." "Whatzure job? How doya' know Tunafish?" "I gave massages." "German massage?" "Yeah." "Oh, I remember. Almost went to you myself. You gave Tunafish blowjobs." "I serviced him upon occasion." "Come in Mama and get your weed." He unlocked the door and let her pass into his living room. Then he locked himself in again. He fixed her a drink and she drank it as one tends to do with drinks. "Master Card and Visa machines ain't workin' today so I'll assume you to have cash and you assume me to ask for it." "Any discount for me, Candyman? I—" She felt embarrassed that she had forgotten her ATM card and only had $50.00 in her purse. She had come so far and now there was the fear that the lack of these bits of paper called currency had the possibility of being an obstacle to the procurement of her stash. He did not say anything for a while but just smiled and let her sip the lemonade. She felt a metamorphosis as if she were cracking out of the icy teddy bear with the stiff arms that the factory of the human race mutantly created and were now whimsical winds. At last he spoke. "'Cause I know you are a professional and be all the more serviceable with large and handsome black men like me so I'll make my body there in full 'vailability for you taste buds. I'll let you tongue and lips give me a bath the way you did Tunafish and maybe there will be a discount for you." He chuckled. His teeth glittered green as the walls of nude centerfolds seemed to be turning around and the floor seemed a soggy mire. She was a game to him and so with all games he, the player, savored the moments, not wanting to delve into pleasures at full thrust lest they end too soon.
Now, when she concentrated as fully as she was capable of she remembered the drink and an imprecise replica of this initial conversation but there were some minutes (she wasn't sure how many) that she couldn't account for as if she had slipped and fallen into some vacuous abyss unawares and then had mysteriously gotten to the other side of the chasm, slapping off the mud that besmirched her clothing without being much more cognizant than this. Maybe she had serviced him during this period or maybe she had just fallen into a vacuous state of one who knew the state of the world: the multitudes who were calculative and disingenuous users; life as the frivolous extroverted game of using others to rack up points; a smile as an artifice; society as billiard balls slapping against each other and rebounding; they who were customers of that which was deleterious to them and were ready to use or be used to get it; and the few higher ones linked to compassion and empathy, whose intellect saw the world and yet had to give a cheerful rendering of it as "life" because one did have to live in this world and celebrate it the best one was able to do. For the empathic ones, hidden beneath hardened facades, their sensitivities were under the scabs of hardened smiles.
"Can't figure out why you'd come all the way to Ithaca for some weed if you are living in Albany like there ain't drugs in other cities." "Don't know anybody else," she said. "Just the Candyman." Her fingers paused in this unbuttoning of the blouse as if a wave of sensibility had momentarily washed upon her. Obviously she hadn't serviced him yet but she could see that she was ready to do so. She detoured his eyes from staring at her breasts by asking him to show her his different brands of marijuana. She thought of Nathaniel to clog her urging to be intimate with Candyman but she couldn't remember many specifics about yesterday no matter how hard she tried. Still she unsuccessfully concentrated in the hope that her ponderings would pull back the memory. It was the following: Yesterday Nathaniel stepped off the school bus and went inside. She was seated on her white colonial chair as superciliously cold, hard, and beyond human frailties as the statue of Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial seen on a winter day. She was the throned Antarctic queen.
"Hey there. How was school?" she asked coldly
"Same."
"We need to talk!," she said.
"What's wrong?" he asked. He looked petrified as if she had discovered his secret relationship with the man who had made going into R-rated movies so easy for him (just the cost of showing his behind and letting those fingers graze on his two hills and this payment deferred until after a movie or movies were finished).
"Nothing she said. She smiled her haughty smile and spoke in her typical phlegmatic tone. "I'm wondering about taking another trip abroad."
"With or without me?"
"Hmm…I love your subtlety. Maybe with you if you care to be a vagabond and don't get in the way of me painting."
"What is a vagabond?"
"No Four Star hotels — living in little dumps that look like closets with no air conditioning and a shared shower. Kind of like Boy Scouts, but no camping out in the forest and bad ventilation in the rooms. Hotels for back packers that are worthy of demolition."
"What's demolition?"
"Anyhow, ugly old buildings that if you were to look at them you would puke on sight."
"You can count me out of staying in slave rooms 'specially if there are shared bathrooms. That's nasty. I 'd scratch my toes and feet every minute morning, day, and night. I scratch my toes and feet for an hour every time I shower in the locker room after gym classes. I like four star hotels."
"You've never been to four star hotels—just seen photographs of Rick staying in one while in Rome."
"I want to go. You need to let me go! But there will be no vagabombing."
"Aren't you the little male dictator. You sound like Michael. Do you like that guy?"
"Better than nothing, I guess."
"'Better than nothing, I guess,'" she mocked. "Glad to know that perspective. It makes it easier to know that you won't be upset when I tell you something. Well, how do I say this? There are 6 billion people on the planet each with his own personality, routine, and dreams to acquire this or that. Even lovers can't get along. It's an absolute miracle that we don't go around plucking each other's eyes out. It is good that we are smart enough to know that there would be ramifications for actions like that. Okay, here it is: better than nothing BEFORE, and NOW you have nothing. I've kicked out that rigid giraffe, Michael. At this house he is no more. Michael won't be living here any longer; and this trip to Euro-Asia, if I decide to do it, will be to celebrate not having that guy silently pull my strings any longer."
"And Rick?"
"And Rick." She sighed. "I guess he won't be here."
"You gonna kick me out next?"
"Don't be ridiculous. You are my son."
"If I was to burn down the house would you keep me then."
"If you were to burn down the house your butt would be as hot as the house but you would still be my son and no, I wouldn't throw you out of the house because there wouldn't be a house for either of us since you would have burnt it down."
He laughed hysterically. His mother's clever sallies enthralled him. Then he smirked hatefully. "Men don't like you very well."
She smiled widely. "It is a reciprocal thing—goes both ways. I don't care what these self-centered little beasts like or don't like. Three cheers for men not liking me and going their merry ways. Hip hip hurray! Hip hip hurray! Hip hip hurray!"
"I think you are strange. You aren't like other moms at all, you know."
"What are they like?"
"I don't know. When I go over to my friends' parents' houses and stuff they don't say weird shit all the time."
"But weird shit is what it is all about. How can you be interesting without saying weird shit continually. It is impossible."
"Do I have to take care of both of those dogs out there?"
"I don't know. I guess someone will have to. We'll make it a joint chore. We'll share the burden and make the dogs feel loved and happy here. What do you say?"
"I say that is a crock of bull shit."
Her mind was preoccupied with this declaration of being called weird. "I'm not weird. I'm just clever. What is weird are moms whose brains change into rocks — probably from too many years of marriage."
"When I was in the second grade kids would say that you catch men outside your trailer, put spells on them, and then you drink their pee."
She looked at his earnest face. "Really? Is that what they said."
"Yeah."
"Why didn't you tell me that then."
"I didn't want to hurt your feelings."
"Oh, how sweet." She felt visibly touched that he should have thought of her feelings over those of his own. She felt more optimistic about him growing up into a decent individual. "Anyhow, I will be going someplace — maybe back to Bangkok…who knows… anywhere really from Tokyo to Tijuana."
"Without me?"
"Probably."
"I don't care where you go. Betty's here to take care of me. She's a better mother, really."
"Even if she takes up all the toilet paper you want to use on your precious butt?"
"Even then," he said. They heard the dog barking, an opening of the door, and a rush of footsteps.
"It's the favored one," said Nathaniel.
Rick rushed against Gabriele's body and this physical presence made her feel a sense of aversion to the boy. As much as she cared for him his grip was like a monkey upon her bark. Her niveous limbs just stood out awkwardly and she did not know what to do. But where thawing caused snow and ice to crack and fall to the ground, her thawing was a cold chill that caused her legs to begin to shake. Her arms embraced him in the desperate clinging of love and she began to cry. It was the first time she had cried since she was a little girl. It was the first time she had ever cried according to her memory.
"So the darker reefer is richer?," she asked. "You got it, Mama." "I don't know the difference really. Maybe you just better mix it all together and we'll hope for the best." "Sounds sensible. All right, I can do but with a bunch of the cheap stuff since you are getting a discount." "I want to know what is in this drink." "That's abita' mountain dew with some lemon juice, abita' water, tad bit of urine, and some truth serum. You feel that you want to tell the truth?" She was picked up and lifted off by a wind and it took him several minutes to call her back. "Gabriele? Gabriele? Gabriele?" "Who?" "You. I was wantin' to know if you are wantin' to be truthful and tell me your dark secrets. "Okay," she said. "Okay, start talking." "Okay, she said. "He slapped her cheeks with his fingertips. "Do you want to tell me all your secrets and be truthful with me?" His hands were now in her shirt unbuttoning the remaining buttons. "I am so inclined but have found the necessity of a facade." "Keep your dictionary closed, sister, and talk straight talk." "I like being honest even when it gets me into trouble unless I think it might be too disadvantageous. When I was a little girl I witnessed a beheading of a Turk in Istanbul." "Turk?" "In Turkey—the country…not the bird. Everyone was clapping and my parents were glad that justice had happened. I knew that justice was savagery and that crying about it wouldn't accomplish anything but just get people to loathe me. Loathe meaning hate and not love. I decided that if I asked questions and looked like I wasn't bothered by it all I would be left alone with my sensitivities intact. I did my consummate performance to look like an adult and appear as if I did not need them." "What would they have done to you if you cried?" "As I've said, they would have looked on it as weakness and they would have despised it. I didn't want to be hated or loved. I wanted to be a graduate from childhood that could only come from an adult action of pompous stoicism. You don't understand?" "Why did you become a whore with such fancy- dancy words?" "I wanted to know fancy-dancy words but I didn't want to get a job using fancy-dancy words. I didn't want to be one of those professional bureaucratic slaves. I decided that everything was a form of prostitution and that bodily prostitution was quicker than mental prostitution and with bodily prostitution I would never have to relinquish my thoughts. Does that make sense?" "Weird, Sister, but go on." " I didn't want to be there behind a desk working for an agency that represented societal interests. If all of society's institutions were a refined form of atavistic savagery I didn't want to be there contributing to any bit of it: writing documentation, red tape, bureaucracy of this and that sucking up my ideas." "You are one heavy, twisted sister." "You've got that right Candyman." The two began to kiss to et cetera.
Candyman, to his own astonishment and hers, got a second erection a minute after their intimacies were completed; and so Gabriele went to the car for her sketchbook, and drew him nude. A few minutes after she was done she was again in a confused state of not knowing if she had flown to Ithaca or had driven there. She was fading fast. All earlier utterances that she had to make to Candyman, where she had to pull down some ethereal sense of self in order to have some coherent conversation and some degree of rationality behind her situation, had exhausted her more than the sex act itself. She fell asleep. And when she woke up she smelled cooking and went into the kitchen. Candyman was frying bacon in the skillet and she knew that he was thinking about their experience together as he watched the hardening bacon shrink on a paper towel bedding.. "Well, I guess I need to pay you, Candyman." "Yeah, what'd we say—forty so that you could have ten bucks for gas money." "That's what was said." "I'm wondering something there, Husky. Why'd you come all this ways when you could get drugs anyplace." "Didn't know where to go there, Candyman, and I needed to get out and think about things, you know."
She paid Candy Man his forty dollars — a discount price for the sexual services she rendered unto him, and the two shook hands. "Going back to your son?" "Oh, did I tell you about him?" "Sure — you were tellin' to me lots you don't know nothin' about. One time you were spacing out and talkin' 'bout your son and a Russian boy, packing and coming here." She remembered: shortly before she went to bed last night, Nathaniel came into her room. She was packing at the time. He looked at her maliciously.
"You bored?" she asked.
"Maybe," he said.
"Do you miss Rick?" she asked. He didn't answer. "Will you sleep with Cat tonight?"
"I hate the smell of that dog."
"Hmm…maybe you should give a friend a call."
"I don't have any. I don't like people and they don't like me."
"I can't believe that. Is there no one at St. Michaels whom you play with?"
"It isn't called St. Michaels."
"Whatever. Answer my question."
"There is a Russian kid who pesters me."
"Well, don't look at it as pestering. I'd say that since his language is different than yours and the nuance of the meanings of words would be different he might make a good friend. I don't know him but as nerdy as he might be, his perspective of life would be slightly different than an American and so you might learn about the world anew through exchanging ideas with him. Do the two of you do anything together?"
"He plays in the same baseball team."
"What's his name?"
"Don't know. It is too hard to remember."
"A Russian boy with an unmemorable name?"
"Yes."
"Do you have his telephone number?"
"No. I want to know were you are going.."
"Don't know. I won't leave for anyplace far away. I think I'll go to Ithaca for a day or two and see a friend."
"Rita/Lily?"
"No, not her."
"Who?"
"You don't know him. Candyman is his nickname."
"A boyfriend?"
"No. He is a potential customer — maybe he will buy a painting." She threw in some lies. "I'll be back in a few days. Don't worry."
"I'm not worried about you," he said in an indifferent tone with a sotto voce of disgust.
"When is your game?"
"Tomorrow"
"What time?"
"6:30."
"You and Betty can take a taxi there; but you'll see me on the bleachers when the balls start flying."
She remembered her promise because of the serendipitous ramblings of Candyman; and vomiting once on the edge of the road, she journeyed back to Albany. Sick to her stomach and dazed when she arrived back at her home, she went to sleep on the nearest couch for a half hour before going out to buy some groceries. She spent an hour or two of the afternoon interminably lost in aisles of food. She kept thinking about Rick and how the two of them used to bump their carts into each other as they raced through the aisles. It depressed her to think that this would never happen again, and yet she didn't see why relationships should end in such an all or nothing cessation as if differences in outlook among changing beings meant a broken contract of quid pro quo. Had their relationship been nothing but a bartering of services the whole time. She supposed that this was the concept of a relationship to most people.
At this moment her life was a foolish quandary of being unable to figure out if there was more salience in trying to reestablish family ties or independent strivings at all cost. She filled her cart, took out items, and then replaced them with others of different labels and equivalent prices. She couldn't figure out how many people she should be shopping for even though she had each person's tastes in mind in making selections. The closer she got to the cash register the more exacerbated were her doubts about buying most of her products, so before she purchased anything she abandoned most of it in a vacant cart and shoved it off once into the oblivion. When she got to the trunk of her car she had only one meager bag of groceries. She thrust it into the trunk, slammed down the lid of the trunk in vexation, and then buckled herself into the coolness of the vinyl seat. She passed a bridal boutique many times in the car and then spontaneously parked in front of the building that she had been rotating around. The saleswomen there could not find happiness in dressing the strangely sullen woman with monosyllabic mendacities of date and place for this celebratory solemnization. Under the lattice inside the store, staring at herself in a tripartite mirror, she didn't like the trains of the wedding dresses she was trying on. They were too short, florid to the point of gaudy, or not as ornate as she thought they should be. When she drove down to the end of the drive at the junction of the house she noticed that Nathaniel's dog was the only one that was chained up on the side of the house and that Michael's sailboat and motorcycle were conspicuously missing. She wasn't sure how she felt. In her room she took off some expensive, gaudy earrings and slipped out of her dress. The closet was now hers. His clothes were missing. Only the toes of her myriad shoes were within this capsule confronting her naked feet. Gracefully, with the highest poise, she swaggered from room to room to counter an inclination to stagger. Rick's room was vacuous space making her life unbearably vapid. She mourned the loss of her other son before going to the ball game.
She was spread out on a bleacher resting her eyes into the intricate mosaic of the silhouette of leaves and taking a break from her sketch (myriad tiny nude candymen having sex with various women, the women having candymen babies in their arms, and each copulation and baby scene wrapped in its own circle or monad; these monads making up total planets, and ultimately the planets composing the cellular outline of a long fanged beast that was the lonely universe) when the man with the unmemorable name looked down upon her.
"Hello, Gabriele, do you remember me?"
Startled, she turned to him. "Yes, but I'd never be able to say your name."
He laughed. No one outside of the immediate family would be able to do that.What an intricate sketch!"
"Do you like art?"
"I love it." He said it so simply with such sincerity that the breath of his idea went up her nostrils titillating her with pleasure. "After you finish your sketch I think you should paint it onto an enormous canvas with a dismal red and black background."
"Yes, I like that idea, even if being so large it is never sold."
"Oh, it would fit over the staircase of a millionaire's old home perfectly.You'll sell it in time."
"I was sitting here not knowing how to apply this thing really and was becoming annoyed at myself on different levels."
"For what reason?"
"For lots of reasons: a personal life that is shit, an idea I wasn't sure what to do with until you came along, annoyed at being annoyed by this large crowd as if they need to be quiet for me."
Sang Huin had been on the bleachers at a stadium with his new Pocket PC when a foreigner looked down upon him.