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