"It's just me and my dad. He likes Saturday Mass better."
"I see. No mom?"
"Dead."
"Oh." Her interjection was lucid but sympathetic. She thought it the right combination for matters like this. She admired his strong and unambiguous declaration. He knew that death was death and for one so young not to fudge when saying it gave her newly found respect for this widower, Mr. Quest, as well as his son. Was there really a realm where ideas were the true form? She was certain that Plato was right in thinking that there was. We were all imitations of ideas. But she was equally certain that no one returned to the realm of ideas once they were dead. Death was death. It sometimes occurred to her that if humans weren't honest about the tenants for the parameters of birth and death (sex and closure) they would lie about everything else within those parameters. If she could only get through the factory of life without becoming a defective misanthrope she knew this to be the highest measurement of success.
She listened to their kid talk for half an hour: some other kid who couldn't catch baseballs and whom they attributed as the culprit in losing a game; those who were successes and failures in a broad jump; teachers who reprimanded them; wretched gossip about poor Little Orphan Annie and her continual penchant for launching her cannon balls at male genitalia; action packed television movies they had seen; popular cartoons on lunch boxes; and sardonic complaints from the deprived Adagio for only getting to watch TV three days per week. She did find the food jolting around their mouths as they spoke rather amusing; but on whole it was dreary conversation and it began to give her a headache.
"Put your plates in the sink when the two of you finish. I need to think."
She excused herself and retreated into the bedroom while they ran to the refrigerator to put their ravenous fangs into the carcass of the chocolate bunny.
In her bedroom she listened for the door of scurrying boys to open and close. Then she began to smoke her cannabis like Shakespeare and let words in thoughts rise from the ashes of the mundane. As they rose in a cani-beer cloud with the levity of laughing gas, she stayed in the bedroom and began to write. She did not feel sick enough to go to the bathroom this time. She thought that she should really lock the door of the trailer but she knew that the Nathaniel would stay outside busy unto himself or with his friend. Less and less would her company be needed. She wrote: "Dear journal, I've been thinking that the personal life should be banned. This socializing and lovey-doving just slows down society's progress. Everywhere, clogging sidewalks, there are these Cornell University girls holding hands with their guys. Makes me sick. If I go to a waterfall or a park to paint or pick up some milk at the 7-11 I have to wave my hand and shoo them away like pesky flies. And you know that each of them is thinking about what he's thinking about her. So apparent! They are orbiting around their guys at all moments of the hours. They are everywhere subservient to chemicals of love in their heads that make them subservient to his whims; and I want to be the demolition of those ties. I see my vocation as roller blading down sidewalks through those linked hands while I get to my destination. I see myself on sidewalks leading to the grocery store. I'm on roller blades and I'm breaking a few arms and blading a few lovey-dovey hearts. Sometimes I dream of shouting through a megaphone, 'About relationships and needing people I caution everyone to be circumspect. Can another be water or oxygen? Can another one be your sustenance? Stop this delusional MTV thinking! You are letting one simple neurotransmitter banging against a pleasure receptor control you. Females, don't be foolish enough to be women! What are you doing wasting all the minutes of your life trying to get someone to be with you? What on Earth makes you want to block off your own thoughts this way? A man won't stay with you forever. They never do and sooner or later you must confront your own inane foolish selves that have been underdeveloped and unchartered all this time. Find a deeper awareness than the personal life. Find a vocation that will allow you to tap into the entity. Tap, tap to not be the whimsical dictates of a selfish man. Tap and confront one's real aloneness. Be intrepid by aloneness for from it one finds oneself. It is by being gregarious that you lose yourself . Befriend your aloneness. To do otherwise makes men think that your highest duty is to be ridden in like riding on a horse. Tap Tap. Buck the man from vaginal penetration. Watch him run away like a horse slapped on its side. Plug into your special talent that links you to the entity and you will never be lost again. You will be part of the new invincible species.' Still, what can I do? I'm just a mere me. I mailed some photographs of Adagio to Peggy and her gang. Sort of appearance only. Decided it was best to keep up their interest in him. Promised that someday they would not only see him but keep him for a while. Don't know why — True, I don't like them despite that they are his his godparents and all—but sometimes the idea of a hiatus from this Mommy game is a bit tempting. I could dump him on them. Antarctica — Antarctica. It's still in my dreams —"
"What about me? Willya' take me with you when you go off to the seventh continent?" The voice was that of Smokey-The-Bear in the "Don't start forest fires" advertisements.
"Up here, youn' lady."
She looked on the shelf. "Well, fuck. You're not Smokey at all."
"No, youn' lady, I'm not. He's just a distant cousin." Gabriele looked at the foot long stuffed polar bear sitting on a man's handkerchief on a shelf above the dresser. She had bought him one time when she went to Buffalo, New York. "Poor Gabey, nobody loves ya' 'cause ya' don't love 'em. Going to restaurants all alone isn't no fun. Parks alone, waterfalls and painting with your paint brush, even fornicating alone. Even when you are with people you are separate. Poor Gabey." Suddenly the polar bear began to change into the higher authority.
"Gabriele, it is me" said the higher authority. " Look at yourself, held together by the stitching of hate-the plastic-eyed polar bear with the stiff arms that the factory of the human race mutantly created — it will be you who shall feel the walls of artificial fur ripped from its threads, and your stuffing falling out. For a little beer on top of four joints makes a person see the unsealed human fragments that had been smoothed over in time. Come on Gabriele, the gal who still chews tobacco and spits it into an empty beer can…the gal with the deep dark-ocean eyes…the gal bereft of what the normal means, grip that other beer bottle now. Together with the joints, this is the only medicine devised to rebreak the strangely concocted pieces that have been glued into the broken you. Drink and smoke! Become fragmented again with the hope that you will heal and be normal. A 17 year old girl goes to eat a meal in her boyfriend's home and a wife to her in-laws. How is it that such simple pleasures continually elude you? How is it that you have made such cynical and erroneous views of the world?" No sooner had her higher authority spoken then Gabriele heard a skid of a fast moving car suddenly stop and a child scream. The polar bear and the handkerchief with the initials embroidered on it tumbled from the shelf. Gabriele quickly stabbed the marijuana to its ashtray of death and flew out the door.
"Who is this mother fucker?" she mumbled to herself. Then she knew. Here was MF, the vice principal of her son, her former client, shouted at hysterically by the mother of the dead little girl. Gabriele held the woman who was deranged in bereavement and sunk into gravel and dust of the trailer park. She was her bulwark.
"So, he will be her lover — this MF?" scoffed Saeng Seob in their bed upon hearing his last chapter.
Sang Huin regretted having begrudgingly read him this chapter. He only read parts of the manuscript when asked to do so. Seong Seob could only understand the superficial aspects of the story at best and he only asked to hear those bits of it read out when Sang Huin seemed to preoccupied with writing it. Sang Huin supposed it gave them something in common. "Maybe. I don't know, really," he said evasively. He removed his computer to a table that was adjacent to the bed and picked up a magazine. His eyes began to peruse the photographs of male models in Gentleman's Quarterly who if known and involved in his life would pull him out of his numb abyss of insipid days into the vibrancy of desire in nightly embraces.
"And become pregnant?"
"I don't think so. I don't know at this point." He yawned. "I wouldn't know what to do with that. I need some believable drama in it." And yet he felt that there was no drama within his own life. Giving private lessons to children he didn't particularly care for, his days were missionless clutter that exhausted what little extroverted characteristics were within him; and coming home to Seong Seob with a lack of sexual variety in that domain was flattening him in the malaise of inordinate boredom. He was certain that there was no drama in his life; and yet paradoxically he knew that drama was inherent even in rocks that weathered away in time. Drama was change and it was in all things. If drama were in the rocks, it too was there in a simple life. His was laden in resentment over the idea of returning home to this blind lover who couldn't see that the two of them living together was inhibiting the progress of his manuscript. "Any ideas," he asked.
"She could have a baby and then throw him in a well."
"Why? What well? I don't want to write unbelievable melodrama."
"It's not unbelievable. It happened?"
"Huh?"
"To me. Postpartum depression. I'm told that a few weeks after my brother was born my mother became depressed. She wouldn't eat very much. She wouldn't leave her room except to go to the temple. One day she wanted to go to the temple and she couldn't find my brother's shoes. When the servants couldn't find them either, she dismissed the servants. She told them to not come back. When they were gone she made a bath for my brother and drowned him. My family says that maybe I fought back and it was too much trouble for her in the bathtub. Anyhow, she decided to drive me to an old contaminated well on my grandmother's estate, pried the boards loose that covered what was left of it, and dumped me in. There wasn't much water in it so I didn't drown, but I lost my eyesight. " Sang Huin felt an empathy as deep as the gods while he listened to the wind howling through the crack of the window. It was a barely audible murmuring of ineffable pain. It was palaver but it called to him somehow, pushing him from his malaise to the malaise of it all.
She could guess that the quick entrance into the trailer park, if it were such, was a reaction to her, the nefarious whore, whom he had ridden in sync to a female's need for pleasure many years earlier. Maybe as an afterthought to the decision of allowing his son to go off with Nathaniel, Rick's father recognized the address his son had gone to. If that were the case she supposed that she was in some way culpable for him driving quickly, if it were indeed done quickly, to remove his son. The inescapable fact zipped her up into its body bag: the removal had lead to the neighbor girl's ill fate and early demise.
She wasn't sure who was to blame. Perhaps it was fate itself. She parsed this concept of fate. She asked herself what it was and it seemed to her that in most situations it was the selfishness of myriad individuals who, together at a convergence, unintentionally brought about another person's harm. She rued over the unfairness of those who thrived for a time and those who seemed bound to perish from their inception. She could become engrossed in her own quasi-pleasant little world and not think about the bigger picture. By comparison to many others suffering from starvation, disease, war, and menial labor her life was that of a contumacious child who refused to leave the amusement park for fear of no longer having such a dizzy perspective of it all. She could become a bit religious (anything from a witch to a Christian) and further the vertigo. Within the lotusland of America, so removed from intense pain and hunger, she could hide to have a brighter perspective where some god or another was still keeping the whole creation, if not each and every individual, safely in his pocket. She did not, however, want self-deception. As much as she was able to do so, she wanted to know reality. Justice was equity but equity was not in the natural order and so the natural order was unjust. What justice there was existed as the creation of man; and so, in ways, society was more righteous than the natural order.
A day before the funeral she could sense a malaise so palpable it seemed to flatten her under its foot like a bug. While her Adagio was at school (if he were indeed hers, for she doubted the tenet of people belonging to each other as it was action and clutter of small earthly creatures who needed to fill their time and the vaccum of their minds no differently than her son and this Rick when they had played with a soccer ball, plastic and air, to gain a connection that bypassed one's lonely domain), she went into the bathroom. She stared at the mountain of his and her clothing beside the washer, which she had crowded into the stall of her shower. The molecules of their stink seemed to bang against each other in the musical vibrations of Eric Satie's musical composition, Gymnopedies; and with the dead heap of morose and musical laundry, her lethargy, and the horror of being a domesticated woman as all womanly slaves since the beginning of time, she couldn't bring herself to do the laundry.
She told herself that she was indeed a silly woman. Nine years ago she had entertained herself in this mental challenge of being desired by one whose orientation was not so inclined to women, spun herself in a specious illusion of intimacy when, in youth, sex was such a novel and believable medium of intimacy, and given birth in the belief that aborting an embryo was barbaric. Now she was struck by how this connection that she brought into the world would be an ongoing frittering away of her days. She cachinnated at her absurdity, which caused Mouse to jump on top of the washer and stare at this mad woman inquisitively. "Hi there, Mouse. Haven't you ever seen a woman laugh while doing the laundry before? You really must get a life." She chuckled at the cat.
She told herself that there were too many people in her life when really there was just one. She told herself that contrary to her precept that people should be breathed in and out she was cluttering up her life with them although really a neatly isolated and Antarctic existence would have given her nothing to contemplate. Still, she again entertained the idea of dumping her son at Peggy's for he had become too indespensable to her life and this was a deep vulnerability. Still the quandary persisted: there was no way that she could allow him to be damaged by the disparaging animadversion of a family no different than a "boot camp" or military training camp. The internecine war games in this so called family of which she had extricated herself brought most damage onto outsiders like herself and she did not want to perpetuate it to the next generation.
Gabriele heard a thump in her mailbox. She received a letter telling her that she was terminated from the local greeting card company. She rummaged though her sketches and found one of her impish ones, less pertaining to social etiquette, missing from the rest. She must have mailed it in by mistake. She guessed that this was similar to what she might have done to be ignored by Hallmark. With Hallmark she wasn't quite sure what she had done but this local greeting cards publishing house was clearly piqued. Did the subconscious, like an empress dowager, make its maneuvers on conscious reality behind the scenes? She had played such games for so long. It was no great wonder they had dismissed her. Only an idiot would have been surprised by this playing with the fates. She also realized that she could not prostitute herself more in her other occupation to rectify the lack of incoming finances. Sanity only allotted so much prostitution per week. "Oh, well," she thought. "Maybe I could sell my paintings."
The thought of herself as an artist the way some might proclaim the title as a full summation of themselves was never something that Gabriele did. She could admit, "I paint" to herself. This was an obvious fact, but she never went beyond that. This added relevance of a bleak economic situation, however, made her say, "I could possibly be an artist."
Evading the menace of time consuming laundry, she sat in front of her canvas but found herself thinking about the neighbor woman and her deceased child. That woman would have pillaged through hell for the opportunity to wash clothes for her daughter. Gabriele felt ashamed of herself for groaning about domestic chores and she felt deep empathy for her neighbor. She went to the grocery store and then brought over a packaged basket of fruit for the grieving mother. She knocked and the woman opened the door slightly.
"What?" she murmered numbly.
"Hello. I hope you don't mind. I was worried that you might not be eating."
"They let him go, you know."
"Quest?"
She took the basket. "More food. People always give food, energy." She laughed bitterly. "Yes, Quest, and I don't know why."
Gabriele released a sympathetic interjection of "Oh, my!"
"It doesn't matter. Nothing matters now. If I'm alone for a minute I keep hearing her everywhere I go but there-there just isn't anything. It doesn't seem real. I don't seem real. I make movements but it doesn't seem like me. I'm talking to you now but it seems like there is somebody else talking who isn't me. You aren't you either. I'm just watching you like from a distant seat at a movie theatre or something is watching that isn't me. "
"That's natural. It will be that way for some time. Feel it your way as long as it takes."
"How would you know?" the woman asked bitterly.
"I don't. I just imagine it is," Gabriele said softly. She did not want what she knew to intrude. She just wanted to listen.
"The police say nobody saw him when he entered the trailer park. Nobody knows if he was speeding. According to the police, Sally ran in front of him to get a ball some boys threw to her." Gabriele couldn't imagine her boy wanting to play with a girl. Then a cold feeling shot through her body: what if her son had thrown the ball at the moment that the car was coming into the trailer park in the hope that the girl would run after it and get killed. "What if this is a reaction to Little Orphan Annie?" she thought. The idea was too chimerical and grotesque to take seriously. She dismissed it but the cold still streaked through her body.
"Have you had breakfast? I know it is the same food idea. It is an empty gesture in an empty world. Would you like for me to stay with you for a while and help you get something to eat - I'd stay for as long as you'd like."
"My mother's here. I've got to go now. Thank you."
"Sure, but take this" said Gabriele. She wrote down her telephone number on a sheet of paper that she pulled out of a pocket. "Call me anytime, any hour, if you need a listener."
"All right," said the woman. She shut the door.
Gabriele went back to bed. The sun dominated through the covering of the drapes. She took her quilt and draped it from the curtain rod. She could not see the point in anything other than sleep. The experience of the senselessness of the girl's death had just fused into other elements of the void and stunted her. If her son were here and continued to be absolutely unaffected by what had occured she would have been tempted to allow him to bring in orange juice and burnt poptarts to show sympathy for herself who was a woman in a philosophic void. She might have done this despite knowing that he would never be empathic to such philosophic quandaries. He was a product of motion and he hadn't experienced enough of life to understand something like this. Like now, each time when the void descended upon her she told herself that she could not fight it off anymore than one could avoid inclement weather. She would just have to ride through the fog that permeated it all. She let the void devour her energy, and then she fell into the sleep that the Ancient Egyptians thought of as the death of the soul. When the quilt fell from the curtain rod she woke up to a tepid rejuvenation.
She got up to fix herself something to eat. The cat was on the table eating the left-over pancakes that she had fixed for her son before he went off to school. Instead of shaking the cat in the air, making it appear to be in the midst of convulsions, she just sat down and watched it eat. Then she tossed the dirty plates into the sink—a function that was not habitual to her, but one that she didn't mind taking on this day when washing them would add to her mental void.
She didn't have him go into school for any part of the day even though the funeral wouldn't take place until 5:00. Instead, long before sunrise she loaded up kid and canvases into her old car. Then they began a long ride that would take them briefly into Syracuse, into Albany, and then back to Ithaca in a circuitious meandering of interstates and main streets. She had that pivotal expectation that if she were able to find the addresses of art galleries the curators there would guide her toward various amateur art fairs so that she could sell her work. There was, however, that less realistic hope that they would have customers who might like the "sui generis" of a Gabriele Sangfroid enough to ferret out the libertine creator from obscurity with this needed substance of money. For their purchases such members of the apparatchik would find a link back to originality and freedom that would assuage their banal and stressful existences.
However, in his untoward behavior characterized by argumentative insubordination about getting in either the car or the school bus, restless climbing over the front seat within the first 15 minutes into the ride, being told to go to a theme park every ten minutes, and claims of car sickness, she could not feel that anything auspicious would happen to her.
"I don't know why you dragged me here with you," he complained early into the morning when they were approaching the city limits of Syracuse.
"Drag, my dear, would be to tie you to the back of the car and pull you on that sweet behind of yours." She gave a wry but playful smile. "Would you like that?"
"Sure. It'd be like water skiing."
She remembered the time that she had taken him to a lake along the Addrionick Mountains to bring to him the entity, the best that she could, since jumping into leaves had been construed as child's play. From a restricted area used for paddle boats and used by swimmers they had rowed along and watched sailboats and water skiers within a bloody orange sunset. She added,"Yes, but with no water or skis—only hard pavement worse than being throttled by a vice principal."
"Mr. Quest?" he asked.
She did not say anything. She no longer spoke of him. The police had not charged him with manslaughter and as far as she knew, the boys had lost their ball, the girl had gone after it, and MF had just turned into the trailer park at a normal speed. She had tried several times to engage her son about his feelings and experience being present at the girl's death and yet then and now he did not seem particularly bothered by it. He never said anything depicting blame and confusion over Mr. Quest's role in the tragic incident.
"Sure, I'd like to be dragged that way" he reiterated.
"Hmm," she said as she pulled out a bag of chocolate from her bookbag. In most occasions she was so conspicuously purseless."Here, have some chocolate and peanut butter things and eat them in the back seat-and be careful that you don't drop part of one and sit on it. I don't want that stuff squashed into the vinyl , or worse, to have to scrub it out of your clothes."
"You need a new car like Chuck's mom. She rides around in a shinny big red van and not like this stinky old thing."
"That ostentatious woman again. Well, I'm delighted for her. I guess if her van is not stinky she must have a son who is neat and doesn't smash chocolate and peanut butter things into the vinyl."
"What is stinkiness?"
"What is stinkiness? I guess it's the decomposition of matter, molecules dancing around in the air or beginning to come apart like the chocolate in one's mouth. Chocolate, however, isn't stinky. Maybe the decomposition of things falling apart and going back to elements like hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon can either stink or be rather fragrant"
"Why isn't the chocolate stinky?"
"Good question. I hope that you become a scientist who specializes in that very thing."
"I hate the smell of those deCOMosing paintings in the trunk. I can smell them from here."
"To each his own," she retorted.
"Why do they smell so bad."
"So that you won't eat them."
"But the smell is so bad I might think they're trash and throw them in the trash."
"No, you'd know better than that because you'd find yourself in the trash.We're searching for buyers of these paintings so that way we won't offend that dainty little princess nose of yours."
"I don't have a princess nose. I have a manly prince nose."
She smiled. She liked the bantering especially at times like this when it wasn't a distraction from a higher contemplation but a distraction from a monotonous one. The minutes went by and soon they were in Syracuse. She presented some of her less preferred paintings and three of them were taken on consignment. In Albany two of her best paintings were offered a showing this way; but as she was insisting on cash, they aquiesced to a paltry pittance of $300.00, which she, in her ignorance, was delighted to gain. She vowed to attempt Rochester and New York City at a later date. After eating some vegeburgers and hamburgers from a fast food restaurant, they returned to Ithaca for the funeral.
During the funeral she saw that sadness had flattened over the bagginess of MF's sleepless face. She felt sorry for him. She realized that he was a sympathetic character who could not be made into the abhorred culprit. It occured to her that the four of them were a microcosm of the human family-each unwittingly doing its small part in the harm of others and each insecurely cuddling in the blanket of themselves where they might dodge feelings of compunction. They would not be alone: there too Little Orphan Annie, the company of executives in charge of manufacturing dodge balls, and the males who had harmed the poor girl, might also abscond.
A couple years passed of being no one's whore. She just painted and studied toward a Master's degree in art history, passively delegating the obstructive clutter of motherhood and all other clutter to her assistant. Her work was resplendent to few; and yet within the limited coterie of art enthusiasts and modern art collectors searching for potential investments, she was a success. They made her so for having one of her paintings on a wall was a portal out of the mundane.
She also believed that she had succeeded. To her, success was measured inwardly but bolstered by things obtained with the purchasing power of money such as her recently built home within an Albany suburb, a new van, and choosing to be bedizen in some expensive jewelry that she wore repeatedly. More importantly, she was bolstered by her freedom. She was now one of those rare birds under the sun, free to explore her ethereal ideas and whims without any major economic considerations. She was one of those rare birds left alone to grow fully within herself.
Apart from beautifying herself unnaturally in the concrete of makeup and displaying feigned smiles, which were done for potential art buyers and Gabriele aficionados, no demands were put on her that she didn't choose to place on herself. The house, the coruscating bits of rock that sometimes dangled from ears and neck, and her new van would have meant little to her if it weren't for how strangely unfettered this success was. It was exempt from all forms of prostitution and she was C.E.O. of only herself. This C.E.O. had no behemoth bureaucratic agency to feed, tame, and prod to a gallop at all hours. She did not have to give her every conscious thought to it and every unconscious thought trying to find some aspect of herself outside of the dinosaur she rode upon and whose domineering presence enervated her when she tried to control it. Instead, her success was full license to run around in the thickets of herself. She was in that other garden of the barefoot child; and she had arrived there on a magic carpet to which few adults could shrink and reposition their limbs to sit comfortably enough to guide the flimsy rug through the windy caprice of ideas.
No longer clinging to poverty as the savior of oneself from prostitution, she was able to relinquish domestic womanly servitude by this appointee, Hispanic Betty, as her housekeeper, cook, and office worker. From this faithful, illegal worker she was able to relinquish soiled underwear, stubborn grass stained pants, meals she was never able to master, buying multi-colored tissue paper for decorating a Valentine's day box, exhorting him to do his homework, and a host of trivial matters on a given day. Because of Hispanic Betty, who was ripe for servitude no less than a virgin for plucking, she could dispense with such trivial clutter. She could spend her time on the meditation of the entity, which always gave her tokens of appreciation in the form of unique perspectives concerning her world. In such a figurative and literal garden where she painted behind her house, she was aided by the verdant colors of the yard half the year and the snow and holly during the other half, the mellifluous smells of clean cold air of winter or of neighbors burning grass or leaves, the winsome blowing of the limbs of her trees, and the dulcet sounds of birds making their homes within them.
With such an idyllic life she should have had headaches less frequently and yet they came with more regularity and intensity, smacking her forehead from within and dredging what was once pure and cloistered waters. With a temperature, black spots filming over her vision, and the need to vomit on and off for a period of hours, each time she experienced a migraine she would be thrust into human vulnerabilities and find herself extremely perplexed as to why she should be so diminished.
The previous day, February 12th, every small movement was exacting and she was forced to go to the drugstore instead of a pot dealer's home since this inward insurrection was so great. She suggested that Hispanic Betty drive her to the doctor. When the woman kept trying to insert the key in the same wrong position within the ignition and at last primed a bit of gas into the icy cold vehicle with the accelerator instead of pumping on the brake peddle, she still had no confidence in her. Lacking this confidence, they switched to a taxi. Throughout that day she was vertiginous and lost, not knowing how to center herself or what to center herself around. The day had been like walking around in an eye-stinging blizzard.
Now it was February 13th and Gabriele was outside drawing the creatures of love depicted by Aristophanes in Plato's Symposium: the hubris of whole beings that Zeus was ready to slice in half and those already cut and diminished desperately searching for their "better halves." She cynically snubbed love as hungers for sex and that personal domain of wanting to love and be loved, which were more hungers and more neediness. Then two things dawned on her. They were opposing ideas that refused to be irrelevant. They refused to be vanquished from the kingdom. They refused to stand outside begging like a Buddhist mendicant at 6:00 a.m. in Laos. They were the making of a more self- actualized Gabriele. She realized that there was great beauty in two people caring about each other for it was nature's plan to use selfish hungers to create that vulnerable spot within the human psyche that needed consistency and permanence among other things; and that she too yearned for a studly apparition who would touch her and by his touch make her real. She felt so empty within these past two years of celibacy. There were days in which she felt that her pristine intellectualism was an absolutely drab prison cell. If someone were to touch her on her shoulder—just a simple human touch—she would not be wallowing in the sludge of her thoughts. She would not be masticating them like a worm.
Taking a break on the porch, she began reading one of her textbooks but soon she fell asleep because of the decongestant she had taken earlier for a cold. For a minute she dreamed that the makeup on her face was an oddly pleasant sensation like baby powder on an infant's buttocks and then the powder began to constrict her face into feigned smiles. She ran into the kitchen and grabbed a scouring pad to abrade away the stiffness before it all began to make her face crack. When she woke up she saw the mail truck drive away. Then the door opened and a woman stepped out with a stack of envelopes in her hands.
"Hispanic Betty," Gabriele asked, "The mail has already come?"
"Aqui esta, senora."
"Anything important?"
"No se nada acerca de esta asunta. I don't know nothing about it. I just get it. Don't look at it." Gabriele didn't care what the woman purportedly hadn't done. It seemed to her that anyone who did a family's laundry had to develop some curiosity about them and she thought it would be rather unnatural to not scan the addresses on envelopes. It irritated her that the woman was so circumspect if not outright leery; and yet she was an illegal worker who needed a job.
"That's professional of you," she said indifferently.
"That's the type of woman I am."
"Swell," said Gabriele indifferently as she perused each envelope. She mumbled aloud. "Ah, not unexpected. A Valentine's card from Rita Lily and one for Adagio from Peggy. Not unexpected there either." She sighed.
"Esta desmasiado frio estar fuera. Necesito volver a mi trabajo. Tengo cosas hacer."
"De acuerdo," said Gabriele and she watched the busy bee fly away from her cold Antarctic garden. Given her new awareness that claiming others in a mutable world was an innate human instinct whereas breathing people in and out of one's life was just a defensive anchor keeping one from being carried away by an instinctive reality to cling to someone, she felt regret that she hadn't taken an interest in her son's construction of a Valentine's day box. She told herself that that this year might be his last year of actually believing that the world was full of beautiful cards and sentiment exchanged with one's peers. She went inside to write letters of contrived gratitude to Rita/Lily and Peggy the way her son and his classmates made Valentine's Day cards for a world of virtual strangers. It wasn't totally contrived. She needed others. She loved others.
"No good can come from chilling tears. This is the fate the gods have spun for poor mortal men, that we should live in misery, but they themselves have no sorrows. There are two jars standing on Zeus' floor which hold the gifts he gives us: one holds evils, the other blessings. When Zeus who delights in thunder mixes his gifts to a man, he meets now with evil, and now with good. But when Zeus gives from the jar of misery only, he brings a man to degradation, and vile starvation drives him over the holy earth" —Iliad
A colonial sofa with an arched wooden back; the dark drapes absorbing the light that would have saturated the living room; Ravel's Bolero playing lightly from her CD; and a fly above vher face…cacooning there, she could only focus on little monads of reality at a time: now it was pulling back the hair out of the face and toward her pillowed head; comparing her thoughts to the over-shuffling of Tarot cards flying off in all directions, the choping of meat at a butcher's shop, or the static of television stations intruding into each other; and the recent and recurrent memory of MF (visibly older but obviously easily recognizable when she saw him in the audience while making her address from the podium). For ten or eleven hours now there was pain and the slow scattering of her thoughts was as a child on a beach with a fist full of sand who discovers his souvenir has been ebbing out of the cracks between his fingers.
She could not shoo away the pesty fly that was as pesty as Mormon flies (those sententious dragon fly missionaries who had knocked on her door earlier that week—Nauvoo, Illinois, Mormon flies so succulent and "so fuckable," whom she had reluctantly rejected from her door). The migraine was intense and she could only lay there in her tomb. Her sterile thoughts were filth. Her harmonic bliss in aloneness was, in illness, devestating and lonely as one suffering in solitary confinement. Within her sickness earlier suppositions about the world discomfited her. They mutated into something less than worms and hid themselves in her gray matter.
Powerless—she who years earlier had been an avid racketball player, criminology and psychology scholar, and a forger of a new destiny, an individual who had made a success by embellishing her inner self in marketable products on canvas—here she was lying on a sofa unable to even successfully shoo away a fly. The weak thing she had become, she tried to suck it into her mouth. She tried to use the human mouth as a vaccum cleaner as this fly incessantly tried to land on the contours of her face. She put a hand over her face and turned on her side. "Come away with me!" she imagined MF as saying. "Come away with me, the two of us out of this pase place!" And again, as throughout her illness, the thought of him was as a light beyond the tunnel. She did not know the reason for it. She had only spoken to him once beyond the service she had initially given to the widower in her previous profession. They hadn't spoken at the funeral. Even though she could have met him again through parent teacher conferences she had delegated these sessions to Hispanic Betty.
The previous night had been an extroverted evening: a reception at a temporary art exhibition where many of her works were on display and then a speech she gave to art students, faculty, and others interested in her art at a university in Albany. She told them that successful art could be a natural propensity or from just learning to paint when not having a natural propensity for it at all (usually something in between) + dispensing with any conventions that stifled an unbiased and uninhibited desire to play in ideas and see the wonder of everything anew. She supported her premise with quotations from Emerson, Thoreau, and myriad artists. It was a typical speech presented and specifically catered to those who yearned to hear motifs stressing independence even if it bordered on the absurd. To her the self should be married and revered but seeking uniqueness in a forest like a post Taoist or post Transcendentalist was to seek it from an external force. Still such was her audience and she would prostitute herself to them a little bit.
As she was listening to Ravel's "Pavane pour une Infante Defunte" she heard the doorbell. She knew that she could not get up without the most trying effort so, staring at the fire alarm some seconds, she finally raised herself briefly. She pushed the "test" button and continued to press it for a long moment of a sonorous outcry. Was her door unlocked? She hoped it was and wasn't. She heard a door open and footsteps. She returned to the sofa. She wondered if it might be a bill collector, a life insurance salesman, or a well endowed and handsome rapist. A whole host of other possibilities entered her head. She told herself that whoever it was, thief or saint, if this person weren't scared away by the fire alarm, she would demand that he or she go buy her some asprin. Surely it wasn't Lily. She hadn't spoken to her for so long and she would never be able to figure out how to get to this city let alone her home. Was that it? Had she used Rita/Lily to fulfill her limited social requirements and then dumped her, figuratively, on the side of the freeway linking to Albany? Had she forgotten about her when there were other people in her life? Were all humans this way? Was there no such thing as caring? She heard further steps pursue the top story…or was she imagining them? She wanted to push the fire alarm again—it didn't make sense but in her pained mind the sound of the fire alarm would make robbers leave and Zulu witch doctors with instantaneous and magical remedies appear. She did not, however, have the energy and that fly kept buzzing around her ears. She kept swatting it but missing it each time. The footsteps were those of a man's. She heard boot soles clunking hurriedly up the stairs under her miniature chandalier. Were they Michael's footsteps? No, surely not and yet she hoped they were all the same. There before her, in leather boots,was Hispanic Betty.
"Fuego! Levantese, senora. Hay un fuego en su casa, dama."
"Oh, it is you, Hispanic Betty. There isn't a fire, you silly deranged fool."
"No, hay un fuego.I heard the fire bell."
"Oh, all right. Just trying to get your attention." She had to muster up all her strength to make her ideas cohesive and sensible. She smiled with the full manipulation of her white fangs. "Please go after some asprin. I swear I can't take much more of this without some relief. El dolor esta desmasiado. Por favor compreme unos asprina a la 7-11 convenience tienda." She closed her eyes. Words were arduous feats.
"Esta usted enferma otra vez?"
"Yeah, sick again. I thought you were on vacation. No desea ir el vacaciones?"
"Purse. La otra noche perdi mi monedero."
"Yeah, I saw your purse, tu bolsa upstairs—arriba la escalera; but run to the convenience store or the grocery store for the asprin— whatever is quickest. Rapidamente!"
"No, dama. Hoy no tengo trabajar hasta cinco."
"For Pete's sake usted es terrible perezosa. You are floja-lazy floja, floja-lazy."
"I'm not none floja, please Miss. I'm your good illegal trabajadora. Don't throw me in the streets."
Gabriele again thought of having figuratively tossed the carcass of Rita/Lily into the thickets of weeds on the embankment."Please, Hispanic Betty, as one of our family go out to get it and then you can have the day off hasta cinco por la tarde."
"You won't fire me now for looking floja?"
"Not if you filfill my fucking request and get the goddamn asprin."
After she took the asprin she got some relief. She had Hispanic Betty get Nathaniel ready for summer school and then she sent him off in a taxi herself. When both were gone she ate a little something. When she recovered more of her strength her mind was still very groggy and painting was far removed from the agenda of the day. Since there was no painting there was no agenda and so she began to clean the house. Inaction, she thought, might lead to a void. A void in the proper state of mind could lead a strong person to philosophic discoveries and a strengthening of one's fortitude; but in weakness a void required energy to escape, and so it was best to keep busy. She saw that a string of cobwebs was dangling from one of the elements of the chandalier. She looked at it, and not knowing how to get up there she decided that this was not a good place to start on a day when one happened to be sick; and so she went into Nathaniel's room.
In the room she dusted everything from the little volkswagon that ran on D batteries to the breeches of the stuffed animal, Pluto. When she opened one of his desk drawers she discovered a child's book called "Heroes of the Bible." It was published by the Latter Day Saints. She wondered whether these dragon flies were so insecure that they even needed children to validate the stories they projected into their minds. Religious minds not only projected such stories onto all the walls of their brains but cast themselves as more Disney characters into this metaphysical film within the most salient roles. God that destroyed humanity in the flood so that something "good" might generate from it; Abraham who was ready to sacrifice his son to any arbitrary and barbaric whim that this godly tyrant entertained—the Bible was camauflaged brutality as was this book that catalogued Joseph to Joseph Smith. Plato would call it more misrepresentation of the gods and yet she couldn't call it libel, slander, or misrepresentation if there was no god and nothing to misrepresent. She took a break and had some bread and grape juice like one more cannibal eating Jesus' 2000 year old body and drinking the virulent tonic of his 2000 year old blood. She resented the Mormon flies for having given her son that book and yet she knew that sometimes people could be positively influenced by something at a certain stage that years later would be beneath them.
She told herself that since Hispanic Betty would be back at 5:00 she could spend the day recuperating in a park. She would not be missed. When he needed his bicycle fixed it was Hispanic Betty whom he turned to. Just the other evening she saw him drag a tent out of the garage. She asked if she could help him. "Hispanic'll do it," he said.
"Well, I'm rather good at such things—repelling, camping, and you name it as long as its outside the house."
"S'not an issue. She's good at everything. You're not needed," he said and the words resonated deep into the far reaches of herself where she remembered Peggy saying, "They don't want you so they pawned you here so quit blubbering for them. I opened our door to you; fought with my husband when I didn't want you here either—and look what you did to me. Look again! Pen marks on this upholstery.You ruined the sofa—a two hundred year old piece of furniture because you don't have sense enough to take pens out of your pants." She remembered all those years where she was this pariah absconding into her room. She remembered this second war where they laughed and ridiculed her every move and how Peggy never acknowledged it was happening. She remembered how Peggy's husband had one day come to her and tried to undress her and that she bit him which invited his fullest hatred of her. From that day onward there wasn't a comfortable moment. Even at Christmas this "uncle" excoriated her for sitting with the rest. She had to sit in a corner of the room and hide in books and distant places. She wanted to tell Peggy about how he had drooled over her with his wet slobbering eyes and then tried to undress her, the biting, and how the biting had led to more contempt. But she was wise. She knew that there was no use broaching this subject any more than shedding any feelings over the decapitation of the Turk. She was all alone in the world and the choices were to kill herself or to become immune to others and not let them affect her and she chose the latter path.
At the park she swam for a short time in the swimming pool. Gleaming studfish of the Spandex species were everywhere and their gleaming bodies magically invoked within her sexual feelings—each in his own way. Then she sat along a lake watching row boats stir the waters that were turned to silver in the sunlight and joggers running on a road that was to her right. Her womanly instincts wondered what life would be like to be involved with one of such studly apparitions. She disregarded such lowly inclinations by walking around the park. She followed loud pop music and then with a hundred others she did some aerobics according to the movements of the teacher on his wooden platform and then, exhausted, she lay in the shade of the trees. She became aware of feathery leaves, angular leaves, paddle shaped leaves and the fronds of palms and ferns. She briefly fell asleep and when she awoke those leaves had become a silhouette. She felt blessed to be in such beautiful variety and the ostensible plan that went into it, or at any rate, "one hell of a variety from adaptation"; and this healed and restored her. As she watched runners also fade into silhouettes she yearned for the mystery of their movement. She wanted to run to foreign countries and escape this God sanctioned superpower that school children were brainwashed into believing as better than all other countires. She wanted to peak inside these foreign lands and say "Hi" to its denizens.
She went into a bathroom in a McDonald's restaurant and changed into more formal clothes. Then she went shopping at Sax. The outlandish prices to the clothing of super rich snobs appealed to her, as it had before, but when she got back to her car she was reminded that they were just foder for covering nakedness.
By chance she saw that a travel agency was still open and she stepped into it. Photographs of Peru, Mexico, Egypt, Italy, and China graced her. Where would she go? Should she take her son with her as part of his education? No, she told herself. This would be a contemplative retreat.
A week later she went from New York to San Fransisco; San Fransisco to Tokyo; and then Tokyo to Bangkok. She took in temples and Buddhas via the river boat bus, the Chao Phraya Express. She saw opulent skyscrapers and she meandered through labyrinths of tackey tin and wooden cobbled shacks along the river. She saw two young boys with Butch haircuts in dark blue shorts and light blue shirts embracing each other as they walked closer than lovers, emaciated and fur-lost dogs beaten with sticks and then shoved into large racket and burlap bag instruments like butterfly nets. She watched the dog catchers dump the hounds into wooden crates, uniformed teenagers in sidewalk restaurants enjoying the process, coconut tonic vendors putting straws in the cut cocunut shells and fruit on a stick salesmen pushing their glass ice and fruit carts. She spent most of her time downtown. On the sidewalk she saw men's underwear sprawled on a table top that was balanced by one of those plastic stools used as chairs at sidewalk restaurants or those for tired sidewalk salesmen. "I wish I had the man in the undies" she said aloud to her amusement. Then she passed containers of raw fish on ice next to the sharkfin restaurant. A young man who gained a commission from bringing in the masses into the restaurant said, "Fish! good!" He was so palpable and so much in her reach. She turned toward him and stopped. She put her hand on his chest and slid it down to his waist. "Fish good, you say?" she asked and then giggled like an embarrassed school girl for she was embarrassed by her own temerity. "Fish very good!" said the google and glaze eyed fish salesmen. He put his fingers into the waste line of his pants and jiggled them in a couple seductive bounces. Outside of the fomenting of her own sensuality, she felt the imagined spirit of Buddha permeating everything like a warm wind.
After three days here she went from Bangkok to Rome. Her world was that other world, that etheral world consisting of the highest apogee of man, that which was least in his making and yet here it was manifest in tangible objects from one museum to another. This was her idea of heaven: to be fully in that small realm of one's mind where true beauty existed and within a city where others, some living and most dead, had also engaged in that area of the brain and produced objects so splendid. At a Burger King a block away from such a museum she bought a couple vegie-burgers, an apple pie turnover, and a chocolate shake. When they were deposited on her tray she turned and walked to an empty table. Near it she stopped with mouth agape. There at an adjacent table were Rick and his father, MF.
In Burger King words ensnared the artistic ascetic for she too succumbed to polite requests and smiles. For whatever chimerical ideas she had about isolation in Antarctica she knew that too little society, as too much of it, would be deleterious. She too would have been an incontrovertible loose canon had she not maintained some sociable traits; and so she sat down at their table despite not wanting to do so. "Rick, if you weren't seated with your father I wouldn't have recognized you. Heavens!" Heaven—it was a word that nobody believed in and everybody used. She put her elbow on the table, chin in a palm. Then she focused her intensity sociably, basking him with it gently in the rays of her orbs. She knew that her gesture was probably an affected one, oblivious to the fact as father and son might be, but she did not think its contrived essence as being all that important. Hers was like one of Peggy's few favorable gestures, only she had improved upon it. Instead of using this gesture for situations where there was an affinity of values she used it, on occasion, to further rapport. By pretending to care more than one actually did one couldn't help but emulate and believe in the skit, making the dubiously real in fact real. With a deep albeit contrived sense of caring, she said, "I haven't seen you for so long. Are you still friends with Nathaniel?"
"So-so," said the boy ruefully.
"Well, don't worry. Everybody meets new people and are attracted to those new influences for a time which help them grow. I'm sure you and Adagio will be friends again. I bet he likes you very much. I know I do." Then to MF she said, "So you guys are taking in Rome?"
"Yes and other bits here and there. We were in Venice a couple days ago. Nice—well worth seeing as I'm sure Florence would be. The problem is that a man can spend the whole trip traveling from one city to the next. So…I've decided that I and this big guy will just stay here in Rome for the rest of the time. Are you here all by yourself?"
"Yes, here all alone. Tell me about yourself. There's got to be a lady friend somewhere here in Rome."
"No." He smiled bashfully. " Just here with my son."
She guessed that the widower was being faithful to the memory of his wife by not pursuing any other relationship outside of an occasional sexual liaison with a whore like herself. She liked the assumption and it made her feel closer to him. To some degree she wanted to ferret out the truth on this matter but the assumption gave her such a warm feeling and she too liked her endorphins and dopamine. "Nathaniel is at home staying with Hispanic Betty."
"Hispanic who?" He chuckled.
"Hispanic Betty. Well, that's my name for her. My assistant — a lovely person in her own way. She's illiterate in both languages but again in her own unique way a lovely enough character. I give nicknames to everything. Nathaniel is Adagio and my cat, Friskie, is Mouse. Nathaniel will be fine with Hispanic Betty. Did you guys just come from the museum?"
"No, we've been sitting here waiting for you for days. Finally we can go into the museum now that we have an expert to show us around. It's been rough sitting."
She laughed. "Wow, Michael! You knew I'd be on this very speck of the planet within this time and space. Handsome and charming as well as psychic. I'm impressed." She laughed again as she glanced at his playful smile. It occurred to her how much of a human's life was consumed in frivolous exchanges of happy feelings. There was really no substance in it at all. She turned back to Rick who was as yet free from being overwhelmed in the sensual impulses that created the libidinous ego, lascivious sociability, and the lustful lies of human will that willed the stimulation of the pleasure receptors of the brain at all times. "You and your father will have your eyeballs shooting out of your sockets when you begin the art tour in this beautiful city, I promise."
The boy laughed with a feral, garrulous confidence. "Now it's my eyes out.Before it was gettin' hair on my chest if I ate your stuff."
She smiled. "You remember. It was called 'Shit on a Shingle.' To MF she explained, "That's a nickname for one of my domestic dishes. It's also known as beef and gravy on toast." To Rick she added, "And given time it will grow hair on your chest. I promise." She began eating her veggie burger.
"Mrs. Sangfroid," said Rick, "what are you eating? It's orange."
She looked at the edge of her burger. "More like raw sienna, golden ochre, cadmium yellow, and goldenrod dark…hard to explain the color. Saffron the closer you dig into the corn. This vegetarian hamburger probably isn't all that nutritious fried with hamburgers but here we are as guinea pigs within modern existence."
"That's a heavy one from a sandwich. Tell me what you mean," said MF.
"Well, I mean that we don't grow our own food so we are reliant on what others present to us as good and we follow the masses into places like this out of convenience and laziness. We are like cognizant teddy bears on an assembly line to have our apertures plugged up with plastic eyes but there is nothing we can do about it. Anyhow, two cheers for Burger King. Hip hip hurray! Hip hip hurray!" She laughed, more amused and interested in herself than anyone else.
"You don't eat meat, Gabriele?"
"Not much," she said.
"Okay," MF said disapprovingly.
"Whether or not animals have any value outside of becoming a product to serve to us doesn't matter so much to me. I think what I think but you can't prove it one way or the other. I just feel that having the attitude that everything exists to serve human pleasures and appetites stunts any enlightenment one might hope to get on this planet. It's not the animal rights perspective but my own."
"Good for you. I admire that," he lied. Their conversation paused and she saw that MF had removed both onions and pickles from his hamburger. She watched both males sink their fangs into the aesthetic round bits of carcass. She told herself that there was indeed something atavistic about it.
"Dad hates vegetables—won't ever eat them."
"Is that a fact!" said Gabriele.
"That isn't true; and don't talk with your mouth full!" rebutted MF irascibly.
"We never have tomatoes in the refrigerator."
"We have Ketchup. It is tomatoes plus."
Gabriele laughed. She as marginally enthralled with the charm of their bantering. Then, like the sound of crickets, the human noise became monotonous. Still, it was better than being deaf, and it bedizened her ears like large cheap earrings containing bogus stones.
"I saw you when you gave your lecture in Albany," said MF to Gabriele as if wanting to change the topic.
"I know. I saw you there. I wanted to catch you but there were droves of people and one reporter swarming all over the place."
"I understood that. It's okay."
"Did you drive up just for that?"
"No, my parents live in Albany but I wanted to see your work and listen to you."
"Wow, thank you" she said humbly.
When they finished eating and were walking to the museum he said, "So, you were in Thailand before coming here. What were your impressions of it?"
"Hmm…I guess that before I went there I half-way wondered if it would be comprised of people without wills the way the Buddha rejected self saying it was an illusion—but no; it was full of mall hoppers and people pacing here and there anxiously with their cellular telephones, eyes glazed over, totally self-absorbed like in the states although perhaps less of them…a lot of poor seeming so quaint from my vantage point but probably not from theirs. What's your impression of Italy so far?"
"Well, it is hard to say with so many tourists. If they get rid of the tourists one can have an impression."
She laughed. She liked that answer. It seemed to her the correct answer; and since he seemed to her a conduit of reality, she felt that he was enmeshed with her somehow. She did not want to believe in fate but here they were together in such an unexpected place. The strangeness made her a bit superstitious. "How long will you be here?"
"Maybe a week. And you?"
"Not long. I can't afford it and Nathaniel won't pick up the phone or reply to email so that troubles me."
"Anything wrong?"
"No, I'm sure it is a bit of resentment about me going on this trip."
"Won't Hispanic Betty answer the telephone?"
"Are you kidding? No, she refuses. She dusts around a telephone like it's a snake and moves to a different room when it rings." He laughed.
She led them into color, perspective, and forms of Masters who had died long ago. They led her to a planetarium, the coliseum, and then a small amusement park on the outskirts of Rome. After Ferris wheel and a roller coaster rides she and they were addicted to motion and so they went on the water log ride as well. As they came down a miniature waterfall they were drenched. From these rides she knew that she was thrust into further action. Without consciously choosing it, she was now on a womanly ride of feeling great pleasure in the company of a man and something resembling family. It occurred to her that this was the ride that all broken adults with battered children inside them went on. From love and establishing a family of one's own one could break from the wretched past. One could remove the glass fragments from the exploding glass house of family, bandage wounded childhood, and could at last distance oneself from memories of the guardians of hell. The ride would be that of a new family and beginning, a type of forgetfulness.
All this time had gone by and still Sang Huin woke up from nightmares with a sweat glazing his forehead. He could not help but remember driving his battered sister to her lover's mansion, dragging her up to the door, watching her faint on the stoop as he pushed the doorbell, and then watching from his car as the wife discovered his delivery.